It disturbed her, the shack, frightened her, and yet she would lose herself sometimes in looking at it when she made her pilgrimages, and the family thought her peculiar as it was.
That is Livia's girl for you. Always worrying her poor head over that old tale.
Livia's girl. She wasn't Heloise so much as she was Livia's girl, because in New Orleans when you ask about a girl's family, you ask first about her mama. Who is your mama? Oh, you're Livia's girl. In New Orleans a girl never loses her maiden name, not to those who know her. The name she is born under is hers for life, and for Heloise it hadn't mattered anyway, for she was destined to marry another Lelourie.
Reynard Lelourie. She had known him forever. Their mamas had been best friends from the cradle, gone to school together at Madame Picard's, and married in a double wedding to two boys who were cousins. Lelouries. When Heloise had been christened at St. Stephen's it had been in the white linen gown dripping with Irish lace that had been worn by Reynard a year before.
It had been what their mamas wanted, their marriage, and it never occurred to either one of them that they might have wanted something different for themselves. For Heloise, such an eventuality was impossible—her heart would have taken her to the ends of the earth for Reynard. She loved him, both for himself and because he was grandson to Henri Lelourie, whose sad story had so fascinated her as a child.
Heloise was the one who had been born with the Lelourie coloring, the blond hair and gray eyes—like stones under water, Reynard had told her once. His own eyes were dark, and heavy with deep blue moods that made him seem romantic. She never had any thought that the blue moods might have something to do with her.
Even knowing him all her life had not prepared her, though, for how much she came to love him after they were married. She hadn't been prepared for how her body could burn, how her heart could shiver. She pruned the roses in their garden and she loved him. She knelt on the prie-dieu for evening prayers and she loved him. She tatted a lace cap for their coming baby and she loved him. He was so solicitous when she became with child. I won't bother you, he said, and she thought, in spite of her disappointment, Of course he won't for the Lelouries have always been gentlemen when it came to things like that, and she loved him.
Heloise suffered from the Lelourie affliction—she was delicate down below. You have a descending womb, her mama said. Your daddy's mama suffered from it terribly, as you know, and her poor mama, she died from it. Yes, Heloise thought, the baby growing inside of her was surely killing her. One morning she would retch up the baby along with her descending womb, and then she would die.
She didn't learn about the Irish woman until after the accouchement. The baby had been so long and hard in coming, and it hadn't been how she imagined it would be. The baby looked like a red and wrinkled old pod, and when they put it in her arms she felt nothing for it, nothing. All she felt was tired and heavy all over, in her body and her heart, and then she heard the whispering.
She's Irish. And married herself, so they say. But you know how these little flings never last for long. A man has his urges, and at least he won't be bothering poor Heloise for yet a while.
She never spoke of it to him. She held her head up proud and she lived with it in silence. When she wept it was always alone, and each time she checked her handkerchief to see if they were tears of blood. She lived with it for two years, lived with it through the sickness of another pregnancy, the hard birth of another daughter. Lying in bed, weak and feverish, she dreamed of herself and her two daughters walking along the broad gray boards of the gallery at Sans Souci.
When she opened her eyes, it was to see her husband's face looking down at her. He was sitting with his hands clasped and dangling between his spread knees. His shoulders were hunched a little, and that made him look oddly vulnerable, like a small boy who is about to be punished. It occurred to her that between them there had always been too much held in, too much unacknowledged regret and silent brooding. An inbreeding of the soul.
Yet even as she thought this, he stood up and turned away from her, was speaking. About the Irish woman. She had a name, the woman. Maeve. It was shocking to hear that name on her husband's lips, like ripping the bandage off a bleeding, putrefying wound.
The woman, Maeve, had left her husband and children. He had set her up in the house on Conti Street, and now he was going to live with her there. Not visit with her as he had been doing two or three times a week. No, they would live as husband and wife, Reynard and that woman. Maeve. Even though that was impossible, for she was his wife. She was Heloise Lelourie, Reynard's wife, Livia's girl.
