Seems poor Cousin Deirdre had died last May right after Mona had had that dream, and First Street had come into the hands of Rowan and Michael, and the great restoration had begun. Every time she’d passed she’d seen Michael up there on the roof, or just climbing a ladder, or climbing over a high iron railing, or walking right on the parapet with his hammer in hand.
“Thor!” she’d called out to him once. He hadn’t heard her, but he’d waved and smiled. Yes, to die for, all right.
She wasn’t so sure about the times of all the dreams. When they’d started, she hadn’t known there would be so many of them. Her dreams floated in space. She hadn’t been smart enough in the beginning to date them, and to make a chronology of Mayfair events. She had that now in \WS\MAYFAIR\CHRONO. Every month she learned more tricks in her computer system, more ways of keeping track of all her thoughts and feelings, and plans.
She opened the bathroom door and stepped into the kitchen. Beyond the glass doors the swimming pool positively glittered for an instant as if a vagrant wind had touched its surface. As if it were alive. As she stepped forward, a tiny red light flashed on the motion detector, but she could see immediately by the control panel on the kitchen counter that the alarm wasn’t set. That was why it hadn’t gone off when she opened the window. What luck! She’d forgotten about that damned alarm, and it had been the alarm that had saved Michael’s life. He’d have drowned if the firemen had not come and found him-men from his father’s own firehouse, though Michael’s father had died a long long time ago.
Michael. Yes, it was fatal attraction from the moment she’d first met him. And the sheer size of the man had a lot to do with it-things like the perfect width of his neck. Mona had a keen appreciation of men’s necks. She could watch a whole movie just to get a load of Tom Berenger’s neck.
Then there was that constant good humor. When had she ever not gotten a smile from Uncle Michael, and often she’d gotten winks. She loved those immense and amazingly innocent blue eyes. Downright flashy, Bea had said once, but she’d meant it as a compliment. “The man’s just sort of too vivid!” Even Gifford had understood that.
Usually when a man was that well-built, he was an idiot. Intelligent Mayfair men were always perfectly proportioned. If Brooks Brothers or Burberrys’ couldn’t fit you, you were illegitimate. They’d put poison in your tea. And they behaved like windup toys once they came home from Harvard, always combed and tanned, and shaking people’s hands.
Even Cousin Pierce, Ryan’s pride and joy, was turning out that way-a shining replica of his father, down to the Princeton cut of the blond hair, and loving Cousin Clancy was perfect for Pierce. She was a small clone of Aunt Gifford-only without the pain. They looked like they were made of vinyl, Pierce and Ryan, and Clancy. Corporation lawyers; their whole goal in life was to see how much they could leave undisturbed.
Mayfair and Mayfair was a law firm full of vinyl people.
“Never mind,” her mother had said once to her criticism. “They take care of all the money so that you and I don’t have to worry about a thing.”
“I wonder if that’s such a good idea,” Mona had said, watching her mother miss her mouth with the cigarette, and then grope for the glass of wine on the table. Mona had pushed it towards her, disliking herself for doing it, disliking that she did it because it was torture to watch her mother not be able to find it on her own.
But Michael Curry was a different sort from the Mayfair men altogether-husky and relaxed, more beautifully hirsute, altogether lacking in the perpetual preppie gleam perfected by men like Ryan, yet very adorable in a beastly way when he wore his dark-rimmed glasses and read Dickens the way he’d been doing it this very afternoon when she’d gone up to his room. He hadn’t cared a thing about Mardi Gras. He hadn’t wanted to come down. He was still reeling from Rowan’s defection. Time just didn’t mean anything to him, because if he had started to think about it, he would have had to think on how long Rowan had been gone.
“What are you reading?” she’d asked.
“Oh, Great Expectations,” he’d said. “I read it over and over. I’m reading the part about Joe’s wife, Mrs. Joe. The way she kept making the T on the chalkboard. Ever read it? I like to read things I’ve read before. It’s like listening over and over to your favorite song.”
A brilliant Neanderthal slumbered in his body waiting to drag you into the cave by your hair. Yes, a Neanderthal with the brain of a Cro-Magnon, who could be all smiles and a gentleman and as well-bred as anybody in this family could possibly want. He had a great vocabulary, when he chose to use it. Mona admired his vocabulary. Mona’s vocabulary was ranked equal to that of a senior in college. In fact, someone at school had once said, she had the biggest words coming out of the littlest body in the world.
Michael could sound like a New Orleans policeman one moment and a headmaster at another. “Unbeatable combination of elements,” Mona had written in her computer diary. Then remembered Oncle Julien’s admonition. “The man is simply too good.”
“Am I evil?” she whispered aloud in the dark. “Doesn’t compute.” She really hadn’t the slightest doubt that she wasn’t evil. Such thoughts were old-fashioned to her, and typical of Oncle Julien, especially the way he was in her dreams. She hadn’t known the words for it when she was little, but she knew them now: “Self-deprecating, self-mocking.” That is what she’d written into the computer in the subdirectory \WS\JULIEN\CHARACTER in the file DREAM.
She walked across the kitchen and slowly through the narrow butler’s pantry, a lovely white light falling on the floorboards from the porch outside. Such a grand dining room. Michael thought the hardwood floor had been laid in the thirties, but Julien had told Mona it was 1890s, a flooring they called wooden carpet, and it had come in a roll. What was Mona supposed to do with all the things Julien had told her in these dreams?
The dense murky murals were surprisingly visible to her in the darkness-Riverbend Plantation, where Julien had been born-and its quaint world of sugar mill, slave cabins, stables and carriages moving along the old river road. But then she had cat’s eyes, didn’t she? Always had. She loved the darkness. She felt safe and at home in it. It made her want to sing. Impossible to explain to people how good she felt when she roamed alone in the darkness.
She walked around the long table, now all cleared and stripped and polished, though only hours ago it had held the last Mardi Gras banquet complete with frosted King cakes, and a silver punch bowl full of champagne. Boy, the Mayfairs sure ate themselves sick when they came to First Street, she thought. Everybody was just so happy that Michael was willing to keep the place going though Rowan had flat-out disappeared, and under suspicious circumstances. Did Michael know where she was?
Aunt Bea had said, with tears in her eyes, “His heart is broken!”
Well, here comes the kid with the wonder glue for broken hearts! Stand back, world, it’s little Mona.
She passed through the high keyhole doorway into the front hall, and then she stopped and put her hands on the frame, as Oncle Julien had done in so many old pictures, in this door or the other, and she just felt the silence and bigness of the house around her, and smelled its wood.
That other smell. There it was again, making her…what? Almost hungry. It was delicious, whatever it was. Not butterscotch, no, not caramel, not chocolate, but something thick like that, a flavor that seemed a hundred flavors compressed into one. Like the first time you bit into a chocolate-covered cherry cordial. Or a Cadbury Easter egg.