Lasher (14 page)

Gifford was speechless. It was more than true that Ryan had never asked her a question like this in all their lives. Most of Ryan’s energy went to preventing Gifford from seeking answers to difficult questions. This was not only unprecedented, it was alarming. Because Gifford realized that she could not rise to the occasion. She didn’t have a witch’s answer to this question. She thought for a long moment, listening to the fire burn, and to the soft sigh of the water outside, so soft it might have been her own breath.

A number of thoughts passed vagrantly through her mind. She even almost said, “Ask Mona.” But then she caught herself, protective and full of shame that she would encourage her niece in that sort of thing. And without preamble, or any sort of forethought, Gifford said:

“The man came through on Christmas Day. That thing, that spirit—I’m not going to say its name, you know its name—it
got into the world and it did something to Rowan. That’s what happened. The man’s no longer at First Street. All of us know it. All of us who ever saw him know he’s not there. The house is empty. The thing got into the world. It—” Her speech, rapid, high-pitched, faintly hysterical, broke off as abruptly as it had begun. She thought: Lasher. But she could not say it. Years and years ago Aunt Carlotta had shaken her and said, “Never, never, never say that name, do you hear me?”

And even now, in this quiet safe place, she could not speak the name. Something stopped her, rather like a hand on her throat. Maybe it had to do with the peculiar blend of cruelty and protectiveness which Carlotta had always shown for her. The Talamasca history had said that Antha was pushed through the attic window, that the eye was torn from her head. Dear God! Carlotta couldn’t have done such a thing.

She wasn’t surprised that her husband hesitated before responding to her. In the silence she was full of surprise herself. It all loomed before her, and she also knew in these moments the terrible loneliness of her marriage.

“You really believe that, Gifford. In your heart of hearts, you, my beloved Gifford, believe that.”

She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. She felt too defeated. They had been arguing all of their lives, it seemed. Would it storm, would it shine? Would a stranger rape Mona on St. Charles Avenue as she walked alone at night? Would income taxes go up again? Would Castro be overthrown? Were there ghosts? Were the Mayfairs witches? Could anyone really speak with the dead? Why did the dead behave so strangely? What the hell did the dead want? Butter is not unhealthy, and neither is red meat. Drink your milk. One cannot metabolize milk as an adult, and so forth and so on, forever.

“Yes, Ryan,” she said sadly and almost offhandedly. “I believe it. But you see, Ryan, seeing is believing. And I always saw him. You never could.”

She had used the wrong word. Could. Real mistake, that. She could hear the little soft sighs with which he drew away from her, away from the possibility of belief or trust, into his well-constructed universe where ghosts did not exist, and Mayfair witchcraft was a family joke, as much fun as all the old houses, and quaint trust funds, and jewelry and gold coins in the vaults. As much fun as Clancy Mayfair marrying Pierce Mayfair, which really, really, really shouldn’t happen, since both were—like Alicia and Patrick—descended from Julien,
but what was the use of telling him? What was the use? There was no reason, there was no exchange of ideas, there was no genuine trust.

But there’s love, she thought. There is love and there is a form of respect. She didn’t depend on anyone in the world the way she did on Ryan. So she said what she always said at such times:

“I love you, my darling,” and it was wonderful to say an Ingrid Bergman line like that with so much heart and mean it so completely. “I really do.” Lucky Gifford.

“Gifford…” Silence on the other end of the line. A lawyer thinking quietly, the man with the silver-white hair and blue eyes, who did the practical worrying with her for the whole family. Why should he believe in ghosts? Ghosts don’t try to break wills, they don’t sue you, they don’t threaten you with Internal Revenue investigations, they don’t bill you for the two-martini lunch.

“What is it, darling?” she asked softly.

“If you believe that,” he said. “If you really believe what you just said to me…if this ghost got through…and the house is empty…then why wouldn’t you go there, Gifford? Why wouldn’t you come today?”

“The thing took Rowan away,” she said angrily. “This isn’t finished, Ryan!” Suddenly she was sitting up. Every bit of goodwill she felt for her husband had done its usual evaporation act. He was the same tiresome and impossible man who had wrecked her life. That was true. It was true that she loved him. It was true that the ghost had come through. “Ryan, don’t you feel things in that house? Don’t you sense things? It isn’t over, it’s just begun! We have to find Rowan!”

