by Edna Ferber
Clio would rush to her, she would put her strong young arms about the woman’s racked body, she would press her fresh young cheek against the other’s ravaged one. “Don’t, chérie, don’t. Let’s not talk about that any more. Let’s talk about Great-Grand’mère Clio Bonnevie, how she came to New Orleans with the troupe of Monsieur Louis Tabary, and how they had to play in tents or vacant shops, and how the audiences behaved—go on, tell me again, from the beginning.”
The girl herself had the face of an actress, inherited from that other Clio who had come to New Orleans in 1791, one of a homeless refugee band of players who had fled the murderous Negro uprising in the French West Indies. The features hadn’t quite crystallized yet, but the face was one of potential beauty—mobile, alight with intelligence, the eyes large and lustrous like her mother’s, the mouth wide and sensual like that of her father, the dead Nicolas Dulaine.
“Well,” Rita would begin, suddenly gay again. “I heard it only from Grand’mère Vaudreuil who was, of course, as you know, the daughter of Great-Grand’mère Bonnevie.” Hearing her reminiscing thus, one would have thought her a descendant of a long line of Louisiana aristocrats rather than the woman she really was. The formality of marriage had not been part of her lineage. Grand’mère Vaudreuil and Great-Grand’mère Bonnevie had lived much as she lived. Men had loved them, they had begotten children, Rita Dulaine had emerged from this murky background as a water lily lifts its creamy petals out of the depths of a muddy pond. “Of course you know Grand’mère Vaudreuil was the talk of New Orleans in her day because she was so beautiful and because José Llulla—Pepe Llulla, they called him—fought a duel with her protector. The duel was fought in St. Anthony’s Garden just behind the Cathedral of St. Louis. They say he had his own cemetery, José Llulla, he was such a hothead and so formidable a duellist. . . . Oh, yes, Great-Grand’mère Bonnevie, they say she was a superb actress, you know she came over from the French West Indies with Monsieur Tabary’s troupe, they played in the very first theater in New Orleans. You should have heard Mama tell of how Great-Grand’mère told her about the way the audiences used to fight to get in, the roughs and the élite all mixed up together. We’ve always loved the theater, our family, it dates from then, no doubt. . . . Your papa and I used to go to the French opera, and sometimes after the play we entertained friends at home. . . . The house in Rampart Street had a lovely garden at the back paved with red brick, cool and fresh, and a fountain in the center. There were camellias and azaleas and mimosa and crepe myrtle. In the evening, the perfume was so heavy it made you swoon ...”
She would forget all about Grand’mère Vaudreuil and Great-Grand’mère Bonnevie, she would live again her own past, drinking deep though she knew it would not slake her thirst, as a wanderer in the desert drinks of the alkaline water because there is no other.
“Before you were born your papa had built a little garçonnière at the far end of the garden facing the house. You were to live there with Kaka as nurse; all the little New Orleans boys of good family lived in their own houses—garçonnières, they are called—near the big house. He was so sure you were going to be a boy. He was disappointed at first, but then he said the next would be a boy. I said we should call him Nicolas Dulaine, I am sure he would have consented if he . . . Your little dresses were the finest embroidery and handmade lace, they were brought from France; he always said there was nothing in New Orleans fine enough. My dresses, too, came from . . .”
Clio began to find this a trifle dull. Aunt Belle Piquery’s memories were of lustier stuff.
“You needn’t talk to me about the food of Paris. I never tasted here such bouillabaisse and such shrimps and crab as we have in New Orleans. Marseilles bouillabaisse isn’t to be compared with it. And the pompano, the lovely pompano, where else in the world is there a fish so delicate and at the same time so rich ... ? Bisque écrevisse Louisiane . . . the bouilli. . . the hard-shell crab stew . . . soft-shell turtle ragout . . . the six-course Sunday morning breakfasts at Begué’s ... I used to love to go the French Market myself in the morning, it made you hungry just to see the vegetables and fruits and fish spread out so crisp and appetizing almost with the dew still on them. On Sunday morning the French Market is like a court levee”—unconsciously Aunt Belle lapsed into the present tense, so vivid were her longings and memories—”it’s the meeting place for society on Sunday mornings after early Mass at St. Louis Cathedral. Or we sometimes go to late Mass and then to Begué’s for breakfast. But first usually we like to spoil our appetite by eating hot jambalaya in the French Market, and delicious hot coffee——”
“Jambalaya! What’s that, Aunt Belle? It sounds heavenly.”
