Madeleine's Ghost

by Robert Girardi

  “Huntin’, fishin’, cardplayin’,” I said. “Yes, ma’am!”

  She elbowed me for my sarcasm and went on.

  “So one summer Papa and I went up to the cabin for two months because he’d been working real hard and needed to get away for a while. By this time, understand, I’m thirteen, and already pretty well developed. Just about as busty as my sister Jolie, who was seventeen and in her last year at St. Jerome’s Academy. You could say I divide my life into distinct categories, B. B. and A. B.—that is, before breasts, when I was a girl, and after, when I grew up pretty fast and did a few things maybe that should have waited for later.”

  She paused here, said, “Wait a minute,” and set her cigarette on the lip of the ashtray on the night table and went out and turned the record over. It began to rain suddenly, as it will in South Louisiana, rain sweeping up from the direction of Algiers and across the low neighborhoods of the city, the drops beating lightly against the shutters. Before she got back into bed, Antoinette pulled the curtains wide and opened the window to the deluge, leaving the shutters closed. Damp air entered the room, and with it the smell of the river and mud and the fecund bayous of the delta. There was a slight chill on her body when she crawled back in beside me.

  “Hold me,” she said.

  I held her until she was warm, watching the cigarette over her shoulder on the nightstand smolder down to its filter and wink out. A few minutes later she rolled away from me, took a breath, and went on.

  “So there was this younger guy that started showing up at Papa’s poker parties, a kid compared to the rest of them, about twenty-five then, I guess, but he was one hell of a good poker player and my God! one of the most beautiful single human beings I had seen outside of Peter Frampton with his shirt open on the cover of Frampton Comes Alive, who I had a serious crush on back then. This poker-playing boy was the son of Claude Palmier, a Cajun tracker out of Mamou Papa used when he took friends from New Orleans on hunting trips. Dothan was his name. A weird name, some biblical thing, but he looked like a combination of Elvis and Richard Burton, and there I was, thirteen with these brand-new breasts and feeling sort of wild whenever he came into the room. Papa stopped letting me hang around in my nightgown that summer, because as he put it, ‘I was growing into too much of a lady.’ But keep in mind this is the seventies. Instead of my coverall flannel nightgown, I wore jeans cut down to here and a midi-halter top thing, and my hair’s parted down the middle like Laurie Partridge, and I’m hanging out all over. All in all, the nightgown would have been less revealing.

  “So after a while I caught Dothan sneaking looks at me over his cards, but not so anyone else would notice. He was very smart about it. Picked his moments. I tried not to look back, but it was impossible. There he was with these black eyes staring like he knew things about me I didn’t know myself. He probably didn’t figure me for thirteen, but I don’t think it would have mattered much to him anyway. Then, one night when they were playing pretty hard, Dothan sat out a hand to use the outhouse. He went out on the porch and into the yard, but he came back real quietly a half minute later and stood just the other side of the screen door. Something made me look up, and he smiled and beckoned and stepped back out of the light. I said something about being hot and went out on the porch and found him there smoking in the shadows. He threw the cigarette away and pushed me against the side of the house and started kissing me like that, and his hands were all over me, and his belt buckle pressed into my bare stomach, and he was saying stuff in my ear I had never heard before. Finally I crooked my elbow around his neck and pushed up against him like I had been doing it all my life and kissed him back, and he probably would have done me right there against the side of the house except for the men playing cards inside.”

  “Jesus,” I said, slightly shocked. “Were you scared?”

  She paused for a moment. “No, I wasn’t scared,” she said. “I knew exactly what he wanted and what I wanted to give him. I’m the youngest of five sisters, and you know how sisters are.”

  “So when did it happen?”

  “Why am I telling you all this?”

  I shrugged. “Because I’m interested?”

  “You’re dangerous. Women lay in bed and they tell you things that they shouldn’t tell you.…” Then, for a minute or so, it seemed Antoinette would stop, but she didn’t.

