By the time Nicolette opened her eyes, Aurore was crying and Rafe had returned.
“Oh, Nicolette.” Aurore wiped her eyes.
“I guess I sang it right.”
Aurore held out her arms, and Nicolette went into them shyly. Aurore inhaled the scent of talcum powder. She wanted to hold Nicolette this way forever, to cushion and protect her. She would have fought a hundred battles to keep Nicolette against her. Nicolette put her arms around her neck and hugged her back.
Rafe spoke. “Mrs. Friloux has to go now, Nicolette.”
Aurore made a sound of protest, but she felt Nicolette stir against her. In a moment she would be gone.
“Thank you for coming to see me,” Nicolette said. “I’m glad you liked my song.”
Aurore put her hands on Nicolette’s shoulders and held her away so that she could see her. “I brought you a gift, but your father has to agree to let you have it.”
“Of course,” Rafe said.
Sadness was like a fog in the room. It seemed to surround and yet separate them all. Rafe’s face was lined with tension, and Nicolette looked as if she wanted to go home.
Aurore pulled a small box from a soft leather bag that was the same pale gray as the dress she was wearing. “Will you open it now?”
Nicolette nodded, glad, perhaps, to have something to do. Inside the box was a gold locket. She held it up and swung it slowly back and forth. “You took it away from me,” she said, turning again to her father. “I remember.”
“I was wrong to take it.”
“May I have it now, then?”
“Yes.”
“Open it,” the lady said.
Nicolette didn’t struggle. She pressed the clasp and stared with interest as the two halves parted. Inside, cut to fit, was a small photograph of Aurore.
“To remember me,” Aurore said.
“Thank you.” Nicolette appeared to be thinking about what to say next. “I’ll keep it always,” she added with a grin, as if she were delighted that, for once, her manners hadn’t failed her. She slipped the locket over her head. It fell to the middle of her chest.
“I’ll walk you downstairs,” Rafe told Aurore. “Nicolette, stay here.”
“Do I have to?” Nicolette glanced up at him again and changed her mind when she saw his expression. “Okay.”
Aurore kissed her on the cheek. Nicolette hesitated; then
she returned the kiss. Aurore stood and touched Nicolette one last time. Just a light pat on the shoulder. Then she crossed the room, and without another look she went out the door with Rafe just behind her.
Aurore stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “When will you leave?”
Rafe watched her. She hadn’t looked at him as she spoke, and she hadn’t said anything about her visit with their daughter. Rafe wanted more, and knew he should have had less. “In the next day or two.”
“It was easier not knowing how perfect she really is.” Her voice caught. “It was easier hating you.”
“Neither of us was born for easier.”
“You could write me through my attorney, Spencer St. Amant.”
“I won’t.”
Her sigh became a moan, a downward spiral of misery. “Rafe.”
He had promised himself that he wouldn’t touch her again. Their lives were already so hideously intertwined. He pulled her into his arms, despite everything he had vowed. They would pay for this as they would pay for everything else.
She locked her arms behind his head and returned his kiss with the same desperation that rushed through him. There were noises from the street and from the shop she had entered to reach the apartment. He pressed her harder against him, as if he could absorb her into his soul and take her with him.
He was the one who finally broke free. He stared at her in the dim light and saw what he had missed before. “Gerritsen beat you.”
She was crying. “No. I fell.”
“What does he know?”
“Nothing. I’m fine. Please, don’t worry.”
He tilted her chin and stared at her. She looked away. “It’s come to this, hasn’t it? I can’t protect you. My very existence is a threat to you.”
“He only knows we met on the isle, Rafe, but I told him you were leaving town. I told him we would never see each other again. I think he believed me.”
“Does he know—?”
“No. I’m sure he doesn’t suspect we were lovers.”
“He suspects.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re leaving. We’ll both be safe.”
He was filled with rage. He had never felt less like a man. Now he knew exactly how he had been branded by his father’s blood. Men like his father had died for so much less than loving and protecting their women.
“I’ll be with you wherever you go,” she said. She touched his cheeks. She was still crying. “I love you. I’ll never love anyone else.”
He couldn’t speak. He turned away; then he turned back. He pulled an envelope from the pocket of his coat. She took it without a word. Inside was his favorite photograph of Nicolette. It captured everything their daughter was.
She held the photograph to her chest. He stared at her and saw the whole woman, her intolerance, her cowardice, as well as all the things he had loved too well. He knew he would remember her this way. He would never forget.
When he reached the top of the stairs, he didn’t look back. He went into the apartment to take his daughter home.
“H
enry worked late that night, just as he did almost every night after the Armistice. His life at that time was a precarious balance of city politics and Gulf Coast. When his efforts to become a real part of the city’s political machine stole too much time from his work, he had to make it up when he could.”
