April of Enchantment (Sweetly Contemporary Collection) (20 page)

“Horsehair? Ugh!”

“It may sound terrible, but it was a shiny fabric a little like taffeta, only suffer and a bit scratchy. That’s where we get the word for crinoline.”

“Oh, I think as far as the style goes, we can stretch a point,” Myra said. “No one will notice except purists like you. What about the food? Shall we have a dinner?”

“It depends on the number of people you mean to invite.”

“Hundreds! As many as the house will hold,” Myra exclaimed.

“You may have to settle for dozens, and even then, it will be impossible to seat them all at a table. You could have a late buffet supper, though, served just before midnight. That was often done.”

“Lovely,” Myra said, her tone becoming brittle. “And I suppose you know exactly what to serve?”

“Well, you could have daube, and meringues, and a centerpiece of nougat. I know a caterer who has a chef who still makes those nougat candy figures.”

Myra gave Laura a smile that was both brilliant and malicious. “Fine, you see to it. In fact, I’ll leave it all to you. I’m sure you’ll do an excellent and authentic job. That, plus finishing up the rest of the house, should keep you so busy you won’t have time for anything else, particularly Justin.”

There was more than a little truth to Myra’s parting gibe. Laura stayed on the run in the following weeks, seeing to the endless final details of the house, and in addition, interviewing women for the position of housekeeper for Justin, ordering hand-lettered invitations and dance programs for the party, arranging for musicians, engaging a florist, seeing to a dress for herself, as well as hiring a caterer and discussing menus and recipes that would combine traditional dishes with those more likely to suit modern tastes. She spent a day in New Orleans ordering tablecloths and napkins matched to the china that Justin’s mother had sent out to the house, and also laying in a supply of linen, pristine white with hand-embroidered monograms — thirty Turkish towels and washcloths, and hand-embroidered linen hand towels to hang on the antique wooden towel racks in the baths. With a wry smile, she even chose soap for the bathrooms and the powder room. Later, she made the rounds of the French Quarter antique shops where she picked up a few tables, ottomans, and a set of wrought-iron boot scrapers shaped like lyres for the front and back doors.

While she was there, she also found what she had been looking for to go in the double parlors, a matched pair of mirrors, tall pier glasses topped with foliated scrolls and a raised cartouche coated with gold leaf, along with their marble-topped bases with cabriole legs. The mirror at one end would go between the windows, whose brass cornices were in a similar style, while the other would sit between a pair of recessed alcoves hung with draperies. There would be no other effort to make the two rooms, divided by great sliding doors that could be pushed back into the walls, match each other. It would be better to harmonize the furnishing, treating them like one room.

The house began to take shape. The painters completed their work and left, the paperhangers crawled up and down ladders, cutting into expensive rolls of paper with abandon, then collected their tools, paste pots, and paychecks. The sound of hammers and saws ceased. The electricians installed auxiliary smoke alarms, turned the last screw that held the chandeliers in place, and inserted small candle bulbs. The telephone service man came out and secreted phones in various cabinets. A cleaning crew was brought in to scrape away the vestiges of paint left on the window glass and wash the panes, rubbing them until they glittered in the bright spring sun. They cleaned the floors and polished them to a mirrorlike finish, washed down the gallery floors, removed the stickers and tags from fixtures, wiped down the sawdust from the baseboards and cornices, and left the house looking and smelling new.

Behind them came delivery men bringing rolled carpets and rugs, and wrestling furniture into place. Laura herself, along with the new housekeeper, spent the better part of two days rubbing lemon oil polish into the antique furniture in the house, while outside a gardening crew cut and trimmed the lawn, pruned the azaleas, spread fertilizer, removed spent blossoms, then finally swept up all the grass clippings and vacuumed the brick walks.

