Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  He watched her pick up an engraved silver knife and cut into the king cake, watched her lick purple icing off her fingers, and heard her teasing her friends about who would get the piece with the china baby doll and be crowned king or queen for the day. He hadn't realized he'd come up to the parlor's open doors for a better look at her until she glanced up and her gaze met his. They stared at each other long enough for a flush of color to rise in her cheeks, and then she had looked down, veiling her eyes with her eyelashes. Her small smile had lingered for a moment, though.

  She was used to being admired, he thought, used to being wanted. That she was supposed to be untouchable and not for him just made him want her more.

  The next time he saw her it was across a bourré table in the back room of a Bourbon Street saloon. She and her uptown boyfriend had left their Mardi Gras ball to come slumming, looking for excitement. Rourke had been there for the game and the money he could win if he was lucky, and good.

  She stood at her boyfriend's shoulder, still wearing her fancy ball gown, watching Rourke deal the cards, her face flushed, her eyes looking a little scared, for she was way out of her debutante depth in this place and she knew it. Then she looked up, and their gazes met the way they had in her father's house, and he knew then that he would have her and soon.

  A month after that bourré game in the Pink Zebra, they were married. One year and a baby later, she was dead.

  Daman Rourke was leaning against the mahogany bar, resting on his elbows, with the heel of one alligator shoe hooked on the brass rail, and watching the girls dance the Black Bottom. He hadn't been here since Jo had died, but he realized now he hadn't needed to stay away. The memories living in this sheik and sheba playland weren't his.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Miss Fleurie making her way toward him through the crowd. Her beaded and spangled dress was the color of the painted stripes on the zebras.

  She leaned into him close, kissing him full on the mouth. “I hope you brought along your balls with you tonight, sugar. 'Cause scared money never wins.”

  She motioned to the bartender, who poured two glasses of champagne from a bottle with a French label. She took a delicate sip then cocked her head, arching one finely plucked eyebrow. “You aren't drinking?”

  “I'm saving myself.”

  Her head fell back in laughter, brass-shaded lamplight burnishing her muscular throat. “Oooh. And here Miss Fleurie hasn't even showed her teeth yet.”

  She drank down her champagne in two swallows and picked up the glass she'd had poured for Rourke. Her gaze, full of wry amusement, went to one of the nearby tables, where a flapper had just dropped a pickled cherry down her own dress, and her sheik was trying to rescue it without using his hands. Her friends were all shrieking and laughing over her daring. Her face was flushed as red as the cherry from too many Manhattans, and from the feel of the boy's lips and tongue on her bare skin.

  Miss Fleurie finished off the champagne and picked up the bottle. “The poor pathetic, frenetic things,” she said. “Let's show them how the game is supposed to be played.”

  The game of bourré has a fearsome reputation, because if you keep losing, you can end up losing so big. It is a cutthroat game, and to be really good at it, you have to know no limit and no fear, and you have to have no stopping place.

  It was a game best played with at least five people, and Miss Fleurie had no trouble enticing three uptown boys whose daddies had deep pockets to round out the table. The table was nothing special, just cheap pine covered with faded green felt, and the chairs around it were rawhide-seat Cajun chairs. A tin lamp hung suspended over the table from an old anchor chain.

  They each anted up twenty dollars, and Miss Fleurie dealt five cards down, one at a time, to each player, and turned up her own fifth card to determine the trump suit: a five of clubs. One of the uptown boys bowed out right then, but the others stayed and the betting began. Rourke threw away a non-trump ace—a move few players were either brave enough or knowledgeable enough to do—and got lucky by drawing a trump card in exchange. Since Miss Fleurie had drawn two cards herself, he made another risky move by leading with his highest trump, a queen, hoping to flush out her only trump early. The gamble paid off, and he bourréd her on the first hand. Now she would have to fill the pot for the next game herself, covering everyone's ante and bets equal to the last hand played. While Rourke had just become seven hundred dollars richer.