“It’s a Creole dish, hot and savory. Garlic and chorices and ham and rice and tomatoes and onion and shrimp or oysters all stewed up together—”
By this time Clio’s mouth would be watering. Aunt Belle Piquer)’ was off on another excursion into the past. “During Mardi Gras we’d have a tallyho or a great victoria and there we’d sit, viewing the parades, or we’d see them from a balcony in North Rampart or Royal Street. We never went near Canal, it wasn’t chic. Your mama never went with us. She and Nicolas were very grand and stayed by themselves; you’d have thought Rita was chacalata. But then, I never held it against her. If Rita did go out people stared at her more than at any Carnival Queen, she was so much more beautiful.”
The girl, listening avidly, would press a quick clutching hand on her aunt’s plump knee. “Am I beautiful, Aunt Belle? Like Mama?”
“You, minette! A little scrawny thing like you!”
“I will be, though.”
“Maybe, when you fill out. Your eyes, they’re not bad, but your mouth’s too big.”
“You wait. You wait and see. I’ll be beautiful, but I shan’t be the way you and Mama were. I shall marry and be very rich and most respectable. But quite, quite respectable. Not like you.”
A smart litde slap from Aunt Belle’s open palm. “You nasty little griffe, you! How dare you talk to me like that!”
The girl did not even deign to put her hand to her smarting cheek. Her eyes blazed. It was the epithet she resented, not the slap. “Don’t you dare call me that! I’m a Dulaine. The royal blood of France flows in my veins.”
“Quelle blague! Your Grandmama Vaudreuil was a free woman of color. Your mother’s a—”
“I’m a Dulaine! My father was Nicolas Dulaine. “You wait. You’ll see! My life will be different.”
Aunt Belle Piquery laughed comfortably and took another chocolate from the little silver bonbon dish that always somehow managed to be on a tabouret beside her chair. “You’ll be a fool about men just the way we all were—your mama and me and your Grandmother Vaudreuil and Great-Grandmama Bonnevie.”
“I won’t I tell you!”
“Though I honestiy can’t say I regret a thing I’ve done. I’ve had a fine time and would have yet if Rita hadn’t gone waving pistols around. Don’t take ‘em seriously, I always told Rita.”
The girl Clio looked at the overplump aging woman; her eyes were pitying but not contemptuous. “You and Mama aren’t Dulaines. I am. My life’s going to be different. I shan’t be a fool about men. They’ll be fools about me.”
At this Aunt Belle laughed until she choked on a bit of chocolate, gasped, coughed, and waddled off to regale Rita and Kakaracon with this chit’s presumption.
“Wiser than her elders,” Kakaracou commented sagely when she heard it.
And now Rita Dulaine lay in the little cemetery outside St. Cloud; and Aunt Belle Piquery too knew at last the belated respectability of a solitary—though earthy—resting place in the cemetery of St. Louis in New Orleans, with her name in gold letters on the tomb and Clio and Kakaracou and Cupidon to place upon it the chrysanthemums that marked All Saints’ Day. Years before she had slyly bought the space under another name, for the cemetery of St. Louis was not for the Belle Piquerys. The stately whitewashed tombs bore the names of the socially elect of New Orleans. T
here was sardonic humor in the fact that even in death respectability was not to be granted Aunt Belle. For by the time Clio, an orphan of twenty, had brought Belle Piquery’s earthly remains back to the New Orleans she loved and had seen her safely entombed among the city’s élite, certain changes had taken place in these hallowed precincts. The railroad had edged its way along the outskirts of the cemetery, and at night the red light of the semaphore glowed down upon the tomb as though the sign of Belle Piquery’s earthly profession haunted her even in this, her last resting place.
