"Yes, I am a prisoner of sorts, but my prison isn't the house. It's my own thoughts that lock me up!" he cried, bringing his hands to his face. He groaned deeply. I put my hand on his shoulder. He lifted his hands from his face and asked, "You're not afraid of me? I don't disgust you?"
"Oh no."
"You feel sorry for me, is that it?" he asked bitterly.
"Yes, somewhat, but I also appreciate your talent," I added.
He softened his expression and took a deep breath. "I want to see again," he said. "My doctors tell me I'm afraid to see again. You think that's possible?"
"I guess so."
"Have you ever run away from anything you couldn't face?"
"Oh yes," I said.
"Will you tell me about it sometime? Will you return?"
"If you'd like me to, yes."
He smiled. "I made up a melody for you," he said. "Want to hear it?"
"You did? Yes, please."
He started to play. It was a wonderfully flowing piece that, remarkably, made me think of the bayou, of water and of beautiful birds and flowers.
"It's very beautiful," I said when he had finished. "I love it."
"I call it 'Ruby.' I'll have my teacher write out the notes, and the next time you come I'll give you a copy, if you like."
"Yes, thank you."
"I'd like to know more about you . . . especially how you came to be brought up in the Cajun world but ended up living with a well-to-do Creole family in the Garden District."
"It is a long story."
"Good," he said. "I'd like it to be like Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights . . . A story that goes on and on, just so you would be here on and on."
I laughed, and he brought his fingers to my face again and again he traced the lines down to my lips, only this time he held his fingers there longer.
"Can I kiss you?" he asked. "I've never kissed a girl before."
"Yes," I said, not quite sure why I was allowing him such intimacies. He leaned toward me and I guided him with my hands to my lips. It was a short kiss, but it quickened his breath. He dropped his hands to my breasts and leaned in to kiss me again, holding his lips to mine longer as his fingers brushed my breasts as lightly as feathers. He tried to push the material away from more of my breasts and was frustrated.
"Louis, we shouldn't . . . ″
It was as if I had slapped him. He not only pulled back but this time rose from the stool.
"No, we shouldn't. You should go now," he said angrily.
"I didn't mean to . . . ″
"To what?" he cried. "Make me feel like a fool? Well do. I'm standing here aroused, aren't I?" he asked.
One glance told me it was so.
"Louis."
"Just tell my grandmother I got tired," he said. His arms dropped stiffly to his sides and he started away, moving toward the door.
"Louis, wait," I cried, but he didn't stop. He hurried off. Pity for him flooded through me. I followed to the doorway and gazed down the corridor after him. He seemed to be absorbed by the very darkness in which he dwelt and in moments was gone. I listened for his footsteps, but there was only silence. Curious, I walked farther into the west wing of the house, passing another, smaller sitting room and then going around the corner to stop at the first door. I knocked gently.
"Louis?"
I heard no response but tried the handle anyway. The door opened, and I looked in on a beautiful, spacious bedroom with a grand canopy bed, the mosquito netting draped around it. The room had a damp, fecund odor, and I saw that the flowers in the vases were all dead. Two small lamps that looked like antique oil lamps were lit. They were on the night stands and threw just enough illumination to outline what looked like someone lying in the bed, but on closer inspection, I saw it was just a woman's nightgown laid out for someone's use.
I was about to close the door when suddenly, an adjoining door on the right was thrust open and Louis appeared. I wanted to call to him but he groaned deeply and slammed his fists into his eyes, falling to his knees at the same time. The act took away my breath. I stood trembling in the doorway. He wrapped his arms around himself and swayed for a moment, then he clawed at the door jamb and pulled himself into a standing position. Head down, he turned and closed the door. I waited a moment, looked over the bedroom once again, and then stepped back and closed the door softly.
Practically tiptoeing, I made my way back to the center of the house and finally to the sitting room in which we had had our tea. Mrs. Clairborne was in her chair, staring up at the portrait of her husband.
