Роберт Батлер - Rafferty and Josephine

"Yes?" Rafferty said, though it felt more like a gasp to him.

"Another thing I've always loved is Jackson Square on Ash Wednesday. It's like those hours in the dark."

"I'll meet you there at noon," Rafferty said.

When Josephine arrived at her house, the sidewalks and neutral ground along St. Charles were awash with Mardi Gras trash, but the crowds were mostly gone, having migrated downtown. There was a message on Josephine's private answering machine. Delphine said, "Mama, I thought you were going to wave at the Rex parade from your window. I had a photographer ready." There was one beat of silence, then another, as Delphine apparently reviewed her tone of voice, which clearly sounded miffed. She softened only a little bit. "I need to talk with you about this whole LeBlanc House thing. Earl says there's really nothing we can do in the courts. But don't worry. I'm going to carry the ball, Mama, and they're not getting off the hook. Call me on the cell. Bye."

Josephine's hand went to the phone, but then pulled back. Who taught her to use language that way? she wondered. Josephine felt as if she herself were on the hook, as a matter of fact, and she didn't know what ball to carry. She did know she couldn't talk about this now with her daughter.

She turned off the ringer on the phone and went to her computer and she booted up and she counted the hours in her head. She'd go till dawn. She'd have fourteen hours, easily. She'd write ten thousand words. Her Windows desktop appeared before her and she loaded WordPerfect and her book came up and Marie Therese, the Southern belle vampire, was standing before the man she loved. He was still whole. He was still human. His blood was still untainted. She wanted him badly. Okay. Josephine's hands went up, her fingers curled, she hung over the keyboard.

And she hung. And hung. Nothing was coming out of her fingertips. And then Josephine noticed that her nail polish was chipped on the forefinger of her right hand. That needed to be fixed. So she went to the master bath and got her nail polish-arterial red-and she threw herself onto the chaise longue and she tried to patch the chip and that wasn't adequate, not in the least, it all had to be redone, and she took the polish off each fingernail and repainted each one meticulously, and then she did her toes and dried them with a hair dryer, and then she emptied the trash can in the bathroom, and then all the trash cans in the house. In short, she was blocked.

Fourteen hours later the house was freshly clean, every pore on her body had been examined, she'd lingered over a Lean Cuisine dinner somewhere along the way and then over popcorn and then over three glasses of wine, which induced her to take a two-hour nap, which she expected to put all to rights, but it did not.

It was nearing dawn, she figured, and this had never happened on a Mardi Gras night, this silence. Never. She'd been sitting for the past two hours before the computer, punching the Enter key to retain her words whenever the screen saver-a photo of Josephine's house dripping blood from the roof-kicked in. She'd performed every trivial chore she could dream up to keep from writing and she'd kept from thinking about the obvious source of this writer's block, too. But as the grandfather clock downstairs chimed seven, Josephine noticed a thin strip of daylight showing beneath the lowered shade and she cried out in fear, as if she were Marie Therese herself, desperate to escape the sun.

Josephine squared hard around before the words on the screen. Her hands rose. The freshly painted fingertips hovered and hovered and then Josephine pulled back. Her hands fell. She sighed, deeply, wearily. She could write no more for now. And she knew that the LeBlanc House sat in the center of this terrible, wordless night.

~

Josephine went out of her house, and before going to Jackson Square, she drove to Magazine Street and parked at the end of a block she'd once known very well. This place had filled her head with voodoo and jasmine in the dark and with the essence of an octaroon girl who was transformed, by the act of her mother, into the undead and who was torn, by her love for a human, between two irreconcilable worlds. Josephine walked along the block, and the coffeehouse and the bookshop and the run of antique stores were closed tight. And there, up ahead, on the other side of the street was the LeBlanc House. When Josephine had first noticed it, Desiree flashed by in an upstairs window instantly, in the arms of the man she loved and could never marry. Now Josephine stood before the house and it was still beautiful and brimming with the stuff of her imagination. It was stuccoed brick washed the color of early afternoon sunlight, and its two-story galleries were lined with wrought-iron swirls of flowers and fruit and vines, and the great shutters at the French windows on the second floor were open. Josephine thought she heard music. She strained to listen, but there was nothing. A dog was barking somewhere. Nothing else. Then even the dog fell silent.

Josephine crossed the street. She hesitated at the realtor sign hung with a red SOLD placard, and then she moved beneath the windmill palms and up the front steps to the door, set off-center to the right of two leaded stained-glass rosette windows as tall as she. Josephine loved this house. Why hadn't she thought to buy it herself? For one thing, to have any house but her father's house never had crossed her mind. And there were a dozen Josephine Claiborne literary sites around New Orleans. Two dozen. She could start buying them and never stop. But standing on the porch of the LeBlanc House, she suddenly felt heavy-limbed with regret. It was true she desperately wanted this place to stay always the same, though she knew that was impossible. Only vampires could live forever. And now she simply felt weary. She thought to turn to go. But something made her step to the door. She cupped her hands around her face and leaned into the glass. A grand staircase led up to the second floor. She put her hand on the doorknob and there was no reason to expect it to turn, but it did. She opened the door and she thought: they don't even care enough about the place to lock up. She hesitated a moment and then called, "Hello?"

There was only silence in reply. No one was here. She did not hesitate now. She stepped in.

~

And Rafferty stepped forward to the priest. He closed his eyes as the priest's thumb traced the cross of ashes on his forehead- Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return -and Rafferty moved away from the altar, up the side aisle. He'd seen Max well ahead of him in the line of penitents and wondered if his son had seen him. He pushed through the doors into the narthex, and there was Max, waiting, a newspaper folded under his arm. As Rafferty approached, Max whipped the paper out and began flipping the pages. "Did you see it?" Max said, though Rafferty was suddenly struck by the cross of dust on his son's forehead. He wanted to reach up and rub it off. "Look," Max said.

Rafferty looked at a full-page ad that screamed STOP THE DESECRATION. Rafferty didn't want to read any more, though he took in the next block of type, only slightly smaller than the first: A PRECIOUS NEW ORLEANS LITERARY LANDMARK IN PERIL.

"I've seen enough," Rafferty said.

"I'll take care of it."

"No, Max." Rafferty tried to keep his voice steady.

Max rolled on. "There's a lot of boilerplate crap about history and literature in there to give it the illusion of rationality, and it's signed 'Fans of Josephine Claiborne,' but the outbursts are actionable and we know who's really behind this."

"Max."

"They know they can't sue, so they try this stunt, turning the public against us. Well, now we can sue."

Rafferty reached out and put his hand gently on his son's shoulder. "Max. We should think this through. Ask some basic questions. Is this particular building so important. "