Madeleine's Ghost

by Robert Girardi

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “In any case a woman like that is worth a little trouble.”

  “Now you’re talking crazy,” Molesworth said, and turned hulking toward the street door.

  “Another round,” I said. “I’ll buy.”

  Molesworth hesitated for an instant, then shrugged and made a place with his bulk at the rail. He was a practical man. He would accept a free beer from the devil himself.

  A few minutes later Antoinette came down to our end of the bar, a cigarette, half ashes, curled in the corner of her lip. Without removing it, she leaned across and kissed his fat cheek.

  “Hello, Lyle,” she said.

  Molesworth nodded. “Antoinette.”

  “What can I get you gentlemen?”

  “Hell, this coonass is buying,” Molesworth said. “Make mine something fancy and expensive, from the blender.”

  “All right, a Frozen Bastard … what about you?”

  She passed her eyes over me in a quick evaluation. I sat back, a little surprised. New Orleans is like London; you can place any native within a street or two if you know what to listen for. I had expected deep bayou, like Dothan’s Lafayette Parish drawl, but what I heard was polished, urbane: St. Jerome’s Academy for Girls, the Garden District, and summers on a forty-five-foot Camper-Nicholson in the Gulf.

  “Well?”

  “Frozen Bastard,” I croaked.

  Then she smiled unexpectedly and did a quick pirouette to the blender down the bar.

  We all have our moments. There are those rare nights when reach exceeds grasp and the implausible becomes as real as the coins in our pocket. When Antoinette brought the drinks—two embarrassing pink concoctions with paper umbrellas and pineapple slices—I made a few offhanded cracks, and she laughed and lingered in banter as Molesworth brooded next to me like a disgruntled genie. Down the bar rednecks waved twenty-dollar bills, trying to catch her attention. She was the darling of the place, the resident deity. She ignored them, had all the time in the world. Outside the obvious symmetries shared by all beautiful women, there was something familiar about her face. Then it hit me, a stroke of genius.

  “In the Presbytère,” I said, actually snapping my fingers, “the Louisiana State Museum …”

  “The museum’s in the Cabildo,” she said, “but what about it?”

  “They’ve got these historical paintings, you know. One I remember—a pretty young woman in a white dress, circa 1825. God, she looks just like you. She could be your sister. I can’t remember the name. But …”

  Antoinette seemed impressed. “I know the one you’re talking about,” she said. “I’ve got a photograph of it on the wall in my apartment. They found that painting stuffed at the back of the attic in my aunt Tatie’s house on Esplanade in the Vieux Carré. Loaned it to the museum when Aunt Tatie went off to the old folks’ home. The woman in the painting is some ancestor. We’re Creoles, one hundred percent. My mother’s family’s been here for always. Had plantations downriver, the whole deal. A couple of people have told me there’s a resemblance, but I don’t see it.”

  “It’s the eyes mostly. She’s got the same eyes. What color are your eyes?” I reached for her hand suddenly and leaned close across the bar.

  Antoinette was startled, but she did not pull away. “Sometimes blue,” she said almost in a whisper, “sometimes gray. Depends on the mood.”

  “No,” I said. “They’re the color of rainwater.”

  There was a pause, my nose a half inch from the smoldering end of her cigarette. Molesworth groaned audibly to my left. Antoinette’s hand felt cool and small in mine. She disengaged gently and stepped back.

  “Your friend here is drunk, Lyle,” she said to Molesworth. “Drunk but cute. Bring him back when he isn’t so drunk.” Then she turned to the clamor at the far end of the bar.

  “You are one dumb sombitch,” he said when she was gone. “I wash my hands of the consequences,” and he made a hand-washing gesture.

  I laughed, something like joy in my heart, and tipped up my Dixie and drank, and I tried not to mind when Molesworth gave me a sharp elbow in the ribs and I turned to see Dothan standing just outside the doorway to the kitchen, a dark figure beneath the paws of the bear in the hard yellow light.

  3

  IN MATTERS of the heart, luck is everything. I have never been a lucky man, which is to say circumstances conspired in my favor once, then never looked my way again.

