by Edna Ferber
“Sixty years ago, young fella, I’d have wiped that grin off your face with a six-shooter. Fights and feuds and fiestas and fandangoes, that was the program back in Texas where I came from in 1880. People call it romantic now. Well, maybe it was. Anyway we had the use of our legs and arms instead of being just limbless trunks riding around in automobiles the way you softies are today. It’s got so you have to jump into a car to go down to the corner to get a pack of cigarettes. Two years ago I went down to Texas, went in an airplane from New York in less time than it used to take us to gallop into town on a Saturday night in the old days. Houston’s a stinking oil town now, Dallas sets up to be a style center, San Antonio’s full of art and they’re starting a movement to run gondolas on the San Antonio River for tourists. My God, I almost had a stroke.”
“That’s very interesting, Mr. Maroon, but look—”
“I can tell you things if you think that’s interesting. Ninety, or nearly. Let ‘em put me in jail. If I was to eat two pieces of chocolate cake this minute and drink a quart of champagne I’d be dead in an hour. What can death do to you at ninety that life hasn’t done to you already!”
“You’re right, Colonel. Uh, look, we’ve got our edition to make, see. And if you’ll just give us what we came for, first, and then—”
“You’re deaf and dumb and blind, the lot of you!” His face was dangerously red considering his age and the weather. He snatched his arm free of his wife’s restraining hand, his voice rang out with a resonance incredible in an organ that had known almost a century of use. “I tell you I’m giving you the real story if you’d have the sense to see it. I’m giving up my money now because I robbed widows and orphans to get it. That was considered smart in those days. But I’ll say this for myself—I didn’t want money or position or power for myself. I wanted Clio Dulaine and I had to have those to get her. So I outwitted them and I’ve outlived them, too, the whole sniveling lot of them—Gould and Vanderbilt and Rockefeller and Morgan and Fisk and Drew. We skimmed a whole nation—took the cream right off the top.”
Tubby Krause spoke up soothingly, but even his unctuous voice had the gritty sound of patience nearing exhaustion. “Yep, that’s right, Mr. Maroon. You ought to write a book about it. I bet it’d make ‘em sit up. Ever read The Robber Barons? Great book. Yeh, those were the bad old boys all right. Now, Mr. Maroon, if you’ll just answer a couple of questions.”
Mrs. Maroon took his great freckled hand in her own two delicate ones; she looked up into his face, earnestly. “You see, Clint, they don’t want to hear it. I told you they wouldn’t. They don’t believe it. Let it go. What does it matter now?”
“Thanks, Mrs. Maroon.” It was Quinlan with an edge to his voice. “You understand how it is. We’re here to get our story. We’ve always been on the square with you and the Colonel. And you’ve been more than square with us. This is our job, see.”
“Yah, your jobs!” snarled Maroon to their astonishment, for he had always been as charming as he was considerate. “You young fools! You deserve to lose ‘em. I suppose if I told you that Mrs. Maroon is the daughter of a Creole aristocrat and the most famous placée in New Orleans back in the ‘60s, you wouldn’t be interested!”
“What’s a placée?”
“I suppose you never heard of José Llulla, either? Pepe Llulla, they called him, isn’t that right, Clio? Long before your day. He fought and won so many duels that he had to start his own cemetery to take care of them. Cemetery of St. Vincent de Paul on Louisa Street. Anybody’ll show it to you. Well, now, Mrs. Maroon’s grandmother was killed by Pepe Llulla. Jealousy.”
The newspaper people were smiling rather uncertainly now. After all, a joke’s a joke, they thought, but the old boy was going too far. Mrs. Maroon’s musical indolent laugh reassured them. Mischievously she shook her husband’s arm as one would remind a dear forgetful child.
“Don’t leave out the important things, Clint, chéri.’’’’ She shut one handsome eye in an amazing and confidential wink. “Surely you won’t forget to tell them that Mama was accused of murder. And the scandal was hushed up,” Clio Maroon went on, equably. “They said he had died of a heart attack. So then Mama was smuggled out of New Orleans, they sent her to France, and of course that’s how I—”
“—came to be educated in a convent,” chimed in two or three rather weary voices.
