Ciji Ware (8 page)

“I’d say we are two lucky
mademoiselles
,” Corlis said softly, “even if my mother is a wilted flower child, and yours is a no-show.”

“I’m really sorry Antoinette’s playing the major magnolia,” Daphne said, and gently squeezed Corlis’s arm. “She’s still steamed at me—and King, by association. Please don’t take it personally, ’cause it’s definitely not.”

“I’m trying not to,” Corlis said. “I mostly feel terrible for you and King.”

“Thanks,” Daphne replied quietly. “You okay if I leave now? No last-minute jitters? I’m an expert on those, you know.”

Corlis smiled, her eyes taking on a joyful shine. “Maddy and Marge have made a blood pact to get me to the church on time.” She added with a hint of embarrassment, “After all my neurotic flip-flops over the
idea
of marriage, I actually can’t wait to say ‘I
definitely
do
!’ to that brother of yours.”

***

It was nearly three twenty-five by the time Daphne entered the back of the church.

“Your harp’s downstairs now,” Miss Carrington announced brightly. The church wedding supervisor was a sixtyish woman, dressed in a fluttery, flowered organza ensemble and a straw picture hat with pink and coral roses clustered around its brim. She pointed to the narrow stairway that led from the balcony to the side entrance foyer where they were standing. “I had two of our men bring it down from the balcony. I hope that was all right?” she asked with a kind of wide-eyed innocence inappropriate for a woman of her maturity—and all too familiar to Daphne. “I just thought you’d look so
pretty
sittin’ up front, near the pulpit.”

Daphne was thrust into a mild panic to discover that her harp was no longer beside the organ where she’d carefully positioned it that morning. “Will I be able to see the organist from down here?” she asked worriedly.

There was no point in telling Miss Carrington that hauling a harp down a set of stairs and then dragging it fifty feet into the church sanctuary meant that it would have to be retuned, top string to bottom. Daphne knew that her preferences didn’t matter a whit to this officious woman. She had dealt with bossy belles a million times before.

“Oh my, yes,” Miss Carrington assured her with a coquettish smile, “you’ll have
perfect
lines of sight. All the harpists play down front near the pulpit. They just love it there!”

“Well, here’s hoping I do, too. When given a choice,” she added pointedly, “I vastly prefer to be near the organist.”

Miss Carrington appeared startled. Clearly she wasn’t accustomed to having her decisions questioned.

Daphne cocked an ear, and exclaimed, “Goodness! It sounds as if people are being seated. I’d better get settled and retune.”

“Close the door when you enter the sanctuary, won’t you please?” Miss Carrington directed archly, lips pursed in a faintly triumphant smile. No New York harpist with a master’s degree from Juilliard would be allowed to hide up in the balcony.

Daphne’s large, gilded harp had been placed forward and to the left of the pulpit. She slipped onto the stool and surveyed the scene. Nearby, two waist-high plaster columns supported magnificent sprays of spring flowers that Cousin Maddy had gathered from friends with private gardens all over Natchez. Attached to each pew were smaller, professionally made bouquets of dainty Queen Anne’s lace anchored with fragrant gardenias and ivory silk ribbons. Daphne was forced to admit that the bride czarina and the floral designers she’d recommended certainly knew their stuff. She cast a measured glance around the interior of the gleaming white church with an eye to the volume she would be required to produce on her harp in order to be heard over the organ.

She began the process of fine-tuning her harp’s forty-seven strings. Mellow organ music muffled the repetitive twangs she produced as she swiftly worked her way up to middle C. Fortunately, most notes had remained in tune despite the harp’s last minute journey from the balcony.

Meanwhile, a platoon of wedding guests took seats in the forward pews. Daphne’s aunt, Bethany Kingsbury Marchand—a recent bride herself—offered a gentle assist to Grandmother Kingsbury, who reluctantly relinquished her aluminum walker to the care of her gray-haired daughter and sank, with great effort, into her seat on the aisle in the first row. Aunt Bethany had dutifully volunteered to sit next to her aged mother at the ceremony instead of serving as matron of honor when her sister, the mother of the groom, made her dramatic proclamation that she wouldn’t be coming to the wedding.

