French Silk

by Sandra Brown

  A struggling wisteria vine and one quick, shy chameleon were all that remained alive in the courtyard. The foundation of the fountain was cracked and crumbling. The basin around the naked cherub was filled with stagnant rainwater and dead leaves. The glider was rusty and squeaked when Claire gave it a gentle push.

  “We used to have ferns hanging everywhere. When the airplane ferns made babies, we’d pinch them off and root them in water before planting them in clay pots. Every spring we’d plant perennials in the flower beds and they’d bloom sometimes through December. On mild evenings we’d eat supper out here. Before I started school, Mama used to sit in this chair and tell me fairy tales,” she said, lovingly running her hand over the rusty wrought-iron.

  “Seeing it like this makes me sad. It’s like viewing the corpse of someone you love.” She gave the courtyard another poignant glance, then stepped back into the sun room. In the kitchen, she checked a tin in the pantry and found that it still contained Bigelow tea. “I made tea the last time I was here. Would you like some?”

  Without waiting for his answer, she rinsed out the kettle and turned on the stove beneath it. She was reaching into the cabinet for china when Cassidy captured her busy hands and drew her around to face him.

  This moment had been inevitable. She had known that eventually Cassidy would ask her about it and she would have to tell him. She had prolonged it for as long as possible but could delay no longer.

  “Claire,” he asked softly, “why did you kill Jackson Wilde?”

  His eyes were gazing intently into hers. The time had come.

  “Jackson Wilde was my father.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Spring 1958

  It was hot in the Vieux Carré even though May was only a few days old. Blossoms had burst in such abundance that the air was heavily perfumed. Leaves were new and vibrantly green. The vitality of spring rushed through the veins of three schoolgirls, filling them with a lust for life that couldn’t be appeased by English literature, geometry, French, or chemistry.

  With energy pumping and looking for an outlet, they abandoned their studies to sneak off in search of the forbidden pleasures to be found in the French Quarter. They gorged on Lucky Dogs bought from a street vendor and had their palms read by a strolling gypsy lady with a parrot on her shoulder.

  On a dare from Lisbet, Alice glanced inside one of the strip joints on Bourbon Street when a teasing barker swung the door open as she passed. Squealing, she raced back to where her friends were waiting. “What’d you see?”

  “It was gross,” Alice squealed.

  “Was she naked?”

  “Except for tassels. She was twirling them.”

  “Liar,” Lisbet said.

  “I swear.”

  “No one can really do that. It’s anatomically impossible.”

  “It is if they’re no bigger than yours,” Alice taunted.

  Mary Catherine Laurent diplomatically intervened. She often played the role of peacemaker, disliking strife of any kind, but particularly among her friends. “She didn’t have on anything else?”

  “Not a stitch. Well, she had a tiny triangle of glitter over you-know-what.”

  “Her pussy?” Dumbfounded, the two other girls gaped at Lisbet. “Well, that’s what my big brother calls it.” Lisbet’s brother was a sophomore at Tulane and often inspired awe among his younger sister’s friends.

  Alice sniffed loftily. “That sounds like something he’d say. He’s rude, crude, and socially unacceptable.”

  “And you’re passionately in love with him,” Mary Catherine teased.

  “I am not.”

  “Are so.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lisbet said, striking off down the sidewalk, the pleats of her blue and gray plaid parochial-school skirt brushing against her calves. “He likes Betsy Bouvier. He told me he got his hand up her skirt on their last date.” She glanced over her shoulder at Alice, who looked stricken. “Gotcha, Alice!”

  “Oh!”

  “Does cunt mean the same thing as pussy?” Mary Catherine asked as she skipped to catch up.

  “Shh!” She was sprayed by the admonitions of her two friends. “My God, Mary Catherine. Don’t you know anything?”

  “Well, I don’t have any brothers,” she said defensively. “Does it mean the same thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “But,” Alice added, “if any man ever says that to you, you should slap his face.”

