Rice, Anne - The Witching Hour

by Greyspid

  She had almost accepted his invitation — to everything, to talk about herself, and to ask him all about them. After all, she had not sought him out. He had come to her with his offer of information. And then, at that moment, had come the compulsion to reveal all, even the story of her strange power, as if he were inviting her to do it silently, exerting some force upon her mind so that she would open its innermost chambers. For he really did want to know about her! And that interest, so keenly personal, from one devoid of the slightest malicious taint, had warmed her as surely as a winter fire.

  Patterns, witnesses, all her far-flung thoughts of these things flashed suddenly to the fore.

  I have killed three people in my life. I can kill with anger. I know that I can. That is what has happened with the transplanted one as you called me. Is there any place in the family history for such a thing?

  Had he flinched slightly as he looked at her? Or was it merely the slanting sun in his eyes?

  But this could not happen. They were standing over the grave of the woman to whom she’d made the promise. ‘No, I will never go back to New Orleans. I will never try to find out.’ The woman who had cared for her and loved her, and given her more perhaps than her real mother ever could. The mood of the sickroom had come back, the sound of soft, near inhuman cries of pain. ‘Promise me, Rowan, even if they write to you. Never… never…"

  ‘You are my mother, Ellie, my only mother. How could 1 ask for more?’

  In those last agonizing weeks, she had feared her awful destructive power most keenly, for what if in her rage and grief she turned it on Ellie’s weakened body, and thereby ended this stupid, useless suffering once and for all? I could kill you, Ellie, I could deliver you. I know I could. I can feel it inside me, just waiting to be put to that test.

  What am I? A witch, for the love of God! I am a healer, not a destroyer. I have a choice as all human beings have a choice!

  And there the Englishman had stood, studying her as if fascinated, as if she had been speaking when she hadn’t been at all. It was almost as if he said I understand. But of course that was only an illusion. He had said nothing.

  Tormented, confused, she’d turned on her heel and left him there. He must have thought her hostile, or mad even. But what did it matter? Aaron Lightner. She’d never even glanced at the card before she’d given it back to him. She did not know why she remembered the name, except that she remembered him and the strange things he’d said.

  Months had passed since that awful day when she had driven home, opened the wall safe, and taken out the paper which Ellie’s executor had had her sign.

  ‘I, Rowan Mayfair, do solemnly swear before God, and in the presence of the undersigned witness, that I shall never return to the city of New Orleans where I was born, that I shall never seek to know the identity of my biological parents, and that I shall eschew all contact with the family called Mayfair should any member approach me for any reason whatsoever, or on any pretext…"

  On and on it went in that near hysterical language, attempting to cover every foreseeable contingency, so many words to have so little meaning. No wonder Rowan distrusted language. It was Ellie’s wish that carried all the weight.

  But Rowan had signed it. The lawyer, Milton Kramer, had witnessed it. Into his files the executed copy had gone.

  Had Michael Curry’s life passed before his eyes like this, Rowan sometimes wondered, the way that my life is passing before my eyes now? Often she had stared at his smiling face, torn from a magazine and pasted to her mirror.

  And she knew that if she saw him this dam might surely break. She dreamed of it, talking to Michael Curry, as if it might happen, as if she might bring him home with her to the house in Tiburon, as if they might drink coffee together, as if she might touch his gloved hand.

  Ah, such a romantic notion. A tough guy who loved beautiful houses, drew beautiful pictures. Maybe he listened to Vivaldi, this tough guy, maybe he really read Dickens. And what would it be like to have such a man in her bed, naked except for his soft black leather gloves?

  Ah, fantasy. Rather like imagining that the fire fighters she brought home would turn out to be poets, that the policemen she had seduced would reveal themselves to be great novelists, that the forest ranger she’d met in the bar in Bolinas was truly a great painter, and that the husky Viet Nam veteran who’d taken her to his cabin in the woods was a great motion picture director hiding from a demanding and worshipful world.

  She did imagine those things, and they were entirely possible, of course. But it was the body that commanded preeminence - the bulge in the jeans had to be big enough, the neck powerful, the voice deep, and the coarsely shaven chin rough enough to cut her.

