“I am making light of this,” he said. He looked over his shoulder for a moment then back at Lottie. She wondered if he feared his wife may have overheard him. “But you know you are to be respectful to your elders, especially in the presence of others.”
“Yes, Grand-père, of course. I will apologize to Grand-mère and ask her to forgive me.” Lottie hated to disappoint her grandfather, and it would be for that reason that she would be especially contrite when she spoke to her grandmother. “But you know how I feel about how Agnes is treated—”
“Stop. We are not going to discuss this further. We have more important business to talk about.”
“But that was all that happened today.” Lottie heard herself whine and winced. That would not go far in supporting her maturity.
“Part of what happened today is because you are a young woman and, in your case, a strong-headed young woman. By now, you should have already had your coming-out party, engaged, married. But the yellow fever, then my unexpected sickness, delayed all that.”
Lottie grasped the arm of the settee. “But, Grand-père, I understood. You know I’ve never complained. We will have time when you are feeling stronger.” Ever since the doctors suggested his need to rest because of his heart, Lottie was careful to not upset him.
“You will soon be twenty. Some might say we have waited too long.”
Too long to make a suitable match? Too long to be told what man would be chosen for her to spend her life with? She could not even make her grandmother happy. How would she ever please a stranger? “Please, PaPa, please.” Lottie reached for his hands. “I am not ready to be a wife. Why do we have to follow someone else’s rules?”
“Oh, my dear Charlotte, you are so much like your father.” He gazed at his son’s portrait then at his granddaughter. “But we are doing this for you. For your future. In a few months when we have your party, you will see.”
“But I do not want to see.”
“I know. I know. And neither did your father.”
Chapter Three
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Gabriel Girod forced a smile when André Toutant strolled into his mother’s café. It wasn’t that he disliked André, but his cousin flaunted his wealth, or at least that of his mother’s protector. If Gabriel had the wealth of his own mother’s protector, he could have joined André in Paris, attending the school the man had promised him.
Both of their mothers lived well as the placées of rich Creole men, white men who provided for them in a system of “left-handed marriages.” As free women of color, they were not allowed by law to marry these men, but they could become their life partners. Care of the women included jewels, gowns, and homes—like the Creole cottages on Rampart Street where both André and Gabriel lived. And for the first ten years of their lives, they both enjoyed the benefits that came with being the sons of rich men. One of those benefits was being sent to Paris for an education. But Rosette Girod changed that when she decided she valued self-respect more than money.
All Gabriel remembered about the night his father walked out of their home was harpoons of lightning slashing the night canvas followed by thunder that roared and rumbled. The kind of thunder Tante Virgine said could “break a boy’s bones.” Huddled in the corner of his bedroom, Gabriel didn’t know if he feared the fury of the storm outside or the one he overheard inside. The one that ended with his mother’s tears.
In the years since, Gabriel had helped his mother by working in the café. During that time, his cousin left New Orleans as a gangly, credulous kid and had returned a gentlemanly, cosmopolitan young man.
“When did you arrive in New Orleans?” Gabriel handed André a steaming cup of café au lait and sat at a small table, one protected from the sun by a canvas awning.
“A few days ago.” André answered Gabriel, but his eyes surveyed the small stand.
He thinks he is above this simple place. That I have sunk to a different class. Gabriel shifted in his chair. “Tante Virgine must be quite proud and happy that you are here. We don’t see as much of her because of”—Gabriel motioned toward the stand and shrugged—“well, we have the business now.” He sounded guiltier than he meant to, thinking André might interpret it as apologizing for having to work. And work seemed as foreign to André as André’s double-breasted frock coat and broad, pleated, starched linen shirt did to Gabriel.
André sipped the coffee and leaned back, comfortably slouched. “Yes, yes, she is. Cooking as if I have not eaten for the past five years, which”—he patted his stomach—“does not seem to be the case. But I doubt she will be excited for long. I plan to return to Paris. I am studying to be a medical doctor.”
