Second Chance

by Linda Kepner

  “I understand. He said the same about you.”

  “Moi?” Louis sat up on the couch indignantly. “He is a gangster, Bishou. All this organizing? It is organized crime. He got his roots in — what you call — rumrunning, ‘revenooing’ — and there are still shady dealings with the American law.” It was the plainest indication how Louis saw himself, not as a career criminal, but as a loner who made stupid mistakes.

  “One expects that in a Southerner. It goes almost without saying.”

  “Does it? Now you surprise me.”

  “There’s no Southerner who doesn’t know who and where the law is, and how to get around it. That’s why they are always cautious of us Yankees. We usually represent the law, or are at least very familiar with it.”

  “He was not cautious of you, Bishou. He spoke of your nice skin and your warm shoulders, and wondered how you would be …” Louis reddened.

  “All right, you don’t have to finish that sentence,” she said, her face reddening too.

  “I should hope not. But he was someone for you to guard against, Bishou, and I only hope you gave him nothing to lead him on.”

  Bishou regarded Louis with surprise. “You’re jealous. Mon Dieu, Louis Dessant, you’re jealous of Gray Jackson!”

  “I am not jealous,” said Louis defensively, the emptiest protest since time began.

  “Listen to you!” she exclaimed incredulously. “What has Gray Jackson got that you haven’t got? You are as jealous of him as he was of you. He couldn’t wait for the bus to leave to ask me over to his hotel room.”

  “What?” Louis sat up. Both feet hit the floor. He uttered an expletive Bishou didn’t bother translating, followed by, “He wanted you to go to bed with him?”

  “Sure. Fact. Now that the ‘poor little rich boy’ was on his way to the airport, why couldn’t I give him what I’d given you?” Bishou heard that familiar growl, and added, “And, I admit, he got slightly more than you — because when we went to the bar, I paid for his drink. You haven’t let me buy you a drink yet.”

  “Nor will I.” His cheeks were still flushed. “The idea.”

  “And we were both lucky neither of us yet knew that you’d purchased my cap and gown for me, Louis, or I would have had no defense against him.”

  He bowed his head. “I had not thought of it like that.” Louis swallowed, and dropped his gaze. “Anyone would have thought you were ma maîtresse.” My mistress. “I meant it only as a kindness.”

  “I knew, Louis. I understood. And damn the rest of them.” His gaze came back up to her face, and she sighed, “And there are the puppy-dog eyes he spoke of, that melt all the women’s hearts.”

  The puppy-dog look vanished immediately, replaced by one of sheer mischief. “Gray Jackson said that?”

  “Bien sûr, and much more besides. You are jealous of each other because you are so alike.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I do. Answer my question, then. What does Gray Jackson have that you don’t have?”

  “Freedom to do whatever he wants,” Louis replied promptly.

  “And what have you got that he doesn’t have?”

  “That, I do not know,” Louis admitted.

  “Thank God,” said Bishou, and she kissed him.

  She sat beside him on the couch, and kissed him again. Whether it was her forwardness that shocked him, or this was a fantasy come true, she couldn’t tell, but he responded wholeheartedly.

  “Ah, oui,” he gasped at last. “Ma Bishou, I am crumbling.” Louis pulled her closely. Two of his fingers stroked her throat, down toward her breast. He unbuttoned two buttons on her blouse. “I was a married man, you know.”

  “And I have never married,” she said softly.

  “Tu es vierge? Of course you are.” His fingers were warm against her throat. He kissed her ear gently. “As I was once. Bishou, stay with me.”

  “I want to — ”

  “Marry me.”

  “You said that you did not want to make that decision.” Bishou closed her eyes and clasped his hand.

  “I lied. I am too lonely. Will you marry me?” Louis drew her close to him.

  “Oui.”

  • • •

  They sat together, blissfully, for quite some time, before they heard Bettina clear her throat. Bishou didn’t move. Louis merely looked up at his housekeeper. “Bettina, elle m’a dit oui.” She told me yes.