  “Or knee him hard right in the nuts.”

  “It’s bad, then?”

  “It’s about the worst,” Lisbet said, dramatically rolling her eyes.

  “Yesterday you said ‘fuck’ was the worst.”

  The two girls looked at each other and shook their heads over Mary Catherine’s ignorance and confusion. “She’s hopeless.”

  They browsed in the gaudy souvenir shops lining both sides of Bourbon Street, pretending to admire the feathered, spangled Mardi Gras masks while actually studying a coffee mug with a detailed phallic handle.

  “Do you think they really get that big when… you know, when you’re doing it?” Alice whispered.

  Lisbet answered with an air of superiority, “Oh, much bigger than that.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “From who?”

  “I can’t remember, but she said it was huge and hurt like hell when he put it in.”

  Mary Catherine was aghast. “You know somebody who’s actually done it?”

  When pressed, Lisbet couldn’t produce an actual name, so the accuracy of her statement was doubtful.

  “I can’t wait to do it,” Alice admitted as they left the shop and continued down the sidewalk.

  “Even though it hurts?” Mary Catherine thought the whole business of sex sounded unappealing and unladylike.

  “It only hurts the first time, goose. After he busts your cherry, it’s okay.”

  “What’s a cherry?”

  That sent the other two seventeen-year-olds careening into the exterior wall of a jazz joint, collapsing in a fit of giggles.

  Invariably their conversations revolved around human sexuality. They were told by the nuns that it was a grievous sin to contemplate such matters, so that was largely what they contemplated. Mary Catherine and her two very best friends had speculated on everything from if the nuns shaved their pubic hair as well as their heads, to exactly how the male anatomy was constructed.

  They sneaked copies of novels by James Joyce, James Baldwin and James Jones—Lisbet had remarked that there must be something to the name that made the men who had it highly sexual—and pored over the passages describing copulation, which had been conveniently underlined by previous readers. But sometimes even those were annoyingly euphemistic and vague.

  It seemed to Mary Catherine that the more she learned about sex, the more there was to learn. To vent her frustration, she added each tidbit of knowledge to her diary. After her prayers each night, she faithfully confided everything to the leather-bound book with the small gold lock. Tonight, she would be able to fill pages with impressions and new vocabulary words.

  She and her friends meandered through the Quarter, a trio of striking young women, whose ripe young bodies seemed out of place in the austere school uniforms. Their slender calves seemed designed to wear high heels and silk stockings rather than the despised oxfords and bobby socks.

  They arrived at Jackson Square and paused to flirt with a sidewalk artist with a red goatee who was indolently soliciting business from the tourists. Of the samples displayed, his best work was a colored chalk portrait of Marilyn Monroe.

  “He’s probably done another one of her in the nude,” Lisbet said knowingly. “He keeps it hidden away in his ratty little garret. At night he takes it out and jerks off while he’s ogling it.”

  “Do you think any man will ever jerk off while ogling a picture of me?” Alice asked wistfully.

  “You’d better go to confession twice this week,” Li
sbet said. “You’ve got sex on the brain.”

  “Me? You’re the walking encyclopedia on the topic. Or at least you think you are.”

  “I’ve been exposed to much more than you have. I’ve seen my brother—”

  “He’s here again.”

  Mary Catherine’s quiet observation brought the two other girls to a standstill. They followed her absorbed gaze to the statue of Andrew Jackson in the center of the square. More particularly, to the young man who was delivering a fiery sermon to a few pedestrians, one unconscious wino, and a flock of pigeons.

  “The Lord is sick and tired of his children sinning,” he declared, slapping the worn Bible in his hand. “He looks down here on Earth and sees the lying and the cheating and the gambling and the drinking and the fornicating—”

  “That’s another word for fuck,” Lisbet informed Mary Catherine in a whisper.

  Mary Catherine shrugged her off impatiently. She was drawn to the young preacher not so much by what he was saying, but by the passion with which he was saying it.

