Lancelot

pigeonnier.
    And that she knew me and I was expected to know her. She smiled at me with perfect familiarity. No doubt she had come to seek shelter from the hurricane at Belle Isle, the strongest building hereabouts.
    She sat bolt upright yet gracefully, smoothing down her dress into her waist, showing her figure to good effect. It was a knit dress which perfectly fitted her full breasts and hips.
    Now she arched her back and sat even more bolt upright. It would never have occurred to me to ask: “Who are you and what do you want?”
    Her hair was dark, perhaps a bit gray, heavy, long, and looped around her head in a not unattractive way. It had not been recently washed. I caught a whiff, not unpleasant, of unwashed woman’s hair.
    I looked at her. She smiled at me, a winning smile, but her eyes glittered. She was the sort of woman, Percival, you remember from childhood, who was extraordinarily nice to you, who spoke well of your parents, who said how nice they were, how handsome you were. Yet at the mention of her name your parents exchanged glances and fell silent.
    She was also the sort you might well remember if you remember how a voluptuous forty-year-old woman attracted a fifteen-year-old youth, how if we were playing football and lounging on the grass at a time-out, sweaty, tired, and cheerfully obscene, and she passed by in the street, erect, heavy in the thigh and small in the waist, we’d fall silent until the inevitable: How would you like some of that?
    Then I noticed the camellia pinned at her shoulder—and at the same moment it came to me that this was not yet the season for camellias—a large open flesh-colored bloom with a sheaf of stalks sprouting from the center bearing stamens, pistils, pollen, pods, ovules.
    She was real enough, I think, though I cannot explain the camellia. The slight embarrassment of not being able to remember her name was all too familiar and not like a dream. She’d come for shelter, she said (doesn’t this prove she was real, in dreams explanations are not required), but she’d changed her mind. She didn’t want to impose on us. Maybe she’d better stay with a relative in town, Cousin Maybelle.
    But where did she get the camellia?
    She still spoke well of everyone. “Your father was such a perfect gentleman. What perfect tact and understanding!”
    â€œUnderstanding?”
    â€œOf Lily. Your mother. Oh, Lily. What a lovely delicate creature. Like a little dove. Not like me. I’m more a sparrow. Plain but tough.”
    â€œA dove?”
    â€œMaybe more like a lovebird. She lived for love. Literally. Unless she was loved, she withered and died. Maury understood that. God, what understanding he had! And he also understood his own limitations and accepted them. He understood her relationship with Harry and accepted that. That man was a saint.”
    â€œWhat was her relationship with Harry?”
    â€œYou’re joking. La, it was not secret.”
    â€œThey were lovers?”
    â€œFor years. Everybody knew. So romantic! They were like Camille and Robert Taylor.”
    Everybody but me. Does everybody know everything but me?
    â€œThat was after my father’s—uh—indictment?”
    â€œYes. Poor Maury was crushed, even though it was all just dirty politics and nothing was proved. I’ve always thought his illness had something to do with what he thought of as his disgrace. Pooh, men are ridiculous. And he was too—tenderhearted. But so aristocratic!”
    I was looking in my father’s sock drawer for the small change he kept in the fitted scoops for collar buttons and caught sight of something under the argyle socks. There it was, the ten thousand dollars, dusky new green bills in a powdered rubber band neat and squared away like a book, and there it was, the sweet heart pang of horror. I counted it. The bills felt like stiff petals, not like paper, like leaves covered by pollen. My heart beats slowly and strongly. Strange: I was aware that my eyes were doing more than seeing, that they were unblinking and staring and slightly bulging. They were “taking it in,” that is, devouring. For here was the sweet shameful heart of something, the secret. For minutes there was an awareness of my eyes devouring the money under the socks, making little scanning motions to and fro, the way the eye takes in a great painting. Dishonor is sweeter and more mysterious than honor. It holds a