Skye Cameron

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  Courtney knocked on the door to say that someone wanted to speak to M’sieu Robert, and I took the list and invitation upstairs to Aunt Natalie. She shrugged over one and stared at the other. Caro had dried herself somewhat sketchily and she came dancing along the gallery after me, to regard the invitation with equal interest.

  “Do you mean that my husband actually wishes us to attend an affair given while this barbarian is in Aurore’s house?” Aunt Natalie asked.

  “Probably it will be easier for Tante Aurore if we do,” I suggested.

  “May I also attend, Maman?” Caro pleaded. “Never have I seen a murderer. It would be very exciting.”

  “But certainly you will not attend,” said Aunt Natalie firmly. “And you may go to your room now and stay there until you have learned not to speak of this man as a murderer. Whether he is, or is not, is hardly your concern. These are matters beyond your comprehension, ma petite. Go now—at once.”

  Caro went skipping off as gaily as though she did not know she was being banished by way of punishment. Aunt Natalie had finished her rinsing and was polishing the last of the crystal drops. Since there was nothing more to do, I went out on the gallery toward Papa’s room. I wanted to tell him what Uncle Robert had said about Courtney.

  Mama stood outside his door, staring absently into the courtyard. She did not see me at once, and in that unguarded moment she looked so completely lost and lonely that my heart went out to her. As long as I could remember, my mother had been gay and irresponsible, leaning entirely upon my father for guidance and good judgment. And now there was no one on whom she could lean. But even as I walked toward her, I thrust back this unexpected sympathy. Too well I remembered how gaily she had flirted with Courtney, how carefree she had seemed that day in the Garden District, with never a thought for my father here at home. I must not forget. I did not dare to trust her.

  As I reached her, my mother saw me and spoke softly. “I couldn’t stay in there with him any longer. Bruce doesn’t care what becomes of me. I think he would die, if he could.”

  “Hush!” I said, fearful lest Papa hear her through the gallery window. “You mustn’t say that—you mustn’t think it!”

  I gave up my futile notion of talking to Papa and went to my own room. Mama followed me and sat in the small rosewood rocker that seemed to suit her dainty person so well. In her hands she held a magazine, which I supposed she had been reading to Papa. She opened it now on her knees and held it out to me.

  “Today this came by post. I took it to your father’s room and read it to him. I thought it might strike some echo, might make him want to take his pen in hand again.”

  I looked at the magazine and saw that it contained the last piece my father had written before his accident. It was called “A Scotsman Looks at Boston.” Glancing at the words, I could remember the evening when Papa himself had read the piece aloud to us in its first draft. We had laughed at his kindly humor and loved the affectionate picture of the city which his words evoked. The piece had been the result of a holiday trip he and Mama had taken together earlier.

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have read it to him,” Mama said, dabbing at her eyes with a scrap of handkerchief. “But I thought it might bring back a happy time to him, and perhaps make him want to write something more. He could write about New Orleans if he wanted to, and I told him so. He knows the city well enough from the days when he first came here, before we were married. You and I could be eyes for him and bring him new material, if only he were willing to take hold.”

  Her solution would have been fine, had Papa taken any real interest in living. But he no longer wanted to write and how could we urge him to what he had lost interest in?

  TEN

  The days before Justin’s party became suddenly filled with preparation. Aunt Natalie, having consulted with her husband, approached me gently on the subject of a new dress.

  “For New Orleans one needs light, summery things,” she told me. “It’s quite natural that your New England wardrobe is not entirely suitable.”

  I didn’t explain that its lack of suitability was due mainly to my lack of interest in clothes. A lack which grew from my desire to avoid any sense of comparison with my mother.

  “It is your uncle’s desire that you dress well on this occasion,” Aunt Natalie went on. “The modiste is coming to consult with us this afternoon and to take your measurements. After all, we wish you to look charming for Courtney that night.”

  A certain resistance began to stiffen within me. If others would only let us alone, Courtney and I might develop a friendship between us—and who knew where it might lead? But I did not like to feel that I was being thrust upon him from every quarter. I did not like to be dressed like a doll and held up for him to admire. Courtney had been nice to me when I wore my brown foulard. He had never called me a wren.

