Prince Lestat (15 page)

For hours they talked, not about the horrid Christian home but about other things, Rose’s love of books, her dreams of writing poetry and stories someday, and her enthusiasm about New York, and how she so wanted to go to a great university like Harvard or Stanford or who knows where?

Those were wonderful hours. They’d stopped at a café on South Beach, and Uncle Lestan sat there quietly, leaning on his elbows, beaming at her as she poured out all her thoughts and dreams and questions.

The new apartment in New York was on the Upper East Side, about two blocks from the park in a venerable old building with spacious rooms and high ceilings. Aunt Marge and Rose were both overjoyed to be there.

Rose went to a marvelous day school which had a curriculum far superior to that of the Willmont School. With the help of several
tutors, mostly college students, Rose soon caught up and was deep into her school work preparing to go to college.

Though Rose missed the beautiful beach in Florida and the lovely warm sweet rural nights, she was ecstatic to be in New York, loved her schoolmates, and was secretly happy that Aunt Marge was with her and not Aunt Julie, as Aunt Marge had always been the adventurous one, the mischievous one, and they had more fun together.

Their household soon included a permanent housekeeper and cook, and the security-guard drivers who took them everywhere.

There were times when Rose wanted to strike out on her own, meet kids on her own, take the subway, be independent.

But Uncle Lestan was adamant. Rose’s drivers went where Rose went. Embarrassed as Rose was by the big stretch Lincoln limousine that dropped her off at school, she came to depend on this. And these drivers were all past masters of double parking anywhere in Midtown while Rose shopped, and thought nothing of carrying twenty and thirty bundles and even braving the checkout lines for Rose, or running errands for her. They were young mostly, cheerful guys, and kind of like guardian angels.

Aunt Marge was frank about enjoying all this completely.

It was a new way of life, and it had its charms, but the real lure of course was New York itself. She and Aunt Marge had subscription tickets to the symphony, the New York City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera. They attended the latest musicals on Broadway, and plenty of off-Broadway plays. They shopped at Bergdorf Goodman and Saks; they roamed the Metropolitan Museum for hours on Saturdays and often spent weekends visiting the galleries in the Village and SoHo. This was
life
!

Over the phone, Rose talked endlessly to Uncle Lestan about this or that play she’d seen, or concert, or what was happening with Shakespeare in the Park, and how they wanted to go to Boston this weekend, just to see it, and perhaps visit Harvard.

The summer before Rose’s senior year, she and Aunt Marge met Uncle Lestan in London for a marvelous week of visiting the most wonderful sites after hours and with private guides. Then Aunt Marge and Rose went on to Rome, and to Florence and to a whole string of other cities before returning to New York just in time for school to start.

It was sometime just before her eighteenth birthday that Rose
turned to the internet to research the ghastly Amazing Grace Home for Girls where she’d been imprisoned. She had never told anyone she knew about what actually happened to her there.

The news reports confirmed everything Louis had told her long ago. The judge who’d sent Rose there had gone to prison. And two lawyers had gone with him.

On Rose’s last night there, apparently, a boiler had exploded, setting fire to the entire establishment. Two other explosions had destroyed outbuildings and stables. Rose had never known there were stables. Local firefighters and police had converged on the school to find girls wandering the grounds dazed and incoherent from the shock of the blast, and many had had visible welts and bruises from being beaten. One or two had shaved heads; and two had been taken to local emergency rooms due to malnutrition and dehydration. Some girls had the words
SLUT
and
ADDICT
written on them with felt-tip pen. Newspaper stories reflected contempt and outrage. They railed against the school as a racket, part of the unregulated religious Troubled Teen Industry in which parents were bilked out of thousands of dollars to pay for “reformation” of teen girls they feared were in danger of becoming druggies or dropouts or suicides.

Everybody connected with the place had been indicted for something, it seemed; but charges eventually were dropped. There was no law requiring regulation of religious schools in Florida, and the owners and “faculty” of the place dropped out of the record.

But it was easy to trace Dr. Hays and Mrs. Hays. They had both died within months in a fiery home invasion. One of the other more notorious teachers had drowned off Miami Beach. And yet another had been killed in a car wreck.

