Madam (24 page)

Peter palmed the worn watch he’d been nervously fidgeting with. He knew in his gut that as soon as he’d come of age he should have stepped in to protect Mary, to protect his own family. He stared Lobrano square in the face. Solemnly, he said, “We’re both sorry excuses for men.”

Mary had risen to watch them from the curtain, her gray eyes unflinching. Her stance as rigid as a barricade. “You’re not the man of this house,” she said. “Peter is. And he told you to git.”

Looking from one to the other, Lobrano only just realized how much Peter towered over him. Even Mary seemed to loom larger. Or maybe it was just the absinthe. Woozy, he inched toward the door.

“Could’ve left both you sissies for dead. Maybe I should have.” He ambled helplessly, and, at last, the door slammed behind him.

Peter’s eyes landed on the rosewood knife resting on the bureau. Snatching it, he defiantly headed to the door.

“Let him go, Peter,” Mary said.

“Need to make sure he stays away from my family.” Peter spoke with an authority Mary had never heard from him before, like a growling dog marking his territory.

She wearily shook her head as she watched Peter disappear. Before heading back to the other side of the curtain, she squeezed her eyes shut. “Dear Saint Anne,” she whispered, “please don’t let Charlotte bring another cock into this world.”

Nestling back aside the bed, Mary cradled Charlotte’s hand. They could hear the men carrying on outside, and Mary began chatting, trying to drown them out. The louder the men got, the more Mary jabbered on—what can they knit for the baby? Maybe she’ll get these gray eyes. Will she have Peter’s nose or Charlotte’s? At some point, Mary noticed that the men’s voices had stopped. The night was suddenly quiet but for Charlotte’s labored breath. Mary waited for the creak of the door, for Peter to come back in. But there was nothing, just silence.

Unnerved, she rose. “Let me get you some more water,” she said, taking Charlotte’s tin cup. She stepped to the other side of the curtain and pointedly looked out the front window. Time seemed to slow as she saw Lobrano hovering over some sacks of potatoes. Why would Peter have hauled out potatoes? And then, there was a snap in her mind, and the sight came into sharp focus.

She raced outside. “Oh God!” she cried. There, on the ground, was Peter, his shirt turning blood-soaked.

The knife tumbled from Lobrano’s hand. He dropped to his knees, trembling. It was Eulalie’s voice that rang out in Mary’s head,
One day, you’ll be on your knees to this girl, asking for forgiveness
. Mary saw, crystal clear, the vision from when she was six years old: there was Eulalie pointing the knife at Lobrano.

“Mary . . . Mary, I didn’t mean . . . you gotta believe . . .” Lobrano sputtered, but he was already invisible to her as she knelt at Peter’s side.

“You’re gonna be all right, Peter, you hear me?” she cried.

Lobrano held out his arms helplessly, then made a crawling, stumbling run for it.

Mary raced back into the house. “Charlotte, Peter and me gotta take care of something,” she called out. “You be strong and bring this baby into the world.”

“What happened, Mary? What’s wrong?”

Mary popped her head behind the curtain, giving Charlotte the warmest smile she could muster. “Everything’s all right. We’ll all be in tall cotton soon enough, don’t you worry.” She let the curtain fall closed and moved quickly to the bureau, hoisting it aside and grabbing the cigar box. There was her week’s earnings in full, plus the profit from Beulah. It wasn’t much, but at least it was something. Spotting her kip against the wall, she hurried outside with it.

“Peter, you stay with me,” she said as she pulled him onto the kip. With strength she never knew she had, she dragged the kip down the road.

Mary had no sense of how much time it took to arrive at Hotel Dieu Hospital. It could have been minutes, it could have been an hour. She’d talked to Peter the whole way, telling him the story of Josie the Conductor. She hadn’t realized he’d lost consciousness.

“Help! Somebody help me!” she called as she hauled the blood-soaked kip into the hospital.

Nurses turned and gasped, as the sight smacked of a whore and her unfortunate trick.

“You can’t bring that in here,” a nurse snapped. “This is a sanitary—”

“He’s been stabbed. My brother!” Mary pleaded.

“Oh, your brother,” another nurse said with a grimace.

“He
is
my brother. Here, I got money to pay!” Mary opened the cigar box, and bills and coins, along with the hotel postcard, cascaded to the floor.

The nurses remained frozen. “We don’t want your money. You and your john need to be on your way, girl.”

Mary began to cry, angry, frustrated tears that burned her cheeks. “Please . . . my little brother.”

Another nurse gingerly stepped forward. With a touch of sympathy, she knelt beside Peter to take his pulse. “Sorry, miss. The only thing I can oblige you with is a death certificate.”

Everything went silent to Mary. The figures before her blurred together. Her legs buckled, and she sank to the ground.

C
HAPTER SEVENTEEN

Jackson Square; the Cabildo is left of the Saint Louis Cathedral

U
p and down the signs bounced: THE TRAVELERS AID SOCIETY PROTESTS STORYVILLE
!
Buttoned-up Jean Gordon and her equally buttoned-up crew weaved through the crowd in Jackson Square, picketing and chanting, “Jesus knows your wretched soul!”

