Don’t run.
Walk.
She cut a wide circle through the neighborhood and then pointed herself in the direction of home.
* * *
Crossing the Rue Notre Dame, Martine arrived back in her own district but kept walking. She heard the noon whistle from the railroad, and still she went on. She walked until every tremor left her body and relief took their place. Then she retraced her steps up to a little green park and drank at the water fountain. She couldn’t go home just yet, and was suddenly so tired. She sat down on a bench. A deep feeling of revulsion clouded her senses. Had she done something to give the wrong impression to Mr. Braddock? If she had she couldn’t think of it.
A situation like this had happened to her sister Elodie once. An employer like Braddock. Elodie had fled too, but without being able to call upon recent references she was never able to find another position. It was lucky for her that she was already engaged to be married at the time, and was soon able to fall back on her husband’s income. Martine had no such prospects. She couldn’t just run out on a job. The Rougeauxes were not desperate, but the family depended on Martine’s contribution, especially where Maxwell’s future education was concerned.
Tears rolled down her cheeks and she rummaged in her pockets for a handkerchief, thankful that at least for the moment there was no one else around. At last she blew her nose and felt a measure calmer. Then that same voice of self-preservation spoke again. This time it said: Eat your lunch.
From her handbag Martine drew out the sandwich wrapped in a cloth napkin that her mother had prepared for her early that morning, half a baguette stuffed with cold cuts, pickles and Momma’s homemade mustard. A man’s kind of lunch. It was cut in half again so two twin sandwiches lay there on the napkin on her knees. She ate one, diligently chewing every bite. There were crows in the trees, and there was a man in worn-out clothes poking around in a rubbish bin.
Now quit feeling sorry for yourself, and go see Didi. That was the order that punctuated the end of her shock. She got up and with some effort she caught the eye of the man by the bin. She lifted up the second sandwich in the napkin so he could see it and laid it down on the bench. Then she hightailed it to her sister’s.
* * *
At this hour the older children would be at school; Didi would be home with the youngest and the two little ones she minded for a neighbor. She came to the door with a finger to her lips. The children were napping.
Elodie, ten years Martine’s senior, had always seemed to her like a grown woman. She had much of their parents’ solidity, and could be every bit as practical and stern, but she also knew things no one else did, and didn’t waste time pushing against something that wasn’t going to budge.
Once, a year ago, Martine had spent much of the day so engrossed in Madame Lambert’s copy of Lord Jim that she felt as if she were living in two worlds at the same time. When Didi came to see the family that evening she took one look at her sister, who was kneeling on the floor with the three children around her neck, and said, “Well, look at you, surrounded on all sides by the open sea.” And not long after that, Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights secretly made Martine’s heart flutter, and he lived in her mind as she went about her work. On an afternoon when the two sisters were helping Momma prepare a crate of pears for canning, Didi pronounced, “He’s no good.”
“Who’s not?” asked Martine.
“Your new beau,” Didi said, and winked before Martine could object.
But Elodie had much to say on important matters too, and after Martine had related the story of that morning at the Braddocks’, her sister stayed quiet a good while.
“You can’t go back there,” Didi said at last. “Won’t be nothing but a tangled mess.” She rose and went to the sideboard where she had some potatoes soaking in a basin.
Martine bit her lip. “What am I going to do then?”
“Find something else.”
“Damn.”
Didi turned back toward her. “You swearing now?”
“Only on special occasions.”
Didi laughed. “Well this one is worth it. No doubt about that.” She gazed out the little window over the kitchen sink. “Listen,” she said, “why don’t you go down to the placement office? It’s not even noon yet. Get a jump on things.”
* * *
Half an hour later Martine was climbing the stairs to the downtown office of the placement agency, a dimly lit set of rooms on the second floor of a brick building off St. Laurent Boulevard. The waiting area was packed; Martine certainly wasn’t alone in seeking work. When it was her turn, the clerk behind the front desk handed her a form and a pencil. Martine filled out her name, age and qualifications, but stopped cold at the place for references. She couldn’t use the Braddocks, obviously. Madame Lambert was dead, and her employer from before that was almost four years ago. How would she explain that kind of gap? She slowly laid down the pencil and said she’d have to come back the next day with the form. Her deft hands were suddenly clumsy, folding the paper and putting it away in her handbag. What little hope she’d had crumpled into her throat and threatened to force its way out in tears. Damn it if she hadn’t already cried enough for one day. She headed for the stairs. Outside the sunlight hit her eyes and she was momentarily blinded, and in that second of blindness she heard her name.
“Martine Rougeaux, is that you?”
Blinking furiously, she quickly recognized the approaching figure. It was Lucille Travis, her old school friend.
“It is you,” cried Lucille, seizing Martine’s hands. “My, it’s been so long!”
“Lucille,” said Martine. The nightclub dancer who had quit church two or three years ago. The wayward one, the older people called her. Lucille’s older brother had died a soldier in the Great War, and her father had passed on right after she left school. Martine had heard lately that her mother was ailing, and that her youngest brother Tony was struggling to stay in school. People shook their heads over that.
