The Witching Hour (74 page)

Llewellyn supplied a vivid description of Julien in the early 1900s, as a thin man who had lost some of his height, but was generally spry and energetic, and full of good humor and imagination.

Llewellyn said frankly that Julien had initiated him in the erotic secrets of life, and not only had Julien taught Llewellyn how to be an attentive lover, he also took the young man with him to Storyville—the notorious red-light district of New Orleans—and introduced him to the better houses operating there.

But let us move on directly to his account:

“Oh, the tricks he taught me,” Llewellyn said, referring to their amorous relationship, “and what a sense of humor he had. It was as if the whole world were a joke to him, and there was never the slightest bitterness in it. I’ll tell you a very private thing about him. He made love to me just as if I were a woman. If you don’t know what I mean, there’s no use explaining it. And that voice he had, that French accent. I tell you when he started talking in my ear … 

“And he would tell me the funniest stories about his antics with his other lovers, about how they fooled everyone, and indeed, one of his boys, Aleister by name, used to dress up as a woman and go to the opera with Julien and no one ever had the slightest suspicion about it. Julien tried to persuade me to do that, but I told him I could never carry it off, never! He understood. He was extremely good-natured. In fact, it was impossible to involve him in a quarrel. He said he was done with all that, and besides he had a horrible temper, and couldn’t bear to lose it. It exhausted him.

“The one time I was unfaithful and came back after two days, fully expecting a terrible argument, he treated me with what would you call it? Bemused cordiality. It turned out he knew everything that I had done and with whom, and in the most pleasant and sincere way he asked me why I had been such a fool. It was positively eerie. At last I burst into tears and confessed that I had meant to show my independence. After all he was such an overwhelming man. But I was then ready to do anything to get back into his good graces. I don’t know what I would have done if he’d thrown me out!

“He accepted this with a smile. He patted my shoulder and said not to worry. I’ll tell you it cured me of wandering out forever! It was no fun at all to feel so dreadful and have him so calm and so accepting. Taught me a few things, it really did.

“And then he went into all that about being a reader of minds, and of being able to see what was going on in other places. He talked a lot about that. I could never tell whether or not he meant it, or if it was just another one of his jokes. He had the prettiest eyes. He was a very handsome old man, really. And there was a flare to the way he dressed. I suppose you might say he was something of a dandy. When he was dressed up in a fine white
linen suit with a yellow silk waistcoat and a white Panama hat, he looked splendid.

“I think I imitate him to this day. Isn’t that sad? I go about trying to look like Julien Mayfair.

“Oh, but that reminds me, I’ll tell you, he did the strangest thing to frighten me once! And to this day I don’t really know what happened. We had been talking the night before about what Julien looked like when he was young, how handsome he appeared in all the photographs, and you know it was like going through a veritable history of photography to study all that. The first pictures of him were daguerreotypes, and then came the tintypes and the later genuine photographs in sepia on cardboard, and finally the sort of black-and-white pictures we have today. Anyway, he had shown me a batch of them and I had said, ‘Oh, I wish I’d known you when you were young, I imagine you were truly beautiful.’ Then I’d stopped. I was so ashamed. I thought perhaps I’d hurt him. But there be was, merely smiling at me. I shall never forget it. He was seated at the far end of his leather couch, legs crossed, just looking at me through the smoke from his pipe, and he said, ‘Well, Richard, if you’d like to know how I was then, maybe I’ll show you. I’ll surprise you.’

“That night, I was downtown. I don’t remember why I went out. I had to get out perhaps. You know sometimes that house could be so oppressive! It was full of children and old people, and Mary Beth Mayfair was always about, and she was such a presence, to put it politely. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Mary Beth, everybody liked Mary Beth. And I liked her a great deal, until Julien died, at least. She was easy to talk to, actually. She would really listen to you when you talked to her, that is one thing I always found rather unusual about her. But she had a way of filling up a room when she came in. She outshined everyone else, you might say, and men there was her husband, Judge McIntyre.

