“Si belle!” said a voice from the far side of the room. In the mirror’s reflection, Effie saw Adeline’s mother propped against the doorjamb.
“Mamm, I thought you were sleeping.” Adeline hurried over to her, the boot heel ringing with each step.
Mrs. Mercier flinched at the noise. “Quel est ce bruit?”
“Rien, Mamm. Now back to bed.”
“Non. Mo ne suis pas fatigue.” She batted away Adeline’s shepherding arm and strode into the room.
Effie stood and offered her the chair.
“Merci, mon chou.” The woman took hold of the back of the chair and eased herself gracefully down. She seemed far more lucid than their first meeting.
Adeline dragged a wicker rocker across the room for Effie, then flopped back onto her tuffet, with a perturbed but resigned expression. “English, Mamm. Remember?”
“Ah, oui, ton amie Américaine. Forgive me.”
Amie. From the Latin amicus. Friend. Effie thought to correct her—she and Adeline were only . . . business partners. But perhaps that would be too difficult to explain. Besides, Mrs. Mercier likely didn’t know of Adeline’s self-professed talents as a spirit medium.
“Effie was just telling me about a gentleman she fancies,” Adeline said, returning to her own hair. Effie caught her eye in the mirror and glared.
“Oh, un homme.” Mrs. Mercier smiled. Her teeth were small and nearly straight, the perfect complement to her full pink lips. “Tell me about your gentleman. What does he do?”
“He’s in the state legislature.”
“Mmm.”
Effie gloried in her approval. He wasn’t really her gentleman, and she hadn’t any hand in his political success. But, as so oft now happened, her feelings disobeyed logic.
“What’s his family name?”
“Greene.”
She turned to Adeline. “Do we know any Greenes?”
“Non, Mamm. He’s an American. A freedman.”
Mrs. Mercier’s expression puckered at the word freedman. “They let those types in the legislature? Ma foi!”
Effie squirmed and the rocker pitched backward until her feet were nearly level with her head. The old wood creaked and whined.
“Of course they do, Mamm.”
“Could be worse, I suppose. And one can’t be too picky these days.” This last comment, Effie saw as she pulled herself forward and the chair rocked back to an upright position, was directed toward Adeline. “Two proposals my daughter’s turned down. Did she tell you? Two!”
Adeline set down her comb with a loud clap.
“Two suitable gentlemen with both family and profession—”
“You didn’t think so at the time.”
“I didn’t think you’d take so long to find another. In my day, Effie, before this dreadful war—”
“She doesn’t want to hear about the good old days, Mother.”
“Mais oui, she does. Don’t you, Effie?”
Both women’s gazes pressed against her. Before she could mutter an apology and insist upon leaving, Mrs. Mercier launched into her tale.
The world she described had more in common with the moon than Effie’s own. Her mother had been the lifelong mistress of a white cotton broker when such arrangements were commonplace. Before, Mrs. Mercier was quick to add, the Americans came and all those Haitian refugees and the whole business became quite tawdry. Her father died when she was a young girl, but left them well situated with a handsome cottage on Royal Street and provisions of $600 a year. She spoke of lavish parties, dances, and nights at the theater.
Adeline, who’d made a show of not listening when her mother first began, stilled. She rested her chin in her palm and gazed at the marble tabletop, as if she could see the figures of her mother’s story on its shiny surface.
“I was such a beauty in my day,” Mrs. Mercier said. “Known throughout the city—from Esplanade to Canal.”
It took little imagination to picture her so. Illness had whittled her down to bone and sapped the luster from her skin, but otherwise she remained a model of perfect proportions and striking symmetry, the ideal composite of her biracial pedigree. Effie, in her blackness, in her largeness, in her directness was indeed alien to this world.
When Mrs. Mercier spoke of meeting her husband, Adeline busied herself again, rummaging through the dressing table drawers, pulling out headscarves and necklaces and little pots of cream and rouge. His great-grandfather had purchased his freedom when New Orleans was still a French colony. His father had fought alongside other free men of color under General Jackson in 1815. He had family—which Effie now understood to mean a prestigious Creole lineage—and a lucrative profession as a land speculator.
