But no. She could not have stayed. She turned the rusty spigot and filled her pail. Water plinked against the metal, sending a spray of icy droplets onto her hand. Even if things had ended differently and she could go back, Effie knew she wouldn’t. Indiana had never been home. Maybe there wasn’t such a place for her anywhere.
Climbing the stairs, she met Meg, already in her nightshirt, returning an empty teacup.
“You look a fright, Effie. You sick? Half the folks on the streetcar today were a coughin’ and a . . .” It was the first time Meg had spoken to her since the séance, but now she chattered on like she’d saved each word.
“I’m fine.” But instead of brushing past her to her room, Effie slumped against the banister, letting the weight of her body drag her down to the steps.
Meg sat beside her. “You upset about the séance?”
“No . . . yes . . . not in the fashion you think.” She hugged the pail to her chest and hung her head. Her reflection in the trembling water was haggard and wan.
“You ought apologize to Madame Desâmes.”
“I ought to go and get my fifty cents back, is what I ought do.”
“You’s too serious, Effie. There’s plenty in life that can’t be explained by all that science business.”
Effie didn’t have the energy to disagree.
“Maybe she could help with what’s been ailin’ you.”
“I greatly doubt that.”
Meg tucked an errant strand of her crimpy hair beneath her headscarf. Her skin, dark as the heart of a calla lily, had a bright underglow in the dim light. “Won’t know till you try. Think of that gal with the serpent wound about her knee.”
“Gout.”
“Gout, a hex, don’t matter. Whatever Madame Desâmes gave her worked.”
“For some the mere suggestion of medicine is enough to cure them.”
“See!”
“I’m not some superstitious girl with delusions of a snake inside my leg.”
Meg stood and shrugged. “Real or imagined, she was cured.”
Back in her room, Effie undressed and washed the day’s stickiness from her skin. She dampened her lamp and lit her reading candle, but the words slipped around the page, jumping like a frog from one stanza to the next.
If only there were a pill she could take that could deaden her feelings. Some poultice to lay across her forehead that would draw out all these unwanted thoughts. Of course, there were such medicaments, ones smoked in darkened saloons in Chinatown or mixed with sugar water at the pharmacy. But opium or laudanum would dull her wits as sure as her emotions.
She blew out the flame and rolled onto her side. Perhaps Meg was right. Perhaps there was something curative in these charms and potions, even if only imagined. A British physician she’d read once had argued in favor of such phenomena. What harm was there in putting Meg’s theory to the test, if only to prove her wrong? Better that than laudanum. And perhaps she could wrangle back her fifty cents too.
* * *
Effie double-checked the black and yellow street sign against the address she’d set to memory. Rue de Toulouse. She remembered it clearly from the municipal roll book at the clerk’s office. Heading away from the river, she tracked the ascending house numbers painted on small iron plaques above the doors. Whoever had enumerated the city’s plats must have done so while inebriated. Numbers varied block to block, so Effie had to reorient herself with each turn. She’d already had to double back twice in search of the right street.
The farther she walked, the more her cramped toes throbbed. The new boots she’d ordered just after New Year’s had yet to be assembled, despite the cobbler’s hardy assurances each time she visited his shop that he needed but a day or two more. Sunlight shone down from the cloudless sky, and savory aromas wafted from the restaurants and boulangeries tucked amid the shops and houses. Women of every skin color strolled by shading themselves with lace-trimmed parasols. Men rambled to and fro from the banks, businesses, and saloons. Not for the first time, she thought to turn around and return to the blissful solitude of her rented room.
When at last she found her destination, Effie couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Someone in the long chain of those she’d interviewed to uncover that Madame Desâmes, medium extraordinaire, was really Adeline Mercier of 827 Toulouse Street must have gotten a detail or two wrong.
The house at 827 rose three stories above the street. A wrought-iron balcony stretched the length of the house, casting a filigree of shade upon the banquette beneath. Blue shutters framed the multitude of French doors that checkered the stucco facade. The grifting woman Effie had met at the séance could not possibly live here.
