by Jim Grimsley
He had been telling her about the research he was doing. Papers inherited from two maiden great-aunts, sisters of her grandfather, not even named Duval or directly related to Mark at all, who had lived in modest houses in Metairie side by side, identical houses in identical yards. They died within months of each other, and Leigh was heir to both, Aunt Kit and Aunt Tit, she called them, and laughed, and never would explain the reason. With boxes of papers in the attic, family archives dating from the nineteenth century and even, as he found, some fragments of the Duvals in the eighteenth, a copy of a letter to Aldonse Duval from an uncle in France who wanted money, a list of household expenses from 1794, a news clipping from a paper of the day about a fire in the French Quarter. She had showed him the boxes of papers stored so carelessly with a slight curl of the lip, and every time he came to study them she gave him the same look. The more he learned, the more he bored her—she told him so in dry tones. “I’m tired of talking about it, sweetie. Really, I am. My family is so old sometimes I feel like I’m its asshole dragging the ground behind.”
She had barely consented to meet Mark at all when he first got in touch with her, but once they came face to face she spent the evening telling him what a handsome young man he was and seemed actually surprised by that.
“The men in my family were never very good looking. But they were all named Robichaux, not Duval. I was glad to get married to a man who could give me a more interesting name. Pendergrass. In fact, I liked marrying a new name so much I did it twice more. And now I have three more names than when I was born. I think that’s very interesting. And I believe I changed into a different person every time my name changed. The differences were subtle, but a person who knew me could tell.”
“Is Jack your husband?”
“No.”
Jack wants things. Asks me to do certain things. Acts of courage, is the way I think of it. Acts of personal responsibility and moral courage. He feels a certain responsibility to vary the course of events, he says. He has a way of making you want the same thing he wants. You’ll see when you meet him. I promise I’m going to let you do that. Introduce you. I want to be there the first time you see him. I know what your taste is, Mark dear.
Newell said, “I think I can walk now.”
“Walk.”
“Didn’t you want to walk somewhere?”
“Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Oh, yes,” Newell said, “I’ve found a new best friend.”
“Can you move? I’m not sure I can move.”
This melting self was what Mark loved, this feeling that when he closed his eyes he was sliding farther into darkness than usual, that the space in his mind was beyond mere consciousness and had become something else, a newly unfolded universe. Every time he closed his eyes he felt as if his eyes were dissolving, and at the moment before the darkness, the world transformed into something more. This was the effect of tripping that he craved, the feeling of a darkness within himself, of rooms constructed within the darkness, of a self elaborated through all these rooms, random lights across his retina shifting and swirling, an aurora of the interior. A field of shimmering lights. Standing in the dreaming place but awake, with a sense of knowing the world as though he had constructed it himself.
Leigh had given him the acid and watched. She liked to watch his skin flush with color, his eyes go radiant, as the drug immured him; she told him so as he was chewing the first of the small white tabs. Jack had picked up the acid earlier from Mac in the French Quarter, along with the black beauties that Leigh liked, and cocaine for Jack, and pot for them all. But Leigh had made Mark drop his first tab of acid in front of her. Because she wanted to witness the change. It was like watching a light come on, she’d said, but very slowly.
They talked for a while about a movie she had seen. After that she said, “I want you to do me a favor.”
By then the lining of his stomach had become a fluttering inside him. The first edges. He knew already the nature of what she wanted. “What you talked about before?”
“Yes.” She described what she wanted, showed him the slightly creped skin at the top of her breast. “Very lightly, that’s the trick.”
He saw a frail white scar, not even that, a thread of white. Nearly healed. “How often do you do this?”
She smiled, touching the scar herself. “It will disappear completely after a while.”
Mark tasted a hint of metal, and the sounds of the room, the traffic outside, became suddenly velvety, and suddenly he was ready. The room was expanding and Leigh was ready and he did what she had asked.
At one moment, when Leigh’s eyes were cast down, when she was shivering, as Mark lifted the razor blade and positioned it carefully in his fingers, through the open door Jack appeared, stood where Mark could see. Jack dark-haired, skin like copper, wearing a robe open at the front, the shadow of his body. Jack’s bare calves below the robe seemed obscenely naked, his bare feet with a smattering of black hair across the top. Mark flushed and took a deep breath and Jack stepped out of sight.
“He likes it.”
“Why?”
Leigh had shrugged. This was weeks before. When she first began to talk to him seriously. “I don’t know.”
Mark shook his head. “I doubt I can do this.”
“I know you can.”
But on the river, the person who kept becoming Leigh in the night, the one he had met in Mac’s place, the face of Newell, a languid look of knowing, a thread of sound coming out of his lips. I think I’m gonna be sad, I think it’s today. What a pretty face this was. What a fresh smell. Newell gritted his teeth and shivered, the drug flushing through him. This was what Mark had wanted to watch, the change of consciousness, the suddenly rich world of internal and external sensation, sounds pressing close, a breeze ruffling the skin one nerve at a time, every sensation minute, everything new.
