“I like the yellow,” I answered at once.
“Sammy…” Uncle reproved me.
LeBoeuf was already ten steps ahead of us. Between the two bedrooms was a dressing chamber worthy of an Old World sovereign, containing a painted tin bathing tub, shaving stands, and floor-to-ceiling-length mirrors. I barely recognized the scrofulous vagabond in grimy linens and two weeks’ growth of fuzzy beard that was my own sorry image in the glass. Uncle winced at the sight of himself.
“I am so happy to have visitors from ... the world,” our host said, pressing together his long-fingered hands as though in prayer, “but in such a hurry were we to escape the storm, I have failed to learn your names.”
We supplied them.
LeBoeuf gasped as though struck a blow, reaching for his jabot with one hand while steadying himself against the arm of a ball-and-claw-footed chair with the other.
“William Walker, did you say?” he addressed Uncle with the profoundest reverence. “The William Walker? Of Philadelphia, America?”
“Thine humble servant,” Uncle informed him.
“I am—how you say—overblown! The great herbalist himself! Father of New World botany! Correspondent of Olaf Lagerlöf and the best scientific minds of Europe?”
“A mere putterer and potterer,” Uncle replied bashfully.
“What a stroke of fortune!” LeBoeuf continued. “I cannot suppose that you noticed the modest plantings…?”
“On the contrary, sir, I observed them with the greatest interest. Thy garden is elegantly made.”
“You make me blush,” LeBoeuf said, smiling boyishly, and trying to hide that smile behind his lace sleeve. “I am the merest amateur. But enough of this chatter, gentlemen, for you are wet and uncomfortable.”
He clapped his hands. A train of Indian servants filed into the bathing chamber with steaming pots of water and emptied them into the tub. One of them stropped a razor and mixed up a foamy bowl of lather. The floor seemed to shift slightly under me, and a deep groan as of creaking timbers resounded through the apartment. Another bolt of lightning flickered in the windows, playing across the beautiful furnishings, the inscrutable faces of the Indians, and the beaming visage of LeBoeuf.
“She lists somewhat in heavy weather,” he apologized. “But do not fear. Chateau Félicité has ridden out many a storm, and much worse too.”
“This place … is a wonder of the world!” I blurted.
“We like it,” LeBoeuf said, then sighed. “Well, I am glad that it pleases you, messieurs. Dinner is at eight. I know your journey has been long and arduous. Bathe and rest. We shall talk later. Oh, how happy I am!”
And with that, our host M. LeBoeuf departed for some other compartment of his incredible floating palace, leaving us to the Indians with their gleaming razors.
At precisely seven forty-five, according to the giltwood clock on the mantle, I was roused from a nap by an Indian servant. Laid out for me was a spanking clean suit of apple-green silk smallclothes and matching frock coat, all in the prewar style and therefore quaint. I met Uncle in our common parlor, and how elegant he looked in a similar silken outfit, only of embossed cerulean blue.
“Why, we look like a pair of ambassadors at a royal court,” I twitted him, so delighted was I, but Uncle made a face.
“’Tis foppish,” he said. “I prefer the quieter colors, thy buffs, grays, and umbers.”
“You look splendid,” said I, passing him a salver of salted pecans that had been left for us on a table.
“Ben Franklin liked to fop about the French court in the old days,” he recalled, with a look of fond nostalgia in his eyes.
An Indian materialized as from thin air, startling both of us. He indicated that we should follow him, and we did so, through that labyrinth of corridors to another part of the palace, whence we arrived at two massive cherrywood doors, which he flung open by their brass handles. Within was a glittering dining room with walls of rose-pink satin, sconced candles burning in gilt fixtures, and a pair of crystal chandeliers.
At a long table napped in embroidered linen and set with crystal and silver and a beautiful blue porcelain service were our host and three others. LeBoeuf stood behind the seat at the head of the table. To his right was that selfsame Indian officer who had led the flotilla of dugouts that had captured us. He was now dressed in a clean linen shirt—no frock or waistcoat—and though unpainted still looked very much the savage, with his bristling roach of hair and its dangling feathers. Across the table from him, that is, to LeBoeuf’s left hand, was a young man of about my own age. He was not prepossessing—a plump, outsized, poor-complected, dull-eyed boy with a body like unto an huge pear, and an head so small and pointed in comparison that it looked like a filbert. His mouth hung slightly agape.
