by Edna Ferber
“No, no, no!” screamed Kakaracou. For a moment it looked as though she would run from the room, from the house, from the street itself.
“Yes, I say. Why not?”
“You can’t. It isn’t—it isn’t decent.” Then, as the girl’s eyes blazed again, “It needs airing—the whole house—it’s like a tomb.”
“Cupide, open up here. Run down to Canal Street and fetch a pail, a mop, a broom. Tomorrow we’ll find women to scrub and clean but we’ll make it do for tonight. Kaka, open the bags and find me an old blouse-volante. This afternoon I’ll engage workmen. A litde paint, a few nails. A glazier. The garden made neat. Today is Monday. By the end of the week everything will be shining and in order.”
Cupide rubbed his tiny hands together, he kicked up his heels like a colt. “This is fine!” he cried. “I like this. Are we going to eat here? Shall I bring things from the market?”
“Get on there!” shouted Kaka, entering into the spirit of the thing. “The marketing is my affair, you whelp. The stove probably doesn’t march, and the chimney’s sure to be stopped up. Well, we’ll see.”
“Shrimps!” ordered Clio. “And a poulet chanteclair and omelette soufflée. How Aunt Belle would love it, poor darling.”
“You’re crazy,” Kaka muttered. “What do you think I am? A magician! If I can give you the plainest of omelettes and a cup of black coffee it will be a miracle. . . . Here is the blouse-volante. What do you want it for?”
“To put on, of course. I’m going to scrub too.”
“Your hands!”
“Oh, the creams will put them right. I can’t wait to see everything neat and gay, the chandelier glittering in the drawing room, and pots in the kitchen and flowers everywhere and the fountain singing in the garden. And Sunday!”
“Sunday?” Kaka was plainly afraid to hear what Sunday might bring out of this new strange mad mind, but she listened nevertheless.
“Sunday well go down to the French Market, just as Aunt Belle used to tell it. We’ll buy everything. Everything delicious. I’ll wear my gray half-mourning. We’ll go to Mass at St. Louis Cathedral. We’ll go to Madame Begué’s for breakfast. Perhaps They will come in for breakfast. Mama said They sometimes did. Then—well, I don’t know. I may stare at Them—like this. Or I may go up to Them and say, ‘How are you, Grandmama, how do you do, Grandpapa.’ ”
“You wouldn’t do that!”
“Ha, wouldn’t I! What are they? Rich. Rich and dull and clannish, drooping around in black like those Paris snobs who think they’re so grand that they have to dress down to keep from dazzling the canaille. I’ll be richer than they. I’ll be grander than they. I’ll dress in the most exquisite—”
“Yes, well, that’s very fine. Meantime, that dress you’re wearing was your poor mama’s but it was made by Worth. I can copy it, but where would I find such material? So take it off and put on the blouse-volante or stop pulling furniture about, one or the other. You won’t get another dress like it in a hurry.”
Clio Dulaine had never done a day’s manual labor. It was a lesson in the adaptability of youth to see her now as she scrubbed, polished, scoured with Kakaracou and Cupidon. She produced carpenters, plumbers, glaziers, cabinet-makers and charmed them into doing their work at once, and swiftly. All that week there was a cacophony of sound throughout the house and garden, a domestic orchestra made up of the swish of the broom, the rub-a-dub of the washboard, the clink-clank of the plumber’s tools, the sharp report of the carpenter’s hammer, the slap-slap of the paint brush, the snip of the gardener’s shears, the scrape of trowel on brick. Above this homely symphony soared the solo of Clio’s song. As she worked she sang in a rich, true contralto a strange mixture of music—music she had heard at the Paris Opera; songs that Rita Dulaine had hummed in a sweet and melancholy tremolo; plantation songs, Negro spirituals, folk songs with which Kaka had sung her to sleep in her childhood; songs that Aunt Belle Piquery had sung in a shrill off-key soprano, risqué songs whose origins had been the brothels and gambling houses of the New Orleans of her heyday. Po’ Pitie Mamze Zizi, she caroled. Then, Robert, toi que j’aime. Three minutes later her fresh young voice would fling gaily upward the broken beat of a Negro melody:
Tell yuh ‘bout a man wot live befo Chris’—
He name was Adam, Eve was his wife,
Tell yuh how dat man he lead a rugged life,
All be-cause he tak-en de woman’s ad-vice. . . .
