Marie Laveau

by Francine Prose

  “Thank you,” said Marie. “At least I’ll have this when I lose the business.”

  Marie Saloppe’s thunderous belly-laugh rocked Marie’s dream. “Sure you’re losing it. Look at you. You’re a grown woman in your prime, and you haven’t been loved right since that Jacques Paris left town. No wonder you’re losing your magic.”

  “How ’bout those musicians who come home with me Sunday nights?”

  “I’m not talking ’bout ’musicians’!” Marie Saloppe shook her head so hard drops of water flew from her oily kerchief. “I’m talking ’bout men with names and faces and stories, men who are still there when it’s time to get up in the morning. I’m talking ’bout doing this dance right. That’s what you need, honey . Get yourself a man. Get loved good. That’s how to get your magic back.”

  Marie Saloppe began to laugh. Marie laughed with her, laughed herself awake, laughed all morning, laughed at the first client who asked her why she was laughing.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  MARIE TOOK A lover named Clement Moevius, former proprietor of the Wheel of Fortune Room, presently employed at the Hotel St. Julian, a fifty-five-year-old gambler who hadn’t had a winning number or a woman in fifteen years.

  On the day Clement Moevius was struck by those two facts, he decided to find a woman. “Unlucky at cards, lucky at love,” he thought. “If fortune won’t smile at me, I’ll find someone who will.” He remembered his last woman—a red-headed cabaret singer from Natchez. But he couldn’t imagine where to find another. He didn’t want a cheap whore. And he wasn’t young or lucky enough to get it for free.

  One night Clement Moevius knocked on Marie’s door. Unable to explain why he was there, the Dutchman squirmed in his chair. Marie knew the signs—but she couldn’t believe it. “You want me to go to bed with you?” she asked.

  “Y-yes,” stuttered the astounded gambler. “And I’ll make it worth your while. I’ll tell you the secret of the wheel at the hotel. I’ve worked there long enough—I know.”

  Marie knew he was lying. It was as plain as his drooping reddish moustache. But it didn’t matter. She was remembering how brave he used to look on the stage of the Wheel of Fortune Room before Marie Saloppe had used her dream to fix him.

  “You play cards?” she asked.

  “Sure do.”

  “Then keep your secret. Let’s play for it.”

  They played gin for a hundred points. Marie palmed aces up her sleeve and drew deuces because she couldn’t bear to dim the light in his eyes, the glow of gambling for something important and winning.

  She put down the cards and led the Dutchman into her bedroom. His thick body was soft and defeated—she’d known exactly how it would feel. She’d also known he wouldn’t stay inside her for more than a minute. But afterward, while he snored peacefully in her bed, Marie felt the air humming with thanks and blessings and realized that her magic had stopped draining away.

  She hadn’t regained all she’d lost. Yet the crisis—as Father Antoine used to say—had passed.

  Marie took a lover named William O’Connell, an Irishman on a winter visit to New Orleans. She met him at a waterfront tavern where free colored men drank with Yankee sea captains, Indian sailors, Spanish cooks, and Lebanese whores. It was a Sunday night. Marie and her musician friends were drunk.

  Just before midnight the noisy room grew quiet and Marie heard a man’s high tenor singing a slow song about the emerald hills of Connemara. At first she was embarrassed for the sweet, almost feminine voice rising from that rough crowd; she couldn’t look at the musicians beside her. But soon she forgot them. The singer’s bell-like voice made her heart ache. She looked around to see the musicians listening, transfixed.

  The song ended and the crowd burst into drunken applause. Marie signaled the bartender, who pointed to a handsome, anemic-looking young man alone at a table in the corner. Marie whispered in the singer’s ear. Then he stood up and followed her out of the bar.

  He made love even more sweetly than he sang. At dawn Marie dreamed that her body was a harp he was playing to accompany his song about the emerald hills. In the morning William O’Connell told her he was a printer from Londonderry.

  “What are you doing in New Orleans?” asked Marie. “Business?”

  “No. It’s a personal matter. My family came over in 1819. Philip and Eileen O’Connell—did you know them?”

  “No.”