"Excuse me," I said. She turned slowly. I thought I saw tears winding down her pale cheeks. "Louis said he was tired and went to his room."
"Oh. Fine," she said, rising. "Your driver is waiting outside to take you back to your dorm."
"Thank you again for dinner," I said.
Otis appeared at the door as if he'd popped out of thin air and opened it for me.
"Good night, mademoiselle," he said, bowing.
"Good night."
I hurried out and down the steps to the car. Buck hopped out quickly and opened the door.
"Have a good time?" he asked.
I didn't respond. I got in and he closed the door. As we drove off, I looked back at the mansion. Louis and his grandmother were about as rich and as powerful as any family I had known or would know, I thought, but that didn't mean that unhappiness stopped outside their door.
How I wished Grandmère Catherine were still alive. I would bring her up here secretly one night, and she would touch Louis and he would see again and put aside all his sadness. Years later, I would attend a concert in some magnificent hall to listen to him play. Before it was over, he would stand up and announce that the next piece was something he had written for someone special.
"It's called 'Ruby,'" he would say, and then he would begin and I would feel like someone who walked in the spotlights.
Grandmère would say it was all wishful thinking, dreams as thin as soap bubbles. But then she would shake her head sadly and add, "At least you can have dreams. That boy . . . he lives in a house without any dreams at all. He truly lives in darkness."
7
So Many Rules
As she had promised, Mrs. Penny was waiting for me in the lobby of the dorm when I arrived. She jumped out of her chair and came rushing to greet me, her eyes full of excitement and expectation.
"How was your dinner?" she cried.
"It was very nice, Mrs. Penny," I said, looking over her shoulder at the girls from the A and B quads who were watching television. Most had turned my way curiously.
"Just nice?" she asked, with disappointment. She looked like a little girl who had been told she couldn't have any ice cream. I knew she wanted a list of superlatives from me, a flood of adjectives, but I wasn't in the mood. She lit up again with a new question: "What did Mrs. Clairborne serve?"
"A shrimp dish," I replied, without mentioning the Cajun recipe. "Oh, and an orange crème brûlèe for dessert," I added. That pleased her.
"I was hoping she would do something special. What did you do afterward? Did you sit and talk in the same sitting room in which we had tea, or did you go on to one of the glass-domed patios?"
"I listened to Louis play the piano. He grew tired and I came back," I summarized.
She nodded. "It was an honor," she said, still nodding "a very high honor. You should be proud of yourself."
For being invited to a dinner? Why wasn't it more of an honor to paint a beautiful picture or get high marks on a school test? I wanted to ask, but I simply smiled back instead and excused myself.
Gisselle, surrounded by Samantha, Kate, and Jacki, was holding court in the lounge when I arrived. From the pink flush in all the girls' faces, I imagined Gisselle had been describing one of her sexual exploits back in New Orleans. They all turned with some disappointment at my interruption, but I had no intention of joining them.
"Well, look who's back," Gisselle quipped, "the princess of
Greenwood."
Everyone laughed.
"How was your evening, princess?"
"Why don't you stop making an ass of yourself, Gisselle," I retorted.
"Oh. I'm sorry, princess. I didn't mean to offend your royal bosom," she continued, the laughter of her r club following quickly. "We poor underlings had a rather uneventful dinner, except for the part where I accidentally spilled my hot soup on Patti Denning." They all laughed again. "How was Louis? At least tell us that much."
"Very nice," I said.
"Did you go groping in the dark with him?" she asked. Despite myself, I couldn't keep my blood from rushing into my cheeks. Gisselle's eyes widened. "Did you?" she pursued.
"Stop it!" I screamed, and crossed quickly to my room. I slammed the door shut to cut off the laughter behind me. Abby looked up from her textbook, surprised at my abrupt entrance.
"What's wrong?'
"Gisselle," I said simply, and she smirked with understanding. She sat up and closed the book on her lap.
"How was your evening?"
