Life had become so noisy. Life had become crude. Garbage trucks roared as they devoured the trash. Trucks clattered in the street. The banana man was gone, the ice cream man was gone. The chimney sweeps came no more. The old woman no longer came with the blackberries. Laura Lee died in pain. Deirdre went mad, and then Deirdre's daughter, Rowan, came home, only one day too late to see her mother alive, and a horror happened on Christmas Day and no one wanted to speak of it. And Rowan Mayfair was gone.
What if Rowan Mayfair and her new man had found the Victrola and the records? But no, Gifford said they had not. Gifford kept watch. Gifford would have snatched them away again, if she had to do it.
And Gifford's hiding place had been Stella's own, known only to Gifford because Evelyn had revealed it to her. Stupid thing to have done, to have ever wasted a tale or a song or a verse upon Gifford or Alicia. They were mere links in a chain and the jewel was Mona.
"They won't find them, Ancient Evelyn, I put the pearls back in the very same secret place in the library. The Victrola with them. The whole kit and caboodle will be safe there forever."
And Gifford, the country club Mayfair, had gone up to that dark house and hidden those things away on her own. Had she seen the man on that dark journey?
"They'll never be found. They'll rot with that house," Gifford had said. "You know. You showed me the place yourself the day we were in the library."
"You mock me, you evil child." But she had shown little Gifford the secret niche on the very afternoon of Laura Lee's funeral. That must have been the last time Carlotta opened the house.
It was 1960, and Deirdre was already very sick, and having lost her baby, Rowan, Deidre had gone back for a long time in the hospital. Cortland had been dead a year.
But Carlotta had always pitied Laura Lee, always pitied her that she had Evelyn for a mother. And then there were Millie Dear and Belle, both saying, Carlotta, can't we bring them all back here? And Carlotta looking sadly at Evelyn, trying to hate her, yet feeling so sorry for her that she had buried her daughter. And perhaps that she, Evelyn, had been buried alive, herself, since the day of Stella's death.
"You can bring the family here," Millie Dear had said, and Carlotta had not dared to contradict her. "Yes, indeed," said Belle, for Belle had always known that Laura Lee was Julien's child. Everyone had known. "Yes, indeed," said Belle, sweet Belle. "Come back to the house with us, all of you."
Why she had gone? She did not really know! Maybe to see Julien's house again. Maybe she had intended all along to slip into the library and see if the pearls were still there, if anyone had ever found them.
And as the others gathered, as they whispered of Laura Lee's suffering and poor little Gifford and poor little Alicia, and all the sad things that had befallen them all, Evelyn had taken Gifford by the hand and led her into the library.
"Stop your crying for your mother," Evelyn had said. "Laura Lee's gone to heaven. Now come here, and I'll show you a secret place. I'll show you something beautiful. I have a necklace for you."
Gifford had wiped her eyes. She had been in a daze since her mother's death, and that daze wouldn't break until she married Ryan many years later on. But with Gifford there had always been hope. On the afternoon of Laura Lee's funeral, there had been plenty of hope.
Indeed, Gifford had had a good life, one had to admit, fretting it away as she did, but still she had her love of Ryan, she had her beautiful children, she had heart enough to love Mona and leave her alone, though Mona frightened the life out of her.
Life. Gifford dead. Not possible. Should have been Alicia. All a mix-up. Horse stopped at the wrong gate. Did Julien foresee this?
It was like just a moment ago--Laura Lee's funeral. Think again about the library--dusty, neglected. Women talking in the other room.
Evelyn had taken little Gifford to the bookcase, and pushed the books aside. She'd drawn out the long string of pearls. "We're taking this home now. I hid it thirty years ago, the day that Stella died here in the parlor. Carlotta never found it. And these, these are pictures of Stella and me too. I'm taking them too. Someday I will give these things to you and your sister."
Gifford, leaning back on her heels, had looked at the long necklace in amazement.
It made Evelyn feel so good to have beaten Carlotta, to have kept the pearls when all else seemed lost. The necklace and the music box, her treasures.
"What do you mean, the love of another woman?" Gifford had asked her many nights after that, when they sat on the porch talking over the cheerful noise of the Avenue traffic.
"I mean the love of a woman, that's what I mean, that I kissed her mouth, that I sucked her breasts, that I went down and put my tongue between her legs and tasted her taste, that I loved her, that I drowned in her!"
Gifford had been shocked and afraid. Had she married with her hair down? Very very likely. A horrid thing, a virgin girl. Though if anyone could make the best of such a thing, it had probably been Gifford.
