Cajun Waltz (7 page)

He recognized Walter Dopsie's daughter at once, though her eyes were hooded and her hair had taken copper glints that spoke of southern sun and not the smoky music hall in which she'd first impressed him. Ten years had puffed and rounded her features—she was in her early twenties now—but oh, it was her. “Angel,” popped from his mouth like a gulp.

She cocked her head. “You.”

His joy at being remembered didn't even embarrass him. Surely it proved that his feelings were pure, his miracle girl now probably some sharecropper's wife and still he'd surrender his soul to win her. “Just down for a visit,” he said. The explanation rang absurd in his ears.

“Didn't imagine you here permanent.”

His thoughts hit a wall. Acknowledgment was called for. “Was a bad night we had. At the end.”

“I don't think about it.”

“I guess me neither.”

She was silent. Evidently it was his job to do the talking.

“So it's your mama been workin' for me all these years?”

“News to me.”

He nodded, stymied again. It annoyed him to have to make small talk when fate clearly had big things in store for them.

Angel Hooker (her parents hadn't married) peered down at the Packard as though at a lifeboat she might deign to let save her. Her softening expression suggested she was starting to sense how much her life might change in the next moments. She wasn't a wife, let alone one tied to a sharecropper. But she was, like Richie, in the market for rescue.

Her mother had risen from the bench and was watching from nearby. Sallie hesitated to approach, her daughter's long intimidation of her now reinforced by Angel's strange bond with Mr. Bainard. Her own mother stood beside her, hand resting on Sallie's arm for support and in unspoken gratitude that her daughter had finally come home for good. Old Mrs. Hooker was full of the cancer but still the family's proud matriarch, driving a truck, scolding the men, farming rice for landowners she'd never met. Her one failure, she would have said, was in not getting her granddaughter to value herself above whatever slick piece of traveling trash came through town. But then Sallie too had been a handful in her day, getting pregnant by that charmer Walter Dopsie, who was as wrong for faithful fatherhood as he was for tilling dirt in Hancock Bayou all his life.

Richie shut off his motor and climbed out of the Packard. The move was unwelcome to Meers, who wanted the hell out of there, but also to Sallie and her mother, whom Richie approached with an earnest stride. They recoiled warily. He belonged here no more than did his big fancy car all covered in dust in front of a ramshackle storefront. But the car spoke money, he had plenty, the Hookers much less. It gave him the courage to be direct. “Ma'am. Sallie. I knew Angel's daddy. I knew Angel some, and I hope to reacquaint if she'll have it.”

The Hooker ladies were speechless.

“And if she's married,” he said, “well, no secret—so am I.”

There was silence till Angel broke it. “Shouldn't you be talkin' to me?”

Richie turned and put his hand on his heart. “Afraid what you might say.”

“How about take me to Shreveport?”

The questioned staggered him thrillingly, like being hit with a handful of rose petals. “Wherever you say, pretty girl.”

Angel's smile, cute as it was, held a sliver of letdown, his ardor too predictable, too easy, another man with a teenage brain. She rested her chin on her arm but kept her eyes on him. They were a paler green than what he recalled, like a new seedling before it buds with flowers or prickers. “Now remind me your name again,” she said.

*   *   *

H
E INSTALLED HER
in a suite at the Youree Hotel in Shreveport and spent so much time there the staff took to calling them Mr. and Mrs. When she gave birth to his son fourteen months later, he got her a cottage with a trellis and carport not far from the Block's on Texas Street. She was electric in his arms from their first time together, giggly and coarse and just a natural to do things to. She gave weepy cries during lovemaking that hardened him whenever he replayed them in his head. She liked to drink and even when she was pregnant would dance naked for him to the wireless. She laughed at jokes that made him blush and dared him, though he refused in appalled disbelief, to let her give him an orgasm with her hand while they waited for her doctor to arrive in a taxicab to deliver the baby. Afterward, Richie wanted to name the boy Walter, but Angel insisted on Seth.

“Seth? Where you get that?”

“It come to me.”

“Now goddamn, Angel, if it some ol' boyfriend—”

“Stop. I like the name.”

“I'd kill the guy, you know that.”

