Anne Rice - Violin

Suddenly it jolted me. Of course. I had planned it, in angst and coldness, on a dark shadowy day when Karl was hurting with every breath, that if she ever tried this, my sister, my poor lost orphaned sister, Katrinka, that I would do this to her. We had planned it. I had told Grady, and Grady had had no choice but to follow my advice, and thought it most prudent besides, and he had a small statement to read.

"How much do you calculate this house is worth, Mrs. Russell?" he asked Katrinka. "what would you say?"

"Well, at least a million dollars," Katrinka answered, which was absurd because there were many larger more beautiful houses in New Orleans for sale for less than that.

Karl used to marvel at it. And Katrinka and her husband, Martin, who sold real estate, knew this better than anyone, as they were fabulously successful uptown; they had their own company.

I stared at Rosalind. Back then, in the dark years, she had read her books and dreamed. She had taken one look at Mother drunk on the bed and then gone into her room with her books. She read Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter of Mars. She had been so beautifully proportioned then. Her dark curly hair was lovely. We were not a bad lot, and each with a different shade of hair.

"Triana."

My mother was beautiful till the moment she died. The funeral home called. They said, "This woman has swallowed her tongue." what did that mean? The cousins with whom she'd died had not even seen her for years, and in their arms she died, with all her long brown hair still brown, not a single gray strand, I remember that, her high forehead-it is not easy to be beautiful with a high forehead, but she was. That last day, as she went down the path, her hair was brushed and pinned. who had done it for her?

She had cut it short only once. But that had been years before. I had come home from school. Katrinka was a baby still, running around the flagstones in pink panties as children did then, all day in the southern heat. No one thought to outfit them in name -

brand suits. And my Mother told me quietly that she had cut her hair, that she had sold it.

What had I said to her? Had I reassured her that she was pretty, that it was fine? I couldn't remember her with short hair at all. And only years later did I understand; she sold her hair, sold her hair, to buy the liquor. Oh, God!

I wanted to ask Rosalind what she thought, if it had been a sin unforgivable not to say goodbye to our Mother. But I couldn't do such a selfish thing! There sat Rosalind in torment, looking from Grady to Katrinka.

Rosalind had her own terrible memories that hurt her so bad she drank and cried.

Once, before our Mother had died, Rosalind had run into Mother coming up the front steps. Our Mother had a package of liquor in her hand, a flat flask wrapped the way they did then at "package liquor stores," in brown paper, and Rosalind had called her a

"drunk," and later confessed to me sobbing, and I had said over and over, "She didn't know, she forgave, she understood, Rosalind, don't." My Mother, never in her life at a loss for words, had in this sad story only smiled at the young Rosalind who was then seventeen, only two years older than me.

Mother! I'm going to die!

I sucked in my breath.

"Do you want me to read the statement?" Grady asked. "You wanted closure. Do you want perhaps to...

"A modern word, that, closure," I said.

"You're crazy," said Katrinka. "You were crazy when you let Lev go-you just gave your own husband to Chelsea and you know it-you were crazy when you nursed Father, you didn't have to have all that medicine for Father, you djdn't have to have the oxygen machines and the nurses and use up every cent he had, you didn't have to do that, you did it out of guilt and you know you did, plain guilt because of Lily..." At Lily's name her voice broke.

Look at her tears.

She could hardly bear to say Lily's name even now.

"You drove Faye away," she said, her face red, swollen, childlike, frantic, "and you were crazy to marry a dying man! To bring a dying man in here, I don't care if he did have money, I don't care if he did fix up the house, I don't care if... You have no right, no right to do these things

A roar of voices came to shut her up. She looked so defenseless! Even her husband, Martin, was angry with her now, and he intimidated her; she couldn't bear his disapproval. How small she looked; she and Faye were eternal waifs. I wished that perhaps Rosalind would get up, go hug her, hold her. I couldn't... couldn't touch her.

"Triana," said Grady. "Do you want to go ahead and make this statement now, as we planned it?"

"What statement?" I looked at Grady. It was something mean and cruel and terrible. I remembered now. The statement. The all-important statement; the drafts and drafts I'd written of the statement.

Katrinka had no idea how much money Karl had left me. Katrinka had no idea how much money I might one day share with her and Rosalind and Faye, and I had made the vow that if she did this thing, this unspeakable thing, if she did this, we would hand her a check, the very impressive check for a million dollars and no cents, even, and that I would demand with her endorsement the promise that she would never speak to me again. A plot hatched in the dark unforgiving part of the heart.

She'd know then, how penny-wise and pound-foolish she'd been.

Yes, and I would look her straight in the eye for all the cruel things she'd ever said to me, the mean things, the little hateful sister things, and her affection for Lev, her

"comforting" Lev while Lily died, as surely as Chelsea. . . but no.

"Katrinka," I whispered. I looked at her. She turned to me, red faced, spurting tears like a baby, all the color washed out of her face but the red, so like the child. Imagine it, a child that little sitting in the school yard with her mother, and her Mother drunk and everyone knowing it, knowing it, knowing it, and that child clinging to her, and then coming home with that drunken woman on the streetcar and...

In the hospital one time I came in and Katrinka was like this, this red, this crying.

"They told Lily twenty minutes before that blood test that they were going to do it. Why did they do that! This place is a torture chamber. They should have never told her so long before they didn't have to-." For my daughter, how she had cried!

Lily's face had been turned to the wall, my tiny five-year-old child, almost dead, within weeks. Katrinka had loved her so much.

"Grady, I want you to give her the check," I said quickly, raising m~ voice.

"Katrinka, it's a gift. Karl arranged it for you. Grady, there's no speech, there's no point, there's no question now, just give her the gift that he wanted her to have."

I could see that Grady gave a huge heaving sigh of relief that there would be no acrimonious and melodramatic words, even though he knew full well that Karl had never laid eyes on Katrinka and had never arranged such a gift-"But don't you want her to know it's your gift?" "I do not," I whispered to him. "She couldn't accept it, she wouldn't. You don't understand. Give Rosalind her check, please," I said. That one had carried no conditions, meant only as a splendid surprise, and Karl had loved Rosalind and Glenn greatly, and leased for them their little shop, Rosalind's Books and Records.

"Say it's from Karl," I said. "Do it."

Katrinka held the check in her hand. She came towards the table. Her tears were still a childish flood, and I noticed how thin she had become, struggling now against age as we all did. She looked so like our Father's family, the Beckers, with her large slightly protruding eyes and her small pretty but hooked nose. She had the touch of the Semite beauty in her, a gravity to her tear-stained face. Her hair was fair and her eyes were blue.