Violin by Anne Rice Page B

crucifix, the tiny detailed body of the anguished Christ, and shoved the Rosary back under the pillow.
    I was fiercely alert. I was like prepared for battle. It was like an early drunk in the first year, when the beer went divinely to my head and I ran down the street with arms outstretched, singing.
    The pores of my skin tingled and the door opened with no effort whatsoever.
    The finery of the alcove and the dining room looked brand new. Do things sparkle for those on the verge of battle?
    Althea and Lacomb stood far across the length of the dining room, hovering in the pantry door, waiting on me. Althea looked plain afraid and Lacomb both cynical and curious as always.
    “Like if you was to scream one time in there!” said Lacomb.
    “I didn’t need any help. But I knew you were here.”
    I glanced back at the wet stains on the bed, at the water on the floor. It wasn’t enough to bother them with it, I thought.
    “Maybe I’ll walk in the rain,” I said. “I haven’t walked in the rain for years and years.”
    Lacomb came forward. “You talking about outside now tonight in this rain?”
    “You don’t have to come,” I said. “Where’s my raincoat? Althea, is it cold outside?”
    I went off walking up St. Charles Avenue.
    The rain was only light now and pretty to look at. I hadn’t done this in years, walk my Avenue, just walk, as we had so often as children or teenagers, headed for the K&B drugstore to buy an ice cream cone. Just an excuse to walk past beautiful houses with cut-glass doors, to talk together as we walked.
    I walked and walked, uptown, past houses I knew and weedy barren lots where great houses had once stood. This street, they ever tried to kill, either through progress or neglect, and how perilously poised it always seemed—between both—as though one more murder, one more gunshot, one more burning house would set its course without compromise.
    Burning house. I shuddered. Burning house. When I’d been five a house had burned. It was an old Victorian, dark, rising like a nightmare on the corner of St. Charles and Philip, and I remember that I’d been carried in my Father’s arms “to see the fire,” and I had become hysterical looking at the flames. I saw above the crowds and the fire engines a flame so big that it seemed it could take the night.
    I shook it off, that fear.
    Vague memory of people bathing my head, trying to quiet me. Rosalind thought it a wonderfully exciting thing. I thought it a revelation of such magnitude that even to learn of mortality itself was no worse.
    A pleasant sensation crept over me. That old horrific fear—this house will burn too—had gone with my young years, like many another such fear. Take the big lumberingblack roaches that used to race across these sidewalks: I used to step back in terror. Now that fear too was almost gone, and so were they, in this age of plastic sacks and icebox-cold mansions.
    It caught me suddenly what he had said—about my young husband, Lev, and even younger sister, Katrinka, that he, my husband whom I loved, and she, my sister whom I loved, had been in the same bed, but I’d always blamed myself for it. Hippie marijuana and cheap wine, too much sophisticated talk. My fault, my fault. I was a cowardly faithful wife, deeply in love. Katrinka was the daring one.
    What had he said, my ghost?
Mea culpa.
Or had I said it?
    Lev loved me. I loved him still. But then I had felt so ugly and inadequate, and she, Katrinka, was so fresh, and the times were rampant with Indian music and liberation.
    Good God, was this creature real? This man I’d just spoken with, this violinist whom other people saw? He was nowhere around now.
    Across the Avenue from me as I walked, the big hired car crept along, keeping pace, and I could see Lacomb muttering as he leant out the rear window to spit his cigarette smoke into the breeze.
    I wondered what this new driver, Oscar, thought. I wondered if Lacomb would want to drive the car. Lacomb doesn’t