  Anger flashed through me as I remembered. A brown wren! Oh, if only I could show his brother! But I knew how beautiful my mother would look and as always I feared what I so often glimpsed in the eyes of those who saw us together.

  Mama and Aunt Natalie were both present when the dressmaker came for my fittings. Mama, of course, was delighted at the prospect of attending Justin’s party. Away from my father’s room and the unhappiness there, she seemed like a bird escaped from its cage. She took pleasure in dressing me up, though she had ceased to prattle about Courtney as an eligible young man.

  On the morning of the party Delphine took a hand. She washed my hair and afterwards I sat with my back to the sun on the second-floor gallery, while she dried it with fluffy towels, scented as always with vetiver, that pleasant root used so often in New Orleans. She had washed my mother’s hair first, and Mama sat near me, her heavy tresses shining darkly in the sun.

  Delphine pressed the towel about my shoulders and fluffed my red hair over it. Then she touched a strand and let the drying tendrils cling to her fingers.

  “The color is perhaps not comme il faut, mam’zelle, but it would be better to display it in a style more elegant. If mam’zelle will permit me—”

  “But of course!” Mama cried. “Let Delphine dress your hair for you tonight. Why not try a new coiffure as soon as her hair is dry enough, Delphine? We can make a beautiful lady of her tonight, not only with the charming new dress, but with a lovely hair style as well. You will never find a husband, Skye, if you always dress like a wren.”

  There was the detestable word thrown at me again. I was tempted to let them see what they could do with me so that no one would ever again call me a wren.

  Delphine’s dark eyes betrayed nothing except the veiled scorn that seemed so often to be in them.

  “Perhaps mam’zelle is afraid to let herself be beautiful?” she said softly, and then went on before I could speak. “Soon the sun will make the hair dry enough. In Madame Natalie’s room there is a great mirror and the light is excellent. Come soon, mam’zelle. I will go now to prepare.”

  She did not listen for my consent or refusal, but went quickly away, her head held high in its blue tignon. I had the strange feeling that while I might stand against Aunt Natalie and my mother, and even oppose Uncle Robert at times, I would be powerless in Delphine’s hands. Her assurance compelled obedience. I did not like the thing she had hinted—that I was afraid to be beautiful. What if I picked up her challenge? What if I showed them all I was not afraid?

  “You will be a succès fou when Delphine is through with you, Skye,” Mama assured me. “As a girl she learned to be an expert coiffeuse from a hairdresser in Paris.”

  Paris? So that was why Delphine’s accent was so markedly that of an educated Frenchwoman.

  “How did a Negro slave happen to study in Paris?” I asked.

  Mama rolled her eyes heavenward. “Ma foi! Delphine was never a slave, nor her mother before her. They are of the gens de couleur libres, a free people of color. Indeed”—she lowered her voice—“her mother was one of those on Rampart Street. A placée. The custom, most fortunately, is no mor
e. Her father sent his daughter to France for an education. But since he would not have her follow in the mother’s steps she was also taught a suitable way to earn a living. However, she came at length to this house and has worked here ever since.”

  “What is a placée?” I asked, fluffing my hair again with the towels to encourage its drying.

  “This is not a subject which ladies discuss,” Mama told me, suddenly prim.

  “If you’ve never discussed it, then how do you know anything about it?” I demanded.

  She had the grace to laugh a little. “Very well. You are, after all, of more than marriageable age and old enough to learn of these matters. Of course these wicked, old-fashioned ways are now dead. But up to the time of the war when Creoles were nearly all wealthy, a young man would often take a colored mistress and keep her in a house on Rampart Street. The girls were all quadroons, or perhaps even lighter than that, and they were well educated and carefully chaperoned by their mothers.”

  “I’ve heard of the quadroon balls,” I said.

  Mama nodded. “These girls were presented at such balls, where a gentleman could meet them and perhaps become the ‘protector’ of the girl of his choice.”

  “All this was done openly?” I asked.

