The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,257

see them coming down the back steps, you know, looking scared sort of, as they went out the back door. But she loved Judge McIntyre, she really did, and I’ll tell you another thing. I don’t think he ever guessed. He was so damned drunk all the time. And Mary Beth was just as cool about all that as she was about anything else. Mary Beth was the calmest person I ever knew, in a way. Nothing ruffled her, not for very long, at any rate. She didn’t have much patience with anyone who opposed her, but she wasn’t interested in being enemies with a person, you know. She wasn’t one to fight or pit her will against anyone else.

“It always amazed me the way she put up with Carlotta. Carlotta was thirteen years old when I left. She was a witch, that child! She wanted to go to school away from home, and Mary Beth tried to persuade her not to do it, but that girl was determined, and so Mary Beth finally just let her go.

“Mary Beth dismissed people like that, that’s the way it was, really, and you might say she dismissed Carlotta. Part of her coldness, I suppose, and it could be maddening. When Julien died, the way she locked me out of the library, and out of the third-floor bedroom, that I’ll never forget. She never did get the least bit excited. ‘Go on, now Richard, you go downstairs, and have some coffee, and then you best get packed,’ she said, as if she was talking to a little child. She bought a building for me down here, lickety split. I mean Julien wasn’t in the ground when she had bought that building and moved me downtown. Of course, it was Julien’s money.

“But no, she never got excited. Except when I told her Julien was dead. Then she got excited. Yes, to tell the truth, she went mad. But just for a little while. Then when she saw he really was gone, she just snapped to and started straightening him up and straightening up the bedcovers. And I never saw her shed another tear.

“I’ll tell you a strange thing about Julien’s funeral, though. Mary Beth did a strange thing. It was in that front room, of course, and the coffin was open and Julien was a handsome corpse and every Mayfair in Louisiana was there. Why, there were carriages and automobiles lined up for blocks on First and Chestnut streets. And it rained, oh, did it rain! I thought it would never stop. It was so thick it was like a veil around the house. But the main thing was this. They were waking Julien, you know, and it wasn’t really what you’d call an Irish wake, of course, because they were far too high-toned for that sort of thing, but there was wine and food, and the Judge was blind drunk naturally. And at one point, with all those people in the room and all the goings-on, and people all over the hallway and back in the dining room and in the library and up the steps, well, with all that just going on, Mary Beth just moved a straight-backed chair up, right beside the coffin, and she put her hand in the coffin and clasped Julien’s dead hand, and she just went to dozing right there, in that chair, with her head to one side, holding on to Julien as the cousins came and went to see him, and kneel on the prie-dieu and so forth and so on.

“It was a tender thing that. But jealous as I had always been of her, I loved her for it. I wish I could have done it. Julien certainly did look fine in the coffin. And you should have seen the umbrellas in the Lafayette Cemetery the next day! I tell you when they slipped that coffin inside the vault, I died myself inside. And Mary Beth came up to me at that very moment, and she put her arm around my shoulder, and so that I could hear it, she whispered, ‘Au revoir, mon cher Julien!’ She did it for me, I know she did. She did it for me, but that was about the warmest thing she ever did. And to her dying day, she denied that he had ever written any autobiography.”

I prodded him at this point, asking him if Carlotta had cried at the funeral.

“Indeed not. I don’t even remember seeing