  “Oh!” Bettina almost dropped the coffee cup. “Mes felicitations, Monsieur, Mademoiselle! I will tell Madeleine!” She ran out of the room with the dirty dishes.

  “She was expecting that,” Bishou observed.

  “My domestiques are much wiser than I am,” Louis replied. “I am a source of constant amusement to them.”

  “That is as it should be.”

  He smiled at her, and stroked her hair. “And you have never kept domestiques.”

  “No matter.”

  He nuzzled her throat. “No matter.” He sighed. “I am starting all over again. I don’t know what the church will allow. Suppose they will not let us marry?”

  “Then we’ll get a civil license.”

  “My thought too. And soon. You know, there are no long engagements on Réunion Island. The wedding may take place three days later.”

  “Three days?” she said, surprised.

  “Oui. Where would a mail-order bride wait in the meantime? We could be married later this week.”

  “Then I had best tell Bat to get his tail out here, soon, if he’s going to be my witness.” She kissed Louis’s cheek again. “After all, he was the one who said, ‘Get that man, Bishou, if he’s worth it.’ ”

  “Then I owe him. And I feel I should meet your twin.”

  She smiled and admitted, “He asked me if you were hot. I said yes, but not for me. Now you make a liar out of me.”

  “As Vig would say, you snuck in through the back door. I probably would not have noticed you so much if Gray hadn’t kept pointing you out to me.” A thought occurred to him. “Do you think he did that on purpose?”

  “He might have. Gray is a schemer.”

  “A good word for him. Now, though, you must contact your brother and tell him to come here.”

  “This is going to be expensive.”

  He snorted. “There speaks the graduate student. Not Dessant.”

  “Mon Dieu, Louis! You cannot pay for all this.”

  “Why not? I did the first time.”

  “And it wasn’t right, then.” She stroked his face. “What can I pay for, or give you, in return?”

  “Well …” He glanced down at her hands. “There is one thing.”

  “And that is?”

  “An American custom Sukey talked about, which I had never heard. That when lycéennes fall in love, they exchange rings.”

  Bishou fought hard to keep a straight face. “You want my college ring?” She remembered how he had detected her by it, from the start. She slipped it off. Between them, they found that it fit best on his left pinky finger.

  Louis smiled and stroked it as if he had been given a precious jewel. He’s allowing himself to fall in love again, Bishou thought suddenly, I can’t disturb this.

  “Now, I can take you home. If I wake up in the night and wonder if it was a dream, I will have the ring.”

  Bishou lifted his hands to her lips and kissed the ring finger. “This is real, Louis. It will happen.”

  “If it were more than a few days, it would be unbearable,” he replied, “because I cannot believe it is true. I am happy, Bishou — yet this is so painful, too.”

  She kissed him again. “I understand. We will be very careful. We will remember that it is not the wedding that matters, it’s the marriage.”

  “Exactly.” His voice sounded husky. “I want to start over, to do it right this time. But someone is bound to say to you, ‘Ah oui, la deuxieme Madame Dessant.’” The second Mrs. Dessant.

  She smiled, and let his look of mischief seep into her own eyes. �
�Or I may introduce myself that way. That will fetch them.”

  Louis Dessant laughed. Curled up on his own couch, a ring on his finger, his bride-to-be beside him — suddenly he looked like he had reached the place that other men found naturally. Bishou let him pull her onto his lap and kiss her.

  “Now I must take you back to the pension,” he told her. “That will be the most difficult thing I have done this evening. I want you to stay here, but — well, I am the widower, and one of us should be vierge on our wedding night.”

  Bishou snickered. “D’accord. My job.”

  “You are a good sport.”

  “That ring was expensive.”

  He laughed again.

  Chapter 16

  She woke to the whistle of the Mauritius Pride docking. That meant it was nine A.M. Bishou sat up and looked around her hotel room. She must have just shed her clothing on her way to bed. Well, it had been a wild night. Her class ring was still gone — good, she hadn’t imagined it.

