I Am Madame X (9 page)

The next day, a letter arrived in a pale blue envelope addressed in a small, cramped hand that Mama instantly recognized as that of Angeline Avegno Lapeyre, Papa’s eldest sister. Mama disliked Angeline, an annoying blonde who bombarded Mama with inane accounts of the triumphs and miseries of her four dull sons. She tossed the letter unopened into the china bowl on the hall table.

When Mama finally got around to reading it several days later, I was sitting with her on the gallery. She had a pile of envelopes on her lap and was slicing through them with a bone-handled knife.

As she read Angeline’s letter, her eyes grew wide. “My God!” she cried. She took a deep breath, then began to read out loud:

The next morning, I had just opened my eyes when I heard Mama call, “Mimi, come say good-bye to us!” I tumbled out of bed and ran barefoot into the entrance hall, where Mama and Valentine were standing, identically dressed in pancake hats that were tied under their chins with black ribbons. Short wool capes covered their dark silk dresses, and they each carried a small carpetbag. Outside, Charles waited in the buggy to take them to the steamer landing in Waterloo. They were headed for New Orleans to collect our share of the Avegno gold. Mama had decided to take Valentine along for company. She was leaving me at home to help Grandmère and Charles.

I don’t think I had ever seen Mama so happy. Her delicate face was luminous, and her beautiful eyes glistened as she kissed each of my cheeks. “Start packing your trunk, Mimi, we’re going back to Paris!” she trilled.

“We just got here,” I said, rubbing sleep from my eyes.

“I know, dear. But two weeks in the country seem like two years.” She clasped Valentine’s hand and floated out the door.

•  •  •

At a meeting with Papa’s lawyers, Mama learned that her share of the Avegno gold amounted to seventy-five thousand dollars—more than enough to support us comfortably in Paris. “I’m rich!” she wired Grandmère. But her euphoria was short-lived.

I knew something was wrong the moment Mama stepped into the house on a cool, rainy afternoon a week later. Her pancake hat was askew on her head, and her skirts were muddy. Valentine lay inertly in her arms; the five-year-old child’s pretty head was resting on Mama’s shoulder.

“Is Valentine sick?” I asked, stroking my sister’s back.

“She caught a chill on the steamer. I’m putting her to bed,” Mama said.

The next morning, I awoke early and scurried to Valentine’s room. The little girl was lying motionless in bed. “Valentine,” I whispered, nudging her small, round arm. The skin burned under her cotton nightgown. “Mama!” I called. My mother ran into the room, followed by Alzea, who was carrying a pile of folded linen. Mama held her palm to Valentine’s forehead. “Alzea, fetch Doctor Porter,” she said, her voice edgy with fear.

When the bell rang an hour later, Mama was spooning broth into Valentine’s mouth while I read to her from her favorite book,
La Belle histoire de Leuk-le-Lièvre,
a fable about a rabbit and his jungle friends. I heard a soft footfall on the hallway carpet, and then the short, squat figure of Dr. Porter appeared in the doorway. He greeted us cordially and set his satchel down next to Valentine’s bed.

I hadn’t seen him since Julie’s suicide attempt, when he had come to the house to fit her with her steel back brace. He had grown stouter and balder, and the few hairs he had left on his head were now snowy white.

“How long has she been like this?” Dr. Porter asked. He hooked his thick spectacles over his ears and peered into Valentine’s face. Mama recounted the morning’s events and Dr. Porter took Valentine’s temperature and felt her pulse. He moved his small hands, which had black tufts at the knuckles, over the glands in Valentine’s neck and armpits, and he lifted her gown to examine her flesh, which was smooth but now had a sickly gray tinge. He pulled a syringe from his bag, filled it with silver nitrate, and jabbed it into Valentine’s limp arm. She gasped and rose a bit as the needle went in, then sank back against the pillow, her tangled curls startlingly red against the white linen sheets embroidered with purple anemones.

“It’s typhoid for certain. I saw four cases just this morning,” Dr. Porter said. He unhinged his spectacles and slid them into his pocket. He snapped shut his black case and stood facing Mama.

