“Yes, ma’am,” Sonny says.
“So nice to see you again, baby. You’ll come in and visit, won’t you?” She unlocks the gate and signals for him to enter, then she wraps her arms around him as he steps inside. “You want a cup of tea, sugar. How about a cup of tea?”
With her friend gone and the sad fraud exposed, Anna Huey wears the kind of casual but elegant clothing Sonny’s often seen on well-to-do tourists visiting from the North, generally New Yorkers who seem to know brand names as well as they do their own family names. To add to the picture, she appears to have changed her hairstyle, which today features a loose chignon on the back of her head, about the size of a roll of socks. Her sturdy crepe-soled shoes have been replaced with smart leather pumps, and her legs, absent the white hose, no longer whistle when she walks. The transformation is so striking that Sonny requires several moments to absorb it.
“You’re beautiful.”
“Thank you. But wasn’t I before?”
Sonny follows her up the path and into the house. “I was out driving and ended up here,” he explains. “Why do I always end up here, Mrs. Huey?”
“Maybe because you know you’re always welcome. Come have a seat, sugar.”
As she prepares the tea in the kitchen Sonny sits in his usual place in the parlor and allows the dark to press in close and hold him. Everything is as it was, everything the same, and it comes to him that this is only as it should be. The house and furnishings belonged to Anna Huey all along, after all. Even the collection of Beauvais portraits.
She returns with a tray and takes the chair next to his, and the routine, though familiar, is somehow disconcerting. Sonny can feel his heart laboring in his chest. And there seems to be an obstruction at the precise center of his throat; he coughs, twice, but it doesn’t go away. “I was hoping to ask you some questions,” he says.
Anna Huey nods. Pours the tea.
“They’re about things that might be hard to talk about. I hope I can say them.”
She finishes and sits holding the ceramic pot in one hand and his cup in the other.
“I keep thinking about what Miss Marcelle said in her will about holding no grudges against your brother Anthony.”
“You want me to tell you about Anthony, Sonny?”
He brings the cup up to his mouth but doesn’t drink. “I didn’t understand that part.”
Anna Huey returns the pot to the tray. She seems to be trying to decide whether she herself understands it either. “Anthony was only thirteen years old when he left New Orleans. That was 1971. He’s never been back.”
“I remember seeing him around a few times, but I never really knew him. No one ever bothered to introduce us, as I recall.”
“No, sugar, you wouldn’t have been introduced. He was just the maid’s little brother, and that wasn’t anyone, was it?” She gives an unhappy laugh and says, “Now that I reflect, Anthony really was more like a son to me than a brother. Both my parents had passed when he was a baby and me and my husband Charles took him in. We didn’t have any children of our own and so we took to raising him like one. He was the caboose of the Arceneaux family—fifteen years younger than I am and seventeen years younger than my sister May.”
“Didn’t know May, either.”
Anna Huey shakes her head. “May at the time I’m talking about was living in a place near Los Angeles called Inglewood. Ever hear of it?”
“Heard of it but never been there. I’ve never been west of Orange, Texas, as a matter of fact. My mother had some cousins out there. We took the Greyhound one summer when I was a kid.”
She looks at him without speaking for a minute.
“I guess I’m nervous,” he explains.
“I understand. I’m nervous, too.”
“I’m just tired of the mystery. You have to help me, Mrs. Huey.”
“I was talking about May?”
“Yes. May in Inglewood.”
“Well, she and her husband had a car-detailing business out there—they’ve since moved on to real estate, but that’s what they were doing in those days. Anyway, after what happened between Anthony and Mr. Johnny I thought it best he leave town and May volunteered to take him. It wasn’t Miss Marcelle’s fault he had to go, it was all Mr. Johnny’s. But she blamed herself to the end. She paid for Anthony’s plane ticket and opened a bank account in his name. Up until the day there wasn’t any left to give she was still sending him money.”
Sonny reaches out and touches Anna Huey’s arm. “All of a sudden I feel like laughing,” he says. “Will you understand if I have to laugh?”