  Two weeks after Molesworth took me to Spanish Town, I happened across Antoinette in the museum in Gibson Hall at Tulane. A dull gray sky stretched tight as a drum over Audubon Park, palm trees along St. Charles drooping listlessly against it. It rained; then it didn’t rain; then it rained again. There is nothing to do in such oppressive weather, impossible to concentrate, so I wandered over to look at the yellow skulls and Indian relics in their dusty glass cases. The museum is a strange, unkempt little place, not much visited and full of mismatched oddities: dingy bones of mysterious provenance, the perfect glass beads of the Mound Builders, two Egyptian monkey mummies from the Middle Kingdom, codices written on human skin, and gold ornaments stolen by the conquistadors—perhaps by stout Cortez himself—from the bloody cities of the Aztecs.

  Antoinette stood before a case of Aztec artifacts in an unseasonable sleeveless flowered dress, shivering, her hair in wet curls down her back. There were bruises on her bare arms, and when I got closer, I saw she was soaked through to the skin.

  “Antoinette?” I said.

  She turned toward me with a zoned-out stare. Her pupils looked dilated. I had been back to Spanish Town twice since the first visit, each time making a point to talk to her, but I could see she did not know my face.

  “At your bar,” I said. “I’ve been in a few times—”

  “Dothan’s bar.” She frowned, an edge in her voice. She was too sedated to show any real anger, but I felt a wicked thrill when I considered that something might have happened between them.

  “Are you all right?” I stepped closer. “Is there something wrong?”

  She ignored the question and pointed at the case. “Check this stuff out,” she said. “It’s really wild.”

  Behind the thick glass, a large obsidian blade, strands of gold wire still wrapped around the haft, lay on a strip of red velvet. I read the tag and shuddered.

  “The Aztec priests used it to cut out the hearts of their sacrificial victims,” she said in a dull monotone. “They believed that the sun was a feeble old man who needed human blood to survive and rise the next day. So they’d force the people to line up at the base of those stone temples, thousands of them. Then, one by one they’d be dragged up to have their hearts cut out with that bit of polished rock. Then the priests would roll their bodies down the other side, where acolytes would flay the skin and wear it like a coat, until it rotted. Shit, imagine having your heart cut out while you were still alive. You’d be able to see them lift it over your head —this bloody hunk of meat—in the last split second before your eyes went black,” She turned to me, expecting a reasonable response.

  “Gruesome,” I said, making a face.

  “No. Not really. Hell, I would have gone voluntarily. I think it would be a good thing to have your heart cut out. Who needs a heart?”

  “Everyone needs a heart,” I said as if talking to a child.

  She shook her head and opened her mouth to speak but instead leaned forward and put her hands and her forehead flat against the glass and gave a small moan.

  “Oh, man,” she said. “This is bad. I’m coming down. Fast.” Then she began shivering in quick little spasms. I touched her bare shoulder and felt the spasms go through her like electric shocks, and I became alarmed. Her teeth began to chatter. I put my books on the floor and took off my coat and put it around her shoulders and stood there for a moment in the dim light of the museum, unsure of what to do next. From a case nearby the black monkey faces of the mummies leered at me through the glass and from across the distance of three thousa
nd years.

  “We’ve got to take you to a doctor or something,” I said at last.

  She clamped her jaw shut in an effort to stop the chattering noise. “No,” she said. “This has happened before. It’s just a bad trip. Listen, you’ve got to help me get home. Will you help me get home?” Then she pushed off the glass and stood woozily on her feet for a second before she slumped back into my arms.

  4

  ANTOINETTE LIVED in the Faubourg Marigny at North Villere, one block from Elysian Fields. The St. Roche shrine was visible through the round window of the stairwell. I lugged her with some effort up the two narrow flights and into the apartment, where she crawled onto a worn yellow satin Victorian fainting couch in the living room and covered herself over with a quilt that lay crumpled in a heap on the floor.

