Violin by Anne Rice Page B

just going to go home now, Roz. You are my darling, always. You call Glenn. Go get him, close up shop, and go to Commander’s Palace. Eat the funeral feast for me, will you? Do that for me. Do the eating for both of us.”
    We had crossed Jackson Avenue. The oaks were fresh with spring green.
    I kissed her goodbye and told Oscar to take her on, do whatever she said, stay with her. It was a nice car, a big gray velvet-lined limousine such as they used at funeral parlors.
    “And so I got to ride in it after all,” I thought as they pulled away. “Even though I missed the funeral.”
    How radiant my house looked. My house. Oh, poor poor Katrinka!
    Althea’s arms are like black silk, and when we hug, I don’t think anything in the world can hurt anybody. No use trying to write here what she said, because she’s no more understandable than Lacomb and says perhaps one syllable of every multisyllable word that she speaks, but I knew that it was Welcome home, and worried, missed you so, and would have done anything in those last days, should have called me, washed them sheets, not afraid to wash them sheets, just you lie down, you let me make you some hot chocolate, you, my baby.
    Lacomb skulked in the kitchen door, a short bald man who’d pass for white anyplace but in New Orleans, and then the voice, of course, was always the dead giveaway.
    “How you doing, boss? You looking thin to me, boss. You better eat something. Althea, don’t you dare cook this woman any of your food. Boss, I’ll go out for it. What you want, boss? Boss, this house is full of flowers. I could sell them out front, make us a few dollars.”
    I laughed: Althea read him some rapid form of the riot act with appropriate rises and falls of tone, and a few good gestures.
    I went upstairs just to make sure the Prince of Wales four-poster bed was still there. It was, and with its new fine satin trimmings.
    Karl’s mother had put a framed picture of him by the bed—not the skeleton they carted away, but the brown-eyed frank-hearted man who had sat with me on the steps of the uptown library, talking about music, talking about death, talking about getting married, the man who took me to Houston to see the opera and to New York, the manwho had every picture of St. Sebastian ever done by an Italian artist or in the Italian mode, the man who had made love with his hands and his lips and would brook no argument about it.
    His desk was clean. All the papers gone. Don’t worry about this now. You have Glenn’s word, and Glenn and Roz have never failed anyone.
    I went back down the stairs.
    “You know, I could have helped you with that man,” Lacomb said. And Althea replied that he had said it enough, and I was back and go be quiet, or mop a floor, just shoo.
    My room was clean and quiet, the bed turned down, the most tender and fragrant Casablanca lilies in the vase. How had they known? Or of course, Althea told them. Casablanca lilies.
    I climbed into the bed, my bed.
    As I have said, this bedroom is the master bedroom of the cottage and the only real bedroom, and it is on the first floor on the morning side of the house, an octagonal wing extending out into the deep dark grove of cherry laurels that hide the world away.
    It is the only wing which the house has, which is otherwise a rectangle. And the wraparound galleries, our deep deep porches that we so love, come round and out along this bedroom, whereas on the other side of the house, they merely stop before the kitchen windows.
    It’s nice to walk from your bed out a tall window onto a porch, back away from the street, and look through the ever glossy leaves of cherry laurels at a comforting commotion that doesn’t take note of you.
    I wouldn’t give the Avenue for the Champs Elysées, for the Via Veneto, for the Yellow Brick Road, for the Highway to Heaven. But it’s nice sometimes to be way back here inthis easterly bedroom or to stand at the railing, too far from the street to be noticed, and peer