The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (322 page)

“You didn’t have to be a priest or monk.”

“Exactly. And so the monks were jealous, but my concept of
this as a boy was all wound up with Wynken, whom I knew to have been influenced by German mysticism and all those popular movements, Meister Eckehart, et cetera, though he worked in a scriptorium and still did old-fashioned parchment prayer books of devotion by hand. Wynken’s books were completely different from those of others. I thought if I could find all Wynken’s books I’d have it made.”

“Why Wynken, what made him different?”

“Let me tell it my way. See, this is how it happened, the boardinghouse was shabby-elegant, you know the kind, my mother didn’t get her own hands dirty, she had three maids and an old colored man who did everything; the old people, the boarders—they were on hefty private incomes, limousines garaged around the Garden District, three meals a day, red carpets. You know the house. Henry Howard designed it. Late Victorian. My mother had inherited it from her mother.”

“I know it, I’ve seen it, I’ve seen you stop in front of it. Who owns it now?”

“I don’t know. I let it slip away. I ruined so many things. But picture this: drowsy summer afternoon there, I’m fifteen and lonely, and Old Captain invites me in, and there on the table in the second parlour—he rents the two front parlours—he lives in a sort of wonderland of collectibles and brass and such—”

“I see it.”

“—and there are these books on the table, medieval books! Tiny medieval prayer books. Of course, I know a prayer book when I see it; but a medieval codex, no; I was an altar boy when I was very little, went to Mass every day for years with my mother, knew liturgical Latin as was required. The point is, I recognize these books as devotional and rare, and something that Old Captain is inevitably going to sell.

“ ‘You can touch them, Roger, if you’re careful,’ he tells me. For two years, he had let me come and listen to his classical records, and we’d taken walks together. But I was just becoming sexually interesting to him, though I didn’t know it, and it’s got nothing to do with what I have to say until later on.

“He was on the phone talking to somebody about a ship in the harbour.

“Within a few minutes we were off to the ship. We used to go on these ships all the time. I never knew what we were doing. It had to be smuggling. All I remember is Old Captain sitting at a big round table with all the crew, they were Dutch, I think, and some nice officer with a heavy accent giving me a tour of the engine room, the map room, and the radio room. I never tired of it. I loved the ships. The New Orleans wharves were active then, full of rats and hemp.”

“I know.”

“Do you remember those long ropes that ran from the ships to the dock, how they had the round steel rat shields on them—disks of steel that the rats couldn’t climb over?”

“I remember.”

“We get home that night and instead of going to bed as I would have done, I beg him to let me come in and see those books. I have to see them before he sells them. My mother wasn’t in the hallway, so I supposed she’d gone to bed.

“Let me give you an image of my mother and this boardinghouse. I told you it was elegant, didn’t I? You can imagine the furnishings, heavy Renaissance revival, machine-made pieces, the kind that junked up mansions from the 1880s on.”

“Yes.”

“The house has a glorious staircase, winding, set against a stained-glass window, and at the foot of the stairs, in the crook of it, this masterpiece of a stairs of which Henry Howard must have been profoundly proud—in the stairwell—stood my mother’s enormous dressing table, imagine, and she’d sit there in the main hall, at the dressing table, brushing her hair! All I have to do is think of that and my head aches. Or it used to when I was alive. It was such a tragic image, and I knew it, even though I grew up seeing it every day; that a dressing table of marble and mirrors and sconces and filigree, and an old woman with dark hair, does not belong in a formal hallway.…”

“And the boarders just took it in?” I asked.

“Yes, because the house was gobbled up for this one and that one, Old Mister Bridey, living in what had once been a servants’ porch, and Blind Miss Stanton in the little fainting room upstairs! And four apartments carved out of the servants’ quarters in back. I am keenly sensitive to disorder; you find around me either perfect order or the neglected clutter of the place in which you killed me.”

“I realize that.”

“But if I were to inhabit that place again.… Ah, this is not important. The point I’m trying to make is that I believe in order and when I was young I used to dream about it. I wanted to be a saint, well, a sort of secular saint. Let me return to the books.”

“Go on.”