  She wasn’t hung over. They hadn’t drunk too much wine. It was high spirits of another sort. “Good gosh,” she said to herself, picking up clothes from the floor. “I just agreed to marry Louis Dessant.” She sat down in the hotel chair and smiled foolishly.

  Oddly enough, they’d gotten back to the pension at a reasonable hour, a little before midnight — delayed, of course, by kissing in the car, somewhere along the way. Bishou laughed to herself. She couldn’t have imagined she would be this happy. She had just wanted to give Louis a chance at the happiness he’d missed, and she would do all the support stuff that she and Bat had done for their own family, to keep things from being too horrible. But this wasn’t turning out like that at all. There were bursts of happiness that were completely unexpected. Maybe this is what love is all about, Bishou mused. And maybe even some of that passion I’ve spent so much time analyzing for dissertations.

  Dissertations. Must see about the progress of that job today, she thought, and when they want me to do an expository lecture. The Bible as Literature? That would be a good topic, especially in this day and age in France, where religion is so questioned. “That topic would work,” she murmured.

  She changed her clothes, visited the bathroom at the end of the hall, and came back to clear everything up. Louis had invited her to come to the factory around two.

  The sisters waited, downstairs. “Well, Mademoiselle,” Marie teased, “you got in just before Joseph barred the door last night.”

  “It was close,” Bishou agreed good-humoredly. “We had a good time. We laughed and laughed.”

  They invited her behind the counter again for coffee and croissants in their own personal quarters. She told stories about Vig and Sukey and their big North Carolina plantation, and how they made Louis Dessant laugh.

  “And what of you?” Eliane asked at last.

  “How do you mean?” Bishou asked in return.

  “Well, an evening with un veuf réunionnais?” A Réunion widower.

  “Mademoiselle,” Marie interrupted, “your ring is gone.”

  Bishou smiled and touched her finger to her lips. “Alas, it has gone with my heart.”

  Both women’s eyes widened. They sat up straighter.

  “Ssh, ssh, ssh! Not a word, for at least another day,” Bishou said. “In the meantime, keep looking for the ring, hein? And you may see it.”

  She left them staring at each other in delight as she skipped out the door, and down the street. Bishou saw people smiling at her. Of course it showed — she was in love. Living it, not writing about it. It was going to be difficult to tamp this down, Bat-like, and apply herself to the work in hand. She glanced at herself in a shopwindow, and stopped to brush back her hair.

  “Oh, I am a fool,” she said to herself, still smiling. Then she hurried on.

  She caught the bus to the université, got off at the gates, and went inside. The job announcement for the professorial position had been taken down. She entered the building for the College for the Humanities, to see if the job was hers, or someone else’s. I can take it, either way, she told herself. After last night, I am guaranteed to be here for the long haul.

  Bishou stepped up to the front counter, and heard her name.

  “Dr. Howard!” said Mme. Ellis incredulously. “You couldn’t have already received the letter. I just posted it this morning!”

  “Then my friends will receive it this evening, and show it to me.” She had arranged for her mail to be delivered in care of the Campards. “Can you show me the carbon copy?”

  It was in the top of the secretary’s correspondence folder. She pulled it out at once, somehow conveying this was as efficient an office as anything Bishou might find overseas. Bishou read it through, a request for a 7:00 P.M. time slot on Wednesday to make a presentation of her choice to a mixed audience of students and faculty, and smiled.

  “Perfect,” she said.

  “Is this new? A public lecture?” Mme. Ellis asked.

  “Are you going to come?” Bishou asked her.

  “Me? To a lecture?”

  Bishou’s gaze had taken in the other secretaries, who were of course listening in. “Us?”

  “Bien sûr. It is public. You might be thinking of taking a course, or sending your nieces and nephews here.”

  “I never thought — yes, I would like to hear you speak, especially an Americaine,” said Mme. Ellis. “Dr. Castelle said to Monsieur le Doyen that American lecture style is different from the European style, and Dr. Rubin said, ‘All the better if we want to represent the world.’ ”

  So they had been talking about her, where the secretaries could hear.