“Excuse me,” Gabriel said to his cousin, relieved that a couple approached the stand and gave him a reason to walk away. The realization of all he could have been throbbed in his chest, a knot of dreams pushing its way out. This is now my life. He reached for the pots, holding one of almost-scalded milk in one hand and coffee with chicory in the other, and poured them together into each cup.
Gabriel returned to the table and hoped that disappointment had not settled like a cloud on his face. But it didn’t need to. His cousin already knew that the distance between them was more than miles.
“So, a doctor of medicine,” Gabriel said. He hoped his words carried pride instead of envy. “What school will you attend?”
“The University of Paris has accepted me,” André said, sounding almost apologetic and only glancing at Gabriel. He stared at a trio of nuns on their way to the cathedral. “To dress in so much black, with hardly a hair showing, in this depressing heat… Now that is showing a commitment to God. Something my mother wished I had taken to Europe with me all those years ago. But maybe I will find it again while I’m here.”
Gabriel opened his eyes so wide, he felt his eyebrows wrinkle his forehead. He stifled his laugh when he saw the look of confusion on his cousin’s face. André’s years in Paris, European clothes, living as free as any white man, attending medical school…what more evidence did André need of God’s commitment to him?
“What amuses you?” André seemed confused.
“Only that the person least committed to faith has the most to be thankful for.”
“Yes, but none of it can I find here. Home. With my family and friends. And yet, what is humorous to me,” André said, “is that the friend I leave surrounded by voodoo, slavery, and crime continues to believe.”
“Some days more than others,” said Gabriel. “I need to close early today. With Rosette gone, I will be walking home.”
“I have a carriage. You don’t need to do that,” said André.
A part of Gabriel wanted to refuse, to prove that he didn’t need the comforts to which André was accustomed. But he remembered that soon his cousin would be thousands of miles away, and he didn’t know if or when he might see him again. He nodded his thanks, and André waited as he closed up the shop.
“I saw your mother and Alcee at the French Market buying shrimp,” said André as they climbed into his carriage. “Alcee still laughs like the little girl I knew, not like the young woman she is becoming. How old is she now? Thirteen?”
“Not yet. She just turned twelve,” Gabriel said. Without Alcee, he might have joined André in Paris. Maybe his father would have stayed, with one less person to depend on him. But, no, he had seen his father’s face soften with delight, his generous smile when he held his sister. Money flowed too freely from the river of the landed gentry into the stream of the Girod home for that to be the reason he left.
“Your mother, is she…?”
Gabriel flinched. He knew the question before his cousin finished it. “Is she still alone? That is what you meant, yes?”
André bent forward to grab the reins. “It was not an accusation. I wanted to ask if she was happy.” He urged the horses forward.
Gabriel saw a glimmer of the boy who’d played tag with him and Lottie, the one he would trip so Lottie could win a race.
He realized in that moment that he didn’t need to mistrust everyone who asked about Rosette. Since he had become the only man in the house, he felt responsible for protecting his mother. They had moved beyond the clustered whispers when she passed or the wide space someone would take on the banquette that forced his mother to step in the vile muck of the street. When she opened her café and started selling coffee and pastries before and after church or during holidays and weekends, Gabriel prayed for customers. Prayed that she would not be made to look foolish, standing alone when people passed her by. Those prayers had been answered in abundance as Rosette’s stand grew into a café with places for her customers to sit. His mother had proven that a head for business could coexist with a beautiful face, a cultured upbringing, and a pampered life.
“I’m sorry. I’m not accustomed to questions from people who truly care about my mother beyond what gossip they can bring with them to the dressmaker,” Gabriel said. “Yes, she is content. She’s worked hard to provide for us, and she’s proud of her success.”
