The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,394

as she left the hotel, and it was so very faint now that it was little more than a mist, giving its shine to the asphalt street, and hovering in the gleaming leaves above the fence, and just touching her face and shoulders.

Here my mother, lived out her life, she thought. And here her mother was born, and her mother before her. Here in this house where Ellie sat near Stella’s coffin.

For surely it had been here, though all the late afternoon long, over the cocktails and the salad and the highly spiced food, they had spoken only superficially of such things. “Carlotta will want to tell you … ” “ … after you talk to Carlotta.”

Was the door open for her now? Had the gate been pushed back to welcome her? The great wooden frame of the door looked like a giant keyhole, tapering as it did from a flared base to a narrower top. Where had she seen that very same doorway shaped like a keyhole? Carved on the tomb in the Lafayette Cemetery. How ironic, for this house had been her mother’s tomb.

Even the sweet silent rain had not alleviated the heat. But a breeze came now, the river breeze they had called it when they had said their farewells only blocks away at the hotel. And the breeze, smelling of the rain, flowed over her as deliciously as water. What was the scent of flowers in the air, so savage and deep, so unlike the florist scents that had surrounded her earlier?

She didn’t resist it. She stood dreaming, feeling light and almost naked in the fragile silk garments she had just put on, trying to see the dark house, trying to take a deep breath, trying to slow the stream of all that had happened, all she’d witnessed and only half understood.

My life is broken in half, she thought; and all the past is the discarded part, drifting away, like a boat cut loose, as if the water were time, and the horizon was the demarcation of what would remain meaningful.

Ellie, why? Why were we cut off? Why, when they all knew? Knew my name, knew yours, knew I was her daughter! What was it all about, with them there by the hundreds and speaking that name, Mayfair, over and over?

“Come to the office downtown after you’ve talked,” the young Pierce had said, Pierce with his rosy cheeks who was already a partner in the firm founded so long ago by his great-grandfather. “Ellie’s grandfather, too, you know,” said Ryan of the white hair and the carefully chiseled features who had been Ellie’s first cousin. She did not know. She did not know who was who or whence they came, or what it meant, and above all why no one had ever told her. Flash of bitterness! Cortland this, and Cortland that … and Julien and Clay and Vincent and Mary Beth and Stella and Antha and Katherine.

Oh, what sweet southern music, words rich and deep like the fragrance she breathed now, like the heat clinging to her, and making even the soft silk shirt she wore feel suddenly heavy.

Did all the answers lie beyond the open door? Is the future beyond the open door? For after all, why could this not become, in spite of everything, a mere chapter of her life, marked off and seldom reread, once she had returned to the outside world where she had been kept all these years, quite beyond the spells and enchantments which were now claiming her? Oh, but it wasn’t going to be. Because when you fell prey to a spell this strong, you were never the same. And each moment in this alien world of family, South, history, kinship, proffered love, drove her a thousand years away from who she’d been, or who she had wanted to be.

Did they know, did they guess for a second, how seductive it was? How raw she’d felt as they offered their invitations, their promises of visits and conversations yet to come, of family knowledge and family loyalty and family intimacy.

Kinship. Could they guess how indescribably exotic that was after the barren, selfish world in which she’d spent her life, like a potted plant that had never seen the real sun, nor the real earth, nor heard the rain except against double-paned glass?

“Sometimes I’d look around,” Michael had said of California, “and it all seemed so sterile here.” She had known. She had understood before she had ever dreamed of