The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,254

when I went up there for the funeral, and you know of course that Stella was buried from the house. No funeral parlor for Stella. Why, Stella was laid out in the very front room in which she’d been shot, do you know that? I kept looking around, wondering where exactly it had happened. And don’t you know everybody else was doing that, and they had already locked up Lionel, of course. Oh, I couldn’t believe it. Lionel had been such a sweet boy, and so good-looking. And he and Stella used to go everywhere together. But what was I saying?

“Oh, yes, that incredible night. I’d just seen young Julien downtown, beautiful young Julien, speaking French to me, and then I was home again and following old Julien into the parlor and he sat down on the couch there, and stretched out his legs and said, ‘Ah, Richard, there are so many things I could tell you, so many things I could show you. But I’m old now. And what’s the point? One very fine consolation of old age is you don’t need to be understood anymore. A sort of resignation sets in with the inevitable hardening of the arteries.’

“Of course I was still upset. ‘Julien,’ I said. ‘I demand to know how you did it.’ He wouldn’t answer me. It was as if I wasn’t there. He was staring at the fire. He always had both fires going in that room in winter. It has two fireplaces, you know, and one is slightly smaller than the other.

“A little later he waked from his dream and he reminded me that he was writing his life story. I might read that after his death, perhaps. He wasn’t sure.

“ ‘I have enjoyed my life,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a person shouldn’t enjoy his life as much as I have enjoyed mine. Ah, there is so much misery in the world and I have always had such a splendid time! Seems unfair, doesn’t it? I should have done more for others, much more. I should have been more inventive! But all of that is in my book. You can read it later.’

“He said more than once that he was writing his life story. He really had quite an interesting life, you know, being born so long before the Civil War, and seeing so very much. I used to ride with him uptown, and we would ride through Audubon Park and he would talk about the days when all that land had been a plantation. He talked about taking the steamboat from Riverbend. He talked about the old opera house and the quadroon balls. On and on, he talked. I should have written it down. He used to tell little Lionel and Stella those stories too, and how they both listened. He’d take them downtown in the carriage with us, and he would point out places in the French Quarter to them, and tell them wonderful little tales.

“I tell you I wanted to read that life story. I remember several occasions on which I came into the library and he was writing away, and remarked that it was the autobiography. He wrote by hand, though he did have a typewriter. And he didn’t mind at all that the children were underfoot. Lionel would be in there reading by the fire, or Stella would be playing with her doll on the couch, didn’t matter one bit, he would just be writing away on his autobiography.

“And what do you think? When he died, there was no life story. That’s what Mary Beth told me. I begged her to let me see whatever he’d written. She said offhandedly there was nothing. She would not let me touch anything on his desk. She locked me out of the library. Oh, I hated her for it, positively hated her. And she did it in such an offhanded way. She would have convinced anybody else she was telling the truth, that’s how sure of herself she was. But I had seen the manuscript. She did give me something which belonged to him, and I’ve always been grateful.”

At that point Llewellyn produced a beautiful carbuncle ring and showed it to me. I complimented him on it, and told him I was curious about the days of Storyville. What had it been like to go there with Julien? His answer was quite lengthy:

“Oh, Julien loved Storyville, he really did. And the women at Lulu White’s Hall of Mirrors adored him, I can tell