“And you? What about your plans to attend L’Ecole Centrale to become an engineer? If you’re still interested, maybe we could arrange a way for you to return with me. You know my mother would have a mind to help. I’m her only child. She has the means—”
Tales of Virgine Toutant’s extravagances were legend in the city. She spent money, Agnes said to Rosette one day, “like people spend time. She just lets it go by, always thinking there be more tomorrow.” Usually Agnes followed her observation with a “hmph” and a tally of the merchants grateful for Virgine’s existence. Or at least the existence of her protector, cotton-exchange broker Bernard LaFonte. Gabriel, however, did not want to add his name to the list of those indebted to Virgine.
“It is a generous offer, but no. My mother needs my help.”
“Do you truly believe she would want you to throw away your dream, your future, if she knew you had the opportunity?”
“No, she wouldn’t. So, please, do not discuss this with Tante Virgine or Rosette. I know my mother would want me to go. She never asked me to sacrifice anything to help her. First, her dream. Then mine.”
The carriage stopped in front of the Girod cottage. “Have you given up your other dream as well? The one you should have forsaken years ago?” André asked.
“I’m not sure what you mean. Being educated in Paris was my dream.”
André tilted his head. “You really don’t know what I mean, do you? It can’t be because you think of it as something real, something not a dream.” André placed his hands on his cousin’s shoulders, gently shaking him. “Tell me the truth.”
“I would if I knew what you meant.”
“Charlotte LeClerc. That dream.” André released Gabriel’s shoulders and reached for the reins.
André’s words stung him, and Gabriel’s hesitation was his answer.
“Even though we were young, her presence pulled you like a magnet. Obviously that hasn’t changed. But you know, you’re following the wrong dream. One you have no control over. It does not matter that with your skin, your hair, you could pass for white. You will always be Rosette’s son. Comme il faut. You will always be a free man of color. And Charlotte will always be white.”
André spoke the truth. A truth like hundreds of bee stings. A truth he would one day have to face.
* * * * *
Gabriel watched the carriage wheels churn as André made his way home through the thick mud, dredging up garbage and untold muck that littered the narrow street. The sun intensified the mingled odors, and the humidity made them almost palpable. Were it not for the fragrances of the gardenias and violets planted in the neighboring gardens, leaving and entering the house would be even more of an assault.
The scent of Rosette’s gumbo filé welcomed him and would certainly pacify the beast that growled in his stomach and reminded him he had not taken the time to eat lunch today. Rosette had left the café early to consider enrolling Alcee in Michel Seligny’s l’Academie Sainte-Barbe. The school was within walking distance of the business, which was important because it enabled Alcee to join her friends in private lessons. Unlike most of their mothers, Rosette worked to support her family, and taking time away to transport Alcee to and from lessons was almost impossible. Gabriel hoped they had been pleased with the school. If not, the conversation between the two females in the house might be spicier than the gumbo, in which case he and his food might escape to the garçonnière. Like most of the separate quarters built by families of wealth allowing their young men to go and come as they pleased, his had been built above the outdoor kitchen.
But instead of finding two women in the parlor, there were three. The one who didn’t live there wiped her red-rimmed, watery eyes with the lace sleeve of a dress scattered with nosegays so vibrant they could have been plucked from the gardens along the rows of cottages. Her tignon, bands of watercolored silks, complemented the flowers spilling over the yards of taffeta that surrounded her. The cane chair Gabriel knew she had to be sitting on had disappeared under the wide bellshaped skirt. Living with his mother and Alcee, Gabriel had learned more than he wanted about fashion and fabrics. He knew enough, though, to know that the young woman’s gown could pay his sister’s tuition for a year.
To get the food he wanted required walking through the parlor to the dining room. Or walking outside and through the narrow alley to the rear of the house. But he had already made eye contact with his mother, who looked too relieved to see him. He was trapped.