Rose hated to admit it but this gave her a great deal of satisfaction. At the same time, something about it bothered Rose. A terrible feeling crept over her. Had someone punished these people for what they’d done, done to Rose and to others? But that was absurd. Who would do such a thing? Who
could
do such a thing? She put it out of her mind, and it was dreadful, she told herself, to be glad these people were dead. Rose did a little more reading on the Troubled Teen Industry and other scandals besetting these unregulated Christian schools and homes, but then she couldn’t endure another moment of thinking of it all. It made her too angry, and when she became angry, she became ashamed, ashamed that she’d ever—. There was no end
to it. She closed the book on that brief and horrid chapter of her life. The present beckoned.

Uncle Lestan wanted Rose to follow her own star when it came to college. He assured her nothing was off-limits.

She and Marge flew to California to visit Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley.

Stanford, near beautiful Palo Alto, California, was Rose’s final choice, and Rose and Marge moved the July before school started.

Uncle Lestan met Rose in San Francisco for a brief holiday in August. Rose fell in love with the city, and had half a mind to live there and commute. Uncle Lestan had another suggestion. Why not live near campus as planned, and have an apartment in San Francisco? It was soon arranged, and Rose and Marge moved into a spacious modern condo walking distance from Davies Symphony Hall and the San Francisco Opera House.

Their small house on a tree-lined street in Palo Alto was charming. And though the change of coasts meant a new housekeeper, and two new drivers, Rose was soon settled in and loving the California sunshine.

After her first week of classes, Rose was in love with her literature professor, a tall, wiry, and introspective man who spoke with the affectation of an actor. Gardner Paleston was his name; he’d been a prodigy of sorts, publishing four volumes of poetry as well as two books on the work of William Carlos Williams before he was thirty. At thirty-five, he was brooding, intense, bombastic, and utterly seductive. He flirted openly with Rose, and told her over coffee after class that she was the most beautiful young woman he’d ever seen. He e-mailed her poems about her “raven hair” and “inquisitive eyes.” He took her to dinner at expensive restaurants and showed her his large, old Georgian-style home in old Palo Alto. His mother and father were dead, he said. His brother had died in Afghanistan. And so he haunted the house, now, what a waste, but he couldn’t bear to give it up, filled as it was with the “rag-and-bone shop of my childhood.”

When Uncle Lestan came to visit, he took Rose walking through the quiet leafy streets of Palo Alto. He remarked on the magnolia trees and their hard, rustling green leaves, and how he loved them from his time “in the South.”

He was mussed and dusty all over and Rose realized that she’d often seen Uncle Lestan this way, exquisitely dressed, but dusty.

It was on the tip of her tongue to tease him about flying about in the stars, but she didn’t. His skin was more darkly tanned than usual and looked almost burned, and his beautiful thick hair was almost white.

He wore a dark blue blazer and khaki pants and black shoes shined to look like glass, and he talked in a low, gentle voice telling her that she must always remember: she could do absolutely anything in this world that she wanted. She could be a writer, a poet, a musician, an architect, a doctor, a lawyer, whatever it was, that she wanted. And if she wanted to marry and make a home for her husband and her children that was fine, too. “If money can’t buy you the freedom to do anything you want, well, what is the good of it?” he asked. He sounded almost sad. “And money you have, Rose. Plenty of it. And time. And if time can’t give us freedom to do what we want, what good is time?”

Rose felt a terrible pain. She was in love with Uncle Lestan. Beside Uncle Lestan, all thoughts of her teacher, Gardner Paleston, simply faded into nothingness. But Rose didn’t say a word. On the verge of tears, she only smiled, and explained that yes, she knew this, that he’d told her this long ago when she’d been a little girl, that she could be and do anything she wanted. “The trouble is I want to do everything!” she said. “I want to live and study here, and live and study in Paris, and in Rome and in New York; I want to do everything.”