“Big talk.”

He smiled, mostly. “Thought you'd want him called for your daddy.”

“I hardly knew the man. Took me travelin' a couple times when my mama tired o' fightin' me.”

Propped on feather pillows in bed, she shifted the baby to her other breast. Richie glanced down warily but found it not so bad. “Lookit that sonofabitch work! And still you want every time I see him I got to wonder who he named for?”

“If you so worried, don't see him.”

“You know I will, whatever he called.”

“In the Bible, Richie! Seth is Adam and Eve's number three child. Sent by the Lord after Cain killed Abel.”

“Well, if it out the Bible, okay.”

“Little gift from me to you. No matter what else. 'Cause you been good to me and I love you.”

In that moment Richie loved her back a hundredfold. He beheld the vision of her and their child with cosmic wonder that men like him often aren't built to acknowledge. But he knew it the instant he felt it, and he knew that it was rare and he would never let it go. In the shaded glow of her bedside lamp Angel's caramel shoulders and the slope of her breasts were something out of a classic painting he'd never seen. His baby's pink head made him want to cry for its preciousness. In fact he did cry a little, Angel too, and when he bent low to give her a kiss their lips made a beautiful fit.

*   *   *

T
HE COMPANY'S GROWTH
slowed only a little during the war years, with Block's stores opening in Houston and Jackson. Esther, from her father's rocking chair relocated to a headquarters office near the Lake Charles city hall, oversaw the selection of sites and distribution centers and the standardization of products and services throughout the chain. Richie was her eyes and ears, making the rounds from place to place in a performance mixing the strut of a corporate boss with the skitter of a traveling salesman. It was an efficient partnership in which they spent little time together, and it came to an end just after New Year's in 1946, when Esther choked on a mouthful of crawfish pie and died at age fifty-four.

Abe Percy had prepared the dish as a pick-me-up for his friend, who was nursing a cold at home. He was sitting beside her while she ate in bed when something caught in her throat and caused a spasm that took her life right there in a blue-faced thrashing silence. He would never get over it. He would never forgive himself. Richie made a special trip to his office a week after the funeral to let Abe know that he wouldn't forgive him either. “I loved the woman,” Richie said. “Now you gone and orphaned her children.”

“They're not orphans. They have their father.”

“Listen to you, talkin' legal at such a time.”

Abe clasped his hands in front of his face to keep them from shaking. “What do you want from me? I can't feel worse than I already do.”

Richie had specific wants in mind. Sympathy intruded. “Hell, everyone knows it was an accident. Show me a crawfish pie ain't got a shell in it. Woman ate like a damn horse.”

Abe's hands tightened.

“I'll be straight,” Richie went on. “I didn't love Esther that much. Not like I love my gal in Shreveport and it's a magical thing, lemme tell you.”

“Come again?”

“Gonna marry her. Our boy, gonna be his daddy official.”

“You have a son with another woman?”

“Almost seven now. Seth. Smart as a whip.”

“Poor Esther.”

“She not part o' this.”

“Clearly.”

“Don't be smart or we done here.”

“Done for what, Richie?”

“The store. The paperwork. Who know that shit more?” Abe had drafted most every legal contract for the Block's chain since Leopold's death. Cutting loose such a client would mean starting over in his profession, a humiliation at middle age after he'd been sacked from the state attorney's office almost twenty years ago, a death sentence if it happened again. “I need you to school Bonnie on the business,” Richie said. “The whole shootin' match.”

A fantasy teased Abe's mind of continuing to work for Block's in order, like a secret saboteur, to hurt Richie someday for his mistreatment of Esther. But he knew he'd lose fire once the money kept coming. “She's in high school,” he protested halfheartedly.

“No more. Asked her to quit, she jumped on it. Hates that goddamn place. Girl likes makin' money.”

“You don't?”

“I like havin' it.”

“And your son? Esther's son.”

“He out the toy army come spring.” The term was Richie's take on Esther's insistence that R.J. enter the East Texas Military Academy as an eighth grader in 1942. Wartime conscription had been revving up and she'd wanted to shield him from the draft on an education deferral. A
military
education, so nobody could call him a shirker—first at high school and then, she'd hoped, in the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M, giving him eight years out of harm's way should the fighting drag on in Europe and the Pacific. The precaution had proved unnecessary once the war ended last summer. “I reckon it's college next,” Richie said. “Stay drunk at the fraternity on my dime.”