  “His judgment is near, ladies and gentlemen. He ain’t gonna stand for our sinning much longer. No, siree.” He plucked a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his shiny navy blue suit and mopped his forehead, which was perspiring beneath a lock of dark blond hair.

  “I weep for sinners to be saved.” Gnashing his teeth and closing his eyes, he threw back his head and appealed to heaven. “Lord God, open their eyes. Sweet Jesus, have mercy on the weak. Give them strength to fight Satan and his wily, wicked ways.”

  The girls entered the gate and moved closer for a better look. “He’s kind of cute,” Lisbet said.

  “You think so?” Alice asked, eyeing the preacher critically.

  “I do.”

  Lisbet turned to Mary Catherine, who was still staring enraptured at the sidewalk preacher. “Hmm. I do believe Mary Catherine is smitten, Alice.”

  She blushed. “I’ve seen him here before. Last Saturday my daddy brought me to Café du Monde for breakfast. He was here then, too. There was a larger crowd. He laid hands on some of the people.”

  “On their what?” Alice asked, crowding in closer to Mary Catherine.

  “On their heads, stupid,” Lisbet said scornfully. “It was their heads, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Mary Catherine replied. “When you get saved, he lays his hands on you so you’ll receive the Holy Spirit.”

  “Let’s get saved,” Lisbet suggested excitedly.

  “We’re already saved.” Then with less conviction, Alice asked, “Aren’t we?”

  “Well, sure. We’ve been baptized. We go to mass. But he doesn’t know that.” Lisbet turned to Mary Catherine. “Go get saved.”

  “Yeah,” Alice seconded. “We’ll watch. Go on.”

  “No!”

  “Chicken.”

  The preacher was extending an invitation for anyone within the sound of his voice to take his hand. It would be the same as accepting the Lord Jesus by the hand, he told his listeners. “Dear brothers and sisters, you don’t want to go to hell, do you?”

  “You don’t want to go to hell, Mary Catherine,” Alice said seriously. “Go on. He’s looking straight at you.”

  “No, he’s not. He’s looking at all of us.”

  “He’s looking at you. Maybe he sees that you’re truly a sinner. Go get saved.” Lisbet gave her friend a firm push.

  Mary Catherine demurred, but in ways she couldn’t understand or explain, she was drawn to the young preacher’s compelling voice. Years before, a young, good-looking priest had trained at their parish. She and all her friends had developed passionately sinful crushes on him. They attended nearly every mass that he conducted. Yet Mary Catherine hadn’t felt moved by that young priest as she did by this shabbily dressed, marginally articulate, but positively dynamic sidewalk evangelist.

  Urged on by her friends, she walked toward him, sending pigeons scuttling aside, drawn as though by a power beyond herself. When she was within several feet of him, he stepped forward and extended his hand. “Hello, sister.”

  “Hello.”

  “Do you want Jesus to come into your heart?”

  “I… I think so. Yes. I do.”

  “Hallelujah! Take my hand.”

  She hesitated. His hand was perfectly formed, strong-looking, the smooth palm turned up invitingly. She stretched her hand forward and laid it in his. She thought she heard Alice and Lisbet gasp in disbelief of her courage, but all her senses were shocked by the sudden fist the preacher closed around her hand.

  “Kneel now, sister,” She did. The pavement was hard beneath her bare knees, but when he laid his hands on her head and invoked God’s forgiveness and blessings, she didn’t feel anything except the heat emanating from his fingers and palms. After a long prayer, he placed a hand beneath her elbow and assisted her to her feet.

  “Just like Jesus told the woman taken in adultery, go and sin no more.” Then he took a wooden offering plate out of a battered suitcase that was lying open at his feet and thrust it at her.

  The gesture took her by surprise. “Oh.” For a moment she was too flustered to think, then she hastily opened her purse, clumsily removed a five-dollar bill, and dropped it into the plate.

