by Andrea Lewis
Afterward, things improved somewhat. The hackman I had hired for the evening, a coal-black Caribbean piloting an elegant brougham, took it upon himself to protect Juliette as she exited. I was so grateful I tipped the man a week’s wage and asked for several extra turns about Vieux Carré. Thus I had opportunity to speak with Juliette alone. She was very curious about the performance and asked far more penetrating questions than Seraphina—or her parents, for that matter—ever did. At one point she looked at me slyly with her feline eyes and asked, “Nuns dancing?”
She was referring to the ballet in Act III in which nuns rise from the grave and dance a bacchanal. I allowed it was scandalous.
“The nuns of my acquaintance…,” she said, “well, it’s quite impossible.”
“You are acquainted with nuns?”
Oh, yes, she was. She attended Sisters of the Holy Family Convent School for Girls. “Until I was fourteen,” she said.
“What happened at fourteen?”
As soon as I said it, I heard how treacherous the question was. We had just drawn up outside El Paradiso on Basin Street and she said, “At fourteen, I was brought here. My father sold me.”
I tried to say something or other—How dreadful, etc.—and she replied only, “I survived.”
I sat frozen, causing her to ask the driver to help her down. I couldn’t bear to part with her and I couldn’t bear to go into the establishment. The player piano and laughter from inside carried even to the street and I refused to share her with a crowd. I asked for even more turns about the Vieux Carré. She and the driver both obliged.
Now, Freddi, you are asking me What else did you do? Forgive me, Brother, when I say very little. I was perhaps more timid than usual! I had paid for her, yet any advances—was I to ravish her as we turned off St. Peter’s onto Bourbon?—felt inappropriate. She was so dignified. Not flirtatious like Seraphina and not importunate like Magda. Rather self-possessed, serene, unblenching. She spoke passionately of Isabelle, the heroine of the opera who redeems Robert with her love.
Driving through the warm night air, whispering together, watching her face pass through gaslight and shadow, hearing mockingbirds—always a good sign—put me in a foolish trance. But a man of my standing, hiding in carriages with colored courtesans and bickering with ushers in his own opera house? No no no.
The accepted and predicted course for me in New Orleans is to marry someone like Seraphina and fornicate as I please with someone like Juliette, feasting on my gateau and having it too, but it is all so … bourgeois. I crave beauty. Not only physical beauty, but beauty of spirit. Something higher. Don’t laugh. If you are honest, Freddi, you want the same. Is it too much to ask?
Your tormented brother, R.
22 August 1895
Dear Mother and Frederick,
I am recalling today my earliest memory—that of seeing Frederick as a newborn in his bassinette. I was three and wholly unprepared for a squalling hobgoblin with a misshapen head to disrupt my only-child paradise. What a greedy little beggar you were, Freddi, wanting not only all of Mother’s time, attention, warmth, and milk, but even some of Father’s distracted glances as well. I was mad with jealousy, yet oddly fascinated. Your miniature fingernails, your transparent pate, your chubby thighs, and your all-consuming, ever-howling, toothless mouth. Suddenly the whole world loved Frederick best. And so did I—I adored you.
Why am I musing today on a thirty-year-old memory? Because I feel like a newborn and I crave, in my newness, that same adoration from you both—even from Father, if he reads this in the afterlife—the adoration bestowed on the new and the innocent.
Of course I am not innocent. For one thing I have lapsed in my correspondence, but, far worse, I have hoarded secrets and hidden my heart from you. Now I feel reborn because I am in love. And like Frederick as a babe, I am avid, hungry, starved, greedy for life. It feels a good kind of greed to want to live a complete life, a deeper life than I lived before, though it entails selfishness too—I want your approval and your love as surely as I did when I was a child. More so.
I imagine you have guessed by now the object of my affection is not Seraphina Carolina Kincaid Gerrity. Rather my beloved’s name is Juliette Devereaux. Frederick has heard mention of her and been sworn to secrecy. Why? Because I am a coward and a fool.
