by Paula Morris
"He said my name when I was taken to his bedside. He tried to smile at me. But he was already very ill, shivering and soaked with sweat. His lips were cracked, like a dry riverbed." Lisette shuddered at the memory. "Already yellow with the jaundice, but his tongue was dark, almost purple, as though it was rotting away in his mouth. I could see he didn't have long."
"But how did he know you?" Rebecca wasn't worried about bumping into other people now: She was intent on Lisette's story.
"At first, I didn't understand. All I knew was that my mother had said she would go, but that was not possible. And this man, he'd asked for me. But to everyone else in the house I was a stranger. I had to sleep in the building out back, where the kitchen was, and it was so hot -- so very, very hot. The cook did not like me. She said I had fancy ways. And the lady of the house, she didn't like me much, either. She never called me by my name. I was in the house less than a week, and on the last night she said I had to sleep on the floor by the daughter's bed. Things were very bad by then. The girl was vomiting up the black blood. I had to hold her down when she was sick, even when the blood sprayed into my face. The father, he was already dead."
"How horrible!" Rebecca had read a little about yellow fever: It sounded like a painful, ugly way to die.
"That day was so hot, so terrible -- totally still." Lisette raised her face to the sky.
146
There was no warmth in the sun this afternoon, Rebecca thought. The sky was darkening to gray, as though rain was coming. She hoped they made it home before it started.
"And no breeze was almost a relief, in a way," Lisette went on, "because the wind brought the smell of the river. Everything on the ships and barges, they were going bad. The stink of death was everywhere. Each morning, outside the cemetery gates, there were bodies. Their faces all sunken, agonized. It was horrible. We kept the shutters closed so we did not have to see, but we could still smell them. This is a bad thing to admit, but all I wanted was for the girl to die so I could go home again."
"But she didn't die?"
"Oh, no, she died." Lisette sighed. "In the night, she died. The mother, she was mad with grief. Screaming, pulling and clawing on the drapes. The doctor and his son came, and the lawyer came -- men in black, swarming through the house like flies. The bodies needed to be buried quickly in the family vault, they said, before they swelled up in the heat and burst open."
That's disgusting, Rebecca thought, waiting for Lisette to go on. But she was distracted, it seemed, by someone who had to be a ghost, sitting slumped on the front steps of a narrow house. He was wearing a tight-fitting black suit and a sharp trilby-style hat; his shoes were pointed. He was looking at Rebecca and Lisette with interest.
"Hi, Marco," Lisette said as they approached. Marco sat up a little, but his hangdog expression didn't change.
"I never took no money," he said. "I never took no money from nobody. But this is what they did to me!"
147
He opened his jacket to reveal a blackened gash down his shirtfront. Rebecca recoiled: She'd seen plenty of congealed blood today, but this seemed a particularly large and jagged wound. Marco seemed pleased with her reaction.
"Dat's right," he said. "I never did nothing, and this is what they did to me."
Lisette pulled Rebecca along the sidewalk, picking up her pace.
"Hurry," she whispered. "Otherwise he'll ask me to touch it."
"Yuck!" Rebecca said, though she couldn't resist glancing back. Marco had settled back against the steps and was rebuttoning his jacket. "At least he didn't die from yellow fever."
"The doctor kept saying you couldn't catch the fever from a dead body," Lisette continued, "but no one else in the house believed him. We didn't know then, exactly, what brought yellow fever to the city summer after summer."
"Mosquitoes carry it, right?" Rebecca was trying to make up for her earlier brain freeze. "Like malaria."
"That's what some ghost told me, years ago --Johnny, remember him?" Rebecca nodded, thinking of the guy in scrubs pacing back and forth along Canal Street. "But back then we thought it lived in the city, in the hot air, in the dirty streets. We thought it was the price we paid for living here."
Lisette fell silent, the only sound now the slap of Rebecca's feet along the sidewalk-- Lisette, she noticed, walked without making noise of any kind -- and the surge of passing cars. Lisette's grip on her hand grew tighter, as though she was steeling herself for the next part of the story. Rebecca
148
didn't want to ask any questions or push her too hard. She knew that what was coming was the saddest part of all.
"I was stripping the sheets off the bed," she said softly. "Taking all the linens to be burned. The first coffin had already been carried over to the family vault, and some of the servants were on their way down the back stairs with the daughter's. I should have gone out through the back gallery, but I didn't want anything else to do with that body. And besides, I was curious. Downstairs there were raised voices, and I could hear the lady shouting something over and over. So I crept down the front staircase, and though the doors to the parlor were closed, I could still hear what they were saying."
"What was she shouting?" Rebecca was almost whispering now. It seemed incredible to her that while Lisette was telling her this story, they were still walking, still holding hands -- incredible that around them the citizens of New Orleans were still going about their Saturday-afternoon business. Just across the road, someone was walking out of a chiropractor's office, rubbing at his neck; someone else was doing a terrible job of parallel parking his car. A woman was hanging red and green plastic beads from the railings of her porch, talking in a high-pitched baby voice to a little dog.
