I Am Madame X (30 page)

Soon the conversation turned to Parlange. “I know you want to see the old place,” said Charles, a sudden sadness shadowing his face. “I’m afraid you’ll find it much changed.”

“We’re very eager to see it,” said Julie.

“The widow of one of the tenant farmers lives in the house now,” Charles continued. “An old Negro woman. I pay her a bit to keep it clean. In summer, she changes the bed linens regularly, in case we show up. I’ve written her to expect a visit from you sometime this month. We try to go once or twice a summer. The children love it, don’t they, darling?” Charles looked at his wife.

“Oh, yes,” said Lulu. “They have the run of the place. But don’t worry about your grandmère’s valuables. I packed them up long ago and stored them in the attic. Feel free to take anything you like.”

“We wouldn’t dare take anything,” I said. “Someday Parlange will be restored to its original splendor. Perhaps one of your children will live there.”

“That would be lovely,” said Lulu. “We
are
lucky to have it. So many of the old country places are gone. My family home was burned by the Yankees. Nothing is left, and we sold the land.”

We talked until dinner, then retired early. The next day and for several days following, while Charles was in court, Julie and I passed the time getting to know Lulu and her children. The heat was sweltering, and we stayed indoors to escape it.

One afternoon, however, I ventured out on my own in the French Quarter. I bought some chocolate for Charles’s children at a confectioner’s shop and was headed home when I noticed a sign for Falconer’s Books at the corner of Dauphine and St. Ann. I decided to pick up something to read.

The shop was empty except for a middle-aged woman who sat on a stool near the register, reading a book. When I walked in, she stood, laid her book on the stool, and stepped from behind the counter. I knew instantly she was Aurélie Grammont, my lost friend from convent school in Paris. When I had last seen her, she had been a slender, tawny-skinned, spectacle-wearing girl. Now her hair, arranged in two plaits pinned to the top of her head, was graying, and she was dressed in a simple blue linen gown instead of a purple serge school uniform. But her bright hazel eyes, her tall, willowy figure, her intelligent expression, were just as I remembered them.

“Can I help you?” Aurélie said.

“I’m Virginie Gautreau. I mean Mimi Avegno.” My heart was pounding as I waited for her reaction.

Aurélie studied me as if I were a rare volume. Then her eyes grew wide, and a gasp rose in her throat. “Mimi Avegno! My God!” She put her thin fingers together in front of her face and shook her head from side to side.

“My mother wrote the letter to Mother Superior behind my back. I had no idea,” I stammered.

“I suspected that’s what happened,” she said coolly.

“It was that boy Harry Beauvais, who knew your father. He knew the story about—” I realized I was babbling and shut my mouth.

“That was a long time ago,” Aurélie said with a deep sigh. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t thought about it in years.”

Aurélie took a long look at me. Her gaze traveled from the top of my little straw hat, with the wide satin ribbon tied under my chin, to the hem of my expensive cream silk dress.

“I knew you were going to be a great beauty. And I hear you’re famous as well, always being painted by artists,” Aurélie said. “At least that’s what my mother writes me.” She cocked her head to the side and looked at me over the top of her spectacles.

“Is your mother still in Paris?” I asked.

“Yes. We came back here after the war. That’s when I met my husband, Henri Falconer. His family has owned this shop for years.”

I wondered if Falconer knew Aurélie’s background. As if reading my mind, she said, “He knows about me. But our sons don’t. My mother moved back to Paris when the second one was born twenty-five years ago. She thought her presence was a threat to our status as a respectable white family.”

“I would never dare say anything.”

Aurélie looked at me with sad eyes. “My husband is in New York on a buying trip. We can go upstairs to talk.”

An uneasy silence descended as Aurélie crossed to the front door and flipped the sign hanging from a chain so that the side reading
CLOSED
faced the street. She led me through a dark corridor in the back and up a narrow flight of stairs. I sat in a wing chair by the window. Aurélie disappeared into the kitchen and emerged a few minutes later carrying a tray with a coffee service.

“I’m accepted as white by everyone I know here,” she said as she handed me a cup of coffee. “I always have been.”

“I won’t say anything, I promise.”