II
From France they had sailed back together in the early spring—this strange trio, distributed as befitted their state of being and their station in life. A quartette they might really have been called, for Aunt Belle, the erstwhile voluble and bouncing, now went as a silent passenger in the freight hold; Kakaracou and Cupidon, in the servants’ quarters, baffled the ship’s officers, what with the color of Kakaracou and the impish proportions of the little man; while the girl Clio, silent, lovely, black-clad, was a piquant source of mystery to the other passengers. New Orleans was their destination, and they seemed to melt into the teeming picturesque city as though they never had left: it. Daily, for fifteen years, they had talked of it, had heard its praises sung, had longed for it through the nostalgia of the languishing Rita and the lusty Belle.
But even Kakaracou, who treated her like a child, was a little awed by the imperious and strategic generalship with which Clio Dulaine took possession of her New Orleans patrimony. Shabby and neglected though it was, Clio went immediately to the old house on Rampart Street. Mice scuttled and squeaked in it, windows were cracked or broken, the jalousies rattled eerily, rank weeds choked the garden once heavy with the fragrance of camellias and mimosa. The little brick garçonnière that faced the house at the rear was overgrown with a tangle of wistaria and bougainvillaea so that the iron lacework of the lovely gallery was completely hidden. The very street itself had taken on a look of decay.
Clio Dulaine stood surveying this scene of ruin, the half-smile on her face curiously cynical for one so young. Then to the shocked dismay of Kakaracou and Cupidon she began to laugh. She looked at the dust and the torn brocades and the broken glass and the weather-stained draperies and she laughed and laughed until she held her sides and then she held her head, and the tears of laughter streamed down her cheeks.
At first Kakaracou had laughed with her, companionably, though not knowing why. But then she looked sober, then serious, finally alarmed.
“Hysterical,” said Cupidon, in French. “Slap her. Hard, on the cheek. I’ll go into the next room.”
Kakaracou had gone to her, had taken her gently in her arms as she stood there, but Clio had shaken her off and gone on laughing. “Don’t bébé, don’t chérie,’’’’ Kaka had murmured. Then, seeing that this was unavailing, she took Cupide’s advice. She slapped the girl’s cheek a stinging blow. Clio’s laughter ceased as though turned off by a piece of mechanism, her eyes blazed at the Negress, she raised her hand to strike her, the woman cowered, and Clio’s hand came down on her thin shoulder, gently, gently.
“Thank you, Kaka. I’m all right now. It was that sofa with one leg off. It looked so crazy and frowsy and dirty, like that old woman who used to limp along the quay in Paris, selling fish.”
Kakaracou stared at it. Then she began to laugh with something of Clio’s hysterical note in her voice. “So it does! Oh, that’s very funny! So it—”
“Stop it! Don’t you begin. That wasn’t why I was laughing, really. Anyway, it’s better than crying. That sofa was the one Mama always talked about. It was made and carved by Prudent Mallard, she said, and the crimson brocade came from France. Solid mahogany. Not so solid now, is it?”
Kaka leaped to the defense of her dead darling. “You should have seen her as she sat on it in her silks and jewels—”
“I know, I know. She told me a thousand times. This house—I remembered it as the most exquisite and luxurious—” She began to laugh again, then pulled herself together with an actual physical effort. She stood there, surveying the mildewed walls, the decrepit furniture. Her young face was stern, her eyes resolute and almost hard. “I suppose nothing in life is what we dreamed it would be. She spoke of this house as if it had been a palace. It’s a shanty, tumble-down and filthy.”
“Is it?” Kaka asked, dully, staring about her as though seeing the room for the first time. “Is it? Why, so it is!”
“It is not!” Clio then retorted with fine inconsistence. “It’s beautiful! You wait. You’ll see. We’re cagou because we are sad and tired and everything’s so neglected. But we’ll make ménage, you and I and Cupide. We’ll sweep and scrub and polish. The jalousies will be mended and the garde-de-frise out there, and the walls and the windows.”
Kaka, the imitative, looked a shade less doleful, but she hugged her thin shoulders and edged closer to the doorway. “In the street they say this house is haunted. That’s why it looks as it does. No one has come near it since he died here.”
“It’s very chic to be haunted by a Dulaine. Buy yourself a gris-gris from the mamaloi. That will keep off the spirits, you’ve always said. You used to complain because there was no voodoo woman in Paris to furnish you with one.”