“Why?” she said, and the word seemed to echo in the room as if she had screamed it.
She watched tears form in his eyes and fall like tiny chips of broken crystal. She couldn't tell if his pain was real. He could weep so easily, and over the smallest things. She had known him to shed tears over the death of the diva in an opera. Yet he could kill a woman's heart without remorse and so simply, just by shutting her out of his life.
He spread his hands, a helpless gesture. “I want her.”
Something tore loose inside Heloise then. She could feel it bleeding, leaking her life's blood into her chest. “You have her,” she said, and she would have shouted the words if she'd had the strength, even though ladies never shouted. “Nights, I have lain in this bed waiting for you to come to me, when instead you have gone to her. Evenings, I have sat downstairs at your table, staring at an empty chair. I have given you my…my…” What had she given him? Only her heart, her dreams, the whole of what she was, and all that she might have been. “What more do you want of me? What more can I possibly give you?”
He had turned his face away from her, but now he turned it back again. It was wet with tears, his face, shining in the weak winter sunlight that came through the window. Yet there was a hardness behind his eyes, a purpose.
“You don't understand,” he said. “I don't want you.”
There could be no divorce, of course. That went without saying. He left and she tried to tell herself that in spirit he had left long ago. You live with it, she told herself that as well. You just go on living with it. There is no shame so awful that couldn't be borne if God wills it.
She went to Mass, she lit candles before the statues of the Virgin Mary and St. Michael, keeper of families. She setup an altar on her black walnut sideboard, and in the flickering light of vigil candles, she prayed for the strength to bear it. In moments of weakness, in her many moments of weakness, she prayed for Reynard to fall inlove withher again. Then one day it came to her, not with a sudden thunderclap of thought, but rather in a slow awakening:
He has never loved me.
Still, she taught Remy, and later Belle, how to make pralines because that was his favorite thing, and she sent their girls to him bearing sweet gifts. Every holiday and birthday and special occasion, she sent them, and each time she hoped that shame or guilt or duty would bring him back to her. It stopped mattering anymore whether he loved her; she wanted him back.
She wasn't sure how it happened that over the years her prayers changed, how her purpose changed. How she went from praying that God would bring her husband into the light to praying that God would leave him to wallow in the misery of the dark. No, more than that. She wanted him to suffer as she had suffered, she wanted him to know the gnawing ache of loneliness that comes from a life wasted, a heart bled empty. She wanted him to awaken screaming in the night from a soul-pain that couldn't be healed or cut out or soothed by anything but death.
Then one day even those bitter prayers ceased to be enough.
So she went to Mamma Rae, the voodooienne, who gave her some love beans. She strung most of the beans into a rosary that morning, and that evening she and the girls made up a batch of pralines because tomorrow was their daddy's birthday.
And while she stirred all the nuts into the boiling sugar, Heloise prayed for death. First for his, and then for hers.
Chapter Ninet
een
FROM THE NEW ORLEANSMORNING TRIBUNE,EXTRA edition, Friday, July 15, 1927:
NEW CRIMES, OLD SCANDALS
By Wylie T. Jones
Another day draws to a close and still no arrest has been made for the Tuesday night murder of Mr. Charles St. Claire, Esq.
The floor and walls of the old slave shack on Sans Souci have been scrubbed down hard with lye soap and water, and yet the stains remain. As well they should, for they stand as testimonial that a grievous crime was committed there and yet justice remains unserved. As the evidence mounts against Mr. St. Claire's wife, movie actress Remy Lelourie, still the police dawdle in carrying out their duty.
What do they fear? Remy Lelourie is young and beautiful, and adored the world over, but justice ought to be deaf. Justice ought to be blind. Is it the scandal they fear—the shame of having one of “our own” held up to the world as a murderess?