  “Thank you kindly, sister. God’s gonna reward you for your generosity.”

  He quickly replaced the offering plate with her five-dollar bill, along with his Bible, inside the suitcase and snapped it shut. Picking it up, he jauntily walked away.

  “Uh, wait!” Mary Catherine couldn’t believe her audacity, but to let him casually walk out of her life was unthinkable. “What’s your name?”

  “Reverend Jack Collins. But everybody calls me Wild Jack.”

  He’d been reared in a poverty-stricken rural town in Mississippi. About the only thing the town had going for it was the railroad. A section crew was headquartered there. For the most part, the men were single and lived in boardinghouses.

  His mama provided evening entertainment for them.

  Being the only whore in town, she did a lively business. She’d conceived and given birth to little Jack without ever knowing which of her customers had sired him. Jack’s first memory was of toddling around their cramped room to fetch his mama her Lucky Strikes. By the time he was eight, they were fighting over the packs her gentlemen friends sometimes left behind.

  He went to school only because the truant officer gave his mama hell if she neglected to get him up and send him off. She in turn gave him hell if he didn’t go. Out of sheer stubbornness, he learned as little as possible, although he was a natural leader. Because he didn’t give a damn about anything or anyone, because he never even whimpered when he got licks but looked at the principal eyeball to eyeball with open contempt, he earned the fear and admiration of his classmates. He used that to his advantage and wielded more authority on campus than did the faculty.

  When he was thirteen, he called his mama a fat, stinking whore one time too many. She coaxed one of her johns to ambush and beat the hell out of him. The next day, he regained consciousness near the railroad tracks with a freight train barreling down it. Holding his broken ribs with one hand, he jumped the freight. He never went back and never saw his mama again. He hoped she died and rotted in hell.

  He hoboed through the South for several years, taking odd jobs until he had enough money to get drunk, get laid, and get in a fight, and then he moved on.

  One night the freight he was on stopped somewhere in Arkansas. It looked like a happening town, the kind that appealed to a wild young buck like him. But to his irritation the “happening” turned out to be a tent revival. The next freight wasn’t due till morning, and that evening it came a downpour. He reasoned that the tent would at least provide shelter, so he attended the revival with everyone else in town.

  He scorned everything about the service and everyone who listened with misplaced hope to the preacher who admonished his congregation to seek treasures in heaven, not on earth. What a dope, Jack thought.


  He changed his mind when he saw how full the offering plate was when it was passed to him. Pretending to put a bill in, he took out a ten. But he looked upon the smug preacher standing on the podium with new respect.

  Jack Collins made a career decision that rainy night in Arkansas. With a portion of that ten-dollar bill, he bought a Bible and struggled through a first reading. He attended more revival meetings. He listened and learned. To pass the hours in freight cars, he imitated the inflection and gestures of the preachers. When he felt ready, he stood on a street corner in a hick town in Alabama and preached his first sermon. The coins pitched to him added up to $1.37.

  It was a start.

  “Hello. You probably don’t remember me.”

  Mary Catherine shyly intercepted him at the corner of the Presbytere. He’d just finished his sermon and had cut across the square with his brisk, quick stride. Having observed him for several days, she had noticed that he always moved as though he were in a hurry to get where he was going.

  He smiled at her. “Course I remember you.”

  “I got saved the other day.”

  “And you’ve been back twice since then. Without your friends.”

  She’d hung back at the edges of the crowd, afraid of appearing bold. He had seemed not to notice her. Flattered that he had, she blushed. “I don’t want to bother you.”

  “No bother, sister. What’s on your mind?”

  “You said the Lord needed help in getting his work done.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So I brought you this.” She pushed a ten-dollar bill into his hand.

  He stared down at it for a moment before raising his eyes to hers and saying emotionally, “God bless you, sister.”

  “Will it help?”

  “More than you know.” He cleared his throat. “Say, I’m hungry as a bear. Want a burger?”