Mortal Sins. Penn Williamson

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      He knew it now, he supposed, although in the days when this photograph was taken, Rourke had barely ever thought of Charles.

      But he sure enough had hated Julius.

      “Mama always used to declare that of the two boys, Julius was the sweetest and the weakest,” Belle was saying. “But then he was also the oldest, and Sans Souci would have come to him if he hadn’t died—not that that ever really mattered to Remy, though. She loved Julius for himself.”

      She reached around him and brushed her finger over Charles St. Claire’s smiling image. “Some people are going to say that’s why she killed him, you know. Why Remy killed Charles. For the house, and because she loved Julius best and she must’ve come to find out that she couldn’t wrap Charles ’round her little finger the way she’d done with his brother. She must’ve come to find out that no matter how alike in looks they were, Charles wasn’t really Julius and never would be.”

      Rourke returned the photograph to the table and picked up the one of Belle again. He turned it around and held it up for her to see. “You were sure a pretty little thing, Miss Belle. Back in those days. Pretty enough to be in the movies.”

      Her face twitched as though he had struck her. She snatched the picture out of his hand and slammed it down on the table. She leaned close to him, close enough for him to see the fine lines feathering her eyes and catch a faint whiff of mildew that clung to her dress. “It was Julius she loved. He was the one she was going to marry that summer. That summer he died and she ran off.”

      Rourke went out of the parlor and down the hall, pausing only long enough to pick up his hat from the sofa table and put it on.

      “Why, I remember how we used to talk about it, Remy and I. How we carried on, planning her wedding, the dress she would wear, and all the flowers, and how there’d be a champagne fountain at the reception.” She had followed him out the front door, onto the gallery with its peeling gray paint. Her face was flushed, and the anger in her voice came as if from a fire raging inside her. “It was Julius that Remy loved. Never you, and not Charles.”

      The clothes-pole man was long gone, but the fruit man had stopped to make a sale next door, and now he’d just started off down the avenue again.

      “Aw-range, so sweet right off the tree, lay-deeee.” The fruit man wore a battered top hat; his mule wore a floppy straw one. A big pan scale swung on a chain as his wagon lumbered along, flashing silver in the sun.

      “It was always Julius she loved.”

      Rourke lifted his own hat and gave her his best southern-gentleman smile. “Or so you would have me believe, Miss Belle. But then we all have our own little shuck and hustle.”

      Rourke left the Lelourie cottage, retracing the way back to Sans Souci, but on foot this time. He crossed the avenue and passed through the scrolled iron gates of the St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, where some of the crumbling old crypts dated back to the turn of the last century. Over a hundred years’ worth of Lelouries and St. Claires had been brought to their eternal rest here in this city of the dead.

      The tomb of the Famille Lelourie was in the style of a Greek temple with a marble child-angel dancing on top of it. The caskets were kept in vaults, behind a lacy wrought-iron gate, but the names of the Lelourie dead had been carved throughout the years onto the temple’s lichen-mottled walls. One of the names, he thought, must belong to the Lelourie boy who had lost Sans Souci in a game of cards and then died in a duel.

      One set of deeply engraved letters seemed to stand out larger than the others: REYNARD LELOURIE. There was no inscription to go along with the name, though; no “Beloved Husband of Heloise,” no “Beloved Father of Remy and Belle.” Certainly no “Beloved Lover of Maeve Rourke.” But above the name was a smaller set of letters: MAUREEN, BELOVED DAUGHTER OF REYNARD.

      “Maureen,” he said, and the name was like a foreign word whose meaning you only half understand.

      In his memory it is a warm spring evening when Rourke is seven years old. The sun is gone but the day still holds on to its light, the sky a dusky gold wrapped with black ribbons of clouds, and Rourke is playing baseball with a gang of boys in an abandoned lot across from the wharves on Tchoupitoulas Street. In his memory his father staggers out of a bar in the Swamp and comes for him while he is catching behind the plate, or maybe he is playing shortstop.

      His father had been sloppy drunk that evening, his face all red and sweaty, and he’d smelled. Rourke didn’t know what he’d done to set his old man off, and he didn’t care. All he wanted to do was get out of there and away from the other boys, more ashamed of having a falling down, stinking boozer for a daddy than afraid of the whipping he thought was coming.

      The shame was a roaring in his ears, so loud he couldn’t hear what his father was saying, and then he did and he knew whatever was coming would be bad, because it was always bad when his father talked about her.

      “ … such a tough lil’ bastard, always so goddamned tough. It’s ’cause you got religion. You got the faith—only it ain’t God you pray to, it’s her. You got this conviction inside you that she’ll be comin’ back for you one day, that she’s goin’ to be savin’ your sweet ass. Well, boy, today’s the day I’m showin’ you different.”

      That at least is what his father says in his memory, and the grip on his arm is like a shackle of iron, unbreakable, but that probably wasn’t true. He could easily have gotten loose from a shambling drunk who was having trouble even keeping his own feet underneath him.

      Still, in his memory he is being dragged to a house in the Quarter, on Conti Street, bursting through the front door and into a strange parlor and then beyond, to a room where his mama and a man are lying on the bed without their clothes on. His father and Reynard Lelourie are shouting but he can’t hear the words, nor can he see their faces. The only thing in that room is his mother, kneeling up on the bed, and she is crying and holding out her hand to him, and her naked belly is swollen, distended, huge.

      He had wanted to run away, but he hadn’t been able to tear his gaze from her belly, and though he made not a sound, was barely breathing, in his mind he was screaming, because his daddy had been right—a small part of him had believed she would one day be coming home. He was her son, and surely she must love him too much to stay away forever.

      A couple of months later somebody told him that the baby, a little girl, had lived only a week or so and then quietly died. For a long while afterward, whenever he imagined the baby lying in her tiny coffin, she would always have his mother’s face.

      Until this day, though, he had never come to the Lelourie crypt, and so he had never known that his baby half-sister had been named Maureen.

      Rourke left the cemetery and walked through a green tunnel of oaks and elms and sycamores, on sidewalks that were buckled and peaked by the roots of the old trees and the passing years.

      He paused to talk to those he met: to the maiden aunts who snipped the dead blooms off their mother’s prize rosebushes; to the young wives who met at each other’s houses for bridge and mahjongg parties; to the colored girls who swept off the porches and rocked the babies on their laps. To the men who delivered the ice and the coal and the gossip from other mouths and places.

      The neighborhood lived on its galleries, especially during the hot summers—creaking back and forth in rocking chairs, observing the rhythms of life. Some of these families had resided in their houses for generations. They thought they knew the Lelouries and the St. Claires СКАЧАТЬ