  “My mother was always telling crazy stories about America. Fortunes. Mansions. Indians throwing gold coins from the docks. I stayed home—God forgive me, but my mother’s stories sounded like lies. A few months later I got word they’d all died in the yellow fever.

  “So I’ve always had it in mind to find my father’s grave. People say I favor him. I’d like to put a wreath on his grave and say a mass for his soul.”

  Marie coughed, choking on the stench of the Charity Hospital on the hottest night in July. “You were right to stay home,” she said, inexplicably angry. “Those stories were lies.” She stared into William O’Connell’s green eyes, bright and wet as the hills in his song. “But I don’t know where you’ll find that grave. Lots of people died that summer.”

  Marie took a lover named Wen Shu, a member of the Rising Sun dynasty, the five hundred and fifty-fifth emperor of China.

  He came to Marie in a dream, accompanied by an impressive retinue: Soldiers with curved axes. Burly Tartar bodyguards. Mandarin secretaries. The emperor was a delicate old man with a dignity which stunned Marie into silence as she watched him remove his brocaded robes and climb into bed. He made love gently, as if she were a small woman, fragile as proce-lain. Then he thanked her.

  “I came all the way from China to see you,” he said. “Your reputation has traveled around the world. My court magicians can turn wooden staffs into serpents. But not since the time of Lao-Tsu have the serpents been able to talk.”

  Marie’s dream changed. She was flying over the ocean on an albatross’s wings. Below her, crowded ships crossed from continent to continent. She saw Madame Henriette escaping from the flames she’d helped her man light, Portuguese sailors seeking African jewels, Eileen O’Connell sailing toward fortune, Clement Moevius sailing toward good luck, the Astounding Avila sailing to a land where no one had ever seen his master’s tricks.

  “You’ve got a better reason than most,” she told the emperor.

  She awoke to find her room filled with incense. On her doorstep was an exquisite peach-colored silk shawl, embroidered with peacocks, leopards, the rising sun. Looking in the mirror, she tried on the shawl. Her eyes were as red as the embroidered sunrise.

  Marie took a lover named Bastile Croquere. He came to her on business. “It’s my wife,” he confessed. “She’s become a saint. She won’t let me touch her.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “A year.”

  “Here’s some Magnet Draw Oil, the strongest I’ve got. Tonight while she’s asleep put a drop on her breast, right over her heart.”

  The fix didn’t work. “Are you sure you found her heart?” asked Marie.

  “Nobody could find her heart,” said Bastile, who’d decided to fix himself in Marie’s bed.

  They approached each other like duelers, keeping a safe distance even when he was inside her. Yet somewhere in the night the duel ended. They were still warriors but now they were fighting in the same army. Marie felt her spirit rising in a course it hadn’t taken since she’d been with Jacques.

  “Now I know what they mean when they talk about your magic power,” said Bastile.

  “Now I know what they mean when they talk about your magic sword,” laughed Marie.

  “Maybe this is what Marie Saloppe meant,” she thought. “Maybe I’ll get my power back from loving Bastile Croquere.” But immediately she knew she was wrong. Bastile’s love had come from her own failure. If her Magnet Draw had worked, he wouldn’t be in her bed. She was confused, but not enough to forget. She’d rather cure Bastile’s wife than have Bastil
e. She wanted her magic.

  “You want your wife cured?” she asked him.

  “Sure,” said Bastile, surprised by the time and place she’d picked to ask.

  “Then we shouldn’t do this anymore. The fix depends on it.”

  Marie took a lover named Ti-Bud Corvo, a convicted wife-murderer awaiting execution at Parish Prison. Ti-Bud’s was a crime of passion. He’d killed his wife in the arms of his neighbor—whose Creole second cousin was the city police chief.

  “Ti-Bud’s got more passion than sense,” said the other prisoners. That was what attracted Marie. The moody Cajun never mentioned his crime. Occasionally he’d speak of his wife; his blue eyes would tear, and his long sinewy hands would shake in a way which made her yawn with a lust which felt almost like fatigue.

  One afternoon while the warden was busy, Marie lay down on Ti-Bud’s hard cot. His passion was enough to make her get up and go directly to Judge Henry Morton, whom she begged to commute Ti-Bud’s sentence.

