Bonaventure took in his Grand-mère’s excitement, and it made him feel big and strong. He was lying on his tummy the first time he heard her plans, facedown on one little fist, which wasn’t all that comfortable. When he heard her anxious anticipation—
tzing, tzing, tzing
—Bonaventure was able to move his arm from beneath his head, inspired by the sound, even though he was no more than a few weeks old.
He stared at his hand and wiggled his fingers until he was plumb tuckered out.
L
ETICE
Arrow’s life revolved around Catholicism. She loved its ritual, its music, and its belief in a loving God. She also loved the mystery of it: the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. She loved the idea that suffering brought one closer to God, and that forgiveness could be found through confession, even though she felt she’d never attained absolution for her sins because she’d never received proper penance.
Mardi Gras is French for Fat Tuesday and is the last day of revelry before the fasting ritual that begins on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Fat Tuesday fell on the twenty-first of February in 1950, arriving on the arm of a steady light rain. The grayness of the day made an undetectable turn toward dusk as the dark of blue became a bruise on the sky.
Letice Arrow drew the drawing room drapes against the cries of “
Laissez les bons temps rouler!
” ringing though the streets of Bayou Cymbaline.
“Go ahead and let the good times roll,” she whispered. “The hours for your sinning are numbered. Your bodies will take your souls straight to hell. Your flesh will rot and you will stink for eternity. What good will your lust do you then?”
She could hardly wait for midnight, when the reveling would cease in accordance with laws of church and state; when purple and green would be returned to holy vestments; when spangles and beads would be swept from the gutters; and when pleasure and excess would be sealed tight away. Letice hated Fat Tuesday. To her, Mardi Gras belonged to Satan. It was unadulterated wanting come to life, adorned in beads and feathers and arousal. Letice was forty-five years old and had, for the most part, turned her back on sexual desire before she’d turned twenty, though not before she’d known it. There’d been a time when she had loved Mardi Gras and the wildness it brought to her body.
Letice was restless that night, feverish and disturbed. When sleep did come, it brought dreams of her youth: a ballroom, a hallway, a clandestine rendezvous. She tossed and turned as she lived out her dreams, and she woke up disturbed all the more.
Letice Molyneaux had met Remington Arrow at a sailing party in 1921, during a boat outing planned for Bogue Falaya and the Tchefuncte River and sponsored by the Jupitala Yacht Club. After that first meeting, they didn’t see each other again until Mardi Gras on February 8, 1922, at the Goddess of the Rainbow ball held at the Athenaeum. Remington had never forgotten her. When Lent was over that year, he began to call upon Letice, seeing her only in the presence of her parents, with whom the couple sat in the Molyneaux parlor on Sunday afternoons.
Remington attributed Letice’s demure manner and downcast eyes to ladylike behavior, when in fact she was trying to hide her impatience. Her quiet manner was not about shyness; she simply had nothing to say. Letice’s thoughts were far away. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about Remington; he was a very good man, though she thought him too proper. All she could do was hope that he would tire of her feigned bashfulness. She did not realize her shyness made him love her all the more, for Remington Arrow thought he’d found his soul mate.
Week after week, Horatio and Emmaline Molyneaux welcomed him heartily, and they were only too happy to grant him permission to marry their only child. The wedding would take place the following year. The two were allowed to be alone after that, and though a fondness had formed in Letice’s heart, she spent her love on someone else.
The Mystic Club held the Arabian Nights Ball on February 10, 1923, during the Mardi Gras of their engagement. Letice was costumed as Scheherazade, an elaborate masque covering her face. It had been a well thought-out choice—she knew there would be many Scheherazades at the ball. Remington was in her company nearly the whole evening, but somewhere around nine o’clock she excused herself for the ladies’ lounge, saying she had a slight headache. A quarter hour passed, then a half. Remington scanned the crowd and every corner of the ballroom, finding many Scheherazades but none that was Letice. Nearly an hour had gone by before he saw a flash of color near the doors leading into the ballroom.
