The convent halls were empty and silent. The sisters had gone to their cells. She tried not to imagine what went on behind their doors, the prayers, the scourging. In time, perhaps, the endless rituals would bring her peace.
She covered her head with a scarf before she entered the chapel, tucking in all wisps of hair. For a moment, rebellion flared, and she wondered why the tyrant God who had allowed her to bring a child into the world only to give it away would be offended by a bare head. But she quickly stifled the feeling. It was she who was to blame, not God. She had lain with a man out of wedlock; sending Clarissa away was her punishment.
She dipped her fingers in the holy-water font and made the sign of the cross before she genuflected. The altar was illuminated by the vigil light. Head reverently bowed, she started toward the front.
She knelt at the railing, her head still bowed. She had so many prayers, so many sins for which to ask forgiveness. She crossed herself and folded her hands. Only then did she look at the altar. At first she saw nothing unusual there. It was starkly simple, covered with clean white linen and adorned with polished silver. The convent was a poor one, the order not well endowed. For the most part, the sisters were from poor bayou families who could provide little as a dowry. The linen had been patched by an expert seamstress, and the silver was only plate.
None of that mattered. God was present here, just as present as in the mightiest cathedral. He was present here to
give her courage to face what she must and strength to live with her decision. She believed in his power, just as she feared that the poison inside her had extinguished his voice.
She lowered her eyes, but as she did, a flash of silver in the soft light caused her to raise them again. She stared at the cross, placed squarely in the altar’s center. It was not the one that had been there yesterday. She had seen this cross once before, had held it in her hands. It was solid silver, ornate, handcrafted in the Spanish style. She had last seen it on the night a man opened a chest of pirate treasure and promised her a new and perfect life.
Étienne came the next morning. She was waiting for him beside Clarissa’s basket. Clarissa was asleep, but she found her fist and sucked on it from time to time, a substitute for the mother who had gently removed her from her breast.
Sister Marie Baptiste escorted Étienne into her room. That morning she had answered Aurore’s questions about the man who had donated the priceless cross in memory of his departed mother. Aurore had told her that if the man returned and asked to see her, she would meet with him.
Sister Marie Baptiste left, and Aurore met his gaze.
“We have a daughter,” he said.
“I have a daughter. I share nothing with you.”
“I told you I would come for her.”
“Yes.”
“Did you really believe you could escape?”
“There seems to be no end to my stupidity.”
“Sister Marie Baptiste says you’ll soon take vows.”
“Sister Marie Baptiste is wrong. I’ve discovered that even God can’t help me escape you and the evil you’ve wrought.”
She examined his face. It was unchanged. She wondered what she had thought she would see.
“And our daughter?”
“Ti’ Boo has found a family who will take her and raise her as their own. My father is dead, and my life is ruined. Can you find it in your heart not to take vengeance on my daughter, too?”
“She’s my child. You refuse to raise her. I will.”
“And if I had said I would keep her, would I have known a moment’s peace from you?”
He shrugged.
She had a thousand questions screaming inside her. But Étienne had as many lies as she had questions, and she knew there was no hope now of ever hearing the truth.
“Where will you take her?” she asked. She heard her voice break.
“Where she will be cared for.”
“I want to know more than that. I want to know where!”
“Back to New Orleans.”
There had been no charges filed. After hearing her accusations, Tim had advised her not to implicate Étienne, in order to save her own good name—if that was still possible. There was no reason Étienne couldn’t stay in New Orleans. Except one.
“If you stay in the city,” she said, “I’ll be sure that your life isn’t worth living.”
His smile chilled her. “How do you intend to accomplish that?”
“Any way I can.”
He looked down at their child for the first time; then he touched a soft curl. “I’ll have to give her a name, won’t I?”
“Her name is Clarissa. In honor of my mother. She was baptized by that name!”
He looked back at her. She knew there were tears in her eyes, and she hated herself for them. Nothing flickered in his, and she knew he would not allow her even this small concession. “If you punish me, Aurore, you will punish our daughter.”
She knew she had been defeated. She closed her eyes without looking at the baby again. “Take her and be damned!”
When she opened her eyes, the room was empty.
“I
never misled you, Phillip. I never said this story would be easy to listen to.”
Phillip didn’t answer. He packed up his notebook and pens. He had already unplugged the tape recorder and secured the cord.
Aurore turned away from the window where she had been staring at the rain that had fallen throughout the day. “I imagine you have some feelings about what I’ve told you so far.”
“I’m not here to have feelings. I’m here to get the facts of your life on paper. If those are the facts, then those are the facts.”
“I gave away my child. My own child. To a man I had every reason to despise.”
“Yes. So you’ve said.” Phillip got to his feet. He didn’t know what else to do. He didn’t want to stay in the library another moment. The fire that had gently removed the chill from the air seemed to have removed the air, as well. He wanted to loosen the collar of his shirt. He wanted to inhale the fresh
air of February, to stand quietly in the winter rain and feel it wash his face and hands.
