The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,429

to Communion. Girls in white blouses and blue wool skirts, boys in their khaki shirts and trousers. But memory scanned all the years; when he was eight years old he’d swung the smoking incense here, on these steps, for Benediction.

“Take your time,” the little woman said. “Just come back through the rectory when you’re finished.”

For a half hour he sat in the first pew. He did not know precisely what he was doing. Memorizing, perhaps, the details he could not have called forth from his recollections. Never to forget again the names carved in the marble floor of those buried under the altar. Never to forget perhaps the painted angels high above. Or the window far to his right in which the angels and the saints wore wooden shoes! How curious. Could anyone now have explained such a thing? And to think he’d never noticed it before, and when he thought of all those hours spent in this church …

Think of Marie Louise with her big breasts beneath the starched white uniform blouse, reading her missal at Mass. And Rita Mae Dwyer, who had looked like a grown woman at fourteen. She wore very high heels and huge gold earrings with her red dress on Sunday. Michael’s father had been one of the men who moved down the aisles with the collection basket on its long stick, thrusting it into row after row, face appropriately solemn. You did not even whisper in a Catholic church in those days unless you had to.

What did he think, that they would have all been here, waiting for him? A dozen Rita Maes in flowered dresses, making a noon visit?

Last night, Rita Mae had said, “Don’t go back there, Mike. Remember it the way it used to be.”

Finally he climbed to his feet. He wandered up the aisle to wards the old wooden confessionals. He found the plaque on the wall listing those who had in the recent past paid for restoration. He closed his eyes, and just for a moment imagined he heard children playing in the school yards—the noontime roar of mingled voices.

There was no such sound. No heavy swish of the swinging doors as the parishioners came and went. Only the solemn empty place. And the Virgin under her crown on the high altar.

Small, far away, the image seemed. And it occurred to him intellectually that he ought to pray to it. He ought to ask the Virgin or God why he had been brought back here, what it meant that he’d been snatched from the cold grip of death. But he had no belief in the images on the altar. No memory of childlike belief came back to him.

Instead the memory that came was specific and uncomfortable, and shabby and mean. He and Marie Louise had met to exchange secrets right inside one of these tall front doors. In the pouring rain it had been. And Marie Louise had confessed, reluctantly, that no, she wasn’t pregnant, angry for being made to confess it, angry that he was so relieved. “Don’t you want to get married? Why are we playing these stupid games!”

What would have happened to him if he had married Marie Louise? He saw her big, sullen brown eyes again. He felt her sourness, her disappointment. He could not imagine such a thing.

Marie Louise’s voice came back again. “You know you’re going to marry me sooner or later. We’re meant for each other.”

Meant. Had he been meant to leave here, meant to do the things he’d done in his life, meant to travel so far? Meant to fall from the rock into the sea and drift slowly out, away from all the lights of land?

He thought of Rowan—not merely of the visual image, but of everything Rowan was to him now. He thought of her sweetness and sensuality, and mystery, of her lean taut body snuggled against his under the covers, of her velvety voice and her cold eyes. He thought of the way she looked at him before they made love, so unself-conscious, forgetting her own body completely, absorbed in his body. In sum, looking at him the way a man looked at a woman. Just as hungry and just as aggressive and yet yielding so magically in his arms.

He was still staring at the altar—staring at the whole vast and gorgeously ornamented church.

He wished he could believe in something. And then he realized that he did. He still believed in his visions, in the goodness of the