Lies Agreed Upon (10 page)

As she wandered, Tess enjoyed the eclectic mix of music
spilling from the various clubs—jazz, blues, Country Western, pop, zydeco—aimed at pleasing tourists more than music connoisseurs. She did not feel ready to brave the dark, crowded interiors and merely listened from the street.

As she prepared to head back to her hotel, she passed a nightspot jammed with a college-age crowd
gyrating to the ground-shuddering heartbeat of rock. Glancing at the spotlighted performers on the stage, she was floored to recognize the bandana-covered head and lean features of Remy the waiter, bent intently over an acoustic guitar. So, she could tell Christina that she’d met a “hunk” on Bourbon Street after all, she thought wryly.

Tess began her homeward trek as a full moon rose above the black line of roo
ftops. Watching the silver disk roll like a lucky coin onto the dark palm of night, Tess felt a deep conviction that she was on the right path, her destined path.

So why
—of all the many images culled from her day—did the glimpse of the eerily familiar courtyard slip back into her mind? The court’s shifting shadows coalesced into the baleful figures of Bea, Cee and Dad. The reality of the mental scene, the disturbingly photographic clarity of the image, sent a shiver down her spine and spurred her feet toward her hotel.

6
ghosts

After the excitement of discovering Remy’s Bourbon Street persona, Tess was disa
ppointed when LaVerna delivered her breakfast order at the café the next morning. LaVerna took her coupon with a disgruntled snort, and Tess briefly wondered what arm-twisting Dreux’s firm had applied to make a minor freebie such a source of irritation.

But when a smiling Remy emerged, juice and croissant in hand, Tess promptly forgot LaVerna’s pique. She blurted quickly before she lost courage, “By the way, um, Remy, do you play in a band? I think I saw you last night on Bourbon Street.”

Remy grinned. “Yeah, but, sorry, I didn’t see you. I hope you enjoyed it.” He glanced at the road map next to her plate. “Where you headed today?”

“I’m going to see historic plantations and then lunch at The Lost Lady Restaurant,” said Tess, striving for chatty nonchalance. “The restaurant
is the converted stable of a plantation once owned by an ancestor, and I hear there’s a ghost story. You see, I’m in New Orleans because of an inheritance, and I’m researching my family.”

“Stop babbling. Why mention the inheritance? Trying to impress?”
Tess bit her lip and stopped talking.

“You don’t sound like you’re from Louisiana. I’d guess West Coast,” smiled Remy, r
emarkably attentive for a waiter whose only connection to her was a free juice and croissant. “I hope it’s a big inheritance. I’m always on the look-out for pretty girls with money.” At Tess’s panicked blink, he winked and added with a grin, “I’m teasing.”

“Yes, I’m from California, and, no, it’s not big money,” explained a flushed Tess.

Remy glanced around the little café and startled Tess by suddenly taking the seat opposite, dirty dishes still in hand.

“Good to take a load off,” he sighed. “So tell me about this family research and ghost story.”

“Well, he’s suspiciously nosy.”

Tess, flattered by Remy’s interest, ignored the warning and began an abridged account of her mysteries. Remy listened attentively and said at the conclusion, “Sounds like something worth exploring. Please stop by for breakfast again to let me know what you find out.”

He glanced up as frowning LaVerna approached with a plate of congealing eggs and grits. “Well, back to work. Good luck on the ghost hunting,” he said quickly and hurried toward LaVerna with a placating smile.

Tess’s first tourist stop was Oak Alley plantation, one of the
most photographed of the restored mansions on the famed “River Road.” The plantation was noted for its entrance alley of 300-year-old native live oaks planted in towering parallel rows. The majestic natural pergola of dark arched branches, verdigris with moss, framed the house dramatically. Passing river boats had once looked up the cathedral-like aisle of oaks to see the bride-white house in a halo of sunlight, veiled by two-story Grecian columns. But after a tour given by a cheery hoop-skirted guide, Tess felt deflated
.

The place was a pretty shell with only a lulling murmur of the past, she thought in disa
ppointment. She gained little emotional insight to the vanished world of her ancestors.

“At least it’s a better legacy than yours.”

Tess had to acknowledge the bitter truth of that. Like Oak A
lley’s owners, generations of Cabreras had lived through the same years of prosperity and loss, war and recovery—but they had left behind only 10 acres of land. 

