"Come on, Mom! Stop it!"
And then Alicia went limp as she always did, just a sack of potatoes on the floor, sobbing and pounding her fist. And the shock of seeing Ancient Evelyn in the doorway, which meant that she had made the long trek up the stairs by herself, not very good, and her dour words.
"Do not hurt that child! Alicia, you are a common drunkard. Your husband is a common drunkard."
"That child hurts me!" Alicia had wailed.
No, Mona would never put her in a hospital again. But the others might. You never knew. Best not to drag Michael into it, even if he wanted to help her fix up the place. Scrap that plan. Go on to the next one.
By the time she'd peeled off her clothes, the room was filled with delicious warm steam. She turned off the lights, so the only illumination came from the orange flames of the gas heater, and then she sank down into the tub of hot water, letting her hair stream out as if she were Ophelia again, or so she always imagined, floating to her death in the famous stream.
She turned her head this way and that to stir her long hair in the water, seeing the swirl of red around her, to get it really clean. She pulled at the bits and pieces of dead leaf. God! One of these could have been a roach! How ghastly. It was this swirling back and forth that made her hair so thick and shining after, the long soak and the turning. A shower would just beat it flat. She loved her hair to be as big and thick as possible.
Perfumed soap. Wouldn't you know it? And a bottle of pearly thick shampoo. These people knew how to live. This was like a fine hotel.
She washed her hair and body slowly, enjoying every minute of it, lathering gently all over and then sinking down to rinse the soap and shampoo away. Maybe she could somehow restore Amelia Street without inviting in all the new brooms of the family. Maybe she could explain to Uncle Michael that things had to be done cautiously and quietly, that he mustn't talk about Patrick and Alicia, that everybody knew anyway. But then what would they do when Ancient Evelyn started to tell the workmen to go home, or that they could not use noisy equipment?
It was comforting to be clean. She thought again of Michael, the sleeping giant, in there in the witch's bed.
She stood up and reached for the towel. She dried her hair roughly, tossing it forward and then backward, loving the freedom of being naked, and then she stepped out of the tub. The soft clean flannel gown felt snug and safe to her, though it was too long of course. So she'd pick it up like a little girl in an old-fashioned picture. That's how it made her feel. That's how her bow made her feel. Little old-fashioned girl was her favorite disguise, to the point where it wasn't a disguise at all.
She rubbed her hair fiercely one more time, and then picked up the brush off the dressing table, stared at herself for a moment in the mirror, and then began brushing her hair firmly back away from her forehead and behind her shoulders, so that it would dry neatly as it should.
The gas heat seemed to curl and breathe around her, to tap on her forehead with fingers. She picked up her bow of ribbon, and pinned it in place on the back of her head. She could just see two little bits of it sticking up. Like devil's horns.
"Oncle Julien, the hour has come," she whispered, shutting her eyes tight. "Give me a clue. Where do I look for the Victrola?" She rocked from side to side, Ray Charles style, trying to recapture one vivid moment from all those ever-fading dreams.
A thin distant sound came to her, under the gentle roar of the gas heater, a song she could barely hear. Violins? Too thin a sound to tell what the instruments were, except there were many, and it was...it was...She opened the bathroom door. Far far away, but it was the waltz from La Traviata playing. It was...the soprano singing. She started to hum it, irresistibly, but then she couldn't hear it! My God, what if the Victrola was down there in the living room!
She padded barefoot, towel over her shoulders like a shawl, into the hallway and peered down over the balusters. Very distinctly came the song of the waltz, louder than it had ever been in her dreams. The woman sang gaily in Italian, and now came the chorus behind her, sounding on the whole scratchy record like so many birds.
Her heart was pounding suddenly. She reached up and touched her bow to make sure it was securely clipped to her hair. Then she dropped the towel in a little careless heap and went to the head of the stairs. At that very instant, light softly leapt out of the doorways of the double parlor, and grew soundlessly brighter as she went down the steps. The wool carpet felt slightly rough to her bare feet, and when she incidentally saw her toes they looked very babyfied beneath the flannel, which she had to lift now, just like a picture-book kid.
She stopped. As she looked down, she saw that the carpet was no longer the red wool carpet. It was an oriental runner, very worn, very thin. She felt the change of texture. Or rather she became aware of standing on something more threadbare, and she followed the cascade of Persian blue and pink roses down the stairs. The walls had changed around her. The wallpaper was a deep dusty gold, and far below an unfamiliar chandelier hung from the oval cluster of plaster leaves on the hallway ceiling--something frothy and Venetian that she could never recall having seen before. And it had real lighted candles in it, this little chandelier.
She could smell the wax. The song of the soprano went on with its reliable and swinging rhythm, making her want to sing with it again. Her heart was brimming.
