Queen of the Mardi Gras Ball

by Lynn Shurr

  While Simon and Clovis stirred the pots with cypress paddles, the women laid out newspaper across the porch. In minutes, the pots were ready to drain. Boiled crawfish, turned a deep red and upended from the pot, spread out across the papers. People carried piles of them away to any convenient peeling place so long as they remained outdoors, Alida reminded them all.

  “Don’t want no stink in my house, you hear,” she said.

  “Save the porch swing.” Pierre pushed Roz in that direction. In a moment, he had two paper cones full of steaming crawfish to set between them.

  Roz picked up one good-sized crustacean and winced when its red pepper and salt coating pierced the tiny cracks in her chapped hands. Looking up, she felt as if the whole family watched her. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t eaten crawfish before. She’d savored them in a bisque and seen them used as a garnish. True, no knives were provided to cut off the heads or little silver seafood forks to withdraw the meat, but she knew how to go about it. Roz twisted off the head, pinched the back, and pulled out the succulent tail. She stripped the vein with one of her short fingernails and popped the meat into her mouth.

  Big-bellied Ursin prodded a school age boy forward. “You gonna suck da head, Miss Roz?” the boy asked, staring at his bare toes.

  “Oh, you gotta suck da head. Dat’s where all da fine fat is,” Ursin dared her.

  Roz looked at the beady eyes and long feelers of the beheaded crawfish, put it up to her mouth and sucked. She gagged down the lump of head fat and forced herself not to chug the glass of lemonade someone handed her.

  “She all right. She one of us now, Brudder.” Ursin turned to his own pile of crawfish to begin twisting, pinching and pulling.

  “Here, you better put dis on before you ruin dat fancy store-bought dress.” Alida Landry handed Roz a white apron and again pointing out the guest as an outsider.

  Pierre had rolled up his sleeves like his brothers. “Merci, Mama. You have another one for me so I won’t have to get my suit pants cleaned?”

  “Men don’t wear no aprons. You should know better den to come to a crawfish boil wit’ fancy t’ings.” She stomped off to eat with her husband at a table beneath one of the live oaks that framed the house.

  Piles of shells accumulated and got dumped in the bayou to discourage the flies. Rows of sweets were laid out to replace the crawfish. Children grabbed sweet dough pies from a tray, or gobbled more beignets. The men and women helped themselves to slices of sweet potato or blackberry pie, coconut or fig cake to go with their coffee. Some of the older boys, already fishing and trapping with their fathers, got into the stash of white mule and became rowdy. Music was called for to burn off the food and liquor.

  Odon and a brother-in-law picked up their fiddles. Ursin rested a small accordion on top of his belly and pumped away. Papa Landry found his wife’s washboard and two spoons and kept the rhythm going. Ignoring the mud, couples stepped lively. Ursin’s hugely pregnant wife scooped up a toddler and bounced him lightly on top of her big belly in time to the music. Little girls whirled together or chased down a boy cousin to drag into the circle. Awkward adolescent males suddenly found the courage to ask their pubescent female relatives to dance. Roz twirled with Pierre. Better than the Yacht Club dance, the dancing went on until a light mist rose from the saturated earth and the dew dripped from the Spanish moss beneath a cloud-covered moon.

  Those with cars and sleepy babies began to depart. Those who came in buggies would stay the night in order to be close to the church to receive their holy ashes in the morning. Alida Landry urged them to finish off the sweets before the strictures of Lent began. Ursin’s wife raised another piece of fig cake to her mouth but lowered it before taking a bite.

  “I t’ink I ate too much, me,” she said. “Or maybe dis baby comin’.”

  “We got seven already. Don’t you know, woman?” Ursin said helpfully.

  Pierre stepped forward. “Would you like me to examine you, Mignon, before you go home?”

  “Mon beau-frere, mais no!” Mignon said, horrified that her brother-in-law might want to see her private parts.

  “I’m in training to be a midwife. I could take a look,” Roz offered. “I’ve delivered several babies. If you should need my services, I’ll be licensed at the end of the month.”

