The Witching Hour by Anne Rice Page A

the shallow, often silly revolutionary rhetoric he heard all around; he could only laugh quietly at the dining table Marxism of his friends who seemed to know nothing personally of the working man. And he watched in horror when those he loved destroyed their peace of mind utterly, if not their very brains, with powerful hallucinogens.
    But he learned from all this; he learned as he sought to understand. And the great psychedelic love of color and pattern, of Eastern music and design had its inevitable influence on his esthetics. Years later, he would maintain that the great sixties revolution in consciousness had benefited every person in thenation—that the renovation of old houses, the creation of gorgeous public buildings with flower-filled plazas and parks, the erection even of the modern shopping malls with marble floors, fountains, and flower beds—all this directly stemmed from those crucial years when the hippies of the Haight Ashbury had hung ferns in the windows of their flats and draped their junk furniture with brilliantly colored Indian bedspreads, when the girls had fixed the proverbial flowers in their free-flowing tresses, and the men had discarded their drab clothes for shirts of bright colors and had let their hair grow full and long.
    There was never any doubt in his mind that this period of turmoil and mass drug taking and wild music had borne directly on his career. All over the nation young couples turned their backs on the square little houses of the modem suburbs and, with a new love of texture and detail and varied forms, turned their attention to the gracious old homes of the inner city. San Francisco had such houses beyond count.
    Michael had perpetually a waiting list of eager customers. Great Expectations could renovate, restore, build from scratch. Soon he had projects going all over town. He loved nothing better than to walk into a broken-down, moldy Victorian on Divisadero Street and say, “Yeah, I can give you a palazzo here in six months.” His work won awards. He became famous for the beautiful and detailed drawings he could make. He undertook some projects without architectural guidance at all. All his dreams were coming true.
    He was thirty-two when he acquired a vintage town house on Liberty Street, restored it inside and out, providing apartments for his mother and his aunt, and there he lived on the top floor, with a view of the downtown lights, in exactly the style he’d always wanted. The books, the lace curtains, the piano, the fine antiques—he possessed all these things. He built a great hillside deck where he could sit and drink up the fickle northern California sun. The eternal fog of the oceanfront frequently burned off before it reached the hills of his district. And so he had captured—it seemed—not only the luxury and refinement he’d glimpsed those many years ago in the South, but a little of the warmth and sunshine he so fondly remembered.
    By the age of thirty-five he was a self-made man and an educated one. He had netted and socked away his first million in a portfolio of municipal bonds. He loved San Francisco because he felt that it had given him everything he ever wanted.
    Though Michael had invented himself as many a person has done in California, creating a style perfectly in tune with thestyle of so many other self-invented people, he was always partly that tough kid from the Irish Channel who had grown up using a piece of bread to push his peas onto his fork.
    He never entirely erased his harsh accent, and sometimes when he was dealing with workmen on the job, he would slip back into it entirely. He never lost some of his crude habits or ideas either, and he understood that about himself.
    His way of dealing with all this was perfect for California. He simply let it show. After all, it was only part of him. He thought nothing of saying “Where’s the meat and potatoes?” when he walked into some fancy nouvelle cuisine restaurant (he did actually like