"Oh, Abby," I cried. "It was . . . so strange. Mrs. Clairborne didn't really want me there."
She nodded as if she had always known. "And Louis?"
"He's in great emotional pain. . . A very talented, sensitive person, as twisted and knotted inside as swamp grass in a boat motor's propeller," I said. And then I sat down and told her all that had happened. It made us both melancholy, and after we had gotten undressed and into our beds, we lay awake for hours, talking about our pasts. I told her more about Paul and the terrible frustration I had experienced when I learned that the boy I was so fond of was really my half brother. She compared this horrible joke Fate had played on me with her own discoveries about herself and her family lineage.
"It seems both of us have been wounded by events over which we have no control . . . like we're being made to pay for the sins of our parents and grandparents. It's so unfair. We should all have a fresh start."
"Even Louis," I remarked.
"Yes," she said thoughtfully, "even Louis."
I closed my eyes and fell asleep to the memory of his composition entitled "Ruby."
The week that followed began uneventfully, with the promise of being routine. Even Gisselle seemed to calm down and to do some real schoolwork. I noted a remarkable change in her behavior when she was at school. In the two classes we shared, she was quiet and attentive. She even surprised me by stopping her entourage in the hallway after English to have Samantha pick up some gum wrappers someone had discarded near the water fountain. Of course, she still held court in the cafeteria, sitting back like some grand duchess whose words were to be treated with royal respect and commenting on this one and that one, usually in a mocking fashion that stimulated choruses of laughter from the ever wing audiences she gathered around her.
But the sarcasm that had characterized her replies to questions in class and her ridicule of our teachers and our homework assignments were absent from her speech and behavior. Twice, when Mrs. Ironwood was standing in the corridors observing the students as they passed between periods, Gisselle had Samantha pause so she could greet the Iron Lady, who nodded back with approval.
But watching my sister's unusual good behavior made me feel like I was watching a pot of milk being boiled. It was bound to bubble up, lift the lid, and simmer over into the flames. I had lived with her long enough to know not to trust her promises, her smiles, and her kind words—whenever any spilled out from her cunningly twisted lips.
What happened next seemed at first totally unrelated. I would have to trace back the zigzag conniving that wrapped itself around my twin sister's evil mind before I could find her true purpose in all this. Ultimately, it stemmed from her initial anger over being brought to Greenwood. Despite her apparent good adjustments, she was still quite upset about it and, as I would learn, quite determined to get back to her old friends and her old ways.
On Wednesday morning, a message was sent into my social studies class, asking me to report to Mrs. Ironwood's office. Whenever anyone was called out of class to see the Iron Lady, the other students looked at the girl with pity and with relief that it wasn't any of them who had been summoned. After having experienced one session with our principal, I understood their fear. Nevertheless, I revealed no nervousness as I stood up and walked out. Of course, my heart was pounding by the time I arrived at the office. One look at the expression on Mrs. Randle's face told me I had trouble.
"Just a minute," she snapped, as if she was an emotional extension of Mrs. Ironwood, mirroring her moods, her thoughts, her angers and pleasures. She knocked on the door and this time whispered my name. Then she closed the door and went back to her desk, leaving me standing in anticipation. She kept her eyes down on her paperwork. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and sighed deeply. Nearly a minute later, Mrs. Ironwood opened her door.
"Come in," she ordered, and stepped back. I threw a glance at Mrs. Randle, who lifted her eyes and then lowered them instantly, as if looking at me was as deadly as it was for Lot's wife when she looked back at Sodom and was turned into a pillar of salt.
I walked into the office. Mrs. Ironwood shut the door behind me and marched to her chair.
"Sit down," she commanded. I took my seat and waited. She threw me a hard look and began. "By this time it would not be unreasonable of me to expect that one of my new students had read the Greenwood School handbook, especially if that new student was scholastically outstanding," she said. "Am I correct?" she asked.
"Yes, I suppose so," I said.
"You've done so?"