"Oncle Julien!" she whispered, almost bursting into tears. Oh, this was the grandest vision she had ever beheld!
She looked down into the hallway. More lovely patterns that she'd never seen before. And through the first of the high parlor doorways, the very doorway through which a long-ago cousin had been shot from this very stairway, she saw that the room was no longer the room of the present, and that tiny flames danced in the graceful crystal gasoliers.
Ah, but the rug was the same rug! And there were Julien's gold damask chairs.
She hurried down, glancing to right and left as the details caught her--the old gas sconces with their fluted crystal saucers of light, and the leaded glass around the huge front door, which had not been there before.
The music was as loud perhaps as a Victrola could get. And ah, behold the whatnot shelf all crowded with tiny ceramic figures, and the brass clock on the front mantel, and the Greek statues on the rear mantel, and the draperies of a mellow old velvet, burnished and fringed, and puddling on the polished floor.
The doorframes were painted to look like marble! So were the baseboards. It was that old kind of graining, so popular at the end of the century, and the gaslight flickered steadily against the darkly papered ceiling as if the little jets were dancing to the rhythm of the waltz.
What flaw could there be in this fabric? The rug was the very same rug she'd seen earlier, but that made perfect sense, didn't it, it had been Julien's, and there were his lovely fauteuils grouped together for conversation in the very center of the rooms.
She lifted her arms, and found herself dancing on the balls of her feet, in a circle, round and round, till the narrow nightgown flared around her, making a perfect narrow bell. She sang with the soprano, understanding the Italian effortlessly, though that was the most recent of all the languages she'd learned, and enchanted with the simple rhythm, and then swaying wildly back and forth, bending from the waist and letting her hair whip out and all over her face and tossing it again, so it tumbled down her back. Her eyes swept the veined and yellowed paper of the ceiling, and then in a blur, she saw the big sofa, Michael's new sofa, only it didn't have the beige damask on it now, but rather a worn gold velvet like the draperies which hung from the windows, gorgeous and warm in the flickering light.
Michael was sitting motionless on the couch looking at her. She stopped in mid-step, her arms curved downward like those of a ballerina, and felt her hair shift and tumble again off her shoulders. He was afraid. He sat in the middle of the couch in his cotton pajamas staring at her, as if she were something utterly terrifying or grotesque. The music went on and on, and slowly she took a deep breath
, getting her pulse under control again and then coming near to him, thinking that if she had ever seen anything truly scary in her life, it was the sight of him sitting there in this room, staring at her, as if he were about to go out of his mind.
He wasn't trembling. He was like her. He feared nothing. He was just all anxious and upset and horrified by the vision, and he was seeing it, he had to be, and he was hearing the music, and as she drew closer, and sank down on the sofa beside him, he turned, looking at her, eyes wide with gentle amazement, and then she locked her mouth on his, pulled him down to her, and slam, bang, it connected, the chain reaction snapping through her. She had him. He was hers.
He pulled back for one instant as if to look at her again, as if to make sure that she was there. His eyes were still cloudy from the drugs. Maybe they were helping now--putting his sublime Catholic conscience to sleep. She kissed him again hurriedly and a little sloppily and then reached between his legs. Ah, he was ready!
His arms locked around her, and he gave some soft complaining sound that was very like him, like it's just too late now, or something, or God forgive me. She could all but hear the words.
She pulled him down on top of her, sinking deep into the sofa, smelling dust, as the waltz surged and the soprano sang on. She stretched out beneath him as he rose up, protectively, and then she felt his hand, trembling slightly in a beguiling fashion, as it ripped up the flannel and felt her naked belly and then her naked thigh.
"You know what else is there," she whispered, and she pulled him down hard again. But his hand went before him, pushing gently into her, awakening her, rather like setting off a burglar alarm, and she felt her own juices slipping between her legs.
"Come on, I can't hold back," she said, feeling the heat flood her face. "Give it to me." It probably sounded savage, but she couldn't play little girl a moment more. He went into her, hurting her deliriously, and then began the piston motion that made her throw back her head and almost scream. "Yes, yes, yes."
"OK, Molly Bloom!" he cried out in a hoarse whisper, and then she came and came and came--gritting her teeth, scarce able to stand it, moaning, and then screaming with her lips shut--and so did he.
She lay to one side, out of breath, wet all over as if she were Ophelia and they had just found her in the flower-strewn stream. Her hand was caught in his hair, pulling it too hard maybe. And then a shrieking sound shocked her and she opened her eyes.
Someone had torn the needle from the Victrola record. She turned, just as he did, and she stared at the bent little figure of Eugenia, the black maid, standing grimly beside the table, her arms folded, her chin jutting.