She made his trouble so hard—
she made his trou-ble so hard—
Lawd, Lawd, she made his trou-ble so hard. . . .
It had been Kakaracou who had taught her Grenadie, ça-ça-yie, a Creole song with its light and fatalistic treatment of death and love. Kaka, too, had taught her those mixtures of French and Negro dialects such as rose so naturally now to her lips in the Creole lullaby:
Pov piti Lolotte a mouin
Pov piti Lolotte a mouin
Li gagnin bobo, bobo,
Li gagnin doule,doule,
Li gagnin doule dans ker a li.
The dialect was Gombo, soft and slurred; she hardly knew the meaning of the words, but her slim white throat pulsed and her voice swelled in song. She was happy who had been bred in such douleur, she was definite and sure who had been so bewildered by her life, shuttled as she was from convent to Paris flat, hearing of her real background always in terms of nostalgia and resentment, never hoping to see it. She worked singing or she worked silent, the tip of her little pink tongue just showing between her teeth as she rubbed and polished, an unusual glow tinting the creamy pallor of her cheeks. She had the happy energy of one who at last belongs; of the vital female who has been dominated all her life and who now, at last, is free. As she sang and polished and flitted from room to room, from garden to kitchen, from garçonnière to street, the house magically took on life, color, charm. She was like a butterfly emerging from a grub; the house was a bijou once dingy with long neglect, now glowing rich and lustrous. The fine chandelier, always too magnificent for the little drawing room, was now a huge jewel whose every handcut crystal gave back its own flashing ruby and topaz and sapphire and emerald.
Every few minutes she ran to the door or window at the call of a street vendor. Here was another opera, high, low, melodious, raucous. The chimney sweep came by. “R-r-ra-monay! R-a-ramonez la cheminée du haut en bas!” The French words fell sweetly on her ear, but the voice came from a black giant in a rusty frock coat, a battered and enormous top hat, over his shoulder a stout rope, a sheaf of broom straw, bunches of palmetto. She beckoned him in, he shook his kinky head over the state of the fireplaces and chimneys. Like a magician he pulled all sorts of creatures out of their nests of brick and plaster—bats, mice, birds. Clio would not have been surprised to learn that the cow that jumped over the moon had come to rest in one of the chimneys of the Rampart Street house.
The coal peddler, a perfect match for his wares, had his song, too.
Mab mule is white
Mab face is black;
Ah sells mab coal
Two bits a sack.
The brush man called, “Latanier! Latanier! Palmetto root!” Clothes poles and palmetto roots dangled from his cart. Fruit women, calling. Berry women. Clio bought every sort of thing, her lovely laughing face popping out at this door or that window. Vast black women stepped down the street carrying great bundles of wash on their heads; they walked superbly, their arms swinging free at their sides. Generations had carried their burdens thus; their neck, waist and shoulder muscles were made of steel. Clio Dulaine threw pennies to every passing beggar or minstrel. Street bands, ragged and rolling-eyed, made weird music done in a curious broken rhythm that later was to be called ragtime or jazz.
Now the doorstep, scoured with powdered brick, shone white. Kaka, down on her knees with pail and brush, gave short shrift to inquisitive neighborhood servants who loitered by in assumed innocence, but who obviously had been sent out on reconnaissance by their mistresses.
“Where you come from?
France, like they say?”
“I come from New Orleans. Not like you, Congo.”
“You make ménage?’’
Kaka had easily dropped into her native New Orleans patois. “What you think! We carpetbaggers like you!”
“Your lady and you, you going stay here?”
The time had come to close the conversation. “Zaffaire Cabritt ça pas zaffaire Mouton.” The goat’s business is none of the sheep’s concern. The inquirer moved on, little wiser for her pains. Cupide gave them even less information, but a better show. Among his talents was that of being able to twist his face into the most appalling shapes and expressions. His popeyes, his wide lips, his outstanding ears, his buttonlike nose were natural contributors to this grisly gift. Perched on a ladder, busy with his window-washing or occupied with brush and pail on the doorstep, or even shopping in one of the neighborhood stores he would ponder a question a moment as though giving it grave consideration. Then in a lightning and dreadful transformation he would peer up at his questioner, his face screwed into such a mask of distortion and horror as to send his questioner gibbering in fright. At first the neighborhood children and the loiterers in the nearby barrooms and groceries had mistaken him for fair game. But his cannon-ball head, his prehensile arms and his monkeylike agility had soon taught them caution and even respect. Bébé Babouin, they called him. Baby baboon.
