Mardi Gras Madness

by Lynn Shurr

  “Alas, we do not raise children for ours are grown, and no more come. I know that dear Alex would like a son of his own. He can do nothing with mine, but Tante Inez says I am beyond the years of childbearing. When I argue, saying everyone knows Camille LeBlanc gave birth at my age, she looks at me slyly and says Madame Camille did not have my sinful nature, so God blessed her with a son. I understand and become silent.

  “Indeed, I have enough children to cause me problems. Felice is sweet and unscarred by the war, but ripe for a man at the age of seventeen. I fear she will marry the first to offer, and many are beginning to show interest. Charles shows no interest at all in marriage though he is twenty-four. I know he keeps a Negress in town and flaunts his virility with other dark women, so my worst fear about him is unfounded. Why, if he loves the company of the opposite sex, does he not then marry?

  “As for Lucinda Bell Moore, my stepdaughter, she is a hopeless spinster at twenty-one. When she came to me in her seventeenth year, I arranged her hair and dress more becomingly, though she would not allow false curls and or extra lace to increase the size of her bosom. But, how can one teach the art of flirtation or the mastery over men with feminine wiles? Poor Lucy would rather argue law with her father, and she does make herself useful at his office. Now and again, she convinces my husband to defend a Nigra in her mother’s memory. How ironic the servants insist on calling her ‘Miss Lucy Bell.’ ‘Belle’ she is not. They have no way of knowing Bell was her mother’s maiden name, and staunch New England abolitionist stock it was, bred to a more easy-natured Pennsylvanian. What a pity Lucy refuses to embrace the Catholic Church and allow herself the choice of the convent as Catherine did.

  “At least, Catherine is settled. She has confessed to me that for the good of her own soul she no longer prays I will burn in Hell as she once did, but pleads with God to spare the souls of her misguided parents. I believe she realizes Alex and I pay only lip service to the Church for social reasons. Enough! These diaries contain too many secrets. I must see they are burned before I die despite the relief they have given me in times of confusion. Where else can the mistress of a plantation bare her soul and not do penance?

  “January 7, 1876. A solution at last! We have been invited for the Mardi Gras season to New Orleans by my brother Armand. The wounds heal at last. Perhaps, Armand has finally acknowledged he survived that bitter war only because he was fortunate enough to be captured by the Yankees. Heaven knows, the war took its toll on the Montleons, two brothers dead, one sister widowed, the rest pinched old maids or aging nuns. My way of surviving might have been the best of all.

  “February 5, 1876. The gowns are ready! We prepare to leave for the city. I have exhorted the young people to search seriously for appropriate matches. It is their duty, I tell them, to rebuild the South. Charles shrugs sullenly, as is his way. Lucy Bell merely stares at the floor. Only Felice, blushing, is likely to take my orders to heart. Dear Alex has declined to go, giving his practice as a reason, though I believe he sees himself as an impediment to reconciliation and the future of the children. I bless the day my lands were conquered by him.

  “March 15, 1876. We return to our beloved Chateau, having neither failed nor succeeded. Armand and I have reconciled with tears and embraces as it should be, but our truce might be strained by the devotion of his eldest son, Jean, to my Felice. The lad eagerly accepted an invitation to return with us for a visit issued by Charles who wishes to explore the return of the land to cane planting by a method called sharecropping. Jean has been schooled in this method by his father. I oppose both this idea and the marriage of cousins. It reeks of a return to the old days of inbred aristocratic families ruling the land. Look at what those times brought upon us!

  “April 30, 1876. There is no help for it. Young Jean refuses to return to his home until he has spoken to us.

  “May 1, 1876. Jean Montleon has asked for his cousin’s hand in marriage from both his adored aunt and the esteemed general. He claims to have his father’s full agreement. How can we refuse? Charles stood at the young man’s elbow adding his voice to the plea and then, asked to speak for himself for the hand of Lucy Bell Moore. We were stunned indeed, but promised to deliver an answer after we had spoken with the young women. What to do? What to do?