  She did not tell Mme. Ellis that, only a day or two after the lecture, her name would change. If the academic world frowned on women, it was bitter toward women who suddenly got married. How would we know, Madame, if in a year or two, you would leave us to have babies? That was the way these universities thought, just like factories. That was why Bishou had been willing to take a part-time, or adjunct, job, without the usual academic benefits or perks.

  In a just-beginning field like this, the job might be a first-time, exploratory position, to see what sort of professors it conjured up — professors who were willing to take the job for the good résumé it provided, nevermind the inadequate pay and benefits. But one couldn’t survive on such a job, unless it expanded over time to become a full professorship with full benefits — or the professor had a sideline that paid real money. Bishou was now in that fortunate position, and had no intention of telling them so. She would play a straight academic game with them. Her private life was none of their business. And the fact that the job ad had already been taken down showed that they were tremendously disposed in her favor.

  As she climbed onto the bus, Armand greeted her with, “Bon matin, Mam’selle Bishou! Got your job yet?”

  She paid him. “Not yet, Armand, but it looks good. Can I go to the Dessant factory with you?”

  “Sure enough. It’ll be a while. Got any on you?”

  “For you? Always, Armand.” She gave him four cigarettes. “That’s where my money goes, handsome men.”

  “Ah, Mam’selle is in love,” said Armand with a grin.

  “I may as well say it, because I know it shows.”

  “Who is the lucky man?”

  “I am not telling. You will know soon enough.”

  The bus driver laughed. “Bonne chance, missy! You will be happy.”

  “Merci. I intend to be.”

  “That is what makes happiness,” Armand continued. “You decide to be.”

  Bishou was impressed. “So many people do not understand that, mon ami.”

  “And so they are unhappy, Mam’selle.”

  “Bien dit. See? You didn’t need to go to université to learn that, did you?”

  Armand laughed again. “You are wise, and it has nothing to do with université, Mam’selle.”

  “Nous verrons,” she replied. We will see.

  She dropped off the
bus at the turnoff for the Dessant Cigarette factory, and walked up the driveway to the security booth. The old guard smiled at her, and she at him.

  “Bonjour. Are you called Joel?” she asked.

  “Oui, bonjour. And you’d be called Mam’selle Howard, n’est-ce pas?” He gave her a pass to the front door. There, another guard telephoned the front office.

  The place was booming. The smell of fresh-cut tobacco filled the air. It was the packaging machines that made all the noise, she could see, as automatic arms dropped, belts whirled, cartons slid. Bishou watched, fascinated, until someone touched her arm. A neat young Frenchwoman stood there, and motioned toward another door. She escorted Bishou to a pair of double doors that closed behind them. The sound immediately abated.

  “Whew!” said Bishou. “One doesn’t realize the noise! I’m sorry. Bonjour. My name is Bishou Howard.”

  The elegant little secretary smiled. “Bonjour. My name is Claire Aucoeur. I am Monsieur Dessant’s secretary.”

  “I am very pleased to meet you,” said Bishou.

  “And I to meet you, Mademoiselle Howard,” said Claire.

  As they walked along, Bishou asked her, “Did you send the teletype message for Monsieur Campard, to Virginia?”

  “Oui, Mademoiselle,” Claire admitted with a smile.

  “Then you know all about me.”

  “I know something of you, Mademoiselle,” the secretary said politely.

  “That is a relief. I have great difficulty explaining myself again and again, and there is nothing more wonderful than a good secretary who doesn’t need all that.”

  Claire smiled, opened a half-glass door that said OFFICE, and motioned her inside. It was a large institutional room with four desks, shelves, plenty of filing cabinets, and a picture of a Dessant Cigarette package on the wall. As offices went, it was stark, with the two bosses’ desks on one side of the room and the two secretaries’ desks on the other. However, Bishou guessed that neither boss spent more time than necessary at those desks.

  Both Etien and Louis stood up, smiling at her. Bishou kissed Louis on each cheek, then kissed Etien on each cheek. She was introduced to Anna, the other secretary, as if Bishou were any other welcome female visitor to the factory.