“Of course. I laugh all the time about horrible things. Laugh all you want, sugar.”
And so he does, Sonny laughs.
“It was a Sunday afternoon when Juliet found them together. They were upstairs in a bedroom, sprawled out on a couch apparently, and I heard a scream and a commotion on the stairs when Juliet came running down. She almost fell—she collapsed near the bottom and had to grab hold of the balustrade. She stood back up and staggered around knocking things down, a lamp and a clock and a table, some other things. I couldn’t begin to imagine why she was so upset. I tried to talk to her and settle her down but it was no use, she was past hysterical and somewhere you don’t go and ever expect to come back the same again. It went on like that for a while before she mumbled something about her daddy and Anthony and I ran upstairs and Mr. Johnny was standing putting on his suit like nothing had happened. ‘A little less starch in the collar next time,’ he told me.” Anna Huey glances at Sonny. “Sonny, you still feel like laughing, sugar, go ahead.”
But Sonny doesn’t laugh, and he doesn’t speak, and he doesn’t move in his chair.
“Miss Marcelle always loved Anthony. He’d gone to her months before looking for a job and she’d let him cut grass and trim the hedges with the other men. It didn’t suit him, though. Anthony was small and you might say delicate and when he complained it was too hard or too hot she brought him in the house. She bought him a suit at D. H. Holmes and he practiced being a butler for a while but somebody knocked, he wouldn’t even answer the door. Most of the time he was out in the garage washing the cars with Mr. Johnny. At least that’s what we thought he was doing. I remember madam used to joke that Johnny Beauvais had the cleanest cars in the state of Louisiana.”
Anna Huey stares across the room at the black screen of the TV, and it’s as though the piece of history she just described was being broadcast there.
“When Anthony was a little boy we used to put straightener in his hair. He always had to have a doll or a little stuffed animal. Go to church or the store, he was carrying it by a leg. Charles would say there was something not-right about him. That’s the word he used too: not-right. We’d argue about it, the only fights we ever had that I can remember. I guess I was protective on account of Mama and Daddy having passed and I felt sorry for him. He was cute too. Oh, Anthony was a beautiful child.”
Sonny touches her arm again. “Juliet found them together?”
“Yes.”
“She never told me.”
“No? Well, I’m not surprised. Think of the shame. She loved her daddy. And her daddy—did she ever tell you this . . . ? Her daddy was a Beauvais.” Anna Huey falls silent, then says, “I told Juliet she had to talk to her mama and tell her what she saw, but she refused. More than hurting her mother she didn’t want to hurt her father. She cursed me, yelling, when I told her that I would have to go and do it. I found Miss Marcelle outside watering her bougainvillea and I asked if I could speak to her a minute and we walked out under the trees. She dropped her can when I told her about Anthony. I’ll never forget that . . . water splashing on her clothes, the look on that woman’s face.”
From the kitchen comes the sound of a ringing telephone. Anna Huey sits quietly until it stops. “A week later Mr. Johnny killed himself. In case you want to see it Miss Marcelle left a copy of his death certificate upstairs with her things. I can run and get it.”
“That’s okay.”
“Suicide by drowning, says so in black and white.”
“I believe you, Mrs. Huey.”
“Miss Marcelle always told people it was an accident, and somehow she kept the Picayune from reporting the facts. I guess she was trying to protect Juliet. But the man did it to himself. That’s what the Orleans Parish coroner ruled, and that’s why in the end there wasn’t any insurance for madam to collect. For doing what he did with a little boy he should’ve gone to prison. Instead he put his wife in one, because when he decided to die he made sure Miss Marcelle was there to see it. I guess he wanted her to have that picture, the last thing.” Anna Huey lifts the teapot but seems to decide neither of them needs any more. “It wasn’t just Anthony,” she says. “But we didn’t learn that until later.”
“There were other boys?”
