I wasn’t born a human being, I was born a Mayfair, Gifford thought. And I married a Mayfair, and I have given birth to Mayfairs; and I shall die a Mayfair death no doubt, and they will pile into the funeral parlor, Weeping in Mayfair style, and what will my life have been? This was often Gifford’s thought of late, but the disappearance of Rowan had driven her nearly to the brink. How much could she take? Why had she not warned Michael and Rowan not to marry, not to live in that house, not even to remain in New Orleans?
Also there was the whole question of Mayfair Medical-the giant neuro-research complex which Rowan had been master-minding before her departure, a venture which had elicited enthusiasm from hundreds of family members, especially Gifford’s eldest and favorite son, Pierce, who was now heartbroken that the medical center along with everything else pertaining to Rowan was on indefinite hold. Shelby was also crushed, though being in law school still, she’d never been so involved; and even Lilia, Gifford’s youngest and most estranged, at Oxford now, who had written home to say they must-at all costs-go on with the medical center.
Gifford felt a sudden tensing all over, as once again she put it all together, only to be frightened by the picture and convinced that something had to be discovered, revealed, done!
And then there was Michael’s ultimate fate. What was it to be? He was recovering, so they said. But how could they tell Michael how bad things really were without causing him a setback? Michael could suffer another heart attack, one which might be fatal.
So the Mayfair legacy has destroyed another innocent male, Gifford thought bitterly. It’s no wonder we all marry our cousins; we don’t want to bring in the innocents. When you marry a Mayfair, you should be a Mayfair. You have lots of blood on your hands.
As for the idea that Rowan was in real danger, that Rowan had been forced somehow to leave on Christmas Day, that something might have happened to her-that was almost too terrible a thought for Gifford to bear. Yet Gifford was pretty sure something had happened to Rowan. Something really bad. They could all feel it. Mona could feel it, and when Gifford’s niece, Mona, felt something you had to pay attention. Mona had never been a melodramatic, bragging Mayfair, claiming to see ghosts on the St. Charles streetcar. Mona had said last week she didn’t think anybody should bank on Rowan coming back, that if they wanted the medical center, they ought to go ahead without her.
And to think, Gifford smiled to herself, that the august firm of Mayfair and Mayfair, representing Mayfair ad infinitum, stops to listen when a thirteen-year-old speaks. But it was true.
Gifford’s biggest secret regret was that she had not connected Rowan with Mona while there had been time. Maybe Mona would have sensed something and spoken up. But then Gifford had so many regrets. Sometimes it seemed to her that her entire life was a great sighing regret. Beneath the lovely surface of her picture-book Metairie home, her gorgeous children, her handsome husband, and her own subdued southern style, was nothing but regret, as if her life had been built atop a great and secret dungeon.
She was just waiting to hear the news. Rowan dead. And for the first time in hundreds of years, no designee for the legacy. Ah, the legacy, and now that she had read Aaron Lightner’s long account, how would she ever feel the same way about the legacy? Where was the precious emerald, she wondered? Surely her efficient husband, Ryan, had stashed it in an appropriate vault. That was where he should have stashed that awful “history.” She could never forgive him for letting it slip into Mona’s hands, that long Talamasca discussion of generations of witchcraft.
Maybe Rowan had run away with the emerald. Oh, that made her realize something else, just one of those minor-league regrets-! She’d forgotten to send the medal to Michael.
She’d found the medal out by the pool only two days after Christmas, while the detectives and the coroner’s office were making all their tests inside the house, and while Aaron Lightner and that strange colleague of his, Erich Somethingorother, were gathering specimens of the blood that stained the wails and the carpets.
“You realize they will write all this in that file?” Gifford had protested, but Ryan had let these men proceed. It was Lightner. Everyone trusted him. Indeed Beatrice was in love with him. Gifford wouldn’t be surprised if Beatrice married him.
The medal was St. Michael the Archangel. A gorgeous old silver medal on a broken chain. She’d slipped it into her purse, and meant a thousand times to send it to him-after he came home from the hospital of course, so as not to upset him. Well, she should have given it to Ryan before she left. But then again, who knew? Maybe he’d been wearing that medal on Christmas Day, when he’d nearly drowned in the pool. Poor Michael.
The logs in the fire shifted noisily and the mellow soothing light flared on the plain sloped ceiling. It made Gifford aware of how very quiet the surf was and had been all day. Sometimes the surf died to absolutely nothing on the Gulf of Mexico. She wondered if that could happen on the ocean. She loved the sound of the waves, actually. She wished they were roaring away out there in the dark, as if the Gulf were threatening to invade the land. As if nature were lashing back at the beach houses and the condominiums and the trailer parks, reminding them that they might be wiped off the smooth sandy face of the earth at any minute, should a hurricane or a tidal wave come. And certainly those things would inevitably come.
Gifford liked that idea. She could always sleep well when the waves were fierce and rapid. Her dreads and miseries didn’t stem from the fear of anything natural. They came from legends, and secrets, and tales of the family’s past. She loved her little house on account of its fragility, that a storm would most surely fold it up like a pack of cards.
This afternoon she had walked several miles south to inspect the house bought so recently by Michael and Rowan, a high contemporary structure built as it ought to be built-on pilings, and looking down upon a deserted sweep of beach. No sign of life there, but what had she expected?
She’d wandered back, heavily depressed by the mere sight of the place-how Rowan and Michael had loved it; they’d gone there on their honeymoon-and glad that her own little house was low and old and hidden behind a small and insignificant little dune, the way you couldn’t and shouldn’t build them today. She loved its privacy, its intimacy with the beach and the water. She loved that she could walk out her doors, and up three steps and along her boardwalk, and then down and out across the sand to the lip of the sea.
And the Gulf was the sea. Noisy or quiet, it was the sea. The great and endless open sea. The Gulf was the entire southern horizon. This might as well have been the end of the world.
One hour more and then it would be Ash Wednesday; she waited as if waiting for the witching hour, tense and resentful of Mardi Gras, a festival which had never made her particularly happy and always involved far more than she could endure.
She wanted to be awake when it was over; she wanted to feel Lent come on, as if the temperature itself would change. Earlier she’d built up the fire, and slumped down on the couch, merely to think away the hours, as if working on something, counting the minutes, feeling guilty naturally, for not going to First Street, for not having done all sorts of things to try to prevent this disaster, and then tensing with resentment against those who always tried to stop her from implementing her good intentions, those who seemed unable to distinguish between the real and imagined threat, and dismissed everything Gifford said out of hand.