  But what if?

  But what if Curry had gone on to the South where he came from. That was probably exactly what had happened. New Orleans, the one place in all the world that Rowan Mayfair couldn’t go.

  The phone was ringing when she unlocked her office door.

  ‘Dr Mayfair?’

  ‘Dr Morris?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been trying to reach you. It’s about Michael Curry.’

  ‘Yes, I know, Doctor. I got your message. I was just about to call.’

  ‘He wants to talk to you.’

  ‘Then he’s still in San Francisco.’

  ‘He’s hiding out in his own home on Liberty Street

  .’

  ‘I’ve seen it on the news.’

  ‘But he wants to meet with you. I mean, well, to put it bluntly, he wants to see you in person. He has this idea…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, you’re going to think this madness is communicable, but I’m just relaying the message. Is there any chance you would meet this guy on your boat — I mean it was your boat you were on the night you rescued him, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I’d be glad to take him back on the boat.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I would be glad to see him. And I’ll take him out on the boat if he wants to go.’

  ‘That is absolutely great of you, Doctor. But I have to explain a few things. I know this sounds absolutely bonkers, but he wants to take his gloves off and touch the boards of the deck where he was lying when you brought him around.’

  ‘Of course he can do that. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that myself.’

  ‘You’re serious? God, you don’t know how relieved I am. And Dr Mayfair, let me tell you right now, this guy is just one very nice guy.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He is really suffering, this guy. He hit me with this idea last week. I hadn’t heard from him in a month! He was drunk when he called. I thought he’d forget about it.’

  ‘It’s a very good idea, Dr Morris. You said the power in his hands was real.’

  ‘That’s right, I did. And it is. And you are a very special doctor, Dr Mayfair. But do you know what you’re getting into? I begged him, I mean really begged him to come back in. Then he calls back last night, demanding I find you right this minute. He has to lay his hands on the boards of the deck, he’s going nuts. I told him, Sober up, Michael, and I’ll give it a shot. Then he calls twenty minutes ago, right before I called you. "I won’t lie to you," he says, "I’ve drunk a case of beer today, but I haven’t touched the vodka or the Scotch. I am as straight as I can possibly get."’

  She laughed softly. ‘I should weep for his brain cells,’ she said.

  ‘I hear you. But what I’m getting to is the man is desperate. He isn’t getting any better. And I would never ask this of you if he wasn’t just one of the nicest -’

  ‘I’ll go get him. Can you call him and tell him that I’m on my way?’

  ‘God, that’s terrific. Dr Mayfair, I can’t thank you enough.’

  ‘No thanks is necessary. I want to see him.’

  ‘Look, strike a bargain with him, Doctor. You’ll let him play psychic on the boat if he’ll come in here and dry out.’

  ‘Call him now, Dr Morris. Within the hour, I’ll b
e at his front door.’

  She put down the phone and stood quite still staring at it for a moment. Then she removed her name tag, and stripped off her soiled white jacket, and slowly pulled the pins out of her hair.

  FIVE

  So they had tried to put Deirdre Mayfair away again after all these years. With Miss Nancy gone and Miss Carl getting more feeble by the day, it was best. That was the talk, anyway. On August 13, they’d tried. But Deirdre had gone wild, and they had left her alone, and now she was going down badly, just real badly.

  When Jerry Lonigan told his wife Rita, she cried.

  It had been thirteen years since Deirdre came home from the sanitarium a mindless idiot who couldn’t tell you her own name, but that didn’t matter to Rita. Rita would never forget the real Deirdre.

  Rita and Deirdre were sixteen when they went to boarding school at St Rose de Lima’s. It was an ugly old brick building, on the very edge of the French Quarter. And Rita was sent there because she was ’bad,’ had been out drinking on the river boat The President with boys. Her dad had said St Ro’s would straighten her out. All the girls slept in an attic dormitory. And they went to bed at nine o’clock. Rita had cried herself to sleep down there.

  Deirdre Mayfair had been at St Ro’s for a long time. She didn’t mind that it was old and gloomy and strict. But she held Rita’s hand when Rita cried. She listened when Rita said it was like a prison.