“Hello, darlin’,” Bethany said to Daphne in a hushed voice. “Mother… there’s Daphne. All the way from New York! Doesn’t she look pretty sittin’ at the harp?”

“Hello, hello,” Daphne whispered back. “See y’all later at the reception.”

She lightly ran her fingers over the strings while she nodded at several other members of the Kingsbury clan from Baton Rouge, who were entering the center aisle just as members of the celebrated LaCroix family of musicians made their appearance. Earlier, Daphne had scarcely had time to say hello to Corlis’s solitary bridal attendant, Althea LaCroix, a friend since Daphne’s grammar school days—and the only black student in her class. Now Althea was a close friend of Corlis’s as well.

Daphne glanced at the rear door just in time to see Cousin Madeline coming down another aisle. She was dressed in a wide-brimmed straw hat and flowered frock similar to the one worn by the wedding organizer. The principal difference was that Madeline’s outfit looked as if it had come straight out of the clothes dryer with no detour to an ironing board. Maddy’s black handbag was at odds with her beige shoes, and both accessories battled the Kelly-green leather belt encircling her thin waist. All in all, Madeline Clayton Whitaker’s ensemble would make a New York clothes designer run screaming into the night.

As Daphne continued quietly tuning the rest of the harp strings, a side door opened. Her breath caught at the sight of her lanky, exceedingly handsome brother striding into the church. He was followed by an older, silver-haired version of himself—Lafayette Marchand, Aunt Bethany’s new husband.

Father and son wore impeccable Brooks Brothers attire. They stood side by side in front of the pulpit, both smiling broadly at the assembled guests. Daphne felt a lump rise in her throat. How had half of New Orleans not guessed that the two were related by blood? she wondered. Why hadn’t her own father, Waylon, figured out the truth ages ago, despite her mother’s carefully nurtured fiction that Lafayette Marchand was just an old family friend?

Just at that moment, the church organist pointed discreetly at his watch. Without further warning, Avery Johns commenced the musical introduction to the first of two pieces that he and Daphne were to play: Mozart’s Concerto in C Major, composed originally for flute and harp. She prayed that the strings ascending from middle C to the harp’s arch, the ones she hadn’t had time to retune, hadn’t gotten fried in transit from the balcony and worriedly cast a quick glance at them. As she joined in with the organ music, wedding guests began turning in their seats to gaze at someone sailing down the center aisle with the confidence of a diva making a grand entrance in
Aida.

The woman who had captured their attention had shapely ankles, an ample bosom, and a waistline a mere inch and a half larger than the eighteen inches it had been thirty-seven years earlier when she’d donned her magnificent ball gown and ermine cape as queen of the New Orleans Mardi Gras. Today she was dressed in a Donna Karan sheath and matching coat in a sophisticated shade of dusty teal.

The mother of the groom—Mrs. Waylon Duvallon, née Antoinette Whitaker Kingsbury—had, indeed, made an appearance at Natchez’s First Presbyterian Church.

Chapter 3

What we’re seeing here is
vintage
Antoinette
, Jack Ebert mused, lingering in the back of the church as his mother’s best friend strode regally down the center aisle toward the front pew. Jack figured that the woman’s ability to upstage virtually anyone was probably stamped into the strands of her DNA. Try as Alice Ebert might, Jack’s mother would never even come close to Mrs. Waylon Duvallon in the magnolia department.

Jack noticed, of course, that Daphne had finished the Mozart without mishap—although nobody else seemed to be listening to her play. Her mother’s dramatic entrance had captured everyone’s attention. In fact, it appeared that the entire congregation couldn’t take its eyes off Antoinette Kingsbury Duvallon in her high-fashion attire, gold and diamond jewelry, bouffant black hair, and the unmistakable aura that proclaimed, “Stand back world, here I come, and I’m
a
lot
more important than
you
are!”

“She’s just one of those people who sucks all the air out of the room,” Jack remembered Daphne telling him not long after they got engaged. That was at a time when he was making every effort to be witty and charming—and she was making every effort not to cry over that asshole, Rafe What’s-his-name, who’d popped her cherry in New York, the lucky bastard.