“You may laugh, but I know—”
“Yes, I can laugh. I’m going to be happy. Not like Mama. She had no pleasure in living those years in France. She talked of nothing but this house and its wonders. Look at it! She might much better have been enjoying a gay time—she and poor funny Aunt Belle. Well, I’m going to have a gay time! Glorious! This house will be lovely again.”
“How? We’ve nothing.”
“Mama’s jewelry.”
“You wouldn’t part with that!”
“How else? Not the best of it, of course.”
“The best! You haven’t got the best of it. That went long ago. The magnificent pieces. She was extravagant, my poor bébé Rita, no doubt of that.”
“Stupide! I’ll keep the best for myself, of course, until someone gives me better. The unimportant pieces will pay for what I shall do to make this place right again. It won’t be much. We shan’t be here long.”
Kakaracou was accustomed to dolorous middle-aged mistresses who wept on her bosom, required to be dressed and undressed like children, asked her advice as though she were a sibyl and berated her by turn. She now rolled her eyes at this strange new note of authority so that they seemed all whites. “Where we go!”
“Oh, wherever there’s money and fun.”
“Not here! Not New Orleans!”
“Pooh! It’s dead here—finished. I saw that the moment I set foot in this town. I only came here to show them they can’t frighten me and bully me the way they did Mama. Clio Dulaine! That’s me. If they threaten me I’ll tell the whole business. They can’t do anything to me. I would, anyway, if it weren’t for Mama. . . . Come on, I want to see the bedroom. She always said the dressing table—she called it a duchesse—was carved of palissandre, and the four-poster bed that Papa gave her was made long ago by Francois Seignouret, of rosewood, too, and signed by him, like a painting, it’s so valuable. Will they be like that sofa, I wonder . . . well ...”
At that moment Cupide waddled in from the dim bedroom across the wide central hall that divided the drawing room and dining room from the two bedrooms. His gait was a rollicking thing to see, quick, light, rolling, like the gay little Basque fishing boats that used to come bouncing into port from the Bay of Biscay with the sardine and herring catch. They had watched them on many a holiday along the Côte d’Argént. As he trotted, Cupide was whistling through his teeth, a talent in the perfection of which he was aided by nature, his two large square yellow incisors being separated by a generous eighth of an inch. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
“Blood in there on the carpet by the bed,” he announced blithely.
Kakaracou shrieked, but Clio Dulaine stared at him a moment, silent. “Let me see,” she said, then. She crossed
the hall swiftly, her silken skirts flirting the dust. “Open the jalousies.”
It had been the bedroom of a lovely and beloved woman. This was apparent in its furnishings, in its delicate coloring, in its arrangement. The exquisitely carved armoire of rosewood was meant to hold only the most fragile of silks and laces; the great arms of the vast palissandre bed were built to cradle love. The light that shone dimly through the broken blinds gave to the room a pale green translucence as it filtered through the rank growth of vines and trees that had spread a verdant coverlet protectingly about the house. The pastel grays and rose and fluid greens of the charming Aubusson carpet formed a pattern of wreaths and roses, faded and dusty now, but still lovely except for that great blotch there by the side of the bed. It must have been a pool, once, a pool that had grown viscid before it had been scoured in vain by hands that had striven to erase its marks. A great rusty brown irregular circle defacing the wistful flowers that strewed the floor.
Cupidon pointed with one tiny blunt forefinger. Kakaracou shrieked again and covered her staring eyes with her two hands, but she peeped through her latticed fingers, too, at once fascinated and terrified. The girl only stared in silence.
“I saw him as plain as if he was there now, the blood spurting out of his shirt like the fountains at Versailles,” began the dwarf with gusto, “and she kneeling there screaming, her hair was dipping in it—”
Kakaracou leaped to him; she cuffed him a thwack across his hard head. He did not even blink. He merely brushed her hand away lightly as though it had been a mosquito.
“Let him be,” the girl commanded. “I want to hear it.” She dropped to her knees beside the sinister stain, she peeled off her fine French glove and, stooping, she passed her hand slowly, caressingly, over the rusty brown spot on the carpet. “His blood. My blood. They are the same. I love it, this spot. I will sleep here tonight, in this bed.”