  Mama looked shocked. “Not so far as ladies were concerned. Wives and mothers and sweethearts were supposed to know nothing of such matters. And of course, when a gentleman married, he must never see his quadroon sweetheart again. At least his wife hoped that he would not. Though of course he was obliged to make a settlement that would take care of her for her lifetime, and of any children there might be. A girl who was so chosen was known as a placée.”

  “And was Delphine’s mother one?” I asked.

  Again my mother nodded. “You understand, however, one does not inquire into such matters, Skye.” She reached out and touched my hair. “It is dry now. You’d better not keep Delphine waiting. I shall sit here for a while, since my hair is not a problem.”

  I hesitated a moment longer, still undecided. Then I went to Aunt Natalie’s handsome bedroom.

  Here the furnishings were more elaborate than in any other bedroom in the house. There was a little prie-dieu with a velvet kneeling cushion. The great bed had an embroidered canopy of pale blue satin beneath the tester. A “ciel de lit” Delphine told me it was called, and said it had been given to Madame Natalie as a bridal canopy when she married Robert Tourneau. Through the door to an adjoining room I could see a white cradle with a curving swan neck, where Tina lay rosily asleep. My uncle chose to have a room of his own across the hall.

  I sat like a doll before the dressing table and let Delphine do what she liked with my hair. I found myself watching as if I watched a stranger about whom I was not at all sure. Who was the girl with red hair who looked back at me in the mirror? Was she truly afraid to be more than herself? Was she the sort who did not dare to be anything that was not easy and safe? I did not like to think that. I watched, interested, but uncertain.

  Delphine stroked scented pomade along strands of my hair and then decided by experiment just how she would comb it for tonight. Finally she wound it in papillotes, so that it would fall into the style she wished when she came to dress it for dinner. Then she found me a lace cap to wear over the paper curlers.

  Once Aunt Natalie looked in on us approvingly.

  “Delphine is right. If you must have such hair, Skye, then it is better to display it modishly. I trust your uncle will approve. It was only the dress he spoke of.”

  Later in the morning the modiste arrived for the final fitting and Mama too came up to Aunt Natalie’s room. I let them pinch me and push me about. The dressmaker was most distressed at the hurry with which this gown was being finished, and I gathered that it was only the Tourneau name which kept her from throwing up her hands in despair.

  The frock was a simple one of white mull, since this was an informal summer occasion. But it was cunningly cut and draped, with touches here and there of pale gold ribbon. The dress, it seemed to me, was for a very young and pretty girl and I was neither. There were times when I felt older than my mother.

  After an early supper that night Delphine brought the dress to my room and closed the door firmly upon any possible intruder. For the last time I made myself passive under her hands, while she dressed my hair and helped me into the frock, hooking the tight bodice up the back over my stays. As always her face was expressionless, yet I sensed in her an air of satisfaction in what she had accomplished.

  “Voilà!” she said at length, and turned me toward a mirror. “Behold yourself, mam’zelle.” She propelled me across the room with strong hands, as if I had been a child, and stood me before my mirror.

  “You will look, mam’zelle,” she said. “Then you will not desire to return to the old way.”

  I gazed into the mirror and saw with some surprise the girl who stared back at me. The white gown was soft with French lace about the throat, giving a gentler, more feminine look than the dark, plain things I so often wore. My hair, clustered in small curls across my forehead, was drawn back in loose waves and pinned high with silver combs. The mass of it fell in a sheer, wavy cascade to just below my shoulders. Delphine held a hand mirror for me and turned me this way, then that.

  “I don’t want to look like a child.”

  “When you appear in a box in the Opera in November,” Delphine said complacently, “this will become the mode. Every eye in the house will be upon you. No lady in New Orleans will have so splendide a coiffure rouge.”

  “And what will Uncle Robert think of that?” I said. “No Creole woman is supposed to make herself conspicuous.”

  “You can be nothing less, Mam’zelle Skye,” said Delphine. “You must resign yourself.” She thrust a few combings into the china hair receiver on my dressing table, and picked up her brushes. “You are yourself, mam’zelle. You do not need to be like your maman.”