  “May 5, 1876. It is clear Felice is deeply enamored of her cousin. Theirs may be a happy union as the boy seems equally infatuated. We have sent her suitor home bearing the good news. The wedding date has been set for early October before the harvest when the weather has cooled, and travel is more tolerable. I have quizzed Lucy Bell and am convinced there is no mutual attraction between her and Charles.

  “Quite coldly, she told me that she and Charles had hit upon a solution to both their problems. He would no longer be hounded to marry, and she would receive the status of a wife. In other words, they created a legal contract between themselves. I argued that marriage is far more than a legal contract. Once I married for status and wealth, overlooking the weaknesses of an attractive man, and came to regret my impulsiveness. Lucy pointed out that while I may have had other opportunities to wed, she has none. Then she drew out an actual contract written by herself in which she granted Charles all marital rights. The paper included a clause saying she would embrace the Catholic faith and raise her offspring, should there be any, therein. In return, he is not to hinder her participation in her father’s legal practice and is to settle all of his belongings on herself and her offspring, should there be any. I was appalled.

  “Having seen the lengths to which Lucy and Charles are willing to go and considering both are of age and could not really be stopped Alex and I could do nothing but consent. Lucy, herself, set the date of the marriage to be the last Sunday in June, saying she was no young girl to be months preparing and would wed as soon as the banns had been said a sufficient number of times and herself confirmed into the Holy Catholic Church. I have bad feelings about all this.

  “June 19, 1876. The wedding of Charles and Lucy Bell has been accomplished. The girl looked as good as possible in gray silk. I gave her the silver and garnet necklace her father presented to me upon our marriage and, though it looked overlarge on her spare frame, I could see my gesture touched her. For a bouquet, the bride carried blood red roses from our gardens. She and Charles rode from the church to the Chateau in a buggy draped with the same. The young men dashed ahead on horseback creating the required havoc, and Felice and her friends crowded into another carriage and admired their antics.

  “With dining and dancing on the lawn, a stranger would have assumed this to be a joyous occasion—had not the groom drunk overmuch and the bride not at all, not even the toasts to the happy couple. Even my dear Alex imbibed too much and for the first night since our own marriage, had to be carried to our bed. How glad I was for his stupor. The room we decorated for the newlyweds sits directly above our chambers in the house and throughout the night, I head small cries and furious poundings.

  “In the morning, I berated Charles for his poor treatment of an innocent, and he greeted my comment with laughter, saying Lucy Bell is as narrow and uncomfortable as a church pew. As for Lucy, when I tried to console her, assuring her future times would be better, she looked away and replied, ‘What is done is done.’

  “September 20, 1876. I have long been concerned about Lucy Bell’s health. The poundings from above continue. Some nights they are so intense Alex cries in my arms. Lucy has asked him not to interfere—even when she comes pale and bruised to the breakfast table. She applies rice powder and goes off straight and spare as ever in the buggy to practice law vicariously with her father. I have told her there is such a thing as too much pride. I would send Charles, my own son, away for the things he does to her, but she says she is fulfilling her part of the contract. During the day, she is free, I must understand. I do not!

  “Now the vomiting has started, so intense the girl keeps nothing down but broth. I have called in Tante Inez, who in her old age rarely leaves her cottage, for I am sure
that this is a female complaint and nothing a doctor could treat.

  “September 21, 1876. Lucy Bell is with child. Never have I seen such symptoms, though Tante Inez tells me it can be so, especially if a child is unwanted or the act of making a child feared. I did not confirm this to her, but Tante Inez knows—as she has always known the secrets of this family. Her dotage has been made quite comfortable because of it. The midwife says Lucy will feel less ill as the child settles in her womb and to expect the little one by early April.

  “September 22, 1876. Charles has removed himself from Lucy Bell’s chambers and taken up his old quarters next to the library. We are all greatly relieved, so relieved I have tried to overlook my son’s announcement that he has now fulfilled his obligation to rebuild the South, and he will leave Lucy Bell alone to swell to the size that her name implies. I am afraid I lost my temper and accused him of being an unnatural son. He replied sharply that it was to be expected when one had unnatural parents, a father who abandoned his son and a mother who whored through the war. I struck him, I did, and I do not regret it.

