The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,256

those little girls manage to live; to breathe; to enjoy themselves. They laugh and they are full of curiosity and tenderness. They adjust, I believe that’s the word. They adjust and they reach for the stars in their own way. I tell you it’s wondrous to me. They make me think of the wildflowers that grow in the cracks of the pavements, just pushing up into the sun, no matter how many feet crush them down.’

“I didn’t argue with him any further. But I remember that he talked on and on. He said there were children in every city in the country who were more miserable than those children. Of course that didn’t make it all right.

“I know he went to Storyville often, and he didn’t take me along. But I’ll tell you something else rather strange … ” (Here he hesitated. He required some prodding.) “He used to take Mary Beth with him. He took her to Lulu White’s and to the Arlington, and the way they managed it was that Mary Beth dressed as a man.

“I saw them go out together on more than one occasion, and of course if you ever saw Mary Beth you would understand. She was not an ugly woman in any sense, but she wasn’t delicate. She was tall and strongly built, and she had rather large features. In one of her husband’s three-piece suits, she made a damned good-looking man. She’d wrap her long hair up under a hat, and wear a scarf around her neck, and sometimes she wore glasses, though I’m not sure why, and off she went with Julien.

“I remember that happening at least five times. And I heard them talking about it after, how she fooled everyone. And Judge McIntyre sometimes went with them, but I think in truth that Julien and Mary Beth didn’t want him along.

“And then once Julien told me that that was how Judge McIntyre had met Mary Beth Mayfair—that it was in Storyville about two years before I came. He wasn’t Judge McIntyre yet, then, just Daniel McIntyre. And he’d met Mary Beth down there and spent the evening gambling with her and with Julien, and didn’t know till the next morning that Mary Beth was a woman, and when he discovered that he wouldn’t leave her alone.

“Julien told me all about it. They had gone down just to roam around and to catch what they could of the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band. Now you’ve heard of them, I imagine, and they were good, they really were. And somehow Julien and Mary Beth, who went by the name of Jules on these excursions, went into Willie Piazza’s and there they ran into Daniel McIntyre, and after that they wandered from place to place, looking for a good pool game, because Mary Beth was very good at pocket billiards, always was.

“Anyway, it must have been daylight when they decided to go home, and Judge McIntyre had talked a lot of business with Julien, since he wasn’t the Judge yet of course and he was a lawyer, and it was determined they would meet uptown for lunch and that maybe Julien would do something to help McIntyre get into a firm. And at that point, when the Judge was giving ‘Jules’ a big hug of farewell, she pulled off her fedora, and down came all her black hair, and she told him she was a woman, and he almost died on the spot.

“I think he was in love with her from that day on. I came the year after they were married, and they already had Miss Carlotta, a baby in the crib, and Lionel came along within ten months, and then a year and half later, Stella, the prettiest of them all.

“To tell you the truth, Judge McIntyre never fell out of love with Mary Beth. That was his trouble. Nineteen hundred thirteen was the last full year I spent in that house, and of course he had been a judge for over eight years by then, thanks to Julien’s influence, and I tell you he was just as much in love with Mary Beth as he had ever been. And in her own way she was in love with him, too. Don’t guess she could have put up with him if she hadn’t been.

“Of course there were the young men. People talked about those young men. You know, her stable boys and her messenger boys, and they were good-looking, they really were. You’d