“Will she be all right?” Mama asked. Her voice came out in a gulpy whisper.

“It’ll be all right, Virginie,” the doctor said. He squeezed Mama’s shoulder. “I’ll come back this afternoon to bleed her.”

Dr. Porter returned at four carrying a strange metal contraption the size of a jewelry box. He placed it on the floor and sat at the edge of the bed. He tapped the length of Valentine’s spine with his hands. I sat on the opposite side of the bed and held my sister’s head as Dr. Porter placed the contraption on Valentine’s back and pulled a lever to release a dozen tiny knives into the child’s flesh. She yelped feebly, and I rubbed my cheek against hers in an effort to console her.

Dr. Porter removed the contraption and placed suction cups on Valentine’s wounds. She cried out again as the blood was drawn out. Then she lay crumpled in the bed, moaning.

Dr. Porter returned every afternoon to reopen the gashes in Valentine’s back and bleed her. The child’s bed was soaked with blood, and I helped Alzea change and wash the sheets. Mama never left Valentine’s side. She slept in a chair and said the Rosary over her every hour. But Valentine did not get better. Every day, she grew thinner and weaker.

One of my earliest memories is of the funeral of a little girl, a victim of scarlet fever, who lived on a neighboring plantation. I remember her small white face as she lay in her coffin, and how, when the pallbearers shut the lid, the child’s sister, a much older girl, screamed and threw herself on the pine box. Her parents had to pull her away. It was my first experience of death, and it terrified me.

I couldn’t bear to think of Valentine buried in the ground in a box. I tried to shake the image from my mind, but it kept sneaking in. It gave me nightmares. Ten days after Valentine first became ill, I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of someone wailing. At first, I thought I was dreaming about the dead little girl. Then I realized the sound was real. Without lighting a candle, I ran down the black hallway to my sister’s room. Mama, Grandmère, Julie, Alzea, and Charles were weeping around the small form in bed. Valentine was dead.

My knees buckled, and I collapsed on the floor. My sobs mingled with the others. “My baby sister! My baby sister!” I shrieked, over and over. I prayed to God to take me, too. I didn’t care if I never grew up. Valentine and I would be happy children together for eternity in heaven.

Charles carried Mama out of the room. Then he returned and softly said to me, “Come, Mimi, Dr. Porter left something to help us sleep.”

I took the medicine and awoke the following morning groggy and disoriented. I staggered to Valentine’s room. Her bed was empty, stripped of all linens. Nearby, on three chairs pushed together and draped with white sheets, lay the body of my sister, dressed in a lace nightgown. While I wept at her side, Alzea slipped into the room and quietly tucked some greenery from the yard around the body.

The next day, Mama, Julie, and I took Valentine to New Orleans to be buried with Papa in the Avegno crypt at St. Louis Cemetery. Grandmère and Charles stayed behind to work in the sugarhouse. The weather was gray, rainy, and bleak, rare for a New Orleans fall. At the dock, men and women wore heavy wool clothes. The roses climbing the fences around the gates of Jackson Square and the leaves on the trees looked pathetic and limp.

Valentine was laid out for two days at the Maison du Mortuaire on Rampart Street. A stream of mourners, friends of my parents and grandparents, and my Avegno relatives filed past her tiny body, which was surrounded by white chrysanthemums. Rochilieu, who had come up from his plantation in Plaquemine, stood close to the casket with his arm around Mama. Once, a large glob of candle wax fell onto Valentine’s forehead, and Rochilieu tenderly scraped it away with his fingers. Just before the mortician closed Valentine’s casket, I placed the rosary Sister Emily-Jean had given me in my sister’s cold, lifeless hands.

By the time we returned to Parlange two weeks later, the last cane stalks had been cut and ground, and the sugar had been packed into hogsheads. To save freight charges, Grandmère had arranged for a speculator from Cincinnati to buy the sugar directly from her. Still, the crop did not yield a sufficient price to cover the plantation’s expenses. She had long ago sold her jewels and spent the money she had hidden in metal chests in the garden. After Grandmère paid the workers, there was little left. She had no choice but to ask Mama for a five-thousand-dollar loan, which Grandmère used to buy seed cane, repair the sugarhouse, and pay taxes.

