Well, hell, what was a girl to do when she was, like, practically force-fed for an entire debutante season at one breakfast, brunch, luncheon, tea, cocktail party, dinner, supper, a grand total of five hundred disgusting party meals one right after another?
After all, this was New Orleans, where hostesses couldn’t show their faces in public, not to mention polite society, if they didn’t lay on buffets of oysters and shrimp and crawfish floating in béarnaise, béchamel, beurre blanc, cream, hollandaise, lemon-butter, mushroom, mustard, remoulade, and veloute sauces. And that was for starters.
Just the thought of the food she’d faced since the deb season began made Zoe want to puke, or, as her friend Chloe would say, talk to Ralph on the big white phone.
Zoe stepped into her pink and white bathroom and did that very thing, smartly.
Zoe was very good at praying to the porcelain goddess, or, as her father would say, vomiting.
It was one of her talents that Ma Elise, her great-grandmother, had failed to enumerate when catching Sam Adams up to speed on the family. No, Ma Elise hadn’t talked to Sam, who was visiting Ma Elise and her aunt Kitty a couple of blocks away in the house where they lived together on Third Street, about Zoe’s daily vomiting.
But, yes, Zoe actually did do a few things other than sleep, try on endless clothes (size three) that she wore to all those parties, and look at herself in the mirror—not that Ma Elise knew about them all.
For one thing, she was quite a little entrepreneur.
Her father, Church, was a doctor, right? Which meant he could write prescriptions, right? And left lots of those cute little ’script pads lying around, right?
Zoe had been able to fake his signature since she was eleven years old and began forging notes to her teachers down the street at McGehee so she could skip school and hang out smoking cigarettes in Lafayette Cemetery.
Actually, she got very good at signatures, so good, in fact, that it wasn’t long before she was writing notes for anybody who had five bucks.
Another thing about Zoe—she was very careful with all that green. She didn’t spend her earnings, but had it changed into silver dollars and built towers of gilt, castles, and silos of coins, all over her bedroom. They beat the hell out of dollhouses, except she had to dismantle them every day before the cook or housekeeper came sneaking around. No matter how many KEEP OUT—THIS MEANS YOU!!! signs she posted on her door, no one ever did. They had orders from her father to lurk—standing in for her mother, who had run off and left her long before the silver skyscrapers began.
It was very complicated, Zoe thought, this business in life of acquiring and losing. You could earn all the silver dollars you wanted to, and then, poof! someone could break in and steal them. Or you could have a mom one day, and then, shazam! she’d flown the old coop before her little biddy was even half grown. So much for all those stories about mother hens. And then there were pounds—as in fat. They were the opposite of money and mothers. Once you collected them, you couldn’t ever get shut of them. They’d hang around for the rest of your life like glop on your waist and hips and thighs. Disgusting.
Some things you couldn’t hold on to. Some things you couldn’t lose. It was all very random. Very complicated.
But back to the ’script pads. By the time Zoe was twelve, she and her friends were serious devotees of uppers and downers. One of their all-time favorites was ’ludes. It was, like, so funny to watch people ’lude out and fall down, especially at those dumb dance parties their mothers (her father) made them go to, you could die laughing when people went kaboom.
Though after a while that got dangerous.
Oh, no, not the ’ludes. ’Ludes wouldn’t hurt you. But getting caught writing ’scripts could. Like fry you. Like Big-Time Trauma. Like, puhleeze, who needed the grief?
Especially if you were a smart little girl like Zoe who could figure things out.
What Zoe had figured out a couple years ago, well, actually she hadn’t figured it out—it was more like she fell into it, but that was a trick in itself, wasn’t it? Like, some people could fall into a pot of gold and think it was just another pile of shit. Zoe kept her eyes open. She knew the diff.
It all started at her friend Chloe Biedenharn’s first tea, the announcement party for her debut. Zoe was in the ground-floor bathroom behind the stairs in Chloe’s grandmother’s big old house over on St. Charles, honking up two or three stellar lines of coke by herself like a greedy porker, when Dr. Cecil Little came barging in.