There were more tales of picnics and soirées, of summering at the lake and of trips abroad. Adeline wound a purple scarf about her head as her mother spoke, tying the two ends together in a large knot just above her forehead. She had her mother’s delicate features and pleasing symmetry, but her dark, restless eyes she must owe to her father.
Effie thought of her own features and wondered if her broad nose and sharp cheekbones came from her mother or her father. Had they both been tall like she, big boned, and square shouldered? She wondered for a moment if, despite her own plainness, her mother too had been beautiful. Just as quickly she banished the thought. Beauty was a curse for a slave. Perhaps that was her mother’s ultimate gift to her.
Adeline, seemingly displeased with her tignon, unwrapped the scarf and started anew. Her hands trembled as they worked, and her eyes had taken on a glossy sheen.
“Come here, mon coeur,” her mother said, interrupting the story. “I’ll do it for you.”
Mon coeur. Had Effie’s mother said such things to her too? Growing up she’d kept a tight rein on such curiosity. What good would it do to wonder? She forbid herself to ruminate on the dark eyes she sometimes saw in her dreams, the soft humming that came to her in moments of silence.
Adeline scooted her tuffet in front of her mother’s chair and sat still while her mother smoothed her hair and set to work winding the scarf. The sight of them weakened Effie’s resolve. She swam back through her fragments of memory, desperate for something—a touch, a kiss, a smile—but there were only those eyes and soft humming.
“I suppose c’est la fin,” Mrs. Mercier said, snaring Effie’s attention again. “The War came and voilà. Here we are.”
“Where’s your husband now?”
Mrs. Mercier looked out the window and signed. “St. Louis Cemetery, I’m afraid.”
“The War?”
“Non, a few years after.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s what you’re trained to say.” Adeline swiveled back to her vanity and swiped at her cheeks with a feathery puff. Tears cut through the newly laid powder. “I’m sorry. As if you could possibly know our loss.”
It was true. Effie had muttered those words a thousand times. Soft, respectful, but void of any real feeling. Keep your distance.
“Did your family lose their fortune?” Adeline continued. “Watch their stature slip away as freemen poured into the city?”
“Tais-toi, Adeline! Where are your manners?” Mrs. Mercier said. “We’re doing just fine. Only yesterday ton frère was telling me about a new buyer in Montpellier.”
Adeline bit down on her lip so hard the flesh blanched around her teeth. “Damned War. Would that it had never happened.”
Effie stood with such force the rocker skidded over the rug, teetering back and forth behind her. “And what of us freedmen? Would that we were still slaves?” Adeline and her mother turned to her aghast, but Effie didn’t wait for either to reply. “I don’t have memories of parties and dances to call up before the War. I have scant memory of my early years at all. But I know that damned War saved me.”
“Effie, I—”
But Effie turned and stomped to the door, unable to explain the sudden churning of her viscera and tightness of her skin. She stopped at the doorway a
nd managed to mutter before leaving, “How ungrateful you are. Would that I had memories of a mother or father at all.”
CHAPTER 12
Effie drew a pail of water from the cistern and set about cleaning her instruments. The morning’s case should have been an easy one, a slight woman taken with childbed fever and her stillborn daughter.
When the dead suffered neither gross trauma nor the decrepitness of age, embalming fluid suffused into the vasculature and tissues with ease, as if it were the natural replacement of life’s blood. The skin was less prone to discoloration, the limbs easier to mold into a restful pose. But as she nestled the cold, stone-like baby in the crook of her mother’s arm for the viewing, a bur snagged inside her. Sharp, painful, unshakable. Just as it had when she’d watched Adeline with her mother.
Jealousy?
No. Only a fool envied the dead. Yet how else to explain this feeling or her sudden outburst in Adeline’s bedroom?