Newell’s nostrils flared. Flushes of color crossed his skin, or else the illusion of that took place in Mark’s perception. The pupils of Newell’s eyes slightly dilated. Slow, languid movements of the orbs. Small, precise gestures of the fingertips, as if Newell were making signs. Blowing out breath in an early morning that had become cool. A moment later, a sound began, and he turned his head to hear it, the cathedral clock striking three A.M. over the Place d’Armes.
He was trying to talk to Newell again, though at times he felt distant from the effort. “It’s about Leigh,” he said.
“What is?”
“What I’m studying.”
“That Sade guy, you mean? You’re studying that for Leigh?”
Mark shook his head. He would try again. “We’re in the same family. Leigh and I.”
“You already told me that.”
He nodded. He had, of course. “But we’re not close.”
Newell nodded, looked away at the river. But that wasn’t what Mark had meant to say. He gave up.
In the papers from Leigh, Mark had found a packet of yellowed pages, one packet among many. Most were ordinary letters, ordinary papers of the type he expected, records of the mundane affairs of people’s lives only made valuable to him by their age, by their connection to some idea he had of his past. But in these pages was something else, a puzzle that might even become a mystery if he were to pursue it. A matter of history, even, if a minor one, and more legend than history. In the pages that unfolded he read what purported to be a journal kept by one of the neighbors of Madame Lalaurie, the owner of the infamous haunted house on Royal Street about which George W. Cable had written, about which Henry C. Castellanos had written, in their books about New Orleans. The neighbor had been a witness to the fire that nearly destroyed the house, and the later riot that did demolish it. Mark had been transcribing the pages ever since he found them, up to the moment today when Leigh handed him the tab of acid; he had even gone to Leigh’s apartment today, hoping to tell her about what he had found, this apparent treasure, or very evident hoax, whatever it should prove to be. But the moment he saw her,
the moment he knew Jack was in the house, he understood she would pay no attention. So he had taken the tab of acid instead of trying to tell her about what he had found, and now he was sitting with the words running through his head, written by a woman who had lived here, only a few blocks from the place where Mark and Newell were sitting, watching the river.
I was not aware of any alarm or signal that there was a fire anywhere in the neighborhood, but when I went out walking in the morning what else should I see but smoke billowing up from the direction of the river, close enough that I could guess the street. A crowd was rushing through the streets already, headed for the fire. Right away I got Marie, and we went together to see the excitement. I think Marie already guessed what we would see; she was wearing the new shoes I had bought her and vain of them, trying to walk only on the banquettes and never in the muck.
We found the fire on the corner of Royal Street and Hospital Street, the Lalaurie house, where Tante Emilie and her husband have had dinner many times. The Lalaurie woman has been married three times, and they say she is very fast with men and got very rich from her husbands when they died. I thought it was all a lot of talk until that story about the little girl she killed, the African child, threw her off the roof, I heard. But that was years ago, and of course she paid her fine, when the story came to light, and the child was a slave, after all. Decent people still eat at her table, though I would not. Because she has been married so often she cheapens the institution, or this is my view, and I have heard she is unkind to her stepdaughters. Anyway, it was her house on fire, and the streets were full. The firemen were everywhere, but their equipment is not the best, a shame, since we live in a city that threatens to burn down every year or so. We watched for a long time while the firemen tried to get the blaze under control; people started to whisper that the fire was winning, when the firemen climbed to the roof of the house to break through it and fight the fire from that direction as well. Another pump wagon arrived from the Marigny fauborg, and already it appeared to me the fire was coming under control, when I noticed for the first time the crowd, its hostility, its coldness.
I am writing this two days later, so I am prone to get ahead of myself. We knew nothing at the time except there was a fire, and when it was under control we had started back to the house when suddenly we stopped, Marie and I, at the same moment.
There was agitation on all sides. That woman, the Lalaurie woman, was in the streets. I glimpsed her walking in the muck with that large African footman of hers paraded at her backside. She is a loud, brassy woman with hair braided and coiled about her ears, thought handsome at one time, though her figure is too thick for my taste and her way of dress too assertive. She was directing people getting the goods out of the house, but I kept losing sight in the crowd, and Marie is not much taller than me, and so we waited and listened and tried to hear what we could not see; rumors were running through the crowd on all sides.
The story that chilled me most deeply was that the fire had been set by the cook, who was kept chained in the kitchen with her neck an open sore from the iron collar that confined her. We heard that story in bits and snatches, and that made it all the more awful when I understood.
Firemen were climbing on the roof of the house. We watched them breaking through the timbers. I kept thinking to myself, I should go back home, I should get out of this crowd, I’m not strong enough for this, but the scene had me spelled to the spot, I never felt such a fixedness in myself. We stood there, Marie and I, letting the crowd move us this way and that. I saw Dr. Mossy at the baker’s shop and he said it was an awful thing, wasn’t it? He’d talked to a fellow who’d looked in the upstairs windows, climbed up in a tree to look, and saw the most horrible sights, a table laid out with instruments of torture, and a man chained in the room, wounded and gored and dripping with blood. He spoke in a fever, nothing like the calm Dr. Mossy who comes when I have a complaint, who hardly speaks at all, and I couldn’t make out half what he said myself, I had to ask Marie what he was talking about. When she told me, I thought he was making it all up, but then the doors of the house burst open, and the firemen began to bring out the slaves one by one.