Mother, Juliette is of mixed race, part African. Someday, if you wish, we will delineate for you the particulars of her heritage; but I beg you, let us not count droplets of blood from this or that side of the seas or this or that hemisphere of the earth. Living amidst the wild blend of blood, skin, and language that is New Orleans has cured me of my old preconceptions. To my shame, it was my own prejudice that led me to secrecy in the first place. What an ass I was, tiptoeing around ancient fears and hatreds like a patronizing prig.
Further, Juliette entered my life through the demimonde. I have asked her to leave that life, and perhaps she will, but I will love her regardless. She was sold at fourteen to a maison de joie. I can only imagine what she endured because she will not speak of it with me.
It is difficult to admit that I—conservatory-trained son of Austrian nobility, music- art- and gustatory-snob of New Orleans’ Garden District, self-satisfied pursuer of high-strung gentrified young ladies—should receive lessons in humanity from a seventeen-year-old courtesan. But that is what happened. She has led me from the thirty-three-year drought of my existence into a world alive with delight, with new eyesight, with new reverence. Music sounds sweeter, wine tastes better, rain feels softer, and the very earth feels firmer. She was the most glamorous courtesan in New Orleans, with the world at her feet, yet she claims to love me. I only hope God grants me a long life that I might spend all of it adoring Juliette.
I saw Magda last week. She almost quit New Orleans because of Seraphina’s harassment—showing up at the stage door, threatening her, insulting her. Once she tried to climb on the stage during Magda’s performance in “Fédora.” Seraphina’s mother has taken her to Switzerland for a rest cure. Who knows? Perhaps you’ll run into them at Klosters or Leukerbad. Meanwhile, Magda flourishes here, audiences worship her, and she’s quite the bohemian—wearing knickerbockers and smoking cigars and seeing her name in all the gossip columns. She is affianced to a divorced actor who was excommunicated. That kind of scandale suits her perfectly.
And so, Mother, to the question of my own marital state. The race laws here are such that Juliette and I are not permitted to marry. We’ve consulted a priest and determined it is quite impossible. If only we could marry, the world would see what we mean to each other. I know when you meet her you will love her as I do. Frederick, I know you will love her too, and I am issuing my first warning: She is mine.
Your devoted, Rainer.
4
Straight Next Time
Without Christophe, we would have perished on 12 August 1901. That night a hurricane flattened buildings and flooded half of Grand Isle, Louisiana, but Christophe—eight years old and crippled—saved us. Guided us under the black-green skies and thrashing oaks, through the hell-roar of wind racketing our ears and the devil’s own red clay grabbing our feet. In each lightning flare I saw Christophe leading my wife by the hand, shouting over his shoulder, “Vite, Madame!” Juliette clung to him, sliding on the slick path. Her hair streamed water and her satin shoes were caked with clay. I scrambled after them, falling, getting up, keeping close to the shredded, muddy hem of my wife’s white dress. If I dropped back even a few yards, I feared I’d never see her again. With every breath I swallowed rain or choked on it. Christophe never faltered. He took us over the chênière and across the bayou to his mother’s house.
Yes, I had thought about tropical storms before we came to Grand Isle. But anyone with the means to quit New Orleans in August—the heat, the cholera—did so. Grand Isle was merely the latest of my many attempts to cheer my wife. Vacations, rest cures, parties, journeys. Nothing worked. As an opera conductor, I had been invited to Atlanta, to New York City, and
to Washington D.C. The more vibrant the city, the more listless was Juliette. The previous summer we had sailed from Boston to Naples on the SS Ivernia and continued by rail to Linz, where my mother took Juliette to Bad Ischl for a course of sulfur-bath treatments. From there to Paris and the Exposition Internationelle. We saw talking films, rode a moving sidewalk and toured the art exhibits in Girault’s Petit Palais. One of the paintings, Cézanne’s Les Deux Enfants, a tender scene of a little girl and boy playing with rabbits, upset Juliette terribly. How would we ever have a child if my wife could not even look at a painting of children?
The day we arrived on Grand Isle and took up our rooms at the Caminada Hotel, we looked from our window to the pearl-blue line of the Gulf horizon and Juliette said, “I feel her presence even here, Rainer. Do you feel it?”
