My Juliet: A Novel

by John Ed Bradley

  Sonny doesn’t answer. He closes the door behind his father and walks past her and enters the lounge to the clank of the cowbell.

  The same boy is playing pinball and the bar now is crowded with beer drinkers and Sonny can smell crab boil past the cigarette smoke. The captain is standing in the same place as before working on another platter of shrimp. Above him the TV shows news from the city and yet another story about an abandoned house torched by arsonists. The captain, gazing upward, absorbs it all as if with a superior understanding. “Your coloreds can’t be trusted with kitchen matches,” he says. He talks in the direction of the set. “They’re like children that way.”

  “Bruce?” Sonny says.

  He wishes he had the club. He wishes he had the captain alone in the room of a house in a bad neighborhood where drug dealers and gangbangers own the streets and anybody who lives there is asking for whatever they get. The story about the fire ends and one about a wreck on the Chef Highway begins. Two people were killed, one injured. The traffic delay lasted for hours while state police investigated the scene.

  “Bruce?” Sonny says again, louder now. He waits and the captain slips under the shelf that serves as a door to the elevated run behind the bar. “What did you call my father when I came in here earlier? You called him something.”

  “I called him something?” The captain wipes his hands on a dish towel and shrimp scales fall to the floor. He laughs and his open mouth shows more of the pink ground meat and dark spaces where teeth are missing. “Oh. You mean when I said he was a retard?”

  Sonny walks closer. “He’s got Alzheimer’s. You don’t know the difference between being sick and being retarded?” And before the captain can answer Sonny lunges at him and clutches his neck in his hands. The captain is slow to react and for a moment Sonny believes he has the strength to crush him. He shoves him against the bar and some of the beer drinkers scatter and a stool topples over and meets the floor with a heavy, metallic thud. Sonny chokes him until a jolt of pain radiates up from his groin and he falls to the floor clutching himself and bellowing for the pain.

  Something forces the whiskey up into Sonny’s mouth and he coughs it out.

  “I’ll show you sick,” says the captain, then spits his mouthful of shrimp at Sonny. “Jimmy, teach this boy some more about sick.”

  The kid who was playing pinball walks over and brings his foot hard into Sonny’s ribs.

  “A little more,” says the captain. “He comes from town.” And Sonny absorbs another one.

  Somebody pours beer on his head as they’re dragging him outside. As they walk away Sonny can hear them laughing but no one says anything. He crawls to where he’s parked and leans back against the front bumper needing to throw up again. His chest stings and he feels where he wet his pants and where the shells dug holes in his hands. When he looks up five or six of them are watching from the window. Someone waves and he recognizes the woman who wanted to know what he was carrying earlier. He doesn’t return the gesture but it crosses his mind he should show he hasn’t lost his humor.

  He pulls himself up and gets behind the wheel and starts the engine.

  “Did we catch anything?” asks a voice.

  Sonny looks over and Mr. LaMott, pushed back against the door, waits with what is either a smile or a frown, depending on your point of view.

  They are a long time down the road before Sonny answers.

  Nathan Harvey’s bristly white mustache, stained yellow in the middle from a forty-year nicotine addiction, tarnishes the shine on his otherwise high-polished demeanor. His outfit today is a light silk weave finished with a raspberry bow tie, argyle socks and wing tips buffed to a military shine. He is older, perhaps seventy. But he carries himself with the confidence of a blue-chip athlete with miles and miles left to run.

  His office is a suite of rooms on a top floor of One Shell Square, an imposing tower of stone and glass in the Central Business District whose majority occupant is Shell Oil, the petroleum giant. Perhaps because her mother employed him, Juliet expected Harvey to keep a less modern workplace, something of the pile-of-bricks variety, say, with flaking plaster on the walls and badly scarred wood floors protesting wherever you walked. Harvey’s office commands panoramic views of the Mississippi River and the French Quarter. That it is equipped with personal computers, and not Remington Noiseless, also impresses.