  “I’m sorry,” said the Judge. “But even I don’tcross the police chief. He knows almost as much as you.”

  “So that’s the one who’s got your number,” sneered Marie.

  “I’m sorry,” repeated Judge Morton. “Notthisone. But the next favor you ask—I’ll do it, no matter what. Anything you want.”

  “I don’t want anything else,” said Marie, sighing as she recalled Ti-Bud’s hands. “But I’ll keep it in mind for the future.”

  Marie took a lover named Charles “Sunny” King, the best musician in the Sunday dance band, the one who knew exactly how to drive the dancers to that fever pitch. His nickname came from a singular talent: On cloudy days he could make the sun appear by playing his drums. “I don’t know why it happens,” he said. “It just happens.”

  Sunny drummed everywhere—on tabletops, cof-feecups, his big thighs and knees. He knew who was playing on every street comer, in every whorehouse and bar, knew who played best and second best. Unfortunately, that was all he knew. Still his good looks and his odd power over the sun charmed dozens of women, who all bought Marie’s fixes to make themselves his one true love.

  His drumming charmed Marie. He was shy and quiet with her. She liked his slow laugh. She’d thought that he’d move his body in the same strong rhythms he drummed—but he was more loving than that. So she stayed with him, night after night. His love didn't restore her magic but his good-natured company let her forget how much of her power was still lost.

  One morning Sunny awoke in a sweat. “This place is haunted,” he told Marie. “I saw a ghost last night in this room—like a normal man but transparent, so I knew he was a ghost. He was my color, maybe a little taller. He was carrying a yellow fish and a piece of stone amber in one hand, a two-by-four in the other.

  “I shook you, but you were fast asleep. ‘Don’t wake Marie,’ he said. ‘Just give her a message—tell her it’s from Jacques. Tell her these men aren’t what she needs. They won’t bring her magic back. She needs solitude. She needs to spend some time by herself and get that power old Franklin Midnight had. Tell her to go out to his shack.’ ” Sunny looked at Marie. “Who’s Jacques?” he asked. “Some old boyfriend of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so.” Sunny shook his head. “I thought that was just the kind of thing an old boyfriend would say.”

  CHAPTER XXVII

  THERE IS A place in every town. The vacant house on the oldest block in the city. The gunpowder shack. The ramshackle farmhouse. The mud hut in the pine forest. The shredded tent.

  No one lives there.

  “The witch lives there,” say the children. They hold their breath and race past it in mortal cfenger until they shriek, safe at last, safe where the dark powers of the house can’t reach them.

  It is ivy and tangled vines. Rotted boards. Holes in the roof. Blackness inside empty frames. Shadowy faces at the window. It is the place of ghost stories and bad dreams, the quiet home of solitude, the dark cellar where mystery spends it childhood.

  It is Franklin Midnight’s shack on Bayou St. John.

  Marie moved in daylight. She left a sign on her door—“Gone on Vacation”—and took back alleys out to the bayou.

  In the bright morning sun, the run-down shack looked small and sad. Marie hadn’t been there since the night of her duel with Doctor John. Yet now she forgot that night and remembered the last time she’d seen it in daylight, when Jacques took her walking.

  A broken door swung on one hinge. Marie pushed it open and entered the dim room. She pried off the thin slats covering one window. Light flooded in on the cobweb-draped comers, the dust-carpeted floor. The shack was bare—no garbage, no broken bottles, not a scrap from Franklin Midnight’s solitary life. “It’s almost pleasant here,” thought Marie. The walls were the lovely red-brown-gold of aged wood. The room felt safe, secure: a shelter.

  Marie dropped her thin bedroll on the floor, then hung her package of food and candles from a rafter. She spent the rest of the day strolling through the bayou, staring at thick bubbles on the surface of the water, at the gulls flying out to sea. The light was fading by the time she returned to the shack.

  Using a handful of rushes as a makeshift broom, she swept out the dust. She took a knife, a candle, and an orange from her pack and stood by the open window, staring at the cypresses around the clearing. It was dusk—light enough to do without the candle. She set the unlit candle on the sill, sat down on her bedroll, and began to peel the orange.