She dried her scalpel and flushed clean water through her syringe pump. A brick held the back door of the shop ajar, letting in the fitful breeze, and from inside Effie heard voices. Colm’s nasal brogue. But also that of a woman. A client perhaps? A paramour? Leave it to Colm to conflate the two.
She stowed her embalming cabinet and dressing case in the storeroom alongside the packets of chemicals, jars of premixed fluid, and spare drapery. Colm’s voice still sounded from the front showroom, a continuous stream of muffled babble, more husky and bombastic than normal.
“Not everyone has the constitution for it, mind you. Just think what society would be without men of my sort to look after our beloved departed,” Colm was saying as she entered to update the ledger. Effie almost laughed. As if he did anything but lug supplies and drive the hearse. He lounged against one of the display caskets with feigned ease, his posture stiff, his pale skin flushed crimson.
“Mais bien sûr! How fortunate there are men like you, Mr. McLeary.”
Effie recognized Adeline’s voice even before she spied her beside the decorative plumes and large stone urn near the front window.
Her insides clenched and she stepped back, hoping to retreat unnoticed. For the past two days, she’d replayed Adeline’s words through her mind. Never had she met someone so callous and entitled, so petty and insufferable. Yet Adeline’s pain at her father’s death—so vivid in her dark eyes—mirrored something in Effie. An aching she could not name or place. An emotional residue coating the void where memories of her own family ought to have been. The Kinyons had filled that void like cotton gauze packed into a wound. A lifesaving remedy perhaps, but painful and apt to fester.
Better now that the void was open to air and could at last scar over. That is, if she could avoid Adeline, whose presence burned like alcohol on the yet tender flesh.
It was too late to slip away, though. Adeline turned in her direction and smiled. “Effie! It’s about time.” When Effie said nothing, she continued. “Your boss here was telling me all about your noble little profession.”
“He’s not my boss.” She turned to Colm, who’d righted himself and straightened the lace shroud his elbow had dragged askew atop the casket. “I finished my work at the Franklin house. Mr. Whitmark is undoubtedly waiting on you and your iron constitution to move the parlor furniture for tomorrow’s service.”
He scowled at her. “I couldn’t very well leave your—er—Miss Mercier here alone, now could I?” He turned back to Adeline and bowed slightly before heading out the back. It wasn’t lost on Effie that he couldn’t envision a world where someone like Adeline—dressed smartly in a bouffant skirt and jacket bodice of grenadine silk, her hair sleek in a low-lying chignon—and Effie with her plain work dress and simple bun were on familiar terms. Effie couldn’t either. For all her longing to impress Samson, she knew her and Adeline’s arrangement was futile.
“How’d you find me?”
“There are fewer undertakers in the city than you think,” Adeline said, sweeping her hand over the fuzzy tops of the ostrich plumes. “Fewer still with a Negress in employment. Why you might be the only one between here and Charleston.”
“There was a problem with the boot heel I take it.”
“No, it worked fine. Better than fine, really. À la perfection. You should have seen their faces!” She turned from the plumes, came a step closer, and then stopped. Her gaze brushed the floor and her fingers twined together. “No, I came for, well, because . . . perhaps I spoke a touch too bluntly before and wanted to make amends.”
An apology? Women like Adeline didn’t make amends with women like Effie. Not in her experience.
“You were a bit ungracious yourself,” Adeline said after a few moments of silence, her eyes still skittish. “Speaking so harshly and then running off like that.”
“It was the truth.”
“Mamm was quite upset.”
“Are you here because of her?”
“I just thought, well, I had an idea. You said you don’t know who or where your kin are. Maybe they’re looking for you.”
Surely this was a trick. Surely she wanted something in return. “What do you mean?”
“The Freedmen’s Bureau used to get all kinds of letters from people searching for lost family. The papers even printed a few.” She cocked her head. “You must have wondered.”
Effie searched her eyes for the glint of guile. Her lips for Madame Desâmes’s sinister smile. But the Adeline before her was the same benevolent woman she’d seen at Charity Hospital. “The Freedmen’s Bureau is gone.”
