Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [90]
“ ‘Look, I know that,’ I said defensively. I got real defensive. ‘But who was she? Why’d she want to burn down this house? Did she die out there on the island? That has to be it.’
“Pops raised his hand for silence. ‘Doesn’t matter who she was. If she did die out there, there’s nothing left of her. And you do what I tell you about making the Sign of the Cross.’
“ ‘Don’t you ever be caught up by her again,’ said Lolly.
“And on and on it went for a half hour, them castigating me and excoriating me and everything else in the book.
“When I left the kitchen, I was in a sort of daze. Memories of being with her were coming back to me and I didn’t dare tell the Kitchen Committee. I just wanted out.
“I went into the parlor, maybe to convince myself that it was the parlor I knew and not that strange apparition, and I found myself looking at the portrait of Manfred Blackwood. So distinguished. So much authority in his bulldog face. It is amazing, the varieties of beauty. His huge mournful eyes, his flattened nose, his jutting chin and turned-down mouth all seemed harmonious and silently grand. I found myself talking to him, murmuring to him that he knew who that Rebecca Stanford was, and I would find out.
“ ‘Why didn’t you come to try to stop her?’ I asked him, watching the play of light on the portrait. ‘Why did it have to be Virginia Lee?’
“I went into the dining room and looked up at the portrait of Virginia Lee. I had seen her, vital, in motion, I had heard her voice, I had seen her small blue eyes blazing with anger and outrage. The dizziness came again. I welcomed it, straining to catch the mumbled voices that were maddeningly beyond my hearing: Mean to my children. Crying, brokenhearted. I’m afraid I’ll die and someone will be mean to my children. The chorus of the Rosary came from the living room. She was crying. So mean to my poor children.
“ ‘Virginia Lee,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to do it.’ But only the silence came back at me, and her portrait was just a portrait, and there were no more prayers. I was struggling to remember things that hadn’t happened. I was sleepy all over. I had to lie down.
“When I reached my room I was utterly exhausted. I cleaned up the bedspread as best I could with a wet washcloth, and then I flopped down and went into a strange half sleep. I felt myself falling out of consciousness.
“Rebecca was talking to me. The room was her room again, and she explained again that things did not happen in a straight line. Everything was happening all the time. She was always here. I grow no older. I never escape. I wanted to ask her what she meant, but some arbitrary darkness crept in, and I turned over and fell into a deep sweet state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, in which my body enjoyed its exhaustion and knew it was exhausted from having spent itself sexually, and she and her strange talk were all gone.
“I was deliciously drowsy when suddenly I realized Pops was in this room. Pops was standing at the foot of the bed.
“Pops started to talk to me in his dull, flat voice:
“ ‘All your life you’ve talked of ghosts and spirits, of Goblin, and seeing shades down there in the cemetery, and now this thing has come either into our house or into your imagination, I honestly don’t know which. But you have got to fight for your mind. You have got to fight for some direction of your brilliance, you, at the age of eighteen, have got to determine some ambition, and that ambition must never be clouded by these ghosts.’
“I sat up out of respect for him, and he went on.
“ ‘I’m angry,’ he said. ‘I’m real angry that you nearly burnt down this house. But I don’t know what to make of what happened to you, and as angry as I am I’m convinced that something clouded your reason because you love Blackwood Farm as much as I do.’
“I said at once that this was true.
“ ‘Well, you get your mind in order, you hear me?’ he went on. ‘And in the meantime, put this woman’s cameos back in her trunk.