by Edna Ferber
“Now it is you who are trying to make me different.”
“No, not different. Only let’s be more ourselves if we’re going to run together. All this play acting. You being so French and me playing Texas cowboy.”
“But I am! I mean, I lived so long in France. And you—well, you are from Texas, you were a cowboy—-at least you said—”
“I sure am. But we both been working too hard at it. Let’s just take the world the way you would a ripe coconut down in the French Market. Crack the shell, drink the milk, eat what you want of the white meat and throw the rest away.”
New Orleans had a small-town quality in spite of its cosmopolitanism. No couple so handsome, so vital and so flamboyant could long escape nodce in any city. Her beauty, her Paris gowns, his white Texas sombrero, his diamond stud, the high-stepping bays and the glittering carriage—any of these would have served to attract attention. But added to these were the fantastic figures of Cupide and Kakaracou. The spectacular couple were seen everywhere, sometimes unattended, sometimes followed by the arrogant, richly dressed black woman and the dwarf in his uniform of maroon and gold.
It was late May, hot and humid, but the city had not yet taken on the indolent pace of summer. Summer or winter, New Orleans moved at a leisurely gait. It still closed its places of business at noon for a two-hour siesta, one of many old Spanish customs still obtaining here in this Spanish-French city. New Orleans deserted commerce for the races; it flocked to any one of a score of excellent restaurants there to lunch or dine lavishly; it gambled prodigally in Royal Street or in Southport or out at Jefferson Parish. New Orleans adored the theater, it was stagestruck en masse. As for the opera, that was almost a religion. Summer was close at hand. Now New Orleans, between the excesses of the Mardi Gras recendy passed and the simmering inertia of the summer approaching, was having a final mid-season fling.
Into this revelry Clio Dulaine and Clint Maroon pranced gaily. The long, lazy mornings in the cool shaded house, the tropical dreamlike evenings in the scented garden were abandoned. The bays and the clarence were seen daily on Canal Street or in the Park. Purposely Clio overdressed—lace parasols, silks, plumes, jewels. In France she had learned to ride, and frequently in Paris she had ridden in the Bois while Rita Dulaine and Belle Piquery had followed demurely in the carriage. Now she got out the dark blue riding habit with the very tight bodice, the long looped skirt, the high-heeled boots, the little hat with the flowing veil. Clint rode à la Texas; sombrero, boots, handkerchief knotted at the throat, tight pants, the high-horned Western saddle silver-trimmed. They tore along the bridle paths, her veil streaming behind her, he holding his reins with one hand while the other waved in the air, cowboy fashion. “Yip-eee! Eeeee-yow!” New Orleans, sedately taking the air in carriages or on horseback, stared, turned, gasped. Sometimes she rode without Maroon, Cupide as groom following, perched gnomelike on the big horse and handling his mount superbly. If possible, this bizarre escort attracted more attention than when she rode with the Texan.
She had inherited plenty of the acting instinct from her lively and gifted ancestor. When they went to the theater they entered just before the curtain’s rise. Between the acts she stood up and surveyed the house through her jeweled opera glasses, leisurely, insolent.
“That looks like real bad manners to me,” Clint observed when first she did this. “Who you looking for?”
“It is the continental custom.”
Then one night on their way to the French Opera she said rather defiantly, “Cupide has found out that they are going to the play tonight. She and this Charlotte Thérèse and two others—an uncle and a young man. These Creoles marry very young, you know.”
“Look, Clio, you’re not figuring on anything wild, are you? Tonight?”
“Don’t be absurd, darling. Cupide discovered that they are to sit in a box, the first stage box at the right. Very indiscreet of them. The mother must be a stupid woman.”
