Madeleine's Ghost (11 page)

A
NTOINETTE LIVED
in the Faubourg Marigny at North Villere, one block from Elysian Fields. The St. Roche shrine was visible through the round window of the stairwell. I lugged her with some effort up the two narrow flights and into the apartment, where she crawled onto a worn yellow satin Victorian fainting couch in the living room and covered herself over with a quilt that lay crumpled in a heap on the floor.

The place was a wreck. A bit worse, if that was possible, than my own pink house on Mystery Street. Clothes lay in piles in every corner and the expensive-looking oriental carpet was filthy, strewn with glossy French fashion magazines, open lipsticks, apple cores, half-eaten Healthy Choice dinners, empty cups of low-fat yogurt, and other junk. A waterless fish tank, gravel at the bottom, sat on the floor, filled with shoes. A large framed photograph of the portrait of the antebellum lady I had seen in the Cabildo hung at a crooked angle between the French doors that opened onto the balcony fronting Marigny.

Antoinette's lips had a white, parched look, and she watched me through glassy eyes, quilt tucked up to her chin, as I rummaged around in the kitchen cabinets, looking for anything that would help: aspirin, a bromide, tea. Reaching onto a top shelf, I knocked a jar of dried red beans onto the tile floor. It shattered, beans and glass shards everywhere.

“Please,” she said from the couch, her lips barely moving. “Come here.”

I left the mess and went to kneel beside her. She shivered visibly beneath the quilt.

“A doctor might not be a bad idea,” I said. “You look terrible.” But it wasn't true. Even sick and shivering, she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.

“No,” she said in a harsh whisper. “A doctor might go to the police or, worse, to my parents. I took one hit too many. It's Dothan's stuff. Homemade, by this half-crazy chemist up in Dessaintes Parish. You can never tell how you'll react. This time it's like a block of ice. It's like I'm sitting naked on a block of ice.” Then she put an arm out from beneath the quilt, took hold of my wrist, and pulled me close. Her breath was foul. “I want to ask you something, and you've got to tell me the truth.”

I nodded.

“You have a nice face, but so do a lot of people who aren't so nice. Can I trust you?”

“I'm Molesworth's roommate,” I said. “If you don't remember.”

“Yes, I remember, but that's not my question. Are you a gentleman?” She asked this without a trace of irony, in the same tone perhaps
that the woman in the portrait on the wall would have used 150 years before.

“Yes,” I said. “A gentleman.”

She closed her eyes. “O.K.,” she said. “I can't get up. I can hardly move. I'm frozen solid. You're going to have to do something for me.…”

I went into the bathroom and stood gawking for a second. Built for the ablutions of another era, the bathroom was as large as the rest of the apartment put together, with an old claw-foot tub, a bidet, and a sink with dual faucets, one for cold water, one for hot, worn brass fish-head fixtures all around. Turn-of-the-century tilework wound around the walls halfway up. A fanlight overlooked the traffic of the faubourg. I cracked the louvers a little, just enough to admit the gray afternoon and ran a bath hot as I could make it without burning my elbow. Then I went back into the small living room and stood over her.

“All right,” I said. “Your bath.”

“You're going to have to—”

I shook my head.

“Please,” she said, sounding pitiful.

“Do you always rely on the kindness of strangers?” I said, but the reference escaped her, and with great effort, she held up her arms.

I helped her into the bathroom and showed her the greenish bathwater steaming under its fish-head spigot.

“There,” I said with an airy wave of the hand.

“I can't do it.” She turned toward me, teeth chattering. “My clothes. Please …” Her skin looked gray in the gray light and felt like ice.

I began to undress her, squinting as if peeling an onion. She stood stiff and unblinking as I undid the zipper on her dress and it fell to the floor. Then I knelt and unbuckled her shoes and held her ankles and pulled her cold feet out of them and stood and backed away.

“The rest,” she said. “What's the difference now?”

“O.K.,” I said. “Think of me as your doctor.” But when I undid the clasp on her bra, she closed her eyes, and she kept them closed as I rolled
her panties down the curve of her hip. Her nakedness gleamed against the dull tiles of the bathroom. I tried not to think at all, and I took her hand and led her to the tub. She lifted one foot over the water, but when her toe broke the surface, she pulled back with a small cry.