“Why, excuse me, darlin’,” he’d said, all flustered-like. He turned away, but she saw him sneak a peek. That’s ’cause he thought she was taking a pee and thought he might see something. You’d think they’d get used to it, seeing something, since they were doctors, but they were all like that, all her father’s friends and her friends’ fathers—who were all the same people really. Trying to sneak peeks and cop feels and then pretend they weren’t. It was enough to make you puke.
But then he caught her act, zeroed in on what she was doing.
“Why, Zoe darlin’,” he’d said, easing back into the room with his long, skinny arms like a praying mantis and shutting the door.
Locking it. For a minute there Zoe thought she was going to have to yell fire! fire! that was what old Ida over to Ma Elise’s house had told her to do when rape was in the air.
“You got some more of that sugar to share with your uncle Cecil?” he’d asked.
Boy, was she relieved. That was all he wanted. Why, sure, she’d said, reached in her little evening bag, hauled out her stash, and cut him two lines on the mirror of the solid gold compact her daddy’d given her for high school graduation.
Sure as shooting he’d dug out his wad of hundreds and peeled off one for tooting, then wiped off the damp end and tucked it down the front of her blue party dress.
“Don’t guess you got any more where that come from, do you, sugah?”
“Why, Dr. Little”—and she truly was surprised—“I’d of thought you’d have plenty of access.”
“Oh, no, Miss Blue Eyes. You ought to know doctors are very careful about that. Don’t ever like to be holding.”
“You don’t say.”
Zoe had turned back to the vanity by then, checking out her mess of curls, her lipstick, and brushing around her nose. There was nothing more embarrassing than coming back from the Ladies with coke all over your face. But all the time she as thinking.
“So what do you do for blow?” she asked.
“Grub. Like I did just now.”
“That’s not exactly grubbing, Dr. Little.” She grinned, deepening her dimples.
She knew that trick always caused a man like Dr. Little to want to stick his tongue in them. It was smart—to distract a man when you were doing business. ’Course, they just thought she was a dumb little twat they were chatting up, so they never figured that out. She’d learned the bit from watching old Bette Davis movies on the VCR. Girl didn’t have a mama grabbed her role models wherever.
“I wouldn’t call a C-note grubbing,” she said.
“Well, hell!” He laughed his hearty there’s-lots-more-where-that-came-from-little-girl laugh.
Then, like it was an egg she could hold in her hand, it came to her—oval and perfect and self-contained—her plan.
But right now, this very minute, the doorbell was ringing. They were here, the Mardi Gras army. Zoe threw on a pink silk robe and ran down the stairs.
Leading the troupe were her great-grandmother, Ma Elise, and Ida, who’d been with her a hundred years, the two little old ladies toddling in, leaning on each other, looking for all the world like a matched pair of salt and pepper shakers. Following them were Aunt Kitty and her friend Sam. They were all here to watch her get dressed and keep her company while drinking champagne and eating turkey sandwiches.
Close behind was the dressmaker she’d seen for a thousand fittings, who’d made the incredible white and silver gown she’d wear tonight with its mantle and a twenty-foot train. It was restin
g in a room of its own across the hall. The hairdresser was trailed by a makeup artist. Mr. Adler insisted on coming himself from his Canal Street store, carrying dark blue velvet boxes holding the diamonds and pearls her daddy had bought her. A lady from the newspaper asked a million stupid questions. She grinned for a photographer.
They would comb her and curry her and document her and then, for the last time this season, fold her into a limo. This time she’d be all by herself, she and The Dress (there would be room for no one else) and whisk her off to view the parade and on to the ball. And finally, except for the Queen’s Breakfast, another meal, it would all be over.
Unless she stayed in New Orleans, of course, where no one would ever forget or let her forget she’d been Queen of Comus. Not for the rest of her life. Not for one red-hot moment.
Five
SAM STOOD TRANSFIXED at the edge of the glittering ballroom. And she’d spent no little time at fancy-dress affairs, having grown up in the white-gloved, I’m-so-charmed-to-meet-you Piedmont Driving Club, Sweet-Briar-or-Randolph-Macon-for-school, Smith-or-Vassar-if-you-were-smart set in Atlanta. She’d worn more than a few silver slippers and full-skirted ballgowns, but none of it held a candle to this Maskers Dance of the Mystick Crewe of Comus.
