The Witching Hour by Anne Rice

New Orleans—and the orchestra gathered to tune up in the pit. Even the strange thin man from First Street was there. Michael caught a glimpse of him far below, his face turned upward, as though he could actually see Michael all the way in the top row.
    What followed swept Michael away. Isaac Stern, the great violinist, played that night, and it was the Beethoven Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, one of the most violently beautiful and simply eloquent pieces of music Michael had ever heard. Never once did it leave him in confusion. Never once did it leave him out.
    Long after the concert was over, he was able to whistle the principal melody, and to remember as he did so the great sweet sensuous sound of the full orchestra and the thin heartbreaking notes that came from Isaac Stern’s violin.
    But Michael’s life was poisoned by the longing created in him by this experience. In fact, he suffered, in the days that followed, possibly the worst dissatisfaction with his world that he had ever experienced. But he did not let anyone know this. He kept it sealed inside of him, just as he kept secret his knowledge of the subjects he studied at the library. He feared the snobbishness growing in himself, the loathing he knew that he could feel for those he loved if he let such a feeling have life.
    And Michael couldn’t bear not to love his family. He couldn’t bear to be ashamed of them. He couldn’t bear the pettiness and the ingratitude of such a thing.
    He could hate the people down the block. That was fine. But he had to love, and be loyal to, and be in harmony with, those under his own roof.
    Reasonably, naturally, he was devoted to his hardworking grandmother who always had cabbage and ham boiling on the stove when he came in. She spent her life it seemed either cooking or ironing or hanging out clothes on backyard lines from a wicker basket.
    And he loved his grandfather, a little man with tiny black eyes who was always on the front steps waiting for Michael after school. He had wonderful stories to tell of the old days and Michael never tired of them.
    And then there was his father, the fire fighter, the hero. How could Michael not appreciate such a man? Often Michael went over to the firehouse on Washington Avenue to see him. He sat around, just one of the guys, dying to go out with them when an alarm came in, but always forbidden to do it. He loved to see the truck tearing out, to hear the sirens and the bells. Nevermind that he lived in dread that he might someday have to be a fireman. A fireman and nothing else. Living in a double shotgun cottage.
    How his mother managed to love these people was another story, and one Michael could not entirely understand. He tried day in and day out to mitigate her quiet unhappiness. He was her closest and only friend. But nothing could save his mother, and he knew it. She was a lost soul down there in the Irish Channel, a woman speaking better and dressing better than those around her, begging to go back to work as a sales clerk in a department store, and always being told no; a woman who lived for her paperback novels late at night—books by John Dickson Carr and Daphne Du Maurier and Frances Parkinson Keyes—sitting on the living room couch, dressed only in a slip on account of the heat, when everyone else was asleep, drinking wine slowly and carefully from a bottle wrapped in brown paper.
    “Miss San Francisco” Michael’s father called her. “My mother does everything for you, you know that?” he’d say to her. He stared at her with utter contempt on the very few occasions when she drank too much wine and her voice became slurry. But he never moved to stop her. After all, she rarely got that bad. It was just the idea—a woman sitting there drinking like a man, from a bottle all evening long. Michael knew that was what his father thought, no one had to tell him.
    And maybe Michael’s father was afraid she’d leave if he tried to boss her or control her. He was proud of