California. Lily out there on a hill, why? There was no one to visit that grave.
Dear God, Lily! But every time I thought of bringing Lily's body home, I had this horrible notion-that when the coffin arrived here in New Orleans, I would have to look in it. Lily, dead before her sixth birthday, had been buried for over twenty years. I couldn't imagine such a sight. An embalmed child covered in green mold?
I shuddered. I thought I was going to scream.
Grady Dubosson had arrived, my friend and lawyer, trusted advisor to Karl and Karl's mother. Miss Hardy was here, had been here for the longest time, and so were several other women from the Preservation Guild, all of them elegant and refined creatures.
Connie Wolfstan said, "We want something, just some little thing, you know, that you wouldn't mind us keeping, to remember him by... I don't know... just the four of us."
I was so relieved. "The silver," I said. "There's so much of it, and he loved it. You know, he corresponded with silver dealers all over the country to buy up Love Disarmed.
Look, see that, that little fork, tha t's actually what you call a strawberry fork."
"You really wouldn't mind if we each took-"
"Oh, God, I was afraid, afraid that you would be afraid because of his illness. There is so much of it. There's enough for all of you."
A loud noise disturbed us. Someone had fallen over. I knew this cousin was one of those few that was kin to both the Beckers of my family and the Wolfstans of Karl's, but I couldn't remember his name.
He was drunk, poor guy, and I could see his wife was furious. They helped him up.
There were long wet stains on his gray trousers.
I wanted to speak, to form words about the silver. I heard Katrinka say, what are they trying to take?" and it came out of my mouth to Althea as she passed, "His silver, you know all that silverware, let his family all take a piece of it."
I felt my face color as Katrinka glared at me. She said that it was community property, the silver.
For the first time I realized that sooner or later all these people would be gone and I'd be alone here and maybe he wouldn't come back, and I saw desperately how his music had comforted me, how it had guided me through memory after memory, and now I was bedeviled, and shaking my head, and obviously looking odd.
What was I wearing? I looked down. A long full silk skirt and a frilly blouse, and a velvet vest that disguised my weight-Triana's uniform, they called it.
There was quite a commotion in the pantry. The silver had been brought out.
Katrinka was saying something biting and terrible to poor sad Rosalind, and Rosalind, with her dark eyebrows pointing up and her glasses sliding down her nose, looked lost and in need of help.
My cousin Barbara leaned down to kiss me. They had to go. Her husband couldn't drive anymore after dark, at least he really shouldn't. I understood. I held her tightly for a moment, pressing my lips into her cheek. when I kissed her, it was like I kissed her mother, my long gone great-aunt, and my grandmother who had been that woman S
sister.
Katrinka suddenly turned me around, hurting my shoulder. "They're sacking the pantry!"
I got up and made a gesture for her to be quiet, my finger to my lips, which I knew, positively knew, would make her boilingly furious. It did. She backed away. One of Karl's aunts came to kiss me and thank me for the small teaspoon she held.
"Oh, it would make him so happy-" I said. He was always sending Love Disarmed to people as gifts and writing, "Now, be sure to tell me if you do not like this pattern because I may inundate you with it." I think I tried to explain that, but clear words were so difficult for me to utter. I moved away, using this person in a way as a means of escape, escorting her to the door, and though others waved as they went down the steps, I went off along the porch and looked out over the Avenue.
He wasn't there. He probably had never existed. With a crashing force, I thought of my Mother, but it wasn't the day before she died. It was another time when I'd given a birthday party for one of my friends. My mother had been drunk for weeks, locked up in the side bedroom, sort of, dead drunk the way she always got, only becoming conscious in the very late hours to roam around, and somehow she'd come wandering out at this party!
She'd come wandering onto the porch, deranged and looking for all the world like Jane Eyre's strange rival, the mad woman in Rochester's attic. We'd taken her back inside, but was I kind, did I kiss her? I couldn't remember. It was too disgusting to think of being that young and that thoughtless, and then it hit me again with a mighty force that I'd let her go, let her die of drunkenness alone, with cousins before whom she was ashamed.
What was the murder of Lily, the failure to save Lily, compared to this?
I gripped the railing. The house was emptying.
The fiddler had been a piece of madness, music imagined! Crazy, lovely, comforting music, spun out of the subconscious by a desperate ordinary talentless person, too pedestrian in every respect to enjoy a fortune left to her.
Oh, God, I wanted to die. I knew where the gun was, and I thought, If you wait just a few weeks, everyone will feel better. If you do it now, then everyone will think it was his or her fault. And then what if Faye is alive somewhere and she comes home and finds her big sister has done such a thing; what if Faye were to take that blame on herself?
Unthinkable!
Kisses, waving hands. A sudden rain of delicious perfume -Karl's Aunt Gertrude, and then her husband's soft, crinkled hand.
Karl had whispered to me when he could no longer turn over without help, "At least I'll never know what it means to be old, will I, Triana?"
I turned and looked down over the side lawn. The lights of the florist blazed on the wet grass and the wet bricks beyond, and I tried to calculate where the path had been down which my mother walked on that last day that I saw her. It was gone. During the years in California, when my father was married to his Protestant wife-out of the church, saying his Rosary every night nevertheless, a damned soul, making her perfectly miserable, no doubt-they'd built a garage. The vogue of the automobile had descended even on New Orleans. And there was no old wooden gate now to be Mother's shrine, her gateway to eternity.
I was choking, trying to catch my breath. I turned around. I looked down the long porch. People everywhere. But I could picture my Mother the night she wandered out, perfectly. My Mother had been beautiful, much more good-looking in every respect than any of her daughters, it seemed; she'd had such a wild expression on her face, lost among all these partying teenagers, awakened from a drunken sleep, not knowing where she was, friendless, only weeks from death.
I tried to catch my breath.
"-all you did for him." A voice spoke.
"For whom?" I said. "Daddy," said Rosalind, "and then to take care of Karl."
"Don't talk about it. when I die I want to wander off into the woods alone." Or use the gun shortly.
"Don't we all?" Rosalind said. "But that's just it. You fall and break a hip like Dad and someone slaps you in bed with needles and tubes, or like Karl, they tell you one more go-round of drugs and maybe-"
She went on, being Rosalind, the nurse and the sharer with me of morbid things as we are two sisters both born in different years but in the month of October.
So vividly I saw Lily in a coffin, imagined now with green mold, her small round face, her lovely tiny hand, plump and beautiful on her breast, her country dancing dress, the last dress that I had ever ironed for her, and my Father saying, They will do that at the funeral parlor, but I had wanted to iron it myself, the last dress, the last dress.