At the end of the first week the house seemed to be in a state of chaos from which order never could emerge. Dust, plaster, paint, soapsuds, shavings, glue mingled in dreadful confusion. But by Friday of the second week order had miraculously been wrought. Kaka’s waspishness waned, she began to talk of toothsome Creole dishes; Cupide, who had seemed to swing like a monkey from chandelier to mantel, from mantel to window, came down to earth, donned his Paris uniform of broadcloth and buttons and announced that the time had come to search New Orleans for a suitable carriage and pair.
Clio, disheveled and somewhat wan, looked down at him with affectionate amusement. “Our carriage and pair will be ourselves and our own two legs, Cupide. At any rate, until someone buys us others. So you may as well lay away your maroon coat and gold buttons.”
“My livery goes where I go. And I go where Mad’moiselle goes,” he announced dramatically. This was not so much loyalty as fury at the thought of being parted from the uniform he loved, the trappings which, in his own eyes, made him a figure of importance in spite of his deformity. Young as she was, Clio Dulaine sensed this. She laid her hand gently on his head, she tipped the froglike face up and smiled down at him her lovely poignant smile. “You are my bodyguard, Cupide. My escort. And we’ll have carriages and the finest of horses. You wait. You’ll see.”
He brightened at that, he capered like a frolicsome goat, he rushed off to the kitchen to tell Kaka that he was once more Cupidon of the maroon livery, the gold buttons, the shiny boots. Kaka, the realist, did not share his happiness. “On the street! You’ll look like a monkey without a string.”
“Carencro!” Cupide spat out at her, for by now he had renewed acquaintance with old half-forgotten New Orleans epithets. This Acadian corruption of carrion crow or black vulture he found particularly suitable in his verbal battles with the sharp-tongued Kakaracou.
Now it was Saturday, and the house was not only habitable, it was charming and even luxurious. From the street one saw only a neat one-story dwelling of the simple plantation type, built well off the ground to avoid dampness. Its low-hanging roof came down like a hat shading its upper windows. It gave the house a misleading compressed look, for inside the rooms were high-ceilinged and spacious, with a wide central hall running straight through the house from front to back. Drawing room, dining room, bedroom, boudoir; beautifully proportioned rooms in this cottagelike structure. But the real life of the house was at the back. There was the courtyard with its paving of faded old orange brick; kitchen and servants’ rooms were separated from the main house, forming an ell at one side of the courtyard. At right angles to this, and facing the house, was the garçonnière. Its two rooms, with a lacework balcony thrown across the front, were protected from dampness by the little basement that formed the ground floor. Here and there, where the plaster had fallen off, the old brick of the foundation showed through yellow-pink like the courtyard pavement.
Inside the house the white woodwork had been freshly painted, the carpets scoured, the windows mended. The rosewood and mahogany of the fine furniture had been rubbed until it shone like satin. The gilt mirrors gave back the jewel colors of the chandeliers. Clio had brought to America bits and pieces from the Paris flat—plump little French chairs, Sèvres vases, inlaid tables of rosewood and tulipwood. These had stood the journey bravely and now fitted into the Rampart Street house as though they dated from the lavish New Orleans day of Rita Dulaine.
And now the three stood surveying their handiwork: the big-eyed girl with that look in her face of one whose life will hold surprising things, but who, even now, is planning not to be taken by surprise; the Negress, wiry, protective, indomitable; the dwarf, rollicking, pugnacious, always slightly improbable, like a creature out of a drawing. Each wore the expression of one who, having done his work, finds that work well done. An ill-assorted trio, held together by a background of common experience and real affection and a kind of rowdy camaraderie.
“It looks well,” said Kakaracou even as she breathed on a bit of crystal and rubbed it with her apron, needlessly.
The little man cocked an impish eye up at her. “It’s well enough—until we can manage something better.”
Clio’s grin was as impish as his. “Now I know what Mama meant. Do you remember she used to say there was an old Louisiana proverb: ‘Give a Creole a crystal chandelier and two mirrors to reflect it and he is satisfied.’ Well, I’ve got the chandelier and the two mirrors. But I’m not satisfied.”