But as the Cabildo doors opened, a hush fell over them. All eyes turned to watch as out sauntered squat Mayor Flower, mousy Alderman Story, and the men of the Public Order Committee.

The mayor waved a scroll. “Signed and sealed!” he called out. Cheers erupted while Jean Gordon rallied her brood with hisses and boos.

A soapbox was set down in the middle of the square, and Flower hoisted himself onto it. “The way I feel about this ordinance for Storyville—” he began, but was quickly interrupted by Alderman Story nearly tripping over himself.

“That is
not
the name of the district!” Story shouted, his voice even higher-pitched than usual. He nervously flailed his arms. “It’s called . . . the District!”

“Ain’t our good Alderman modest?” Flower said with a chuckle. “Yes, so, as I was saying, the way I feel about this ordinance for
the District
is the way I felt about the prohibition debate in our fine city. People from the countryside were for prohibition at home, but when they came to New Orleans they were wet and wanted New Orleans to be saturated. We recognize that New Orleans represents a destination for people who need balance in their disciplined lives. And now people will have the right to pay a trip to the new district, if it’s within their code of ethics. My friends, our sincerest hope is that this ordinance will produce a self-contained, upstanding business district of its own right.”

The Travelers Aid Society was drowned out by the cheering.

But one major Storyville proponent—and arguably the individual with the most to gain from the turn of events—was clearly absent: Tom Anderson.

At that very moment, in the back of town, Anderson was overseeing workers as they strung Nobels Extradynamit around the dilapidated houses of Basin Street. After a series of thumbs-ups from on down the line, a lever was pushed and, with a great boom, smoke billowed up as the houses crumbled down. Anderson surveyed his street—what would look like ruins to anyone else was a million-dollar avenue to him. His saloon would be on the corner, and as Storyville business expanded, he’d build one bordello after another.

But for now, he was to start with the two houses left standing on Basin: Countess Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall, which Anderson had a hefty stake in and, two doors down, a vacant but exquisite Victorian with a towering cupola. There was something that had attracted him to the Victorian, even though he’d considered tearing it down because of its state of disrepair. But unlike the other houses now in rubble, this one had an attention to detail, an artistry, a personality, with detailed iron lace, decorative masonry, and copper finishings that had aged to a glowing blue-green patina. But his favorite feature was presiding over the front door: an intricate plaster relief of a cherubic woman with flowing hair, her face framed by seashells and flowers and a cornucopia overflowing with fruit. It was as if the house already had a symbolic madam. And now it needed a real one.

Not far from Basin, rats scurried over crumbling tombstones and random bones that had surfaced in the paupers’ cemetery. Next to Mary stood Charlotte, gently swaying as she held a tiny swathed bundle. Solemnly, they watched as two gravediggers lowered an unadorned pine box into the ground.

“If anythin’ of value’s buried with him, best take it back,” one of the diggers said. “This swampland don’t keep much down.”

Mary shook her head.

Trudging by, another gravedigger dragged a coffin on a rope, the body inside shifting loudly from side to side. There was no such thing as respect for the dead here. A haggard woman trailed the coffin, cursing it. “You son of a bitch, gamblin’ and drinkin’ away everythin’. From your own daughter! Here’s where you spend the rest o’ your days. The pauper’s lot. You happy now?” The teenaged daughter, in a tattered black dress, was stone-faced behind her.

Mary couldn’t help but look, and, as they passed, her eyes met the daughter’s. The girl attempted to hold her head high, as if to say, You’re no better off.

It was true. Peter had never done anyone harm, but his fate was the same. No sepulchre, no funeral, just some tears and the hope that his body would stay buried.

The baby started to whimper. Charlotte had named her Mary Anna, explaining that’s what Peter had wanted too. The notion of another Mary Deubler in the world felt heavy, and Mary thought back to her own mama, who had wanted her children to take their father’s last name—even though there was no father in sight. The Lobrano lineage was tainted with misfortune, she’d said, and she wanted her children to have a chance with a new family line. It seemed clear that the Deubler name too had fallen short; it held nothing to offer to this new generation.

Mary envisioned her namesake growing up and having to come to this forlorn place to pay her respects. The pauper’s lot would be all she’d know of her father. At the thought of that, Mary feared she might be sick right there at the gravesite. She took some deep breaths. “Charlotte, why don’t you go on, take Anna home.” She steadied herself. “Anyway, it looks like rain.”

Tears streaming down her face, Charlotte nestled the baby closer. Sweet Charlotte, she looked as if she might break in two from the weight of her heartache, and yet her wet eyes still smiled when she looked at her tiny daughter. Baby Anna was slight, like Peter, but—thank God—not sickly. She had Charlotte’s doll-red lips and Peter’s sandy hair but had indeed inherited Mary’s gray eyes. With slow leaden steps, Charlotte moved away, her head hung low.

Once Charlotte was out of sight, Mary crumpled onto the ground, her body feeling as if it might cave in on itself. Never had she felt this helpless. She’d waited all morning at the parish sheriff’s, only to be told that if Lobrano were found, he could be tried, but that with no witnesses and with the murder weapon the property of the Deubler house, it would be near impossible to prove Lobrano hadn’t acted in self-defense. In other words, a woman with no money and no husband shouldn’t bother with justice.