One of the women was the cook, two white men helping her, an iron collar sharpened at the edges still gripping her at the neck, she barely able to walk, her neck, wrists, and ankles scored with wounds, and other ghastly bloody marks on her body. Everyone in the crowd was murmuring that she was the one who had set the fire.
She died that day, I think. The crowd fed her and gave her all the food she wanted right there, and she died of the kindness. She had been starved so long, her body was too tired to take in so much food.
The old paper was faded, fragile, the ink faded. He had held them carefully his hands that same afternoon, the smell of age, old dust that is in fact old skin. The skin of this woman had dusted over her papers, her smell reduced to its last essence.
“I could sit here all night,” someone was saying, a voice was saying, and suddenly the whole shimmering night in motion, a ship sliding by in the dark, headed upriver to the new docks, sailing calm and even with towers of containers on deck. The lowing of the horn, a long full throbbing note, a hoarse high sound surrounded by plush, a sound so tangible it tingled across Mark’s skin.
“I could sit here all night and watch the river,” this guy was saying, this cute guy, the one Mark was supposed to be watching, studying, to see the effect of the acid on the untested young mind, except that Mark himself was strung on a thin wire, was seeing a brave new world of his own, a ship gliding by in the night with smells wafting off it, the dusky river.
“We are sitting here,” Mark said, and Newell started to laugh, was laughing at him, and Mark looked away.
“But how long have we been?” asked the face.
“I don’t know. Why are you laughing at me?”
“Laughing,” the face said, “but I don’t mean it.”
“I don’t know how long we’ve been here.”
“You could look at your watch.”
The ship’s horn sounded again, the shivering sound filling the air along his skin, the breath of cool, and when he moved his hand, trails of his hand moved along behind, as if he were moving very slowly or seeing very quickly, or as if the hand left a taste of itself, colors, in the air where it passed. Mark looked at his watch, the thin metal hands splayed on the face; it made no sense to him. He looked at it again.
“We’ve been out here a long time,” Newell said. “I want to stand up. Do you want to?”
“Stand up?” Still staring, though, at the face of time.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if I can,” Mark said.
“This is amazing. My head feels so clean. It’s like there’s a window in my head and there’s a wind blowing inside.”
“After you stand up.”
“No, we have to stand up together. Come on.”
Suddenly rising, he wondered if Newell were lifting him somehow, and there they were standing, side by side.
“Can you walk?” Newell asked
“I don’t think so.”
“You sure?”
Mark shrugged, but by then, he had already taken a step and found that he could. A surprise, that first moment, moving, but now they were crossing the levee, looking down at the shadows of the grass and the trees, ahead the quiet of Jackson Square. Newell stopped to look back at him, on the landing of the steps, no one else on this side of the street, a few people still in the Café du Monde, sounds, though, from everywhere, the air, the river, the voices behind them and the traffic passing.
“Do you want to eat something?” Mark asked.
“I want to go dancing,” Newell said.
We stayed in the street most of the day; I knew my husband would be angry (and he was) but I couldn’t tear myself away. I’m one for a spectacle when it’s to be had, and anyway, it was not much later than we usually set out for a walk along the levee or a drive down the Bayou St. Jean to the lake; in fa
ct, it was exactly that hour. The crowd had been growing all afternoon, every color of skin and every shape of eye, all of us shameless, and I had come out of the house without a pair of gloves, though at least I had a hat. The Lalaurie house was locked up and the women were inside it, so we understood; some men had dug up two bodies in her courtyard, the skeleton of an adult and a child, and everyone guessed this was the little girl she had flung from the roof. Everyone around us was talking, we were all sharing the news, watching the comings and goings. The sheriff would be here to arrest her before nightfall, this was what we understood, but we waited and waited and he never came.
A carriage pulled up to the front of the house, and anybody who drives on the bayou road in the evening would have recognized it as her own, driven by that same sleek footman, who went to the front door and knocked. The door opened at once and Madame and her daughters descended instantly to the street, mounted to the carriage and closed it up too quickly for anyone to react, and the horses were off before people understood what had happened and started to shout.
Oh such a fury, such a commotion! I can’t say I liked it, and I can’t say I ever want to see it again. People took off after her, and pretty soon carriages were trying to push through the crowd. Marie and I were nearly trampled, and finally I told her we would have to go home. I spoke very firmly, and for once she had nothing to say. We had to fight our way the few blocks distance, and the whole way people were talking of nothing but the awful scene on Royal Street.
But the crowd was all moving to the jail, and we followed, Marie and I, because we heard the Lalaurie slaves were there, wounds on display, and we wanted to see, and we did—seven of the slaves, though the old woman was already sick and dying, though still out in plain sight. Her neck pitted, worms crawling in the wound. The instruments of torture were laid out on tables for everyone to see. I can’t bring myself to describe more than one or two. A collar for the neck with the inner ring sharpened like a barber’s razor. A device for piercing the breasts and nipples of a woman. Only two of dozens of such devices that these people kept and used.