Uncle Lestan smiled and told her how proud of her he was. “You’ve grown into a beautiful woman, Rose,” he said. “I knew you’d be pretty. You were pretty when I first saw you. But you’re beautiful now. You’re strong and healthy and, well, you’re beautiful. There’s no point mincing words about it.” And then he turned suddenly into a tyrant, telling her that her driver had to go with her wherever she went, that he even wanted her driver sitting in the back of her college classrooms when there was room, or right outside of them. Rose argued. She wanted freedom. But he wouldn’t hear of it. He had become an overzealous and intensely European guardian, it seemed to Rose, but how could Rose really argue? When she thought of all Uncle Lestan had done for her, she fell silent. All right. Her driver would go everywhere with her. He could carry her books. That would be nice, though these days with iPads and Kindles, she didn’t have to carry many books.

Six months after that visit, Rose received a letter from Uncle Lestan saying that she would not be hearing from him so often anymore
but that he loved her, and he needed this time to be alone. Be assured of his love, and be patient. He would eventually come round. And in the meantime she was entirely safe and must ask his attorneys for whatever her heart desired.

That had always been the way, really. And how could she ask for more?

A year passed without her hearing from Uncle Lestan.

But she had been so busy with other things. And then another year, but it was all right. It would have been wicked and ungrateful to complain, especially when his attorney in Paris called regularly every month.

Two weeks into her junior year, Rose was hopelessly in love again with Gardner Paleston. She was in three of his classes and certain that she could become a great poet someday if she listened to every single word he said. She’d gone to the campus clinic and gotten the information and pills she needed to prevent any accidental pregnancy, and she was just waiting for the time to be perfect for them to be together. Gardner Paleston called her every evening and talked to her for an hour. She had more potential than any other student he’d ever had, he said.

“I want to teach you all I know, Rose,” he said. “I’ve never felt that way about anyone before. I want to give you all that I can, do you understand what I’m saying, Rose? Whatever I know, what I’ve learned, whatever I have to pass on, I want to give it to you.” It sounded as if he was crying on the other end of the line. Rose was overcome.

She wanted desperately to talk with Uncle Lestan about Gardner but that was not to be. She wrote long letters and sent them to the attorney in Paris, and received the most touching little gifts in response. Surely they came from the attorney, she thought, but then each arrived with a gift card signed by Uncle Lestan, and these cards were more precious to her than the pearl necklaces or amethyst brooches they accompanied. Surely Uncle Lestan would one day see Gardner’s exceptional talent, his passion, his genius, for what it was.

As she sat dreaming in class, Gardner Paleston became the most sensitive and brilliant being Rose had ever imagined. He was not as beautiful as Uncle Lestan, no, and he looked older actually, perhaps because he didn’t have Uncle Lestan’s health, she couldn’t know. But she came to love everything about Gardner including his hawklike nose, his high forehead, and the long fingers with which he gestured dramatically as he strode back and forth before the classroom.

How disappointed he was, he declared, how crushed, he said bitterly, that “not a single student in this room understands a tenth of what I’m saying here!” He bowed his head, eyes closed, fingers pressed to the bridge of his nose, and trembled. Rose could have cried.

She sat on the grass under a tree reading over and over William Carlos Williams’s poem: “The Red Wheelbarrow.” What did it mean? Rose wasn’t sure she knew! How could she confess this to Gardner? She burst into tears.

Before Christmas, Gardner told Rose the time had come for them to be together. It was the weekend. He’d carefully prepared everything.

Rose had a big fight with her favorite driver, Murray. Murray was young and dedicated, and fun really, but just as obnoxious as all the other paid guardians. “You stay two blocks behind us,” said Rose. “Don’t let him see that you’re following! I’ll be spending the evening with him, you understand, and you can wait outside, quietly, unobtrusively. Now, Murray, don’t ruin this for me.”

Murray had his doubts. He was a small muscular man, of Russian Jewish descent, who’d been a San Francisco policeman for ten years before getting this job, which paid him three times what he’d made before. He was also a very honest, straightforward, and decent guy, like all the drivers, and he let it be known he didn’t approve of “this professor.” But he followed Rose’s orders.

Gardner picked up Rose about six o’clock that evening and drove her to the mysterious old Georgian mansion in old Palo Alto, following a curved drive through the manicured garden up to a porte cochere that couldn’t be seen from the street.