  “Miss Beauvais, please meet Mr. Nathan Harvey,” the attorney’s secretary says as the two come together. “Mr. Harvey, Miss Juliet Beauvais.”

  “Ah, yes, the daughter,” Harvey says, giving Juliet’s hand a strong, athletic shake.

  Who can guess how many horror stories her mother confided to this man, most all of them casting Juliet as the villain and she the victim? Harvey, despite this secret knowledge, seems ready to pinch Juliet on the cheek and reward her with a Tootsie Pop for arriving on time.

  “Maria will show you to the library,” he says, “and be sure to take in the view. You can almost see the state of Mississippi—the red of their already red necks broiling in the noonday sun.”

  “The red of their already red . . . ?” She’s playing dumb. “Oh, okay. They’re rednecks!”

  “Miss Beauvais?” The secretary is standing at the entrance to a hallway, waving in the fashion of a flight attendant to boarding passengers. “If you’ll come with me, please.”

  Juliet follows her into a large, book-filled conference room where Sonny sits with Anna Huey at a long mahogany table. Although he seems loath to acknowledge her, Juliet leans over and brushes her mouth against Sonny’s face. It’s the sort of half-felt gesture that college sorority girls, too sophisticated for handshakes, reward each other just for being wonderful. “Hello, sweetie. How are you?”

  “Julie,” he allows with a note of formality.

  Sonny doesn’t look right. Something about his face suggests a recent trauma. He was always on the pale side, but today purple streaks mark the corners of his mouth and make his overall cast appear abnormally white. It’s as if he talked too much and bruised his lips.

  “Baby, are you okay? Did they beat you, too?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t hear about the other night? Somebody beat me with a club.”

  Sonny starts to speak but the cleaning woman interrupts. “‘Somebody beat me with a club.’ Juliet, I can’t believe you just said that. What in the world is wrong with you? Juliet, you’re mocking your mother’s death. You’re making fun, and of all times now!”

  “Hey, Julie, why don’t you have a seat?” Sonny says.

  Juliet stares at Anna Huey even though she still seems to be addressing Sonny. “As I was saying, somebody came to my hotel and let me have it with a pipe. I put up a fight. I kept clawing at the sonofabitch, trying to rip his eyes out. The best I could do was get some skin off his arm.” Juliet, looking at Sonny finally, touches a spot on top of her head. “Come feel. It’s as big as a goose egg. You believe me, don’t you, sweetie?”

  “Believe you? Why wouldn’t I believe you, Julie? You’ve never lied to me.”

  Anna Huey, pushing her chair back, laughs as she comes to her feet and walks over to the window. The vertical blinds are open and she brings her gaze to the rooftops of the French Quarter, the neighborhoods beyond.

  “Oh, okay,” Juliet says. “I kept trying to figure out what was different about you today, Anna Huey, and it’s the clothes. My heavens, you’re actually wearing some. Hey, lady, where’s the uniform?”

  “I think I’m leaving,” Sonny says.

  “Stay where you are,” Anna Huey tells him.

  Nathan Harvey shuffles in carrying a stack of folders and sits at the head of the table. As he’s sorting papers, Harvey’s secretary passes out ink pens and yellow legal tablets. “For any notes you might want to take,” he explains. “And now a surprise. Or what I hope is a surprise.” Harvey waits, obviously enjoying the moment. He raises an eyebrow and screws up his face in a smile. “The great lady herself is going to be speaki
ng to us this morning.”

  “The great lady?” Juliet involuntarily comes up an inch in her chair.

  “Well, she won’t be here in the actual flesh,” Harvey says, “but your mother did elect to appear on video giving a loose reading of her will and we’re going to watch that now. To avoid any confusion, I should tell you that recorded wills such as the one you are about to see have no validity in the state of Louisiana. They’ve become popular since the VCR revolution in recent years and their purpose is strictly as a companion to the statutory will, which we will discuss in detail as soon as the tape is over.” The lawyer glances back over his shoulder. “Maria?”