“I’m going to come get you in the morning,” he said. He was furious. Her anger had drawn out his anger. But he was struggling. “I want to come up there and drive you back home.”

“OK, Ryan,” she said. “I wish you would.” She heard the plea in her own voice, the plea that meant surrender.

She was only glad that she’d had the courage to say the little bit she had about “the man,” that for the record, she had spoken her piece, and he could argue with her, and beat her down, and criticize her to death later on, perhaps, Tomorrow.

“Gifford, Gifford, Gifford…” he sang softly. “I’m going to drive up. I’ll be there before you wake up.”

And she felt so weak suddenly, so irrationally incapable of
moving until he came there, until she saw him come through the door.

“Now, lock up the house tight, please,” he said, “and go to sleep. I’ll bet you’re sacked out on the couch and everything’s open…”

“This is Destin, Ryan.”

“Lock up, make sure the gun is in the chest by the bed, and please, please, please set the alarm.”

The gun, good Lord! “As if I’d use it with you not here.”

“That’s when you need it, darling, when I’m not there.” She smiled again, remembering Mona. Bang, bang, bang. Kisses.

They still blew kisses to each other before they rang off.

The first time she had kissed him, she was fifteen, and they were “in love,” and later Alicia said, when Mona was born: “You’re lucky. You love your Mayfair. I married mine ’cause of this!”

Gifford wished she had taken Mona, then and there. Probably Alicia would have let her do it. Alicia was already a full-time drunk. It’s a wonder Mona had been born at all, let alone robust and healthy. But Gifford hadn’t really thought of taking Alicia’s baby from her; she could still remember when Ellie Mayfair, whom Gifford never knew, had taken Deirdre’s baby, Rowan, all the way to California, to save her from the family curse, and everyone had hated her for it. That had been the same terrible year that Oncle Cortland had died, after falling down the steps at First Street. So terrible for Ryan.

Gifford had been fifteen and already they were very much in love. No, you simply did not take a baby away from a mother, no matter what you thought. They’d driven Deirdre mad, and Oncle Cortland had tried to stop it.

Of course Gifford could have taken better care of Mona. Hell, anybody could have taken better care of Mona than Alicia and Patrick. And in her own way, Gifford always had taken care of Mona, as surely as she took care of her own children.

The fire had died away. She was getting just a little uncomfortably cold. Best to build it up again. She didn’t need much sleep anymore. If she dozed off sometime around two, she’d be fine when Ryan got here. That was one thing about being forty-six. She didn’t need sleep anymore.

She went down on her knees in front of the broad stone hearth and, lifting another small oak log from the neat stack
beside the fireplace, threw it into the weak little fire. A bunch of newspaper, crumpled, with kindling, and off it went, curling and flaring against the soot-blackened bricks. The bright warmth came out all over her hands and her face, until she was driven back by it, and there was a sudden moment of remembering something unpleasant, something to do with fire and the family history, but then she deliberately and carefully forgot.

She stood in the living room looking out over the white beach. Now she could not hear the waves at all. The breeze covered everything in a heavy drape of silence. The stars shone as brightly as if they were tumbling on the Final Day. And the sheer cleanness of the breeze delighted her and made her want to cry.

She wished she could stay until all this seemed too much. Until she longed for the oaks of home again. But that had never happened. She’d always left before she truly wanted to. Duty, family, something—always compelled her home from Destin before she was ready.

That was not to say that she didn’t love the cobwebs and old oaks, that she didn’t love the crumbling walls, and listing town houses, and broken pavements; and the lovely endless embrace of her good cousins and cousins and cousins. Yes, she loved it, but sometimes she only wanted to be away.

This was away.

She shuddered. “I wish I could die,” she whispered, her voice trembling and fading away on the breeze. She went into the open kitchen—no more than a section of the giant main room—and filled a glass with water, and drank the water down. Then she went out through the open glass doors, through the yard, and up the steps and out the boardwalk over the little dune and down on the clean-swept sand.

