by Lynn Shurr
Chapter Sixteen
The interval between Christmas and Thanksgiving is simply too brief when everything must be put in order before a vacation. Laura worked frantically at the library completing the vacation schedules and leaving instructions with the staff on how to conduct the children’s Christmas party, her own inspiration that she felt guilty about abandoning to others. Determined not to spend this holiday among strangers, she planned to head home to be with her nice, normal family back in Pennsylvania.
At night, she wrapped gifts in her room. Really, the presents were only tokens since she’d stretched her finances to replace her wardrobe and make the rent she insisted on paying to the LeBlancs over Robert’s protests. She did not want to owe him anything. Bad enough he still looked at her with those longing, bedroom eyes despite their quarrel. Mrs. Domengeaux’s insurance settlement seemed a very long time in coming. That good woman had promised Laura a share for her lost furnishings. Perhaps, the adjuster had heard rumors about the source of the fire.
So, Dad and her brother-in-law got the alligator tooth keychains from the Cajun Corner, and her nephew and niece would have to make do with the voodoo dolls stuffed with Spanish moss and supplied with thorns for sticking. Undoubtedly, they’d name the dolls after a teacher or each other and try them out. At least, the framed family trees for Cissy and Mom looked impressive. She begged a few of Pearl’s best recipes, the ones not calling for too much seafood or pepper sauce, in order to have something else to share.
Actually, she’d spent more on the LeBlanc family than on her own. The binding of the typed diary had been more expensive than she’d reckoned. Since Angelle incessantly asked for money, she put twenty dollars inside a hollow Victorian Christmas ornament for the child. Twenty dollars, too much to be giving a seven-year-old who would have been content with five, but Laura recognized it as guilt money, hating to leave the child in case her deranged mother decided to visit again.
For Pearl who, although quiet and sometimes hostile, often put flowers in her room or snatched up laundry before Laura could do it for herself, a gold-plated stickpin with a small cultured pearl on the end seemed appropriate. She’d gotten Robert LeBlanc the most impersonal gift she could conjure, a year’s subscription to American Cattleman magazine. Hopefully, the postcard announcing the present wouldn’t arrive until she was long on her way to Pennsylvania.
When she completed her wrapping, Laura curled up with the Montleon diaries, which increased in relevancy and became less quaint in tone with each passing year. The year 1858 brought a cholera epidemic to the hot, lowlying plantation lands. The disease took many of the slaves, Caroline’s youngest son, and an unborn child aborted with the cramping symptoms of the illness.
In a hand still shaking with weakness, the mistress wrote, “In many ways we are still blessed. Papa Aurelien lives though he is very weak. My strength is returning, and I am able to conduct business from my bed. Charles and Catherine seem free of permanent damage, and my husband, who is away visiting in a healthier clime, is entirely untouched. Still, I wonder if the taking of little Gus and the unborn one, also a male child, is a punishment for my past sin. Tante Inez says my illness has rendered me foolish. Women have always done what must be done, and Mother Mary forgives them, says she. I pray that is so.”
In 1859, Caroline wrote with irritation of the impending birth of her next child. “Although I am in my eighth month and the heat of the summer weighs on me, I am expected to tend to those in the quarters, though Tante Inez and her apprentices can do as well without me. The women who come to sit with me know Adrien came home for the holiday season, but where is he now? I wish I had the courage to deny this birth, but I fear for my immortal soul. God help me.”
Of the actual birth of her second daughter, the diarist said, “The child was small and the labor easy. I was able to return to my duties rapidly. This daughter is sweet and fair and unlike her quarrelsome dark brother and sister. I will call her Felice in hope that joy will come to her and that she absorbed none of my bitterness in the womb.” Caroline mentioned no favorite sister by that same name.
The year 1861 brought the war to Chateau Camille. Caroline commented acidly, “All the talk is of war, but Adrien merely paints. His obsession is to complete an informal portrait of myself and the children before he leaves. Hardly can I see my husband as a soldier. He has always been as he is now, an artist and a lover of women. As he paints, he says he will take no side in a war over slavery. I understand the evil of our peculiar institution, but how will we plant the cane that makes our fortune without their labor, I ask him. Do not plant he says and paints on.”