  He could lose big himself on the very next hand, though, and so Miss Fleurie laughed, for it might be one in the morning on Bourbon Street, but the night was still young, and her blood, like his, Rourke thought, was flying high.

  “Oooh, baby,” she cooed, pursing her lips at him in a mock kiss. “I knew you were going to be good, but nobody told me just how good.”

  Early morning mist crept along the narrow cobbled streets. Daman Rourke's heels struck against stone, grating raw against his jittering nerves. He never felt fear during a game, but afterward it would take him hours to come down.

  He walked to Jackson Square and sat on a bench beneath the banana trees. He braced his elbows on his spread thighs and bent over, covering his face with his hands. His face felt rough and tired and sore, as if the bones had been bruised.

  He had won nearly ten thousand dollars and a name from Miss Fleurie.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  CHARLES ST. CLAIRE HAD BEEN MARRIED TO BELLE'S sister for a month when he came around to Esplanade Avenue calling on them that first time.

  Mama was in bed with one of her sick headaches, and so Belle was left to entertain him alone. She hadn't much to offer him, only effervescent lemon, but he said that would be just fine. She felt strange going back into the kitchen to stir up the citric-acid crystals and chip some ice. All fluttery inside, as if she'd swallowed a mouthful of butterflies.

  She didn't remember him much from when they were children. It was odd, now that she thought about it, that after Julius had proved such a disappointment, she hadn't set her cap for Charles. Why, she'd hardly ever thought of him. Julius was always coming around to moon over Remy, but they'd never seen much of Charles. The St. Claires as a family, although distantly related, were always a bit standoffish because of the Scandal and that old business about the duel, and anyway, Charles had always struck her as a rude and sullen boy. She wondered now, though, if perhaps she had misjudged him.

  When she returned to the parlor with the effervescent lemon, she blushed to see that he was looking at the painting of Sans Souci that Mama had framed and hung above the mantel. “Remy must be so happy to be living there with you now,” she said, mostly for lack of anything better. “She always did so love that house.”

  He startled her by laughing. “Dear Belle, dear genuine Belle. I notice how you don't claim that she always so loved me, and you would be right in your surmise of what each of us is getting out of this marriage. Your sister has Sans Souci, and I am the proud owner of the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  Belle didn't understand him, how he could say such a thing and laugh. She didn't know what to say to him, so she offered a small, tremulous smile. The smile he gave back to her was sweet and warm and touched her in all her empty places.

  He came calling once or twice a week after that. Sometimes they would sit in the parlor with Mama, and it was sweetly hurtful for Belle to see how her mother, so starved for the simple companionship of another living presence in her house, would open up like a tulip in the sun under his easy compliments and smiles. Usually, though, Belle would entertain Charles St. Claire alone in the garden, and as she became more used to his presence, she would sometimes work while they talked. Or rather he did the talking and she mostly listened.

  She thought there was a wound he carried around deep inside him that he showed to no one. She could catch glimpses of it sometimes, in the way he held himself as if he hurt all over when he spoke of certain things: his memories of growing up at Sans Souci, and of Julius shooting himself with that old French revolver
all those years ago. Yet she thought the pain in him went beyond those things to something unnamed and unacknowledged, an amorphous shadow that went unseen and unheard even by himself.

  He said to her once, “For so long things just happened to me, without any thought on my part, or will, or desire, and I don't care anymore, I just don't care.” She wondered if the world must seem for him as it was for her, like a house empty of people, of furniture, of light and life, even of memories. She wondered if, like her, he found himself wandering from room to room in that dark house with no sound in his wake, no air disturbed.

  She began to live for those hours in the garden, and life stopped on the days he didn't come. Time became an interlude between when she had seen him and when she would see him again.

  One day in May, when she was kneeling on the ground planting some chrysanthemums in a clay pot, she stood up too fast and he was there, looping his arm around her waist to steady her, and she wanted to stop breathing. She knew they were wrong, her feelings, but they were there and she was permitting them to stay. He was the someday she had been waiting for the whole of her life. Or not so much him as the feelings he evoked in her.