She meant Thérèse, the daughter we had lost three years earlier, on 7 August 1898. The daughter who had never drawn breath in this world. From that day forward, Juliette had suffered a deepening melancholia that I feared was fathomless. She still embraced the notion that poor, unbaptized Thérèse was journeying through the ether and required rescue.
I kissed Juliette’s hair and breathed her essence, eau de lavande and Le Désirable soap. “Darling, we must look to the future now.”
“I know, Rainer. I’ll try. I want a child as much as you do.”
I kissed her neck, her forehead, her lips. When I touched the topmost button of her dress, she pulled away and went to the dressing table to study her face in the mirror and rearrange her cosmetics.
Of course, I had not endured the pain she had. When Thérèse tried to enter this world too early and died in the process, the ordeal nearly took Juliette’s life as well. I flung myself into the task of restoring Juliette’s health. Our cook prepared vast meals, only to have Juliette cry at the table and ignore the food. Her physician—the preeminent medical man in New Orleans—had said he was “reasonably certain” she could conceive again. But three years on, her body slender but healthy, she could not free herself of despair. At twenty-three, she was as beautiful as the day I met her. But I wanted children. And I wanted the lively, spirited wife I remembered returned to me.
* * *
While Juliette was rearranging her cosmetics a knock came at our door. I answered to find a tall, angular woman with dark eyes and sharp cheekbones, typical enough of the Acadians thereabouts.
“Je suis ici pour Madame.”
She was the lady’s maid I had requested for Juliette. She wore a long peach-colored skirt, a white blouse, and a gold cross at her throat. She had a haughty tilt to her head and a copious amount of wavy brown hair swept back from her face with a band of white muslin.
“Do you speak English?” I asked. Juliette and I both spoke New Orleans French and could understand Acadian accents, but I did not like this woman’s presumptuous attitude.
“Pourquoi? Tu ne parle pas Français?” She not only talked back but did so in the familiar.
“Entrée,” Juliette called from the dressing table.
The woman paused and made the sign of the cross on the doorjamb. Then she brushed past me, opened Juliette’s trunk without asking, and said, “Bonjour, Madame. J’m’appelle Philomène.”
I took my cigar case and left, while Philomène marveled at the first of Juliette’s gowns to emerge from the trunk. Knowing Juliette, she would tip this bold woman far too much money and dispense gifts from her belongings as well. My wife never failed to empathize with servants.
While Juliette dressed, I spent a pleasant enough hour on the front gallery with my cigar and the day-old Picayune provided by the hotel. The “Weather Prophet” said a storm would cross south Florida but was expected to lose much of its force before reaching Louisiana.
When we went in for supper, it seemed the entire dining room—hum of voices, clatter of cutlery, flicker of candlelight—paused to regard Juliette at her loveliest as she made her way to our table. Whatever Philomène’s faults, she proved an expert at enhancing Juliette’s beauty, having dressed her hair in a swept-back style adorned with the jet-bead comb that had been my traveling gift. Juliette, too, was pleased with Philomène. “She speaks English perfectly well, you know.”
“She could have told me as much.”
“You insulted her by asking. These Acadians are very proud.”
“She should remember who hired her.”
The wine list had a Château Camensac Bordeaux, outrageously priced, but I ordered a bottle. When I offered my glass for a toast, Juliette added, “Philomène has a little boy. Christophe.”
We dined on an excellent speckled trout marinated in mustard sauce. We watched the evening sky melt into pale coral and greenish blue as we strolled the white oyster-shell path that fronted the hotel. Creosote torches lit the way and discouraged most of the mosquitoes. The evening air was humid, but ambrosia compared to New Orleans. Juliette took my arm and I was feeling quite content until she said, “Philomène will bring me herbs tomorrow.”
“You mean medicines?”
“No. Her own herbs. Apparently she’s something of a healer.”
“A servant. Who works at a hotel with wealthy patrons. And happens to have cures for sale?”
“She didn’t ask for money.”
“I’m sure she didn’t. She knew with you she wouldn’t have to.”
“It can’t harm anything. She’s bringing her little boy too.”
