Lasher

by Anne Rice

  "You really believe that, Gifford. In your heart of hearts, you, my beloved Gifford, believe that."

  She didn't answer. Couldn't. She felt too defeated. They had been arguing all of their lives, it seemed. Would it storm, would it shine? Would a stranger rape Mona on St. Charles Avenue as she walked alone at night? Would income taxes go up again? Would Castro be overthrown? Were there ghosts? Were the Mayfairs witches? Could anyone really speak with the dead? Why did the dead behave so strangely? What the hell did the dead want? Butter is not unhealthy, and neither is red meat. Drink your milk. One cannot metabolize milk as an adult, and so forth and so on, forever.

  "Yes, Ryan," she said sadly and almost offhandedly. "I believe it. But you see, Ryan, seeing is believing. And I always saw him. You never could."

  She had used the wrong word. Could. Real mistake, that. She could hear the little soft sighs with which he drew away from her, away from the possibility of belief or trust, into his well-constructed universe where ghosts did not exist, and Mayfair witchcraft was a family joke, as much fun as all the old houses, and quaint trust funds, and jewelry and gold coins in the vaults. As much fun as Clancy Mayfair marrying Pierce Mayfair, which really, really, really shouldn't happen, since both were--like Alicia and Patrick--descended from Julien, but what was the use of telling him? What was the use? There was no reason, there was no exchange of ideas, there was no genuine trust.

  But there's love, she thought. There is love and there is a form of respect. She didn't depend on anyone in the world the way she did on Ryan. So she said what she always said at such times:

  "I love you, my darling," and it was wonderful to say an Ingrid Bergman line like that with so much heart and mean it so completely. "I really do." Lucky Gifford.

  "Gifford..." Silence on the other end of the line. A lawyer thinking quietly, the man with the silver-white hair and blue eyes, who did the practical worrying with her for the whole family. Why should he believe in ghosts? Ghosts don't try to break wills, they don't sue you, they don't threaten you with Internal Revenue investigations, they don't bill you for the two-martini lunch.

  "What is it, darling?" she asked softly.

  "If you believe that," he said. "If you really believe what you just said to me...if this ghost got through...and the house is empty...then why wouldn't you go there, Gifford? Why wouldn't you come today?"

  "The thing took Rowan away," she said angrily. "This isn't finished, Ryan!" Suddenly she was sitting up. Every bit of goodwill she felt for her husband had done its usual evaporation act. He was the same tiresome and impossible man who had wrecked her life. That was true. It was true that she loved him. It was true that the ghost had come through. "Ryan, don't you feel things in that house? Don't you sense things? It isn't over, it's just begun! We have to find Rowan!"

  "I'm going to come get you in the morning," he said. He was furious. Her anger had drawn out his anger. But he was struggling. "I want to come up there and drive you back home."

  "OK, Ryan," she said. "I wish you would." She heard the plea in her own voice, the plea that meant surrender.

  She was only glad that she'd had the courage to say the little bit she had about "the man," that for the record, she had spoken her piece, and he could argue with her, and beat her down, and criticize her to death later on, perhaps, Tomorrow.

  "Gifford, Gifford, Gifford..." he sang softly. "I'm going to drive up. I'll be there before you wake up."

  And she felt so weak suddenly, so irrationally incapable of moving until he came there, until she saw him come through the door.

  "Now, lock up the house tight, please," he said, "and go to sleep. I'll bet you're sacked out on the couch and everything's open..."

  "This is Destin, Ryan."

  "Lock up, make sure the gun is in the chest by the bed, and please, please, please set the alarm."

  The gun, good Lord! "As if I'd use it with you not here."

  "That's when you need it, darling, when I'm not there." She smiled again, remembering Mona. Bang, bang, bang. Kisses.

  They still blew kisses to each other before they rang off.

  The first time she had kissed him, she was fifteen, and they were "in love," and later Alicia said, when Mona was born: "You're lucky. You love your Mayfair. I married mine 'cause of this!"