Though the major work was over, there was still no time to rest. Justin moved in, an operation that, off and on, took the best part of a week. With him he brought several boxes of ornaments that had been donated by his mother, handed down from his grandparents. He also brought a number of portraits of his various ancestors, among them one of Jean Bienvenu Roman by Healy — Jean, a darkly handsome man with a stern face who bore a striking resemblance to Justin himself. While he was engaged in hanging the portraits, Laura polished a silver and cut-glass epergne, a candelabrum, and several separate candlesticks. She set out Parian glassware, a set of Wedgwood urns, and a collection of millefiori paperweights, watched jealously by Myra, who wandered back and forth between Laura and Justin giving unwanted, unasked advice. When Myra tried to help wash a few of the ornaments, she dropped a delft china slipper into the sink and would have broken it, if it had not fallen on a cushion of toweling Laura had placed in the bottom against just such falls.

That was still not all. On the morning of the party, Laura had to return to the house, to be there when the florist and caterers arrived in order to show them where and how everything should be placed. Justin would not be there. He had gone into the office to get a little work done, and also to be on hand for the inevitable calls from friends in Baton Rouge asking for directions to the house. That, at least, would be a relief.

The caterer was punctual to the minute. He and his helpers set to work, along with the chef, who would be on the premises until the party was over. The florist, however, was late. Lunchtime came and went, and still he had not put in an appearance. Laura called the shop and was told that one of their delivery vans was having mechanical problems, but that they had another. It was behind schedule, but Crapemyrtle’s order would be on the doorstep in two or three hours at the most, if she would only bear with them.

It was odd to have nothing to do. Laura wandered out to the kitchen, where the catering staff was at work. The new addition was a hive of activity, a scene of ordered chaos. She watched for a time and spoke to the chef, a rotund man with a gray walrus mustache. Feeling in the way, she retraced her footsteps through the pantry, passing through the dining room, with its long mahogany table and chairs, lace tablecloth, sideboard, lowboy, and tea chest, and then moving out into the hallway.

The noise from the kitchen did not penetrate here. The quiet of the house surrounded her, encompassing her in its expansive, generous content. An ache grew in the region of her heart, and with deliberate footsteps Laura moved down the hall, touching the scenic paper with the tips of her fingers, placing the palm of her hand on the Sheraton mahogany console table with satin-wood banding that sat against the wall, caressing the polished banister of the staircase where it ended in a serpentine coil for a newel post.

She mounted the stairs, admiring its clean, freshly painted, spiraling sweep. The upper hallway had been laid with an Axminster runner in gold and green marked off in squares with black. In one bedroom done in blue was a cherry tester bed with a graceful canopy fitted out in a Chinoiserie print. The same cloth had been used in drapes at the windows, which were embellished with tassels and tiebacks and drawn aside to show swiss muslin under-curtains, and also on the bed in a spread that was overlaid by a hand-crocheted coverlet. The walls of another room had been given a delicate striped paper in eggshell white and gold. It had a gold swag border that matched the swag design on a commode set that graced a washstand, including the pitcher and bowl, slop jar, footbath, chamber pot, and other toilet articles.

It was the master bedroom that drew Laura, however. She pushed open the door, but did not go inside. Here, the Mallard bed had been set up and fitted out with mattresses and monogrammed sheets. The sunburst beneath the canopy was in gold antique silk, fastened with a circular pin of bronze. The other hangings were of soft green with the faintest possible undertone of gold. The walls had been painted off-white and left severely plain. In one corner stood the cheval glass, while in another was a footed shaving stand. The armoire took up one wall, and a small dressing table of fine inlay work sat between the windows. Drawing all these elements together was the rug on the floor, a fine Wilton reproduction of green and gold on an off-white ground. Justin’s robe lay across the foot of the heavy linen coverlet on the bed. His silver-backed hairbrushes were on the shelf of the shaving stand.

Myra had seen the room since it was finished, but she had not commented one way or another on the absence of her emerald satin. She seemed to have forgotten her request for it as quickly and easily as she had discarded her passionate yearning for a game room and a pool. It was just as well. In the end, Laura had not been able to inflict such a color scheme either on the room or on Justin.