  “It happened two weeks later in the back of his pickup on some blankets,” she said. “He got me drunk on wine and I wanted to do it, so we did. Afterward I was scared finally, and I cried because I knew there was no going back. But he kissed me and told me he loved me and said he wanted me and would always want me because I was beautiful like the stars to him, and he swore he would marry me and take me away from Papa and we would live together in a big house in the bayou, and by God, he meant it. All of it. Dothan may be a hard-ass sometimes and a little bit of a smuggler and what not, but when he says a thing, he means it.

  “So we made love all that summer, and I got to like it. I would sneak out of the cabin just before dawn, just after Papa went to bed, drunk from the card game, and Dothan and I would make love in his truck parked on one of the trails in the bayou. Or in the ruins of the old Spanish fort, sun coming up over the crumbling brick walls. When I went back to New Orleans in the fall, Dothan drove down in his truck for the weekends, and we’d get hotel rooms out in Arabi or someplace. I told my parents I was sleeping over at one friend or another’s, and we’d go to redneck bars out there in the suburbs, where they’re not too picky about IDs, and Dothan would tell the rednecks that I was his wife.…”

  Antoinette was quiet for a while, smoking, her eyes dark and far away. “Do you want me to go on?” she said at last.

  “Yes.”

  “Of course, my parents found out, finally. I had built this web of lies, and it all came crashing down on me. Jolie told them, that bitch. She said she did it for my own good, but I think she did it because she was jealous. Because she wanted a boyfriend as beautiful as Dothan. When Papa found out it was Dothan, he was furious. He told me I could never see him again. Ever. There I was, his favorite daughter, a slut or something, and there was Dothan, ten years older and worse; a Cajun, for chrissakes, a bayou rat. Not good enough for his daughter, no way in hell. There’s always been this thing between the Creoles and the Cajuns in Louisiana. You know that, right?”

  “Vaguely,” I said.

  “The Creoles were aristocrats, descendants of Spanish and French nobility, all that crap. Plantation owners. And the poor backwardsass Cajuns, well—redneck peckerwoods. Possum-eating scum who ran down from Canada when the Brits got too tough on them.”

  “Plantation owners?” I raised one skeptical eyebrow, a habit acquired from Molesworth. “Did your family really have a plantation once?”

  “Hell, yes. Had a big old place down past English Turn on the river. Slaves, the whole nine yards.”

  “What happened?”

  “Burned to the ground during the Civil War, that’s what happened, like everything else. We’ve still got a bit of land down there, all tangled over with kudzu and Spanish moss. Keep in mind this is Mama’s family. Papa’s family wasn’t much different from Dothan’s really. They were Creole, but poor Creole. Fishermen or something out on Grand Isle. Papa came up the hard way. Went to the army in World War II, went to engineering school on the GI Bill. Made a lot of money in the oil fields by inventing this drill bit thing, I don’t know. The house on Prytania Street, all the dumb old pictures, and dusty old books, that’s Mama’s stuff. You ever see the house?”

  I shook my head.

  “You will,” she said, and she leaned over and kissed me lightly on the lips and continued her story. “After he found out about Dothan, Papa wouldn’t speak to me, not a word. For three weeks I stayed in my room. I wouldn’t go to school. I hardly ate. I just cried and cried. It was terrible. Mama came in to talk to me, but I wouldn’t talk to her. I wouldn’t talk to anyone. I just cried because they were watching me all the time and
I couldn’t get to Dothan. Finally I managed to sneak a phone call to him from a pay phone, and he came down in his pickup truck and parked right out front and knocked on the door. I saw him through the window, but I stayed in my room. I could hear the yelling from downstairs and glass breaking. Dothan told Papa he wanted to marry me. Today I think how ridiculous this was, but then it seemed like something right out of Romeo and Juliet. I was barely fourteen, a freshman at St. Jerome’s Academy. Shit! Of course, Papa said no. Papa said if he ever saw Dothan again, he’d get the police and have him locked in jail for statutory rape. Then he threw a half full bottle of Old Grand-Dad at something Dothan said, but Dothan ducked, and it crashed into Mama’s china closet and broke a whole lot of her precious antique crockery.