  Gifford wished she had taken Mona, then and there. Probably Alicia would have let her do it. Alicia was already a full-time drunk. It's a wonder Mona had been born at all, let alone robust and healthy. But Gifford hadn't really thought of taking Alicia's baby from her; she could still remember when Ellie Mayfair, whom Gifford never knew, had taken Deirdre's baby, Rowan, all the way to California, to save her from the family curse, and everyone had hated her for it. That had been the same terrible year that Oncle Cortland had died, after falling down the steps at First Street. So terrible for Ryan.

  Gifford had been fifteen and already they were very much in love. No, you simply did not take a baby away from a mother, no matter what you thought. They'd driven Deirdre mad, and Oncle Cortland had tried to stop it.

  Of course Gifford could have taken better care of Mona. Hell, anybody could have taken better care of Mona than Alicia and Patrick. And in her own way, Gifford always had taken care of Mona, as surely as she took care of her own children.

  The fire had died away. She was getting just a little uncomfortably cold. Best to build it up again. She didn't need much sleep anymore. If she dozed off sometime around two, she'd be fine when Ryan got here. That was one thing about being forty-six. She didn't need sleep anymore.

  She went down on her knees in front of the broad stone hearth and, lifting another small oak log from the neat stack beside the fireplace, threw it into the weak little fire. A bunch of newspaper, crumpled, with kindling, and off it went, curling and flaring against the soot-blackened bricks. The bright warmth came out all over her hands and her face, until she was driven back by it, and there was a sudden moment of remembering something unpleasant, something to do with fire and the family history, but then she deliberately and carefully forgot.

  She stood in the living room looking out over the white beach. Now she could not hear the waves at all. The breeze covered everything in a heavy drape of silence. The stars shone as brightly as if they were tumbling on the Final Day. And the sheer cleanness of the breeze delighted her and made her want to cry.

  She wished she could stay until all this seemed too much. Until she longed for the oaks of home again. But that had never happened. She'd always left before she truly wanted to. Duty, family, something--always compelled her home from Destin before she was ready.

  That was not to say that she didn't love the cobwebs and old oaks, that she didn't love the crumbling walls, and listing town houses, and broken pavements; and the lovely endless embrace of her good cousins and cousins and cousins. Yes, she loved it, but sometimes she only wanted to be away.

  This was away.

  She shuddered. "I wish I could die," she whispered, her voice trembling and fading away on the breeze. She went into the open kitchen--no more than a section of the giant main room--and filled a glass with water, and drank the water down. Then she went out through the open glass doors, through the yard, and up the steps and out the boardwalk over the little dune and down on the clean-swept sand.

  Now you could hear the Gulf. The sound filled you. There was nothing else in the world. The breeze broke you loose from everything, and all sensation. When she glanced back, the house looked deceptively small and insignificant, more of a bunker than the handsome little cottage it was, behind its levee of sand.

  The law couldn't make you change something which had been built in 1955. And that is when Great-grandmother Dorothy had built it for her children and her grandchildren, and Destin was no more than a sleepy little fishing village, or so everyone said. No condominium towers in those days. No Goofy Golf. Just this.

  And the Mayfairs still had their bits and pieces of it, tucked away every few miles from Pensacola all the way down to Se
aside--old bungalows of various size and age built before the thundering hordes--and the building codes--had come.

  Gifford felt chilled, pummeled by the breeze suddenly, as if it had doubled its fist and tried to push her rudely to one side. She walked against it, down to the water, eyes fixed on the soft waves that barely lapped on the glittering beach. She wanted to lie down here and sleep. She had done that when she was a girl. What safer beach was there than this unknown sweep of Destin, where no dune buggies or vehicles of any kind could ever come to hurt you with their wheels or their hideousness, or their noise.

  Who was that poet who had been killed long ago on the beach at Fire Island? Run over in his sleep, they thought, though no one ever knew? Horrible thing, horrible. She couldn't remember his name. Only his poems. College days; beer; Ryan kissing her on the deck of the dancing boat, and promising her he would take her away from New Orleans. What lies! They were going to live in China! Or was it Brazil? Ryan had gone right into Mayfair and Mayfair. It had swallowed him whole before his twenty-first birthday. She wondered if he could remember now their favorite poets--how they loved D. H. Lawrence's poem about blue gentians, or Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning."