“Judge McIntyre was a terrible sot. He was always drunk. And what a quarrelsome drunk. I tell you I had to go looking for him more than once and bring him home from the Irish bars on Magazine Street. You know, the Mayfairs weren’t his kind of people, really. He was an educated man, lace curtain Irish, to be sure. Yet I think Mary Beth made him feel inferior. She was always saying little things to him, such as that he ought to put his napkin in his lap, or not smoke his cigars in the dining room, or that he was biting the edge of his silver when he ate, and the noise annoyed her. He was eternally offended by her. But I think he really loved her. That’s why she could hurt him so easily. He really loved her. You would have had to have known her to understand.
She wasn’t beautiful. That wasn’t it. But she was … she was absolutely captivating! I could tell you about her and the young men, but then I don’t want to talk about all that. But what I was trying to say was that they would sit there at the table till all hours after dinner, Mary Beth and Judge McIntyre and Julien, of course, and Clay Mayfair, too, while he was there. I never saw people who liked to talk so much after dinner.

“Julien could put away half a fifth of brandy. And little Stella would fall asleep in his lap. Ah, Stella with the ringlets, dear pretty Stella. And beautiful little Belle. She’d come wandering in with her doll. And Millie Dear. They called her Millie Dear then but they stopped later on. She was younger than Belle, but she, you know, sort of watched out for Belle. It took a long time to catch on about Belle. You just thought she was sweet at first, an angel of a girl, if you know what I mean. There were some other cousins who used to come. Seems Julien’s boy, Garland, was around plenty after he came home from school. And Cortland, I really liked Cortland. And for a while there was talk he might marry Millie, but she was only a first cousin, being Rémy’s girl, and people didn’t do that sort of thing anymore. Millie has never married. What a sad thing … 

“But you know, Judge McIntyre was the kind of Irishman who really can’t stand to be around his wife, if you follow my meaning. He had to be with men, drinking and arguing all the time, and not men like Julien, but men like himself, hard-drinking, hard-talking Irishmen. He spent a great deal of time downtown at his club, but many an evening he went to those rougher drinking places on Magazine Street.

“When he was home, he was always very noisy. He was a good judge however. He wouldn’t drink till he came home from court, and since he always came home early he had plenty of time to be completely drunk by ten o’clock. Then he would go wandering, and round midnight Julien would say, ‘Richard, I think you had better go look for him.’

“Julien just took it all in stride. He thought Judge McIntyre was funny. He would laugh at anything Judge McIntyre said. Judge McIntyre would go on and on about Ireland and the political situation over there, and Julien would wait until he was finished and say cheerfully and with a twinkle in his eye, ‘I don’t care if they all kill each other.’ Judge McIntyre would go crazy. Mary Beth would laugh and shake her head and kick Julien under the table. But Judge McIntyre was so far gone in those last years. How he ever managed to live so long I cannot imagine. Didn’t die till 1925, three months after Mary Beth died. They said it was pneumonia. The hell it was pneumonia! They found
him in the gutter, you know. And it was Christmas Eve and so cold the pipes were freezing. Pneumonia. I heard when Mary Beth was dying, she was in such pain they gave her almost enough morphia to kill her. She would be lying there out of her mind, and in he’d come, drunk, and wake her up, saying, ‘Mary Beth, I need you.’ What a poor drunken fool he was. And she would say to him, ‘Come, Daniel, lie beside me, Daniel.’ And to think she was in such pain. It was Stella who told me that … the last time I ever saw her. Alive that is. I went up there one last time after that—for Stella’s funeral. And there she was in the coffin, it was a miracle the way Lonigan closed up that wound. Just beautiful she was, lying there, and all the Mayfairs in that room. But that was the last time I saw her alive, as I was saying … And the things she said about Carlotta, of how Carlotta was cold to Mary Beth in those last months, why, it would make your hair stand on end.

“Imagine a daughter being cold to a mother who was dying like that. But Mary Beth took no notice of it. She just lay there, in pain, half dreaming, Stella said, not knowing where she was, sometimes talking out loud to Julien as if she could see him in the room, and of course Stella was by her night and day, you can be sure of that; how Mary Beth loved Stella.