Pressing her lips tightly upon each other, Laura closed the door once more. She swung away, moving out onto the gallery. The sight of the trim lawns and shrubbery, the double row of crape myrtles already forming small, hard green balls of buds could not hold her attention. She felt on edge, strangely tearful and overtired. Without pausing, she turned back into the house.

Descending the stairs, she moved through the gold-and-white double parlors with the Belter chairs and settees, the matching mirrors, and the gold-and-red Oriental rugs rolled up out of the way, to leave the floor clear for dancing. Everything was in readiness here except for the bower of ferns and palms that would partially conceal the musicians in one inside corner, and the empty bowls sitting on marble-topped tables that would hold arrangements of roses and old-fashioned sweet peas, forget-me-nots, and fern. There was nothing for her to do there.

Across the hall, the sitting room had a welcoming air, though it may have been her imagination. Its soft cream walls were ornamented by a rose-garland border paper under the cornice. The rose-marble mantel had been cleaned, as bad the slate hearth, and a brass fireguard and other fixtures set in place. On the floor was an Aubusson carpet in rose, gold, and cream with green touches. The drapes at the windows were of antique satin in a dusty-rose shade, the edges finished with tasseled fringe and the fullness caught back with satin ropes. The bottom hems were folded onto the floor in a small pile of excess material as had been the style in the early Victorian period when generosity in all things had been a much-admired symbol of wealth. The draperies had been modeled after a set in a house in Natchez, Mississippi, up the river, the only difference being the material, which, like the other hanging and window coverings throughout the house, had been treated for flame retardation. There was a pair of Sheraton wing chairs in a flower print, and a Directoire chaise-sofa in a dark-rose brocade. A number of smaller rosewood chairs and tables and a secretary-desk completed the furnishings.

Laura sat down in one of the wing chairs, leaning her head back against its padded rest. How many long winter hours would Myra sit here? Would Justin leave his library to come and sit beside her, and would they hold hands across the space between the wing chairs? Would he sometimes cross to her and take her in his arms before he led her up the stairs to the great tester bed made by Prudent Mallard?

Laura came abruptly to her feet. She brushed through the draperies at the French windows, opened them, and stepped out onto the gallery. With agitation churning along her nerves, she moved down its length and descended the brick steps, turning toward the garden.

The spireas, the quince, winter honeysuckle, and camellias were all gone. Green, maturing leaves had taken the places of the blooms. But the flowering season was only beginning, for wafting toward her came the scent of roses, the first of the old roses that always came into flower before the hybrid teas.

Laura stopped to sniff the small yellow Lady Banksia that grew in wild disarray over a trellis, then drifted past it to the burr rose with its single pink flowers. She moved on to the Marie Louise, a dark-pink damask rose, and beyond to the pink-and-white York and Lancaster. The rose that had been damaged by the backhoe, a rugosa had been pruned back so severely it was not yet in flower, but it had several new canes and one or two slender new buds on its old growth. The gentle April air was heady with fragrance as the day’s warmth reached its peak with the westward leaning of the sun. A soft breeze sprang up, setting the shadows to gentle movement, brushing Laura’s skin like a caress. She took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, trying to ease the hard knot of pain inside her. It had been there for some time now, but she could not grow accustomed to it, nor did she think it would ever leave her.

Had Lorinda felt this stifling ache for her Jean so many years ago? Had she known the relief of telling him how she felt? And if so, had that made it better, or worse? Had Lorinda ever, in her long years of marriage to another man, forgotten her first love? Had she come to feel some semblance of affection for her second choice, the man who was the father of her children? Or had she always lain staring into the night beside him, wishing he was someone else? Did she sometimes weep for what might have been? In the twenty years before Jean’s death at Chancellorsville, did they avoid each other? Or did they sometimes meet, sometimes look at each other across the heads of their children while their spouses sat beside them, oblivious to their silent communication? And when she had died, more than forty years after Jean had quitted the earth, did Lorinda mind that even then she could not lie beside him?