Someone said, “Oh, listen, Mrs. Maroon! You going to start kidding us too? After we’ve given you the best years of our lives!”
Clio Maroon smiled up at her husband. “You see, dear? Next time. Next time.”
“That’s right,” Len Brisk assured her. “Next time we’ll run all that movie stuff, Mr. Maroon, just to show you our hearts are in the right place, even if our heads aren’t. Then what’ll you do to us?”
“Sue you for a million dollars,” Mrs. Maroon put in, swiftly.
“But it’s all true!” Clint Maroon shouted. “Damn it, it’s all true I tell you! I just want you boys and girls to write it—to write it so that Americans will know that this country today is finer and more honest and more free and democratic than it has been since way back in Revolutionary days. For a century we big fellows could grab and ran. They can’t do it today. It’s going to be the day of the little man. Tell them to have faith and believe that they’re the best Americans in the decentest government the world has ever seen. It’s true, I tell you. We’re just coming out of the darkness. Don’t let anyone tell you that America today isn’t the—”
“Sure. Sure. We know.”
She turned to go then, with a glance at them over her shoulder—a whimsical and appealing glance from those fine eyes that seemed to convey a little secret understanding between her and them. I am leaving an old and sick man in your care, the glance said. Be lenient. Be kind. Aloud, “Don’t keep Mr. Maroon too long, will you? And please help yourselves to drinks and sandwiches there on the table. If I come back at the end of—oh—fifteen minutes don’t be too cross with me. Mr. Maroon finds this heat rather trying.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Maroon. You’ve been swell. . . . Think it’s safe to leave a bunch of newspapermen with all this scotch and rye?”
She went then, carrying herself with such grace and dignity that if it had not been for her steel-gray hair you might have thought her a woman of thirty, her soft draperies flowing after her, her head held high. As she closed the door and vanished she heard Keppel’s voice, not quite so suave now, for time was pressing. “Now then, Mr. Maroon, is it true that you . . .” And then the hard incisive tone of Larry Conover’s voice keyed to the tempo of the tabloid he represented. “Hi, wait a minute, fellas. Something tells me Mr. Maroon isn’t kidding. Are you, Mr. Maroon? Say, listen, maybe we’re missing the real story. What was that again about—”
She made as though to turn back and re-enter the room. But she only hesitated a moment there before the door, and shrugged her shoulders with a little Gallic gesture and smiled and did not listen for more.
She and Clint Maroon had met and fallen instantly in love at breakfast in Madame Begué’s restaurant that April Sunday morning in New Orleans, almost sixty years ago. Though perhaps their encounter in the French Market earlier in the day should be called their first meeting. Certainly there he had persisted in staring at her and following her, and he had even attempted to speak to her. She had had to administer punishment, brisk though secondhand—for his boldness.
Clio Dulaine was back in New Orleans after an absence of fifteen years. Though she had left it as a child and had not seen it again until now, when she had just turned twenty, she was as much at home in it, as deeply in love with it as if she were a Creole aristocrat with a century’s background of dwelling in the Vieux Carré. Throughout the years of her life in France she had heard of New Orleans and learned of it through the memories and longings of two exiled and homesick women—her mother, the lovely Rita Dulaine, and her aunt Belle Piquery. These two, filled with nostalgia for their native and beloved Louisiana city, had lived unwillin
gly and died resentfully in the Paris to which they had been banished—the Paris of the 1870’s. In those years the mind of the girl Clio had become a brimming reservoir for their dreams, their bizarre recollections, their heartsick yearnings. Though they dwelt perforce in France, they really lived in their New Orleans past. The Franco-Prussian War, the occupation of Paris had been to them a minor and faintly annoying incident. Their chief concern with it was that in those confused years their copy of the New Orleans French newspaper L’Abeille sometimes failed to arrive on time. Its arrival was an event. They fell upon its meager pages with the eager little cries of women famished for news from home. They devoured every crumb of information—births, deaths, marriages, society, advertisements. Though these two women belonged to that strange and exotic stratum which was the New Orleans underworld, Rita’s life had been for many years entwined with that of one of the city’s oldest and most aristocratic of families. In that fantastic society she had been the mistress of Nicolas Dulaine, only son of that proud and wealthy family; not only that, she had been known by his name, she was Rita Dulaine, she had lived in the charming little house he had purchased for her in Rampart Street, she had borne him a daughter, she was queen of that half-world peopled by women of doubtful blood. She was a placée, she had taken the name of Dulaine, she was the acknowledged beauty in an almost macabre society of strangely lovely women. Her gowns came from Paris, her jewels from the Rue de la Paix, she had traveled abroad with Nicolas Dulaine as his wife. Love, luxury, adulation, even position of a sort, Rita Dulaine had had everything that a beautiful and beloved woman can have except the security of a legal name and a legal right as the consort of Nicolas Dulaine.