Ah, this was Washington Avenue. It was. No doubt of it. And behold, the florist shop was still here, and that meant that Ancient Evelyn could go carefully up these few little steps and order the flowers herself for her precious girl.
"What did you do with my treasures?"
"Don't tell those things to Mona!"
Ancient Evelyn stared in bafflement at the florist blossoms crowding against the glass, like flowers in prison, wondering where to send the flowers for Gifford. Gifford was the one who had died.
Oh, my darling...
She knew what flowers she wanted to send. She knew what flowers Gifford liked.
They wouldn't bring her home for the wake. Of course not. Not the Metairie Mayfairs. They would never never do such a thing. Why, her body was probably already being painted in some refrigerated funeral home.
"Don't try to put me on ice in such a place," Evelyn had said after Deirdre's funeral last year, when Mona stood describing the whole thing, how Rowan Mayfair had come from California to lean over the coffin and kiss her dead mother. How Carlotta had keeled over dead that very night into Deirdre's rocker, like she wanted to be dead with Deirdre, leaving that poor Rowan Mayfair from California all alone in that spooky house.
"Oh, life, oh, time!" Mona had said, stretching out her thin pale arms, and swinging her long red hair to the left and the right. "It was worse than the death of Ophelia."
"Probably not," Ancient Evelyn had said. For Deirdre had lost her mind years before, and if this California doctor, Rowan Mayfair, had had any gumption at all, she would have come home long before now, demanding answers of those who drugged and hurt her mother. No good could come of that California girl, Ancient Evelyn knew, and that was why they'd never brought her up to Amelia Street, and Ancient Evelyn had therefore seen her only once, at the woman's wedding, when she wasn't a woman at all, but a sacrificial creature for the family, decked out in white with the emerald burning on her neck.
She'd gone to that wedding not because Rowan Mayfair, the designee of the legacy, was marrying a young man named Michael Curry in St. Mary's church, but because Mona would be the flower girl, and it had made Mona happy for Ancient Evelyn to come, to sit in the pew and see, and nod as Mona passed.
So hard it had been to enter the house after all those years, and see it beautiful once more the way it had been in those times when she had been with Julien. To see the happiness of Dr. Rowan Mayfair and her innocent husband, Michael Curry. Like one of Mary Bern's Irish boys, he was big and muscular, and very frank and kind in his brusque and ignorant way, though he was educated they said, and affected the common air, so to speak, because he'd come from the back streets, and his father had been a fireman.
Oh, so like the boys of Mary Beth, Ancient Evelyn had thought, but that was all she remembered of that wedding, all she remembered of Deirdre's daughter. They'd taken Ancient Evelyn home early when Alicia had been too drunk to stay. She hadn't minded. She'd sat by Alicia's bed as always, saying her beads, and dreaming, and humming the songs tha
t Julien used to play in the upstairs room.
And the bride and groom of last year had danced in that double parlor. And the Victrola was hidden in the library wall, and no one would ever find it. She herself did not think of it, or maybe she would have gone to it, as all the others sang and drank and laughed together. Maybe under that roof, she would have wound it again and said "Julien," and to the wedding he would have come, an unexpected guest!
Hadn't even thought of it then. Too afraid Alicia would stumble.
That night, late, Gifford had come upstairs to Alicia's room at Amelia Street. She'd put her hand on Ancient Evelyn's shoulder. "I'm glad you came to the wedding," she'd said so kindly. "I wish you would come out again, more often." And then she had asked. "You didn't go to the secret place. You didn't tell them?"
Ancient Evelyn had not bothered to answer.
"Rowan and Michael will be happy!" Gifford had kissed her cheek and gone off. The room stank of drink. Alicia moaned as her mother had moaned, determined to die at all costs, be with Mother.
Washington Avenue. Yes, indeed this was it. Over there, the white-shingled Queen Anne house same as always. It was the only one left on any of the four corners, of course, but it was the same, very same.
And here the florist. Yes, she had been about to buy the flowers, hadn't she? For her darling girl, her darling...
And look, the strangest thing was happening. A little bespectacled young man had appeared in the doorway of the florist, and he was speaking to her, was he not? Time to listen over the rumble of the traffic.
"Ancient Evelyn. That's you. I hardly recognized you. What are you doing so far from home, Ancient Evelyn, come inside. Let me call your granddaughter."
"My granddaughter's dead," she said. "You can't call her."