Роберт Батлер - Rafferty and Josephine

"Is your princess incorruptible?"

"God no. She has fangs."

They danced on not speaking further, their feet never missing a step onetwothree and Amelia Earhart looked again and though her fixed, famous face did not show it, the look was intense, and Josephine caught a glimpse and she said, "That's my daughter we just passed. Amelia Earhart," and Rafferty turned his face to see and Amelia was gone but there was a great golden robe and another face intent upon the couple and Rafferty said, "That's my son Louis the Fourteenth."

"Your son was once very unkind to one of my characters."

They swirled past the orchestra with Rafferty silently trying to figure this out and Josephine realizing she was very pleasantly awaiting whatever it was this man would say next. Then she understood his hesitation. "Your son Louis ," she said. "He banished her to Louisiana before there was a New Orleans, though she wreaked a terrible revenge. She was a character in one of my books. I'm a writer."

Rafferty instantly picked up where he'd broken off. "He must have had a good reason. To banish her."

"Please," Josephine said, "I should know."

"Forgive me. He is my son."

"He is grown. You can't protect him forever."

"Should I speak to you honestly then of your daughter's overrated flying skills?"

And the music quickly built to a crescendo and stopped. Rafferty and Josephine stopped, too, but they did not let go of each other. They found themselves in the same place: wishing for music, not wanting to let go, wearying of their own arch indirectness.

Rafferty said, "Would you like to step outside of this room?"

She would and they did, he taking her hand and leading the way through the crowd and both of them feeling the fleshy immediacy of the touch of a new hand and wondering what was happening. Then, in the corridor outside the ballroom, with a new waltz muffling into life behind the closed doors and with the brightness of the light here, they both of them, without thinking, lifted their hands to their masks and with a faint quaking inside, as if they were two new lovers rendering themselves naked together for the first time, they stripped off their masks.

Though it was not uncommon in Josephine's novels for her heroine to suck the blood of any man who was interested in her, nevertheless taking great sensual pleasure in the act-the foundation of her wide popularity with modern women-and though she considered herself a true writer, expressing her own personal view of the world in her work, she found that this man's face pleased her inordinately, the boyish cheek-pinchiness of it, and she felt a serious warm fluttery thing beginning in her, and she didn't want to suck his blood at all, merely nibble on his earlobes perhaps. What did this response betoken in her? She declined to answer as she stood naked-faced before this man who was even then feeling a similarly tender thing, the habit of Rafferty's aloneness falling away at once before this woman's lovely thin-nosed high-browed face with the tracings of a rich life of the senses around her eyes and mouth. He wanted to take her in his arms once more, and it was Mardi Gras, after all, it was New Orleans, after all-he wanted to kiss her. Rafferty and Josephine stood sweetly suspended like this for a long moment and before either of them could move or even speak, the music surged loud from the direction of the ballroom and Rafferty's eyes shifted just slightly to see Amelia Earhart emerge and then stagger at the sight of him. She revved her engines and buzzed the field.

"You're Rafferty McCue," Amelia said. "We're going to sue your ass."

Things had gone quickly bad from there, as Louis the Fourteenth appeared in the corridor soon after, and if there had been swords to draw, they would have been drawn, and Rafferty and Josephine seemed to lose the power of speech as Amelia Earhart and King Louis debated, in a condensed and strident form, the trade-offs of history and commercial progress, of intellectual rights and property rights, of good taste and bad, of his arrogantly patronizing tone and her strident hysteria. And then finally Delphine stripped off her mask and said, "Mama, let's go. We'll fight these people till the bitter end," and her adversary stripped off his mask, revealing a face that Josephine found herself feeling instantly kindly toward, for it had the same blue flash of eyes and baby-bottom cheeks of the man she'd just danced with. Then Delphine's hand was under Josephine's elbow and they were moving away and Josephine barely had time to glance back, and she and Rafferty shared a last look, wistful in its blankness.

Josephine tried to force her mind away from the whole incident as she lay that night in her bed and listened to distant laughter and the faint pop of a faraway firecracker. The irony was not lost on Josephine: her stirring up her daughter against the man with whom she would, that very night, dance, and dance quite wonderfully. And Desiree Jones waltzed into Josephine's mind, Desiree the beautiful octaroon orphan of Voodoo Vampire , reared as the daughter of the great Voodoo Priestess, Lily DeSang. Early in the book, Desiree had fallen in love with a dashing white New Orleans lawyer, the wealthy Marcellus Breckinridge, and though, as a result, she had incurred the frightening rage and the formidable threats of her Voodoo mother, she left DeSang and became Breckinridge's mistress. Now the two of them were dancing, Desiree and Marcellus, in the second-floor ballroom of the disputed LeBlanc House and the words were clear in Josephine's head, she'd risen from her traveling coffin in forty-five bookstores across America and read: Desiree danced with her heart whirling faster than her body. She was in his arms; she belonged to him alone at last. And then, even as he lifted her up in a grand spin, her gaze fell upon the window and there she was. The face was unmistakable and ghastly in the light from the great chandelier. It was Lily DeSang. Desiree tried to resist these eyes. But they were the eyes of the only mother she'd ever known. And she drew Marcellus to a stop and she excused herself and she headed for the balcony door.

"Don't go," Josephine whispered into the dark. But Desiree did not stop. She moved to the door and out into the night.

Lily was before her, quickly, gliding across the balcony, and Desiree wanted to stand up to her, wanted to tell her she loved her but it was time to find a life of her own. She did not have a chance. Lily put her arms around Desiree and for a moment it seemed that everything was going to be all right, her mother would understand. Then Lily bent near and Desiree felt the two points of pain flare in the side of her neck and a terrible coldness came over her and a weakness and she knew she would always be the darkly dutiful daughter of Lily DeSang and there was a knock at the door. Josephine started and sat up.

"Mama?" It was Delphine's voice. She was staying the night in her room in Josephine's house, avoiding the Mardi Gras madness in the Quarter. "Are you awake?" she asked, low.

"Yes, dear. Come in."

Delphine slipped into the room and sat on the edge of Josephine's bed. "We haven't talked yet about. you know."

"The devil."

"And his minion."

"I didn't even know who he was until you arrived. That was Rafferty McCue, you say?"

"The restaurant owner ," Delphine said, her emphasis making it sound like car thief . "From the Ninth Ward ," she added, which sounded even worse. "I'll drive him off Magazine Street. Believe me."

This was what Josephine had kindled in her daughter. She felt suddenly like Lily DeSang, after having bitten her daughter in the throat and shaped her to her own dark will. But how could she undo it? And did she really want to? Josephine hardly knew this man. He was a fetching face, some sweet banter.