Martine had imagined that Lucille went off to cheapen herself in those clubs, and as her parents discouraged the friendship she had let it drift. She remembered with a sudden shame how she had quit going by Lucille’s house, had once even pretended not to be home when Lucille had come by.
But Lucille didn’t look like a lost woman now, standing there right before her on the sidewalk. Her face looked healthy and open, if a little tired, and happy to see her old friend, as if Martine had never done her any wrong. Martine took in the stylish hat with a dark red ribbon that matched her dress and handbag, but it was the smile that outshone everything else.
“I can’t believe it,” said Martine. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, just fine,” said Lucille, “but I’m late. Can you walk with me a minute?”
They turned the corner onto St. Laurent. Lucille asked Martine what she was doing downtown and how were all her family, and Martine asked her the same. A moment later they stood before the Club Marcel, an upscale place with a couple of side doors down a little alleyway.
“Rehearsal,” Lucille said, with a note of apology. She was not unaware of the attitudes that surrounded what she did.
Just then one of the side doors flung open and another young woman appeared.
“There you are,” she said, heading for Lucille. “Mr. Alain is having a conniption. The piano player showed up drunk, and he threw him out on his ear!”
“Hey, Donnae, this is my old friend Martine,” said Lucille.
The young woman nodded at Martine over her shoulder and turned back to Lucille. “You better come in, we’ll have to do what we can without him.”
Lucille looked at Martine. “Are you busy right now? You want to fill in for an hour? I know you play. Mr. Alain will give you five bucks.” Lucille’s eager tone pulled on Martine’s heart, as if they were still children and her friend wanted her to visit.
Martine sucked in her breath. “I don’t know,” she hesitated, “I don’t have to be anywhere, bu
t….” What would her parents think? Not only socializing there on the street with Lucille, but walking straight into a nightclub? On the other hand, it was daytime, just a rehearsal, just an hour, and maybe they need never know….
“Come on,” said Donnae, catching one of Martine’s arms. And with that she was inside Club Marcel.
The three women hustled down a corridor and up some stairs, pushing through a door that opened into a large hall with a stage, a long bar to one side, and an open floor full of tables and chairs. Five or six other women in partial costume milled around or practiced steps. Lucille and Donnae took Martine over to one end of the bar where a tall white man with slicked-back hair shouted in French into a telephone. Donnae interrupted him.
“Mr. Alain, we’ve got a piano player,” she said, loud enough for him to hear.
He turned around, looked Martine up and down rapidly, said something curt into the telephone and hung up.
The next thing Martine knew she was seated on the lacquered bench of a massive grand piano, looking over the sheet music. She spent a few minutes warming up, getting it right. Mr. Alain leaned down and snapped his fingers, telling her to up the tempo. Martine had never touched a grand piano before. She played the spinet at home, of course, and the old upright belonging to the church, but never had music come to life under her fingers in such large and sonorous tones as these. The sound filled the hall around her, and seemed to fill every hall that echoed inside of her too.
Every now and then she looked up at the dancers, who flowed and hopped and turned with the music. They were dancing in their drawers, but not any kind of drawers Martine had ever seen. None of the women in her family had undergarments studded with rhinestones, that was one thing she could be sure of. Lucille was the most luminous of all. For every resonant tone of the piano, Lucille responded in the suppleness of her movements. Nothing lewd in it at all. If anything it was grace Martine saw, and fun.
Before she knew it, it was over.
The dancers dabbed at themselves with towels and Lucille took Martine’s arm and led her over to the bar. “Well done!” she told her several times, “you played that thing right out!”
Mr. Alain was leaning on the polished surface of the bar smoking a cigarette. He reached into his coat and pulled out a billfold, from which he withdrew a five-dollar bill and held it out to Martine with two fingers. This was more than she made in a week working at the Braddocks’. Taking the money, she spotted a row of beer bottles just behind him on a shelf, bearing the familiar Rougeaux label. She sent them a silent message: Don’t tell Papa.
Lucille put a coat on over her dancing costume and walked Martine outside. It was quiet in the little alleyway outside the door, removed now from the music in the hall and the traffic from the boulevard.
“It sure is good to see you, Martine,” said Lucille. “You were always kind to me.” Martine shook her head, actually she was not and she hadn’t been. But Lucille didn’t seem to notice the gesture. “Folks used to look at me like I was some kind of wild animal,” she went on. It appeared being spurned by people in the neighborhood still hurt. Martine’s shame returned and her cheeks flushed. No wonder Lucille had quit church.
“I suppose I seem a little wild to you,” said Lucille, her eyes on the ground. “I know what folks said about me. I try not to think about it too much. Somebody’s got to pay the bills, take care of my momma, keep my brother in school.” Lucille looked up at her. “Do you think I’m a bad person? Aw, you probably wouldn’t tell me even if you did. You must think I’m crazy, going on like this.”
Martine was duly overwhelmed. “No, surely I don’t,” she said. “I admire you.”
Lucille met her eyes in a grateful look.
“You should be proud,” continued Martine, “taking care of your family all alone. Why is it anyone else’s business how you get your money? I saw you in that dance hall. I can see you work hard. And you’re good at it too. You dance like an angel. You’re beautiful!”