Far more appealing was the lady across the table from him—that is, next to the Indian. She was dressed in a diaphanous gown, a fashionable Grecian, gauzy thing, the neckline of which revealed a deep cleft of her rising and falling bosom. It was so sheer, in fact, as to admit the shadows of those roseate circlets to which, like targets, a youth’s eyes are helplessly drawn. Her long neck was creamy white, dotted here and there with little velvety moles. Her rich auburn hair was coiffed simply, in the classical mode, pinned up at the back, but with invitingly loose wisps curling about her temples as though she was just roused from a slumber. Her eyes, long-lashed and dark as onyx, reflected the dancing light of the candelabra. It was devilishly hard to calculate her age. She wore an expression of wit and intelligence that evinced experience in the world, yet her beauty alone might have tamed an howling wilderness.
“Ah,” LeBoeuf exclaimed upon our entrance, “our guests arrive!” And he stepped forward to greet us. “Of course, you have already met my trusted aide-de-camp, Yago,” he said, as the Indian nodded crisply our way. “Here is proof positive that the aborigine of North America can be raised to the level of a gentleman,” he flattered his adjutant. One could detect a very complex and interdependent relation between the two.
The beautiful woman coughed daintily.
“May I present my beloved wife,” LeBoeuf continued. She stepped forward to offer her hand. Flustered, I bent to kiss it in the European manner, but it was deftly withdrawn just before my lips made contact. My knees knocked. Had I made a gaffe?
“Enchanté,” she said in the husky voice of a female at the apex of maturity.
“Madame,” Uncle said with a bow.
My stomach growled so loudly that all present must have heard it.
“The two of you are famished, no doubt,” LeBoeuf said and clapped his hands. “O, yes, permit me to introduce my ward, Lou-Lou,” he gestured at the pear-shaped young man to his left. “In English now, my boy.”
“Good night,” Lou-Lou said, an imbecilic smile lighting his bovine face. He remained at his place, however.
“Lou-Lou,” LeBoeuf frowned at his ward. “Remember your lesson. Come now: once again.”
“Good evening?” the young man ventured to correct himself.
“That’s better,” LeBoeuf said. “He has so little opportunity to practice, you understand.”
“Of course,” Uncle said, as a troop of Choctaw waiters marched in bearing trays of steaming delectables and ewers of claret. We have blundered into heaven, I thought, as we took our seats at table.
The bill of fare was so sumptuous as to render one of Judge Ravenel’s hearty, homespun suppers a mere feeding of hungry animals in comparison. To begin: a satiny, piquant sorrel soup; then quenelles of catfish finished in wine sauce; rolled, stuffed flank of buffalo smothered in morels; braised endive; pecan pudding and fresh oranges—grown in LeBoeuf’s very courtyard.
“I am sorry that the circumstances of your conveyance here were shrouded in such mystery,” LeBoeuf told us, dandling a morsel of buffalo on his fork. “So deprived are we of cultivated society here that I cast my net to draw in all the fish who swim up the river. But such a catch as William Walker, the great botanist! It leaves me—ho
w you say—palpitant!”
“You flatter me, sir,” Uncle replied. “Thine house is a marvel. Never in my wildest dreams would I have conjured such a magnificent thing in the watery heart of terra incognita.”
“Poof, it is a prettily painted box compared to your wondrous garden at Philadelphia, monsieur.”
“My reputation is grotesquely inflated, sir,” Uncle countered in unfeigned modesty.
“Not at all,” LeBoeuf persisted, “for I have seen your handiwork with my own eyes.”
“Hast thee visited my garden at Owl’s Crossing?”
“Certainement,” LeBoeuf said. “In ’91, shortly after my arrival upon these shores of liberty.”
“What month—do you happen to recall?”
“July.”
“Ah, wild rose time! I was embarked upon my ramble in Labrador just then,” Uncle related.
“My heart was broken, monsieur, for your reputation in Europe is of the highest order and, as you shall see, botanicals are my passion. Au fait, you could not have arrived at a more propitious hour, for tonight in the conservatory blooms that rarest of flowers, the century plant.”