  The girls watched ‘Father Knows Best’ on an old television set with a round six-inch screen, swear to God! And the creaky old wooden radio that stood on the floor under the window was no better. You couldn’t get to the phonograph. The South American girls always had it, playing that awful ‘La Cucaracha,’ and doing those Spanish dances.

  ‘Don’t mind them,’ Deirdre said. She took Rita with her down to the play yard in the late afternoon. They swung on the swings under the pecan trees. You wouldn’t think that was much fun for a sixteen-year-old girl, but Rita loved it when she was with Deirdre.

  Deirdre sang when they were on the swings - old Irish and Scotch ballads, she called them. She had a real true soprano voice, delicate and high, and the songs were so sad. It gave Rita chills to hear them. Deirdre loved to stay out until the sun was gone and the sky was a ’pure purple’ and the cicadas were really going in the trees. Deirdre called it twilight.

  Rita had seen that word written out, all right, but she’d never heard anyone really say it. Twilight.

  Deirdre took Rita’s hand and they walked along the brick wall, right under the pecan trees, so that they had to duck under the low leafy branches. There were places you could stand where you were completely hidden by the trees. It was crazy to describe it, but it had been such a strange and lovely time for Rita - standing there in the half dark with Deirdre, and the trees swaying in the breeze and the tiny leaves showering down on them.

  In those days, Deirdre had looked like a real old-fashioned girl from a picture book, with a violet ribbon in her hair and her black curls tumbling down her back. She could have been real sharp if she’d wanted to be. She had the build for it, and new clothes in her locker she never bothered to try on. But it was easy to forget about things like that when you were with Deirdre. Her hair had been so soft. Rita had touched it once. So soft.

  They walked in the dusty cloister beside the chapel. They peeped through the wooden gate into the nuns’ garden. Secret place, Deirdre said, full of the loveliest flowers.

  ‘I don’t ever want to go home,’ Deirdre explained. ‘It’s so peaceful here.’

  Peaceful! Alone at night, Rita cried and cried. She could hear the jukebox of the Negro bar across the street, the music rising over the brick walls and all the way up to the fourth-story attic. Sometimes when she thought everybody was asleep, she got up and went out on the iron balcony and looked towards the lights of Canal Street

  . There was a red glow over Canal Street

  . All New Orleans was having fun out there, and Rita was locked up, with a nun sleeping behind a curtain at either end of the dormitory. What would she do if she didn’t have Deirdre?

  Deirdre was different from anybody Rita had ever known. She had such beautifully made things - long white flannel gowns trimmed in lace.

  They were the same kind she wore now thirty-four years later on the side screen porch of that house where she sat ’like a mindless idiot in a coma.’

  And she had showed Rita that emerald necklace she always wore now, too, right over the white nightgown. The famous Mayfair emerald necklace, though Rita had not heard of it then. ‘Course Deirdre had not worn it at school. You couldn’t wear jewelry at all at St Ro’s. And no one would have worn a big old-fashioned necklace like that anyway, except to a Mardi Gras ball perhaps.

  It looked just awful now on Deirdre in her nightgown. All wrong, a thing like that on an invalid who just stared and stared through the screens of the porch. But who knows? Maybe somehow Deirdre knew it was there, and Deirdre sure loved it.

  She let Rita touch it when they sat on the side of the bed at St Ro’s. No nuns around to tell them not to rumple the bedspread.

  Rita had turned the emerald pendant over in her hands. So heavy, the gold setting. It looked like something was engraved on the back. Rita made out a big capital L. It looked like a name to her.

  ‘Oh, no, don’t read it,’ Deirdre said. ‘It’s a secret!’ And she’d looked frightened for a moment, her cheeks suddenly red and her eyes moist, and then she took Rita’s hand and squeezed it. You couldn’t be mad at Deirdre.

  ‘Is it real?’ Rita asked. Must have cost a fortune.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Deirdre said. ‘It came from Europe years and years ago. It belonged to a great-great-great-great-grandmother back then.’

  They both laughed at all the greats.

  It was innocent the way Deirdre said it. She never bragged. It wasn’t like that at all. She never hurt anybody’s feelings. Everybody loved her.