Again avoiding the LeBlanc family, Laura kept to her room and continued reading the diary for 1861, completing it on the same evening she finished her packing for her holiday trip back north. Lying in Caroline’s marriage bed with the cathedral window quilt pulled up to her chin, Laura gazed at the metal bar once used to draw the now vanished mosquito netting over the occupant and contemplated the timelessness of anger and revenge. She thumbed the diary to pages underscoring her thoughts.
“Adrien has taken ship, not with the grand Confederate navy, but to Paris, the one thing denied him by his adoring mama. Says he, let the Confederacy pursue its dreams while I pursue mine. I asked if he ever considered the dreams of his wife. Adrien replied that I already had my dream and should continue to live it. Less glibly, he made the expected protestations of the trip being too dangerous for a woman and young children. He is taking our portrait with him so we will be with him always.
“I preferred his more honest first statement. Chateau Camille is my dream. Even at that age when a new silk gown meant more to me than the slavery question, I knew I married Adrien not for love, but for this plantation. What could be more ideal, I felt, than a husband who cared nothing for his land, an only child with aged parents who would leave the running of the place to me most gladly. At last, I would no longer be secondary to my three brothers or at the beck and call of a demanding mother and eight younger sisters whose ranks Mama added to with each passing year. Adrien, of course, wanted to be relieved of his responsibilities by a strong woman like old Camille and found her in me. I have relieved him for so long in so many ways it should not amaze me that he feels no responsibility toward myself or the children.”
Bitter passage followed bitter passage. “And now I find that Adrien has left another souvenir of his lust beneath my skirts. I called for Tante Inez and demanded her special services again. She brought her elixir once more. This time my partner in sin rolled her yellowed eyes and said she is not sure Mother Mary forgives the taking of a life in anger but only those taken out of necessity. I sent that pandering old darkie from the room and drank my wine of gall, a last toast to Adrien LeBlanc. I drank it to the final drop, far more than Tante Inez prescribed, but it will be, as is my hope, doubly effective. I feel intensely ill.”
The diary did not resume for nearly a month. Then, a chastened Caroline wrote, “I shall never act out of anger and revenge again. I am thankful I was too weak to confess when the priest came to administer last rites. As he did so, my thoughts dwelt on how to avoid the Kingdom of Heaven or the eternity of Hell and stay on this earth to rear my living children. Papa Aurelien, meaning well, made Charles and Catherine watch by my ‘deathbed.’ He spared only Felice due to her tender years. Poor children, having to sit in a room reeking from the bloody rags that staunched my hemorrhage in the heat of midsummer. Hearing their prayers kept me on this earth. For them, I recovered.”
Caroline’s serenity proved momentary. “What is this folly!” I asked Papa Aurelien. He replied he felt compelled by his honor to take Adrien’s place at the front defending our homeland. I told him honor is nearly as worthless as revenge, but he looked upon me sternly and said women know nothing of honor. He commended Chateau Camille and his grandchildren into my care and rode off to die.
“Christmas—1861. No gifts for the children. The package of luxuries promised in Adrien’s letter has
not arrived, but I place no blame, both the war and my esteemed husband being equally unreliable. How I wish my prediction regarding Papa Aurelien had not come true. It erred only in the cause of his passing. Old and feeble as he was, camp fever took him quickly and he never saw a day of battle. Is the Confederacy so desperate they would retain a soldier who needed aid to dismount his horse? Neighbors have come to express their sympathy but do not linger at the home of a man who fled to France. I face the New Year alone.”
Laura, unable to sleep before her trip, delved into the year 1862. The entries were far spaced and sketchy as if Caroline LeBlanc had become too exhausted to write in the evenings. Her energies consumed by her labors, the diary read like a chronicle of the times rather than an outlet for her emotions. “I have erected looms and found an ancient Acadian woman to instruct both the servants and myself in the craft of weaving. We must prove to be apt students, or the Negroes will be in rags shortly. Imagine half a state growing cotton with no mills to spin it, and you will be able to envision a Confederacy at war with no means to make boots for their soldiers. Mon Dieu, men are so impractical!