“I hit the sacred books on the table. One of them I took from its own little sack. I was charmed by the tiny illustrations. I examined each and every book that night, planning to thereafter take my time. Of course the Latin was unreadable to me in that form.”

“Too dense. Too many pen strokes.”

“My, you do know things, don’t you?”

“Maybe we’re surprising each other. Go on.”

“I spent the week thoroughly examining all of them. I cut school all the time. It was so boring. I was way ahead of everybody, and wanted to do something exciting, you know, like commit a major crime.”

“A saint or a criminal.”

“Yes, I suppose that does seem a contradiction. Yet it’s a perfect description.”

“I thought it was.”

“Old Captain explained things about the books. The book in the sack was a girdle book. Men carried such books with them. And this particular one was a prayer book, and another of the illuminated books, the biggest and thickest, was a Book of
the Hours, and then there was a Bible in Latin, of course. He was casual about all of it.

“I was incredibly drawn to these books, can’t tell you why. I have always been covetous of things that are shining and bright and seemingly valuable, and here was the most condensed and seemingly unique version of such I’d ever beheld.”

I smiled. “Yes, I know exactly.”

“Pages full of gold, and red, and tiny beautiful little figures. I took out a magnifying glass and started to study the pictures in earnest. I went to the old library at Lee Circle—remember it?—and I studied up on the entire question. Medieval books. How the Benedictines had done them. Do you know Dora owns a convent? It isn’t based on the plan of St. Gall, but it’s just about the nineteenth-century equivalent.”

“Yes, I saw it, I saw her there. She’s brave and doesn’t care about the darkness or the aloneness.”

“She believes in Divine Providence to the point of idiocy and she can make something of herself only if she isn’t destroyed. I want another drink. I know I’m talking fast. I have to.”

I gestured for the drink. “Continue, what happened, who’s Wynken de Wilde?”

“Wynken de Wilde was the author of two of these precious books that Old Captain had in his possession. I didn’t figure that out for months. I was going over the little illustrations, and gradually I determined two of the books were done by the same artist, and then in spite of Old Captain insisting that there would be no signature, I found his name, in several places in both books. Now you know Captain sold these types of things. I told you. He dealt in them through a shop on Royal Street.”

I nodded.

“Well, I lived in terror of the day he was going to have to sell these two books! These books weren’t like the other books. First off, the illustrations were exceedingly detailed. One page might contain the motif of a flowering vine, with blossoms from which birds drank, and in these blossoms there were human
figures intertwined, as if in a bower. Also, these were books of psalms. When you first examined them you thought they were psalms of the Vulgate, you know, the Bible we accept as canonical.”

“Yes.…”

“But they weren’t. They were psalms that never appeared in any Bible. I figured that much out, simply by comparing them to other Latin reprints of the same period that I got out of the library. This was some sort of original work. Then the illustrations, the illustrations contained not only tiny animals and trees and fruit but naked people, and the naked people were doing all sorts of things!”

“Bosch.”

“Exactly, like Bosch’s
Garden of Earthly Delights
, that kind of luscious sensuous paradise! Of course, I hadn’t seen Bosch’s painting yet in the Prado. But it was here in miniature in these books. Little figures frolicking beneath the abundant trees. Old Captain said, ‘Garden of Eden imagery,’ that it was very common. But two books full of it? No. This was different. I had to crack these books, get an absolutely clear translation of every word.

“And then Old Captain did the kindest thing for me he’d ever done, the thing that might have made a great religious leader out of me, and may still make one in Dora, though hers is wholly another creed.”

“He gave you the books.”

“Yes! He gave me the books. And let me tell you more. That summer, he took me all over the country to look at medieval manuscripts! We went to the Huntington Library in Pasadena, and the Newbury Library in Chicago. We went to New York. He would have taken me to England, but my mother said no.

“I saw all types of medieval books! And I came to know that Wynken’s were unlike any others. Wynken’s were blasphemous and profane. And nobody, nobody at any of these libraries had a book by Wynken de Wilde, but the name was known!