  Harvey’s secretary wheels a television and VCR hookup into the room. Harvey dims the lights and the screen flashes and a block of color fills Juliet’s face. She shifts in her seat, and suddenly her mother appears seated in her favorite chair in the parlor at home.

  “Hello everyone,” the dead woman begins, fingering a thicket of index cards in her lap. “As this is my last will and testament I’ll try not to ramble and veer too far off course but that won’t be easy with that camera in my face. Juliet, I must say, darling, I now have a new appreciation for what you do. My heavens. And, look, I’ve kept my clothes on.”

  Only Harvey laughs. Miss Marcelle, in no hurry, pours herself a cup of coffee, and Juliet notes the antique silver service and dish of lady fingers on the butler’s table. The showoff. Why didn’t she use one of her regular cups? With a camera in the room, were the color-coded plastic mugs no longer good enough?

  “Well,” Miss Marcelle continues, “I don’t plan to die any time soon, but my dying will be made less a bother by this will and that’s why Nathan has advised me to do it.

  “First of all, I want to leave one hundred dollars to Sonny LaMott. Sonny, this is not a gift but a commission to paint my portrait, which I’d like to hang in the parlor here at home. Anna Huey, if you can stand to look at me, I’d like it on that wall there.” She points to a place in the room. “Sonny, you’ve been a friend and I admire anyone who aims to greatness. If I might make a suggestion, Sonny, paint me not as I am today but as I was when I married Johnny and first moved to the mansion. I was young once, too, and some say quite the lady. And you might if you look closely find a native resemblance to your Juliet, and let this inspire you, Sonny, as I know how you’ve always felt about her. Thank you, darling.”

  Miss Marcelle consults her cards again. “Anna Huey, I leave you my wardrobe. Please have your friends come by and choose from what clothes of mine you don’t want yourself. The rest you can give to St. Vincent de Paul. Anna Huey, please think of me every morning when you sit down in the kitchen to your biscuit and jam. I hope you will tell Anthony how grateful I am to him for sending all those precious cards pretending they were from Juliet. I hold no grudges against the dear boy and I never have. Tell him I said so, if you would.

  “Juliet, darling, I want you to have the wedding band your father gave me, as it is the most valuable item I have left in my possession.” She shuffles her crib notes and uses her thumb to square them. “Also, I’d like to leave you what money I have left after Sonny gets his commission. It should amount to a few hundred dollars, but if it’s less please try to understand. Money is something I’ve had trouble with these last years, and I’m sure when I’m done Nathan will provide you—”

  “Stop the tape,” Juliet says.

  “. . . with more details and I’ll be disgraced to a degree—”

  “Stop it,” Juliet says again. “Stop it now.”

  “. . . but not nearly so much as when your father . . .”

  Harvey, in the dark, hurries over to the machine.

  “Mr. Harvey? Mr. Harvey, what is she rambling on about?”

  He punches a button and brings the show to a pause. “Miss Beauvais, I’ll have to ask you to quiet down and be patient. It’s coming.” He turns from Juliet to the image of Miss Marcelle on the screen, then back to Juliet again. “May we continue, please?”

  Harvey doesn’t wait for her response. The tape starts to play again and he returns to his seat, settling in with a sigh. “Juliet,” says Miss Marcelle, “I pray that you have a daughter of your own one day and I pray you’re a better mother to her than I have been to you. As you well know, your father never loved me and I spent your childhood resenting you because you were the one he cared about. This is no easy admission for me to make, but there you have it. Your father and I were never meant to be together, I’m afraid, and yet we did have you . . .”

  Miss Marcelle stops and clears her throat, and something in the room distracts her. It’s Anna Huey, her white-stockinged thighs whistling as she carries in a glass of water. Miss Marcelle takes a sip and looks down at her cards, and the camera focuses in tighter. Her face occupies every inch of the screen. “For the record,” she says, “let me say again to you, darling, that your father’s death was a destiny that came at no fault of mine. I know you’ve blamed me but blame doesn’t equal truth and the truth in this case is all I have and all I’ve ever had. I still dream of that sad day at Lake Pontchartrain and always I wish it were I who was lost to the water and not Johnny. I know he was your happiness.”