  He kept his arm around her waist, although he should not have, and he said, “You need to get out more often, Belle. Why don't I take you to lunch at Antoine's tomorrow? Would you like that?” And just like that it was done.

  She had been waiting for this moment ever since he'd started to come around, waiting for the moment without knowing she was waiting, and at some point the waiting had turned into something deeper, and now the waiting was over. It was done.

  He took her to Antoine's, and they went through the back entrance, the one for gentlemen entertaining ladies they didn't want to be seen with. She knew then for certain what he meant to do and she thought once again, It is done.

  They sat in a red leather booth, so close she could feel her leg against his and smell his shaving cream. He dropped a raw oyster into a glass of bourbon. It is an aphrodisiac, he told her, smiling, and she felt sophisticated and naughty just hearing the word. She was being reshaped by him, invented anew.

  Afterward, they walked through the narrow streets of the Quarter in the rain, sharing an umbrella. She wondered if the house he was taking her to was like her daddy's Conti Street house, come down to him from fathers to sons, from the days of plaçage. She wasn't going to feel bad about Remy, she wasn't going to think about this man being her sister's husband. Remy had taken Julius from her, and then Remy had stolen all her dreams. It was only fair that she have something of Remy's in return.

  They entered a courtyard through an iron gate, passing under a domed brick walkway. She could smell the river and the damp brick walls, and the molding pecan husks that had fallen from the trees last fall. They climbed the stairs to the top flat of a converted porte-cochere townhouse, and no sooner did the door close with a whisper behind them than he had taken her into his arms.

  They kissed and she felt the brush of his cheek, a little rough, and she smelled his warm neck.

  “Your hair smells like rain,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, her voice breathy, frightened. “Well, it's raining.”

  He laughed and kissed her again, his mouth on hers, and she felt too much to stop now. So deep inside was the feeling that there was nothing to do but give in to it.

  She was twenty-eight years old and yet she knew nothing of what to expect—Mama had never been able to mention the word pregnant above a whisper, and she certainly had never spoken of what went on between a man and a woman in bed. After it was over, he held her and stroked her hair and told her he was sorry, but it always hurt a girl her first time.

  He got up then, and slipped on his trousers and a paisley silk dressing gown. He lit a cigarette and went out on the balcony and leaned his elbows on the railing. It had stopped raining.

  She watched him smoke. The sheets were damp, from the rain in the air and from them, from what they had done. The sheets smelled of the patchouli oil he wore in his hair, and of something earthy that reminded her of the loamy dirt in her garden.

  I have a lover, she thought, and she felt joy. Perfect joy.

  She expected him to call around to the house the next day, but he didn't come and didn't come and didn't come. A hysteria grew inside her, like steam trapped in a bottle.

  After two weeks she could bear it no longer. She dressed in the clothes she had bought for him: a green silk crepe dress with a shawl collar, snakeskin shoes. She had got herself a gray cloche hat because it was the style, but she couldn't get it to sit right on her head. It was her long hair, which had to be pinned up and wouldn't fit underneath. She would never cut her hair, though. Hadn't he told her how he didn't like these latest fashions of bobbed hair and flat chests that made women look like boys?

  She took the streetcar down to the Quarter. It was raining again, teeming so hard the streets were flooded in places, overflowing the low brick banquettes and running into shops, lapping at the stoops of the Creole cottages. Rain poured down gutters, along the galleries, and shot in waterfalls off the ends of the sloping roofs. The wet palms and branches of the pecan trees flapped in the wind.

  MORTAL SINS 343

  Not until she was knocking on the door to the flat, soaked and trembling like a half-drowned cat, did it occur to her that there was no earthly reason for her to have thought he would be here, in this place, at this moment. So she was surprised when the door opened right up, as if he'd been expecting her.

  Opened to the kind of silence that falls after a funeral bell has stopped tolling.