“Puya robusta!” Uncle dropped his fork in astonishment.
“Yes, my American friend. Only once in one hundred years does it send forth its massive stalk and blossom.”
“I have heard tales of this curious species,” Uncle confessed, “but never seen one.”
“Till tonight,” LeBoeuf assured him. “In the forbidding jungles of Mexico, where it lives, the Indians like nothing better than to set the highly inflammable stalk on fire, like a guttering torch.”
Lou-Lou burst out laughing at the idea, brown sauce dribbling down his chin. A moment later, he started to gag. Madame looked on with concern. LeBoeuf patted his back.
“Etes-vous bien?” he asked the boy dryly.
“Oui, merci,” Lou-Lou said and resumed wolfing his meal.
“Why do the Indians set the blossom on fire?” I inquired.
LeBoeuf shrugged. “They too must think it is funny,” he said. “In any case, it is a rarity among rarities. This afternoon the bud was as big as my fist. Like the night-blooming cereus”—
“Hylocereus undatus,” Uncle inserted.
—“it commences its florescence when all daylight has vanished. In approximately an hour, my friends and dear ones, the show will begin.”
“But, how did thee obtain such a treasure?” Uncle asked at the same instant that the champagne made its regal appearance.
“On the frontier,” LeBoeuf said with a gleam in his eyes, “resourcefulness is everything, no?” He raised his glass. “A toast: to our American guests!”
We quaffed the nobility of wines. More servants trooped into the room with our dessert.
“I am anxious to hear what brings the great William Walker thirty leagues up the Tennessee River,” our host essayed.
“A search for botanicals,” Uncle told him, maintaining his caution despite all the wine and flattery.
“You are a long way from home, young man,” Madame remarked to me. Her sleek tongue daintily explored a spoonful of pecan pudding.
“The frontier is my new home,” said I boastfully. “I have shot bears. I have been tortured by savages.”
“Ooo, là!” Madame exclaimed. “Do you hear, Yago?”
The Indian cast a fishy glance my way, meanwhile rapidly devouring his dessert.
“This was another tribe, of course,” I hastened to add. “The Shannoah, a barbarous, cruel people.”
“My grandmother was Shannoah,” Yago said.
“Was she? Perhaps I was amongst them on a bad day. They certainly have a highly developed sense of humor.”
Yago agreed that this was so. He smiled broadly and I noticed for the first time that his teeth were filed down to points.
“How did you like your meal?” Madame deftly changed the subject.
“Superb,” said I in earnest. “Everything here is so lovely. Am I correct to say that the china is Sèvres? The Louis Seize? In the classical mode?”
“It is somewhat … later,” she said with a coy flutter of the eyelids.
Later, thought I? The porcelain factories of Sèvres closed up shop after the downfall of the sixteenth Louis.
“It is Louis Dix-sept,” she said with a hearty laugh, and I could now see she was having a joke at my expense. Her husband cut short his conversation with Uncle and cleared his throat. Madame’s gaiety ceased.
“May I have more pudding, please?” Lou-Lou bridged the awkward moment with his shrill request.
“Don’t you think you have had enough, my boy?” LeBoeuf said.
“No. I want more.”
“Lou-Lou—”
“Please, please, please, please….” the fat boy began to wail in a most abject and childish manner, seemingly oblivious to the present company and the spectacle he was creating.
“All right. All right!” LeBoeuf said and clapped his hands loudly. A Choctaw appeared from the adjoining pantry. LeBoeuf pointed to Lou-Lou’s plate and, with a look of undisguised distaste, ordered it to be refilled. “Well, then,” our host stood up at his place and rubbed his hands in anticipation, “the hour has arrived to view the blossoming of Puya robusta. Messieurs Walker, Yago, my darling Marie—let’s to the conservatory.”
We vacated our seats. LeBoeuf herded us toward the door.
“Wait! Wait for me!” Lou-Lou cried, hurriedly spooning down his second helping of dessert.
“Do you want to eat like a pig or act like a man, Lou-Lou?” LeBoeuf upbraided his ward, though in a patient tone of voice, as if he was long used to his idiocy.
“I want to come with you. Please, please!”
