Taltos (7 page)

Twenty-five thousand dollars?

Mona’s eyes had drifted to Rowan. Rowan was frowning just a little at the flowers, as if the flowers were talking to her in a quiet and secret tongue.

There followed a colorful description from Mary Jane of climbing swamp cypresses, of knowing just what electric wires to touch and not to touch, of purloined work gloves and boots. Maybe this girl was some kind of genius.

“What other stocks do you own?” asked Mona.

“What do you care at your age about the stock market?” asked Mary Jane with blithering ignorance.

“Good heavens, Mary Jane,” Mona had said, trying to
sound as much as she could like Beatrice, “I’ve always had a great obsession with the stock market. Business to me is an art. Everyone knows that about me. I plan someday to run my own mutual fund. I assume you know the term, mutual fund?”

“Well, sure I do,” said Mary Jane, laughing at herself in an utterly agreeable and forgiving manner.

“I have, in the last few weeks, already completely designed my own portfolio,” Mona said, and then she’d broken off, feeling dumb for having been baited like that by someone who probably was not even listening to her. Derision from the firm of Mayfair and Mayfair was one thing—and it would not last long—but from this girl it was another.

But the girl had really looked at her, and stopped just using her for a sounding board, while taking little peeping glances in between her own hasty words.

“Is that so?” asked Mary Jane. “Well, let me ask you something now. What about this Shopper’s Channel on TV? I think this is going to go over like crazy? You know? I’ve put ten grand in the Shopper’s Channel. You know what happened?”

“The stock’s nearly doubled in the last four months,” said Mona.

“You got it, that’s right, now how did you know that? Well, you’re some strange kid, aren’t you now? And I thought you were one of those uptown girls, with that ribbon in your hair, you know, that you always wore, and going to Sacred Heart, you know? And I figured you wouldn’t even talk to me.”

A little pain had flared in Mona at that moment, pain and pity for this girl, for anybody who felt that cast out, that snubbed. Mona had never in her life suffered that lack of confidence. And this girl was interesting, putting it all together on her own, with far less nuts and bolts than Mona had.

“Hold it, please, darlings, let’s not talk Wall Street,” said Beatrice. “Mary Jane, how is Granny? You haven’t told us a word. And it’s four o’clock, and you have to leave soon if you’re going to drive all the way back—”

“Oh, Granny’s fine, Aunt Beatrice,” said Mary Jane, but she had been looking straight at Mona. “Now, you know what happened to Granny after Mama came and got me and took me away to Los Angeles? I was six years old then, you know. Did you hear this story?”

“Yeah,” said Mona.

Everybody had. Beatrice was still embarrassed about it. Celia stared at the girl as though she were a giant mosquito. Only Michael seemed uninformed.

What had happened was this: Mary Jane’s grandmother, Dolly Jean Mayfair, had been slapped in the parish home after her daughter left with six-year-old Mary Jane. Dolly Jean was supposed to have died last year and been buried in the family tomb. And the funeral had been a big affair, only because when somebody called New Orleans, all the Mayfairs drove out there to Napoleonville, and beat their chests in grief and regret that they had let this old woman, poor Dolly Jean, die in a parish home. Most of them had never heard of her.

Indeed, none of them had really known Dolly Jean. Or at least they had not known her as an old lady. Lauren and Celia had seen her many times when they were all little girls, of course.

Ancient Evelyn had known Dolly Jean, but Ancient Evelyn had never left Amelia Street to ride to a country funeral, and no one had even thought of asking her about it.

Well, when Mary Jane hit town a year ago, and heard the story of her grandmother dying and being buried, she’d scoffed at it, even laughing in Bea’s face.

“Hell, she’s not dead,” Mary Jane had said. “She came to me in a dream and said, ‘Mary Jane, come get me. I want to go home.’ Now I’m going back to Napoleonville, and you have to tell me where that parish home is.”

For Michael’s benefit, she had now repeated the entire tale, and the look of astonishment on Michael’s face was becoming unintentionally comic.

“How come Dolly Jean didn’t tell you in the dream where the home was?” Mona had asked.

Beatrice had shot her a disapproving look.

“Well, she didn’t, that’s a fact. And that’s a good point,
too. I have a whole theory about apparitions and why they, you know, get so mixed up.”

“We all do,” said Mona.

