Miss Hardy raised her voice. Katrinka slammed the door. Katrinka is one of only two adults I know who actually slams doors when she is angry. The other was miles away, long gone out of my life, and dearly remembered for better things than such petty violence.
Rosalind, our eldest, the heaviest, very plump now with her hair all white yet beautifully curly as it had always been-she had the loveliest richest hair-just sat there still making that shrug, that smirk.
"You don't have to rush to the hospital," she said. "You know that." Rosalind had been a nurse for too long, lugging oxygen tanks and cleaning up blood. "No rush at all,"
she assured me with authority.
I know a better place than this, I said or thought. I had only to close my eyes and the room swam and the grave came and there was that painful wonder: Which is dream and which is real?
I laid my forehead on the windowpane, and it was cold, and his music. .. the music of my vagabond violinist. . .1 called to it. You're there, aren't you? Come on, I know you didn't go away. Did you think I wasn't listening. . . ? It came again, the violin. Florid yet low, anguished, yet full of naive celebration.
And behind me Rosalind began to hum in low tune, a phrase or so behind him... to hum along, to join her voice to his distant voice.
"You hear him now?" I said.
"Yeah," she said with her characteristic shrug. "You've got some friend out there, like a nightingale. And the sun didn't drive him off. Sure, I hear him."
My hair was dripping water on the floor. Katrinka was sobbing in the hallway and I could not make out the other two voices, except to know that they were women's voices.
"Just can't go through this right now, I can't go through this," Katrinka said, "and she's crazy. Can't you see? I can't, I can't, I can't."
It seemed a fork in the road. I knew where the grave was and just how deep, and I could go there. Why didn't I?
His music had moved into a slow but lofty melody, something merging with the morning itself; as though we were leaving the graveyard together. In a disquieting yet vivid flash I saw our little bouquets on the white marble Altar Rail of the Chapel as I looked back.
"Come on, Triana!" My mother looked so pretty, her hair in a beret, her voice so patient, her eyes so big. "Come on, Triana!"
You're going to die separated from us, Mother. Beautiful and without a gray hair in your head. When the time comes I won't even have the sense to kiss you goodbye the last time I see you. I'll only be glad you're going because you're so drunk and sick and I'm so tired of taking care of Katrinka and Faye. Mother, you will die in a terrible, terrible way, a drunken woman, swallowing her tongue. And I will give birth to a little girl who looks like you, has your big round eyes and lovely temples and forehead, and she'll die, Mother, die before she's six years oId, surrounded by machines during the few minutes, the very few minutes, Mother, when I tried as they say to catch some skep. I caught her death, I-Get thee behind me, all such torment. Rosalind and I run ahead; Mother walks slowly on the flags behind us, a smiling woman; she's not afraid in the dusk now, the sky is too vibrant. These are our years. The war has not come to an end. Cars passing slowly on Prytania Street look like humpback crickets or beetles.
"I said, Stop it!" I talked to my own head. I put my hands on my wet hair. How dreadful to be in this room with all this noise, and dripping with water. Listen to Miss Hardy's voice. She is taking command.
Outside, the sun fell down on the porches, on the cars streaking by, on the old peeling wooden streetcars as they crossed right in front of me, the uptown car clanging its bell, with all the drama of a San Francisco cable car.
"How can she do this to us?" sobbed Katrinka. But that was beyond the door. The door she had slammed. She was bellowing in the hallway.
The doorbell rang. I was too far over to the edge of the house to glimpse who had come up the steps.
What I saw were the white azaleas against the fence all the way to the corner and around where the fence turns. How lovely, how sublimely lovely. Karl had paid for all that, gardeners and mulch and carpenters and hammers and nails and white paint for the columns, look, the Corinthian capitals restored, the acanthus leaves rising to hold high the roof; and look, the clean blue for the porch roof so that the wasps thought it was the sky and would not nest up there.
"Come on, honey." This was a man's voice, a man I knew, but not so well, a man I trusted, but couldn't think of his name just now, perhaps because in the background Katrinka was shouting and shouting.
"Triana, honey," he said. Grady Dubosson, my own lawyer. He was all spiffed up, full suit and tie, and didn't even look sleepy at all, and perfectly in command of his serious face as though he knew, like so many people here, just how to deal with death and not to put a false face or a denial on it.
"Don't worry, Triana darlin'," he said in the most natural, confiding voice. "I won't let them touch a silver fork. You come with Dr. Guidry and you go downtown. Rest.
There can't be any ceremony till the others are back from London."
"Karl's book, there were some pages upstairs."
Glenn's consoling voice again, deep, southern: "I got them, Triana. I took his papers down and nobody's going to incinerate anything up there-"
"I'm sorry for the trouble I've made," I whispered.
"Absolutely cracked!" That was Katrinka.
Rosalind sighed. "He didn't look to me like he suffered, just like he went to sleep."
She was saying that to comfort me. I turned around again and made a small secret of thanks to her. She caught it; she gave me her soft beam.
I loved her utterly. She pushed her thick framed glasses up on her nose. All her young life, my father shouted at her to push her glasses on her nose, but it never really worked because she had, unlike him, a rather small nose. And she looked the way he had always hated her-dreamy and sloppy, and sweet, with glasses falling down, smoking a cigarette, with ashes on her coat, but full of love, her body heavy and shapeless with age. I loved her so.
"I don't think he suffered at all," she said. "Don't pay any attention to the Trink.
Hey, Trink, did you ever think about all the beds in the hotels that you and Martin sleep in-like who's been in them, I mean, like you, with AIDS?"
I wanted to laugh.
"Come on, darlin'," Grady said.
Dr. Guidry took my hand in both of his. What a young man he was. I can't get used to doctors now being younger than me. And Dr. Guidry is so blond and so utterly clean, and always, in the top pocket of his coat, is a small Bible. You know he can't be a Catholic if he carries a Bible like that. He must be a Baptist. I feel so ageless myself.
But that's because I'm dead, right? I'm in the grave.
No. That never works for very long.
"I want you to follow my advice," said Dr. Guidry as gently as if he were kissing me. "And you let Grady take care of things."
"It's stopped," said Rosalind.
"What?" demanded Katrinka. "What's stopped?" She stood in the hallway door.
She was blowing her nose. She wadded up the Kleenex and threw it on the floor. She glared at me. "Did you ever think what this kind of thing does to the rest of us?"
I didn't answer her.
"The violinist," Rosalind said. "Your troubadour. I think he's gone away."
"I never heard any damned violinist," Katrinka said, clenching her teeth. "Why are you talking about a violinist! You think this violinist is more important than what I'm trying to tell you!"