  ‘My mother left it to me,’ Deirdre explained. ‘And someday I’ll pass it on, that is… if I ever have a daughter.’ Trouble in her face. Rita put her arm around Deirdre. You just wanted to protect Deirdre. Deirdre brought out that feeling in everybody.

  Deirdre said she’d never known her mother. ‘She died when I was a baby. They say she fell from the upstairs window. And they said her mother died when she was young, too, but they never talk about her. I don’t think we’re like other people.’

  Rita was stunned. Nobody she knew said such things.

  ‘But how do you mean, Dee Dee?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Deirdre said. ‘We feel things, sense things. We know when people don’t like us and mean to hurt us.’

  ‘Who could ever want to hurt you, Dee Dee?’ Rita asked. ‘You’ll live to be a hundred and you’ll have ten children.’

  ‘I love you, Rita Mae,’ Deirdre said. ‘You’re pure of heart, that’s what you are.’

  ‘Oh, Dee Dee, no.’ Rita Mae shook her head. She thought of her boyfriend from Holy Cross, the things they had done.

  And just as if Deirdre had read her mind, she said:

  ‘No, Rita Mae, that doesn’t matter. You’re good. You never want to hurt anybody, even when you’re really unhappy.’

  ‘I love you, too,’ Rita said, though she did not understand all that Deirdre was telling her. And Rita never ever in her whole life told any other woman that she loved her.

  Rita almost died when Deirdre was expelled from St Ro’s. But Rita knew it was going to happen.

  She herself saw a young man with Deirdre in the convent garden. She had seen Deirdre slip out after supper when no one was looking. They were supposed to be taking their baths, setting their hair. That was one thing Rita really thought was funny about St Ro’s. They made you set your hair and wear a little lipstick because Sister Daniel said that was ’etiquette.’ And Deirdre didn’t have to set her hair. It hung in perfect curls. All she needed was a ribbon.

  Deirdre was always disappearing at that time. She took her bath
first and then snuck downstairs, and didn’t come back till almost lights out. Always late, always hurrying in for night prayers, her face flushed. But then she’d give Sister Daniel that beautiful innocent smile. And when Deirdre prayed she seemed to mean it.

  Rita thought she was the only one who noticed that Deirdre slipped out. She hated it when Deirdre wasn’t around. Deirdre was the only one that made her feel all right there.

  And one night she’d gone down to look for Deirdre. Maybe Deirdre was swinging on the swings. Winter was over and twilight was coming now after supper. And Rita knew about Deirdre and twilight.

  But Rita didn’t find Deirdre in the play yard. She went to the open gate of the nuns’ garden. It was very dark in there. You could see the Easter lilies in the dark, shining white. The nuns would cut them on Easter Sunday. But Deirdre would never break the rules and go in there.

  Yet Rita heard Deirdre’s voice. And gradually she made out the figure of Deirdre on the stone bench in the shadows. The pecan trees were as big and low there as they were in the play yard. All Rita could see was the white blouse at first, and then she saw Deirdre’s face and even the violet ribbon in her hair, and she saw the tall man seated beside her.

  Things were so still. The jukebox of the Negro bar wasn’t playing just then. No sound came from the convent. And even the lights in the nuns’ refectory looked far away because there were so many trees growing along the cloister.

  The man said to Deirdre: ‘My beloved.’ It was just a whisper, but Rita heard it. And she heard Deirdre say: ‘Yes, you’re speaking, I can hear you.’

  ‘My beloved!’ came the whisper again.

  Then Deirdre was crying. And she said something else, maybe a name, Rita would never know. It sounded as if she said: ‘My Lasher.’

  They kissed, Deirdre’s head back, the white of the man’s fingers very clear against her dark hair. And the man spoke again:

  ‘Only want to make you happy, my beloved.’

  ‘Dear God,’ Deirdre whispered. And suddenly she got up off the bench and Rita saw her running along the path through the beds of lilies. The man was nowhere in sight. And the wind had come up, sweeping through the pecan trees so that their high branches crashed against the porches of the convent. All the garden was moving suddenly. And Rita was alone there.