Tess soldiered on
to “Laura: A Creole Plantation.” The raised-foundation, one-story, veranda-girt home was painted in a collage of red, ocher, moss and mauve and was far removed from the white classicism Tess anticipated. Here the tour encompassed slave quarters as well as the colorfully painted “maison principale,” or big house. The tour gave Tess her first sense of the complexity of a plantation enterprise and the managerial skills of someone like Josephine. At its peak, the Laura estate boasted miles of road lined by a mill, commercial structures and slave quarters—69 buildings to employ and house over 180 slaves.

Despite Dreux’s insinuation that Josephine was somehow unusual,
Tess also learned that hard-headed, even hard-hearted, female management was the rule at Laura plantation. It began with the French founder’s strong-willed widow, continued under her fierce daughter and ended with great-grand-daughter Laura, the plantation namesake.

T
hese women had prospered from slavery, from human oppression. It made Tess hope Josephine was as much a friend as a mistress to Solange. 

“Rubbish. There is no honest affection when one person is in bondage to another.”

“OK,” conceded Tess, “but you must admit that Louisiana had a less rigid racial apar
theid.” 

“
Maybe just less honest. If you’re referring to the Code Noir, it was no human rights charter.”

The Laura tour had earnestly explained the slave-owning Code Noir, or Black Code, first enacted by the French colonial government. One notable requirement was that slaves had to be brought into the Catholic fold, which explained why south
eastern Louisiana’s black population still had a majority of Catholics. But many strictures were ignored. Sex between owner and slave was prohibited, for example, but the large mixed-race population proved the taboo was often broken, and not just by liaisons with free “placées.”

For the first time, Tess wondered if the Cabrera line had any dark descendants invisible on Dreux’s genealogical charts.

Tess left her touring of other families’ relics for the Lost Lady Restaurant, a very minor historical site of greater personal interest. She soon was seated at a white-linen-draped table in the former plantation’s carriage house and stables. Displays of worn carriage wheels, carriage lamps and coiled whips created a rustic frieze below the bare cypress ribs buttressing the great central roof beam—all cheerily clean of past-life reminders of hay and horse manure.

At the entry,
Tess had looked in vain for a plaque or framed news article about the famous ghost story. Now she impatiently flipped through the oversized, leather-bound menu and finally found “The Legend of The Lost Lady” on the last page. The page was illustrated by a photo of misty moss-draped oaks, presumably the old plantation grounds:

The Lost Lady Restaurant occupies the stables of a bygone plantation. It gets its name from the tragic history of the plantation’s mid-nineteenth century mistress, Josephine Chastant. Noted for her beauty and her intelligent management of her father’s sugar cane business, Josephine scorned convention to conduct business in the male commercial world. She received many offers of marriage but refused them all to retain independent control of her beloved plantation. To please her ailing father, she finally accepted the marriage offer of a neighbor, a Spanish immigrant named Antonio Cabrera, because the eager young suitor promised her equal say in managing the plantation properties.

Unfortunately, after Josephine’s first two children died at birth, her hu
sband blamed her active lifestyle and set restrictions during her third pregnancy. She was confined to her home and could no longer exert control over the plantation. Josephine felt betrayed, and the pair became estranged.

Nevertheless, in 1843, the young couple both rejoiced at the arrival of a son named Benjamin. Benjamin seemed healthy, but, one night shortly after birth, the baby stopped breathing. At some point in the frantic effort to revive the child, a distraught Josephine left the house unnoticed.

By dawn, it was clear little Benjamin would survive, and the exhausted household finally noticed that Josephine was missing. A search team found her body entangled in debris on the river bank. It was assumed that the depressed mother, thinking another child had been lost and unhappy in her marriage, committed suicide by drowning herself.

To this day, evening diners on our back terrace occasionally report seeing a woman in a long white gown walking under the
nearby oak trees. Those who have seen “The Lost Lady” say she appears for only a few minutes and then vanishes instantly “like a light blinking out.”

Tess closed the menu, but the image of a body tangled in river debris lingered unpleasantly. She told herself cynically that the tale was probably a fabrication by restaurant entrepreneurs eager to add ghostly spice to a bland tourist menu. But the queasy chill at her core persisted. Some of the dark emotions from her mother’s suicide were revived and sapped any enjoyment of her overpriced shrimp po’ boy sandwich.