She wore her pink faille with the black lace flounces and Rita’s jewels, and when, after the first act, she stood up to survey the house through her glasses, the audience sat staring as though at a play within a play. Their seats were well front. She turned her head slowly toward the right box, she adjusted her opera glasses on their tiny jeweled stick, her back to the stage, so that there was unmistakable intention in her long, steady stare at the sallow middle-aged woman in black and the sallow young girl in prim white. She stared and stared and stared. All the audience, as though slowly moved by a giant magnet, turned its head to stare with her, hypnotized. Through her glasses Clio saw the dull red rise and spread over the woman’s face and throat and bosom; she saw the girl twiddle her fan and look down and look up and then speak to her mother. And the woman made a gesture for silence and the two men bent forward to shield them and quickly made conversation. And finally Clio turned her head indolently away from them and toward Maroon, who by now was looking as uncomfortable as the four in the box.
“Very chacalata. Very plain. Very dowdy.”
When the lights went up after the second act the four in the box were gone.
They went everywhere, Clio and Clint; she made sure that wherever they went all eyes should follow them. They went to the French Market on Sunday morning, they breakfasted at Hippolyte Begué’s. The white sombrero, the Lone Star boots, the coat-tails; the Paris dresses, the plumed hats, the exotic attendants were restaurant talk now and coffee-table gossip. They say his collar button is a diamond . . . that woman down in Rampart Street, remember? Very beautiful . . . mistress . . . shot him . . . hushed up . . . Charlotte Thérèse . . . Rita, she called herself Dulaine . . . Clio . . . this is the daughter . . . demi-mondaine . . . Paris . . . must be twenty years ago . . .
She actually went with him to the gambling houses where respectable women did not go and in many of which women were not allowed. She accompanied him to the old marble building in Royal Street that once had been the Merchants’ Exchange where traders, gamblers, auctioneers and merchants had met in the old days for the transaction of every sort of business. The second-floor rooms, topped by the beautifully proportioned domes, were used as a gambling house now. Number 18 Royal Street. She stood at the gaming table with Clint, she placed her money quietly and decisively.
“Why do they stare so! After all, I’m only playing quietiy.”
“They don’t see many women here, I reckon. Not like you, leastways.”
“I always went with Mama and Aunt Belle when we were in Nice or Cannes or Monte Carlo.”
“It’s different here. Out West, the girls in the gambling saloons, why—if that’s where they were, that’s what they were. New Orleans is no cow-town, but I can’t help seeing they kind of look at you funny. Let’s go home, Clio.”
“But that’s what I’m here for, foolish boy!”
He rubbed his hand over his eyes in that bewildered way. “I should think somedmes you’d get mixed up yourself not knowing which kind of a woman you are.”
“I do! Get mixed up, I mean. Sometimes I am all Mama’s family and sometimes I am all Papa’s family.”
“But there’s times when you’re both at once.”
“Then look out!”
New Orleans, in spite of its Creole aristocracy with their almost royal taboos, looked with a tolerant and sophisticated eye on manners and customs that would have shocked many larger American cities. Its ways had a tang of the old world; it liked its food, its fun, its women, its morals spiced with something racier than the bland and innocuous American cream sauce. So the Texan and the girl with their flamboyant ways and their outré clothes, their bizarre attendants and their lavish spending became a sort of feature of the town. One day you saw them at the races, the next they were shopping at the French Market, or driving the length of Canal Street down to the banana wharves where, to the mystification of the townspeople, they watched the giant black men unloading or loading the sugar, bananas, or coffee that made up the fragrant cargo.
“I love to watch it,”
Clio had said. “It is so beautiful and rhythmic and mysterious, too, like the jungle. See the muscles of their arms and backs. They move like panthers, these black men.”
Clio Dulaine was enjoying herself, no doubt of that. Interspersed with her flauntings and posturings as a florid woman of the world she managed to see the best and the worst of New Orleans. She was saying hail and farewell to the city whose praises and whose shortcomings, whose fascination and whose sordidness had been dinned into her ears all her life. “Oh, I remember that!” she would say of a beautiful building or a shop or a restaurant. She never before had seen it except through the eyes and the memory of the two nostalgic women. “They’ve remodeled the front of that building. . . . They should have used a ham bone instead of bacon strips in this Gombo Zhebes, and I don’t think they’ve browned the flour enough in the roux. . . . This used to be the shop of Prudent Mallard the cabinetmaker, he was a great artist. Oh, dear, it’s a meat market now! He made the great palissandre bed in my bedroom.”
