Merrick - Anne Rice [7]
A chill had come over me, of something momentous and meaningful, when I’d spoken those words to her. I had indulged the pleasure. “We’ll always take care of you.” I had underscored it, and I might have kissed her had she not been so ripe and pretty, with her bare feet on the flowered carpet and her breasts naked beneath her shift.
She had not replied.
“All gentlemen and ladies, it seems,” Aaron had said, perusing the daguerreotypes. “And in such excellent condition, these little portraits.” He had sighed. “Ah, what a wonder it must have been in the 1840s when they learnt to take these pictures.”
“Oh, yes, my great-great uncle wrote all about it,” she had said. “I don’t know if anyone can read those pages anymore. They were crumbling to bits when Great Nananne first showed them to me. But as I was saying, these are all his pictures. Here, the tintypes, he did those too.” She had a woman’s weariness in her sigh, as though she’d lived it all. “He died very old, they say, with a house full of pictures, before his white nephews came and actually broke them up—but I’ll come to that.”
I had been shocked and bruised by such a revelation, unable to excuse it. Broken daguerreotypes. Faces lost forever. She had gone on, lifting the small rectangles of tin, many unframed yet clear, from her cardboard treasure chest.
“I open boxes sometimes from Great Nananne’s rooms, and the paper is all little bits and pieces. I think the rats come and they eat the paper. Great Nananne says rats will eat your money and that’s why you have to keep it in an iron box. Iron’s magical, you know that. The sisters—I mean the nuns—they don’t know that. That’s why in the Bible you couldn’t build with an iron shovel, because iron was mighty and you couldn’t put the iron shovel above the bricks of the Lord’s temple, not then, and not now.”
It seemed a bizarre intelligence, though she had been most technically correct.
She’d let her words wander. “Iron and shovels. It goes way back. The King of Babylon held a shovel in his hand with which he laid the bricks of the temple. And the Masons, now they keep that idea in their Order, and on the one-dollar bill you see that broken pyramid of bricks.”
It had amazed me, the ease with which she touched on these complex concepts. What had she known in her life, I wondered. What sort of woman would she prove to be?
I remember that she’d been looking at me, as she’d said those words, gauging my reaction, perhaps, and it had only then become clear to me how much she needed to talk of the things she’d been taught, of the things she thought, of the things she’d heard.
“But why are you so good?” she had asked, searching my face rather politely. “I know with priests and nuns why they’re good to us. They come and bring food and clothes to us. But you, why are you good? Why did you let me in and give me a room here? Why do you let me do what I want? All day Saturday I looked at magazines and listened to the radio. Why do you feed me and try to get me to wear shoes?”
“Child,” Aaron had interjected. “We’re almost as old as the Church of Rome. We’re as old as the orders of the sisters and the priests who’ve visited you. Yes, older, I would say, than almost all.”
Still she had looked to me for an explanation.
“We have our beliefs and our traditions,” I had said. “It’s common to be bad, to be greedy, to be corrupt and self-seeking. It’s a rare thing to love. We love.”
Again, I had enjoyed our sense of purpose, our commitment—that we were the inviolate Talamasca, that we cared for the outcast, that we harbored the sorcerer and the seer, that we had saved witches from the stake and reached out even to the wandering spirits, yes, even to the shades whom others fear. We had done it for well over a thousand years.
“But these little treasures—your family, your heritage,” I’d hastened to explain. “They matter to us because they matter to you. And they will always be yours.