Роберт Батлер: Rafferty and Josephine

"It's important to me ," Max said, and there was no anger in his voice, no issues of control, only the hurt of a child. "It's for me, Dad." He seemed to hear his own tone. He sharpened his voice and waved the newspaper. "This can hurt us. All over town."

For the second time in two days Rafferty felt panicky, this time at the prospect of his son telling him to choose-Josephine or him. "Let's talk about this later," Rafferty said.

"Don't you trust me?" Max said.

"I do. That's not the issue."

"Then what is?"

"Later."

"You sent me to Harvard. "

Rafferty thrashed around for a way to end this for the moment. He said, "Max. Let's argue later. We're standing in a the middle of a goddamn church, for Christ's sake."

Max blinked and then he shrugged and shot his father a little smile. "You're a goddamn good defender of the faith there, Dad," he said, and he turned and went out the doors of the cathedral.

Rafferty stood for a time in the narthex and tried to figure out what it all meant. He looked at his watch. Josephine would be arriving any minute. This cleared his head. They'd talk about the LeBlanc House directly. They'd work it through.

So Rafferty stepped out of the cathedral into Jackson Square and he sat down on a bench and he watched the Catholics going in clean and coming out soiled with their own mortality, and a fortune-teller set himself up nearby, ready to resume his alternate view of the future, and a skinny young man took a saxophone out of a case and laid the case open for donations and he started licking his reed. Rafferty looked at his watch. The ashen foreheads drifted by. The musician licked his reed some more, licked on and on until Rafferty wondered if this was his talent, he would lick his reed all afternoon to the delight of a crowd of tourists. Rafferty looked at his watch. She was late.

And it got worse. Rafferty sat, and eventually the saxophonist actually played, and Josephine did not come. Neither did any crowds for the saxophonist, and he stopped and packed his instrument and went away, and the fortune teller fell asleep-didn't he know from his cards that there'd be no customers today? — and Josephine was forty-five minutes late, and then an hour late, and Rafferty rose. He'd been able to suspend all serious thought till he could talk to her but now there was no keeping his worst fears out of his head. She'd stood him up. And the ad was her declaration why.

For a long moment, Rafferty didn't know what to do.

~

Along Magazine Street, the restaurants and the coffeehouses and the antique shops and the bookstores were open, the hangovers and the penance of their owners having been dealt with by noon. The LeBlanc House sat implacably beneath its palms and there was no sign of life in the windows. A car whisked by. A bald man trailed behind a small white dog who snuffled past on a leash. Another car ground its gears and accelerated along in the opposite direction, and the street fell silent. The palm fronds quaked almost imperceptibly from a low-grade breeze. And then Rafferty McCue was standing on the sidewalk, contemplating this house.

Max was right. It would make a wonderful restaurant. But Rafferty was paying a very high price. Perhaps higher than he could imagine, even with ashes on his forehead. He sagged before the LeBlanc House, sagged as if he were as old as this place and fallen into shambles. What was the point of coming here? He turned to leave.

But he took a last look at LeBlanc House. It was his, after all. It was Max's. He quaked at this thought as faintly as the palm fronds, and he didn't know why, though he knew it wasn't from pleasure. He stood in suspension for a moment and then he stepped forward, hesitating briefly at the realtor sign hung with the red SOLD placard, and then he moved beneath the windmill palms and up the front steps to the door. He peered in. There was a staircase before him. And for the second time this day a veteran resident of New Orleans who should never have expected a door to be unlocked on an empty house tried the knob.

He instantly followed the swing of the door and he closed it behind him. He stood in the foyer and drew in the smell of the place, deeply, that strange mixture of mildew and old flowers and cooking oil that had burned away years ago and some animal something, which was perhaps just two hundred years of humanity come and gone in this space. He and Max would fill it with the smell of good food and they would fill it with people talking and laughing and taking their ease. Rafferty felt good about what he was doing with his life. And he felt terrible, standing in this foyer, knowing that what he was doing made this woman he'd held in his arms despise him.

He thought to turn around and leave, but the house itself had let him come in. He had to know her. He thought to go to the kitchen. But that felt like a slap in Josephine's face. He should appreciate the place first as she no doubt appreciated it. He looked up the staircase. Max had spoken of the large room on the second floor and Rafferty climbed the stairs.

There was a landing and a turning and he went up and his footfalls grated in the silence and then he emerged into blindness, the light from the French windows wiping his senses clean for a moment in their contrast with the dimness of the stairway and now the great room that lay around him. He stood now facing to the rear of the space, and his eyes adjusted and in the dimness he could see an old trunk and a few tattered boxes against the far wall and a long table listing downward over a missing leg. The floor felt vast. The ceiling was high. There was a vague glimmer of a chandelier in the shadows. He turned to the front of the room and jerked back. Between the two windows lay a body.

Rafferty moved toward it, squinting against the light. It was a woman. She was dead. And then he realized it was her. Josephine, lying on her back on the floor, her hands folded on her chest, her mouth slightly open, her eyes closed forever. He threw himself forward onto his knees, leaning to her, flares of panic streaking through his head, his arms, and he reached out, his hand trembling, and he pulled it back. He couldn't touch her. He had to touch her. This was his fault. And so he bent down, very near, bent to her and he kissed her on her barely parted lips. She was still warm. And she stirred.

He jerked back again. "Thank God," he cried.

Josephine opened her eyes and she looked into the face hovering over her and she thought for a moment that she was in her coffin, that she'd awakened to find the man who would drive a stake through her heart. But no. It was Rafferty. She was merely sleeping. "You should have awakened me," she said.

"I did," he said. "I thought you were dead."

"You think you woke me from the dead?"

"No. I. it's OK now. I was wrong."

"Did you kiss me?"

Rafferty was ashamed. He'd taken advantage of her. "I. well. I thought I was kissing your dead body."

"That's an excuse?" she said, though she knew she wasn't angry. "It's a good thing I woke up. Who knows what else you might've done."

"But if you were dead, you never would have known."

"It's hard for me to say, Oh, well, that's OK then. Don't you know how to make up better reasons?"

"Not on Ash Wednesday."

Josephine sat up and leaned back against the wall. "I fell asleep," she said. "I broke into your restaurant and fell asleep. I was up all night."

"Writing."

"Not writing, thanks to you."

"Look," Rafferty said, "I know I'm Catholic, but I can't take all this guilt. I'm still dealing with your ad."

"Ad?"

Rafferty realized at once that Josephine knew nothing about it. He eased himself onto the floor beside her and also leaned against the wall. "It's just something between our kids," he said.