Saratoga Trunk (6 page)

“Now then, listen to me, you two. You, Angélique Pluton. You, Cupidon.” They stared at her with uncomprehending gaze as though she had spoken in a strange language. Never in her life had she called the woman anything but Kaka, or—crowing mischievously— Kakaracou. The dwarf had always been Cupide. “Do you want to stay with me?”

The little man’s mouth fell open. It was the wrinkled woman who said, with an edge of fear in her voice, “Where else!”

“Then remember that no matter what I say I am—that I am. I shall be what it suits me to be. Life is something you must take by the tail or it runs away from you. . . . Now where did I hear that! That’s clever. I must have made it up. Well, anyway, I don’t want to hear any more of this telling me who I am and what I am to do. Do as I say, and we’ll be rich. Which do you choose—stay or go?”

“Stay!” shouted Cupide, cutting a caper with those absurd bandy legs. The Negress voiced no choice. The fear was gone from her eyes. She stood with her lean arms crossed on her breast, assured and even a trifle arrogant.

“Play-acting,” she sniffed, “Like your great-grandmother. That’s the Bonnevie in you. You and your cleverness! What will Your Highness choose to be tomorrow? Queen of England, I suppose!”

Clio dropped her role of adventuress. She pouted a moment as she had in her childhood when her nurse Kaka would not bend to her will. Then she threw her arms around the woman and hugged her. “Tomorrow, Kaka, we’ll dress in our best and we’ll have a wonderful time, you and Cupide and I. We’ll go first to the Cathedral and then to the French Market and then to Begué’s for breakfast—or we may go to the French Market first and then to Mass—well, anyway, now I’ll have my hair washed, Kaka, and such a brushing, and my hands in oil, and then you’ll rub me all over with that lovely sweet stuff that you used when Mama had one of her sad times and couldn’t sleep. And tomorrow morning I’ll wake up all fresh and gay in my own home in New Orleans. Oh, Kaka!” Here she gave an unadult squeal and clapped her hands. There was something touching, something moving about this, probably because it made plain that her stern and implacable role of the past fortnight had been only an acting part. At sight of this the faces of the two changed as a summer sky grows brilliant again when the sun drives off the clouds. For two weeks she had been a stranger to them, a managing mistress, hard, almost harsh, driving them and herself in a fury of energy. Now she was young again and gay; the house was fresh, cool, orderly; in the kitchen just off the courtyard Kaka’s copper pans shone golden as the sauces they soon would contain, and on the kitchen table was a Basque cloth of coarse linen striped with bright green and red and yellow. The window panes glittered. The steps were scoured white. The courtyard bricks were newly swept and the fountain actually tinkled its lazy little tune; inside the high-ceilinged rooms you were met by the clean odor of fresh paint; silver, crystal, satin and glass reflected each other, surface for surface; the scent of perfume in Clio’s bedroom, her peignoir softly slithering over a chair back.

“En avant, mes enfants!”
cried Clio, satisfied.

“A la bonne heure!”
shouted Cupide.

But,
“Tout doux,”
the acidulous old woman cautioned them. “Not so fast, you two.”

III

But next morning even Kakaracou’sgrim mask was brightened by a
gleam of anticipation. Sunday morning, April, and steaming hot. New Orleans citizens did not remark the heat, or if they did they relished it. They were habituated to that moist and breathless atmosphere, they thrived on it, they paced their lives in accordance with it. Clio and Kaka and Cupide slipped easily into the new-old environment as one allows an accustomed garment, temporarily discarded, once more to rest gratefully upon one’s shoulders.

Kaka’s broad nostrils dilated with her noisy inhaladons as the three emerged into the brilliant April morning sunshine of Rampart Street. Over all New Orleans there hung the pungent redolence that was the very flavor of the bewitching city.

First, as always, the heavy air bore the scent of coffee pervading everything like an incense wafted from the great wharves and roasting ovens. Over and under and around this dominant odor were other smells, salty, astringent or exotic. There were the smells of the Mississippi, of river shrimps and crayfish and silt and rotting wood and all manner of floating and sunken things that go to feed the monster stream; of sugar, spices, bananas, rum, sawdust; of flower-choked gardens; of black men sweating on the levees; of rich food bubbling in butter and cream and wine and condiments; the sweet, dank, moldy smell of old churches whose doors, closed throughout the week, were opened now for the stream of Sabbath worshipers. The smell of an old and carnal city, of a worldly and fascinating city.