  The place was a wreck. A bit worse, if that was possible, than my own pink house on Mystery Street. Clothes lay in piles in every corner and the expensive-looking oriental carpet was filthy, strewn with glossy French fashion magazines, open lipsticks, apple cores, half-eaten Healthy Choice dinners, empty cups of low-fat yogurt, and other junk. A waterless fish tank, gravel at the bottom, sat on the floor, filled with shoes. A large framed photograph of the portrait of the antebellum lady I had seen in the Cabildo hung at a crooked angle between the French doors that opened onto the balcony fronting Marigny.

  Antoinette’s lips had a white, parched look, and she watched me through glassy eyes, quilt tucked up to her chin, as I rummaged around in the kitchen cabinets, looking for anything that would help: aspirin, a bromide, tea. Reaching onto a top shelf, I knocked a jar of dried red beans onto the tile floor. It shattered, beans and glass shards everywhere.

  “Please,” she said from the couch, her lips barely moving. “Come here.”

  I left the mess and went to kneel beside her. She shivered visibly beneath the quilt.

  “A doctor might not be a bad idea,” I said. “You look terrible.” But it wasn’t true. Even sick and shivering, she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.

  “No,” she said in a harsh whisper. “A doctor might go to the police or, worse, to my parents. I took one hit too many. It’s Dothan’s stuff. Homemade, by this half-crazy chemist up in Dessaintes Parish. You can never tell how you’ll react. This time it’s like a block of ice. It’s like I’m sitting naked on a block of ice.” Then she put an arm out from beneath the quilt, took hold of my wrist, and pulled me close. Her breath was foul. “I want to ask you something, and you’ve got to tell me the truth.”

  I nodded.

  “You have a nice face, but so do a lot of people who aren’t so nice. Can I trust you?”

  “I’m Molesworth’s roommate,” I said. “If you don’t remember.”

  “Yes, I remember, but that’s not my question. Are you a gentleman?” She asked this without a trace of irony, in the same tone perhaps that the woman in the portrait on the wall would have used 150 years before.

  “Yes,” I said. “A gentleman.”

  She closed her eyes. “O.K.,” she said. “I can’t get up. I can hardly move. I’m frozen solid. You’re going to have to do something for me.…”

  I went into the bathroom and stood gawking for a second. Built for the ablutions of another era, the bathroom was as large as the rest of the apartment put together, with an old claw-foot tub, a bidet, and a sink with dual faucets, one for cold water, one for hot, worn brass fish-head fixtures all around. Turn-of-the-century tilework wound around the walls halfway up. A fanlight overlooked the traffic of the faubourg. I cracked the louvers a little, just enough to admit the gray afternoon and ran a bath hot as I could make it without burning my elbow. Then I went back into the small living room and stood over her.

  “All right,” I said. “Your bath.”

  “You’re going to have to—”

  I shook my head.

  “Please,” she said, sounding pitiful.

  “Do you always rely on the kindness of strangers?” I said, but the reference escaped her, and with great effort, she held up her arms.

  I helped her into the bathroom and showed her the greenish bathwater steaming under its fish-head spigot.

  “There,” I said with an airy wave of the hand.

  “I can’t do it.” She turned toward me, teeth chattering. “My clothes. Please …” Her skin looked gray in the gray light and felt like ice.

  I began to undress her, squinting as if peeling an onion. She stood stiff and unblinking as I undid the zipper on her dress and it fell to the floor. Then I knelt and unbuckled her shoes and held her ankles and pulled her cold feet out of them and stood and backed away.

  “The rest,” she said. “What’s the difference now?”

  “O.K.,” I said. “Think of me as your doctor.” But when I undid the clasp on her bra, she closed her eyes, and she kept them closed as I rolled her panties down the curve of her hip. Her nakedness gleamed against the dull tiles of the bathroom. I tried not to think at all, and I took her hand and led her to the tub. She lifted one foot over the water, but when her toe broke the surface, she pulled back with a small cry.

  “I can’t,” she said. “It’s too hot.”

  “You’ve got to,” I said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Slowly.”

