The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  What I wrote on the scrap was Au secours! Then I put the date, 3 juillet 1839. The Americans if drowning or in other trouble call out, Help! which doesn’t capture the attention near as much, it’s more like a little sound a puppy would make. The bottle was green glass with Poison down one side. I wonder who’ll fish it out of the brown water, and what will that man or woman or child make of my message? Or will the medicine bottle float right through the city, out into the Gulf of Mexico, and my scribble go unread till the end of time?

  It was a foolish message, and a childish thing to do. I know that; I’m fifteen, which is old enough that I know when I’m being a child. But I ask you, how’s a girl to pass an afternoon as long and scalding as this one? I stare at the river in hopes of seeing a boat go by, or a black gum tree with muddy roots. A week ago I saw a blue heron swallow down a wriggling snake. Once in a while a boat will have a letter for us, a boy attaches it to the line of a very long fishing rod and flicks it over to our pier. I’m supposed to call a nègre to untie the letter and bring it in; Maman hates when I do it myself. She says I’m a gateur de nègres, like Papa, we spoil them with soft handling. She always beats them when they steal things, which they call only taking.

  I go up the pecan alley toward the Maison, and through the gate in the high fence that’s meant to keep the animals out. Passers-by always know a Creole house by the yellow and red, not like the glaring white American ones. Everything on our Plantation is yellow and red – not just the houses but the stables, the hospital, and the seventy slave cabins that stretch back like a village for three miles, with their vegetable gardens and chicken pens.

  I go in the Maison now, not because I want to, just to get away from the bam-bam-bam of the sun on the back of my neck. I step quietly past Tante Fanny’s room, because if she hears me she might call me in for some more lessons. My parents are away in New Orleans doing business; they never take me. I’ve never been anywhere, truth to tell. My brother, Emile, has been in the Lycee Militaire in Bordeaux for five years already, and when he graduates, Maman says perhaps we will all go on a voyage to France. By all, I don’t mean Tante Fanny, because she never leaves her room, nor her husband, Oncle Louis, who lives in New Orleans and does business for us, nor Oncle Flagy and Tante Marcelite, quiet sorts who prefer to stay here always and see to the nègres, the field ones and the house ones. It will be just Maman and Papa and I who go to meet Emile in France. Maman is the head of the famille ever since Grandmère Nannette Prud’Homme retired; we Creoles hand the reins to the smartest child, male or female (unlike the Americans, whose women are too feeble to run things). But Maman never really wanted to oversee the family enterprise, she says if her brothers Louis and Flagy were more useful she and Papa could have gone back to la belle France and stayed there. And then I would have been born a French mademoiselle. “Creole” means born of French stock, here in Louisiana, but Maman prefers to call us French. She says France is like nowhere else in the world, it’s all things gracious and fine and civilized, and no sacrés nègres about the place.

  I pass Millie on the stairs, she’s my maid and sleeps on the floor of my room but she has to help with everything else as well. She’s one of Pa Philippe’s children, he’s very old (for a nègre), and has VPD branded on both cheeks from when he used to run away, that stands for Veuve Prud’Homme Duparc. It makes me shudder a little to look at the marks. Pa Philippe can whittle anything out of cypress with his little knife: spoons, needles, pipes. Since Maman started our breeding program, we have more small nègres than we know what to do with, but Millie’s the only one as old as me. “Allo, Millie,” I say, and she says, “Mam’zelle Aimée,” and grins back but forgets to curtsy.

  “Aimée” means beloved. I’ve never liked it as a name. It seems it should belong to a different kind of girl.

  Where I am bound today is the attic. Though it’s hotter than the cellars, it’s the one place nobody else goes. I can lie on the floor and chew my nails and fall into a sort of dream. But today the dust keeps making me sneeze. I’m restless, I can’t settle. I try a trick my brother, Emile, once taught me, to make yourself faint. You breathe in and out very fast while you count to a hundred, then stand against the wall and press as hard as you can between your ribs. Today I do it twice, and I feel odd, but that’s all; I’ve never managed to faint as girls do in novels.