  “October 15, 1876. The days are better now. Lucy seems less ill and will be able to participate in Felice’s wedding in a few days. Charles is preoccupied with planting his inherited arpents in cane, supervising and driving the darkies who are ‘sharing’ their labor with him. I have heard him discussing the purchase of Felice’s holdings with Jean after the crop comes in, and he has approached Catherine, here in her black robes, about paying the convent for her portion of the land. My arpents will come to him eventually through Lucy Bell because of my marriage to her father. I begin to see it all now and understand far too well.

  “October 20, 1876. We have seen the young couple aboard the steamer for New Orleans. The wedding was perfection, though I have been too busy to write of it. Felice looked as happy as her name implies in her white lace and pink fall roses. There was joy in the dancing, and the bride and groom were drunk on each other’s smiles. This is as it should be. I wish them well.

  “December 20, 1876. We have curtailed our holiday activities and visits for the sake of Lucy Bell who has swollen to great size. I do not recall ever having been so large or awkward in my sixth month. Her limbs and face have an unhealthy puffiness about them, but despite all this, she persists in accompanying her father to the office where her obvious condition embarrasses the clients. Still, Alex will not deny her. He says it is Lucy’s only joy. That I believe since she will not knit or sew for the infant or talk about the child except to say that if it is a male, it must be called Alexander, Alexandra if a girl. Charles who will accept only the idea of a son has settled on a second Aurelien LeBlanc, and so they are at odds as usual.

  “I have allowed myself two thoughts concerning Lucy Bell. One that she may bear twins; the other that Charles had his way with her before the wedding. I doubt the last, though many in town, seeing her difficulty in kneeling at Mass, believe it is so. I will call in Tante Inez and hope she confirms the former.

  “December 31, 1876. The year that began so well ends in misgivings. Tante Inez says Lucy Bell will not bear twins or possibly any child at all for the girl is very ill. I was forced to call in Dr. Arceneaux when Lucy suffered an attack of vertigo on the stairs and had a slight fall. The fall did no damage, but the doctor saw what Tante Inez has seen. Lucy Bell suffers from a poisoning of the system and has been confined to bed where she suffers nobly, patterning herself on her deceased mother’s last months without doubt. Does she fear death or welcome it? Such morbid thoughts for the year’s end!”

  Laura bent over the closing entry, trapped in the past until Tante Lilliane, wheeling close, coughed in her ear and read over her shoulder.

  “Lucy Bell. Well, you certainly picked a strange place to start, though I’ve always felt a close kinship toward that woman. Given another hundred years, she would have been a lawyer, a career woman, not a spinster, not dead at twenty-two from complications of childbirth. She wasn’t a breeder the doctor said later, all wrong for it, suffered a torturous two day labor, gave birth to a slightly premature but healthy boy, and lay in her grave three days later. She got her way on the name though, Alexander Aurelien LeBlanc, A. A. LeBlanc, my father.

  “He married so late in life I remember him only with gray hair. It’s no wonder, caught as he was between two strong characters like Caroline and Charles. He was quiet and scholarly, lean and stooped over, nearsighted, too, a real disappointment to his father who never bothered to remarry. Charles had that ‘servant’s staircase’ built to the housekeeper’s room when he added the new kitchen to the house and installed his current colored mistress there. Charles raised cane, outside and in.” Tante Lilliane snorted at her own wit.

  “I’ll give this much to him. He put the plantation back on a paying basis and had a fortune to leave my daddy, though I know that’s not why he did it. Somewhere, we have a snapshot of Charles taken shortly before he died, holding a riding crop and astride a white horse, overseeing the cane cutters. Some say he rode with the Klan, and I believe it. The old days, that’s what Charles wanted.”

  “How did they die, Charles and Caroline?” Laura wondered out loud.