The tragedy of Dulaine’s death had changed her from a high-spirited and imperious woman to a dazed and broken creature, suddenly sallow and almost plain at times. Even Aunt Belle Piquery, her older sister, Belle the practical, the realistic, had been unable to urge her out of her valley of douleur. Usually after a ship’s mail had brought them a little bundle made up of back numbers of L’Abeille, Rita was plunged deeper than ever in gloom. Whenever the words appeared in the newspaper’s columns—Madame Nicolas Dulaine—they seemed to leap out at her as though printed in red letters a foot high. This was his widow. This woman lived and he was dead. It was she who had really killed him with her possessiveness and her arrogance and her spite. Rita was long past weeping, but she would begin to weep again, dry tears. Her face, lovely still, would become distorted, her eyes would stare out hot and bright, her hand would clutch her throat as if she were choking, the sobs would come, hard and dry, racking her.
Then Angélique Pluton, whom they called Kakaracou—Kaka, her maid and Clio’s nurse—would hold her in her arms like a baby, and soothe her and murmur to her. She spoke in a curious jargon, a mixture of French, Spanish, New Orleans colloquialisms, African Negro. “Hush, my baby, my baby. Spare your pretty eyes. There are dukes over here and kings and princes waiting to marry you. You will go back to New Orleans in your own golden carriage and they’ll crawl at your feet, those stony-faced ones.”
“I’ll never go back, Kaka. I’ll die here. They won’t let me come back. They said they’ll put me in prison. They said I killed him. I was only trying to kill myself because I couldn’t live without him.”
Brisk Belle Piquery would say, “You’re only making yourself sick, Rita. I think you enjoy it. After all, they threw me out, too, and said they’d put me in prison if I ever showed my face in New Orleans. And I was only your sister.”
“There you go reproaching me. I wish I were dead too. Why didn’t I kill myself! I wanted to.”
“You didn’t really,” the practical Belle would say. “People hardly ever do. You wanted to keep him, of course, and you thought if he saw you pressing a pistol against your heart—well, there, there, let’s not talk about it. He should have known better than to snatch it away, poor boy. Anyway, he’s dead. Nothing can bring him back now. We’ll be dead, too, first thing you know. So let’s enjoy life while we can.”
“You’ve never really loved, Bella. You don’t know.”
“I’ve loved lots of them,” Aunt Belle retorted blithely. “I spent my life at it, didn’t I! Only with me it was a career and with you it was your whole existence.”
This elicited a little scream of pained remonstrance from the New Orleans Camille. “Belle! How can you speak like that of my love for Nicolas!”
“Now don’t flare up, Rita. I just meant I know he was your life, but you expected too much. You even thought he would marry you after Clio was born. Imagine! Such a bêtise/”
“He would have, if it hadn’t been for Them and Her.”
“If it makes you feel better to believe that, then go on believing it. All I ever expected in life was a little fun and a chance to die respectable and to be buried in the cemetery of St. Louis with my name in gold letters—Belle Piquery—and chrysanthemums on All Saints’ Day—though who’d bring them I don’t know. But when I die, that’s where I want to be. They’ll let me come back to New Orleans then. You’ll do that for your Aunt Belle, won’t you, Clio?”