Now you could hear the Gulf. The sound filled you. There was nothing else in the world. The breeze broke you loose from everything, and all sensation. When she glanced back, the house looked deceptively small and insignificant, more of a bunker than the handsome little cottage it was, behind its levee of sand.

The law couldn’t make you change something which had been built in 1955. And that is when Great-grandmother Dorothy had built it for her children and her grandchildren, and Destin was no more than a sleepy little fishing village, or so everyone said. No condominium towers in those days. No Goofy Golf. Just this.

And the Mayfairs still had their bits and pieces of it, tucked away every few miles from Pensacola all the way down to Seaside—old bungalows of various size and age built before the thundering hordes—and the building codes—had come.

Gifford felt chilled, pummeled by the breeze suddenly, as if it had doubled its fist and tried to push her rudely to one side. She walked against it, down to the water, eyes fixed on the soft waves that barely lapped on the glittering beach. She wanted to lie down here and sleep. She had done that when she was a girl. What safer beach was there than this unknown sweep of Destin, where no dune buggies or vehicles of any kind could ever come to hurt you with their wheels or their hideousness, or their noise.

Who was that poet who had been killed long ago on the beach at Fire Island? Run over in his sleep, they thought, though no one ever knew? Horrible thing, horrible. She couldn’t remember his name. Only his poems. College days; beer; Ryan kissing her on the deck of the dancing boat, and promising her he would take her away from New Orleans. What lies! They were going to live in China! Or was it Brazil? Ryan had gone right into Mayfair and Mayfair. It had swallowed him whole before his twenty-first birthday. She wondered if he could remember now their favorite poets—how they loved D. H. Lawrence’s poem about blue gentians, or Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.”

But she couldn’t blame him for what had happened. She had been unable to say no to Ancient Evelyn, and Granddaddy Fielding and all the old ones who cared so much, even though her own father and mother were dead; it was as if Gifford and Alicia both had always belonged to the older ones. Ryan’s mother never would have forgiven them had they not gone through with the white-dress wedding. And Gifford could not have left Alicia then, who was still so young and already mad and getting into constant trouble. Gifford hadn’t even gone away to school; when she’d asked to go, Ancient Evelyn had said:

“And what is wrong with Tulane? You can ride the streetcar.” And Gifford had. To Sophie Newcomb College. That they’d let her go to the Sorbonne in her sophomore year had been a minor miracle.

“And you a tenfold Mayfair,” Ancient Evelyn had declared when the wedding was being discussed. “Even your mother
would be shocked, God rest her soul, and to think how she suffered.”

No, there had been no real question of Gifford getting away, of a life up north or in Europe or anywhere else on the planet. The biggest fight had been over the church. Would Gifford and Ryan marry at Holy Name or go back in the Irish Channel to St. Alphonsus?

Gifford and Alicia had gone to Holy Name School; on Sundays they went to Mass at Holy Name, uptown across from Audubon Park, a world away from old St. Alphonsus. The church had been white still in those days, before they painted the nave, and the statues were exquisitely made of pure marble.

In that church on the Avenue, Gifford had made her Communion and her Confirmation, and walked in procession her senior year, with bouquet in hand, in white ankle-length dress and high heels, a ritual worthy of a debutante.

Marry at Holy Name. It seemed so natural. What was St. Alphonsus to her, the old Mayfair church? And Deirdre Mayfair would never know. She was by that time, already, hopelessly crazy. It was Granddaddy Fielding who made the fuss. “St. Alphonsus is our church and you a tenfold Mayfair!”

Tenfold Mayfair. “I hate that expression. It doesn’t mean anything,” Gifford had said often enough. “It makes me think of folded napkins.”

“Nonsense,” Ancient Evelyn had said. “It means you are ten times from within the fold. Ten different lines of descent. That’s what it means. You ought to be proud of it.”

Evenings, Ancient Evelyn sat on the porch of Amelia Street, knitting until it got too dark for her to see. Enjoying as she always had the drowsy twilight on St. Charles Avenue with so many people out strolling, and the streetcars with their yellow lights on inside, crashing along the curving track. Dust, those were the days of noise and dust—before air-conditioning and wall-to-wall carpets, the days of helping take laundry stiff as paper off the back line. You could make people out of the little old clothespins—little wooden men wearing tiny hats.