Yet shame and scandal have never been strangers in the life of this idol of the silver screen. The wild and sordid Hollywood parties, the affairs with her leading men, the extravagant waste of her wealth and youth and beauty have all been recorded over the years in the pages of countless newspapers and slick magazines. Even her days as an innocent child here in New Orleans were tarred by the brush of scandal, when her father deserted home and family to live openly in sin with a married woman, a woman who deserted her own husband and children in turn. They say the sins of the father ought not to be visited upon the children, and apparently homicide detective Lieutenant Daman Rourke agrees, for it was his own mother who became the paramour of Mr. Lelourie.
Perhaps Lt. Rourke can explain, then, why Mr. Charles St. Claire's brutally mutilated body will be buried tomorrow for all eternity, while his slayer still walks the earth—beautiful, rich, famous, and free.
Bridget Mary Kinsella O'Mara lay in a black-lacquered casket in her mama's parlor. Vigil lights flickered on the mantel before a plaster statue of St. Michael, and a brace of candles draped with rosary beads burned at Bridey's head. At her feet rested an enormous wreath of white magnolia blossoms cut from a tree in the backyard and woven together by the loving hands of her mother and sister.
The two women had also draped black crepe-paper streamers over the mirror on the walnut sideboard and along the lintels of the doorways, and tied black crepe-paper bows around the doorknobs. As they'd worked they thought of all the friends and family who would be coming to the wake, to see the wreath and the house in mourning, and so they had wanted it all to seem just right for Bridey.
Doris Kinsella sat stiff-backed now in a chair next to her daughter's casket, her hands gripped together around a handkerchief to make a fist in her lap. She wasn't weeping; she would seem for long minutes not even to be breathing, but then she would draw in such a shuddering gasp of a breath that the crucifix she wore would jump on her breast.
She shook hands and accepted kisses on her cheek from those who came to offer condolences. An empty chair sat beside her. One at a time friends and family would come to fill it, speak to her, and then depart. They all took care to see that she wasn't left alone for long.
Her older daughter, Abby, passed around platters of cheese and soda bread and served tea and coffee and blackberry cordials to the women, who clustered in groups and talked about food and babies and all the rain they'd been having this summer and how it was rotting the roots of the flowers in their gardens. They waited until Bridey's sister had passed out of earshot before the gossip began to unfold in whisperings, like drapery.
It had to be a closed casket. They couldn't make her look right, the poor thing.
He was with her, at her house in the middle of the night, and y'all know what that means.
I still say that husband of hers didn't drown in no freak squall. He ran off with some juice-joint floozie, you mark my words.
Mmmmm-huh. And I wouldn't be surprised if he was the one come back to her house in the middle of the night tossing bombs. When he found out what all she's been up to with Daman Rourke while he was away.
The men had all drifted back through the bedroom and into the kitchen, where a beer bucket sat cooling in chipped ice in the sink and a plate of clay pipes and a bowl of tobacco had been set out on the table. The men dipped tin mugs into the bucket and passed around the flasks of hooch they'd brought along with them, and soon the air became thick with smoke and the malty smell of beer and whiskey.
In New Orleans no occasion, no matter how solemn, passed quietly, and Bridey's wake was no different. People surged through the open door of her mama's house on wings of speech, and were met with a flapping of shouts and exclamations and greetings. Yet when Daman Rourke entered, the noise slowed and died with barely a rustle. They didn't all stare exactly, for that would have been bad manners, but he felt the weight of their collective attention like a slap across his face.
His gaze went right to the casket, then sheered away. He so desperately didn't want to be here, but he'd had to come and so he concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other, to bring himself to Bridey's mama so that he could pay his respects and be gone.
Mrs. Kinsella had her whole attention focused on the handkerchief she was clutching in her lap. Too late he realized the man sitting in the chair next to her, holding her hand and speaking gently into her ear, was Casey Maguire.