“Captain still let me keep the books! And I set to work on translating them right away. Old Captain died in the front room, the first week of my senior year. I didn’t even start school till after he was buried. I refused to leave him. I sat there with him. He slipped into a coma. By the third day of the coma, you could not have told who he was, his face had so changed. He didn’t close his eyes anymore, and didn’t know they were open, and his mouth was just a slack sort of oval, and his breath came in even gasps. I sat there. I told you.”

“I believe you.”

“Yes, well, I was seventeen, my mother was very sick, there wasn’t any money for college, which every other senior boy at Jesuit was talking about, and I was dreaming of flower children in the Haight Ashbury of California, listening to the songs of Joan Baez, and thinking that I would go to San Francisco with the message of Wynken de Wilde, and found a cult.

“This was what I knew then through translation. And in that regard I had had the help of an old priest at Jesuit for quite some time, one of those genuinely brilliant Latin scholars who has to spend half the day making boys behave. He had done the translation for me gladly, and of course there was a little of the usual promise in it of my proximity and intimacy, he and I being alone and close for hours.”

“So you were selling yourself again, even before Old Captain died?”

“No. Not really. Not the way you think. Well, sort of. Only this priest was a genuine celibate, Irish, almost impossible to understand now, this sort of priest. They never did anything to anyone. I doubt they even masturbated. It was all being near boys and occasionally breathing heavily or something. Nowadays religious life doesn’t attract that particular kind of robust and completely repressed individual. A man like that could no more molest a child than he could get up on the altar at Mass and start to shout.”

“He didn’t know he felt an attraction for you, that he was giving you special favors.”

“Precisely, and so he spent hours with me translating Wynken. He kept me from going crazy. He always stopped in to visit with Old Captain. If Old Captain had been Catholic, Father Kevin would have given him the Last Rites. Try to understand this, will you? You can’t judge people like Old Captain and Father Kevin.”

“No, and not boys like you.”

“Also, my mother had a disastrous new boyfriend that last year, a sugar-coated mock gentleman, actually, one of those people who speaks surprisingly well, has overly bright eyes, and is obviously rotten inside, and from a totally unconvincing background. He had too many wrinkles in his youngish face; they looked like cracks. He smoked du Maurier cigarettes. I think he thought he was going to marry my mother for the house. You follow me?”

“Yes, I do. So after Old Captain died, you had only the priest.”

“Right. Now you get it. Father Kevin and I worked a lot at the boardinghouse, he liked that. He’d drive up, park his car on Philip Street and come around and we’d go up to my room. Second floor, front bedroom. I had a great view of the parades on Mardi Gras. I grew up thinking that was normal, for an entire city to go mad two weeks out of every year. Anyway, we were up there during one of the night parades, ignoring it as natives can do, you know, once you’ve seen enough papier-mâché floats and trinkets and flambeaux—”

“Horrible, lurid flambeaux.”

“Yes, you said it.” He stopped. The drink had come and he was gazing at it.

“What is it?” I asked him. I was alarmed because he was alarmed. “Look at me, Roger. Don’t start fading, keep talking. What did the translation of the books reveal? Were they profane? Roger, talk to me!”

He broke his frigid meditative stillness. He picked up the drink, tossed down half of it. “Disgusting and I adore it. Southern Comfort was the first thing I ever drank when I was a boy.”

He looked at me, directly.

“I’m not fading,” he assured me. “It’s just I saw and smelled the house again. You know? The smell of old people’s rooms, the rooms in which people die. But it was so lovely. What was I saying? All right, it was during Proteus, one of the night parades, that Father Kevin made the incredible breakthrough that both these books had been dedicated by Wynken de Wilde to Blanche de Wilde, his patron, and that she was obviously the wife to his good brother, Damien; it was all embedded in the designs of the first few pages. And that threw an entirely different light on the psalms. The psalms were filled with lascivious invitations and suggestions and possibly even some sort of secret codes for clandestine meetings. Over and over again there appeared paintings of the same little garden—understand we’re talking miniatures here—”

“I’ve seen many examples.”

“And in these little tiny pictures of the garden there would always be one naked man and five women dancing around a fountain within the walls of a medieval castle, or so it seemed. Magnify it five times and it was just perfect. And Father Kevin began to laugh and laugh.