Tess had no trouble finding the next stop on her outing: Mimi’s Garden District house. It was a charming Gothic Revival reflecting the little woman’s chirpy personality. Golden tan stu
cco was decorated by white plaster dados like cake icing, and the cast-iron porch balustrade and arched roof supports wrapped the home in exuberant blue-gray quatrefoil and fleur-de-lis. Through an iron-rail fence unfettered by shrubbery, passersby had a clear view of clumps of blue irises and yellow day lilies at the base of a raised foundation. It was like a light-hearted convent garden, Tess thought.

Mimi’s pleasant house was in stark contrast to the Garden District home where her grandfather had been murdered.
Although documentation about her inherited land on the Mississippi had been missing from her mother’s files, her meticulous mother had filed away paperwork about the sale of this house 15 years ago.

Tess sought out the address with macabre curiosity during a quick round of the
neighborhood prior to arriving at Mimi’s. The Garden District was a place on her tourist to-do list in any case. After the Louisiana Purchase, its 65 blocks were chosen by wealthy Americans to show off their prosperity with architectural jewels set in landscaped grounds.

As s
he drove slowly by her grandparents’ former address, Tess wondered if it was only her overwrought imagination that gave the place a haunted-house quality. The property was wrapped by an 8-foot fence of black, spear-tipped rails containing densely overgrown hedges. Funereal black urns topped the pillars at each corner of the fence. Just visible over the top of the unfriendly hedging was a two-story Italianate gray-stucco building. Ionic columns supported open galleries with black cast-iron balustrades and black-shuttered French windows. The balustrades had a dense design of thistles and thorny vines, which further emphasized the home’s forbidding enchanted-castle aspect. Tess could not reconcile it with her grandmother’s ethereal personality and assumed the home was much changed.

Tess had to ring Mimi’s doorbell a number of times before rapid, tapping footsteps a
pproached. Mimi peeped out like a happy sprite in modern tailored slacks and silk blouse. “Oh, you’re here. And you’re right on time. You know, in New Orleans, so many of us have a dreadful tendency to tardiness. I don’t know if it’s the heat or our Mediterranean heritage that slows us down. But how was your tour of the River Road? Tell me which plantations did you visit? Did you stop at the Lost Lady for lunch? Do tell me the details of that ghost story.” The little woman twittered nonstop and did not wait for, or seem to expect, a response as she led Tess down the house’s central hall.

Their footsteps echoed noisily between the old hardwood floors and the high ceilings, and Tess looked around curiously. The house was constructed for pre-modern coolness with thick walls, high ceilings and two long rooms on either side of the central hall
to allow for an unblocked passage of air from front to back through matched French windows at either end. One side was a double parlor and one side was a dining room, and both were furnished with Empire furniture in warm brocades. Ornate stone fireplaces on each side were Gothic Revival tributes to medieval hearths that looked elegant rather than silly because of the size of the rooms. Mimi had done well in her marriage to Mr. Walker, Tess concluded.

To the right of the dining room, they entered a kitchen wing that had obviously been r
ecently modernized, and Mimi was proudly showing off her granite countertops and stainless steel appliances when a husky voice interrupted from French doors to the back patio: “Mimi, are you boring the poor girl with your kitchen remodel? Please don’t make her inspect every darn doodad!”

With an embarrassed gasp, Mimi bobbed up from an under-counter tour of spice racks and lazy-susans. “Lillian, I’m so sorry. You know how easily I get distracted. Tess, let me intr
oduce my old friend, Lillian Vanderveld. Lillian, this is Therese Parnell, a descendant of the Cabrera family.”

Tess reached out to shake the other woman’s hand, saying, “Thank you so much for ta
king the time to meet me, Lillian. Please call me Tess, both of you.”

Lillian was a tall, stout woman dressed in an expensive navy-silk sheath dress ornamen
ted by a triple-strand pearl necklace. Large pearl-drop earrings dangled on either side of a squat neck and heavy jaw. She seemed a bit overdressed for a casual meeting, and the elegance contrasted jarringly with her orthopedic shoes and iron-gray hair cut in a severely mannish style.

“What an odd combination of ladies
’ guild and prison guard.”

Tess rejected the unkind observation and gave a warm smile to Lillian, who responded with a sour nod.