I coaxed Juliette onto the dance floor that night. The Caminada Hotel held an Acadian fais do-do every evening. During the first waltz she began weeping in my arms. Women and men alike glared at me, perhaps suspecting some cruelty on my part, perhaps unable to perceive that I love Juliette more than my own life.
Back in our suite, situated above the ballroom, we lay on the feather bed side by side, Juliette lost, no doubt, in a prayer for Thérèse, while the fiddles and accordions played on below.
* * *
Philomène brought the mysterious herbs—at least I saw a small linen bundle—when she arrived to help Juliette with the next morning’s toilette. She also brought Christophe. I was shocked upon first seeing his deformity. The poor child’s spine was twisted in some cruel way, causing the right side of his torso to curve in toward the left. He limped into our rooms behind his mother and gazed at us mildly through huge brown eyes. He had impossibly thick lashes and the same masses of dark brown hair as his mother. I could almost see Juliette’s heart flood toward this unfortunate the moment he entered. She knelt beside him in her nightgown and said, “Are you Christophe?” Her fingers combed his thicket of hair off his forehead in a gesture I felt was reserved for me, though I had not experienced its pleasure in some time. “How old are you?”
“Eight years, Madame.”
“And you are a help to your Maman?”
He nodded.
“Philomène,” I interrupted. “What do you propose to do with Christophe while my wife is bathing and dressing?”
Philomène crossed her arms and looked from the boy to me. Just as I realized what would happen, Juliette said, “Rainer is going out for a walk. Christophe can accompany him.”
Philomène added, “Oh, thank you, Monsieur. Very kind of you.” So. English would be used if I cooperated.
I had envisioned a brisk tramp about the grounds and I’ll admit to the unkind thought that Christophe would slow me down. I needn’t have worried. His pace was determined. The contrast between his ruined body and his self-assurance was striking. He wore a loose muslin shirt and yellow cotton trousers that were hacked off and frayed an inch or two above his ankles. He galumphed along tirelessly, his bare, sun-browned feet slapping the ground at their bizarre angles. I wanted to walk toward the shore but Christophe said, “This way,” and led me inland. At the end of the groomed path he plunged onward, on a rougher track that entered a thick copse of trees. We were soon under a virid canopy of oak, willow and dogwood, so dense the very air was green. “Christophe, where does this take us?”
He be
nt to touch a thick bush of long narrow leaves. “Citronella,” he said. “For bellyache.”
A few steps farther and he pointed to a branch of dogwood. I lowered it for him. Hidden among the leaves was a cluster of red berries. He plucked them out and slipped them into a pocket. “Maman keeps. For healing fevers.”
I had another unkind thought, looking at Christophe’s twisted spine and thinking Maman was not much good at healing.
Christophe caught me eyeing his deformity. He pressed his hand to his chest. “This come when Maman cure a cripple-man. Before I am born. His cripple go to me.” He indicated another dogwood branch for me to lower. “Maman say I be straight next time. Next life.” He picked more berries and pocketed them.
Christophe went on to identify countless plants growing on the chênière: okra blossom for boils, aloe for bee stings, calamus root for rheumatism, witch hazel, button bush, mustard, la mauve, sassafras, l’herbe à malot. We came into a clearing that muddied its way down to a bayou, where viscous green water mirrored mangroves on the other side. Suddenly shy with pride, he showed me his pirogue, tied to a broken-down jetty. He wanted to take me out in this tiny craft and looked crestfallen when I declined. His gaze went to some thin arcs of cloud, far off to the southeast “Tempêtes,” he said. “Maybe twelve hours soon.”
“Storm clouds?” I found this hard to believe. The wisps of vapor were as delicate as Alençon lace.
I asked him about storms. He had been born during the infamous hurricane of 1893. Given that the Caminada was the only hotel to have survived that storm, I had placed much confidence in its thick timber construction and a new seawall the hotel had boasted of in its advertisements.
“Christophe, what work does your papa do?”
“Papa he die. He be pêcheur de chevrettes.”
That was the fanciful Acadian phrase for shrimper. “When did he die?”