  But she couldn't blame him for what had happened. She had been unable to say no to Ancient Evelyn, and Granddaddy Fielding and all the old ones who cared so much, even though her own father and mother were dead; it was as if Gifford and Alicia both had always belonged to the older ones. Ryan's mother never would have forgiven them had they not gone through with the white-dress wedding. And Gifford could not have left Alicia then, who was still so young and already mad and getting into constant trouble. Gifford hadn't even gone away to school; when she'd asked to go, Ancient Evelyn had said:

  "And what is wrong with Tulane? You can ride the streetcar." And Gifford had. To Sophie Newcomb College. That they'd let her go to the Sorbonne in her sophomore year had been a minor miracle.

  "And you a tenfold Mayfair," Ancient Evelyn had declared when the wedding was being discussed. "Even your mother would be shocked, God rest her soul, and to think how she suffered."

  No, there had been no real question of Gifford getting away, of a life up north or in Europe or anywhere else on the planet. The biggest fight had been over the church. Would Gifford and Ryan marry at Holy Name or go back in the Irish Channel to St. Alphonsus?

  Gifford and Alicia had gone to Holy Name School; on Sundays they went to Mass at Holy Name, uptown across from Audubon Park, a world away from old St. Alphonsus. The church had been white still in those days, before they painted the nave, and the statues were exquisitely made of pure marble.

  In that church on the Avenue, Gifford had made her Communion and her Confirmation, and walked in procession her senior year, with bouquet in hand, in white ankle-length dress and high heels, a ritual worthy of a debutante.

  Marry at Holy Name. It seemed so natural. What was St. Alphonsus to her, the old Mayfair church? And Deirdre Mayfair would never know. She was by that time, already, hopelessly crazy. It was Granddaddy Fielding who made the fuss. "St. Alphonsus is our church and you a tenfold Mayfair!"

  Tenfold Mayfair. "I hate that expression. It doesn't mean anything," Gifford had said often enough. "It makes me think of folded napkins."

  "Nonsense," Ancient Evelyn had said. "It means you are ten times from within the fold. Ten different lines of descent. That's what it means. You ought to be proud of it."

  Evenings, Ancient Evelyn sat on the porch of Amelia Street, knitting until it got too dark for her to see. Enjoying as she always had the drowsy twilight on St. Charles Avenue with so many people out strolling, and the streetcars with their yellow lights on inside, crashing along the curving track. Dust, those were the days of noise and dust--before air-conditioning and wall-to-wall carpets, the days of helping take laundry stiff as paper off the back line. You could make people out of the little old clothespins--little wooden men wearing tiny hats.

  Yes, we had belonged to the old ones, Gifford thought. All Gifford's life, her mother had been ill, a recluse, suffering, and pacing the floor behind closed doors, and then dying when Gifford and Alicia were so young.

  But Gifford had a lingering fondness for that old way of life, or walking on the Avenue with Ancient Evelyn, who always had her Irish cane. Or reading to Granddaddy Fielding.

  No, I never really wanted to leave, she thought. She had never stayed long in any modern American city. Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, they weren't to her taste, even though their initial cleanliness and efficiency might prove very attractive. She remembered the first time she'd seen Los Angeles as a child. What a city of wonders! But she tired of those other places quickly. And maybe the charm of Destin was that it was so very close to home. You gave up nothing to come here. She could push the pedal to the floor and see those oaks by sunset. New Orleans, city of roaches, city of decay, city of our family, and of happy, happy people.

  She remembered that quote from Hilaire Belloc that she'd found in her father's papers, after his death:

  Where e'er the Catholic sun does shine

  There's music, laughter, and good red wine

  At least I've always found it so.

  Benedicamus Domino!

  "Let me tell you a little secret," her mother, Laura Lee, had said to her once. "If you're a tenfold Mayfair, which you are, you'll never be happy outside New Orleans. Don't bother." Well, she'd probably been right. Tenfold, fifteenfold. But had Laura Lee been happy? Gifford could still remember her laugh, the crack in her deep voice. "I'm too sick to think about happiness, daughter dear. Bring me the Times-Picayune and a cup of hot tea."