Effie loitered in the balcony’s shade. Likely a white family lived here. How would she explain her unsolicited intrusion upon their afternoon? She squatted and loosened her bootlaces. The skin on her heels had surely worn to fresh blisters.
How much time had she wasted obtaining this address? Wasted in finding this house among the Quarter’s assemblage of ill-marked cottages and townhouses, businesses and warehouses, saloons and cafés. How much more time would she waste before finally succeeding in purging her nettlesome affliction?
A sudden chill took her. She stepped from the shaded banquette to the street. What if she never succeeded? Already a glint of madness fluttered inside her. She thought of the gaunt lunatics with matted hair and dead eyes at the Lafayette asylum. She and Captain Kinyon had embalmed the body of a young woman there once, the daughter of a wealthy Indianapolis banker sent to “convalesce” after a severe bout of hysteria. It had taken Effie hours to clean the dirt and feces from the crevices of her cold skin, to detangle her lice-infested hair.
With no further heed to the consequences, Effie knocked on the lacquered door. A minute passed. Two. She knocked again. Waited.
Just as she was about to turn and leave the door opened and in the narrow breach stood Madame Desâmes.
“Oui?”
“Madame—er—Miss Mercier?”
“Yes?”
“My name is Euphemia Jones, we met—”
“I’m sorry, ma’amselle. We’re not in need of any help.” She started to shut the door. “Try the house two doors down.”
Effie stuck her foot into the jam. “Wait.”
Miss Mercier raised a delicate hand to her brow to shade her eyes from the sun. “Ma’amselle, really I—” Her eyes narrowed. “I remember you.” She glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “You’re that Yankee coquin who caused all that fuss at my séance.”
“I merely pointed out your ruse. Obvious to anyone with half a wit. But that’s not why I’m here. I—”
“That cost me a heap of business.” She opened the door wide and stepped so close the hem of her dress brushed Effie’s. “Not one of those silly girls requested another sitting.”
The heavy scent of vetiver wafted from her light brown skin. It drowned out the commingled smells of the street—dried horse manure, roasting peanuts, tobacco, rotting food scraps. Effie preferred the latter. She remembered the way the women at the séance had glared at her, Madame Desâmes’s smug smile, and refused to back away. “They seemed duly stupefied to me.”
“I provide an important service, a way for—”
“Service?” Effie laughed. “You swindle simpletons of their money.”
“I—”
Footsteps clapped past them on the banquette. Miss Mercier straightened and flashed a smile over Effie’s shoulder. “Bonjou, Monsieur Tredoux.”
“Bonjou. Ça va?”
“Bien,” she said, her wide, straight-toothed smile persisting until the man jaunted off.
“Another spirit-seeker you bamboozled?”
“Hush,” she said, her eyes sweeping up and down the street. “He’s a neighbor.”
“I’m sure he has memories of some dead beloved you can exploit.”
“Is that why you came? To harangue me?” Miss Mercier said. “How did you even find me?”
“It wasn’t easy. You ought to employ the same care with your tricks as you do concealing your identity.”
Miss Mercier turned back into the house.
“Wait, wait . . . I’m sorry.” The words sat heavy and strange on Effie’s tongue. She’d not taken the time to probe the wound cut that night at the séance. Now, upon actual inspection, she found it deep and festering. Still, she ought to be more conciliatory if she wanted this woman’s help. “I’m . . . I’m too frank sometimes.”
“I’ll say.”
“I heard . . .” Effie clasped her hands and looked down at the dusty pavers. “I heard you can make Voodoo medicines.”
Miss Mercier’s laughter drew her gaze upward again.
“Ma foi! Are you kidding?”
“You don’t, then?”
A raspy voice sounded from inside the house. “Adeline, qui est à la porte?”
“Personne, Mamm,” Miss Mercier shouted over her shoulder, then in a whisper to Effie, “You have to go.”
She started to close the door, but again Effie wedged herself into the jam. “Please, I can pay you.”