“New Orleans has fallen, and Yankee gunboats are on the river. The Negroes are beginning to disappear in the night, going down river to join their saviors, no doubt. Well, that makes only 299 pairs of trousers to cut and sew as there are no able-bodied men to bring back the runaways. The Conscription Act has snapped up even Charles’ tutor, weak-eyed and knock-kneed though he was. How desperate the Confederacy has become! I will have to undertake my son’s education—though I do not know when I will find the time.
“I have managed wheaten loaves for Christmas dinner, a true triumph from a small amount of home-raised and milled grain. We are in no danger of starvation but are worn down by the monotony of cornbread, morning, noon, and night. As yet, we have not suffered the depredations of my family along the Mississippi. The Yankees are slow in coming to our little bayou. I have offered my kin sanctuary at the Chateau, but they decline to take hospitality at the home of one who has shirked his duty. Their sporadic letters come by the irregular mail boat or overland and bring naught but bad news. Brother Regis is dead in some skirmish that will be forgotten within months. Brother Armand is captured by the Yankees at Vicksburg. My foolish sisters, Lizette and Helene, have married in haste to soldiers who fill a uniform well—which seems to be their only criterion, though one, a Lieutenant James Wallace is said to have a plantation in Alabama. The youngest, Anne and Suzette, protest that by the time they are grown there will be no more men left in the Confederacy to marry. I believe they are right. All will be dead and buried in foreign places. Regis will never lie next to Felicite, Marguerite, and Marie, those barely remembered sisters lost in their infancy. Such morbid thoughts, but I know what 1863 will bring to Chateau Camille—the Union Army.”
Laura reached beneath the bed for another volume and pressed the catch, but this single book remained locked. The clasp appeared to be newer than the rest, its brass untarnished, its lock more sturdy than the usual diary security. Ah well, the hour grew late. She intended to rise before dawn and be on the road before the rest of the family woke up. Laura cushioned the old leather diary with underwear and packed it in her borrowed luggage in case the holiday offered some leisure reading time.
Restless all night, she rose in the dark and washed her face at the kitchen sink rather than use the bathroom at Robert’s end of the hall. She applied minimal makeup, tied her hair back and slipped into the comfortable slacks and shirt she liked to wear for traveling. Silently and almost furtively, she passed out of the front door and cursed the suitcase that bumped softly against the frame and the winter coat slung over one arm that caught on the knob.
As Laura eased the trunk of her car closed over her belongings, Pearl in a worn pink robe materialized on the front porch. Bearing a thermos and a lunch bag, the housekeeper silently placed her offerings next to the driver’s seat and before Laura could say her thank-yous, retreated into the house. Driving slowly toward the rising sun, she gazed at Chateau Camille framed in her rearview mirror. Another dark figure stood on the gallery. He raised a hand as if to catch her attention. The early light reflected off of a bit of red foil wrapping paper covering the small box he held. Laura did not stop. She turned her eyes to the road, followed the bayou, and then veered for the interstate and headed east.
Chapter Seventeen
Christmas in the bosom of her family turned out not to be as Laura pictured it fifteen-hundred miles away in Louisiana. Her mother escorted her relentlessly from relative to relative, even seeking out one decrepit great-aunt in a nursing home. The old woman blinked repeatedly while trying to place Laura in the family genealogy and finally wished “Lulu” all the best. More cognizant kin listened politely to Laura’s account of her new job and locale and redoubled their expressions of regret over David’s death. Everyone, including her own mother, said how nice that Laura had found something interesting to do until she remarried.
At least Sister Cynthia had a different attitude. She teased Laura about the mysterious man who owned Chateau Camille and answered the phone sometimes when her mother called. “He sounds tall, dark and handsome, Mom says.”
Laura tried to deny this. “I wouldn’t call my landlord mysterious exactly. Okay, maybe he is. I certainly don’t understand him. He is dark and possibly handsome in a swarthy sort of way, but definitely not tall. We aren’t together in any way at all.” Laura stepped unheeding into her sister’s trap.