  “I watched him drive away, but I had stopped crying because I knew what I was going to do. A week later I decided to go back to school, and a few days after that Dothan was waiting for me with his truck. I was in my school uniform. I still remember it: dress blue blazer with the cross and crown on the pocket, white shirt and bow tie, blue plaid skirt, saddle shoes. I just put my books on the curb and got in the truck without a second thought. Jolie saw us drive away and ran after, screaming for us to stop, but I didn’t look back. We drove down to the river near the grain elevators off the levee and made love right there in the cab. Then we drove off to Baton Rouge. Dothan had already rented an apartment there in Spanish Town, not far from LSU. That’s why he called the bar Spanish Town, after the six months we spent there, living together like we were married.”

  “Six months? What about your parents?”

  “My poor parents were frantic. They called the police, they called the FBI; they called everyone. There was an APB out on Dothan. The state troopers were looking for him all over. It was even in the papers and on TV. They called it a kidnapping, but Dothan wasn’t afraid. We would live together for three years, he said. Then, when I was seventeen and old enough to consent, we would get married. He sold the truck, got some phony name and phony driver’s license from one of his crooked friends, and got a job working in an electronics store, selling stereos. Dothan in an electronics store, crazy just to think about it.

  “We had fun for a while. Dothan played husband and I played wife, and we smoked pot and ordered out fried chicken and pizza every night and went to the bars and made love afterward. But I was too young for it, really. I missed my family and my friends at school. So one Saturday, when Dothan was out scoring some weed, I called Mama, and she cried and cried. She loved me, she said, she missed me. She wanted me to come home. Then Papa got on the phone, too, and he cried. It really shook me up, hearing Papa cry. It was terrible. I made a deal with him right then and there. ‘Let me keep going out with Dothan,’ I said, ‘don’t get him in trouble, and I will come home and go back to school.’ They agreed. They just wanted me home.

  “The next day Dothan packed up my things and drove me back to New Orleans. He was scared, but Papa kept his word and called the police and squared things somehow so Dothan wouldn’t get in trouble. Dothan and I have been together ever since, going on ten years now. I mean, we’ve had our ups and downs. Didn’t even speak to each other for almost a year once. I went on a few dates, even brought a few of them around to the house, but they were nothing compared to Dothan, and when we got together again, it was great. And it’s been great up till recently. Till he moved down from Mamou and opened up his bar. And that’s pretty much the whole story. The end.”

  Antoinette was quiet for a few minutes afterward, smoking her cigarette and blowing the smoke through her nose. The rain picked up outside, and wind rattled the shutters. She got up and closed the window, pulled on her robe, and turned to look at me through narrow eyes.

  “Let’s go eat some étouffée,” she said.

  I got up and put on her spare terry-cloth robe, and we went into the living room and she brought out the étouffée and the salad. The étouffée was dried out from sitting on the stove all that time, and the rice was sticky; but the salad was good, and the wine was fine. It was a silent meal. The candles burned low. Side two of the jazz record kept repeating itself. At last, during the salad, Antoinette looked up at me.

  “O.K.,” she said. “What else? There’s something else.”

  I looked down at my plate. “What is he like?” I said.

  “You’re jealous?”

  “No. A little.”

  She took a sip of her wine and sighed. “He’s wild. He just does whatever the hell he wants, and the rest of the world be damned. You’ve got to realize I grew up with him. I did everything with him. Before Dothan, I was a little girl. He does a lot of drugs, more lately, so I’ve done a lot of those, too, because for a while there we did everything together. I don’t really see them as bad, especially pot, as long as it’s recreational and doesn’t take over your life.”

  “Is he dangerous? Molesworth says he’s dangerous.”

  “I suppose he can be mean. He’s never been mean to me. He’s never hit me. Lord knows, I’ve hit him a hundred times. Gave him a black eye once after I heard through the grapevine he went off with some bimbo in Shreveport. I love him. I’ll always love him. It’s just that …” Her voice trailed off.

  “What?”

  “He’s the same. He’s always the same. I don’t think he’ll ever grow up. He’ll just stay the same hell-raising good old boy forever. I started out younger than him, and he knew everything. Then I caught up with him, and for a year or two we had the best time. But now I’m older than he is. I’ve been to college, more or less—that is, I’ve got a year or so left at Dominican. I know things he doesn’t know, and I see now that a lot of the things he does are just plain stupid. We’re becoming different people now. He’ll never change. I think change is a good thing. He doesn’t. And I’d like to go out with someone else for a while.”