  “As they lived—Charles dramatically in the old manner and Caroline in bed,” Tante Lilliane replied with a nasty chuckle. “Charles went before his mother, sent to hell by a black man with a knife after raping the man’s fourteen-year-old daughter. Of course, the black man hung. Charles would have been so pleased. By then, Caroline was bedridden. A stroke took her suddenly and left her mostly paralyzed for nearly two years before the end. The servants spoonfed her and changed her diapers like a baby. When they told her about her son’s death, she didn’t even bat an eyelid to show she understood. My father said he’d read to her in the evenings, bringing books from the old library in the house. He tried to pick things he thought she’d read in her youth. He said she’d become excited, blinking her eyes and making noises whenever he said he had a new book from the library. He considered it her only pleasure in her last days.” Tante Lil laughed and coughed at the same time at the joke fate had played on her great-grandmother.

  “I see. She was afraid he’d read the diaries,” Laura inserted.

  “So true! A.A. never did read them, though. He would not have pried into a lady’s personal affairs. Really, the old general raised him, saw he got to the right schools, taught him law, and left him his practice when he passed on. A.A. was raised as a Moore, not a LeBlanc, not a Montleon either. Daddy used to say when Aunt Felice visited with her eleven children, he felt like it was him against the world. After a while, there were so many Montleons, we couldn’t keep track of them and sort of lost touch with the New Orleans branch of the family. You can imagine how it was when T-Bob brought Vivien, already pregnant, fact accomplished, home to marry with her airs about being descended from one of Caroline’s sisters who had married a cousin. Brother and I almost swallowed our tongues. You see, we knew it all.”

  Tante Lil dabbed at her eyes where tears had gathered in the corners. “Can you believe, my gentle daddy, knowing how proud I was of being a LeBlanc, gave me the diaries all wrapped up in a big box for my seventeenth birthday. Caroline, Charles, Aurelien and Camille had passed into legend before I drew my first breath. They were in the local history books, all of them: Aurelien LeBlanc, builder of Chateau Camille; Caroline Montleon LeBlanc who saved the old plantation; Charles LeBlanc who rebuilt the family fortune. Opening that box ruined my life.”

  “Why did you let it?” Laura found herself taking the old woman’s age-spotted hand. With the television turned low, contemporary news created background music for the tragedies of the past. The child, Angelle, unconcerned about her ancestry, slept curled on the rug in front of the screen.

  “I was too young. Dear impractical Daddy might as well have given me a bomb. Within days, I knew why the DeVilles didn’t want me seeing their son. If all this was true about my monumental ancestors, then the whispers I had heard all my life about there being black bloo
d in the family was also true. Before the diaries, Lionel and I defied his family. Afterwards, I understood their reasons. I thought all the coloreds knew, too, and some did. She’s no better than us I thought they said just out of my hearing.”

  Tante Lil leaned her head back in her chair and closed her eyes with lids as thin as parchment paper. She continued to talk. “My mother, God bless her, was a French woman. Gave birth to me upstairs in this house after she’d taken a fall. Miss Roz, the white midwife, delivered me. I was so tiny I could have fit in a shoebox, but of course, I had a lacy bassinet. I was Mama’s treasure. She told to me, ‘It does not matter, cherie, you are you, and in France, a little black blood, some scandals, makes one more exotique, more sought after by men.’ If she had lived, I might have come to believe it, but Mama died of pneumonia back before penicillin came into regular use, you know. She was in her forties, and I only eighteen. Daddy packed me off to Normal School to become a librarian, something to make up for losing Lionel and Mama, because up ’til then he always opposed my going away.

  “Poor Daddy, he never got over Mama’s death. He was twenty years her senior and should have died first. He called her his war prize, his ‘prix de guerre’. Can you imagine a staid, established lawyer of nearly forty dropping everything and running off to fight the Kaiser? Of course the army gave him a desk job. He spent more time in France after the fighting then during, helping to settle affairs because he spoke the language. He told me once he fancied himself another General Moore going off to win a trunk full of medals and the heart of a beautiful woman, but he only accomplished the second, which was enough for him. Oh, he held on during the Second World War while my brother, Robert, went off to fight. He said he had to make sure Robert had sugar for his coffee over there in Europe, and something to come home to besides. But after the war, he passed on as gently as he’d lived.”