“Well then, if you’re not involved with this southern gentleman, you should go to the New Year’s Eve party Don’s boss is giving. We’ll fix you up with this really fun salesman who recently got divorced. You’ll have a great time with Benny.”
Laura consoled herself by thinking she still had Christmas and a week after that to come up with an excuse not to go out with Benny, but Christmas day held its own little horrors. She warned everyone not to expect much from her and asked for nothing in return. Naturally, she received gifts costing twice as much as usual. Her parents had purchased a new set of luggage for her and enclosed a note hoping she would use the bags to come home more often. A present claiming to come from “Your Niece and Nephew, Jennifer and Jason,” contained dark brown leather driving gloves purchased from the best department store in the mall. The box from Cynthia and Don held a matching shoulder bag, soft, capacious and almost jet-set in quality. The most dreadful gift of all came in an envelope and brought out all the tears of obligation, embarrassment and anger Laura had been stifling—a check for $100,000, David’s death benefits.
“It’s been here for a while, but I just couldn’t risk mailing the check to you. Why don’t you put the money in the bank up here and let it draw interest until you decide what to do, Laura? More cash will come when the helicopter company settles. There, there, everything is going to be fine now.” Amazing how her mother could misinterpret emotions when she chose.
Laura endured the rest of the morning, accepting thanks for her inadequate gifts and helping to clean up of mounds of torn paper and discarded boxes. She pleaded a headache and went upstairs to lie down before dinner. Wanting desperately to escape into another life, she tried to open Caroline Montleon’s diary with a hairpin. It held its secrets tight.
Her brother-in-law, Don, the selected ambassador to summon Laura to dinner, found her still struggling with the lock on the diary. “I could smash that for you with a hammer,” he volunteered.
“No thanks, it’s not mine to smash,” Laura confessed.
“Hot stuff?”
“No, historical papers I want to have reprinted for the library.”
“Look, Sis, you came here to get away from work for a while. This New Year’s Eve party is exactly what you need to cheer you up. Now come to dinner and get some real home cooking. I’ll bet that foreign food is giving you ulcers.” Don laid an arm around her shoulders and led her to the table with all the finesse of a hungry grizzly bear.
****
This New
Year’s Eve party is definitely not what I needed, thought Laura from her corner of the overstuffed couch.
She watched her “date” Benny Schweitzer gyrate his paunch around the store manager’s wife. On Benny’s long frame, his belly looked like a basketball shoved beneath his black silk shirt. Or maybe he is six months pregnant, Laura speculated, smiling into the ruby surface of another cosmopolitan. He shouldn’t be drinking then, no, no, no. She could have as much liquor as she wanted. A series of cosmos had carried her beyond the point of being kind to or even amused by with her escort. She wondered if the fur on his chest where the gold chains nested was real or glued on like the hairpiece whose base showed when he tossed his head in the dance. Benny threw her a supernaturally green glance just to let Laura know he hadn’t forgotten her while doing his duty by the old bag—his own words. Funny how the tinted contact lenses made his eyes appear almost opaque, completely depthless.
“Eyes are the mirror of the soul,” Laura mumbled to herself. She poked the lemon slice floating in the cocktail glass like a huge yellow eyeball. David’s eyes had sparkled, embracing her and the rest of the world. Robert’s eyes drew you into their dark, troubled depths until you swam without direction, not knowing up from down. She tried to avoid Robert’s eyes, but could not. She wanted to drown in them. Yes, an excess of vodka was making her honest.
Definitely time to leave. She scanned the room for Cynthia and Don who had brought her to the party, introduced her to Benny, then melded themselves into the group they called “the old married folks.” Apparently, the old married folks had gone home to pay off the babysitter.
Benny slithered toward her as if his tight pants made it impossible for him to walk normally. “Dance?” He held out his arms.
“No thanks.” To dance with Benny meant keeping time to the music while he circumnavigated the room, now appearing to dance alone, then seeming to have two partners at once as he bisected other couples. Laura felt the greatest urge to fall asleep.