  Alida Landry bore down on the group. “You don’t touch my grandbaby, you. We get Mignon a good Cat’lic woman who ain’t banned from da Church for her evil ways, you hear. You chase my Pierre when you got a man already back in New Orleans, so my son don’t marry nobody else. Go back where you come from!”

  “Woman, go in da house!” Simon Landry shouted.

  His wife didn’t budge. She remained breathing heavily into Roz’s face. Roz stood her ground, but she was shaking when Pierre took her hand. He spoke in rapid patois to his mother. Roz knew he had called her husband a wild beast though she did not catch all he said. Of one word shouted by Alida Landry, she was certain—putaine, a prostitute.

  “Let’s go. You can’t reason with her. Mignon, come in to the clinic if your pains continue.” Pierre tugged at Rosamond’s arm, but she didn’t move.

  “Mrs. Landry, I left a man who beat me, and I’m trying to make a new life. I’ll be a good midwife, and I won’t need Pierre or anyone else to support me.”

  “Won’t nobody come to you, a woman who abort her own child and leave her husband. Maybe you deserve beatin’.”

  Some of the other women murmured, whether in her favor or not, Roz couldn’t tell. Ursin let one end of his squeezebox drop. It made a small, hurt noise.

  “I’m sorry you believe that of me.” Roz shook off Pierre’s hand and walked regally toward the parked cars. Behind her the argument raged in Cajun French, several voices joining in. She didn’t strain herself to translate.

  Roz got into the passenger seat of the Model T and closed the door. She sat in the dark waiting for Pierre. He came along shortly and, grateful for the automatic starter that spared his good right arm, made their exit a quick one.

  When they turned onto the road, he apologized. “I’m sorry. This wasn’t a good idea.”

  “Really? Your mother hates me. My family thinks you are some low class opportunist trying to break into the upper crust. We’d make quite a couple.”

  Pierre ignored her sarcasm. “I’ll make it up to you. I think I have a likely candidate for a C-section due to deliver in the next few weeks. We’ll do a trial by labor, of course, but I’m fairly sure her pelvis is too narrow for a normal delivery. Would you like to observe?”

  “Oh, Pierre, you do know the way to a girl’s heart.”

  When they passed the clock on its post by the bank, she noticed the hands had passed midnight. Mardi Gras was over. Lent, when all temptations must be put aside, had begun. Roz let herself down from the car and walked into the boarding house without a backward glance.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Roz had a problem. She hadn’t expected to see Dr. Pierre Landry again so soon after the awkward Mardi Gras celebration, but here he stood, not three feet away, lecturing the midwives on the reasons for Caesarean sections and the operation itself. A careful procedure performed by a surgeon in a hospital could preserve the mother’s health and fertility he told them. No need these days to choose between the life of the baby and the life of the mother as had been the case in the last century. The midwives should never attempt the operation themselves, but be ready to call for a doctor or get their patient to the clinic as soon as it became apparent normal labor had failed.

  Hard as she tried to concentrate, Roz found herself listening to the sound of his voice and watching his lips form words beneath the soft, drooping moustache. She wished she had stayed in his car for a kiss on Mardi Gras Eve instead of flaunting her independence. As his hands, tanned and confident, moved over the model he used to demonstrate the surgical technique, Roz dwelled on how sure and gentle he was with women, with her. Being a modern career woman could be awfully lonely.

  At the lunch
break, Nurse Emory escorted Dr. Landry from the room, and the midwives pulled out their tins and baskets. The woman who had received the two laying hens for her services tossed Roz a boiled egg to go with her orange and crackers. Beulah sat beside her and took out a fried pork chop with the bone still in it sandwiched between two slabs of bread. She ate a big bite, swallowed, and washed it down with a container of buttermilk.

  “My, my, I do have an appetite today. Nothing I likes better than a man wit’ a tickly moustache, his hair all slicked back, and nice, clean hands. Fine skinny ass, too.”

  “Doan let Nurse Emory hear you talkin’ like dat about da doctor,” Granny Sue warned.

  “What? She thinkin’ the same, I bet. Jus’ listen to her laugh. You ever hear her laugh befo’?”

  In the adjoining lunchroom, the midwives could just make out the sound of Pierre’s low voice and a husky answering chuckle from Nurse Emory.