And there was Letice.
He crossed the room and executed a perfect courtier’s bow, taking her hand and asking her for the pleasure of a dance. It was a complete quadrille:
le pantalon
,
l’été
,
la poule
,
la pastourelle
, and finale. The quadrille is not a close dance; there was no opportunity to ask if she’d been in the ladies’ lounge all that time. But then again, it wouldn’t do to seem possessive. For Remington, it was enough to hold this slip of a girl in his arms and feel her softness, smell her sweetness, and know their wedding would soon take place. Just once that evening he allowed himself the pleasure of brushing back a wisp of her hair that had somehow come loose from its comb.
More than six hundred people attended the mass at which twenty-eight-year-old Remington Arrow and eighteen-year-old Letice Molyneaux were joined in holy matrimony. It was June 21, 1923, and the sun shone brightly through the stained glass windows of Our Lady of the Rosary, the Molyneaux family parish church, on Hamilton Square in Bayou Cymbaline. The groom was striking and the bride was lovely, if just a wee bit pale. It was said she’d suffered an illness in the springtime soon after Mardi Gras, a fever of some kind or other, which was no doubt the reason she was so painfully thin. Nonetheless, Letice was a vision in her ivory silk charmeuse gown.
A reception was held at the Roosevelt in New Orleans. Every florist within a hundred miles had worked to fill the grand hotel’s lobby, as well as the ballroom in which the reception took place, this wedding being the social event of the season in the entire state of Louisiana and in those parts of Texas and Mississippi that mattered.
Remington hardly took his eyes off Letice through the ceremony and reception, and he pinched himself more than once to make certain it was real. That night, when they were alone in the bridal suite, he asked if she would require the help of a maid in unbuttoning her wedding dress and brushing out her hair.
“No, sir, I shall not,” she said. “I was hoping that you would help me.” She offered him a shy smile and blushing cheeks, and he loved her all the more.
His fingers fumbled over the satin buttons and hooks-and-eyes of her bodice, but he was better with the brushing of her long, wavy hair. The motion of it calmed him and excited him at the same time. After Letice had retired to the bedroom, Remington remained in the sitting room with a snifter of brandy. He was determined to be a gentleman, and so was giving her the opportunity to plead exhaustion. He got into bed without making a sound and then tried to lie very still.
Remington Arrow could not have been more shocked when his bride reached for him that night. Never in his wildest dreams had he hoped things would happen this way. When he noticed the bloodstain on the sheets in the morning, a quick look at his wife’s face showed it burning bright red, and Remington looked away.
As time went on, Remington and Letice brought out the best in each other. His shyness let in some
joie de vivre
, and he bought her a Victrola and every 78 record he could find. On Sundays they listened to opera, but every single Saturday night the two of them danced to ragtime music: King Oliver’s muted cornet, or Sidney Bechet’s clarinet, or the romping style of Jelly Roll Morton and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. And once in a while they danced in an easy slow sway as Bessie Smith sang about loving someone when that someone don’t love you. For that song Remington held Letice a little tighter, and her eyes filled with tears every time.
On every Mardi Gras evening of their married life, Remington Arrow executed a perfect courtier’s bow and took his wife’s hand for the pleasure of a dance. He never did know the truth about that certain Mardi Gras, or of what transpired after it on St. Philip Street in New Orleans.
N
OW
all these years later, on Ash Wednesday in 1950, Letice felt the joy of deprivation and the comforts of sackcloth. She fasted and prayed and went to church to pray more. She closed her eyes as the priest marked her forehead with a black cross derived from the ash of burnt palms, and reminded her that from dust she was made and unto dust she would return. She fancied that she felt the mark penetrate her skin and cut itself deep into the bone of her skull. She breathed deeply, as if to fill her lungs with incense and its sacred, misty wish. She chose to kneel on the cold stone floor rather than the padded kneeler. With head bowed and hands clasped together, Letice recited the Penitential Prayer of Saint Augustine:
O Lord,
The house of my soul is narrow;
enlarge it that you may enter in.