“Mona, tone it down,” said Michael.

Just as if I’m his daughter now, thought Mona indignantly. And he still hasn’t taken his eyes off Mary Jane. But it had been said affectionately.

“Honey, what happened?” Michael had pushed.

“Well, an old lady like that,” Mary Jane had resumed, “she doesn’t always know where she is, even in a dream, but she knew where she was from! This is exactly what happened. I walked into the door of that old folks’ home, and there, slap-bang in the middle of the recreation room, or whatever they called it, was my grandmother and she looked up at me, right at me, and after all those years she said, ‘Where you been, Mary Jane? Take me home,
chère
, I’m tired of waiting.’ ”

They had buried the wrong person from the old folks’ home.

The real Granny Dolly Jean Mayfair had been alive, receiving but never laying eyes upon a welfare check every month with somebody else’s name on it. A royal inquisition had taken place to prove it, and then Granny Mayfair and Mary Jane Mayfair had gone back to live in the ruins of the plantation house, and a team of Mayfairs had provided them with the basic necessities, and Mary Jane had stood outside, shooting her pistol at soft-drink bottles and saying that they’d be just fine, they could take care of themselves. She had some bucks she’d made on the road, she was kind of a nut about doing things her own way, no thank you kindly.

“So they let the old lady live with you in this flooded house?” Michael had asked so innocently.

“Honey, after what they did to her in the old folks’ home out there, mixing her up with some other woman and putting her name on a slab and all, what the hell are they going to say to me about her living with me? And Cousin Ryan? Cousin Ryan of Mayfair and Mayfair? You know? He went down there and tore that town apart!”

“Yeah,” said Michael. “I bet he did.”

“It was all our fault,” said Celia. “We should have kept track of these people.”

“Are you sure you didn’t grow up in Mississippi and maybe even Texas?” Mona had asked. “You sound like an amalgam of the whole South.”

“What is an amalgam? See, that is where you have the advantage. You’re educated. I’m self-educated. There’s a world of difference between us. There are words that I don’t dare pronounce and I can’t read the symbols in the dictionary.”

“Do you want to go to school, Mary Jane?” Michael had been getting more and more involved by the second, his intoxicatingly innocent blue eyes making a head-to-toe sweep about every four and one-half seconds. He was far too clever to linger on the kid’s breasts and hips, or even her round little head, not that it had been undersized, just sort of dainty. That’s how she’d seemed, finally, ignorant, crazy, brilliant, a mess, and somehow dainty.

“Yes, sir, I do,” said Mary Jane. “When I’m rich I’ll have a private tutor like Mona here is gettin’ now that she’s the designee and all, you know, some really smart guy that tells you the name of every tree you pass, and who was president ten years after the Civil War, and how many Indians there were at Bull Run, and what
is
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.”

“How old are you?” Michael had asked.

“Nineteen and a half, big boy,” Mary Jane had declared, biting her shiny white teeth into her lower lip, lifting one eyebrow and winking.

“This story about your granny, you’re serious, this really happened? You picked up your granny and …”

“Darling, it all happened,” said Celia, “exactly as the girl says. I think we should go inside. I think we’re upsetting Rowan.”

“I don’t know,” said Michael. “Maybe she’s listening. I don’t want to move. Mary Jane, you can care for this old lady all by yourself?”

Beatrice and Celia had immediately looked anxious. If Gifford had still been alive, and there, she too would have
looked anxious. “Leaving that old woman out there!” as Celia had said so often of late.

And they had promised Gifford, hadn’t they, that they would take care of it? Mona remembered that. Gifford had been in one of her hopeless states of worry about relatives far and wide, and Celia had said, “We’ll drive out and check on her.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Curry, it all happened, and I took Granny home with me, and don’t you know that the sleeping porch upstairs was just exactly the way we’d left it? Why, after thirteen years, the radio was still there, and the mosquito netting and the ice chest.”

“In the swamps?” Mona had demanded. “Wait a minute.”

“That’s right, honey, that’s exactly right.”

“It’s true,” Beatrice had confessed dismally. “Of course, we got them fresh linen, new things. We wanted to put them in a hotel or a house or …”

“Well, naturally,” said Celia. “I’m afraid this story almost made the papers. Darling, is your granny alone out there right now?”