  Breathing through her teeth, she put one foot in the water, a millimeter at a time. Then, hand on my shoulder, she put in the other. A tear rolled down her cheek and splashed lightly on the surface. Still holding on to my arm, she crouched down, steam rising from her cold flesh. I tried not to look; it was impossible. I looked away and still saw her reflection in the silvered mirror, her breasts floating in the water. She slid under finally, her black hair spreading on the surface like ink. A bubble rose, then another, and at last she pushed up, breathing hard, and leaned her head back against the tub.

  “O.K.,” she said. “I think I’ll be O.K. now.”

  “Good,” I said. “I draw the line at scrubbing your back.”

  I went out of the bathroom without a word and put on my coat and gathered my books. From inside the bathroom now came that bath sound of splashing water and the sound of her breath.

  “Antoinette,” I called in, “I’m going to take off.”

  The bath sounds stopped for a beat. “No, please,” she called. “Wait till I get out. Please.”

  She was in there a long time, soaking. I heard the water run again, and again after that. I settled on the couch in my coat and tried to read my history text, France and the Age of Napoleon, by Hervé Surgère for an upcoming exam. It was dry reading, written by a man who had no feeling for the grandiose color of the era, but there were a few unforgettable anecdotes.

  I read how the emperor, upon his return from Elba for the Hundred Days that culminated in Waterloo, began his march toward Paris, gathering supporters along the way. The new royalist government sent an army to stop him, composed of veterans of Austerlitz and Marengo and other campaigns, now led by foppish aristocratic officers who had emigrated in 1793 and returned at the emperor’s abdication like a swarm of locusts descending on France. They met up at a field near Grenoble, Napoleon and his few hundred followers facing an army of thousands. Alone, the emperor walked across the open ground till he was within range of the opposing guns. There he stopped, spread his arms, glanced up at the blue sky and the peaks in the distance. Then he stared down the muzzles of the muskets aiming for his heart.

  “Soldiers!” he cried. “Would you fire upon your emperor?”

  “Fire!” the officers ordered. “Fire!” But the men threw down their guns and ran to him, tears in their eyes.

  From the bathroom came more watery sounds and a tuneless sort of humming. I closed the book with a sigh and poked around the apartment. It had once been part of a much larger place, perhaps a Creole gentleman’s pied-à-terre in the 1850s. Plaster medallions in the ceiling were interrupted by cheap presswood partitions; fanciful grape leaf molding circled the walls until cut off by the pasteboard walls of t
houghtless remodelers.

  In the tiny bedroom there was barely enough room for the ancient four-poster of dark wood. It had the heavy, solid look of furniture made by slave artisans. From between the mashed pillows, a stuffed brown bear protruded feetfirst. On the bureau, an ormolu box spilling over with earrings and piles of makeup. Behind this, ranks of framed family photographs going back several generations. Also, there was one of those plastic photograph cubes filled with pictures of Dothan: Dothan and Antoinette on a Gulf beach in the sand. Dothan astride a big Harley panhead, his tattooed hand at the throttle, his eyes hidden behind mirror frame shades. Dothan shirtless, one foot on the fender of an old yellow pickup, the butt of a twelve-gauge shotgun resting on his hip, a tar paper shack and the green riot of the swamp behind.

  I picked up the cube with the tip of my fingers and held it to the light just as Antoinette stepped into the room barefoot and sober, wrapped in a thick white terry-cloth robe, her hair twisted into a turban with a blue towel.

  “That’s Dothan,” she said, leaning in the doorway. “But you know that.”

  I replaced the cube carefully among the other photographs. “Are you feeling better?”

  “I’m fine,” she said a bit sullenly, and picked her way through the rubble to the bed. She approached it knee first, swung around, and in a quick movement was sitting cross-legged in the sheets, hands gripping her elbows. An awkward silence followed in which I heard the metallic rush of traffic heading up Marigny to the Pontchartrain Expressway.

  She spoke first. “I know what you’re thinking—” she began.

  “Forget about it,” I interrupted. “If you’re straightened out now, I’ll be leaving.”

  I pushed off the dresser and started for the door.

  “Wait!” she said, but when I stopped and turned toward her, she looked away and bit her lip, a flush to her cheeks.

  “I just want you to hold me for a little please before you go,” she said in a small voice after a minute. “Please. This is the last thing I will ask you to do.”