It is ruinous, O repair it!
It displeases your sight.
I confess it, I know.
But who shall cleanse it,
to whom shall I cry but to you?
Cleanse me from my secret faults, O Lord,
and spare your servant from strange sins.
She repeated those last words many times over as if trying to show God her desolation . . .
Cleanse me from my secret faults, O Lord, and spare your servant from strange sins.
Prayer was the only way Letice knew to keep herself together.
On April 2, Letice joined her fellow faithful in remembrance of Christ’s entry into the city of Jerusalem by taking part in a procession and carrying branches and singing Hosanna before Palm Sunday mass. Holy Week had come.
On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, she meditated on Christ’s last days on this earth. After bathing and dressing on the morning of Maundy Thursday, Letice prayed for two hours, after which she rose from her knees, went into her
en suite
bathroom, and poured all but a small amount of Chanel No. 5 down the sink. Then she went to the kitchen and removed a cruet of olive oil from the cupboard nearest the stove. As she poured a modicum of the oil in with the drops of perfume, she watched the heavy green-gold liquid mingle with the scented water to form a substance she believed destined for blessedness. Holding the bottle in both of her hands, she clasped it to her chest and asked God to consider it a chrismatory. She then wrapped it in a white handkerchief and placed it inside her purse.
Letice left for Our Lady of the Rosary to commemorate the agony of Christ in the Garden and to attend the Mass of the Chrism that was held every Holy Thursday morning before the Easter Triduum. Upon returning home, she placed the secretly sanctified oil beneath the crucifix that hung in her private chapel. She remained there in solitude, down on her knees and lost in a spell. It wasn’t until early evening when Mrs. Silvey knocked softly on the chapel door that Letice realized she hadn’t eaten all day.
Bonaventure heard a new sound coming from his grand-mère when she came to kiss him goodnight. It was a sort of constant low vibration and he didn’t know quite how to feel about it. When he was all grown up, he would hear that sound again in the song of a somber cello.
On Good Friday, Letice returned to Our Lady of the Rosary to make a spiritual pilgrimage through Christ’s final hours. She wished to take personal responsibility for what had happened to Jesus, and to apologize to him from noon until three, when Stations of the Cross would begin. Letice had gone to the stations every Lent of her life but had never felt such nervousness as she did on that night; she shook as if chilled to the bone. Tremors quivered through her mind, shaking her thoughts down close to her heart.
As she moved with the priest from station to station, she looked upon Jesus and saw William instead. And Letice tormented herself with all that she did not know, asking question upon question for which no answers came.
Jesus is condemned to death
. . . How had the crazy man chosen his victim? Had he looked at William and said, “Him. He’s the one”?
Jesus is given his cross
. . . Had William realized what was about to happen? Did he think for a moment that it was all just a joke?
Jesus falls the first time
. . . Did their eyes meet in those last seconds? Did the gunman blink when he pulled the trigger? Did he smile? Did he shout?
Jesus meets his mother
. . .
At the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to Jesus to the last.
Letice could only sob.
Simon of Cyrene carries the cross
. . . Had the first bullet entered William’s heart or his stomach?
Veronica wipes the face of Jesus
. . . Had death come keening out his mouth?
Jesus falls the second time
. . . Had he hung on to life as he fell to the floor?
Jesus meets the daughters of Jerusalem
. . . Did anyone take his hand?
Jesus falls the third time . . .
Which of the bullets was the one that had killed him?
Jesus is stripped of his garments . . .
What had become of the clothes he had died in?
Jesus is nailed to the cross . . .
Why had he stopped on his way home from work? Why couldn’t he have been in the back of the store or have left just five seconds sooner? Please God, please God, can you please tell me why? I ask this of you, yet in my heart, I know.