  She leveled her pale eyes at me, and I saw that she meant what she said, and I felt a twinge in my heart for this man who loved her and had loved her from the beginning. Men can be like that, constant and blind, their women changing in the dark hours when they are not looking, just when they think everything is safe. Mutating, growing new limbs, turning away, becoming utterly unrecognizable in the space of two weeks, a day, an hour. I might not be the one she’d settle on in the end, but she was through with Dothan, that was plain to see.

  Antoinette put her wineglass down, leaned across the table, and took hold of my hand.

  “Now that I’ve told you all this,” she said, “I want you to forget it. I want you to make love to me and keep making love to me for the next three months. And when Dothan gets back, I want to be as far away from him as possible. I want to be gone. O.K.?”

  I started to say something, but Antoinette said, “Shh!” and put her lips over mine and took my hand, and we went into the bedroom and got back into the high four-poster bed, where we stayed for the next three days. Making love and talking softly in the soft light as rain swept across the low neighborhoods and the brown river frothed and boiled up the sides of the levees and sandbags broke in the lower delta and water spread across the black, rich earth of cotton fields beneath the wild yellow hurricane sky of the season.

  12

  SUDDENLY, FROM the furtive life of motel rooms and French Quarter tourist bars, I entered a world I barely knew existed. The way Antoinette handled her credit card and a comment or two from Molesworth had led me to believe her parents were well off, but in fact, they were better than this. They were filthy rich. According to Louisiana Magazine, Antoinette’s father, Charles Gaston Rivaudais, was the major shareholder in the Louisiana Gulf Company, and one of the dozen richest men in the state. Her mother, Helene d’Aurevilley Rivaudais, was the last-surviving offspring of a prominent Creole plantation family who had come to the region not ten years after the Sieur de Bienville caused his surveyors to lay out the streets of a new city at a defensible bend in the river.

  Her full name was Antoinette Marie Jeanne d’Aurevilley Rivaudais, a marvelous mouthfu
l. She had four older sisters—Elise, Manon, Claudine, and Jolie. All of them attractive, though none as downright beautiful as Antoinette. Elise, the oldest and most responsible, had married an engineer out of the University of Texas at Austin who now managed the Biloxi branch of her father’s firm. They had two girls, a four- and a five-year-old hellion with blue eyes and hair the color of straw.

  Manon, the bohemian of the family, met an Irish jazz musician while attending Juilliard in New York and had married him the year before in a quick ceremony at City Hall in Manhattan. Then they moved home to New Orleans for no particular reason and lived in a restored ninteenth-century Creole-style raised cottage on Carrollton Avenue, a wedding present from Papa. The Irish husband drank whiskey professionally, smoked Turkish cigarettes, and occasionally gigged at clubs around town. Manon’s specialty was the harp, that damnably bourgeois instrument. She gave recitals twice a year with a quartet that played chamber music in the bandshell in Audubon Park and lived without a qualm of conscience off her trust fund.

  Claudine and Jolie were just a year apart, three and four years older than Antoinette. They were the ambitious ones. They had gone to LSU together, both majored in political science, and now lived in Washington, D.C., in a neatly appointed town house on the Hill, not far from the ugly white wedding cake of the Capitol. Claudine worked in some minor administrative capacity for Republican Congressman Robert Essex, who represented the uptown wards of New Orleans and was, coincidentally, a large shareholder in the Louisiana Gulf Company; Jolie worked as a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association. They were both part of the contingent of attractive, preppy, hard-drinking Louisianans that enliven our staid capital.

  I admired the Rivaudais family. I admired their style and their complacency and the grace with which they went about the world, the grace that comes from belonging to a specific place, from belonging to its streets and its skies, from knowing you are home. I had the wanderer’s appreciation for those things they took for granted: family portraits, tombs in old cemeteries all over the city full of their familiar dead, stories of a hundred years past, ancient photographs, trunks full of musty letters.