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THE POINT is, Old Captain was a sler, a collector I spent years with hiht me home, couldn’t live withoutwith anyone or anywhere, and maybe Old Captain was the perfect person But Wynken de Wilde, that started with Old Captain and the antiques he sold through the Quarter, usually sht now, Wynken de Wilde a, except a drea passion¡ªaside from Dora¡ªhas been Wynken de Wilde, but if you don’t care about him after this conversation, no one will Dora does not"

"What was this Wynken de Wilde all about?"

"Art, of course Beauty But I got itto start a new religion, a cult¡ªfree love, give to the poor, raise one’s hand against no one, you know, a sort of fornicating Amish community This was of course 1964, the ti to be singing all the time about ethics and charity, and I wanted a new Brethren of the Common Life, one in tune with modern sexual values Do you knoho the Brethren were?"

"Yes, popular es, that anyone could know God"

"Yes! Ah, that you know such a thing"

"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 h he worked in a scriptorium and still did old-fashioned parchment prayer books of devotion by hand Wynken’s books were coht if I could find all Wynken’s books I’d have it made"

"Why Wynken, what made him different?"

"Let -house was shabby-elegant, you know the kind, et her own hands dirty, she had three ; the old people, the boarders¡ªthey were on hefty private incoed 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 s 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¡ªhe rents the two front parlours¡ªhe lives in a sort of wonderland of collectibles and brass and such¡ª"

"I see it"

"¡ªand 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 ical Latin as was required The point is, I recognize these books as devotional and rare, and so to sell

" ’You can touch theer, 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 becoh I didn’t know it, and it’s got nothing to do hat I have to say until later on

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

"Within a few o on these ships all the ti All I re round table with all the crew, they were Dutch, I think, and so ine 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 re ropes that ran from the ships to the dock, how they had the round steel rat shields on them¡ªdisks of steel that the rats couldn’t cliet ho 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 one to bed

"Let house I told you it was elegant, didn’t I? You can is, heavy Renaissance revival, machine-made pieces, the kind that junked up mansions from the i88os on"

"Yes"

"The house has a glorious staircase, winding, set against a stained-glass , 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¡ªin the stairwell¡ªstood ine, and she’d sit there in theher 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 i it every day; that a dressing table of ree, and an old wo 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 lected 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 i toI 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 exa to thereafter take my time Of course the Latin was unreadable to me in that form"

"Too dense Too s, don’t you?"

"Maybe we’re surprising each other Go on"

"I spent the week thoroughly exa all of the I ay ahead of everybody, and wanted to do so, 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 illuest 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 seely unique version of such I’d ever beheld"

I sold, and red, and tiny beautiful little figures I took out a lass and started to study the pictures in earnest I went to the old library at Lee Circle¡ªremember it?¡ªand 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 canof herself only if she isn’t destroyed I want another drink I know I’estured for the drink "Continue, what happened, who’s Wynkende 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 radually I determined two of the books were done by the sa 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 theh 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 pagevine, with blossoms from which birds drank, and in these blossoures intertwined, as if in a bower Also, these were books of psalht they were psalate, you know, the Bible we accept as canonical"

"Yes"

"But they weren’t They were psalured thattheot out of the library This was soinal 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 inbeneath the abundant trees Old Captain said, ’Garden of Eden iery,’ 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 reat religious leader out of h 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 ton Library in Pasadena, and the Newbury Library in Chicago We went to New York He would have taken land, 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 ht 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 coed 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 caasps I sat there I told you"

"I believe you"

"Yes, well, I was seventeen, e, which every other senior boy at Jesuit was talking about, and I was dreaht Ashbury of California, listening to the songs of Joan Baez, and thinking that I would go to San Francisco with the e of Wynken de Wilde, and found a cult

"This hat I knew then through translation And in that regard I had had the help of an old priest at Jesuit for quite soenuinely brilliant Latin scholars who has to spend half the day ladly, and of course there was a little of the usual pro 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 evennear boys and occasionally breathing heavily or soious life doesn’t attract that particular kind of robust and completely repressed individual A et 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 withcrazy 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, ar-coated entlely well, has overly bright eyes, and is obviously rotten inside, and froround He had too ish face; they looked like cracks He s 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 coo up to reat view of the parades on Mardi Gras I grew up thinking that was noro mad teeks out of every year Anyere up there during one of the night parades, ignoring it as natives can do, you know, once you’ve seen enough papier-mach��¦ floats and trinkets and flambeaux¡ª"