  I poke through some wooden boxes but they hold nothing except old letters, tedious details of imports and taxes and engagements and deaths of people I never heard of. At the back there’s an old-fashioned sheepskin trunk, I’ve tried to open it before. Today I give it a real wrench and the top comes up. Ah, now here’s something worth looking at. Real silk, I’d say, as yellow as butter, with layers of tulle underneath, and an embroidered girdle. The sleeves are huge and puffy, like sacks of rice. I slip off my dull blue frock and try it on over my shift. The skirt hovers, the sleeves bear me up so I seem to float over the splinters and dust of the floorboards. If only I had a looking glass up here. I know I’m short and homely, with a fat throat, and my hands and feet are too big, but in this sun-colored dress I feel halfway to beautiful. Grandmere Nannette, who lives in her Maison de Reprise across the yard and is descended from Louis XV’s own physician, once said that like her I was pas jolie but at least we had our skin, un teint de roses. Maman turns furious if I go out without my sunhat or a parasol, she says if I get freckled like some Cajun farm girl, how is she supposed to find me a good match? My stomach gets tight at the thought of a husband, but it won’t happen before I’m sixteen, at least. I haven’t even become a woman yet, Maman says, though I’m not sure what she means.

  I dig in the trunk. A handful of books; the collected poetry of Lord Byron, and a novel by Victor Hugo called Notre-Dame de Paris. More dresses – a light violet, a pale peach – and light shawls like spiders’ webs, and, in a heavy traveling case, some strings of pearls, with rings rolled up in a piece of black velvet. The bottom of the case lifts up, and there I find the strangest thing. It must be from France. It’s a sort of bracelet – a thin gold chain – with trinkets dangling from it. I’ve never seen such perfect little oddities. There’s a tiny silver locket that refuses to open, a gold cross, a monkey (grimacing), a minute kneeling angel, a pair of ballet slippers. A tiny tower of some sort, a snake, a crouching tiger (I recognize his toothy roar from the encyclopedia), and a machine with miniature wheels that go round and round; I think this must be a locomotive, like we use to haul cane to our sugar mill. But the one I like best, I don’t know why, is a gold key. It’s so tiny, I can’t imagine what door or drawer or box in the world it might open.

  Through the window, I see the shadows are getting longer; I must go down and show myself, or there’ll be a fuss. I pack the dresses back into the trunk, but I can’t bear to give up the bracelet. I manage to open its narrow catch, and fasten the chain around my left arm above the elbow, where no one will see it under my sleeve. I mustn’t show it off, but I’ll know it’s there; I can feel the little charms moving against my skin, pricking me.

  “Vanitas,” says Tante Fanny. “The Latin word for—?”

  “Vanity,” I guess.

  “A word with two meanings. Can you supply them?”

  “A, a desire to be pretty, or finely dressed,” I begin.

  She nods, but corrects me: “Self-conceit. The holding of too high an opinion of one’s beauty, charms or talents. But it also means futility,” she says, very crisp. “Worthlessness. What is done in vain. Vanitas paintings illustrate the vanity of all human wishes. Are you familiar with Ecclesiastes, chapter one, verse two?”

  I hesitate. I scratch my arm through my sleeve, to feel the little gold charms.

  My aunt purses her wide mouth. Though she is past fifty now, with the sallow look of someone who never sees the sun, and always wears black, you can tell that she was once a beauty. “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities,” she quotes; “all is vanity.”

  That’s Cousine Eliza on the wall behind her m
other’s chair, in dark oils. In the picture she looks much older than sixteen to me. She is sitting in a chair with something in her left hand, I think perhaps a handkerchief; has she been crying? Her white dress has enormous sleeves, like clouds; above them, her shoulders slope prettily. Her face is creamy and perfectly oval, her eyes are dark, her hair is coiled on top of her head like a strange plum cake. Her lips are together, it’s a perfect mouth, but it looks so sad. Why does she look so sad?

  “In this print here,” says Tante Fanny, tapping the portfolio in her lap with one long nail (I don’t believe she ever cuts them), “what does the hourglass represent?”

  I bend to look at it again. A grim man in seventeenth-century robes, his desk piled with objects. “Time?” I hazard.

  “And the skull?”

  “Death.”

  “Très bien, Aimée.”