“Who’s Creole here?” demanded Kaka, sourly. Always, when speaking to outsiders, she boasted that the Creole blood flowing in Clio Dulaine’s veins actually was tinged with the cerulean hue of royalty. In private she never missed an opportunity to remind the girl that her origin was one-half aristocratic Creole and one-half New Orleans underworld. Perhaps this was her instinctive desire to protect the girl from bruising herself against her own ambitions as her mother before her had done.
Yet, “I am!” Clio shouted now. “I’m Creole!”
“Take shame on yourself, denying your own mama.”
“That’s a lie! Don’t you dare!” She stopped in the midst of her protest as though suddenly remembering something. She stood looking at these two human oddments as though seeing them clearly for the first time. It was a deliberate and measuring look. In that moment she seemed to shed her girlhood before their very eyes and become a woman. The daughter of a placée, the niece of the hearty shrewd strumpet Belle Piquery, most of her life had been spent in the company of two women whose every thought was devoted to pleasing men. Convent-schooled though the girl was, she had absorbed the very atmosphere of courtesanship. Because she had loved them, her voice, her glance, her movements were an unconscious imitation of theirs. Yet there was a difference even now. Where they had been fluid and easy-going she was firm; where they had wavered she was direct. The square little chin balanced the sensual mouth; the melting eyes were likely to cause you to overlook the free plane of the brow. Wan and disheveled with her two weeks of concentrated work, she now seemed to gather herself together in all her mental and physical and emotional being.
“Now then, listen to me, you two. You, Angélique Pluton. You, Cupidon.” They stared at her with uncomprehending gaze as though she had spoken in a strange language. Never in her life had she called the woman anything but Kaka, or—crowing mischievously— Kakaracou. The dwarf had always been Cupide. “Do you want to stay with me?”
The little man’s mouth fell open. It was the wrinkled woman who said, with an edge of fear in her voice, “Where else!”
“Then remember that no matter what I say I am—that I am. I s
hall be what it suits me to be. Life is something you must take by the tail or it runs away from you. . . . Now where did I hear that! That’s clever. I must have made it up. Well, anyway, I don’t want to hear any more of this telling me who I am and what I am to do. Do as I say, and we’ll be rich. Which do you choose—stay or go?”
“Stay!” shouted Cupide, cutting a caper with those absurd bandy legs. The Negress voiced no choice. The fear was gone from her eyes. She stood with her lean arms crossed on her breast, assured and even a trifle arrogant.
“Play-acting,” she sniffed, “Like your great-grandmother. That’s the Bonnevie in you. You and your cleverness! What will Your Highness choose to be tomorrow? Queen of England, I suppose!”
Clio dropped her role of adventuress. She pouted a moment as she had in her childhood when her nurse Kaka would not bend to her will. Then she threw her arms around the woman and hugged her. “Tomorrow, Kaka, we’ll dress in our best and we’ll have a wonderful time, you and Cupide and I. We’ll go first to the Cathedral and then to the French Market and then to Begué’s for breakfast—or we may go to the French Market first and then to Mass—well, anyway, now I’ll have my hair washed, Kaka, and such a brushing, and my hands in oil, and then you’ll rub me all over with that lovely sweet stuff that you used when Mama had one of her sad times and couldn’t sleep. And tomorrow morning I’ll wake up all fresh and gay in my own home in New Orleans. Oh, Kaka!” Here she gave an unadult squeal and clapped her hands. There was something touching, something moving about this, probably because it made plain that her stern and implacable role of the past fortnight had been only an acting part. At sight of this the faces of the two changed as a summer sky grows brilliant again when the sun drives off the clouds. For two weeks she had been a stranger to them, a managing mistress, hard, almost harsh, driving them and herself in a fury of energy. Now she was young again and gay; the house was fresh, cool, orderly; in the kitchen just off the courtyard Kaka’s copper pans shone golden as the sauces they soon would contain, and on the kitchen table was a Basque cloth of coarse linen striped with bright green and red and yellow. The window panes glittered. The steps were scoured white. The courtyard bricks were newly swept and the fountain actually tinkled its lazy little tune; inside the high-ceilinged rooms you were met by the clean odor of fresh paint; silver, crystal, satin and glass reflected each other, surface for surface; the scent of perfume in Clio’s bedroom, her peignoir softly slithering over a chair back.