The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,259

she said she was going out on the front steps to wait for her daddy to come home.

“Mary Beth was there, and she said, ‘Well you are going to be waiting a very long time, because your father is drunk right now at the club, and they won’t load him into a carriage till about ten o’clock. So you had better wear a coat when you go outside.’

“This wasn’t said in a mean way, really, just matter-of-fact, the way she said everything, but you should have seen the way that girl looked at her mother. I think she blamed her mother for her father’s drinking, and if she did what a little fool of a child she was. A man like Daniel McIntyre would have been a drunk if he had married the Virgin Mary or the Whore of Babylon. Didn’t matter a particle at all. He told me himself how his father had died of drink, and his father before him. And both of them at the age of forty-eight, no less. And he was afraid he’d die at forty-eight. I don’t know whether he made it past forty-eight or not. And you know his family had money. Plenty of money. You ask me, Mary Beth kept Judge McIntyre up and running a bit longer than anyone else might have been able to do.

“But Carlotta never understood. Never for a moment. I think Lionel understood, and Stella too. They loved both their parents, at least it always seemed that way to me. Maybe Lionel was a little embarrassed by the Judge from time to time, but he was a good boy, a devoted boy. And Stella, why, Stella adored her mother and father.

“Ah, that Julien. I can remember that last year, he did the damnedest thing. He took Lionel and Stella both with him down to the French Quarter to see the unseemly sights, so to speak, when they were no more than ten and eleven years old, I kid you not! And you know, I don’t think it was the first time either. I think it was just the first time that he couldn’t keep it from me, the mischief he was up to. And you know he had Stella dressed as a little sailor boy and did she ever look cute. And they had driven around all evening down there, with him pointing out the fancy clubs to them, though of course he didn’t take them in, not even Julien could have pulled that off, I suppose, but they’d been drinking, I can tell you.

“I was awake when they came home. Lionel was quiet, he was always quiet. But Stella was all fired up with everything she’d seen down there in those cribs, you know, with the women right on the street. And we sat on the steps together, Stella and I, talking about it in whispers long after Lionel had helped Julien up to the third floor and put him to bed.

“Stella and I went out and opened up a bottle of champagne in the kitchen. She said she was old enough to have a few drinks, and of course she didn’t listen to me, and who was I to stop her. And she and Lionel and I ended up dancing out on the back patio as the sun came up. Stella was doing some ragtime dance she’d seen down there. She said Julien was going to take them to Europe, and to see the whole world, but of course that never happened. I don’t think they really knew how old Julien was, any more than I did. When I saw the year 1828 written on that stone, I was shocked, I tell you. But then so much about Julien made sense to me. No wonder he had such a peculiar perspective. He had seen an entire century pass, he really had.

“Stella should have lived so long, really she should have. I remember she said something to me I never forgot. It was long after Julien died. We had lunch down here together at the Court of Two Sisters. She had already had Antha by then, and of course she hadn’t bothered to marry or even identify the father. Now, that’s a story, let me tell you. She just about turned society on its ear with that one. But what am I trying to say? We had lunch, and she told me she was going to live to be as old as Julien. She said Julien