“Look, Alcee, Gabriel is home.” Rosette sounded very much as she did on Carnival when he and Alcee were younger and she attempted to distract them from the long wait for the procession by pointing out pirates and devils and strangely-put-together animals. Even now, his sister brightened, much happier to see him than on most days. Perhaps because her penance had ended and she could be released from her mother and the visitor.
Rosette moved from the ornate wood-and-cane settee in one fluid motion, walked to the door, and escorted Gabriel to the young woman, who, despite the soft hiccups and tears, managed to appear striking. The damp fringes of eyelashes, the full lips, even the wisps of dark brown hair that strayed from her stylish tignon might have, on a dance floor, seemed calculated to entice.
“This is my son, Gabriel.” Rosette paused. “This is Mademoiselle Serafina Lividaus. She recently moved to a house on Rue Esplanade.”
Serafina looked up at Gabriel and nodded without extending her hand, which would have been awkward, since only moments before she had wiped away tears from her eyes and nose.
“I am pleased to meet you,” he said. She didn’t look much older than Alcee, but something about the dullness in her eyes suggested she had already experienced far more than his sister. He felt the soft press of his mother’s hand on his back and mentally groaned, anticipating being steered to the settee. Instead, she turned him in the direction of the dining room.
“Alcee, p’tit, please show your brother the meal I saved for him while Serafina and I stay in the parlor to finish our discussion.”
“Yes, Mother,” she said and moved with uncharacteristic speed to Gabriel’s side.
Rosette patted his cheek. The scent of the eucalyptus she’d used earlier in the filé lingered on her hand. “Thank you for your help today.”
The white embroidered lace tablecloth from their earlier meal still covered the table. Gabriel served himself rice then lifted the top of the tureen to ladle the still-steaming shrimp and gumbo into his bowl. Alcee carried three chunks of bread from the sideboard, served two to Gabriel, and kept the other for herself. She pulled out a chair across from him and then, as if she’d changed her mind, walked to the edge of the dining room and pulled the secreted doors closed.
“Now we can talk,” she said.
“My stomach talked to me and told me to feed it. I’ll listen while you tell me about the visit to the Academy this afternoon.”
“Well.” She breathed in and out like she was preparing to sta
rt a footrace, glanced to her right, then looked back at Gabriel. The ringlets in her hair, which had been pulled to one side, continued to sway from the motion, too playful an action for the serious expression on her face.
Gabriel tore a piece of bread and chewed it with deliberate slowness to prevent a smile. From the first time Alcee had toddled over to him, demanding to be taken to the market and pummeling his leg with her plump little fists until he relented, Gabriel knew she would not be afraid to ask for what she wanted. Over the years, she’d learned when to push and when to pull and was growing into a strong young woman because of her confidence. Unfortunately, that was not a quality considered attractive to men or sometimes even other women. And it often placed her in an orbit outside the universe of her peers.
“The director writes short stories, so I am certain he can teach writing. The school is in a nice building.” She handed him a piece of her bread, which meant she wanted it dipped into the gumbo and returned, continuing to talk as she waited. “But the students did not spend much time talking to me after Mother left to talk to Monsieur Seligny. I don’t think they liked me.”
Gabriel handed Alcee her bread then served himself another bowl. His sister was not one to be pacified with platitudes. He dismissed responding as he might to his own friends, telling them that things would get better, to give it another chance, or, depending on the friend, to pray. “Did you talk to them? Politely?”
She shifted in the chair and started making crumbs with the thin crust of the bread. “Yes. I think so.”
“So.” Gabriel kept his voice light, stirred his gumbo, and watched the shrimp as they chased the okra around the edge of the bowl. “What did you talk to them about?”
Alcee made what had become known in the Girod household as her “oyster” face—that medley of pain and disgust that transformed her face from winsome to wicked when offered a raw oyster on the half shell. She swirled bread crumbs in circles on the tablecloth. “I just asked them why manners classes were important only for the girls and why we couldn’t be enrolled in whatever classes were offered for the boys.”
Love Finds You in New Orleans, LA Page 3