"Horrible, lurid flambeaux"

"Yes, you said it" He stopped The drink had co at it

"What is it?" I asked him I was alarer Don’t start fading, keep talking What did the translation of the books reveal? Were they profane? Roger, talk to id meditative stillness He picked up the drink, tossed down half of it "Disgusting and I adore it Southern Co I ever drank when I was a boy"

He looked at ," he assured ain 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 h 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, Daes

And that threw an entirely different light on the psalgestions and possibly even sos Over and over again there appeared paintings of the sa miniatures here¡ª"

"I’ve seen many examples"

"And in these little tiny pictures of the garden there would always be one nakedaround a fountain within the walls of a nify it five tih and laugh

" ’No wonder there isn’t a single saint or biblical scene in any of this,’ Father Kevin said, laughing ’Your Wynken de Wilde was a raving heretic! He was a witch or a diabolist And he was in love with this woman, Blanche’ He wasn’t shocked so er,’ he said, ’if you did get in touch with one of the auction houses, very likely these books could put you through Loyola, or Tulane Don’t think of selling them down here Think about New York; Butterfield and Butterfield, or Sotheby’s’

"He had in the last two years copied out by hand about thirty-five different poelish, the best sort of translation¡ªstraight prose fro repetitions and i we realized was that there had been inally, and e possessed were the first and third By the third, the psalain and again cohtness, but also answers to so at the hands of her spouse

"It was clever You have to read it You have to go back to the flat where you killed et those books"

"Which o to Loyola or Tulane?"

"Of course not Wynken, having orgies with Blanche and her four friends! I was fascinated Wynken was ion because it had been Wynken’s and in every philosophical word he wrote he encoded a love of the flesh!

You have to realize I didn’t believe any orthodox creed really, I never had I thought the Catholic Church was dying And that Protestantism was a joke It was years before I understood that the Protestant approach is funda for the very oneness with God that Meister Eckehart would have praised or that Wynken wrote about"

"You are being generous to the Protestant approach And Wynken did write about oneness with God?"

"Yes, through union with the women! It was cautious but clear;

’In thine arms I have known the Trinity more truly than men can teach,’ like that Oh, this was the neay, I was sure But then I knew Protestantisot drunk on Bourbon Street because they could not dare do it in their hoe your opinion?" I asked

"I’eneralities I ions in existence in the West at our time Dora feels very much the same, but we’ll come to Dora"

"Did you finish the entire translation?"

"Yes; just before Father Kevin was transferred I never saw hiain He did write to me later, but by that time I had run away from home

"I was in San Francisco I’d left without , and taken the Trailways Bus because it was a few cents cheaper than the Greyhound I didn’t have seventy-five dollars in ave me And when he died, did those relatives of his from Jackson, Mississippi, ever clean out those rooht Captain had left so for reatest gift and all those luncheons at the Monteleone Hotel e had had guether, and he let ue I just loved it

"What was I saying? I bought the ticket to California and saved a s happened We carne to a point of no return That is, e passed through soh o back hoht I think it was El Paso! Anyway, then I knew there was no going back

"But I was headed for San Francisco and the Haight Asbury, and I was going to found a cult based on the teachings of Wynken in praise of love and union and claiodlike union and I would show his books to h to tell you the truth, I had no personal feeling about God at all

"Within three months, I had discovered that my credo was by no means unique The entire city was full of hippies who believed in free love, and panhandling, and though I gave regular lectures to large loose circles of friends on Wynken, holding up the books and reciting the psalms¡ªthese are very taine"

"¡ªer and boss of three rock musicians anted to becos, or collect the proceeds at the door One of theh tenor, and quite a range The band had a sound Or at least we thought it did

"Father Kevin’s letter foundup in the attic of the Spreckles Mansion on Buena Vista Park, do you know that house?"