  I was only eight when my uncle and aunt came back from France, with – among their copious baggage – Cousine Eliza in a lead coffin. She’d died of a fever. Papa came back from Paris right away, with the bad news, but the girl’s parents stayed on till the end of the year, which I thought strange. I was not allowed to go to the funeral, though the cemetery of St. James is only ten miles upriver. After the funeral was the last time I saw my Oncle Louis. He’s never come back to the Plantation since, and for seven years Tante Fanny hasn’t left her room. She’s shut up like a saint; she spends hours kneeling at her little prie-dieu, clutching her beads, thumping her chest. Millie brings all her meals on trays, covered to keep off the rain or the flies. Tante Fanny also sews and writes to her old friends and relations in France and Germany. And, of course, she teaches me. Art and music, French literature and handwriting, religion and etiquette (or, as she calls it, les convenances and comme il faut). She can’t supervise my piano practice, as the instrument is in the salon at the other end of the house, but she leaves her door open, when I’m playing, and strains her ears to catch my mistakes.

  This morning instead of practicing I was up in the attic again, and I saw a ghost, or at least I thought I did. I’d taken all the dresses out of the old sheepskin trunk, to admire and hold against myself; I’d remembered to bring my hand mirror up from my bedroom, and if I held it at arm’s length, I could see myself from the waist up, at least. I danced like a gypsy, like the girl in Notre-Dame de Paris, whose beauty wins the heart of the hideous hunchback.

  When I pulled out the last dress – a vast white one that crinkled like paper – what was revealed was a face. I think I cried out; I know I jumped away from the trunk. When I made myself go nearer, the face turned out to be made of something hard and white, like chalk. It was not a bust, like the one downstairs of poor Marie Antoinette. This had no neck, no head; it was only the smooth, pitiless mask of a girl, lying among a jumble of silks.

  I didn’t recognize her at first; I can be slow. My heart was beating loudly in a sort of horror. Only when I’d sat for some time, staring at those pristine, lidded eyes, did I realize that the face was the same as the one in the portrait of Cousine Eliza, and the white dress I was holding was the dress she wore in the painting. These were all her clothes that I was playing with, it came to me, and the little gold bracelet around my arm had to be hers too. I tried to take it off and return it to the trunk, but my fingers were so slippery I couldn’t undo the catch. I wrenched at it, and there was a red line around my arm; the little charms spun.

  Tante Fanny’s room is stuffy; I can smell the breakfast tray that waits for Millie to take it away. “Tante Fanny,” I say now, without preparation, “why does Cousine Eliza look so sad?”

  My aunt’s eyes widen violently. Her head snaps.

  I hear my own words too late. What an idiot, to make it sound as if her daughter’s ghost was in the room with us! “In the picture,” I stammer, “I mean in the picture, she looks sad.”

  Tante Fanny doesn’t look round at the portrait. “She was dead,” she says, rather hoarse.

  This can’t be right. I look past her. “But her eyes are open.”

  My aunt lets out a sharp sigh and snaps her book shut. “Do you know the meaning of the word ‘posthumous’?”

  “Eh…”

  “After death. The portrait was commissioned and painted in Paris in the months following my daughter’s demise.”

  I stare at it again. But how? Did the painter prop her up somehow? She doesn’t look dead, only sorrowful, in her enormous, ice-white silk gown.

  “Eliza did not model for it,” my aunt goes on, as if explaining something to a cretin. “For the face, the artist worked from a death mask.” She must see the confusion in my eyes. “A sculptor pastes wet plaster over the features of a corpse. When it hardens he uses it as a mold, to make a perfect simulacrum of the face.”

  That’s it. That’s what scared me, up in the attic this morning: Eliza’s death mask. When I look back at my aunt, there’s been a metamorphosis. Tears are chasing down her papery cheeks. “Tante Fanny—”

  “Enough,” she says, her voice like mud. “Leave me.”

  I don’t believe my cousin – my only cousin, the beautiful Eliza, just sixteen years old – died of a fever. Louisiana is a hellhole for fevers of all kinds, that’s why my parents sent Emile away to Bordeaux. It’s good for making money,but not for living, that’s why Napoleon sold it so cheap to the Americans thirty-six years ago. So how could it have happened that Eliza grew up here on the Duparc-Locoul Plantation, safe and well, and on her trip to Paris – that pearly city, that apex of civilization – she succumbed to a fever? I won’t believe it, it smells like a lie.

