Saratoga Trunk (3 page)

The tragedy of Dulaine’s death had changed her from a high-spirited and imperious woman to a dazed and broken creature, suddenly sallow and almost plain at times. Even Aunt Belle Piquery, her older sister, Belle the practical, the realistic, had been unable to urge her out of her valley of
douleur.
Usually after a ship’s mail had brought them a little bundle made up of back numbers of
L’Abeille,
Rita was plunged deeper than ever in gloom. Whenever the words appeared in the newspaper’s columns—Madame Nicolas Dulaine—they seemed to leap out at her as though printed in red letters a foot high. This was his widow. This woman lived and he was dead. It was she who had really killed him with her possessiveness and her arrogance and her spite. Rita was long past weeping, but she would begin to weep again, dry tears. Her face, lovely still, would become distorted, her eyes would stare out hot and bright, her hand would clutch her throat as if she were choking, the sobs would come, hard and dry, racking her.

Then Angélique Pluton, whom they called Kakaracou—Kaka, her maid and Clio’s nurse—would hold her in her arms like a baby, and soothe her and murmur to her. She spoke in a curious jargon, a mixture of French, Spanish, New Orleans colloquialisms, African Negro. “Hush, my baby, my baby. Spare your pretty eyes. There are dukes over here and kings and princes waiting to marry you. You will go back to New Orleans in your own golden carriage and they’ll crawl at your feet, those stony-faced ones.”

“I’ll never go back, Kaka. I’ll die here. They won’t let me come back. They said they’ll put me in prison. They said I killed him. I was only trying to kill myself because I couldn’t live without him.”

Brisk Belle Piquery would say, “You’re only making yourself sick, Rita. I think you enjoy it. After all, they threw me out, too, and said they’d put me in prison if I ever showed my face in New Orleans. And I was only your sister.”

“There you go reproaching me. I wish I were dead too. Why didn’t I kill myself! I wanted to.”

“You didn’t really,” the practical Belle would say. “People hardly ever do. You wanted to keep him, of course, and you thought if he saw you pressing a pistol against your heart—well, there, there, let’s not talk about it. He should have known better than to snatch it away, poor boy. Anyway, he’s dead. Nothing can bring him back now. We’ll be dead, too, first thing you know. So let’s enjoy life while we can.”

“You’ve never really loved, Bella. You don’t know.”

“I’ve loved lots of them,” Aunt Belle retorted blithely. “I spent my life at it, didn’t I! Only with me it was a career and with you it was your whole existence.”

This elicited a little scream of pained remonstrance from the New Orleans Camille. “Belle! How can you speak like that of my love for Nicolas!”

“Now don’t flare up, Rita. I just meant I know he was your life, but you expected too much. You even thought he would marry you after Clio was born. Imagine! Such a
bêtise/”

“He would have, if it hadn’t been for Them and Her.”

“If it makes you feel better to believe that, then go on believing it. All I ever expected in life was a little fun and a chance to die respectable and to be buried in the cemetery of St. Louis with my name in gold letters—Belle Piquery—and chrysanthemums on All Saints’ Day—though who’d bring them I don’t know. But when I die, that’s where I want to be. They’ll let me come back to New Orleans then. You’ll do that for your Aunt Belle, won’t you, Clio?”

It was a strange life the two women lived in the charming little Paris flat overlooking the Bois—the flat paid for by Them with threat money and hush money. But it was stranger still for the child Clio when, at sixteen, she emerged from the convent school. And strangest of all was the sight they presented as they drove in the Bois or walked in the Champs Elysées. Rita Dulaine, tragic in black, her great dark eyes demanding sympathy, her sable garments chic as only the Paris couturiers could make them. By her side the bouncing Belle in such a welter of flounce and furbelow that it was almost impossible to tell where bosom began and bouffant draperies left off. Their carriage was a landaulet with a little cushioned seat opposite the large tufted one, and on this, her back to the driver’s box, perched Clio, her legs, far too long for this cramped little bench, doubled under her voluminous skirts, primly. Beside her, bolt upright, her spare, straight back disdaining the upholstery, sat Kakaracou with dignity enough for all. Her skin was neither black nor coffee-colored but the shade of a ripe fig, purplish dusted with gray. Above this, and accentuating the tone, reared the tignon with which her head always was bound, a gaudy turbanlike arrangement of flaming orange or purple or pink or scarlet, characteristic of the New Orleans Negro.

Certainly the occupants of the landaulet were bizarre enough to attract attention even in the worldly Paris. But the figure perched on the driver’s seat held the added fillip of surprise. Seated there, his legs braced against the high footboard, his knees covered with a driver’s rug, his powerful arms and hands managed the two neat chestnuts with a true horseman’s deftness of touch, there seemed nothing remarkable about the coachman, Cupidon. It was only when he threw aside the rug, clambered down over the wheel as agilely as a monkey and stood at the curb that you saw with staring unbelief the man’s real dimensions. The large head, the powerful arms and chest belonged to a dwarf, a little man not more than three feet high. His bandy legs were like tiny stumps to which the wee feet were attached. This gave him a curiously rolling gait like that of a diminutive drunken sailor on shore leave. The eyes in the young-old face were tender, almost wistful; the mouth sardonic, the expression pugnacious or mischievous by turn. This was Cupidon, whom they fondly called Cupide; bodyguard, coachman, major-domo. When he spoke, which was rarely, it was in a surprisingly sweet clear tenor like that of a choirboy whose voice has just changed. He might have been any age—fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty. There were those who said that, though white, he was Kakaracou’s son. Certainly she bullied and pampered him by turns. Sometimes you saw her withered hand resting tenderly on the tiny man’s head; sometimes she cuffed him smartly as though he were a naughty child. She managed to save the choicest tidbits for his plate after the others had finished, she filled his glass with good red wine of the country as they sat at the servants’ table, he in his specially built high chair on which he clambered so nimbly up and down.

“Drink your red wine, Little One. It will make you strong.”

Instead of thumping his chest or flexing his arm he would rap his great head briskly. “I don’t need red wine to make me strong. I’m strong enough. Here’s my weapon.” But he would toss down the glassful, nevertheless, giving the effect as he did so of a wickedly precocious little boy in his cups. Everyone in the household knew that his boast was no idle one. That head, hard and thick as a cannonball, was almost as effective when directed against an enemy. Thigh-high to a normally built man, he would run off a few steps, then charge like a missile, his head thrust forward and down, goat fashion. On a frontal attack, men twice his size had been known to go down with one grunt, like felled oxen.

Except for her years at the convent in Tours this, then, was the weird household in which Clio Dulaine had spent her girlhood exile. But then, it did not seem strange to her. Kakaracou and Cupidon both had been part of the Dulaine ménage in Clio’s infancy when they had lived so luxuriously, so gaily in the house on Rampart Street in New Orleans. They were as much a part of her life as her mother or Aunt Belle Piquery. And all four of them dinned New Orleans into her ears, all four spoke of it with the nostalgia of the exiled, each in his or her own wistful way.

Rita Dulaine from her couch before the fire would stare into the flames like one hypnotized. It was as though she saw the past there, flickering and dying. “There’s no society here in Paris to compare with the salon that your papa and I had in Rampart Street. The élite came to us. Oh, not those Creole sticks with their dowdy black clothes and their cold, hard faces.”

“But Papa was a Creole. The Dulaines, you always told me, were the oldest and most—”

“Yes, yes. But he was my—he was your papa. His family, though, they were cruel and hard, they made me leave New Orleans after the— the—accident—after your papa was hurt—after he had a heart attack “ She would fall to weeping again, after all these years, if the dry gasping sounds she made could be called weeping.

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?”