Just for starters, the security at New Orleans’s Municipal Auditorium was drum-tight. Compared to this, the White House dinner she’d once attended with her uncle George was loosey-goosey.
The evening before, Kitty and Ma Elise had primed her with more details on the enormity of Carnival, the preparations for one beginning as soon as the previous year’s was done.
“Every year each krewe—that’s a carnival organization—” said Kitty.
“I know,” said Sam.
“—has to pick a theme. The newer, tackier ones choose things like TV shows or cartoon characters, pop stuff. The Old Guard sticks to the classics, mythology. Then, once you have a theme, there are the parade floats to be designed and built. Costumes to be made”—she ticked them off—“invitations, party favors, and doubloons to throw off floats for the crowds. And, of course, invitation lists to scrutinize.”
“Courts to be chosen—and queens,” piped up Ma Elise. The still-beautiful old lady was wearing a purple lace dressing gown, tucked into a wing chair, and sipping cognac half as old as she was. “Did Kitty tell you the one about the Queen of Rex whose pushy father insisted she be crowned? So that year’s Queen of Comus, to whom she’d have to pay her respects when their balls ended, quietly resigned, and they replaced her with a shopgirl? So Miss Upstart Queen of Rex had to bow to a—well, she was from a decent family—but to this Uptown crowd she was a nobody?”
Sam and Kitty laughed.
“What?” Ma Elise said.
“I think you just told her, Meems,” said Kitty.
“Oh, well, anyway, where was I? Preparations—there are decorations for the balls, of course. Then scripts, sets, and costumes for the tableaux—those are where members of the krewes and their ladies pose like living dioramas, acting out stories. It’s silly, really, you’ll see. And, my goodness, music, food—lunches, dinners, post-ball breakfasts. All sorts of people to be seen to—float drivers, flambeaux carriers, cooks, waiters.”
“It’s like each krewe,” said Kitty, “having at the most a couple hundred members, building the Rose Parade, a ballet, and an opera rolled into one every single year. And these are men with businesses to run, professions, families. Which is why the city’s never moved out of the Stone Age.”
“It’s true.” Ma Elise nodded. “But don’t ever tell anybody we said so.”
“Sure, it’s a lot of fun,” Kitty continued, “but it’s also why everything’s gone to pot. We can hardly compete with the state of Mississippi, for chrissakes, much less the Japanese, because all our energy goes into making parties, riding floats, fluffing up our ballgowns.”
But now as Sam smoothed the skirt of her own deep turquoise gown and looked around this magnificent ballroom, she was glad these people had gone to all the trouble. The women were done up to a fare-thee-well in satins and ermines and bugle-beads, jet, and jasmine, and lace which had blinded more than one Belgian nun—puffed bouquets of ladies dressed by Lacroix, Saint Laurent, Chanel, and de la Renta—joyfully overdressed, overjeweled, and overperfumed. It was quite wonderful, this fantasyland of white and silver, Comus’s theme this year being The Winter’s Tale. Crystal chandeliers showered thousands of points of lights down on the costumed crowd. Masses of snowy lilies and roses, narcissi, and forced magnolias perfumed the waltz-filled air.
It was a spectacular explosion of diamonds and pearls, woodwinds and brass, a swirl of sound and illumination.
For the moment Sam put it out of her mind that Comus and this ball were a throwback to all that was snobbish, discriminatory, racist, and exclusionary.
Kitty and Ma Elise had talked about that last night too, explaining and bemoaning, yet in some ways justifying.
“The old-society, old-money version of Carnival has nothing whatsoever to do with what the public sees,” Ma Elise explained. “Nothing to do with the hoi polloi, the nouveaux, and certainly nothing to do with blacks or Jews. I’m not saying that’s right. I’m saying that’s the way it’s always been. Except that, you know, the very first Rex was a Jew named Louis Salomon, and, in fact, the organization of Rex has always had some Jewish members. But a Jew could never be Rex. Rex must call on Comus, don’t you know, at the end of their two balls, and except for a very few spectators at the Comus ball recently, well, it’s just not done—”
“That’s—” Sam started.
