American Gothic

by Michael Romkey

  Without thinking about it, his fingers found the bottle in his pocket. He pulled out the cork and took a swallow of Professor Newton’s Tonic.

  The wooden coffin in which Evangeline McAllister lay was neither finished nor lined with satin, the cheapest means available for burying a body besides dumping it into the river or a nearby bayou. Her complexion, fair to begin with, had turned a ghastly shade of pale. He was lucky she did not look at all like Mary or he could not have borne it.

  The elixir of laudanum and alcohol almost immediately took some of the edge off Peregrine’s nerves. A feeling of release spread through him, like the unwinding of a twisted towel.

  He leaned low over the body, breathing in the odor of rot that no quantity of cheap perfume could disguise. It was with a sinking feeling that he noted no sign of puncture wounds on the girl’s neck, but then the black lace collar chastely covered most of it.

  Peregrine did not think he could make himself touch her in death, but he had come too far to stop now. He carefully took the edge of the collar between his thumbs and forefingers and drew it slowly down, making sure he did not touch the cold, dead flesh.

  Nothing. The neck betrayed not the slightest evidence of the twin holes he had seen oozing blood at Yu’s.

  Peregrine stood up, struggling against the panic trying to take hold of him, the chaos and confusion of madness.

  “Think!” he whispered to himself.

  How could what he was seeing be real? And if he could not trust his eyes, had they lied to him last night, or were they lying now?

  He bent again over the coffin. Wounds in the dead do not heal themselves. When you were dead, you were dead, and there was no disguising it.

  Or was there?

  Peregrine vainly studied Evangeline’s neck for signs of artifice. There was no other way: he would have to touch her.

  He tentatively pressed his fingers to the body, like doubting Thomas probing the wounds in Jesus. It made him shudder to feel the cold, lifeless flesh. He began to gently knead the claylike skin, searching for wax and makeup used to disguise the wounds.

  He found no wounds.

  He was going mad.

  A woman coughed discreetly behind him.

  Peregrine spun around, horrified that he had been seen pawing the corpse. The pocket doors were open just far enough to admit a person. Mrs. Foster stood close behind him, looking up at him with—this, a surprise—great tenderness and sympathy.

  “The stricken look on your face tells me that you cared for her very much, Major. You are the only one of Evangeline’s gentleman friends to call and pay your last respects. It is not easy to be alone in the world.”

  “I know.”

  “Evangeline came from a fine family. They lost everything in the war. Her family has a crypt in the Lafayette Cemetery. The other girls and I would like to send her there to buried, if we can raise the necessary funds. That’s what she would have wanted, to be with her family.”

  Peregrine was seized with the impulse to tell Mrs. Foster just how little he cared about the sacrifices of Southerners. If not for the rebellion, his own family would still be alive. The anger quickly passed. He had no animosity toward poor Evangeline. She was as much a victim of war as he.

  “How much do you need?”

  Mrs. Foster mentioned a figure.

  Peregrine took the money from his wallet and put it into her open hand.

  “That’s very kind of you…”

  Peregrine didn’t wait to be thanked but lurched out the door. It was suddenly too much for him—the thought that he was going mad, Evangeline, his memories, and his grief. Peregrine had the bottle of laudanum to his lips before he was down the front stairs of the brothel.

  6

  The Quadroon Ballroom

  NATHANIEL PEREGRINE PERCHED on the edge of his chair,a cake plate balanced on one knee and a teacup daintily held between thumb and forefinger. He was making polite small talk with Colonel Harry Kuehl’s wife. How unusual it seemed, he said, to spend Christmas in New Orleans, without a prayer of snow. How true, Clara Kuehl agreed. And the temperature—she declared that Crescent City winters were seasonable as September back home in Connecticut!

  In the two weeks that had elapsed since Peregrine’s shattering visit to Evangeline’s wake, he had stopped drinking and gradually reduced his intake of laudanum. His eyes were clearer than they had been in many a month. Seamus O’Rourke remarked daily about the improvement to his commander’s color. Peregrine’s appetite had recovered some, though he still had no taste for food and took little pleasure from eating.