Though her childhood and girlhood in France had been a fantastic mélange of conventional school life and haphazard household she had an eye for architecture, an ear for music, a taste in food, a flair for clothes, a love of horses, and even some knowledge of literature.
So she and Clint Maroon, walking or driving about the streets of the heady old city, were frequendy drunk with its charm, its potent perfume, its mellow flavor.
“Funny thing,” Clint Maroon said. “Going up and down the town like this, you and me together, it’s like being with a man sometimes.”
“I don’t know that I like that, quite.”
“Maybe that does sound funny. I didn’t mean it that way. Only you make things come alive, the way you see them and talk about them.”
“I love to see new sights and visit strange cities. I want to see all of America. And I shall, too.”
“You and me.”
“No, we mustn’t get used to each other—too much. Here, yes. And perhaps Saratoga.”
“If I didn’t know different I’d say you were a coldblooded piece.”
“That isn’t coldblooded. It is just sensible. I want respectability and security and comfort. Most people don’t give as much thought to planning their lives as Kaka does to a dinner menu. Then when it turns out wrong they think the world is to blame.”
“But suppose you plan it and know just where you’re heading and even then it turns out wrong?”
“This is fate. You can do nothing about that.”
Now the newspapers were beginning to mention the two. The French newspaper L’Abeille, usually too conservative to make mention of so spectacular a pair, published a sneering reference to the beautiful and mysterious visitor who calls herself the Comtesse de Trenaunay de Chanfret and her devoted escort, the Texan, Monsieur Clint Maroon.
“La Comtesse,” the story went on, “chooses to reside in a section of our beautiful city not ordinarily favored by members of the foreign nobility visiting our shores. It is said that the house at least is closely connected with a certain notorious New Orleans femme fatale now dead.”
“It isn’t enough,” Clio said. “It must be something more. Something touched with bizarrerie.’’’’
“I won three thousand dollars at Number 18 last night,” Clint drawled, plaintively. “And there was a piece about it in the Picayune. Seems they got a woman there runs that paper, name of Mrs. Holbrook. I never heard of such a thing. Women’ll be going into politics, next. This Mrs. Holbrook, she writes poetry, too, signs her name Pearl Rivers. Piece in the paper called me that romantic Texan. The boys back home ever get wind of that I’ll never get shut of it. They’ll ride me ragged.”
Clio surveyed him thoughtfully, speculatively, the light of invention slowing dawning in her eyes. “A duel,” she said, meditatively, as though thinking aloud. “Of course it really should be over me, but— what of Mr. Holbrook? Why doesn’t he—you’re a marvelous shot— you could challenge—”
“No ma’am! You won’t make any José Llulla out of me. Besides, she’s a widow woman.”
Regretfully she abandoned the idea. “If only your race-horse Alamo were here. Cupide could ride him. That would make réclame.”
“It’s getting too late for the races here. Besides, they’re shipping him up to Saratoga. And I’m going to have my horse up there for you to ride, Blue Blazes, she’s so black she’s blue, the way your hair looks sometimes, and her little hoofs they never touch the ground. They’ll sit up in Saratoga when they see you on her.”
“It’s going to be wonderful to feel the air clear and cool with pine trees. You know, Clint, I am a little tired of shrimp and pompano and magnolias and all things soft and sweet.”
“Then come on!”
“No, first I must finish here. I must have money. I will not sell my jewels because I shall need them. Besides, I have a sentimental feeling about them. I have made up my mind that I shall not be sentimental about anything. But Mama’s jewels—that’s different.”
“There you go! Taking things hard again. You put me in mind of the way I used to be; I never would just open a door and walk through, I had to bust it down for the hell of it. I just naturally liked doing things the hard way. Always shooting my way through a crowd instead of shouldering.”
“But people make way for you now, don’t they?”
“Oh, it’s all right—long’s somebody doesn’t think of shooting me first.”
“Now it’s you who are taking things hard. After all, what can they do to me! I have done nothing but enjoy myself in New Orleans, and I’ve harmed no one. But I should think their pride would have sent them to me before this.” She stared out at the hot little courtyard with its unavailing fountain, its brick paving oven-hot in the sun. “I suppose,” musingly, “it’s too late and too hot for a concert.”