“Wipe your mouth and come along, then.”
What a trying responsibility, thought I as we debouched into the hallway, to be the guardian of such a nincompoop.
We hastened to the conservatory through the labyrinthine corridors and stairways of the floating palace. Only one candle was deployed within, for Monsieur LeBoeuf was concerned lest too much light interfere with the blossoming. The room was filled with specimens, many of them southern botanicals I had never laid eyes on before. Now and then distant lightning flashed through the glass roof, and the strange cacti and palmettos stood hairily revealed. It was an impressive collection. Uncle was unabashedly agog.
The Puya stood at center in an oaken tub. It was a low shrub of thick spiny leaves, from the center of which arose a single hirsute stalk perhaps eight feet high, terminating in a bud the size of an artichoke.
Chairs were brought in for us and we sat in a semicircle around the plant. Madame placed herself in the seat next to mine, disposed at such an angle that every time I turned to reply to some bit of conversation, I could not help but see down the soft slope of her bosom within the gauzy dress. It exercised my brain to a not inconsiderable degree.
“Ssshhh, everyone!” our host importuned us. “Behold the reproductive tropism!”
As if on cue, the sepals, or outer leaves, of the blossom began to quivery[O12].
“By heaven,” Uncle exclaimed ecstatically. “’Tis just as Dr. Lagerlöf described it in his treatise on bromeliads!”
“Listen closely,” LeBoeuf said, and we all keened our ears. The process was under way so rapidly that one could actually hear the crinkling petals as they began to unfurl. The minutes went by. Soon, the yellow-green flower began to open. The bright orange anthers became visible.
“Shall we set it on fire, Uncle Fernand?” Lou-Lou proposed.
LeBoeuf pursed his lips, closed his eyes, and shook his head.
“But it would be funny.”
“No, I don’t think so, Lou-Lou. Yago, you will remove him to his quarters, hmmm?”
“No, no!” Lou-Lou protested. “I want to stay. Please!”
“If you go back to your room, I will have a treat sent to you.”
“What kind of treat?”
“What would you like, Lou-Lou?”
; “More pudding.”
“Very well, you may have more pudding.”
“And treacle cake.”
“Very well, you may have treacle cake too.”
“And…”
“Enough,” LeBoeuf said with an indulgent laugh. “Yago, if you please.”
The Indian took Lou-Lou by the elbow and led him out of the conservatory.
“Such a scamp,” LeBoeuf remarked when they were gone, but I sensed that he was embarrassed by his ward’s witless antics. “Ah, look, the Puya has opened to the maximum!”
Indeed, the petals had now spread out to the size of a soup plate. Uncle was in a state of utter thrall.
“How long doth the bloom endure?” he inquired of our host.
“Only a few hours,” LeBoeuf replied. “By midnight, it will be a wilted, pulpy mass.”
“You sound as though you had seen it before, Monsieur LeBoeuf,” I said.
“O, but I have,” he avouched. “Two or three times.”
“But how can that be if the plant blooms only once in a century?”
“Ah, but they do not all bloom at the same time. I witnessed the same spectacle years ago in the orangerie of the Comte d’Artois, and again in England, at the Earl of Richmond’s.”
“Thy questions are rude and niggling, nephew,” Uncle remonstrated under his breath.
“Do not scold him, Monsieur Walker. He has an inquiring mind. I admire that in a youth.”
Madame patted me on the thigh. It seemed to me that her hand lingered there a moment longer than was befitting. I glanced at her helplessly. Her bosom heaved, her nostrils flared, and her lips glistened in the candlelight. Then she stood up.
“Would you excuse me, my darling husband? I have a headache and I should like to retire.”
“As you please, my love,” LeBoeuf said. She kissed him chastely on the cheek, bid Uncle and me goodnight, and exited the conservatory in a stately cloud of jasmine-scented perfume.
“How long doth this Puya take to set seed?” Uncle asked LeBoeuf when Madame was gone.
“From five to eight days,” the Frenchman said, and I could imagine the wheels spinning in Uncle’s mind. Soon, the remarkable flower began to sag on its stalk, its brief and breath-taking efflorescence over for another hundred years.
An Embarrassment of Riches Page 14