“Their records aren’t. They’re stored away in the statehouse somewhere, and I know a fellow who can help us find them. Come on.”
Effie hesitated. She had wondered. As much as she’d tried not to in the eleven years since the War’s end, that quiet ache, that longing had never gone away. When fleeing Indiana, she might have gone anywhere. New York. Philadelphia. Even London or Paris after saving a few more coins. But she’d come here. South. To New Orleans.
Unconscious acts of the soul, one theorist she’d read described such phenomena. At the time, Effie had been skeptical. Was skeptical still. But she ventured a nod at Adeline and fished the shop key from her pocket.
She followed Adeline along the busy streets downriver. As they walked, Adeline peppered her with questions about her childhood, to which Effie could only answer, “I don’t know, I don’t remember.”
Adeline frowned. They waited for the streetcar to pass, then crossed Royal Street and headed down St. Louis. “What do you remember, then?”
Her first fully formed memory began with smoke wafting through the early-morning mist of a swamp. Mud caked her tattered clothes, and insect bites welted her skin. She followed the smell through the ferns and palm fronds and drooping moss to a break in the trees. Triangles of stretched cloth sprawled across the patch of high land while men in blue trousers and dirty undershirts squatted before cook fires. The scent of roasting coffee beans and boiled meat mixed with that of the smoke. Despite the snarls of her long-empty stomach, fear of these men kept her hidden in the undergrowth.
One man sauntered over and relieved himself only inches from where she crouched. She kept perfectly still, holding her breath until her windpipe spasmed for need of air. Urine splattered onto her neck and cheek. When he buttoned his trousers and turned to go, Effie thought herself safe, but a nettlesome ibis honked from the waterways behind her. The man spun back around. His eyes, still crusted with sleep, swept the bayou. He took a step forward, his scuffed boot flattening the grass beside her. He gazed out another moment, then yawned and threw his arms up in a stretch.
“There’s a darkie right there by your feet, Joss,” a voice said.
In trying so hard to keep still, Effie hadn’t noticed the other man approach.
The man called Joss hollered and leaped back while the other heehawed like a mule, drawing the attention of several others. Joss dragged her from the underbrush. “What you doin’ here, boy?”
When she didn’t reply
, he shook her and asked again. His fingers circled so tight about her arm she thought her bone might snap.
“I’s lookin’ fo de Yankees.”
“Where you come from? How long you been watching me?”
“I’s lookin’ fo de Yankees.”
He pulled her up so that her tiptoes barely brushed the ground. “You a spy for the Rebs?”
“I’s lookin’—”
“You say that one more time and I’ll—”
“Let him go,” one of the men in the gathering crowd said, his voice quiet but commanding. “He’s just a frightened boy.”
Joss released her arm and stalked away. Many of the others followed. The quiet-talking one, a man not so young as the others but not so old that his bones had begun to bend or his hair lose its color, told her she’d found the Yankees. Every cell in her body sang with relief. She didn’t know just who or what the Yankees were, but she’d been told to run, run until she saw a gathering of men in blue—not gray, that was important—and to say the very line she’d just delivered. Then she’d be safe.
The man, whose calm hazel eyes reminded her of honeycomb, took her to his campfire and gave her water and food. “My name is Lieutenant Kinyon,” he’d said as she scarfed down the watery stew and rock-hard bread. “You’re safe here with me.”
Now, with sunlight winking through the wrought-iron railings of the overhead balconies, Effie relayed the memory to Adeline.
“Mon Dieu,” Adeline said, then fell silent a moment. “They thought you were a boy? How old were you?”
Effie shrugged. “Seven. Maybe eight. Captain Kinyon realized I was a girl after a few days, but he thought it best not to make a show of it. So I kept my hair cropped and wore trousers through the War.”
She gave Effie that familiar, disapproving look. “That explains a lot. But seven, that’s quite old for one’s earliest memory. You remember nothing before that?”
“Just bits and pieces. Nothing anchored to a specific time and place.”
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