“Concert! Who?”
“I sing quite nicely. You’ve said so yourself. A concert—a public concert—that would be very annoying, I should think. But it’s too hot, isn’t it?”
“Hell, yes. Anyway, honey, that’s the first really bad idea you’ve had. Stand on a platform, open to insult!”
“M-m, perhaps you’re right. Let me see. I could say that this place is to be opened as a gambling house. Cupide and Kaka could spread the rumor in no time at all.” “Now you’re talking wild, Clio.” “Am I, chéri? Well, perhaps you’re right.” But she must have mendoned it. Or perhaps the implike Cupidon was eavesdropping as they talked. Within two days there arrived at the Rampart Street house a messenger with a letter in a long legal envelope and written in a dry legal hand. Though the envelope was addressed to the Comtesse de Trenaunay de Chanfret the letter itself dismissed her briefly, thus:
MADAM:
Will you call at my office at the address given above so that I may communicate to you a matter of importance.
I trust that you will find it convenient to come within the next two days, and that the hour of eleven will suit you.
May I add that the matter which I wish to discuss will prove to be to your advantage.
With the hope that I may be favored with your immediate reply I beg to remain,
Your obedient servant,
AUGUSTIN MATHIEU HAUSSY.
This curt episde was greeted by Clio as though it had been lyric with love. “There! That’s what I’ve been waiting for.”
“How do you know it’s because of them?”
“Who else!”
“Want me to go along with you?”
“I’m not going. This Monsieur Augustin Mathieu Haussy—he will come to me.”
“Suppose he won’t?”
“He will.”
And two days later Kakaracou in her best black silk and her finest white fichu and most brilliant tignon opened the door of the Rampart Street house to a dapper littie man carrying a portfolio. Clio received him alone in the dim drawing room, as she had arranged. “It is better that I see him alone, Clint. I am really a very good, shrewd woman of business. I learned t
o be because Mama and Aunt Belle were so bad.”
She wore a childishly simple little dress of white china silk like a girl at her first Communion: puffed sleeves like a baby’s, and a single strand of pearls. Curiously enough, this was the one piece of jewelry which always had been hers. Nicolas Dulaine had given it to this, his child, on her first birthday.
She had been seated on the crimson brocade and mahogany sofa. As the visitor entered rather hesitandy, for the dimness was intensified in his sun-dazzled eyes, she rose, slowly, a slight, almost childish figure.
Cupide, in livery, bawled from the doorway, “Monsieur Augustin Mathieu Haussy!”
She inclined her head, wordlessly. She put out her hand. He bowed over it. When he straightened to look at her he had to raise his eyes a litde, for she was tall, and he was of less than medium height. They looked at one another—a long measuring look.
A little man, with a good brow, a quizzical eye: not more than thirty; a keen face, a long clever nose. “This is no dusty fool,” Clio thought.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness of the room he saw that the demure white figure resolved itself into a purposeful and lovely woman.
“You are younger than I thought—from your letter,” said Clio.
“And you, Mademoiselle, are so young that I am certain you do not yet consider it a compliment to be told that you seem younger.”
“Madame,” she corrected him, smiling; motioned him to a chair.
He perched on the edge of his chair like a sharp little bird, his toes pointing precisely ahead. “I had hoped that we were going to be honest and straightforward.”
She thought, this is not going to be so easy. He has a brain, this little man. Charm, too. Aloud she said, “But of course. I hope you noticed that I did not say to you, ‘To what do I owe the honor of this visit?’ “
“Good. I think I should tell you that I do not belong to the old-school New Orleans tradition. I belong to the post-war New Orleans. I have seen the Carpetbaggers come and go; I have seen New Orleans under Negro rule; I have lived through the yellow-fever scourge of two years ago; I am one of those who wish to rid New Orleans of its old-time unsavoriness. New Orleans of the Mississippi steamboat must pass. By the end of the year five railroad trunk lines will enter—”