It was a strange life the two women lived in the charming little Paris flat overlooking the Bois—the flat paid for by Them with threat money and hush money. But it was stranger still for the child Clio when, at sixteen, she emerged from the convent school. And strangest of all was the sight they presented as they drove in the Bois or walked in the Champs Elysées. Rita Dulaine, tragic in black, her great dark eyes demanding sympathy, her sable garments chic as only the Paris couturiers could make them. By her side the bouncing Belle in such a welter of flounce and furbelow that it was almost impossible to tell where bosom began and bouffant draperies left off. Their carriage was a landaulet with a little cushioned seat opposite the large tufted one, and on this, her back to the driver’s box, perched Clio, her legs, far too long for this cramped little bench, doubled under her voluminous skirts, primly. Beside her, bolt upright, her spare, straight back disdaining the upholstery, sat Kakaracou with dignity enough for all. Her skin was neither black nor coffee-colored but the shade of a ripe fig, purplish dusted with gray. Above this, and accentuating the tone, reared the tignon with which her head always was bound, a gaudy turbanlike arrangement of flaming orange or purple or pink or scarlet, characteristic of the New Orleans Negro.
Certainly the occupants of the landaulet were bizarre enough to attract attention even in the worldly Paris. But the figure perched on the driver’s seat held the added fillip of surprise. Seated there, his legs braced against the high footboard, his knees covered with a driver’s rug, his powerful arms and hands managed the two neat chestnuts with a true horseman’s deftness of touch, there seemed nothing remarkable about the coachman, Cupidon. It was only when he threw aside the rug, clambered down over the wheel as agilely as a monkey and stood at the curb that you saw with staring unbelief the man’s real dimensions. The large head, the powerful arms and chest belonged to a dwarf, a little man not more than three feet high. His bandy legs were like tiny stumps to which the wee feet were attached. This gave him a curiously rolling gait like that of a diminutive drunken sailor on shore leave. The eyes in the young-old face were tender, almost wistful; the mouth sardonic, the expression pugnacious or mischievous by turn. This was Cupidon, whom they fondly called Cupide; bodyguard, coachman, major-domo. When he spoke, which was rarely, it was in a surprisingly sweet clear tenor like that of a choirboy whose voice has just changed. He might have been any age—fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty. There were those who said that, though white, he was Kakaracou’s son. Certainly she bullied and pampered him by turns. Sometimes you saw her withered hand resting tenderly on the tiny man’s head; sometimes she cuffed him smartly as though he were a naughty child. She managed to save the choicest tidbits for his plate after the others had finished, she filled his glass with good red wine of the country as they sat at the servants’ table, he in his specially built high chair on which he clambered so nimbly up and down.
�
��Drink your red wine, Little One. It will make you strong.”
Instead of thumping his chest or flexing his arm he would rap his great head briskly. “I don’t need red wine to make me strong. I’m strong enough. Here’s my weapon.” But he would toss down the glassful, nevertheless, giving the effect as he did so of a wickedly precocious little boy in his cups. Everyone in the household knew that his boast was no idle one. That head, hard and thick as a cannonball, was almost as effective when directed against an enemy. Thigh-high to a normally built man, he would run off a few steps, then charge like a missile, his head thrust forward and down, goat fashion. On a frontal attack, men twice his size had been known to go down with one grunt, like felled oxen.
Except for her years at the convent in Tours this, then, was the weird household in which Clio Dulaine had spent her girlhood exile. But then, it did not seem strange to her. Kakaracou and Cupidon both had been part of the Dulaine ménage in Clio’s infancy when they had lived so luxuriously, so gaily in the house on Rampart Street in New Orleans. They were as much a part of her life as her mother or Aunt Belle Piquery. And all four of them dinned New Orleans into her ears, all four spoke of it with the nostalgia of the exiled, each in his or her own wistful way.
Rita Dulaine from her couch before the fire would stare into the flames like one hypnotized. It was as though she saw the past there, flickering and dying. “There’s no society here in Paris to compare with the salon that your papa and I had in Rampart Street. The élite came to us. Oh, not those Creole sticks with their dowdy black clothes and their cold, hard faces.”
“But Papa was a Creole. The Dulaines, you always told me, were the oldest and most—”
“Yes, yes. But he was my—he was your papa. His family, though, they were cruel and hard, they made me leave New Orleans after the— the—accident—after your papa was hurt—after he had a heart attack “ She would fall to weeping again, after all these years, if the dry gasping sounds she made could be called weeping.