  She ate it slowly, carefully, as if it were a ten-course meal. Halfway through, she realized she was watching herself with a strange detached pleasure, thinking: This woman named Marie Laveau holds her paring knife like this. She eats her orange slowly. Like this. She tears apart the sections, pulls back the white membrane and the juice wets her fingers. Like this. It was startling, not like the shock she’d felt as a young girl catching her reflection in the ballroom mirror, but a gentler surprise, like catching someone she’d lived with all her life in the familiar and mysterious act of peeling fruit. “This is who I am,” she thought. “Marie Laveau eats an orange like this.” And the solitude settled on her, the peace of knowing she was fully there, contained in herself, all she ever needed.

  Then the night came and showed her that the day had been lying. The night brought its own music. Beating wings. Trembling leaves. Frogs croaking like sick old men. Screech owls wailing like lost children. Breezes whispering foul threats.

  Marie identified each sound. “The owls,” she told herself, “The frogs,” using their simple names to order and tame the chaotic noisy blackness. But then she heard the darker cries, the night’s true voice, the sounds with no name, no origin: Heartbeats. Footsteps. Thuds. Crashes. Screams.

  Huddled on the bedroll, Marie hugged her knees. Her hand came to rest on something smooth and slightly damp. Her heart raced until she remembered: orange peels. “Stop it,” she scolded herself out loud. “You’ve been alone before. There’s nothing to be scared of.” She groped her way across the room, found and lit the candle.

  But the candle was conspiring with the darkness, bound by a common sense of the right way to celebrate night. The flickering light invited in the shadows, honored guests born among the cobwebs, dark shapes enveloping the room, dancing in time to the nameless sounds.

  She blew out the candle and gazed out at the warm, humid night. The noises diminished as she stared them down. Then visions rushed in to fill the anxious hush: Disembodied lights snaking through the low branches of twisted trees. Blazing eyes. Puffs of green smoke. And finally a human form—a gigantic angular man leaning against the same tree on which Doctor John had hung his cloak during their duel.

  Marie slid down to the floor, her back against the damp wall. Trembling, she told herself she was crazy to have picked this spot, tied to so many terrifying memories; her duel with Doctor John, blind, deaf Franklin Midnight alone for all those black years. “Why here?” she thought. “Just ’cause some drummer dreamed about Jacques
Paris?” She stood up, halfready to pack her things and go back ...

  Then she saw: A silver crescent moon had risen. The tall figure vanished from the cypress grove, faded back into her imagination. The sounds had names. The shadows were attached to forms.

  She spared her bedroll beneath the window and lay down, then remembered Marie Saloppe’s old warning: Sleeping with moonlight on your face will make you crazy. She shifted her body out of the stream of light.

  Just before she fell asleep, Marie realized: This was Franklin Midnight’s world. Not the bright bayou days, but these nights full of half-tones, sounds, and shadows. This was his province, the time and place he came into his own, when he talked to the forest and it answered. This was the time he gathered his courage and filled the air with vibrancy for miles around. This was the time his magic grew.

  At the edge of sleep, Marie felt the waves of Franklin Midnight’s power pulsing through the shack.

  She learned to love the darkness, the hours when edges were blurred and the night spoke in its true voice. She learned to love the solitude.

  The solitude healed her, night and day. It was never painful like that time she’d spent lost in the other world behind the mirror. She wasn’t lost now. She knew exactly where she was.

  She learned to maintain that sense of completeness, of wonder at her own being. She remembered how she’d feared the differences which had set her apart like Cain or Pinhead Helen, the destiny predicted by Marie Saloppe, Delphine and Doctor John: Solitude. Now she saw that solitude was not a curse, but a blessing. Not an affliction, but a cure.

  She was good to herself, more patient than she was with clients, calmer than with anyone except perhaps the snake. On foggy days she lit fires in the clearing and brewed Garden of Gilead tea. When she talked to herself—which was often—she spoke in a soothing voice, like a mother comforting her favorite child. It was a life of dignity—more so than the life of a voodoo queen. There were no hurt feelings, no misunderstandings, no tests. “When do you see true dignity?” Marie asked herself. “When there’s no one around to see.”