Saratoga Trunk (8 page)

“Never see such a funny little
maringouin!
He climb up there he make them nags look like steppers. Look him now! Hi-yah!”

Sulkily Clio took her place on the wine-silk shawl against which her gray gown glowed the pinker. Kaka triumphantly took the little seat facing her, her back to the coachman’s seat. “Begué’s!” she commanded over her shoulder to Cupide.

“Fold your arms!” Cupide commanded of the chuckling Negro beside him on the box. “Sit up straight, you Congo! Eyes ahead!”

The man wagged his head in delighted wonder. “Just like you say,
Quärtee.
Look them horses step! My, my!”

Kaka, victorious, decided to follow up her advantage. “Madame la Comtesse looked very chic talking to that dock laborer. Is it for that we crossed the ocean and returned to New Orleans to live!”

“I didn’t talk to him. He talked to me. He isn’t a dockhand. He’s a Texan, probably. Can I help it if—”

“Texan! Savages!”

“A clarence, he said. Thoroughbred bays. And serve you right if he has Cupide brought into court.”

“That one! Not for him, courtrooms. I know the look of them. He’s probably wanted in Texas himself, and skipped out with somebody’s carriage and pair.”

“Oh, Kaka, let’s not quarrel. I was going to have such a lovely day. I looked forward to it.” The morning was sunny; she was young; a clarence drawn by long-tailed bays and driven by a huge Texan in a white sombrero could not long remain hidden on the streets of New Orleans; instinct warned her that danger lay ahead, common sense told her that Kakaracou was right.

They turned into Decatur Street and drew up at Madame Begué’s with quite a flourish.

“Let him wait,” Clio commanded, loftily.

“No such thing. Sitting here, doing nothing, while we pay him for it. I’ll pay him off now. If he wants to wait until we come out that’s his business. You, Cupide!”

Cupide had heard. He tossed the shabby reins into the hands of their owner, and, agile as a monkey, scrambled out on the heaving back of one of the astonished horses, retrieved his check reins (at which the horses’ heads, released, immediately slumped forward as though weighted with lead), leaped down and handed Clio out in his best Paris manner. The check reins he tucked away under his coat; he sprang to open the restaurant door, and the strange little procession of three climbed the narrow stair and entered as Rita Dulaine had entered so often twenty years before, with the woman to attend her like a duenna, the dwarf to stand behind her chair as though she were Elizabethan royalty.

IV

New Orleans of the late ‘80’s had itself been sufficiently bizarre to have
found nothing fantastic in the sight of the beautiful
placée
followed by her strange retinue. But the New Orleans of Clio’s day, breakfasting solidly in its favorite restaurant, looked up from its plate to remain staring, its fork halfway to its mouth.

The three stood a moment in the doorway, their eyes blinking a little in the sudden change from the white glare of the midday streets to the cool half-light of the restaurant. In that instant Monsieur Begué himself stood before them in his towering stiffly starched chef’s cap, his solid round belly burgeoning ahead of him. He bowed, he clasped his plump hands.

“Madame! But no. For a moment I thought you were—but of course it isn’t possible—”

“I have heard my mother speak of you so often, Monsieur Begué. They say I resemble her. I am Comtesse de—uh—Trenaunay de Chanfret. But this is America, and my home now. Just Madame de Chanfret, please.”

She was having a splendid time. She relished the little stir that her entrance had made; it was pleasant to be ushered by Hippolyte Begué himself to a choice table and to have him hovering over her chair as he presented for her inspection the menu handwritten in lively blue ink. Having entered with enormously dramatic effect, she now pretended to be a mixture of royalty incognito and modest young miss wide-eyed with wonder. She had seated herself with eyes cast down, she had handed her parasol to Cupide, her gloves to Kaka, she had pressed her hands to her hot cheeks in pretty confusion, she had thrown an appealing glance up at the attendant Begué.

“I want everything that you are famous for, Monsieur. You and Madame Begué.” She cast an admiring glance at the plump black-garbed figure reigning behind the vast cashier’s desk at the rear. “All the delicious things Mama used to describe to me in Paris.”