“M-m-m!” said Clio. And “M-m-m!” chorused Kaka and Cupide.

Any one of the three, as they set out this Sunday morning, would have been enough to attract attention on the streets of New Orleans, sophisticated though the city was. Certainly Clio Dulaine alone was a figure to catch the eye and hold it, to say nothing of the bizarre attendants who walked in her wake.

She was wearing a dress of stiff rich gray silk faille, and it was amazing that so prim a color could take on, from its wearer, so dashing and even brilliant a look. Perhaps it was that the gray of the gown was the shade of a fine pearl with a hint of pink behind it. It made her black hair seem blacker, her skin whiter. It had, in fact, an effect almost of gaiety. For contrast, and doubtless because this gown was supposed to represent mourning in its second stage, the overskirt and basque were trimmed with little black velvet bows as was the pancake hat with its black curled ostrich tips, tilted well down over her eyes. Beneath this protection her eyes swam shaded and mysterious like twin pools beneath an overhanging ledge. In her ears were pearl screws, very foreign and French, and a pearl and black onyx brooch made effective contrast just beneath the creamy hollow of her throat. If one could have seen her brows below the down-tipped pancake hat it might have been remarked how thick and dark and winged they were—the brows of a forceful and vigorous woman. She was a figure of French elegance as depicted in the fashion papers. No well-bred French woman would have ventured out of doors in a costume so rich, so picturesque.

Beside her and perhaps just a half step behind her paced Kakaracou, looking at once vaguely Egyptian, New Orleans Negro duenna, and a figure out of the Arabian Nights. Her handsome black grosgrain silk gown was as rich and heavy as that of any grand lady, though severe in style. Over it her ample white apron and fichu were cobweb fine and exquisitely hemstitched. In the withered ears dangled heavy gold earrings of Byzantine pattern, and where the fichu folded at her breast was a gold brooch of Arabesque design. Surmounting all this was a brilliantly gay tignon wound about her head. The gray-brown face, like an old dried fig, had the look of a rather sardonic Egyptian mummy, yet it had a vaguely simian quality due partly to the broad upper lip but more definitely to the eyes, which had the sad yet compassionate quality found in an old race whose heritage is tragedies remembered. As she walked she had a way of turning her head quickly, almost dartingly like a bird, and this set her earrings to swinging and glinting in the sun. The eyes beneath their heavy wrinkled lids noted everything.

Behind these two, a figure out of Elizabethan court days, except that he wore no brilliant turban, no puffed satin pantaloons, walked the dwarf Cupidon. He walked without self-consciousness other than that of pride; the tiny bandy legs, the powerful trunk and shoulders, the large head, the young-old face were made all the more bizarre by his coachman’s plum broadcloth uniform ornamented with gilt buttons and topped by a glazed hat with a gay cockade on one side. The wistful yet merry eyes watched the slim, graceful figure that walked ahead of him as a dog watches his mistress even while he seems busy with his own affairs. A mischievous and pugnacious little figure yet touching and, somehow, formidable. Hooked over one tiny arm was a large woven basket, for they were on their way to the French Market, these three on a fine hot, humid New Orleans Sunday morning, just as Clio Dulaine had planned.

Now and then the girl would turn her head to toss a word over her shoulders to the stern, stalking figure just behind her.

“It smells exactly the way Aunt Belle said it did.” A long deep inhalation. “But precisely!”

“How else!”

The little procession moved on up the street. Passers-by and loungers stared. In their faces you saw reflected a succession of emotions like the expressions of rather clumsy pantomimists. First there was the shock of beholding the three in all their splendor; then the eye was lit with admiration for the lovely girl; startled by the mingled magnificence and gaudiness of the Negress; shocked or amused by the little liveried escort strutting so pompously behind them. The three figures made a gay colorful frieze against the smooth plaster walls of the
Vieux Carré.
Past the old houses whose exquisitely wrought ironwork decoration was like a black lace shawl thrown across the white bosom of a Spanish
senora;
past the Cabildo with its massive arches and its delicate cornices, pilasters and pediment. The sound of music came to them as they passed the Cathedral, but Clio did not enter.