Much to his surprise, that Christmas the ice princess had seemed grateful for the attention he’d paid her at her parents’ annual holiday party. Before that, she’d always been Miss High-and-Mighty-Sorry-I’m-Busy. Not that he’d ever really wanted to date Daphne Duvallon, despite his mother’s unrelenting prompting over the years. Daphne’s ethereal act never really turned him on. Later, he’d taunted her that the calluses on her fingertips from playing the harp were bigger than her boobs. It wasn’t true, but people always laughed when he said it.

There was one night, though, when she looked like such a class act, playing “Greensleeves,” or something, on that old harp in the parlor on Orange Street in the Lower Garden District. Her parents’ place had been done up with pine swags, holly boughs, and gold French ribbon everywhere. Candlelight glinted off Daphne’s blond hair, and she seemed genuinely interested when he described the juicy, off-the-record details of the symphony’s bankruptcy that had just hit the papers that week. He’d had a field day with that story on TV and in
Arts
This
Week
, and it had finally earned him some goddamned recognition as a force in New Orleans media. Jack had thought that, for once, the snooty Miss D. had actually considered him witty and charming. How was he supposed to know that her rapt silence merely reflected her state of shock at having just found out that the conductor who’d deflowered her was a married man, for Christ’s sake! He should have known never to trust a woman without major hooters. Cindy Lou, on the other hand, had one great pair of ta-tas.

Jack’s gaze drifted away from the woman who’d been within minutes of being his wife. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t even thinking about Daphne Duvallon or even Cindy Lou Mallory and the night they’d—

As often happened when he thought about sex, the memory of another woman—lifeless, naked, and laid out on a stainless steel gurney—rose unbidden before his eyes. That day, decades ago, his thirteen-year-old cousin Victor had dragged him into the embalming room at the back of Ebert-Petrella’s and gleefully whipped off the sheet. Vic laughed harshly and pointed at the corpse, rigid as the slab of cold metal that lay beneath her, shoving his younger cousin forward with a hard push.

The dead woman was minus one breast. There she lay… one huge knocker on the right side of her chest, and on the other side—
nothing.
Only a big old scar. She’d had cancer, or something, Vic had said—and then the creep fondled the breast she had left and dared Jack to touch her.

How old had he been then? Five? Six? He’d freaked out, started to cry, and peed in his pants. He’d run screaming and sobbing into the back parking lot, straight into his father’s legs as his old man was climbing out of the hearse. His father smelled of whiskey, because he’d probably stopped off somewhere for a snort or two on the way back from Metairie Cemetery. The bastard gave him hell for wetting himself and then joined Vic’s taunts for being such a “fucking baby.”

Man, he
hated
women with no tits, that was for sure! That was probably why Cindy Lou could make ol’ Pete come to attention with a flick of her—

Jack silently ordered himself to stop obsessing about that redheaded hellcat and pay attention to what was about to happen to Daphne. From behind the pillar, he still had a direct view of his ex-fiancée and that shitty harp that everyone thought was so frigging beautiful. Thanks to the printed program he’d secured earlier when the florists were decorating the church, he knew she’d be playing “Amazing Grace” before the ceremony began, accompanied by the organ. It was perfect. Just perfect.

Wouldn’t Miss Priss be surprised to know who’d served as her mother’s chauffeur from New Orleans to Natchez? As soon as he’d dropped off Antoinette at the front steps, he’d parked the big old limo right outside the church on Pearl Street. What a joke it all was!

Much to Jack’s surprise, King, who was standing in front of the pulpit next to Lafayette Marchand, brought his left hand from behind his back and took several steps forward, leaving his father to gaze bemusedly at the unfolding scene. With great flourish, the groom presented his mother with a corsage of dainty white roses. Antoinette’s jaw appeared to clench while she allowed her son to pin the flowers on the lapel of her ensemble. Next, King bent forward, brushing his mother’s cheek with a light kiss, and whispered something into Antoinette’s ear while the bastard stared right at him.