“I can't,” she said. “It's too hot.”

“You've got to,” I said.

“I can't.”

“Slowly.”

Breathing through her teeth, she put one foot in the water, a millimeter at a time. Then, hand on my shoulder, she put in the other. A tear rolled down her cheek and splashed lightly on the surface. Still holding on to my arm, she crouched down, steam rising from her cold flesh. I tried not to look; it was impossible. I looked away and still saw her reflection in the silvered mirror, her breasts floating in the water. She slid under finally, her black hair spreading on the surface like ink. A bubble rose, then another, and at last she pushed up, breathing hard, and leaned her head back against the tub.

“O.K.,” she said. “I think I'll be O.K. now.”

“Good,” I said. “I draw the line at scrubbing your back.”

I went out of the bathroom without a word and put on my coat and gathered my books. From inside the bathroom now came that bath sound of splashing water and the sound of her breath.

“Antoinette,” I called in, “I'm going to take off.”

The bath sounds stopped for a beat. “No, please,” she called. “Wait till I get out. Please.”

She was in there a long time, soaking. I heard the water run again, and again after that. I settled on the couch in my coat and tried to read my history text,
France and the Age of Napoleon
, by Hervé Surgère for an upcoming exam. It was dry reading, written by a man who had no feeling for the grandiose color of the era, but there were a few unforgettable anecdotes.

I read how the emperor, upon his return from Elba for the Hundred Days that culminated in Waterloo, began his march toward Paris, gathering supporters along the way. The new royalist government sent an army
to stop him, composed of veterans of Austerlitz and Marengo and other campaigns, now led by foppish aristocratic officers who had emigrated in 1793 and returned at the emperor's abdication like a swarm of locusts descending on France. They met up at a field near Grenoble, Napoleon and his few hundred followers facing an army of thousands. Alone, the emperor walked across the open ground till he was within range of the opposing guns. There he stopped, spread his arms, glanced up at the blue sky and the peaks in the distance. Then he stared down the muzzles of the muskets aiming for his heart.

“Soldiers!” he cried. “Would you fire upon your emperor?”

“Fire!” the officers ordered. “Fire!” But the men threw down their guns and ran to him, tears in their eyes.

From the bathroom came more watery sounds and a tuneless sort of humming. I closed the book with a sigh and poked around the apartment. It had once been part of a much larger place, perhaps a Creole gentleman's pied-à-terre in the 1850s. Plaster medallions in the ceiling were interrupted by cheap presswood partitions; fanciful grape leaf molding circled the walls until cut off by the pasteboard walls of thoughtless remodelers.

In the tiny bedroom there was barely enough room for the ancient four-poster of dark wood. It had the heavy, solid look of furniture made by slave artisans. From between the mashed pillows, a stuffed brown bear protruded feetfirst. On the bureau, an ormolu box spilling over with earrings and piles of makeup. Behind this, ranks of framed family photographs going back several generations. Also, there was one of those plastic photograph cubes filled with pictures of Dothan: Dothan and Antoinette on a Gulf beach in the sand. Dothan astride a big Harley panhead, his tattooed hand at the throttle, his eyes hidden behind mirror frame shades. Dothan shirtless, one foot on the fender of an old yellow pickup, the butt of a twelve-gauge shotgun resting on his hip, a tar paper shack and the green riot of the swamp behind.

I picked up the cube with the tip of my fingers and held it to the light just as Antoinette stepped into the room barefoot and sober,
wrapped in a thick white terry-cloth robe, her hair twisted into a turban with a blue towel.

“That's Dothan,” she said, leaning in the doorway. “But you know that.”

I replaced the cube carefully among the other photographs. “Are you feeling better?”

“I'm fine,” she said a bit sullenly, and picked her way through the rubble to the bed. She approached it knee first, swung around, and in a quick movement was sitting cross-legged in the sheets, hands gripping her elbows. An awkward silence followed in which I heard the metallic rush of traffic heading up Marigny to the Pontchartrain Expressway.

She spoke first. “I know what you're thinking—” she began.

“Forget about it,” I interrupted. “If you're straightened out now, I'll be leaving.”

I pushed off the dresser and started for the door.

“Wait!” she said, but when I stopped and turned toward her, she looked away and bit her lip, a flush to her cheeks.