“Ridiculous. I know. But that’s how it is. Now, as for blacks, just like the gays, they have their own krewes, their own parades. In fact, Zulu is the first parade to roll Mardi Gras morning, throwing coconuts as favors. And did you see the black Indians?” Sam shook her head. “Oh, my dear, you must. Tribes like the Wild Tchopitoulas with the most fantastic costumes. Beading and feathers—and they dance. It’s quite wonderful. And Comus still uses black flambeaux carriers to light the parade route. But that’s all street business.”
The real Carnival, Kitty explained, the one that counted, the one that the Lees knew, took place behind closed doors. The real Carnival traced its lineage back to the 1850s. It was controlled by private men’s clubs like the Pickwick, the Boston, and the Louisiana, who in turn were the power behind the old-line Carnival organizations. Boston Club was mostly Rex. Pickwick numbered many of the Mystick Crewe of Comus. It was these clubmen’s debutante daughters, like Zoe, who filled the courts of each year’s balls. And those balls—which were conducted with all the formality and secrecy and protocol of the court of Louis XIV—were closed to everyone except that tiny, tight fistful of New Orleans’s white elite who passed the torch from father to son. The real Carnival couldn’t be broached, the keys not bought, begged, borrowed, or stolen.
And only occasionally was an outsider like Sam allowed a peep.
“Quick,” said Kitty, a powder puff in pink and gold, “we’ll grab those two seats.” She pushed Sam right past the boutonniered committeeman who was trying to help them to chairs near the stage in the reserved callout section.
“She had first dibs.” Sam nodded toward a titanic dowager upholstered in silver, who fixed them with a glacial glare.
“Tough titty,” Kitty spat out.
So much for grace and gentility.
Kitty pointed toward the stage. “Here we go. Heads up. The processional’s beginning.” Trumpets blared. The masked king, a bowlegged old geezer in a short little doublet of white and silver, would have fared better in long pants than the obligatory tights. He took his seat beneath a huge sculptured crown of gold, looking for all the world like a bantam rooster. Then each of the six maids was individually presented with no less pomp than if it were her wedding day.
“Do they have to be blond?” Sam whispered.
“It helps. Blond and blueblooded.”
“And rich.”
“Not always
. Some of them are born to the lace—good blood, no bucks. The organization passes the hat, but”—Kitty waggled a hand—“it’s a hard way to go. Kissing ass for all those parties and clothes.”
A riotous fanfare cut loose. The audience stood as one and applauded.
“Hip, hip! Hip, hip!”
“Elizabeth the Second, no doubt,” said Sam.
Kitty shook her head. “No, it’s Zoe. This is it—the moment. They say once you’ve been Queen of Comus you might as well die and go to heaven, ’cause it don’t get no better.”
The cheers swelled to a roar.
“And is that true?” Sam yelled above it.
“Sure was in my case. All the rest of it’s been downhill. Forever after.”
Sam turned back to Zoe, and memory transformed her into Kitty at that age. Kitty was a beautiful woman now, but Sam had known her then—unblemished red-gold and pink and cream. How dazzling she must have been in her diamonds and silk train. Like a dewy ripe peach about to be plucked—by Lester Lee. Gorgeous, dashing, aristocratic, crazy, weak Lester, who would blow his brains and Kitty’s dreams to hell after 364 days and nights of love.
Sam shook her head, and the queen turned back into Zoe, who was in her own right quite heart-stoppingly splendid. When Sam had last seen her, Kitty’s niece was fully made up and coiffed but had left her house in her underwear beneath a dressing gown so as not to wrinkle The Dress.
Here she was in full, glorious regalia. Though far too thin and pale, high spots of excitement colored her cheeks. And there was The Dress—that magnificent, low-necked gown of white satin embroidered with bows of silver sequins. Around her shoulders rose a high, plumed ruff of net and diamante. Her diamonds and pearls were perfection, including a crown set atop her own glory of dark curls. Behind her flowed twenty feet of silver satin edged with ermine.
“Isn’t she something?” said Sam. “Too bad she has to spend the evening chatting up the king. He looks like a real toad.”
“He is. And older than Church. But his family’s so grand, we don’t talk about that.”
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