  She started to speak, but he held up his hand. “I don't know what has possessed you to drop by uninvited,” he said in a voice that should have matched the cruelty of his words, but did not. “I'm afraid, though, that I must ask you to leave. I am expecting company.”

  She tried to breathe, but her lungs felt thick and wet. “I-I'm sorry,” she said. “But I…You haven't been 'round in a while and I…” Only he was already closing the door and there was something terrible about his expression in the uncertain light. There was no sorrow in it, or pain, or regret. There was nothing on his face at all.

  The next thing she knew she was standing in the middle of her garden with the rain cutting her hands and face.

  She fell to her knees in the mud and began to rip up by the roots all the flowers so lovingly planted and tended over the years, ripped and ripped, and she thought how sorry they would be, he and Remy. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

  She opened her mouth, and the scream inside filled it so she couldn't breathe, and so she tried to rip it out, rip out the scream, only it wouldn't come, and after a time she shut her mouth and leaned back on her heels with her muddy hands resting in her lap and the rain still coming down, and she had the most horrifying thought that this, this one moment out of all her life, was all there would ever be.

  Belle had been talking for a long time now, and crying, and so she'd grown hoarse. She knelt in the dirt, and her hands worked the flower bed along the front of the house she shared with her mama, the mangled, savaged bed, digging deeper and deeper into the dirt, until her arms were buried in it up to her elbows.

  “Yet you went back to him,” Daman Rourke said softly. “Last Tuesday evening. The day he was killed.”

  Belle pulled her hands out of the wet earth to pound it with her fists. “You are mistaken, I'm afraid. Charlie was hateful to me. Hateful. I never wanted to see him again.”

  Rourke was sitting next to her, on the bottom two steps of the gallery, although still within the shade cast by the roof. It was barely eight in the morning, but the air was already hot and breathless and dense with humidity. He hadn't had time to go home for a shower and shave after the bourré game, and he'd had no sleep, no sleep for years, it seemed. His mouth felt cottony, his body aching and battered.

  “It rained hard that evening, so hard your umbrellas were still a little wet the next day,” he said, his voice gentle still. He had his forearms braced o
n his spread knees and was running the brim of his hat through his hands, as if he had only a small concern with what the woman who knelt in the flower bed was saying. He wasn't even looking at her. “Your mama said y'all had gone to church, but my partner asked your priest if you'd been to Mass that evening and he said you hadn't.” Rourke's head came up, then, and his eyes found hers. His smile was full of charm, a little teasing. “It's an awfully bad sin to lie about something so sacred as going to Mass.”

  Her mouth parted, and the skin around her eyes and nostrils went white. He thought she would cry out or rage at him, but she laughed instead. The laughter surprised him, for the wildness he heard in it, yet at the same time it gave her face a dreamy look, showing him flashes of the girl she once had been.

  “Oh, I know what you're thinkin'.” She pushed away sweaty hanks of her hair, leaving behind a smudge of mud on her forehead. The earth she'd turned up had a raw, damp odor, like an old cellar. “I slept with my own sister's husband. Lordy, how much worse a sin can there be? Well, there's worse. Oh, worse, worse, worse.” She thrust her hands hard and deep back into the earth, then pulled them out again, thrust and pulled, thrust and pulled. “It's worse, don't you think, to be an unmarried old maid who's going to have a baby?”

  Out on the avenue the vegetable man was making his morning rounds, his donkey's hooves clip-clopping on the pavement, his scale jingle-jangling, singing, “Try my okra and my beans, lay-dee.”

  A baby.

  A flock of mockingbirds flew into the yard to feed on the insects in the grass. She'd planted a gay bouquet of flowers, had Belle: white jasmine and lavender wisteria, yellow and red hibiscus, blue and pink hydrangeas.

  A baby. Miss Fleurie had said nothing about a baby, but perhaps she hadn't known. Perhaps Charles St. Claire hadn't known himself until the night he was killed.