At that Lucille covered her whole face with her hands and hunched forward. Her shoulders shook. Martine wiped at her own eyes.
“Listen, I’ll tell you something,” Martine said, hurrying to give Lucille her last clean handkerchief. “I’m out of a job because the man of the house tried to get too friendly today. Scared the living life out of me.”
Lucille dabbed at her face with Martine’s handkerchief and blew her nose.
“That dirty dog,” she whispered. “Believe me, I know the kind.”
The two girls were quiet a minute. Lucille twisted the handkerchief.
“Martine,” she said, “I could use some help at my house. My momma is getting weaker and I need someone to help look after her and Tony while I’m working. Someone who could stay over the night a few times a week. I can pay.”
“You all need someone to help?” said Martine, suddenly feeling as if she were floating.
Martine walked away in a daze. Why was it the Rougeaux household could contribute music and alcohol to places like nightclubs but drew the moral line at associating with dancing girls? If she was going to work for Lucille she was going to have to get her parents’ permission. To convince Papa, she’d have to get Momma on her side first, and for that she’d need Didi again.
But she didn’t go straight to her sister’s house this time. It was the money, Mr. Alain’s five-dollar bill tucked away in her handbag. It became another live thing, like the grand piano, chirping with a song only she could hear. This money was of a different kind than the money she knew; gained so easily and illicitly, it seemed both sin and windfall. She should donate it to the church, that’s what she should do. And that’s what she resolved to do, even as she realized she stood before the ornate, polished doorway of the Blanc et Levesque Bookshop.
She could see stacks of books, visible through the gilded letters on the shop windows, great shelves of books that disappeared into the shadowy ceiling. Something beautiful in there could be hers.
When she emerged again she carried a thick volume of the great English poets, bound in sturdy, charcoal-colored cloth. Her cheeks burned. She had the book, wrapped in paper and now squeezed into her handbag, and she had two dollars and thirty-five cents left over. That she would give to God.
Martine’s feet flew. In under twenty minutes she rounded the corner onto Rue Delisle, where the stately grey stone of the Union Congregational Church came into view. A man was busy with a broom, sweeping the sidewalk around the two linden trees that flanked the arched entryway. Martine hopped up the three stairs to the door and skipped inside.
The collection box was kept in the church office on weekdays. Martine heard the voice of the new young minister, the Reverend Charles Este, finishing up a conversation with his secretary and two women from the community, about plans for renovating the basement. The Reverend had only been instated that month, but already initiatives were afoot for numerous new projects. He was a person who inspired tremendous confidence in those around him, and he did so with great warmth.
Martine hesitated in the foyer, outside the half-open office door. Reverend Este caught sight of her as he followed the ladies to the door.
“Miss Rougeaux,” he said, treating her to his wide smile. He already knew most of the congregation by name. “What brings you here on a weekday?”
“Just a donation,” she said. The Rougeauxes gave to the collection plate each Sunday, so it was unusual to be bringing money now. “I have something extra, Reverend,” she tried again, “I wanted to bring it in before I was tempted to spend it.” She dug in her pocket for the two dollars and change, and then held it out to him.
“Very thoughtful of you,” Reverend Este said, taking the money to the collection box and waving her inside the office toward a chair, “to give us your extra.” He took his seat behind the desk. “Have you something on your mind, Miss Rougeaux?”
His look was so kind, that despite herself she sat down and told him she’d run into an old friend, and that her friend just sort of
worked at a nightclub, and that she was kind of thinking about helping her out at home.
“That sounds like a very beneficial kind of arrangement,” he said, smiling again.
“Yes,” said Martine, “especially since this morning I lost my job.”
“Is that so?” he leaned forward and rested his broad chin on his clasped hands.
“And Lucille, my friend, said I was always so nice to her…” surely she was taking up the Reverend’s time now, but she couldn’t seem to help it. “It’s not true though, not true at all. My parents don’t approve of dancing, of girls going into clubs, and they didn’t want us to stay friends. And I don’t suppose they’ll let me work for her.”
“So there’s the rub,” said the Reverend.
“But I really think I could. Help them. They say her little brother Tony is doing bad in school. I was good at school, I could help him too, not just keep the house.” She saw Tony in the street sometimes, running around with the other boys. He was ten and always outgrowing his britches. Last summer she’d seen Mrs. Travis, walking slowly with a cane and carrying groceries. Martine hadn’t seen her since then, maybe she was too ill to go shopping now, and she thought with another pang that she hadn’t offered any help to Mrs. Travis with that heavy bag. She’d turned her back on her because she hadn’t wanted to risk seeing Lucille, and Mrs. Travis had always been kind to her. Martine bit her thumbnail.
“But your parents may object,” said the Reverend.
“I suppose they want to protect me,” said Martine, though this had not before occurred to her.
Reverend Este nodded sympathetically. “I say,” he said, “does your friend Lucille ever come to church?”
“No sir,” she said, “they used to. I mean her family, the Travises, before her papa died.”
“Well,” he said, “I hope she might come again one day. All God’s creation is welcome here.”
“Yes sir.” Martine stood. “Thank you.” She turned to go.
House of Rougeaux Page 12