No sooner was the last hogshead sold than Charles and Grandmère set to work repairing the ditches and fences, and laying the seed cane for next year’s crop. I helped in the mornings, listlessly pushing myself through the motions of hammering and hoeing—all the while dreaming of a reunion with Valentine in heaven.

In the afternoons, I sat for Julie. She was painting a portrait of Valentine, working from a daguerreotype that had been taken in Paris. I posed for the coloring of flesh, hair, and clothes. Every day after lunch, we went to Julie’s bedroom, which she had turned into a studio. Paints and brushes cluttered the dressing table; empty canvases leaned against the walls. Julie had removed the curtains so that light poured in, giving the mahogany furniture and gray walls a golden glow.

Julie posed me on a toile-covered fauteuil, wearing an old white chiffon dress of Mama’s that Alzea had cut down to fit me. With a palette in one hand and a brush in the other, Julie perched at the end of her chair and painted briskly with long, vigorous sweeps. Sometimes she’d take up her crutches and hobble around the room to see how the light looked from different perspectives.

My limbs ached from holding them immobile for long stretches, but I tried not to complain. We took breaks every hour, and sometimes we talked as Julie painted. I told her about Farnsworth, about Aurélie’s departure, about Mama’s bizarre concern that my skin was darkening, about Dr. Chomel and his Solution. I had used up my last jars before we left Paris, and my face had returned to its former luster.

“Mimi, you have the most beautiful skin. The way the light catches it—sometimes casting a pink glow and at other times a blue shadow—is just extraordinary,” said Julie. She held out a brushful of flesh-toned paint and squinted at me.

“Turn your head to the right, please. Ahh. Such a distinctive profile. You are a great beauty,
chérie.
”

I knew I wasn’t pretty like Mama and Valentine. My nose was too long, my chin too pointed, my forehead too high, my lips too thin. Yet, even at eleven, I was starting to sense I had something better than mere loveliness. By some strange alchemy, my features had combined into a face of extraordinary
interest.
That was why men stared at me, why Aurélie and Julie called me beautiful.

It took Julie two months to complete Valentine’s portrait. When it was finished, Grandmère hung it over the parlor mantel—the first of Julie’s pictures to be displayed. Valentine is frozen for all time in front of a window overlooking the garden. Dappled sunlight filters in, casting lavender and gray shadows in the folds of her frothy white dress. The blue ribbon around her neck echoes the color of the sky, and pink roses—Julie had painted them from memory—flash impressionistically in the background.

Mama loved the portrait. She created a little shrine on the mantel below it with flowers and candles, and moved the prie-dieu from her room in front of the fireplace. Every day, she prayed here for several hours, her head bent low over her rosary beads. Her tears fell silently, wetting the needlepoint hearth rug.

Mama had not mentioned Paris since Valentine’s death, so I was surprised when she told me one morning in December that she had booked passage to France and we would be leaving in a week.

“I don’t want to go,” I protested.

“I can’t stay at Parlange,” she said. “Everything reminds me of Valentine.”

Mama had no plans beyond using part of her inheritance to buy a house in a fashionable neighborhood and launching herself in society, which, she said, meant getting to know the best people and being invited to their parties. It seemed like a waste of time to me.

The thought of leaving Parlange filled me with distress. I had settled in so happily that now I couldn’t imagine life off the plantation. What would I do without fields to roam in and a garden to play in? What would I do without Julie?

I’ll never forget how quiet the house was on the cool, sunny Sunday morning when we left. Mama and I ate breakfast alone in the dining room while Julie, Grandmère, and Charles went to town for services at St. Joseph’s Church. Our metal trunks, lying next to each other in the dim hall, looked like coffins. I thought of Papa and Valentine and gulped back a large sob.

From the dining room windows, I saw the buggy rattle up to the house. Charles helped Grandmère and Julie to the front gallery, where they settled themselves in wicker chairs. Then he loaded our trunks into the buggy and strode into the dining room.

“We better get going, ladies, if you want to make that one o’clock steamer.”