"I do know it It’s a hotel"

"Exactly, and it was a private home in those days, and the top floor had a ballroom with bath and kitchenette This ell before any restoration Nobody had invented ’bed and breakfast,’ and I just rented the ballroom and the musicians played there and we all used the filthy bath and kitchen, and in the day, when they were asleep all over the floor, I’d dream about Wynken and think about Wynken and wonder hoould ever find out more about this man and what these love poems were I had all sorts of fantasies about him

"That attic, I wonder about it now It had s at three points of the compass, and deepseats with tattered old velvet cushions You could see San Francisco in every direction but east as I reood sense of direction We loved to sit in thosealcoves and talk and talk My friends loved to hear about Wynken We were going to write sos based on Wynken’s poems Well, that never happened"

"Obsessed"

"Coo back for those books, no matter what you believe of me e’re finished here All of thele one that Wynken ever did It was ot into dope for those books Even back in the Haight

"I was telling you about Father Kevin He wrote me a letter, said that he had looked up Wynken de Wilde in some manuscripts and found that Wynken had been the executed leader of a heretical cult Wynken de Wilde had a religion of strictly female followers, and his works were officially condemned by the church Father Kevin said all that was ’history,’ and I ought to sell the books He’d write more later He never did And two months later I committed multi-ed the course of things"

"The dope you were dealing?"

"Sort of, only I wasn’t the one who made the slipup Blue dealt rass in suitcases I was into little sacks of it, you know, it ht by the kilo and lost two kilos Nobody knehat happened to theured, but we never knew

"There were a lot of stupid kids walking around then They would get into dealing’ never realizing that the supply was originating with so people in the head Blue thought he could talk his way out of it, he’d make some explanation, he’d been ripped off by friends, that sort of thing His connections trusted hiun

"The gun was in the kitchen drawer, and they’d told hiht need him to use it souess when you are that stoned, you think everybody else is stoned Theseto worry about, that had been just talk We would all be as fa Company and Janis Joplin very soon

"They ca the day I was the only one ho roo these two ht in the kitchen, hardly listening IWynken, I’radually I realized what they were talking about out there in the ballroo to kill Blue They kept telling hi was okay, and please coo, and no, he had to co quickly And then one of them said in a very low, vicious voice, ’Co in hippie platitudes, like it will all come around, man, and I have done no evil,to take Blue and shoot him and dump him This had already happened to kids! It had been in the papers I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck I knew Blue didn’t have a chance

"I didn’t think about what I was doing I coe of energy overtookroouys, not hippies, nothing hippified about theels They were just killers And both sort of visibly sagged when they discovered there was an i my friend out of the room

"Now, you know me, that I am as vam as you are probably, and then I was truly convinced ofand flashing towards these twoa dance out of the walk If I had any idea in my head, it was this: If Blue could die, that wouldlike that be proven to me then, you know?"

"I can see it"

"I started talking to these characters very fast, chattering in a kind of intense, pretentiousout four-syllable words and walking right towards the that they had disturbeda class out there, me and the others’

"And suddenly one of theun I think he thought it would be a slam dunk I can reun and pointed it at me And by the time he had it aimed, I had both hands on it, and I yanked it away from him, kicked him as hard as I could, and shot and killed both er paused

I didn’t say anything I was tempted to sun that ith him, why hadn’t I realized it? He hadn’t instinctively been a killer; he would never have been so interesting if that had been the case

"That quick, I was a killer," he said "That quick And a sine"

He took another drink and looked off, deep into the host body now, revved up like an engine

"What did you do then?" I asked

"Well, that’s when the course ofto call the priest, going to go to hell, phone my rass down the toilet, life finished, screahbors, all of that

"Then I just closed the door and Blue and I sat down and for about an hour I talked Blue said nothing I talked I prayed,for those two, but if there caun now, and it had lots of bullets, and I was sitting directly opposite the door

"And as I talked and waited and watched and let the two bodies lie there, and Blue simply stared into space as if it had been a bad LSD trip, I talked o to jail for the rest of ic"

"Right"

"We cleaned out that pad ied to us, called the other two ot them to pick up their stuff at the bus station Said it was a drug bust co down

They never knehat happened The place was so full of fingerprints froht jam sessions, nobody would ever find us None of us had ever been printed And besides, I kept the gun

"And I did so else, too, I took the money off the men

Blue didn’t want any of it, but I needed bucks to get out of there

"We split up I never saw Blue again I never saw Ollie or Ted, the other two I think they went to LA tocrazy I’m not sure I went on I was totally different froain"

"What made you different?" I asked "What was the source of the change in you, I mean, what in particular? That you’d enjoyed it?"

