Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [56]
“I saw the Lost Souls of the graveyard several times after that, and I’ve seen them in the past year. They don’t change. They linger and they stare and nothing more. They do seem to be locked together, a floating mass from which no one spirit can detach itself. I’m not even certain they have personality, as we know the word. But the way that they follow me with their eyes argues that they do.
“I must have been asked to leave at least four schools when my Aunt Lorraine McQueen came home.
“It was the first time that I can remember ever laying eyes on her, though she had been home several times when I was a baby, and told me so with much enthusiasm and sweet embraces and fragrant lipstick kisses and proffering of the most delicious chocolate-covered cherry candies, which she gave to me from a large fancy white box.
“Her room was the same as it is now, in location, and I have no memory of ever noticing it until I was taken in to see her on that long-ago day and she put me on her lap.
“Even counting the guests who had passed through Blackwood Manor, Aunt Queen was the prettiest of the women I’d ever beheld. Her spike-heel ankle-strap shoes struck me as very lovely to look at, glamorous is my word now, and I very much enjoyed her heavy perfume and the feel of her soft white hair.
“I calculate she must have been near seventy around that time, but she looked younger than Pops, who was her grand nephew, or Sweetheart, and both of them were in their fifties, I think.
“Aunt Queen was dressed all in tailored white silk, which was her favorite style of dressing, and I remember I dripped some of the chocolate-covered cherry candy on her suit, and she said airily that I mustn’t worry, she had a thousand suits of white silk, and she laughed in the most delightful manner and told me I was as ‘brilliant’ as she had once predicted I would be.
“Her room was all done in white, with lace and silk decorating the canopy of the bed, and long gossamer high-waisted white ruffle curtains on her windows, and she even had a white fox fur with real heads and tails, which she had tossed over a chair.
“She told me that she adored for things to be done in white, and showed me her fingernails, which were lacquered in white, and the cameo at the neck of her blouse, which was white on pale pink coral, and said that she had needed all things to be white for the last thirty years, or ever since John McQueen, her husband, had died.
“ ‘I think I am just getting tired of it,’ she declared in the most dramatic and interesting manner. ‘I did so love your Uncle John McQueen. I never loved a man before him. And I never will marry again. But I’m ready to be drenched in color. Surely your Uncle John McQueen would approve. What do you think, Tarquin? Should I buy suits of different colors?’
“It was a positive landmark in my young life when she spoke these words. No one had ever asked me such a serious adult question before. In fact, she spoke to me entirely as if I were an adult. I adored her from those moments forward with a loyalty that has no limit.
“Within a week she was showing me swatches of colored damask and satin and asking me which I thought was the happiest and the sweetest color, and I had to confess, of all things, that yellow seemed to me to be the happiest, and I took her hand and led her to the kitchen to see the yellow curtains there, which made her laugh and laugh and say that yellow made her think of butter.
“But she did the room in yellow! It was all in light summery fabric, airy like the white she had used before, but the whole room was magical in yellow, and frankly I never liked it as much as I did with that first change.
“Over the years, she has done the room in many different colors, including bed hangings, draperies and chairs, and as for her clothes, she has done the same thing. But on that first day, she seemed a true royal personage of pure whiteness, and I remember reveling in her beauty