  She places the index cards on the table then takes one of the lady fingers and nibbles its edge. “Nathan,” she says upon realizing that she’s still being filmed, “you can turn that off now. I’m done.”

  The overhead lights come on and Nathan Harvey reclines in his chair scratching his short yellow whiskers. Someone is crying and Sonny swivels in his chair and discovers Anna Huey racked with sobs, a hand covering her mouth.

  Juliet wears a befuddled expression, but no more so than the one Sonny is wearing. Miss Marcelle did not give a complete accounting, after all.

  Why did she fail to mention the fate of the mansion?

  “Any questions,” the lawyer says.

  “Did she mean to leave everything out?” Juliet reads from her yellow tablet. “A commission for Sonny. Some hand-me-downs for the maid. An old ring and a few dollars for me. Can that be it?”

  “Maria?” Harvey, snapping his head back, talks toward the door. “Oh, Maria? We’re ready for you now, darling.”

  The secretary returns and passes out Xerox copies of a document titled with bold block lettering. Dated and signed by Marcelle L. Beauvais, Nathan Harvey and two witnesses, it is Miss Marcelle’s last will and testament and it consists of two pages only. Sonny reads quickly. Finished after less than a minute, he looks up and faces Juliet.

  “This is a joke,” she says.

  The lawyer doesn’t answer.

  “Mr. Harvey, the Beauvais Mansion has been in my family since the early 1800s. When it was built it was the finest house of its kind in all the South and not a few architectural historians still regard it as such. My father was the fifth generation to live there, and I the sixth.”

  In an instant Juliet has abandoned her sex kitten persona and adopted that of a preservationist on loan from a local historical society. Sonny, for one, couldn’t be more impressed. Now she glares at the lawyer with equal parts rage and curiosity, then points to the TV set. “Am I right to assume Mother didn’t include any mention of the Beauvais because it automatically goes to me?” When there is no answer, Juliet says, “I’m the last of them, in case you forgot.”

  Harvey rocks in his chair and lets a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. Sonny halfway expects him to call Maria back with more papers, with something, but in a moment the lawyer reclaims his formal deportment and makes a steeple of his hands. He takes in a breath of air and as quickly exhales it. “She didn’t include the mansion in the will, Miss Beauvais, because it wasn’t hers to include. Your mother didn’t own it.”

  “She didn’t own it? You’re full of crap, mister.”

  A silence follows, and the only sound is the squealing of the videotape rewinding in the VCR. Sonny slumps in his seat. “If not my mother,” Juliet says, “then who does own it, Mr. Harvey? Tell me that. Who does own it?”


  It isn’t the lawyer who provides the answer.

  “I do,” says Anna Huey, slowly rising to her feet and returning to her spot by the window.

  “I got nothing against you wearing that dress,” Juliet says, “but I draw the line . . . I do draw the line at you claiming my house. Goddamn, Mr. Harvey.”

  Harvey digs in his folder for another document. “If you’ll allow me, Mrs. Huey?”

  Anna Huey gives a nod and Harvey says, “As you either are unaware or have forgotten, Miss Beauvais, Mrs. Huey’s husband, Charles, was killed a number of years ago in an accident on a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico—”

  “Right. Charles. But what does that have to do with anything?”

  “Please, dear. Let me finish.” Harvey waits until Juliet is quiet, then he says, “This firm on behalf of Mrs. Huey brought a civil action against the oil company for which Charles was employed, and at trial we prevailed. Mrs. Huey’s suit resulted in one of the largest jury awards in the history of the state of Louisiana.” Harvey brings a hand to his mouth but too late to hide his satisfied smile. “She got twenty million.”