Aurélie sat in a chair opposite me and poured herself a cup of coffee. Outside, the summer day glistened. White light and long blue shadows poured through the cozy parlor. “I’m not worried about you,” she said. “It’s your mother.”

“She’s not here. She’ll never know I saw you. I’m so ashamed for what my mother did. Can you forgive me?”

Aurélie removed her spectacles and pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and index finger. Then she put her spectacles back on, carefully hooking the arms behind each of her well-shaped ears.

“There’s no need to ask my forgiveness,” she said. “I have something to tell you, too.” Aurélie looked at the floor and sighed heavily. Then, lifting her gaze to meet mine, she continued. “It was
my
mother who wrote the letter to the columnist, asking her to cancel your party in 1884. She was friendly with one of the upholsterers who was working in your mother’s house.”

I recoiled in shock. “I never dreamed—” The words died in my mouth.

“The upholsterer was a light-skinned Negro from New Orleans who was passing for white like me,” Aurélie said. “When my mother told him the story about what had happened at the convent, he suggested she exact revenge by ruining your party.”

“I guess we’re even, then.”

“I suppose so.”

Aurélie and I talked for the rest of the afternoon, reminiscing about the convent and catching up on each other’s lives. She showed me photographs of her sons, schoolteachers who had their mother’s curly black hair and tawny skin. I told her about Pierre and Louise. When we parted, we hugged each other tightly and promised to stay in touch. In early evening, I returned to Charles’s house, and went straight to bed after dinner, exhausted by the chance reunion with my girlhood friend.

It warmed me to see that Aurélie’s life had turned out well, and to finally solve the mystery of our Salon party debacle. I rose the next morning feeling lighthearted. Julie and I boarded a steamboat for New Roads. Eight hours later, we stepped ashore at the Waterloo landing, hired a carriage with a pair of harnessed horses from the depot livery, and set off for Parlange.

We might as well have been in a foreign country, so changed was the landscape since I had last seen it. Nearly all the plantations I knew from my childhood were gone, the houses demolished, the gardens trampled, the fields overgrown with trees. Streets had been paved through some of the old farms, and the once-empty countryside was dotted with houses, churches, offices, even a department store, the Famous, a low-slung white frame building, which sold everything from coal and groceries to corsets, hats, furniture, and buggies.

The air was still, thick with humidity. I could hear the carriage driver’s labored breathing, and from a stream near the side of the road, the croaking of frogs. By the time we reached Parlange an hour later, the weather had cooled a bit. Dusk had fallen, and the alley of oaks was softly lit by a golden-pink sunset.

The house was just as I had remembered it, with bright-green shutters and a collection of brown wicker chairs scattered on the gallery. As Julie and I mounted the steps, I noticed several buckets of water on the gallery floor. Then the door creaked open, and a fat black woman in a red calico dress and an old-fashioned tignon appeared on the threshold. She was carrying two more buckets, which she set down in front of her.

“You must be Miss Mimi and Miss Julie,” the woman said. “I wasn’t expecting you folks so soon.” She spoke French in a lilting Creole patois. “Come on in. I’m sure I can find something to throw together for supper.” She held the door for us, and we stepped into the foyer.

“I’m Cora Périne,” she said. “My husband, Michel, and I used to farm that strip near the new mill. Michel’s been dead now five years.” Cora crossed herself with a pudgy, callused hand.

The light slanting through the windows was fading quickly. Cora reached into a pocket in her apron and pulled out a box of matches and two candle stubs, which she handed to Julie and me. She lit the candles and led us through the house. It was even barer than it had been when I had seen it last. Most of the chairs and tables were gone from the parlor, and of Grandmère’s one hundred china plates in the dining room cupboards, only twelve were left.

Cora noticed my dismay and said, “There isn’t much furniture here, but at least we’ve got some beds for you to sleep in. I’ve put you in the back corner room. Folks say it’s the only place in the house where the she-ghost doesn’t bother anyone.”

“What she-ghost?” I asked.

Cora stood perfectly still and lowered her voice. “The lady that died here on her wedding day. She jumped from the gallery, they say, because she didn’t want to leave her beautiful home. Now she comes back and wanders around. She doesn’t hurt anybody, but she’s scared a few folks, that’s for sure.”

“I know. I saw that ghost once,” said Julie.