“I just want you to hold me for a little please before you go,” she said in a small voice after a minute. “Please. This is the last thing I will ask you to do.”

I went over to the bed and sat down and reached for her. Then she leaned forward and put her head against my coat, pressing her face into the tweed and put her arms around me. We stayed like that for about fifteen minutes without talking, listening to the traffic and the rain, the gray light of afternoon deepening to dusk. I felt her warm, damp body through the terry cloth, and I felt her trembling. Then she was still, and for a moment I thought she was asleep. But she stirred at last and took my hand and kissed it lightly and sat up.

“It's late,” she said. “You'd better go.”

I didn't know what else to say, so I said, “O.K., I hope you feel better,” and I got up and went out into the rain along Villere, and I tried not to think of her body and her black hair and the way she looked naked and shivering in the bathroom. Then I walked over into the Quarter to a place generally known as Twenty Naked Girls, because of a neon sign out
front to this effect, where they have strippers on the stage with nothing but G-strings between themselves and the world. I ordered a watery bourbon and watched a woman with a mass of cheap-looking blond hair and huge breasts take off her clothes and run her hand between her legs, but it made me feel rotten, just rotten. I left without finishing my drink and walked up Orleans Street and through Congo Square up to Broad, where I caught the bus to the corner of Gentilly and Marepas, the stands of the Fairgrounds rising just beyond.

Molesworth's Land Rover was gone from the drive when I got home, and the house was empty. I went to my room and lay on my bed in my coat and stared into the darkness. Outside, the rain passed in squalls over the muddy track beyond the chain-link fence, and passed over the cars on their way across the causeway to Covington, and passed over the upright tombs reflecting in the lagoon in the cemetery at Metairie. And there was rain, I knew, on the flat roof of Antoinette's apartment as she slept in her big bed, her flesh damp beneath her robe, and rain on the brown waters of the river rolling down, oblivious, to the sea.

T
WO DAYS
later, Friday afternoon, there was a knock on the door at our pink house on Mystery Street. Molesworth heaved himself off the couch with some suspicion, as our only regular visitors were bill collectors and officers of the court attempting to serve subpoenas on the previous tenants. But on the stoop stood a teenage delivery boy from Marche Florists, his arms full of two dozen yellow roses wrapped in cellophane. The delivery boy looked at Molesworth, bare-chested in his tattered plaid robe, and Molesworth looked at the delivery boy, who wore a pressed white shirt and green apron with “Marche Florists” printed across the front.

“I think you got the wrong house, pardner,” Molesworth said, and made a motion to close the door, but the boy insisted.

“Two twenty-four Mystery Street, right? Mr. Ned Conti, is that you?”

“Coonass,” Molesworth called over his shoulder, “boy here's got something for you.”

I came out from the kitchen, munching on a grilled cheese sandwich, signed for the flowers, and stood rather stupidly in the middle of the living room, flowers in my arms, the antics of Wile E. Coyote blaring from the TV in the background. No one had ever sent me flowers before, and I couldn't think what to do with them.

“First you cut the stems,” Molesworth said calmly. “Then you put them in some water. Then, most important, you read the card and see who was stupid enough to send you that mess of posies.”

I did what he said. I cut the stems and put them in our plastic water pitcher out of the refrigerator and set them on the mantel, where they gleamed like hope amid the squalor of the place. Then I read the card.

“These are for you,” the card said in a female hand. “I'll be at the Napoleon House at eight tonight.”

“Well?” Molesworth said, looking up from the TV.

“They're from my, uh, mom,” I said.

“Your mom?” He raised an eyebrow; then he shook his head. “Have it your own way, Coonass,” he said, and went back to his cartoons.

A
T EIGHT
the streets of the Quarter were crowded, full of tourists and horse drawn carriages. I took the bus down to the corner of Dauphine and St. Louis and walked the rest of the way through the crowds. The Oyster Houses were packed to capacity; the bars spilled patrons onto the street. Drunken midwestern businessmen on a spree, honeymoon couples arm in arm, tipsy after two Hurricanes at Pat O'Brien's, and a little dazed by it all. Though barely five years in the city, I had acquired the native's scorn for these pasty-faced legions who couldn't hold their liquor. Show me a
Louisianan, and I'll show you someone who can drink even an Irishman under the table.