Miss Mercier hesitated. “Fine. But keep quiet.”
She let Effie in and hurried her through a lavish parlor replete with Oriental rugs, a marble fireplace, and a lacquered piano. Decorative molding crowned the walls and edged the doublewide entryways. In the dining room, a gilded chandelier hung above the long table.
Yet for all its gilt and marble, something about this home struck her as different from the fancy homes she’d visited to attend to the dead. For one, she’d never known a Negro to possess such wealth. Meg talked of the Gens du Couleur Libres, who’d lived here free before the War. Several of the men at the Republican clubhouse were likely of this set. Effie had gathered from the bits of conversation she couldn’t tune out that, as with the city’s whites, strata existed among these Negroes based on income, family name, lingua franca, the lightness of one’s skin. Miss Mercier seemed to possess the right admixture of these attributes.
Even this could not quite explain what stuck out to Effie about these sumptuous rooms. But Miss Mercier bustled onward, leaving Effie little time to consider. They passed through a sunlit loggia with a curving staircase at one end and into a stone-tiled courtyard. Overgrown camellia bushes and shaggy palms skirted the yard. An orange tree, heavy with fruit, lolled in one corner; a large crepe myrtle roosted in another. Crabgrass pushed up between the tiles at her feet. At the courtyard’s center stood a dry fountain topped with a moss-covered cherub. One of its wings had broken off, leaving a craggy stub of feather-etched stone.
“Allez-y,” Miss Mercier said when Effie dawdled by the fountain. “This way.”
A single-story outbuilding sat at the back of the courtyard, containing a kitchen and empty servants’ quarters. They entered the kitchen and Miss Mercier pointed to a wooden stool, then opened a large cupboard. “What kind of gris-gris are you looking for?”
Effie sat. Dusty jars filled with an assortment of powders, liquids, feathers, bones, and even matted wool crowded the bottom shelf. Dried leaves, flowers, and tendrils of lichen hung from the shelf above. This had been a bad idea. Entirely irrational. An inert medicine only worked on a believing subject. Yet without hesitation she said, “I fear I’ve fallen in love.”
“A charm de l’amour, then. Let me see.” She rummaged through the jars. “Melon seed with boiled fowl’s gizzard can make a man positively besotted.”
“That’s not what I meant. I don’t want to cast a spell or a charm or hex on anyone. I want you to cure me.”
“Cure you?”
“Of these feelings.”
Miss Mercier continued to search through the cupboard. “He’s married, then?”
Effie thought a moment. “I don’t believe so.”
“Engaged, then. A minor impediment.”
“Not that I know of.”
“You’re married and afraid your husband will find out. I have a charm for that too. A little snakeroot—”
“What? No, I just want . . . don’t you have something to, to . . . dampen one’s emotions?”
Miss Mercier turned around and regarded her with a nonplussed expression. “The Chinaman down on Liberty Street sells—”
“Not opium. That’s not what I’m looking for.”
“Who is this man?”
“His name is Samson Greene.” This too she said without hesitation, considering only after that she still hadn’t any good reason to trust Miss Mercier and numerous reasons not to. Yet finally speaking his name aloud was freeing. “He’s a legislator in the statehouse.”
“A Creole?”
Effie shook her head. “A freedman, I think.”
“You don’t know for sure where he’s from, you don’t know for sure whether he’s engaged or married—what makes you so sure you’re in love with him?”
Effie shrugged, recalling Miss Mercier’s words from the night of the séance, that a girl like her wouldn’t know love if it dropped on her head. “All I do is think about him. That and try to devise ways not to think of him.”
Miss Mercier leaned forward and rested her elbows on the waist-high table beside which Effie sat. “What’s this fellow got that’s so special? Legislator or not, if he’s a freedman likely he hasn’t much money.”
It wasn’t about the money. Effie could make her own money, after all. But what, then? She’d rolled this question round and round in her brain till it made her dizzy and still had no answer. “I don’t know.”
“Well, he must be handsome.”