“She spoke of my food! In Paris!” He was immensely flattered. He snapped his fingers for Léon, the headwaiter, he himself flicked open her napkin and presented it to her with a flourish. Then the three heads came close—the restaurateur, the waiter, the audacious girl—intent on the serious business of selecting a Sunday morning breakfast from among the famous list of viands at Begué’s. Madame Begué’s renowned crayfish bisque? Not a dish for even Sunday New Orleans breakfast. Pompano? Begué’s celebrated calf’s liver
à la bourgeoise? Filet de truite, Poulet chanteclair?
With an
omelette soufflée
to follow?
Grillades? Pain perdu?

Clio, speaking her flawless Parisian French to the two attendant men, ordered delicately and fastidiously. Hippolyte Begué himself waddled off to the kitchen to prepare the dishes with his own magic hands.

Clio Dulaine now leaned back in her chair and breathed a gusty sigh of relief and satisfaction. She looked about her with the lively curiosity of a small girl and the air of leisurely contemplation befitting her recently assumed title and station. She was attempting to produce the effect of being a woman of the world, a connoisseur of food, a
femme fatale
of mystery and experience. Curiously enough, with her lovely face made up as Aunt Belle had taught her, her rich attire, her bizarre attendants, her high, clear voice speaking the colloquial French of the Paris she had just left, she actually achieved the Protean role.

That choice section of New Orleans which was engaged in the rite of Sunday breakfast at Madame Begué’s stared, whispered, engaged in facial gymnastics that ranged all the way from looking down their noses to raising their eyebrows.

Well they might. Behind the newcomer’s chair stood Cupide, a figure cut from a pantomime. He brushed away a fly. He summoned a waiter with the Gallic “P-s-s-s-s-t!” He handed his mistress a little black silk fan. He glared pugnaciously about him. He stood with his tiny arms folded across his chest, a bodyguard out of a nightmare. His face was on a level with the table top as he stood. Each new dish, on presentation, he viewed with a look of critical contempt, standing slightly on tiptoe the better to see it as he did so.

From time to time Clio handed him a bit of crisp buttered crust with a tidbit on it—a bit of rich meat or a corner of French toast crowned with a ruby of jelly, as one would toss a bite to a pampered dog.

Breakfasting New Orleans snorted or snickered, outraged.

“Not bad,” Clio commented graciously from time to time, addressing Kaka or the world at large. “The food here is really good— but really good.”

Kakaracou sat at table an attendant, aloof from food and being offered none. Certainly Begué’s clients would have departed in a body had she eaten one bite. Her lean straight back was erect, disdaining to relax against Begué’s comfortable chair. The eyes beneath the heavy hoodlike lids noted everything about the table, about the room; she marked each person who entered at the doorway that led up the stair from the hot noonday glare of Decatur Street. For the most part her hands remained folded quietly in her neat lap, the while her eyes slid this way and that and the darting movement of her head set her earrings to swinging and glinting. Occasionally the purple-black hand, skinny and agile, darted forth like a benevolent spider to place nearer for her mistress’s convenience a sugar bowl, a spoon, a dish. She viewed the food with the hard clear gaze of the expert.

“Red wine enough in that sauce, you think? . . . The
pain perdu
could be a shade browner.”

The delicate and lovely girl slowly demolished her substantial breakfast with proper appreciation. She might have been a lifelong
habituée
dawdling thus over her Sunday morning meal. The room watched her boldly or covertly. Monsieur Begué hovered paternally. The waiters approved her and her entourage. Here was someone dramatic and to their fancy; someone who, young though she was, knew food. Titled, too. From France. There was about these serving men nothing of the appearance of the gaunt and flat-footed of their tribe. They were fruity old boys with mustaches and side whiskers. In moments of leisure they sat in a corner near Madame Begué’s high desk reading
L’Abeille
and engaging in the argumentative talk of their fraternity. Nothing meager about these servitors. They, like Madame and Monsieur Begué, were solid with red wine and gumbo soup and the rich food for which the city was famous. Their customers were clients; each meal was a problem to be weighed, discussed. They advised, gravely. They were quick to see that the lovely stranger knew the importance of good eating.

From time to time Léon reported in a sibilant whisper, “A Comtesse, that little one . . . The little monkey is old, his face is marked with wrinkles when you see him close . . . She orders like a true Creole. Grits, she said, one must always have with breakfast at Begué’s.”