"No, not at all It was no fun It was a success But it wasn’t fun I’ve never found it fun It’s work, killing people, it’s messy It’s hard work It’s fun for you to kill people, but then you’re not human No, it wasn’t that It was the fact that it had been possible to do it, to just walk up to that son of a bitch and un fro he ever expected could happen, and then to kill them both without hesitation They ht you were kids"

"They thought ere dreamers! And I was a drea, I do have a great destiny, I areat, and this power, this power to sith!"

"From God, this epiphany"

"No, from fate, fro for God You know they say in the Catholic Church that if you don’t feel a devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, well, they fear for your soul I never had any devotion to her I never had any devotion to any real personal deity or saint I never felt it That’s why Dora’s development surprised me in that particular, that Dora is so absolutely sincere But we’ll get to that By the tiot to New York, I knew my cult was to be of this world, you know, lots of followers and power and lavish comforts and the licentiousness of this world"

"Yes, I see"

"That had been Wynken’s vision Wynken had communicated this to his wo until the next world You had to do everything now, every kind of sin this was a common conception of heretics, wasn’t it?"

"Yes, of some Or so their ene I did purely for money It was a contract I was the ain, a bunch of no-accounts, eren’t ht I was into dope again, and was being a hell of a lot s a personal distaste for it This was the real early days, when people flew the grass across the border in little planes, and it was almost like cowboy adventures

"And the word came down that this particular man was on the shit list of a local power broker who’d pay anyone thirty thousand dollars for the killing The guy himself was particularly vicious Everybody was scared of hi around in broad daylight and everyone was scared to ured that somebody else would do it How connected these people were to what and to whoaured a way to do it I was nineteen by then - I dressed up like a college boy in a crew-neck sweater, a blazer, flannel slacks, had my hair cut Princeton style, and carried a few books withIsland, and walked right up to hi, and shot hi dinner inside"

He paused again, and then said with perfect gravity, "It takes a special kind of ani so vicious And not to feel any remorse"

"You didn’t torture him the way I tortured you," I said softly

"You know everything you’ve done, don’t you? You really understand!

I didn’t get the whole picture when I was following you I iined you were more intimately perverse, wrapped up in your own romance An arch self-deceiver"

"Was that torture, what you did toinvolved in it, only fury that I was going to die Whatever the case, I killed thisto me I didn’t even feel relief afterwards, only a kind of strength, you know, of accoain soon and I did"

"And you were on your way"

"Absolutely And in my style too The as out If the task seeet into a hospital dressed like a young doctor, with a na on uy dead in his bed before anyone was the wiser I did that, in fact

"But understand, I didn’t make myself rich as a hit man It was heroin first, and then cocaine, and with the cocaine it was going back to so, who flew the cocaine over the border same fashion, same routes, same planes! You know the history of it Everyone does today The early dope dealers were crude in their overnovernment planes, and when the planes landed, sometimes they were so stuffed with cocaine the driver couldn’t wriggle out of the cockpit, and we’d run out and get the stuff, and load it up and get the hell out of there"

"So I’ve heard"

"Now there are geniuses in the business, people who kno to use cellular phones and co techniques for enius of the dopers! So furniture, I tell you And I went in there, organizing, pickingthe borders, and even before cocaine ever hit the streets, so to speak, I was doing beautifully in New York and LA with the rich, you know, the kind of customers to whom you deliver personally They never have to even leave their palatial hoet the call You show up Your stuff is pure They like you But I had toto be dependent upon that

"I was too clever I made some real-estate deals that were pure brilliance onthe cash on hand, and you know those were the days of hellish inflation I really cleaned up"

"But how did Terry get involved in it, and Dora?"

