"It's no use," he said. "He doesn't want to see you. Wait until later."
But I didn't see him until it was time to attend the services. Despair had washed the radiant color from his face until it resembled a death mask. He gazed at me with vacant eyes and moved like someone in a trance. I squeezed Beau's hand and shot him a troubled glance and he nodded. He tried to approach Paul before me and speak to him, but Paul didn't acknowledge him. He barely acknowledged his own parents, and with people all around him continuously, it was difficult for me to say the things I wanted to say to him.
The church was filled to capacity, not only because of the people the Tates knew and did business with, but because of the people who knew and remembered my grandmere Catherine. My heart nearly burst when I saw their faces. Beau and I sat up front in the pew behind Paul and his family and listened to the priest deliver the eulogy. Every time I heard my name, I winced and gazed around. There wasn't a dry eye in the church. Paul's sisters were crying openly, but Paul was like one of Nina Jackson's zombies, his body stiff, his eyes so empty, they sent chills down my spine. Who in his or her right mind would look at him and not believe it was really Ruby in that coffin? I thought. It gave me a sick, empty feeling in the base of my stomach.
I'm watching people cry over me, listening to a priest talk about me, and gazing at a coffin that is supposed to have my body in it, I thought. It made me feel absolutely ghoulish. It was all I could do to keep myself from fainting.
It was worse at the cemetery. It was I who was supposedly being lowered into the ground; it was I over whose coffin the priest was saying the final words and giving the last rites. My name, my identity, was about to be buried. I thought to myself that this was the final chance, the last time for me to cry out and say, "No, that's not Ruby in the coffin. That's Gisselle. I'm here. I'm not dead!"
For a moment I thought I had actually spoken, but the words died on my lips. My actions had made them forbidden. The truth had to be buried here and now, I realized.
The rain started and fell relentlessly, colder than usual. Umbrellas sprouted. Paul didn't seem to notice. His father and Jeanne's husband, James, had to hold his arms and keep him standing. When the coffin was lowered and the priest cast the holy water, Paul's legs folded. He had to be carried back to the limousine and given some cold water. His mother gave me a scathing glance and followed quickly.
"He's going to win the Academy Award for this," Beau said, shaking his head. Even he was beyond amazement; he was in awe and, from the look in his face, as frightened by Paul's behavior as I was.
"You're right," he whispered to me as we walked back to our vehicle. "He was so disturbed about losing you, he went a bit mad and accepted the illusion as reality. The only way he could accept the fact that you had left him was to believe it was you who was sick and now you who died," Beau theorized, and shook his head.
"I know, Beau. I'm so worried."
"Maybe now that it's over, that she's gone, he'll snap out of it," Beau suggested, but neither of us was filled with any confidence.
We returned to Cypress Woods, mainly to see how Paul was. The doctor went up to the suite to examine him, and when he came down, he told us he had given Paul something to help him sleep.
"It will take time," he said. "These things take time. Unfortunately, we have no drug, no medicine, no treatment, to cure grief." He pressed Gladys's hand between his, kissed her on the cheek, and left. She turned and glared at me in the strangest way, shooting icicles out of her eyes. Then she went upstairs to be with Paul.
Toby and Jeanne went off in a corner to comfort each other. People began to leave, anxious to put this dreadful sadness behind them. Paul's mother remained in the suite with him, so I couldn't get to see him even if I had wanted. Octavious came down to speak to us. He directed himself at Beau as if he, too, couldn't fix his eyes on my face.
"Gladys is as bad as Paul is," he muttered. "It's the way she is about him. Whenever he was sick, even as a child, she was sick. If he was unhappy, so was she. Dreadful, dreadful thing, this," he added, shaking his head and walking off. "Dreadful."
"We should leave now," Beau said softly. "Give him a day or two and then call. After he comes back to himself somewhat, we'll invite him to New Orleans and work out everything sensibly."
I nodded. I wanted to say good-bye to Jeanne and Toby, but they were like two clams who had closed their shell of grief tightly around themselves. They wouldn't look at or talk to anyone. And so Beau and I started out. I paused at the door. James was holding it open, waiting impatiently, but I wanted to gaze around at the grand house once more before leaving. I was filled with a sense of termination. This was the end of so many things. lut it wasn't until late in the afternoon of the next day that I was to discover just how many.
15
Farewell to
My First Love
.
Early in the evening of the following day, just
as Beau and I were about to take our seats for dinner, Aubrey appeared in the dining room doorway, his face pale, to inform me I had a phone call. Since returning from the funeral and Cypress Woods, both Beau and I had been moving like two sleepwalkers, eating little, doing little, talking in low voices. The clouds of gloom that hovered over the bayou followed us back to New Orleans and now lay over us like a ceiling of oppression, darkening every room, filling our very souls with shadows. It had rained all the way back from Cypress Woods. I fell asleep to the monotonous wagging of the wipers on the windshield and woke with a chill that a pile of blankets and a dozen sweaters couldn't chase from my bones.
"Who is it?" I asked. I was in no mood to talk to any of Gisselle's friends, who I imagined had heard about my death and wanted to gossip, and I had left instructions with Aubrey to tell any of them who did call that I was unavailable.
"She wouldn't say, madame. She's speaking in a coarse whisper, however, and she is very insistent," he explained. From the way he couched his words and shifted his eyes, I understood that whoever it was, she had spoken to him roughly. I was positive now that it was one of Gisselle's bitchy, spoiled girlfriends who wouldn't take no as an answer from a servant.
"Do you want me to take it?" Beau asked. "No. I'll take care of it," I said. "Thank you, Aubrey. I'm sorry," I added, apologizing for the ugliness he had to experience.
I went into the study and seized the receiver, my heart pumping, my face flush with anger.
"Who is this?" I demanded. For a moment there was no reply. "Hello?"
"He's gone," a raspy voice replied. "He's gone away and we can't find him and it's all because of you."
"What? Who is this? Who's gone?" I asked with machine-gun speed. The voice had sent an icicle down my spine and nailed my feet to the floor.