“The Quarter is full of children. Some will tap-dance on the bricks for a nickel. For a nickel more others will do other things. To be honest,” she says, “I could never do anything but feel sorry for Juliet. Anything she ever did, I forgave her. Even today I do. That girl came into this world a sweet precious angel, her mother’s joy, and the things she saw, sugar. Oh, the things she saw.”
They sit without speaking until Sonny can tolerate the silence no longer. He stands and straightens his clothes but then he sits down again.
“Now’s the time to ask,” Anna Huey says, “if there’s anything else you need to know. After today I leave all this behind me.”
“Just one more thing, Mrs. Huey. And it’s not so much about them as it is about you.”
“Say it, sugar.”
“Why would you pretend to be a cleaning woman and live as Miss Marcelle’s servant when you were the one who owned this house? Why allow that indignity?”
“Indignity?” And she sits up in her chair. “I considered it an honor.”
She leads him to the stairway and the portraits showing Juliet’s forebears, the entire collection bathed now in light from cans in the ceiling. Sonny notes the Vaudechamp still hanging crooked, and the one of Johnny Beauvais at the top of the stairs. “My mother worked for that man there,” Anna Huey says, pointing to a face. “And my grandmother for that fellow. And my great-grandmother for him. They were ladies, Sonny. As long as there’s been a Beauvais in this house, so too has there been an Arceneaux. My people always knew this day was coming. The Bible promised it. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth,’ it says. Well, meek or not, it’s our turn now.”
Sonny nods to the portraits. “You gonna leave them up there, Mrs. Huey?”
“Hell no,” she says, then laughs as tears grow large in her eyes. “Every last one of them sonsabitches is coming down.”
Anna Huey walks Sonny all the way to the avenue and they embrace in the thin, early dark, the name BEAUVAIS visible through the clumps of morning glory on the gate. The wind stirs the magnolias and crape myrtles and Sonny smells their bright blossoms. Along the sidewalk lamps burn yellow, dropping pools on the black pavement.
“Even after all I’ve told you,” Anna Huey says, “and all you already know—even after everything, if Juliet came to you and said she wanted you back . . . ?”
Anna Huey is unable to finish, and Sonny unable to answer.
“I never asked if it was you that killed her, did I, sugar?”
He shakes his head. “No, ma’am. You never did.”
She hitches a ride to Bywater with a male white in a big car. The radio plays classical music of all things. Juliet decides to make conversation. “You don’t have any jewelry you want to get rid of, do you? Any rings?”
“No.”
“You got that one on your finger there. What about that one?”
The man seems uncomfortable all of a sudden. He is quiet as they thump over the railroad tracks between Faubourg Marigny and Bywater and Juliet gets a better look at him. He’s wearing black and his hair is short, his fingernails neat and trim. Something about him is just too clean, too soft, and in that instant her automatic priest detector goes off.
She leans forward and by the light of the instrument panel catches a glimpse of the white tab at his shirt collar. “I’ll be damned. You are one.”
“Yes. Yes, I am a priest. Father Michael from Saint Cecilia. Where are we going, miss?”
“Past Piety Street, but you can let me out wherever. Here, if you want.”
He stops by the levee near Sonny’s house and Juliet turns to face him. “Let me ask you a question, Padre. It’s been on my mind lately.” He nods and she says, “If someone were to come to you and confess a murder, would you be required to keep it a secret? Is there some kind of lawyer-client–type deal working between a priest and his people? Or would you give that person dispensation or whatever and call the cops?”
“Did you say dispensation?”
“I mean the thing you give that forgives him, that makes him clean again.”
The priest keeps both hands on the steering wheel. “Would you like for me to hear your confession?” he says.
Tears show in Juliet’s eyes and start to run but she’s laughing when she says, “Got a few days?”
He reaches over the back of the seat and retrieves a box of Kleenex from the floor.
“Thank you,” she says. “I hope I didn’t scare you.”
“No.”
Juliet snorts into a blanket of tissues, making her nose even drier.
The priest looks at his watch then squirms in his seat pulling a business card from his wallet. “Here’s my office number. I wish we could talk more but I’m already late for an appointment.”
