dare to explain it. She’s burnt my books, you know, right out there on the grass. She burnt what was mine. She burnt my life when she did that. But I want you to do this for me, believe in this for me. Take the Victrola out of this house. You must keep it, in memory of me. It’s mine, this thing, I have loved it, touched it, imbued it with my spirit as surely as any stumbling mortal can imbue an object with spirit. Keep it safe, Eve, play the waltz for me.
“Pass it on to those who would cherish it after Mary Beth is gone. Mary Beth can’t live forever any more than I can. Never let Carlotta get it. A time will come…”
And then he’d sunk into sadness again. Better to make love.
“I cannot help it,” he had said. “I see but I can do nothing. I do not know any more than any man what is really possible. What if hell is utterly solitary? What if there is no one there to hate? What if it’s like the dark night over Donnelaith, Scotland? Then Lasher comes from hell.”
“Did he really say all that, now?” asked Stella, years later, and only a month after that very conversation, Stella herself had been shot and killed. Stella whose eyes closed forever in the year 1929.
So much life since the death of Stella. So many generations. So much world.
Sometimes it was a downright consolation to hear her beloved redhaired Mona Mayfair railing against modernism.
“We’ve had nearly an entire century, you realize, and the most coherent and successful styles were developed in those first twenty years. Stella saw it. If she saw art deco, if she heard jazz, if she saw a Kandinsky, she saw the twentieth century. What have we had since? Look at these ads for this hotel in Miami. Might as well have been done in 1923 when you were running around with Stella.”
Yes, Mona was a consolation in more ways than one.
“Well, ducky, you know, I might run off to England with this man from the Talamasca,” Stella had said in those last weeks of her life. She’d stopped eating her spaghetti as if this were something to be decided then and there, with fork in hand. To run from First Street, run from Lasher, seek help from these strange scholars.
“But Julien warned against those men. Stella, he said they were the alchemists in my poem. He said they would only hurt us in the long run. Stella, he used that word, he said not to speak with them ever at all!”
“You know, this Talamasca man or whatever he is, he’s going to find out about that other one, that the body’s in the attic. When you’re a Mayfair you can kill anyone you want, and nobody does anything about it. Nobody can think what to do.” She’d shrugged, and a month later her brother Lionel killed her. No more Stella.
No more anyone who knew about the Victrola or Julien with Evelyn in Julien’s bedroom. Evelyn’s only living witness gone to the grave.
It had not been a simple thing, during Julien’s last illness, to get the Victrola out of the house. He’d waited for a time when Mary Beth and Carlotta were not at home, and then sent the boys down to fetch another “music box,” as he stubbornly called it, from the dining room.
And only when he had a record ready to play full blast on the big one, did he tell her to take the little Victrola and run away. He’d told her to sing as she walked with it, sing as if it were playing, just sing and sing aloud until she reached her house uptown.
“People will think I am crazy,” she had said softly. She had looked at her hands, her left hand with the extra finger—witches’ marks.
“Do you care what they think?” His smile had always been so beautiful. Only in sleep did he look his age. He had cranked the big music box. “You take these records of my opera—I have others—take them under your arm, you can do it. Take it uptown, my darling. If I could be a gentleman and carry the whole load for you up to your attic, you can be sure I would. Now, here, when you get to the Avenue, flag a taxi. Give him this. Let him carry the thing inside.”
And there she was singing that song, singing along with the big music box,