"She was shouting, 'Who is she? Who is she?' I could hear her screaming this. And then the lawyer's deep voice would go on for a while, and she would start screaming again. She didn't sound sad anymore. She just sounded angry."
"Were you frightened?" Rebecca asked her. It must have been so hard for Lisette -- in this strange part of town and
149
strange house, with dead bodies, and an enraged woman screaming.
"I wasn't scared -- not then, anyway." Lisette had stood with her ear against the heavy door, trying to make sense of the lawyer's low drone. "I thought -- why doesn't this woman know who her own daughter is? Why is she asking this lawyer? But then I realized she wasn't talking about her daughter. They were going over her husband's will; and that's why she was asking this question. I heard the lawyer say my name -- Lisette Villieux. She was talking about me."
150
***
CHAPTER NINETEEN
***
Rebecca felt feverish with excitement: she could barely take in what Lisette was telling her. She no longer cared about looking out for ghosts or asking about how they died: All she wanted to do was barrage Lisette with questions about her own life. How did the lawyer know her name? Why did the dying man send for her? Why was everyone arguing about her after the man was dead?
"In his will," Lisette said, her pace slowing again. "I was mentioned in his will. And my mother -- I heard her name as well, Rose Villieux. That was why I couldn't move away from the door, you see? I had to stay and listen. I wanted to know what they were saying about us, and why."
"I understand," Rebecca told her. She would do exactly the same thing, she thought, even if her brain was telling her to run for her life out the front door.
"It took a while for me to make sense of what they were saying, but eventually it was clear. The dead man -- he was my father. Our house in Tremé, he'd bought it for my mother
151
and me. In his will, he gave it to her. That's what the lawyer was telling his wife -- that was why they were speaking my mother's name. And there was some money for me, so I could keep going to school."
"You were his daughter?" Rebecca couldn't believe it.
"Natural daughter, as we used to say. It was the way things went back then.
Lots of men in New Orleans had two families, one white and one black. Some of the girls I knew at school had rich Creole fathers who gave them gifts and saw to their education. Some of them had fathers who spent a lot of time with them and their mothers."
"But where did they all meet -- these white men and black women? Were the women originally their servants? Their slaves?"
"Sometimes. Sometimes they met at one of the quadroon balls in the Quarter. If you were a young woman of color, you could meet some fine, rich young Creole at a ball and your mama, she would make a deal with him. To get you a house, and money for life."
"That sounds like prostitution, almost!" Rebecca said, instantly regretting it: She didn't want to insinuate anything about Lisette's mother. But although Lisette was shaking her head, she didn't look offended.
"It's no different from the way white girls met their husbands at balls and parties." She pulled on Rebecca's hand to draw her back onto the sidewalk; a pickup was careering around the corner in front of them. "And weren't their parents doing the same thing, making sure they had a nice house and things for the rest of their lives? It was just that
152
black and white people couldn't get married, by law. So some gentlemen, they never married at all. They just spent their time with their colored wife and family."
"But your father ..." Rebecca began, and then stopped. It was too awkward to say: Your father had nothing to do with you.
"He was an American, not a Creole," Lisette said quietly. "Maybe it was hard for him, having that double life. That day he sent the note to my mother, I think he knew he was dying. Maybe he wanted to see me one last time. Maybe he saw me many times when I was growing up, and I didn't realize. I mean, maybe he saw me in the street and knew me. I think about this a lot -- how I didn't know him, but he knew me."
Rebecca imagined Lisette's father, watching her from afar -- looking at her as she skipped to the market, swinging a basket; looking into her little classroom from the hallway, making sure she was hard at work.
"So did he meet your mother at one of those balls?" she asked. Lisette shrugged.
"I don't think so. My mother was too dark-skinned to go to them, and she told me she'd never allow me to attend one. Maybe she'd done some work for him, some tailoring -- I don't know. I never had the chance to ask her. One moment, I was standing outside the parlor doors listening, thinking -- here is this secret that my mother never, ever told me. Thinking that the man who just died was my father. And then the doors burst open, and suddenly the lady is there. And she's wild."
"Wild as in crazy?"
"Crazy, angry. Her eyes red and big." Lisette widened her
153
eyes. "Pulling at her hair. When the doors burst open, they almost knocked me over. And when she saw me, well ..."
Rebecca waited. She wasn't sure if Lisette could go on. Her friend was looking away, trailing her free hand along the neat hedge outside one of the Prytania Street houses.
"She flew at me," Lisette said, her voice so soft Rebecca had to twist closer to hear clearly. She gave Lisette's hand a comforting squeeze. "Shrieking, arms flailing. She was beating me, ripping at my clothes. She ripped my sleeve off, almost."