“Mama put barbed wire on the drainpipes,” Juliet says, believing that will keep him. “She says it was to train her vines, but we both know better, don’t we?”
“Well,” the priest says, “it was nice meeting you.”
Juliet glances at his card. “Father Michael Manny,” she says. “You don’t look like a Manny to me. When I see a Manny I see a hairy Italian behind a meat counter. I see a guy from the old country. He lives in a house full of screaming kids. His breath, even after he brushes, smells of pickled olives. Your name isn’t Manny.”
“Maybe not,” he says. “Good-bye, dear.”
Not two minutes after Juliet’s left the car she realizes that she hitchhiked to the wrong neighborhood. It wasn’t Sonny she meant to see. It was the other boy. Leonard.
She stands in weeds looking at the little houses, each a disaster on its own terms. She can’t recall which of them belonged to Sonny. “It’s me,” she calls with hands around her mouth. “It’s Julie.”
Hammered by June bugs drawn to porch lights, she climbs front stoops and knocks to be let in, first one door, then another, now a third. “Oh,” she says, finally finding a face past a frieze of black burglar bars, “I was looking for someone.”
“You got the Labiche residence.” The man, who must be eighty, points to the room behind him.
“Well, I wanted the LaMotts. You know where they are?”
“Cecil LaMott’s in a home, but they live a ways up the street. The son, anyhow. The lady, I forget what they called her, a stroke killed her right in the yard.”
Although it’s a little more information than Juliet needs at the moment, at least there is someone to talk to. “You don’t have any wedding rings you want to get rid of?”
“What?”
“Wedding rings?”
The man holds his hand up. “It’s the only thing she left me. That and the hole in my heart.”
“Let me be honest with you a second. Let me lay my cards out on the table. I’ve got this blistering cocaine hangover and only one thing will make it right.”
“You said a hangover?” He leans in closer, his robe coming open, chest dark and hairless against the terry cloth. “You got a hangover try tomato juice. Something about the acid.”
Finally she remembers the stairs. A pickup parked in the grass. Banana plants and weeping mimosas. “Let me go,” she tells the old man. “You have
a nice life.”
“You, too,” he says, and for once somebody really seems to mean it.
Juliet searches the street, her back to the levee. She doesn’t find any trucks, but a flight of stairs, rickety and water-damaged and snapping beneath her weight, leads her to a door that feels right. She punches a lighted bell, and a woman, what looks like a woman, presents her face in the slot past a police chain. “Sonny LaMott live here?”
“Curly,” the woman says to the room behind her, then disappears from view.
Now a fat man holding a can of beer, the lower third of his belly showing under his undershirt. “You still can’t find him?”
“Find who?”
“Sonny. I told him you were looking for him.”
Juliet looks past him at the small apartment, yellowed newspapers on the floor, a can of bug spray on the wagon-wheel coffee table. “Was I here earlier?”
The man takes a swallow from his can. He spends a long time looking at her. “Why don’t you come inside and rest your feet. When Sonny gets back I’ll walk you over.” Stepping back he opens the door wide, and points to a mat on the floor where he seems to want her to wipe her feet. “Florence, we got any tuna surprise left?”
Florence, hugging her arms at her chest, stands in front of a TV set, framed by rabbit-ear antennae and illumined by a purplish glow. “That was last week,” she says. “But maybe they got some left in the box.”
Curly points to the kitchen. “Be polite and go get our company a plate.” He glances back at Juliet and gives his head a shake. “Florence stepped into a door last night, in case you were wondering where them bruises came from. Florence, tell our company you stepped into a door.”
“I stepped in a door.”
“It was the bathroom door. Florence, which door was it?”
“Bathroom.”
“I don’t want any tuna surprise,” Juliet says. “I’d take some tomato juice, though.”
“We don’t drink tomato juice in this house. But how about a V8?”
“You drank all the V.O.,” Florence yells from the kitchen.
“It’s okay,” Juliet tells him. “I was just trying to find Sonny.”
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