Blood again, as if Mother had been living still, drunk, falling off the bed, striking her forehead as she had twice on the gas heater, bleeding, bleeding. Blood on the floor.
Oh, Rosalind, my mourning, raging sister Rosalind! The broken Rosary on the floor.
I looked at this Rosary now. I did the childlike unquestioning thing that came to my mind. I kissed the crucifix, the tiny detailed body of the anguished Christ, and shoved the Rosary back under the pillow.
I was fiercely alert. I was like prepared for battle. It was like an early drunk in the first year, when the beer went divinely to my head and I ran down the street with arms outstretched, singing.
The pores of my skin tingled and the door opened with no effort whatsoever.
The finery of the alcove and the dining room looked brand new. Do things sparkle for those on the verge of battle?
AIthea and Lacomb stood far across the length of the dining room, hovering in the pantry door, waiting on me. Althea looked plain afraid and Lacomb both cynical and curious as always.
"Like if you was to scream one time in there!" said Lacomb.
"I didn't need any help. But I knew you were here."
I glanced back at the wet Stains on the bed, at the water on the floor. It wasn't enough to bother them with it, I thought.
"Maybe I'll walk in the rain," I said. "I haven't walked in the rain for years and years."
Lacomb came forward. "You talking about outside now tonight in this rain?"
"You don't have to come," I said. "where's my raincoat? Althea, is it cold outside?"
I went off walking up St. Charles Avenue.
The rain was only light now and pretty to look at. I hadn't done this in years, walk my Avenue, just walk, as we had so often as children or teenagers, headed for the K&B
drugstore to buy an ice cream cone. Just an excuse to walk past beautiful houses with cut-glass doors, to talk together as we walked.
I walked and walked, uptown, past houses I knew and weedy barren lots where great houses had once stood. This street, they ever tried to kill, either through progress or neglect, and how perilously poised it always seemed-between both-as though one more murder, one more gunshot, one more burning house would set its course without compromise.
Burning house. I shuddered. Burning house. when I'd been five a house had burned. It was an old Victorian, dark, rising like a nightmare on the corner of St. Charles and Philip, and I remember that I'd been carried in my Father's arms "to see the fire," and I had become hysterical looking at the flames. I saw above the crowds and the fire engines a flame so big that it seemed it could take the night.
I shook it off, that fear.
Vague memory of people bathing my head, trying to quiet me. Rosalind thought it a wonderfully exciting thing. I thought it a revelation of such maguitude that even to learn of mortality itself was no worse.
A pleasant sensation crept over me. That old horrific fear-this house will burn too-had gone with my young years, like many another such fear. Take the big lumbering black roaches that used to race across these sidewalks: I used to step back in terror. Now that fear too was almost gone, and so were they, in this age of plastic sacks and icebox-cold mansions.
It caught me suddenly what he had said-about my young husband, Lev, and even younger sister, Katrinka, that he, my husband whom I loved, and she, my sister whom I loved, had been in the same bed, but I'd always blamed myself for it. Hippie marijuana and cheap wine, too much sophisticated talk. My fault, my fault. I was a cowardly faithful wife, deeply in love. Katrinka was the daring one.
What had he said, my ghost? Mea culpa. Or had I said it?
Lev loved me. I loved him still. But then I had felt so ugly and inadequate, and she, Katrinka, was so fresh, and the times were rampant with Indian music and liberation.
Good God, was this creature real? This man I'd just spoken with, this violinist whom other people saw? He was nowhere around now.
Across the Avenue from me as I walked, the big hired car crept along, keeping pace, and I could see Lacomb muttering as he leant out the rear window to spit his cigarette smoke into the breeze.
I wondered what this new driver, Oscar, thought. I wondered if Lacomb would want to drive the car. Lacomb doesn't do what Lacomb doesn't like.
It made me laugh, the two of them, my guards, in the big crawling black Wolistan car, but it also gave me license to walk as far as I wanted.
Nice to be rich, I thought with a smile. Karl, Karl.
I felt as if I were reaching for the only thing that could save me from falling, and then I stopped, "absenting myself from this dreary felicity a while" to think of Karl and only Karl, so lately shoved into a furnace.
"You know it's not at all definite that I will even become symptomatic." Karl's voice, so protecting. "when they notified me regarding the transfusion, well, that was already four years, and now another two-"
Oh, yes, and with my loving care you will live forever and ever! I'd write the music for it if I were Handel or Mozart or anyone who could write music . . . or play.
"The book," I said. "The book is marvelous. St. Sebastian, shot full with arrows, an enigmatic saint."
"You think so? You know about him?" How delighted Karl had been when I told the stories of the saints.
"Our Catholicism," I had said, "was so thick and ornamented and rule-ridden in those early days, we were like the Hasidim."
Ashes, this man! Ashes! And it would be a coffee table book, a Christmas gift, a library staple that art students would eventually destroy by cutting out the prints. But we would make it live forever. Karl Wolfstan's St. Sebastian.
I sank to dreariness. I sank to the sense of the small scope of Karl's life, a fine and worthy life, but not a great life, not a life of gifts such as I had dreamed up when I tried so hard to learn the violin, such as Lev, my first husband, still struggled to maintain with every poem he wrote.
I stopped. I listened.
He wasn't about, the fiddler.
I could hear no music. I looked back and then up the street. I watched the cars pass. No music. Not the slightest dimmest sound of music.
I deliberately thought of him, my violinist, point by point, that with his long narrow nose and such deep-set eyes he might have been less seductive to someone else-perhaps.
But then perhaps to no one. what a well-formed mouth he had, and how the narrow eyes, the detailed deepened lids gave him such a range of expression, to open his gaze wide, or sink in cunning secret.
Again and again, old me mories threatened, the most agonizing and excruciating bits of recollection drifted at me -my Father, crazed and dying, tearing the plastic tube from his nose, and pushing the nurse away . . . all these images came as if flung in the wind.
I shook my head. I looked around me. Then the full fabric of the present wanted to enwrap me.
I refused it.
I thought again very specifically of him, the ghost, refurbishing in my imagination his slender tall figure and the violin which he had held, and trying as best as my unmusical mind could do to recall the melodies he'd played. A ghost, a ghost, you have seen a ghost, I thought.
I walked and walked, even though my shoes were wet and finally soaked, and the rain came heavy again, and the car came round, and I told it to go away. I walked. I walked because I knew as long as I walked, neither memory nor dream could really take hold of me.
I thought a lot about him. I remembered everything that I could. That he had worn the common formal clothes you pick up in the thrift shops more easily than casual or fashionable clothes; that he was very tall, at least six foot three I calculated, remembering how I had looked up at him, though at the time I had not been very dwarfed or in any way intimidated.