“America is lovely,” said Clio graciously, gazing across the Place d’Armes to the stately double row of the Pontalba buildings facing the square. The remark was addressed to the world, over her shoulder, and was caught deftly by Kakaracou who in turn tossed it back to Cupide, like an echo.

“America is lovely.”

Cupide looked about him, spaciously. “It’s well enough.”

With one little gray-gloved hand Clio pointed across the Place d’Armes to the stately brick front of the Pontalba buildings with their lacy festoons of ironwork. “As you probably know, Kaka, my Aunt Micaela, the Baroness Pontalba, built those apartments.” She turned her head slightly to catch Kaka’s eye. For a moment it seemed that Kaka must reject this statement, but Clio Dulaine’s look did not waver, her eye held the other in command. The turbaned head turned again to enlighten the little man.

“Mad’moiselle’s Aunt Micaela, the Baroness Pontalba, built those fine apartments, Little One.”

Pattering along behind them the dwarf rolled his goggle eyes in mock admiration of this palpable fantasy.
“Ma foi!
My uncle, the Emperor Napoleon, built the Arc de Triomphe.”

Clio laughed her slow, rich laugh that was so paced and deep-throated. This morning she was gay, eager, this morning nothing could offend her. She was finding it to her liking, this colorful, unconventional city. She sniffed the smells of river water and good cooking and tropical gardens; her young eyes did not flinch from the glare of the sun on the white buildings; as they approached the busy French Market she felt at home with these people walking and chatting and laughing. Some of them had come there solely for sociability, some had market baskets on their arms or servants walking behind them carrying the laden hamper. She liked the look of these people, they were dark and juicy like the lusty people of Marseilles; indeed she thought the city itself had the look of Marseilles down here by the French Market so near the water front. These people thronging the streets on a spring Sunday morning had French and Spanish and American blood running strong in their veins, a heady mixture. And the Negroes were here, there, everywhere accenting the scene, enriching it with their expressive tragi-comic faces, their fluid movements. You heard French spoken, Spanish too, English; the Negro dialect called Gombo; the patois called Cajun, which had been brought to the Bayou country by the Acadian settlers from Nova Scotia.

And now they were in the midst of the Market’s clamor, the crackling of geese, the squawk of chickens, vendors’ cries, the clatter of horses’ hoofs. Footsteps rang on the flagstoned floor, the arcaded brick and plaster structure was a sounding board, the arched columns formed a setting for the leisurely promenading figures or the scurrying busy ones. Creole ladies severe in their plain street dress of black were buying food for the day fresh from the river or lake or nearby plantations, while the basket on the arm of the servant grew heavier by the minute.

Greeks, Italians, French, Negroes, Indians. Oysters, fish, vegetables, oranges, figs, nuts. Delicate lake shrimp like tiny pink petals; pompano, trout, soft-shell crabs, crayfish. Quail, partridge, snipe, rabbits.

“Oh, Kaka, look, some of that! And that! Look, Cupide, herbs and green for
gombo-zhebes
that Aunt Belle longed for in Paris and couldn’t get. I can’t wait to taste it. Kaka! Kakaracou! Where are you! Look! Crayfish for bisque. Or shall we have redfish with
court-bouillon?
Cupide, come here with that basket.”

Fat Negro women, their heads bound in snowy white turbans, baskets of sandwiches on their arms, lifted the corner of a napkin to tempt the passer-by with the wares beneath. A hundred appetizing odors came from charcoal braziers glowing here, there, behind stalls or at the pavement’s edge. The fragrant coffee stands with their cups of
café noir or café au lait were,
situated at opposite ends of the market, but in the very heart of the food stalls they were selling hot Creole dishes to be served up on the spot and eaten standing. There was the favorite hot jambalaya steaming and enriching the already heavy air; the mouth watered as one passed it.

The trailing skirts of Clio’s exquisite French dress had swished from stall to stall, the basket on Cupide’s arm had grown heavier and heavier. The market men and stall vendors, their Latin temperament quick to respond to her beauty and her strong electric attraction, gave her overweight measure. Cupide was almost hidden behind the foliage of greens in his basket; now and then a crayfish claw reached feebly out to nip the maroon sleeve of his uniform only to be slapped smartly back in place by the little man. They were followed now by quite a little procession of the curious and the admiring and the amused. They paid no heed. Even in Paris they had become accustomed to this.