  “Won’t do her no good. Doc looked at Peep dat whole time.”

  “That’s not true,” Roz protested.

  “Ha! When he was strokin’ de uterus and lookin’ at you, I could feel it in my woman parts, good as going to one of dose hot moving pictures wit’ John Gilbert and Greta Garbo makin’ steam.”

  “Nothing can come of it.”

  “Peep, here’s a few things I knows. You can’t keep de rain from fallin’, a baby from comin’, or a man and woman apart who wants to be together. Bide yo’ time, girl. It gonna happen.”

  Roz sighed with relief when Nurse Emory returned without Pierre and continued the normal course of the class, though he did several more lectures on recognizing and reporting venereal diseases, abnormalities in the newborn, and the normal development of the infant. Roz kept her eyes on her notes, concentrating on moving the pencil clutched between her stubby-nailed fingers across the paper. She didn’t raise her hand to answer his questions. She didn’t give anyone a reason to gossip.

  At the end of March, Roz stood with the other midwives to receive her certificate. Widow Purdue had helped her make a proper white uniform and veil and her midwife’s bag from cloth purchased with the carefully hoarded twenty dollars received for the birth of Lilliane LeBlanc. She invested in white nurses’ shoes and stockings and had her hair cut for the occasion. Edna and Faye offered to touch up the darker blonde of her roots with a bottle of peroxide, but considering Faye’s orange frizz and Edna’s homely hairdo, Roz decided on a style as short as a nun’s to even out the color.

  Nurse Emory told her students she was proud of their accomplishment and desire to improve their skills and gave each one a colored cardboard wheel that made it easy to determine a mother’s due date. Dr. Landry did a brief congratulatory speech, shook each hand, and presented the certificate. If he held Roz Boylan’s fingers longer than the others and gazed into her eyes while he did it, no one commented.

  A photographer paid by Nurse Emory snapped an official picture of the graduates. In years to come, people seeing the photo would assume Rosamond Boylan had been one of the instructors along with Nurse Emory, the only white faces in the group. The truth shocked them, and as Roz continued to display the picture, she was able to enjoy the reactions more and more over the years.

  What she did not enjoy was having no family attend the ceremony. André, to keep peace with the St. Rochelles, kept Loretta away. They were not to validate Rosamond’s choice of such a shabby career, or offer any encouragement for her to continue on its path. Despite this, Henri snuck in about the time they served punch and cake and delivered a small package containing extra white stockings sent by his mother.

  At the boarding house over a chicken killed and cooked for the occasion, Widow Purdue and the others presented Roz with a her own shingle reading “Rosamond Boylan—Certified Midwife.” They trooped outside to watch Mr. Toomey nail it beside the front door. All the widow asked was that Roz answer the door if calls came in the middle of the night.

  As they admired the sign, Dr. Pierre Landry came to call. Having heard all about Roz’s Mardi Gras with the Landry family, Faye and Edna stared at the attractive and forbidden doctor as he walked up the steps. Bernard Toomey stepped manfully and, perhaps, jealously in front of the women to see what the doctor wanted.

  “Mrs. DeVille has gone into labor. I promised Roz—Mrs. Boylan—she could observe the delivery.”

  “In that case,” Bernard said protectively, “go ahead, but don’t keep her out too late.”

  “That’s up to the baby, I’m afraid, but she’ll be safe with me.”

  “Very well, then,” Mr. Toomey said very seriously. “Ladies, I think the rest of us should get out of this cold and damp.”

  Feeling as giddy as a girl about to elope, Roz went to get her veil and bag. Imagine observing her first surgery! Being with Pierre was just lagnaippe, an extra goodie, as the Cajuns would say.

  “I have something for you. It’s not new. I used it as a student.” Dr. Landry indicated a package lying on the front seat of his car. Roz stripped off the paper and held up the stethoscope.

  “I’ll be the envy of all the midwives. Thank you, and thanks for remembering to come for me tonight.”

  “I never forget you, Roz.”

  She let the words pass by and evaporate in the chilly air. This relationship could go nowhere. She needed to establish good moral credentials as a midwife. Roz repeated that ten times to herself on the way to the clinic. Easier said than done.