The talk between mistress and maid was not at all the sort of conversation ordinarily found in this relation. It resembled the confidences exchanged between friends of long standing or even conspirators who have nothing to conceal from one another. And conspirators they were. As guest after guest entered the dim coolness of the restaurant Kaka commented on them succinctly and wittily. The girl munched and nodded. Now and then she laid down her knife and fork to laugh her indolent deep-throated laugh.

The women who entered now, decorously escorted by the men of their family, were, for the most part, dressed in quiet, rich black, like Parisian women; the men wore Sunday attire of Prince Albeit coat or sack suits with dark ties. Sallow, reserved, rather forbidding, they conducted themselves like royalty incognito, aware of their own exalted state but pretending unconsciousness of it.

“Chacalata,”
Kakaracou said, witheringly. It was a local New Orleans term, culled from heaven knows where, to describe the inner circle of New Orleans aristocracy, clannish, self-satisfied, resenting change or innovation.

“The same dresses they wore when we left for France fifteen or more years ago. They’re so puffed with their own pride they think they don’t have to dress fashionably. They’d come out in their
gabrielles,
those
chacalata
women, if they thought it decent.”

Clio giggled at the thought of beholding these stately New Orleans Creole women in the informality of the loose wrapper locally known as a
gabrielle.
She preened herself in the consciousness of her own rich finery. “Dowdy old things, in their snuffy black. I could show them black. I wish I’d worn my black ottoman silk with the Spanish lace flounces.”

“Too grand for the street,” Kaka observed. “Ladies don’t dress up on the street. But then, you’re not a lady.” She said this, not spitefully or insolently, but as one stating a fair fact to another.

“Not I!” Clio agreed, happily. “I’m going to enjoy myself, and laugh, and wear pretty clothes and do as I like.”

“Like your mama.”

“No, not like poor dear Mama. She didn’t have any fun—at least not since I can remember. Always moping and reading old letters and trailing around in her
gabrielle,
ill and sad.”

“She wasn’t always like that, my poor
bébé
Rita.”

“Look!” Clio interrupted, in French. “There! Coming in. Is it They?”

The head in its brilliant tignon jerked sharply in the direction of the doorway. The spare figure stiffened, then relaxed. “No. No, silly”

“Are you sure? You’re sure you’d know them, after all these years?”

“I would know them, those faces of stone, after a hundred years. . . . Stop staring at the door. Drink your good red wine and eat another slice of that delicious liver. It will bring you strength and make your eyes bright and your cheeks pink.”

Clio pushed her plate away like a willful child. “I don’t want to be pink. Pink women bore me, just to look at them, like dolls.”

Indeed the naturally creamy skin was dead white with the French liquid powder she used, so that her eyes seemed darker and more enormous; sadder too, and the wide mouth wider. Almost a clown’s mask, except for its beauty. It was a makeup that Aunt Belle Piquery had taught her—Aunt Belle of the round blue eyes and the plump pink cheeks and the pert little nose. “I’m the type men take a fancy to, but you’re the type they stay with and die for,” the hearty old baggage used to say to Clio. “Like your ma.”

“All right, pink or not, eat it anyway,” Kaka now persisted.

“I won’t. I’m not hungry. I just ordered everything because I wanted to taste everything.”

Like an angry monkey Kakaracou chattered her disapproval. “I told you! It’s that jambalaya you stuffed yourself with in the French Market.”

“Oh, what’s it matter! I eat what I like when I like. . . . It’s getting late, isn’t it? They’re not coming. You said yourself They stopped coming after Mama and Papa—after They—when Mama moved into the Rampart Street house. It isn’t likely They started coming after Papa died. Anyway They’re millions of years old by now.”

The eyes of the Negress narrowed, they were knifelike slits in her gray-black face. “They stopped. But They came again, after. Creoles are like that. Customs. Habits. Everything
de rigueur.’’’’

The girl leaned forward, eagerly. “Do I look enough like her? When They come in will it be a shock to Them to see me sitting here? Do I look like the picture Mama and Papa had taken together? Will They think I am Mama—just for that first moment?”

The woman’s eyes regarded her sadly across the table; she shook her turbaned head. “You are like her, yes, perhaps even enough to startle anyone who knew her when she was your age. But she was beautiful. She was the most beautiful woman in New Orleans.”

“I’m beautiful too.”