  I stole a second look at the mirror and saw that bright color had come into my cheeks and that my gray-blue eyes had in them a shine of excitement. My breathing quickened and I had the queer sense of being both attracted and frightened as I looked at this unfamiliar self in the mirror.

  “You begin to see, do you not, mam’zelle?” Delphine said knowingly. She reached into the pocket of her apron and drew out several crumpled rose petals which she dropped on the dressing table before me. “For your lips, mam’zelle. It is also wise to bite the lips strongly under the cover of one’s handkerchief. Have you earrings? Pearls, perhaps? Your ears are of delicate shape—you should not hide them. Pearls will set them off.”

  She did not wait for my answer, but opened the jewel case on my dresser and found a pair of tiny drop earrings of creamy pearl that Papa had given me long ago. Again without permission, she removed the plain gold rings I wore to keep the piercing in my ears open, and replaced them with the drops of pearl. Then she stood back to view her handiwork.

  “Tonight,” she said, “your maman will be as nothing. Every man will look at you.”

  I turned from the spell the mirror put upon me. “Why do you say that? You don’t like my mother, do you, Delphine?”

  She walked to the door without a word. “I must go to help Madame Natalie now.” And out she went, drawing the door softly closed behind her.

  What a strange woman she was. The others in this household took her so entirely for granted, yet I suspected that strong emotions could blaze behind the still mask of her face. What did she think about as she served us, and why should she care how I looked tonight? I could understand that she might like to dress me up and show me off as an example of her own handiwork. But why should she say that tonight my mother would be nothing? Why should she care?

  The mirror drew me again like a magnet. My window shutters had been closed against the warmth of the afternoon, but now I pushed them ajar so that more light could fall upon me. With the light came the heady scent of the garden, and I felt again the strangeness I had experienced on my first nig
ht in New Orleans. But now I no longer wanted to guard myself against this tropical beauty; as if all of me that belonged to New Orleans were ready to surge up with frightening force, to possess me entirely.

  The girl in the white dress, with the soft waves of bright hair, belonged to New Orleans as surely as did the scent of roses and jasmine, and I knew she could revel in such a belonging. The Creole might lie submerged, but it could come to the fore and have its day.

  Very well, let it come! For this one night I would belong to New Orleans. I would dare what I had never had the courage to dare before. And I’d see to it that Justin Law would never again think of me as a wren.

  I caught up the crumpled petals and rubbed them into my lips where a little of their pinkness remained and the scent clung to my fingers. Then I went quickly out upon the gallery to my father’s room.

  His door stood open, and I went in with only a tap and stood before him, both eager and hesitant. Perhaps Papa had been dozing, for he opened his eyes and looked at me as if I were something out of his dreams.

  “’Tis your grandmother you look like, lassie. Your hair, your eyes, the lift of your head. These are hers as I remember them.”

  His words reassured me. For a moment I had forgotten that I was a Scotswoman as much as I was a Creole. I pulled a chair over beside his bed and sat down. There was time to talk to him before we had to leave, and for once he did not seem lost in apathy.

  “Tell me about Scotland,” I said. “So I’ll remember who I am tonight. Tell me about your Isle of Skye.”

  He smiled as he used to when I was a child begging for stories and he told me once again of that day when my grandmother had stood at the bridge below the glen at Sligachan and waved her eldest son off to Portree. From Portree a boat would take him to the mainland, and finally his way would lead across the seas to distant America.

  Near the bridge was the place where the crossroads met and parted—to Dunvegan and Portree and Kyleakin.

  “The gray mists were coming down upon the glen that day,” he said. “Old Sgurr nan Gillian had lost its jagged head in the clouds and mists hung low over the hump of Marsco. The black Cuillin had vanished beyond, but the spell of those dark mountains lies forever upon that glen, and their voices are heard in the burn that tumbles down its length. I remember how black and wet the boulders looked that day, strewn across the moor. And I remember your grandmother’s bright red hair with mist drops shining on every strand. That was the last time I saw her, lassie.”