"Yes, although I haven't committed it to memory," I added, perhaps too sharply, for her eyes narrowed into slits and her face whitened, especially at the corners of her mouth. Her frown deepened before she continued.
"I don't ask for it to be committed to memory so it can be recited word for word. I ask that it be read, understood, and obeyed." She sat back and snapped open a handbook tearing back the pages and then slapping the book open.
"Section seventeen, paragraph two, regarding leaving the Greenwood campus. Before a registered student can leave the school boundaries, she must have specific, written parental permission on file with the administrative office. This must be dated and signed.
"The reasoning behind this is simple," she went on, looking up from the manual. "We incur certain liabilities when we accept a student. If something terrible should happen to you while you are not under our supervision, we would bear the brunt of the blame if we permitted you to gallivant about at your every whim.
"Normally, I don't find it necessary to explain our reasoning, but in this case, with your particular history, I have done so just so that you understand I am not, as some of your type are bound to claim, picking on you.
"Your teacher should have known better than to take you in her automobile. She has already been reprimanded and her indiscretion noted in her file. When her renewal comes up, it will be one of the considerations."
I stared at her. It was difficult to breathe, to not be drowned by everything that was happening so fast. Mrs. Penny had obviously betrayed me, I thought, and after she had promised she wouldn't. Now she had gotten both me and Miss Stevens in trouble.
"That's not fair. She only wanted to provide me an opportunity to paint. We didn't go anyplace terrible. We . . ."
"She took you to lunch too, didn't she?" she demanded, her eyes hardened to rivet on me.
"Yes," I said. Something hard and heavy grew in my chest, making it ache.
"What if you had gotten sick from the food? Who do you think would be blamed? We would be blamed," she replied, answering her own question. "Why, we could even be sued by your parents!"
"It wasn't a dirty little restaurant. It was—"
"That's not the point now, is it?" She sat back again and fixed her gaze on me with those cold steel eyes. "I know your kind," she said disdainfully.
Daring her scorn, I fired back: "Why do you keep saying things like that? I'm
not a 'kind.' I'm a person, an individual, just like anyone else who attends this school."
She laughed. "Hardly," she said. "You are the only girl with a rather depraved background. Not one of my other girls has a blemish on her family history. In fact, over eighty percent of the girls in this school come from families that can trace their lineage back to one of the hundred Filles a la Cassette or 'Casket Girls' who were originally brought to Louisiana."
"My father can trace his lineage back to them too," I said, even though I didn't place any value on such a thing.
"But your mother was a Cajun. Why, she was probably of questionable mixed blood. No," she continued, shaking her head, "I know your kind, your type. Your bad behavior is more insidious, subtle. You learn quickly who are the most vulnerable, who have certain weaknesses, and you play to those weaknesses, like some sort of swamp parasite," she added. My face flushed so hot I thought the top of my head would blow off. But before I could respond, she added what I realized was her real reason for calling me in.
"Just like you somehow managed to take advantage of my poor cousin Louis and get yourself a dinner invitation to my aunt's home."
The blood started to drain from my face.
"That's not true," I said.
"Not true?" She smiled coyly. "Many young women have dreamed of winning Louis's heart and becoming the one who would inherit this vast fortune, this school, all this property. A young blind man is hardly a catch otherwise, is he? But he is vulnerable. That's why we have been so careful about who he has as company up to this point.
"Unfortunately, you managed to make an impression on him without my aunt's knowledge, but don't think anything will come of it," she warned.
"That was never my intention. I didn't even want to go to dinner at the mansion," I added. She widened her eyes with surprise, her lips curled in a skeptical smile. "I didn't, but I felt sorry for Louis and . . . ″
"You felt sorry for Louis? You?" She laughed coldly. "Don't worry about Louis," she said. "He'll be just fine."
"No he won't. It's wrong to keep him encased in that house like a caterpillar in a cocoon. He needs to meet people . . . especially young women and—"
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