That's why it was torn, thought Rebecca. The woman married to Lisette's father had practically clawed it off Lisette's body.
"Didn't anyone try to stop her?" Rebecca asked.
"The lawyer man tried," Lisette replied. "But she was like a woman possessed. In that moment, I think, she hated me. Maybe because her own daughter had just died, and I was still standing there, young and healthy. Or maybe it was because she'd just found out this terrible secret, that her husband had another woman -- a black woman -- and another child, and a house he'd bought for them on the other side of the city. Maybe she even knew my mother somehow, and that's why my mother said she couldn't go to nurse him when he was ill. I think about these things over and over. I wish I could ask my mother."
"So she attacked you, right there in front of the lawyer."
"And the doctor -- he'd been out back checking on two of the manservants, because they'd just taken ill as well. He was running up the hall, I remember. She shook me and shook me, and I was backing away, trying to get free of her and her claws and her angry face."
154
"But you couldn't?" The houses they were passing were starting to look familiar, Rebecca realized. They must be back in the Garden District.
"There was nowhere to go. I tripped on the bottom step and fell, and she was still over me, shaking and shaking me. She slammed my head against the stairs. It must have hurt, though I don't remember the pain at all. It's a funny thing, the way we don't remember the pain. Just the sensation of hitting, and then a smoky kind of darkness. And then I was standing up, but at the same time I could see myself lying on the stairs. My body was still, and my eyes were open, but they were just staring at nothing. My head was leaning in a strange way, and a dark spot, like spilled ink, was growing on the stair carpet. That woman was still shaking me, trying to bash my head against the wood another time. And the men -- one of them had his hands on her shoulders, pulling her way. The other was shouting something -- 'For the love of God!' I remember that."
"And you could see all this?" Rebecca was imagining what it would be like to see your own lifeless, bleeding body.
"Oh, yes. I could see it. I could walk down the stairs. I could watch them all and hear them all. And that's how I knew."
Lisette looked at Rebecca, her eyes as dark as the inky blood she'd just described.
"Knew you were dead," whispered Rebecca.
"Knew I was a ghost." Lisette stopped short in front of a locked gate, gesturing with one shoulder to its broad front gallery, the old-fashioned gaslight by the door, its narrow white pillars. Lumber and scaffolding were piled all over the
155
yard at the corner; it looked as though construction was underway on an addition of some sort. A solarium, thought Rebecca, and a swimming pool. She knew the details, because she'd heard all the talk about it at school. It was the Bowman house.
Rebecca must have flinched, or tightened her grip on Lisette's hand, because Lisette hurried to reassure her.
"They're not here this weekend," Lisette told Rebecca. "They always go away for all of Thanksgiving -- I don't know where. They wouldn't be able to see you, anyway."
"Of course," Rebecca said. Something about this house provoked such a strong, visceral reaction in her.
"The place you died," said Rebecca, gazing up the steps. "It's this house, isn't it?"
Lisette nodded.
"And the woman who killed you," Rebecca said slowly, "was Mrs. Bowman?"
Lisette nodded again. All the warmth had disappeared from the afternoon. A few drops of rain spattered the sidewalk. Rain had no effect on Lisette: It just hit the ground she walked on, as though she wasn't there -- because, of course, she wasn't. But Rebecca shivered, anticipating the coming storm.
"My death had to be covered up, of course," Lisette said, stroking the iron railings. A breeze was picking up: Leaves danced down the sidewalk, and the big oak tree on the corner started rustling, as though it was warning the Bowmans of their presence. "They knew my mother would be around asking questions before too long. I wasn't one of their slaves. So the doctor said he would declare me another victim of
156
yellow fever, and sign all the necessary papers. His name, you know, was Sutton."
"Really?" So Helena and Marianne's families had been friends a long, long time.
"And late that night, the lawyer and the doctor came back for me. My body was wrapped in a sheet. They carried me across the road to the cemetery -- they had keys, of course, to the gate. I followed them over, to watch what they were doing. I was thrown into the family tomb, on top of my father's coffin, and my sister's."
"Didn't your mother demand to see your body? You know, when she found out?"
"They told her I'd been buried in a communal grave in th
e cemetery with other fever victims. Too many people were dying every day by then. When she went to the cemetery, the grave was filled in and the Bowman family vault -- well, it was all sealed up."
"Of course," said Rebecca. They stood together, safely invisible, looking up at the Bowman house. It was hard to believe such a terrible thing could have happened in such a beautiful house. On a night like this, with clouds tumbling in the sky, and the low growl of thunder in the distance, the house looked calm and solid, a refuge rather than a place of danger. A place of secrets, sickness, murder. "It must be awful, having to look at this house every day."
"Sometimes, I even go inside," Lisette said.