Aurore waited until he had gathered his things and started toward the door before she spoke again. “Will you be back tomorrow?”
He paused. There was really no question of whether he would return. He would see this through to the end; he had given his word. But the fact that she’d asked said everything about the guilt that she’d lived with for so long. He was her confessor, and she was searching for absolution. She had chosen a black man because her crime had been against a black child.
“I’ll be back, if that’s what you want,” he said, without turning.
“It is.”
He reached the doorway, and she spoke again. “Phillip, I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone what I’ve told you. Not until you’ve heard it all.”
He looked over his shoulder. “What will hearing the rest of it change?”
“The truth is always more than the sum of its parts. I’ve lived a long life. Don’t judge me entirely on what you’ve heard today.” She held up her hand as he started to speak. “And, yes, I know that you’re not being paid to judge me. I also know that you will. How could you not?”
He nodded, although it was less in agreement than in goodbye.
The New Orleans streets were wet and slick. Nicky had given Phillip a car to use while he was in town, a beige compact that was so innocuous he didn’t know which American auto giant had produced it. At well below the
speed limit, he dodged pedestrians and drivers who, like the city itself, seemed to exist on brief adrenaline highs.
He found a parking spot on North Rampart not far from Club Valentine. Despite a light sprinkle, he took his time. As he turned onto Basin Street, the Iberville Housing Project stretched as far as he could see. It was the second oldest project in the nation, built of red brick and adorned with front stoops and balconies. The architects had understood the lifestyles of the people to be housed there and refused to kowtow to the Washington bureaucrats who complained of frivolity.
Basin was a short, inconsequential street, although it hadn’t always been so. Once it had marked one of the boundaries of Storyville, the city’s official red-light district. Storyville, irreverently and unofficially named after Alderman Sidney Story, who had proposed it, had been set aside in 1897 to ensure that prostitution wouldn’t flourish in other parts of town. Straitlaced women and poker-faced men had cried out against sanctioning prostitution, but a greater number had sighed with relief. Finally, if they chose, they could avoid that section of town that was given over to vice and pretend that the streets of New Orleans were respectable.
The district had flourished until 1917. At the beginning, more than two thousand prostitutes worked within its boundaries, and thousands more lived off its bounty. Storyville property was the most expensive in the city and considered the best investment. Fortunes were made by dignified scions of society, who might not patronize the houses, but had no qualms about buying and renting them.
Storyville, with its razzmatazz, its honky-tonks, still existed in living memory, although not in reality. Like a monster that
devoured history to sustain itself, the Iberville Housing Project had swallowed Storyville whole.
Phillip knew very little about his mother’s childhood. He knew that she had lived on Basin Street, and that a timeline placed her here somewhere near the end of Storyville’s heyday. She had only rarely talked about those days, and never in any depth. She had no living relatives. She had been raised by her grandfather, a jazz pianist named Clarence Valentine, who had died in Paris soon after Phillip was born. She and Phillip had been a unit of two, and later, of course, Jake had become a welcome addition.
Phillip hadn’t spent many hours puzzling over an absence of family. He had been schooled with wealthy Europeans who knew their servants better than their parents. He had never known his own father, who had left Nicky before Phillip’s birth, and in the months he spent with Nicky, the musicians in her bands had become surrogate uncles and grandfathers. He had never lacked for spoiling or discipline.
Now he wanted to know more. Aurore Gerritsen’s story had whetted his interest in his own history. For the first time, he felt rootless, like an exotic orchid that had been grown without soil. Perhaps his intensifying relationship with Belinda had made him aware of the shallow nature of his life. Perhaps Belinda’s desire to be connected to her African past had affected him, too. But his kinsmen in this country, the descendants of men and women who had been ripped from their families and thrown into the crowded holds of ships, had found it hard through the centuries to reestablish their family trees.
He was no different.
This time, when he walked through the front door of the
club, Nicky wasn’t rehearsing. It was early, and chairs were still overturned on tables. Most of the lights were off, but the spicy scent of boiling seafood wafted from the kitchen. Best of all, Nicky sat in a well-lit corner, her feet propped high, riffling through papers. She looked up and smiled as he approached. “I’m not used to having you around so much,” she said. “It gives me the best feeling to see you walk through that door.”
He kissed her cheek before he took a free chair. “What are you doing?”
“This and that.” She swept her hand toward the table. “Bills. Music. Menus. It’s never dull.”
“Where’s Jake? I thought he took care of bills and menus.”
“He went North for a few days. His sister’s sick. You remember Lottie?”
Phillip nodded. When Jake and Nicky married, an entire extended family had come with the deal. Jake was one of ten children.
“Looks like she’s going to be all right, but he wanted to see his folks, anyway. We’re going back up there together next month.”
“What’s it like having all those people fussing around you?”
“Why don’t you come with us and find out sometime?”
“You need reinforcements?”
“They’re good people. They produced Jake, didn’t they? There’s just so many of them.”