  Peregrine’s room at the boardinghouse was no longer littered with empty liquor bottles. He had thrown all that out before surprising the housekeeper a week earlier by asking her to please begin making up his room each morning—and giving her a generous tip in recompense for the burden of having to catch up after so long a time without dusting or having the rugs beaten.

  The night had become foggy by the time he left the Kuehls’ holiday party. He decided against taking a carriage back to his room. A walk would be good after the noise and forced gaiety. It was an unusually quiet night, the fog absorbing the sound of the city and perhaps keeping people off the streets.

  The brass tip of Peregrine’s walking stick tapped against the bricked sidewalk, punctuating each alternate step with a brilliant click, while the silk liner of his cape whispered against his trouser legs.

  He paused to light a cigar. As he cupped his hand around the wooden match, his eyes rested on the display inside the shop window barred against thieves in the decadent metropolis. Three new Colt pistols with walnut grips rested on a bed of red felt, looking as immaculate and precise as a surgeon’s tools. Peregrine squinted against the smoke. There was a moth inside the display case, trapped when the shopkeeper had last opened the glass doors to arrange the weapons. The dead insect lay on the bed of red cloth, wings spread wide, freed of its brief, meaningless life of fluttering from one thing to the next.

  The cigar tasted bitter in his mouth, though it was a good cigar, a gift from Harry Kuehl. Peregrine dropped the smoke and put his boot on it, twisting the foot back and forth, back and forth, extinguishing it completely.

  A similar army-issue Colt revolver could be found in the bureau drawer back at the boardinghouse. In the right pocket of his trousers was the derringer he carried when he went about New Orleans. He did not need to touch his pocket to feel its weight against the front of his leg.

  That was how it would finally end, Peregrine thought—a bullet from a rebel gun, or from one held in his own steady hand.

  From the next block came the tinny rattle of dance music played fast. A rough cheer went up from the crowd outside. Peregrine smiled mirthlessly and shook his head. There was so much vice in the city that he could scarcely go out after dark without happening upon at least one altercation.

  The confrontation was entirely one-sided, he saw as he came closer. A big man in a bowler hat held the much smaller man from behind while his confederate struck the little man repeatedly with his fists, which were clothed in tight black leather gloves. Peregrine stepped into the street to skirt the onlookers. He had no interest in such affairs. There was a time when he would have stopped such a brutal thrashing, but what did he care if Southerners beat one another to death? It was all happening outside one of the city’s more notorious haunts. Before the war, the place had been known as the Quadroon Ballroom—and it was still, for all Peregrine knew, though Butler had put a stop to the crude, and distinctly Southern, transaction for which the ballroom had become famous.

  It was illegal for a white man in Louisiana to marry a woman of color, so a twisted social convention was devised to formalize intimate relations between wealthy Southern “gentlemen” and the most beautiful young café au lait women. Mulatto mothers would bring their free quadroon daughters to the ballroom and auction them to rich men not to serve as slaves but mistresses. The practice, known in the city as plaçage, was perversely ritualized, eve
n to the degree that notarized contracts specified the money and property to be given the femmes de couleur to support them and any bastard children resulting from their arrangement. Butler had outlawed the rites of plaçage, yet the ballroom was still a locus for assignations between the races, as well as those attracted to debauched “entertainments,” including common prostitutes.

  The man doing the beating, a sharp-faced thug in a gaudy double-breasted vest of purple silk, took a sap out of his jacket and struck their victim across the head. The man’s body went instantly limp in the big man’s arms.

  A flash of color the hue of blood drew Peregrine’s eyes to the gallery. There, among the people who had come out of the ballroom to enjoy the beating, was a woman in a striking scarlet gown. She was smaller than the other women, with a complexion so white and perfect that she might have been made of porcelain.

  A chill of recognition shivered through Peregrine’s body.