As had happened yesterday in the diner, Rourke felt as if the tissue of his self were being torn, twisted between his certainty that Maguire's mind and will had been behind the lob of the grenade that took Bridey's life and an almost desperate need to be proven otherwise.
This evening, though, Maguire's face showed him only grief and a certain wariness. Rourke stared at him for the space of two slow, hard heartbeats, and then his gaze went to the bent head of Bridey's mama. He was struck by how white was her scalp where it showed in the part of her dark red hair.
She looked up as he came to stand before her, but she said nothing. Grief had dragged at her eyes and blanched her skin gray, like coal that has been burned to soot.
He knew if he tried to kiss her cheek she would probably spit in his face. He wasn't sure she would even accept his hand, and so he decided at the last moment to spare them both by not offering it.
He had to say something, though. “Mrs. Kinsella,” he began, but he was unable to find more words. His thoughts kept getting tangled and disconnected, and there weren't words for this, anyway. He could tell her he was bruised and bleeding and broken with guilt and grief, and for her it would never be enough.
He felt Casey Maguire's pale eyes burning into the side of his neck, while Bridey's mother looked up at him, out of tear-sodden eyes that were unforgiving. She would never betray bad manners by asking him to leave her house, but her eyes told him how much she wanted to.
He turned away from her and almost knocked into Bridey's casket, and he had to grab the candelabra to keep it from falling over. The cloying sweetness of the magnolias caught at his throat.
He wanted to leave the parlor and the casket, but it was too soon to go back out the front door, and the kitchen was full of his fellow cops. He could see Roibin Doherty through the sliding double doors. The aging sergeant was talking loudly, laughing and gesturing with his hand like an umpire calling a batter out on strikes. He wore a big piece of sticking plaster on his nose, and as Rourke watched he hooked one hip on the table and tucked into a plate of corn-bread and cabbage. For once the man didn't look half in the bag, but Rourke still wasn't going near him.
He went instead to the fireplace mantel with its makeshift altar. St. Michael, who was supposed to have kept the family safe, had done a piss-poor job of it.
The saint's statue seemed to be melting before his eyes, dissolving into a pool of black blood. Something let go inside of him, and he was floating away again. He told himself it must be the wine he'd had earlier that evening. Mamma Rae's mischief. He felt as though he were dead himself, one of the walking dead. As if all his bones, like St. Michael's, had dissolved and his blood had turned f
oul.
Someone touched his arm and he turned slowly, for he was still dizzy and dazed, to look down into red-rimmed, swollen gray eyes. The woman who looked back at him was both someone he knew and a stranger. A slightly older, more worn down version of Bridey.
“Abby,” he said, trying to get hold of himself, but his words still kept getting lost somewhere.
She was holding a glass of blackberry cordial in a hand that was chapped red from housework and mothering. She was married to a bricklayer and had five children and lived two doors down in an eastlake shotgun double identical to this one.
She saw where he was looking and tilted the wineglass in his direction. “Would you like some?”
“No,” Rourke said, unable to keep himself from shuddering. “I'm…No, thank you.”
Her mouth trembled, trying to smile. “Well, it is ghastly.” She took a sip anyway. “I was just telling my cousin Joyce from Slidell? I was telling her about that pet alligator you used to have when we were kids. How you and Bridey once took it for a walk on a leash down St. Charles and like to've scared all the rich ol' biddies there half to death. Whatever did happen to that gator?”
“I took it out to the swamp after that and let it go.”
He was pleased that he'd finally gotten out a whole, coherent sentence. Now he wanted very much to leave.
He tried to make a polite sideways shuffle, but she stopped him by touching his arm, although she let go as soon as she felt him shudder again.
“Day,” she said. “Mama hasn't been herself since Daddy died—”
“Don't.” He drew in a deep breath. “Don't feel you need to apologize for something that needs no excusing. Your mama's right to feel about me as she does. I should've left Bridey alone.”
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