"Pure fluke Or destiny Who knows? Went hoainst Terry and got her pregnant Damned fool

"I enty-two, er, please come home’ That stupid boyfriend with die cracked face had died She was all alone I’d been sending her plenty of house was now her private home, she had two maids and a driver to take her around town in a Cadillac whenever she felt the desire She’d enjoyed it i any questions about theWynken I had two more books of Wynken by that time and et to that later on

Just keep Wynken in the back of your mind

"Mybedroom upstairs now to herself She said she talked to all the others who had gone on ahead, her poor old sweet dead brother Mickey, and her dead sister, Alice, and her mother, the Irish ht say¡ªto whom the house had been willed by the crazy lady who lived there Mya lot to Little Richard That was a brother that died when he was four Lockjaw- Little Richard She said Little Richard alking around with her, telling her it was time to come

"But she wanted me to come home She wanted me there in that room I knew all this I understood She had sat with boarders that were dying I had sat with others than Old Captain So I went home

"Nobody knehere I was headed, or what my real name was, or where I came from So it was easy to slip out of New York I went to the house on St Charles Avenue and sat in the sickroo her spittle, and trying to get her on the bedpan when the agency didn’t have a nurse to send We had help, yes, but she didn’t want the help, you know She didn’t want the colored girl, as she called her Or that horrible nurse And I ust me much I washed so many sheets Of course there was a ed them over and over for her I didn’t mind Maybe I was never normal In any event, I simply did what had to be done I rinsed out that bedpan a thousand times, wiped it off, sprinkled powder on it, and set it by the bed There is no foul smell which lasts forever after all"

"Not on this earth at least," I murmured But he didn’t hear me, thank God

"This went on for teeks She didn’t want to go to Mercy Hospital I hired nurses round the clock just for backup, you know, so they could take her vital signs when I got frightened I played s, said the rosary out loud with her Usual deathbed scene From two to four in the afternoon she tolerated visitors Old cousins caht"

"You weren’t torn to pieces by her suffering"

"I wasn’t crazy about it, I can tell you that She had cancer all through her and no amount of money could save her I wanted her to hurry, and I couldn’t bear watching it, no, but there has always been a deep ruthless side to me that says, Do what you have to do And I stayed in that rooht till she died

"She talked a lot to the ghosts, but I didn’t see the, ’Little Richard, coet her’

"But before the end came Terry, a practical nurse, as they called theistered nurse because they were in such demand Terry, five foot seven, blonde, the cheapest and oods I had ever laid eyes on Understand This is a question of everything fitting together precisely The girl was a shining perfect piece of trash"

I sernails, and wet pink lipstick" I had seen her sparkle in his et with this kid The chewing guold anklet, the painted toenails, the way she slipped off her shoes right there in the sickrooe showed, you know, under her white nylon uniform And her Stupid, heavy-lidded eyes beautifully painted with Maybelline eye pencil and mascara She’d file her nails in there in front ofthat was so completely realized, finished, ah, ah, what can I say! She was a hed, and so did he, but he went on talking

"I found her irresistible She was a hairless little ani it with her every chance I had While Mother slept, we did it in the bathroo up Once or tent down the hall to one of the empty bedrooms; we never took more than twenty minutes! I timed us! She’d do it with her pink panties around her ankles! She save a soft laugh

"Do I ever knohat you’re saying," I mused "And to think you knew it, you fell for her and you knew it"

"Well, I o thousand miles away from my New York wooes along with dealing, you know, the foolishness of bodyguards scurrying to open doors for you, and girls telling you they love you in the backseat of the liht before And so ht in the middle of it, the best oral job you’ve ever had, you can’t keep your mind on it anymore"

"We are more alike than I ever dreaiven me"

"What do you mean?" he asked

"There isn’t time You don’t need to know about ot Terry pregnant She was supposed to be on the Pill She thought I was rich! It didn’t matter whether I loved her or she loved me I mean this was one of the dumbest and most simpleminded humans I have ever known, Terry I wonder if you bother to feed upon people that ignorant and that dull"

"Dora was the baby"

"Yeah Terry wanted to get rid of it if I didn’t rand e al except on paper and that was a blessing because Dora and I are in no way legally connected) and one hundred grand when the baby was born After that I’d give her her divorce and all I wanted was hter,’ she said

" ’Sure, our daughter,’ I said What a fool I was What I didn’t figure on, the very obvious and siure on was that this wo nurse in her rubber-soled shoes and dia, would naturally feel for her own child She was stupid, but she was aanybody take her baby Like hell I wound up with visitation rights