  She was already watching him by the time he saw her. The corners of her mouth turned upward and her eyes glittered in the light of the gas lamps.

  And then, without seeming to move at all, she somehow was no longer there in the crowd pressed up against the gallery banister.

  Peregrine staggered slightly, but the streets of New Orleans were so filled with drunkards and degenerates after dark that no one paid attention as he caught himself with the help of his cane.

  The fight ended, the revelers were now fast disappearing back into the Quadroon Ballroom.

  Peregrine stood frozen in the street.

  Part of him wanted to rush back to the boardinghouse and lock the door against the girl, against the madness threatening to smother him in a boiling chaos of delusion. But he also wanted to know if she was real, if he had seen what he thought he had seen in the opium den, or if he was indeed becoming insane.

  The first course led to safety, the more dangerous path to knowledge.

  Peregrine was unafraid to die.

  And besides, he had to know.

  “What you?”

  “I’d like inside,” Peregrine said to the hatchet-faced man in the silk vest, when he stepped sideways to block Peregrine’s passage into the ballroom. “Is there an admission fee?”

  “Private party.” The man looked Peregrine up and down. “Beat it.”

  Peregrine shrugged, allowing his cloak to fall open. The man in the silk vest scowled, but seeing the blue uniform drained the certainty from his eyes.

  “You are interfering with a federal officer on official business,” Peregrine said. “I will have you arrested if you delay me.”

  “Official business in here?” the man in the vest said, gesturing with his thumb. “You’ve got to be joking.”

  Peregrine took a step closer, taking advantage of his height to make the shorter man look up at him. “Your employer may not particularly care if I have you clapped in irons, but he will take a dim view when I come back with a company of men and permanently close this public nuisance.”

  Peregrine smiled with half of his mouth.

  “And I promise he’ll know his notorious business would still be in operation, if not for you,” he said.

  The muscles worked in the man’s jaw but his hands remained outside of the pockets where Peregrine had seen him put the sap.

  “It’s a she, ” the man in the silk vest said, referring to his employer. He stepped out of the doorway so Peregrine could enter. “Enjoy yourself, sir, on your official business. ”

  Peregrine turned sideways as he went past the gatekeeper, not giving the man in the silk vest the opportunity to hit him over the head while his back was turned.

  The Quadroon Ballroom was hot, smoky, loud, and jammed with people. On the stage, an orchestra of black musicians played “The Camptown Ladies” at a frenetic, nearly demented tempo. The trumpeter, a skeleton of a man with sweat streaming down his shaved head, jerked and writhed as he played, as if battling a seizure that threatened to make him heave his horn into the seething mass of dancers.

  Peregrine found a vacant spot against a pillar to lean. The ballroom was stifling, but he kept the cloak wrapped tight around him; it would have been suicide to reveal himself to the crowd in a Union officer’s uniform.

  A high-pitched wail rose above the frenzy. Peregrine seemed to be the only one who noticed, the revelers in the ballroom too possessed by abandon to pay attention to a woman’s scream.

  Peregrine moved off toward the sound, but progress was nearly impossible in the jammed room.

  “Excuse me,” he said repeatedly. “Excuse me. Excuse me.”

  He had no opportunity to prepare himself against the assault that hit him from the blind side, slamming him through the open door of the cloakroom. Peregrine lost his cane as he was driven back against the rear wall. It was the big man in the bowler, the one who had held the man outside while the other man in the silk vest administered the beating. He held Peregrine against the wall with a massive forearm across Peregrine’s chest. Peregrine’s eyes followed his attacker’s free hand as it went up in the air. His attacker was holding a sap filled with lead shot by the leather thong. A blow across the head would knock him unconscious, fracturing his skull, possibly killing him.

  Peregrine pressed the derringer he’d held in his hand since entering the Quadroon Ballroom against the big man’s coat. The big man sucked in his breath between his teeth, and Peregrine reflexively pulled the trigger, not giving the other man the opportunity to split his head open. There was a muffled crack, the man’s coat and the closeness of their bodies smothering the gun’s small report.