“You can afford it.”

“Yeah? That your money gone for piss at that prep school?”

“It'll be his money eventually.” The lawyer smiled, knowing it would annoy. “Leopold's will, remember? The grandchildren become owners at age twenty-five.”

“Why I got to get on it, make my plans.” Richie leaned forward. “For Angel and my lil boy.”

“Her name is Angel?”

“It fit, trust me.”

“You're serious about this.”

“Best you be, too.”

“May I ask, have you told Bonnie and R.J.?”

Richie nodded, though it didn't mean yes. “That's got to come, I know.”

*   *   *

H
E PREPARED FOR
introducing his elder children to Angel and Seth by buying a residence big enough for them all. He called it Georgia Hill after being informed it was of Georgian revival design and thinking it needed a plantation name. Located outside town not far from the lakefront, the place rather strained for glamor, its whitewashed pillars and portico overmatching the brick façade like too much icing on a cake. But it appealed to Richie for its view—the view of
it,
from the road. The main house sat among several outbuildings on a rise overlooking lawns and established plantings. Two southern live oaks guarded each side of the driveway entrance, trunks gray and hefty as an elephant's hindquarters. Entering between them in a long-hooded limousine and seeing the Georgia Hill grounds unfurl before you was to understand that nothing beats money sometimes. It was a lesson that his daughter Bonnie, the older twin by minutes and by temperament, instinctively endorsed. Not so her brother. The difference went far to explain why they'd never got along.

Rather than warm to the child most like them—one prudent, one feckless—their parents had each favored their opposite. There'd been something poignant about this in Esther's case. Her feelings for her son held a bit of whatever once had been positive in her marriage to Richie. She'd wanted mainly to give Leopold a grandchild, but Richie had attracted her with his energy and chatter. He was even romantic when he made the effort. Their early times together, he would slide down her big body and lay his head between her legs, her pubic hair a tickly pillow under his cheek, and declare, “I could die here with a smile.” She would pull him on top to stop him from talking. Embarrassment felt like love in those moments.

Where R.J. disappointed was in traits he shared with his father—his evasiveness, his third-rate friends. But Esther tapped the same indulgence toward him that she'd shown Richie in the beginning. It wasn't easy; she was happiest when working in solitude at matters of business. Nor was it easy to ship him off to boarding school at age thirteen. Eluding the draft had been only one reason. Esther had begun contemplating removing R.J. from his father's influence the second Richie had hit her that first time in Block's. Subsequent incidents—slaps on her cheek or backside much harder than playful, maybe a grip on her arm tight enough to remind her that he could draw blood if he wanted—had made fierce her desire to give R.J. a life beyond Richie. She'd done it in small ways already, letting the boy dabble at playing guitar and slipping him catalogs to purchase the race records he liked listening to, frivolous wastes of time in her view but worth allowing if it made him think of his mother as not some all-business robot. She did hope military school would sharpen him up some. More than that, she wanted it to happen away from her husband.

Esther didn't miss R.J. in his absence; nor did he miss her. But when each on occasion thought of the other, it was with generosity enough to suppose that mother and son might have become close in the future. R.J.'s were the only moist eyes at Esther's funeral other than Abe Percy's. Richie had arranged the event to be held at the Baptist church; accommodating his wife's Jewish heritage was too much trouble given her non-practice and the continuing dreary news out of Europe about death camp survivors and hollow-eyed peasants that no one knew what to do with. Richie was well known in Lake Charles, but few of the funeral attendees had any sense of Esther beyond her being plainspoken and obese. R.J., on bereavement leave from the military academy, was praised by his father's friends for showing maturity in the face of what everyone agreed was his mother's pathetic death by gluttony. He knew their praise was based mostly on his cadet uniform, its crisp formality an improvement on his hometown reputation as a rich man's shiftless son. The contempt this aroused in him tempered his sorrow and enabled him to keep tears at a minimum.