  They entered the hospital lobby only to be immediately intercepted by Mayor DeVille and his eldest son Hector already smoking cigars in the waiting area. Behind them, a distraught woman cried into a hankie while the mayor’s wife comforted her.

  “Doctor, is it time?” the mayor’s son asked.

  “If your wife hasn’t progressed since I last examined her, we will have to perform the surgery I mentioned before both she and the baby become too exhausted. Mother and child should come through it well. Please, excuse us. We need to prepare.”

  The crying woman sobbed harder. The men stared curiously at Roz, but stood aside. As she trailed Pierre to the stairs, the younger DeVille nudged his father.

  “You think the doc took a nooky break while my wife is in labor?” he said. “That one is hot to trot.”

  “Wouldn’t mind having a nooky break with her myself right about now, so I can’t hold it against him.” The mayor took a long draw on his cigar and reluctantly turned back toward the hysterical female. “For your sake, son, I hope Anaise doesn’t take after her mother.”

  Anaise Olivier DeVille occupied the clinic’s only private room. After ten hours of labor, she was hardly the chic and haughty lady who snubbed Roz at the beauty parlor. Sweat plastered her dark hair to her scalp, and her big belly, rippling with hard contractions, dominated her slim body. A nurse wiped the beautiful, suffering face with a cool cloth and murmured words of comfort. “Here’s the doctor, dear. It will soon be over.”

  Roz took a place to one side of the bed as Pierre began his examination. “Let’s see how things are going. Mrs. DeVille, the baby’s head has not engaged in the pelvis. Your labor is not progressing normally. It is time to perform that surgery we discussed during your last visit.”

  “No!” Anaise DeVille’s dark eyes widened with panic beneath her finely plucked brows. “I can do this. I was cut out of my mother, and the surgery left her sterile. She has a terrible scar and suffers from nervous attacks. She couldn’t even bear to stay in the room with me.” She gritted her teeth as another contraction began.

  “Take a deep breath, let it out slowly, and try to relax the rest of your muscles. It will help with the pain,” Roz told her.

  “What is she doing here? Tell her to get out!”

  “Mrs. Boylan is a certified midwife. I’ve asked her to stay with you while I prepare for the surgery. I can assure you that surgical techniques have improved since your mother gave birth. It will be possible for you to have one or two more children, and I will do my best to minimize the scar, but we cannot wait any longer. Nur
se, please tell the staff to see that everything is ready. Anaise, there is really no choice.”

  Pierre left Roz standing by the bed alone with the patient. “Could I rub your back or get you a wet cloth to suck?”

  “Keep your nigger-loving, baby-killing, husband-shooting hands off of me!” Anaise DeVille swore.

  “Very well.” Roz put her hands behind her back. She couldn’t help but notice that Mrs. DeVille’s manicure remained as perfect as if she had taken the time to do her nails before coming to the hospital.

  Another spasm came and went. As Anaise DeVille gulped down air, a sly look crossed her face. “I’ve heard you and the doctor are lovers. Convince him not to do this to me. I’ll be your friend. I’ll see you are invited to the best homes in Chapelle and Lafayette.”

  Roz knew women said all sorts of ugly things in the throes of labor, and she, as a midwife, needed to ignore any insults and soothe the patient. She’d done that a dozen times in humble houses where poor women, black and white, gave birth while their husbands sat on the front steps and listened to their screams. She’d been called whitey, bitch, slave driver, and whore by mothers in transition.

  She’d been promised their milk cows, best iron pots, and eternal prayers for her soul that would get her out of purgatory snip-snap if she would make the pain stop. The pain always stopped when the baby came. The promises transformed into crocks of butter, a dozen eggs, or a simple thanks.

  Roz took none of this personally. These women didn’t know her or judge her. Pain formed their words. Somehow, she doubted this was the case with Anaise DeVille. This woman thought she knew Roz and what she wanted most. Anaise DeVille was so very wrong.

  “You are no longer queen of the Mardi Gras ball, Anaise, but you can be the living mother of a healthy child. It’s time to stop worrying about your beauty and your pride, and do what has to be done. If you married a man who loves you less because you got a scar up your belly delivering his baby, then you made as big a mistake as I did with Burke Boylan.”