  The big man sat down hard on the floor. The sap fell out of his hands, which he put over his middle.

  “Bad luck for you,” Peregrine said.

  Peregrine kicked the sap away in case the other man made a move for it, but the big man just sat there, looking down at the blood leaching between his fingers and shaking his head, as if he couldn’t believe what had happened. He groaned, closed his eyes, and sank slowly to his side until his cheek was pressed against the wooden floorboards.

  He was dead.

  Peregrine went to the door and looked out. One shot remained in the little two-barreled weapon. He saw no sign of the man in the silk vest, or the lady he had come into the ballroom to find. Peregrine’s cane had disappeared. The Quadroon Ballroom was not the sort of place where property left unattended lasted for long.

  The woman shrieked again, nearer now. There was an alcove ahead on the right. The cry seemed to come from within.

  Slowly, tortuously, Peregrine shouldered his way through the crowd. As he inched closer, he was able to see into the smallish space, which had room within for only a single table. The candle on the tabletop threw spears of iridescent green light through two glasses of absinthe. A woman was seated in one of the chairs, her skirt drawn up far enough to reveal the garter and a shocking expanse of naked leg. Above the garter was a black hand belonging to an attractive woman with high cheekbones and almond eyes that made her look almost Oriental. The other woman’s head was tipped forward, a mass of chestnut curls hiding her face until the hand disappeared beneath the skirt and her head rolled back.

  It was Mrs. Foster.

  Peregrine lost what little hope he’d had that Mrs. Foster had used the gold he’d given her to bury Evangeline in the family crypt. It was far more likely that he’d financed a spree for the madam. Evangeline had probably ended up dumped into a pauper’s grave, the sexton frantically shoveling in quicklime and dirt in a race to stay ahead of water seeping into the grave.

  A scarlet gown materialized through the haze of smoke.

  Mrs. Foster and Evangeline instantly forgotten, Peregrine strained against the bodies to follow as she paused in the far corner of the hall. She looked back just once before disappearing through the door, her eyes going straight to his, as if she knew he was watching her.

  It was impossible! Peregrine thought. What could he do? She was so close, and yet there he was, trapped by the crowd. It was like th
e recurring nightmare he had in which he ran and ran to catch up with his family, but hard as he tried, they only got farther and farther away until at last they were gone.

  Peregrine flung himself over a table and onto the dance floor. Ignoring the angry cries behind him, he dodged between the dancers and shoved his way toward the back of the ballroom.

  The doorway opened to a corridor lined with rooms whose purpose was easily divined by the men and women queued up for their turn to purchase a few minutes of intimacy. At the end of the hallway, a door was closing behind a vanishing vertical line of scarlet.

  Peregrine tried to run, stumbling past the plungers and jezebels. Something caught his foot—he either was tripped or tripped himself—and he went sprawling, the derringer cartwheeling across the filthy floorboards and disappearing amid the forest of boots and shoes. Peregrine scrambled back to his feet, expecting to hear the gun discharge, but the people laughing at him, who might have been hit by the errant lead slug, were lucky that night. Without wasting time to look for his weapon, he crashed through the door and nearly fell down the steep wooden stairs leading to the rear alley.

  The alley was empty but for a closed carriage moving quickly away, the driver whipping the horse into a full run.

  7

  The Garden District

  PEREGRINE THREW MONEY at the driver, angry even though he knew there was no reason to blame the man for losing the other carriage in the traffic of St. Charles Avenue.

  The woman who had killed Evangeline, and who had come close to killing Peregrine—assuming it wasn’t all the creation of a bizarre fantasy—had gotten away from him again. Peregrine felt like a hapless wanderer, pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp through the night. Each time he got tantalizingly close to the deadly fairy, she would pull away and vanish. The chase was leading him deeper and deeper into a perilous swamp, even though the dangers might have been confined within his mind, which had suffered a series of terrible shocks since he’d marched off to war.