“Why, Mary Beth told me once that she could put all her other children in a sack and throw them in the Mississippi River, for all she cared. Stella was the only one that mattered. ’Course she was joking. She was never mean to those children. I remember how she used to read by the hour to Lionel when he was little, and help him with his schooling. She got him the best teachers when he didn’t want to go to school. None of the children did well in school, except for Carlotta, naturally. Stella was expelled from three different schools, I believe. Carlotta was the only one who really did well, and a lot of good it did her.

“But what was I saying? Oh, yes. Sometimes I felt I had no place in the house. Whatever the case, I went out. I went to the Quarter. It was the days of Storyville, you know, when prostitution was legal here, and Julien had taken me down to Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall himself one night and to the other fashionable places, and he didn’t much care if I went on my own.

“Well, I said I was going that night. And Julien didn’t mind. He was up there snug in the third-floor bedroom with his books and his hot chocolate, and his Victrola. Besides, he knew I was only looking. And so I went down there, strolling past all those little houses—you know, the cribs they used to call them—with the girls in the front doors beckoning for me to come in, and of course I had not the slightest intention of doing it.

“Then my eyes fell on this beautiful young man, I mean a simply beautiful young man. And he stood in one of the alleyways down there, with his arms folded, leaning against the side of the house, simply looking at me. ‘Bon soir, Richard,’ he said to me and I recognized the voice at once, the French accent. It was Julien’s. And I saw that the man was Julien! Only he couldn’t have been past twenty! I tell you I never had such a start. I almost cried out. It was worse than seeing a ghost. And the fellow was gone, like that, vanished.

“I couldn’t get to a cab fast enough and I went right straight home to First Street. Julien opened the front door for me. He was wearing his robe, and puffing on his obnoxious pipe and laughing. ‘I told you I would show you what I looked like when I was twenty!’ he said. He laughed and laughed.

“I remember I followed him into the parlor. And it was such a lovely room, then, nothing like it is now, you should have seen it. Absolutely lovely French pieces, mostly Louis Cinque, which Julien had bought himself in Europe when he went with Mary Beth. So light and elegant and simply lovely. That art deco furniture was all Stella’s doing. She thought it was quite the thing, what with potted palms everywhere! The only good piece of furniture was that Bözendorfer piano. The place looked perfectly mad when I went up there for the funeral, and you know of course that Stella was buried from the house. No funeral parlor for Stella. Why, Stella was laid out in the very front room in which she’d been shot, do you know that? I kept looking around, wondering where exactly it had happened. And don’t you know everybody else was doing that, and they had already locked up Lionel, of course. Oh, I couldn’t believe it. Lionel had been such a sweet boy, and so good-looking. And he and Stella used to go everywhere together. But what was I saying?

“Oh, yes, that incredible night. I’d just seen young Julien downtown, beautiful young Julien, speaking French to me, and then I was home again and following old Julien into the parlor and he sat down on the couch there, and stretched out his legs and said, ‘Ah, Richard, there are so many things I could tell you, so many things I could show you. But I’m old now. And what’s the point? One very fine consolation of old age is you don’t need to be understood anymore. A sort of resignation sets in with the inevitable hardening of the arteries.’

“Of course I was still upset. ‘Julien,’ I said. ‘I demand to know how you did it.’ He wouldn’t answer me. It was as if I wasn’t there. He was staring at the fire. He always had both fires going in that room in winter. It has two fireplaces, you know, and one is slightly smaller than the other.

“A little later he waked from his dream and he reminded me that he was writing his life story. I might read that after his death, perhaps. He wasn’t sure.

“ ‘I have enjoyed my life,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a person shouldn’t enjoy his life as much as I have enjoyed mine. Ah, there is so much misery in the world and I have always had such a splendid time! Seems unfair, doesn’t it? I should have done more for others, much more. I should have been more inventive! But all of that is in my book. You can read it later.’

“He said more than once that he was writing his life story. He really had quite an interesting life, you know, being born so long before the Civil War, and seeing so very much. I used to ride with him uptown, and we would ride through Audubon Park and he would talk about the days when all that land had been a plantation. He talked about taking the steamboat from Riverbend. He talked about the old opera house and the quadroon balls. On and on, he talked. I should have written it down. He used to tell little Lionel and Stella those stories too, and how they both listened. He’d take them downtown in the carriage with us, and he would point out places in the French Quarter to them, and tell them wonderful little tales.