Cora’s round eyes grew rounder. “Lord! Don’t tell me such things!”

“Oh, it was long ago—before the war ended. It was in the middle of a very hot night. I couldn’t sleep, so I went out to the gallery for some fresh air, and I saw the ghost flapping around.”

“What did she look like?” asked Cora, almost in a whisper.

“I couldn’t see her face well,” said Julie. “Her head was covered in a veil.”

I held my candle stub to Julie’s face and stared at her in amused surprise. Then I turned to Cora.

“It’s just a lot of nonsense,” I said. “You shouldn’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared. As long as I’ve got the water buckets on the porch. That’s what the voodoos do to get rid of restless spirits.”

Cora opened the door to one of the back bedrooms and motioned for us to go inside. She followed us in and lit two candles on the table in the center of the room.

“Here you are, ladies. I’ll have supper ready in no time.”

After Cora had left and closed the door behind her with a loud click, I berated Julie, “Why did you do that to her? Don’t you think we should tell Cora there’s no ghost, that
you’re
the bride who jumped off the gallery?”

“She’d never believe it,” said Julie wearily. “Anyway, I suspect she likes dabbling in voodoo. It makes her feel important. Who knows what other gris-gris she’s got stashed around.”

Julie opened her carpetbag and began to remove a few items, then stopped and sighed deeply. “You know,
chérie,
the distance from the gallery to the ground wasn’t high enough to kill me. I only realized it today when I was climbing the steps. I’m so stupid.”

This was the first time Julie had mentioned her suicide attempt since the day I had asked her about it as a child.

“Perhaps, in a way, you knew that,” I said. “You didn’t really want to die.”

“Perhaps. Of course, now I’m glad to be alive. But at the time, I did want to end it all. Can you see me married to Rochilieu?”

“I can’t see you married to anyone.”

“Neither can I.” Julie hobbled over to the armoire, opened the door, and hung up a dress inside it. “I won’t say I’m sorry I did it. But I’d sure like to be rid of this limp.”

Julie and I stayed at Parlange a week. On several mornings, we took the carriage for a ride through the fields. The large wedge of land fanning out from the house was now divided into thirty tenant farms leased under contract with Charles. The farmers lived in the former slave cabins and sent their children to a school that had been erected on the site of the old sugarhouse. A new mill for processing cane had been built a mile away. Everything was changed.

It was only late on warm evenings, as I sat on the gallery, with the crickets buzzing in the grass, the scent of magnolia filling the air, and the pearly moon rising above False River, that I felt transported back to my childhood. Then it was easy for me to imagine Valentine romping in the garden and Charles feeding his pet bear outside the barn. I could see Grandmère stomping around in her men’s boots, swearing at the workers, and Alzea bent over the kitchenhouse stove. Now Alzea, too, was long dead, buried, as she had requested, in one of Grandmère’s dresses, under a cypress tree in the garden.

That weekend, Julie and I returned to New Orleans, and after a last, brief visit with Charles and his family, we sailed for France. The day after we arrived home, I went to the Galerie Demont to view a La Gandara exhibit. Pierre had lent the artist’s portrait of me to the show. When I walked in, the poet Robert de Montesquiou was holding court in front of my picture. He pointed to my image with a mauve-gloved hand and improvised:

It was true. In middle age, I had begun putting on weight, as had my Avegno aunts. People who hadn’t seen me in a long time were astonished by how matronly I had become.

I used to love showing myself off in public. I lived for being seen and admired. But it wasn’t fun when I was no longer the most beautiful woman in the room. Even before my trip to America, I had started going out less. Now I hardly went anywhere. There were stories in the press that I had become a recluse, that I only ventured out swathed in opaque veils, with the windows of my carriage drawn; that I had all the mirrors in my house removed, for fear I’d catch a glimpse of my fading beauty. It was nonsense.

I had simply retired from the limelight. And, in fact, I enjoyed the quiet life. I returned to the piano, practicing all day sometimes. I played less Beethoven and more Debussy, modern music being one of the few things I admired about the twentieth century. Like many people my age, I felt I had little place in this new world of accelerating change. For one thing, I could never get used to the telephone and motorcars. To this day, I keep a carriage and horses, and though I had a telephone installed, I rarely use it, preferring instead to send
petits bleus.