  And to think Mona had more Mayfair blood than anyone in the clan. What was she? Twentyfold? Now, Gifford had to see this computerized family exploration for herself, this endless chart that traced all those many lines, of double cousins and triple cousins marrying one another. What she had wanted to know was this: was there any fresh blood at all during the last four or five generations?

  It was becoming ridiculous now, Mayfair marrying Mayfair. They didn't bother to try to explain it to others. And now Michael Curry, all alone in that house, and Rowan gone, heaven only knew where, the child once stolen away for her own good, come right back home to be cursed somehow...

  Ryan had said once, in a very reckless moment, "You know, Gifford, there are only two things in life that matter--family and money, that's really it. Being very very rich, like we are, and having your family around you."

  How she had laughed. It must have been April 15th, and he had only just filed his income tax. But she'd known what he meant. She was no painter, no singer, no dancer, no musician. Neither was Ryan. And family and money were their entire world. Same with all the Mayfairs she knew. The family was not just the family to them; it was the clan; the nation; the religion; the obsession.

  I could never have lived a life without them, she thought, mouthing the words as she liked to do out here, where the wind off the water devoured everything, where the featureless roar of the waves made her feel lightheaded and as if she could in fact sing. Ought to sing.

  And Mona will have a good life! Mona will go to whatever college she wants! Mona can stay or go. She will have choices. There wasn't a fit cousin for Mona to marry, now, was there? Of course there was. She could think of twenty if she tried, but she didn't. The point was Mona would have a freedom that Gifford never had. Mona was strong. Gifford had dreams in which Mona was always very strong, and doing things that nobody else could do, like walking on top of a high wall, and saying, "Hurry up, Aunt Gifford." Once in a dream, Mona had been sitting on the wing of a plane, smoking a cigarette as they flew through the clouds, and Gifford, terrified, had been clinging to a rope ladder.

  She stopped very still on the beach and tipped her head to the side, letting the wind bring her hair tight around her face, covering her eyes. She floated, the wind holding her steady. Ah, the loveliness of it all, she thought, the sheer loveliness. And Ryan coming to take her home. Ryan would be here. Maybe
by some miracle Rowan was alive! Rowan would come home! All would be explained and the great shining miracle of Rowan's first return would begin to give forth its light again.

  Yes, sink down and sleep in the sand. Dream of it. Think about Clancy's dress. You have to help her with her dress. Her mother doesn't know a thing about clothes.

  Was it now Ash Wednesday?

  She couldn't see her watch by the light of the clear heavens. Even the moon did not help, shining so brightly down upon the water. But she felt in her bones that it was the beginning of Lent. That far away in New Orleans, Rex and Comus had opened their ballrooms to one another, and the courts had taken their final Mardi Gras bows. Shrove Tuesday was over.

  But she had to go in. Ryan had said to go in, to lock everything up, to turn on the alarm. She knew she would do it because he had said so. Some night when she was really angry with him, she'd sleep in the sand, safe, and free, beneath the stars, like a wanderer. On this beach, you were all alone with the oldest part of the known world--the sand, the sea. You could have been in any time. You could have been in any book, in biblical lands, in Atlantis of legend. But for now, do what Ryan says. Don't for the love of God be asleep out here when he comes! He'll be so furious!

  Ah, she wished he was here now.

  The night last year that Deirdre Mayfair had died, Gifford had wakened with a scream, and Ryan had taken hold of her. "Somebody's dead," she'd cried, and he'd held her. Only the phone ringing had taken him away. "Deirdre. It's Deirdre."

  Would she have such a feeling when something finally happened to Rowan? Or was Rowan too far away from the fold? Had she died already in some horrid and shabby way, perhaps only hours after her departure? No, there had been letters and messages from her in the beginning. All the codes are correct, Ryan had said. And then Rowan had actually called that doctor in California long distance on the phone.

  Ah, tomorrow we'll know something from this doctor, and round her thoughts came again to the same place, and she turned her back on the sea, and walked towards the dark dune and the soft seam of light above it.