It must have been after midnight when I finally came back up the front steps, and heard, behind me, the car sliding before the front curb.
Althea had a towel in her hands.
"Come in, my baby," she said.
"You should have gone to bed," I said. "You seen my fiddler? You know, my musician friend with his violin?"
"No, ma'am," she said, drying my hair. "I think you run him off for good. Lord knows, Lacomb and I were ready to break down that door, but what you got to do you did. He's gone!"
I took off the raincoat and entrusted it to her, and went up the stairs.
Karl's bed. Our upstairs room, ever illuminated by the red light of the florist across the street through lace and lace and lace.
A new mattress and pillows, of course, no indent of my husband here, no last bit of hair to find. But the delicate carved wooden frame in which we'd made love, this bed he'd bought for me in those happy days when buying things for me had been such pleasure for him. why, why, I had asked, was it so much fun? I had been ashamed that fine carved furniture and rare fabric had made me so happy.
I saw the fiddler ghost distinctly in my mind, though he was not here. I was alone in this room as a person can be.
"No, you're not gone," I whispered. "I know you're not."
But then why shouldn't he be? what debt had he to me, a ghost I'd called names and cursed? And my late husband burnt up even three days ago. Or was it four?
I started to cry. No sweet smell of Karl's hair or cologne lingered in this room. No smell of ink and paper. No smell of Balkan Sobranie, the tobacco he would not give up, the one my first husband Lev always sent him from Boston. Lev. Call Lev. Talk to Lev.
But why? what play did it come from, that haunting line?
"But that was in another country; And besides, the wench is dead."
A line from Marlowe that had inspired both Hemingway and James Baldwin and who knows how many others....
I began to whisper a line from Hamlet to myself, ". . . 'the undis-cover'd country from whose bourn no traveler returns.'"
There came a welcome rustling in the room, the mere stir of the curtains and then those creaks and noises in the floor of this house which can be brought merely by a shift of the breeze against the dormers of this attic.
Then quiet came. It came abruptly, as if he'd come and gone, dramatically, and I felt the emptiness and the loneliness of the moment unbearably.
Every philosophical conviction I'd ever held was laid waste. I was alone. I was alone. This was worse than guilt and grief and maybe was what... no, I couldn' t think.
I lay down on the new white satin spread and searched for an utter blackness of body and soul. Shut out all thoughts. Let the night be for once the ceiling above, and beyond that a simple untroubled sky, with meaningless and merely tantalizing stars. But I could no more stop my mind than my own breath.
I was terrified my ghost had gone away. I'd driven him away! I cried, sniffling and wiping my nose. I was terrified that I'd never see him again, never, never, never, that he was gone as certainly as the living go, that I'd cast this monstrous treasure to the wind!
Oh, God, no, not so, no, let him come back. If the others you have to keep to yourself for all Time, I understand and always have, but he's a ghost, my God. Let him return to me....
I felt myself drop below the level of tears and dreams. And then.. what can I say?
what do we know when we know and feel nothing? If only we would wake from these states of oblivion with some certain sense that there was no mystery to life at all, that cruelty was purely impersonal, but we don't.
For hours, that was not to be my concern.
I slept.
That's all I know. I slept, moving as far away from all my fears and losses as I could, holding one desperate prayer. "Let him come back, God."
Ah, the blasphemy of it.
Chapter 7
The following day, the house was full of people. All doors were opened so that the two front parlors flanking the wide front hall were in clear view of the long dining room, and people could flow easily over the varied carpets, talking in cheerful voices as New Orleans people do after a death, as if it were what the dead person wanted.
A little cloud of silence surrounded me. Everybody thought I was mentally taxed, shall we Say, having spent two days with a dead body, and then there was the question of slipping out of the hospital without a word, for which Rosalind was being blamed again and again by Katrinka, as if Rosalind had in fact murdered me when nothing could have been further from the truth.
Rosalind, in her deep drowsy voice, asked repeatedly if I was all right, to which I said repeatedly yes. Katrinka talked about me, pointedly, with her husband. Glenn, my beloved brother-in-law and husband of Rosalind, seemed a broken thing, hurt deep by my loss yet unable to do anything but stand rather close to me. I thought musingly to myself of how much I loved them, Rosalind and Glenn, childless, the keepers of Rosalind's Books and Records, where you could find Edgar Rice Burroughs in paperback or a song on a 78 disk recorded by Nelson Eddy.
The house was warm and sparkling, as only this house could sparkle, with its many mirrors and windows and a view in all directions. That was the great genius of this cottage, that, standing in the
dining room as I did, you could look through open doors and windows to all four points of the compass, though they were tangled up with trees and the gusty afternoon. It was so lovely to have made a house of such openness.
A big supper was ordered. Caterers came, whom I knew. Some woman famous for a chocolate pie. And there was Lacomb with his hands behind his back looking sneeringly at the black bartender in his suit. Lacomb would make friends with him, however. Lacomb made friends with everybody, at least everybody who could understand him.
At one point, he slid up to me so silently I was startled. "You want something, boss?"
"No," I said, throwing him a little smile. "Don't get drunk too soon."
"Boss, you're no fun anymore at all," he said, slipping away with his own sly smile.
We gathered around the long narrow oval table.
Rosalind, Glenn, as well as Katrinka, her two daughters and her husband, and many of our cousins ate lustily, carrying their plates about, because there were far too many for the chairs. My people mingled easily with the gregarious Wolfstan family.
Karl had begged these relatives not to visit him during his final months. Even when we married, he knew he was sick, and he had wanted it to be private. And now with his mother already gone back again to England, and everything settled and done, these Wolfstans-all of them rather shiny-faced agreeable people of clear German descent-looked a bit surprised at things-a dazed kind of surprise as when you are awakened out of deep sleep, but nevertheless they were at home among all the fine furniture Karl had bought for me-the cabriole-legged chairs, the pearl-inlay tables, the desks and chests of intarsia made up of tortoiseshell and brass, and the timeworn genuine Aubusson rugs, so thin beneath our feet that they seemed sometimes ma de of paper.
It was all Wolfstan style, this luxury.
They all had money. They had always owned houses on St. Charles Avenue. They were descended from the rich Germans who migrated to New Orleans before the Civil War, and made big money in cigar factories and in beer, long before all the ragged Potato Famine crew hit our shores, the starving Irish and Germans who were my ancestors.
These Wolfstan people had blocks of property in key places, and owned the leases on old stores and businesses.