“No, ma’am, she’s with Benjy. Benjy’s from the trappers live out that way—real crazy people, you know??? The kind that live in those shacks all made out of pieces of tin, and windows from salvage and even cardboard? I pay him below minimum wage to watch Granny and to cover the phones, but I don’t take out any deductions.”

“So what?” said Mona. “He’s an independent contractor.”

“You sure are smart,” said Mary Jane. “Don’t you think I know that? I was actually biting my lip on another little tidbit right at that point, you know??? That Benjy, bless his heart, has already discovered how to make some easy money in the French Quarter down here, you know?? Peddling nothing but what God give him.”

“Oh my Lord,” said Celia.

Michael laughed. “How old is Benjy?” he asked.

“Twelve years old this September,” said Mary Jane. “He’s all right. His big dream is to be a drug dealer in New
York, and my big dream for him is to go to Tulane and become a medical doctor.”

“But what do you mean, cover the phones?” asked Mona. “How many phones have you got? What are you actually doing down there?”

“Well, I had to spring for some money for the phones, that was an absolute necessity, and I’ve been calling my broker, naturally enough. Who else? And then there’s another line that Granny can talk on to my mother, you know, my mother is never getting out of that hospital in Mexico.”

“What hospital in Mexico?” asked Bea, utterly aghast. “Mary Jane, you told me two weeks ago how your mother died in California.”

“I was trying to be polite, you know, save everybody the grief and the trouble.”

“But what about the funeral?” Michael had asked, drawing close enough most likely to sneak a look down Mary Jane’s tightly laced junk polyester blouse. “The old lady. Who
did
they bury?”

“Darlin’, that’s the worst part of it. Nobody ever found out!” said Mary Jane. “Don’t worry about my mother, Aunt Bea, she thinks she’s on the astral plane already. She might
be
on the astral plane for all I know. Besides, her kidneys are shot.”

“Now, that’s not exactly true about the woman in the grave,” said Celia. “They believe it was …”

“Believe?” asked Michael.

Maybe big breasts are markers of power, Mona had thought as she watched the girl bend nearly double and laugh and laugh as she pointed at Michael.

“Look, that’s all very sad about the woman in the wrong grave,” said Beatrice. “But, Mary Jane, you have to tell me how to reach your mother!”

“Hey, you don’t have a sixth finger,” said Mona.

“Not now, precious,” said Mary Jane. “My mother had some doctor in Los Angeles chop it off. That’s what I was going to tell you. They did the same thing to—”

“Enough of this talk, really,” said Celia. “I’m so worried for Rowan!”

“Oh, I didn’t know,” said Mary Jane. “I mean—”

“Same thing to whom?” asked Mona.

“Now that’s another thing. When do you say ‘whom’ instead of ‘who,’ exactly?”

“I don’t think you’re at that stage yet,” Mona had replied. “There are a lot of other basic things….”

“Enough, ladies and gentlemen!” Bea had declared. “Mary Jane, I’m going to call your mother.”

“You’re going to be so sorry, Aunt Bea. You know what kind a’ doctor cut off my sixth finger in L.A.? It was a voodoo witch doctor from Haiti, and he did it on the kitchen table.”

“But can’t they dig up the wrong woman and find out once and for all who she was?” Michael asked.

“Well, they have a very good suspicion, but …” Celia had started.

“But what?” Michael had asked.

“Oh, it has to do with welfare checks,” Beatrice had declared, “and that’s none of our business. Michael, please forget about that dead woman!”

How
could
Rowan just ignore these proceedings? And here he was, calling Mary Jane by name, doing everything but eating Mary Jane up with a spoon. If this didn’t snap Rowan to, then a tornado wouldn’t do it.

“Well, Michael Curry, come to find out they’d been calling that dead lady Dolly Jean for some time before she passed on. Wasn’t anybody in that place with a lick a’ sense, if you ask me. I think one night they just started putting Granny in the wrong bed, and what do you know, the old lady in Granny’s bed died, and there you have it. They buried some poor old stranger in the Mayfair grave!”

At that point Mary Jane had flashed her eyes on Rowan.

“She’s listening!” Mary Jane had cried. “Yes, she is, swear to God. She’s listening.”

If it was true, no one else could see it or sense it. Rowan had remained oblivious to the eyes turning to her. Michael had flushed as though hurt by the kid’s outburst. And Celia had studied Rowan, doubting, and grim.