“He is.”
“And kind.”
“He seems so.”
“And intelligent?”
Effie leaned forward too. They were close enough she could again smell Miss Mercier’s vetiver perfume. “Most assuredly.”
“But that’s not why you love him?”
“His voice . . . it reminds me of someone.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
Miss Mercier stood and waved a hand in Effie’s direction. “Tu ne sais rien.”
Again with the French. But her exasperation needed no translation. That Effie knew so little on such an important point exasperated her too. “And when he looks at me it’s like . . . like he really sees me. Like I’m the only person in the world.”
“Maybe he’s sweet on you too.”
“No.” She’d analyzed their interactions at length. “His interest is of a professional nature. He’s misguided on some points, I have to say, and overmuch confident, but—”
“Why not just seduce him?”
“Seduce him?”
“You know, make him fall in love with you.”
She spoke as if that were easy as pie. “How?”
“With your feminine charms, bien sûr.”
Effie stood. This was hopeless. An utter waste of time. She hadn’t such skills. Never before had she been in want of them. Keep your distance, Mr. Kinyon had said. From the living and the dead. And she did.
“I’m not the charming type.”
Miss Mercier’s eyes roved from the top of Effie’s bonnet to her ill-fitting shoes. “True. But surely your maman taught you something of the art of love.”
A shiver worked down Effie’s neck. Without a lit stove, the kitchen was cold. She buttoned her overcoat and reached for the purse she’d set upon the bare table. No, not entirely bare—a half-eaten loaf of bread sat at the far corner, a ceramic dish of marmalade, a bowl of eggs. “Where’s your cook?”
“Pardon?”
“Why hasn’t she started on dinner?”
Miss Mercier wrapped her arms around her waist and her gaze retreated to the floor. “It’s . . . er . . . her day off.”
But more than a day’s worth of dust covered the stovetop. Of the various pots and pans stored hither and thither about the room, only the kettle appeared recently used.
When Effie had first seen Madame Desâmes, she assumed the fancy dress and flowery manners wer
e part of the ruse. Arriving here had proved her wrong, yet why would a woman of such means grift about as a medium? Curiosity? Boredom? Pure maleficence?
It suddenly all made sense. There’d been an emptiness to the house, not enough furniture to fill the big rooms. Of course, all the requisite pieces where there—dining table and chairs, settee and armchair, sideboard and tea table—but no writing desk or card table, no ornate pedestals crowned with porcelain urns or marble statues. Bright patches in the otherwise faded paper suggested walls once replete with decoration, where now only a few scattered paintings hung.
“You haven’t any money.”
Miss Mercier dropped her arms to her side and raised her chin. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s why you go about performing séances and selling charms. That’s why you let me in.”
“C’est ridicule! Look at my dress—it’s French silk. Our house, it’s one of the largest on the entire Rue de Toulouse. We have our own box at l’opéra.”
“Then why the Madame Desâmes routine? You find swindling countrified folk entertaining?”
Miss Mercier snickered. “You talk like you’re not one of them.”
“I know enough to see through your two-bit ruse.”
Miss Mercier grabbed Effie’s upper arm and towed her from the kitchen. “I never should have let un coquin like you in.”
Effie shrugged free and stamped across the courtyard with Miss Mercier following close as a shadow. “To think, I almost bought one of your trifling elixirs.”
“It wouldn’t have worked anyway. Une vilaine négresse comme toi. Nobody’s ever going to love you.”
Effie’s toe caught in a crack in the stone tile and she tripped forward, catching hold of the loggia’s arched jamb just before falling. Stucco flecked off onto her gloves. Suddenly she was small again, before the War, shelling beans on a splintery porch stoop. A sharp pinch stung the back of her arm.
“Vilaine négresse!” a sallow-faced white woman said, yanking Effie from the stoop toward a dilapidated outbuilding. Beans from her upturned bowl skittered across the dusty ground. “To the shed with you. You’re likely as diseased as ta mamm.”
The Undertaker's Assistant Page 7