  I’m up in the attic again, but this time I’ve brought the Bible. My brother, Emile, before he went away to France, taught me how to tell fortunes with the Book and Key. In those days we used an ugly old key we’d found in the cellars, but now I have a better one; the little gold one that hangs on my bracelet. (Eliza’s bracelet, I should say.) What you do is, you open the Bible to the Song of Solomon, pick any verse you like, and read it aloud. If the key goes clockwise, it’s saying yes to the verse, and vice versa. Fortune-telling is a sin when gypsies or conjurers do it, like the nègres making their nasty gris-gris to put curses on each other, but it can’t be wrong if you use the Good Book. The Song of Solomon is the most puzzling bit of the Bible but it’s my favorite. Sometimes it seems to be a man speaking, and sometimes a woman; she says I am black but comely, but she can’t be a nègre, surely. They adore each other, but at some points it sounds as if they are brother and sister.

  My first question for the Book today is, did Cousine Eliza die a natural death? I pull the bracelet down to my wrist, and I hold all the other little charms still, letting only the key dangle. I shake my hand as I recite the verse I’ve chosen, one that reminds me of Eliza: Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains of gold. When my hand stops moving, the key swings, most definitely anticlockwise. I feel a thrill all the way down in my belly. So! Not a natural death; as I suspected.

  What shall I ask next? I cross my legs, to get more comfortable on the bare boards, and study the Book. A verse gives me an idea. Was she – is it possible – she was murdered? Not a night goes by in a great city without a cry in the dark, I know that much. The watchmen that went about the city found me, I whisper, they smote me, they wounded me. I shake my wrist, and the key dances, but every which way; I can’t tell what the answer is. I search for another verse. Here’s one: Every man hath his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night. What if… I rack my imagination. What if two young Parisian gallants fought a duel over her, after glimpsing her at the opera, and Eliza died of the shock? I chant the verse, my voice rising now, because no one will hear me up here. I wave my hand in the air, and when I stop moving, the key continues to swing, counterclockwise. No duel, then; that’s clear.

  But what if she had a lover, a favorite among all the gentlemen of France who were vying for the hand of the exquisite Creole maiden? What if he was mad with jealousy and strangled her, locking his hands around
her long pale neck rather than let Tante Fanny and Oncle Louis take her back to Louisiana? For love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave, I croon, and my heart is thumping, I can feel the wet break out under my arms, in the secret curls there. I’ve forgotten to wave my hand. When I do it, the key swings straight back and forward, like the clapper of a bell. Like the thunderous bells in the high cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Is that an answer? Not jealousy, then, or not exactly; some other strange passion? Somebody killed Eliza, whether they meant to or not, I remind myself; somebody is to blame for the sad eyes in that portrait. For Tante Fanny walled up in her stifling room, and Oncle Louis who never comes home.

  I can’t think of any more questions about Eliza; my brain is fuzzy. Did she suffer terribly? I can’t find a verse to ask that. How can I investigate a death that happened eight years ago, all the way across the ocean, when I’m only a freckled girl who’s never left the Plantation? Who’ll listen to my questions, who’ll tell me anything?

  I finish by asking the Book something for myself. Will I ever be pretty, like Eliza? Will these dull and round features ever bloom into perfect conjunction? Will I grow a face that will take me to France, that will win me the love of a French gentleman? Or will I be stuck here for the rest of my life, my mother’s harried assistant and perhaps her successor, running the Plantation and the wine business and the many complex enterprises that make up the wealth of the Famille Duparc-Locoul? That’s too many questions. Concentrate, Aimée. Will I be pretty when I grow up? Behold, thou art fair, my love, I murmur, as if to make it so; behold, thou art fair. But then something stops me from shaking my hand, making the key swing. Because what if the answer is no?

  I stoop over the trunk and take out the death mask, as I now know it’s called. I hold it very carefully in my arms, and I lie down beside the trunk. I look into the perfect white oval of my cousin’s face, and lay it beside mine. Eliza, Eliza. I whisper my apologies for disturbing her things, for borrowing her bracelet, with all its little gold and silver trinkets. I tell her I only want to know the truth of how she died so her spirit can be at rest. My cheek is against her cool cheek, my nose aligns itself with hers. The plaster smells of nothing. I set my dry lips to her smooth ones.