The Witching Hour by Anne Rice Page A

her prettiness, her slender body, and even the nice way that she talked. He even got the wine for her now and then, bottles of port and sherry which he himself detested. “Sticky sweet stuff for women,” he said to Michael. But it was also the stuff that winos drank and Michael knew it.
    Did his mother hate his father? Michael never really knew for sure. At some point in his childhood, he came to know that his mother was some eight years older than his father. But the difference was not apparent, and his father was a good-looking man and his mother seemed to think so. She was kind to her husband most of the time, but then she was kind to everyone. Yet nothing in the world was going to make her get pregnant again, she often said, and there were quarrels, awful muffled quarrels behind the only closed door in the little shotgun flat, the door to the back bedroom.
    There was a story about his mother and father, but Michael never knew if it was true. His aunt told him the story after his mother’s death. It was that his parents had fallen in love in San Francisco, near the end of the war, while his father was in thenavy, and that his father had looked very handsome in his uniform and had the charm in those days to really get the girls.
    “He looked like you, Mike,” his aunt said years later. “Black hair and blue eyes and those big arms, just like you. And you remember your father’s voice, it was a beautiful voice, kind of deep and smooth. Even with that Irish Channel accent.”
    And so Michael’s mother had “fallen hard” for him, and then when he went overseas again he had written Michael’s mother lovely poetic letters, wooing her and breaking her heart. But the letters had not been written by Michael’s father. They had been written by his best friend in the service, an educated man on the same ship, who had laid on the metaphors and the quotes from books. And Michael’s mother never guessed.
    Michael’s mother had actually fallen in love with those letters. And when she’d found herself pregnant with Michael, she went south trusting in those letters, and was received at once by the common good-hearted family who prepared for the wedding in St. Alphonsus Church immediately and had it all done right as soon as Michael’s father could get leave.
    What a shock it must have been to her, the little treeless street, the tiny house with each room opening onto the other, and the mother-in-law who waited hand and foot on the men and never took a chair herself during supper.
    Michael’s aunt said that Michael’s father had one time confessed the story of the letters to his mother when Michael was still a baby, and that Michael’s mother had gone wild and tried to kill him and she had burned all the letters in the backyard. But then she’d quieted down and tried to make a go of it. Here she was with a little child. She was past thirty. Her mother and father were dead; she had only her sister and brother out in San Francisco, and she had no choice but to stay with the father of her child, and besides the Currys were not bad people.
    Her mother-in-law in particular she had loved for taking her in when she was pregnant. And that part—about the love between the two women—Michael knew had been true, because Michael’s mother took care of the old woman during her final illness.
    Both his grandparents died the year Michael started high school, his grandmother in the spring and his grandfather two months after. And though many aunts and uncles had died over the years, these were the first funerals that Michael ever attended, and they were to be engraved forever in his memory.
    They were absolutely dazzling affairs with all the accoutrements of refinement which Michael loved. In fact, it troubled him deeply that the furnishings of Lonigan and Sons, the funeralparlor, and the limousines with their gray velvet upholstery and even the flowers and the finely dressed pall bearers seemed connected to the atmosphere of the