"Six years I flew in and out of New Orleans every chance I had just to hold Dora in s And understand, this child was mine! I mean she was flesh oftowards me when she saw me at the end of the block She flew into my aro through the Cabildo; she adored it; the cathedral, of course Then we’d go for muffaletas at the Central Grocery You know, orsandwiches full of olives-"

"I know"

"¡ªShe’d tellthat had happened in the week since I’d been there I’d dance with her in the street Sing to her Oh, what a beautiful voice she had froood voice My ot the voice And the ether over the river and back, and sing, as we stood by the rail I took her shopping at D H Holht her beautiful clothes Her mother never minded that, the beautiful clothes, and of course I was s for Terry, you know, a brassiere dripping with lace or a kit of cos for one hundred dollars an ounce Anything but Blue Waltz! But Dora and I had soif I can just see Dora within a few days"

"She was verbal and iinative, the way you were"

"Absolutely, full of dreams and visions Dora is no naif, now, you have to understand Dora’s a theologian That’s the a spectacular? That I engendered in her, but the faith in God, the faith in theology? I don’t knohere that caave an to hate each other When school-tihts were hell I wanted Sacred Heart Acade lessons, music lessons, teeks aithto irl into a snot Terry had alreadyit old and creepy, and settled for a shack of a ranch-style tract hoy suburbs! So my kid was already snatched from the Garden District and all those colors, and settled in a place where the nearest architectural curiosity was the local y-Eleven

"I was getting desperate and Dora was getting older, old enough perhaps to be stolen effectively from her mother, whom she did love in a very protective and kind way There was so had nothing to do with it And Terry was proud of Dora"

"And then this boyfriend caht If I had cohter andout onwith this bankrupt electrician boyfriend of hers to Florida!

"Dora knew fro down the block They were all packed! I shot Terry and the boyfriend, right in that stupid little tract house in Metairie where Terry had chosen to bring up hter rather than on St Charles Avenue Shot them both Got blood all over her polyester wall-to-wall carpet, and her Forine it"

"I du ti like this directly, but no h The electrician’s truck was in the garage anyway, and I bagged them up, and I took them out that way, into the back of the truck I took thehway, I don’t even knohere I dumped them No, maybe it was out Chef Menteur Yeah, it was Chef Menteur Soules River They just disappeared in the muck"

"I can see it I’ve been dumped in the swamps s He continued

"Then I went back for Dora, as by then sitting on the steps with her elbows on her knees wondering why nobody was hoet in, and she started screa, "Daddy! I knew you’d come I knew you would!" the et her clothes I didn’t want her to see the blood I put her with me in the boyfriend’s pickup truck and out of New Orleans we drove, and we left the truck in Seattle, Washington That was my cross-country odyssey with Dora

"All thoseand talking I think I was trying to tell Dora everything that I had learned Nothing evil and self-destructive, nothing that would ever bring the darkness near her, only the good things, what I had learned about virtue and honesty and what corrupts people, and orthwhile

" ’You can’t just si, ’you can’t just leave this world the way you found it’ I even told her hohen I was young I was going to be a religious leader, and what I did noas collect beautiful things, church art from all over Europe and the Orient I dealt in it, to keep the few pieces I wanted I led her to believe, of course, that is what had h, it was partly true"

"And she knew you’d killed Terry"

"No You got the wrong idea on that one All those i otten rid of Terry, or I’d freed her from Terry, and now she could be with Daddy forever, and fly aith Daddy when Daddy fleay That’s a different thing fro Daddy murdered Terry That she does not know Once when she elve, she called, sobbing, and said, ’Daddy, will you please tell o when they went to Florida’ I played it off, that I hadn’t wanted to tell her that Terry was dead Thank God for the phone I do very well on the phone I like it It’s like being on the radio

"But back to Dora of six years old Daddy took Dora to New York and got a suite at the Plaza After that, Dora had everything Daddy could buy"

"She cry for Terry even then?"

"Yes And she was probably the only one who ever did Before the wedding, Terry’s mother had told me Terry was a slut They hated each other Terry’s father had been a policehter either Terry wasn’t a nice person Terry was ood person to bump into in the street, let alone to know or to need or to hold