“Didn’t you have all kinds of people swarming around you when you were a kid?”
“It was different.”
He settled back in his chair, pleased that they had gotten to the point of his visit so quickly. “Tell me about it. You hardly ever talk about your past.”
“Seems like you’d be getting enough of people’s pasts these days without listening to mine. How’s the interview going, anyway?”
“It’s made me aware of just how little I know about my own history.”
“There’s not much to tell.”
“You don’t remember your mother at all?”
“She died when I was born.”
“And your father?”
“Died when I was young.”
“What about relatives?”
“Not a one that I ever met.”
“And you don’t know anything about your family?”
“I’ve told you about my grandfather. The rest of my family were the people who helped raise me along the way. They were all the family I needed. I never missed the other kind.”
Nicky’s answers were familiar to Phillip. They were the same answers she had always given him. She had always been generous with information about her life after his birth, but her early years were a mystery.
“You really don’t like talking about this, do you?”
She looked up from a sheet of music. “I can’t talk about what I don’t remember.”
“Do you remember anything about being a child here on Basin Street?”
“Not much. I can’t even tell you how old I was when we moved away. But I was still young. I remember missing the music. There was always music on Basin Street.”
“There wasn’t music where you moved to?”
She looked past him, as if she were trying to remember. “There were music lessons.” She looked back at him. “My
father paid for them. Funny, the things that stand out in a little kid’s head.”
“Then your father was still alive?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember when he died?”
She hesitated just an instant too long. “No.”
Nicky was almost compulsively honest. The only punishments Phillip remembered receiving as a child had been for telling lies. Now, for the first time he could recall, Nicky herself was lying. Whatever pieces of the truth she remembered, she didn’t want to share them with him.
“Sometimes I feel like I didn’t come from anywhere at all,” he said. “Like I sprang from the air. If I have children, what will I tell them?”
She lifted a brow. “Are you going to have children?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’re thinking about it?”
“Right now I’m thinking about the past, not the future.”
“I would help if I could.”
This time Phillip knew she was being honest. For reasons he didn’t understand, Nicky couldn’t tell him more.
“Were my grandparents good people?” he asked. “Do you remember that much?”
“I really don’t know anything about my mother. But my father was a good man. He would have been proud of you.”
He thought carefully about his response. “Well, if you’re ever ready to tell me more, I’m ready to hear it.”
She didn’t deny that there was more. She reached across the table and placed her hand on his. “Why don’t you bring Belinda by one of these nights? I’ll reserve a table up front.”
“I’d like that.”
“You’ve got family all around you, Phillip. It’s not who you come from, but who’s standing right beside you, that counts most. Remember that.”
Phillip had been gone for an hour when Nicky finally put her papers away. She had accomplished little after his visit. He had done something she had believed impossible. He had made her remember.
Early in her life, she had learned not to look behind her. She suspected she was that kind of person naturally. She had been a carefree child who moved from one experience to the next without worrying about what had come before. Her world had been filled with color and music, with women who fussed over her and men who gave her money just because she was pretty.
In later years, looking back had been too painful, so she had kept her eyes forward. She had done the things she needed to in order to survive, and she hadn’t regretted any of them.
But sometimes, when she least expected it, a memory crept in. A song, the scent of magnolias in May, a humid summer night, and she was back in the district.
She rose and went to stand at the front door. The sky was beginning to darken, and down the street the small children who had crowded the Iberville sidewalks—or banquettes, as the native-born New Orleanians called them—were beginning to be replaced by older children, children just on the verge of becoming adults, children who, even if they didn’t yet realize it, were trying to discover who they were.
Her son was thirty-seven, long a man. But, like the children across the street, he needed to discover himself. She had given Phillip everything she could, but she had not given him what
he needed now, not even the fragments of truth about her past that she remembered. There was no foundation and no sense of continuity to Phillip’s life. And if he was going to continue on from here, if he was going to build a family of his own, he needed to know where he fit.
She walked slowly down the street, her arms crossed in front of her. The city of New Orleans had done its best to erase all signs of Storyville. For a time, even Basin Street, synonymous with the district itself, had been renamed North Saratoga, and not until the forties, when the memory of what had gone on here had acquired new luster, had the name been changed back. But by then there had been little else that was fit to save.
It was an accident that Club Valentine was on Basin Street. Years ago, when she and Jake decided to settle here and open a nightclub, they had looked at all manner of property, and the location they chose had been the best available to them.
But now she wondered if it was an accident at all. Had childhood memories, so long suppressed, surfaced as she had considered the building? Had nostalgia colored a decision that at the time had seemed merely practical?
She stared at the other side of the street. She didn’t know exactly where on Basin Street the Magnolia Palace, her childhood home, had stood. She supposed there might be a record at City Hall, but it was of no consequence anymore. Identical two-story redbrick buildings sprawled in every direction. There was nothing left of the Magnolia Palace.
Nothing except her memories.