Phillip helped Aurore up several steps and through the door into the morning room. He had remained silent as she spoke. From their first meeting, he hadn’t wanted to feel anything for this woman and her struggles. Then, after he discovered her identity, he had been coldly furious. Now, despite himself, he felt compassion. Fifty years had passed, but she still suffered for decisions she had made. That suffering was in her voice.
She continued. “We still weren’t certain how the war’s end would affect Gulf Coast. The purchase of a freighter had been so successful that we’d bought another. I believed there would be a market for almost any commodity we could import. The war had been a time of deprivation. With the
world safe for democracy, I believed that thoughts would turn to a higher standard of living. Prices would soar, and Gulf Coast would prosper.
“Henry half believed me. I’d shown an instinct for trends. Although I didn’t frequent the office as much as I once had, I stayed up-to-date. There was little he could do that I wasn’t aware of, and despite my successes, my meddling infuriated him.”
Aurore sank to a seat in the morning room. Phillip leaned against the wall, his arms crossed against his chest.
“But then, much about me infuriated Henry,” she said. “He’d thought I would be easy to manipulate, but in every way I frustrated him. I escaped his control. I traveled to Grand Isle without his knowledge, and only a passing remark by someone who had seen me there alerted him.”
“So that’s how he knew.”
She rested her head against the back of her seat and closed her eyes. “That night was particularly dark and quiet. The new Gulf Coast offices were in the middle of a poorly lit section of the riverfront. Usually there were others on the street, men like Henry, who stayed late to squeeze every ounce of profit from the day’s successes. But by the time Henry left, even the most die-hard had gone home, and the street was empty. He had driven himself to work. He hurried toward the corner where he had parked, but not quickly enough. A man stepped out of the shadows.”
She opened her eyes and turned to Phillip. “In later years, when Henry was at his worst, I tried to imagine that beating as a small compensation. I could imagine the night growing darker. The quiet suddenly shattered by the impact of a fist against his flesh. I’m sure he defended himself, hands up,
feinting, darting from side to side, but he was no match for the attacker he couldn’t see.”
“Rafe?”
She didn’t answer directly. “Henry’s attacker was a phantom. He struck again and again, with lightning speed. Eventually Henry fell to the banquette. He curled into a ball and protected himself as best he could while the phantom kicked him. When the blows finally ceased, he fainted where he had fallen. He was found there much later that night. His recovery took weeks.”
Phillip was silent as he thought about everything she had told him. He had felt compassion for Aurore, but he felt none for her husband.
“I never saw Rafe again.” Her eyes didn’t waver. She continued to watch him.
“What happened to him?”
“Have you ever asked your mother about her life in Chicago?”
“My mother prefers not to talk about her past. She never even told me her real surname.”
“Ask her about Chicago, Phillip.”
“And if she pretends that she can’t remember?”
“Ask her again. Because only she can tell you.”
By anyone’s standards, Nicky was a success. She’d had an enviable career, first in Europe, then, in later years, in the United States. She had toured with some of the world’s finest bands, rubbed shoulders with jazz greats and rhythm-and-blues idols. Her earliest recordings were classics now, in honored positions on the shelves of musicologists and collectors. Her newest recordings sold well enough to prove that she still had an audience apart from the one that crowded Club
Valentine. She had avoided the addictions that often went with her profession, and after years of searching she had found a man who cherished and respected her.
There had been sorrows along the way. She had loved two men before Jake, and those love affairs had nearly destroyed her. She had struggled alone to raise Phillip in the midst of a war so vast and terrible that at times she had lost all hope of surviving it.
And she had watched her beloved father die at the hands of a madman.
It was the last that had haunted her since the day Phillip had asked about his roots. It was no surprise to Nicky that her son wanted to know who he was. She had been a good mother; she had no regrets about the decisions she had made and the love she had showered on him. She couldn’t look at Phillip without being proud—or without wishing that she and Jake had been blessed with children together.
But she had failed her son in one important way. She had not told him about the man he so resembled. And she hadn’t told him, because so many years later, the memory of her father’s death still had the power to claw at her, to wound her in new and different ways each time she remembered it. She hadn’t wanted Phillip to suffer, too.
Now she knew that she had been wrong.
“I have reasons for asking,” Phillip said. He sat across from her in the apartment above Club Valentine that served as an office, as well as guest quarters for out-of-town performers.
Nicky thought she knew his reasons for wanting to know more about who he was. Phillip had always known exactly what he wanted to do with his life. Even adolescence hadn’t shaken him. He had come through those troubling years with
self-assurance. He was a man who looked forward, not inward. But Phillip had reached a turning point.
“Have you seen Belinda since you got back?” she asked.
“No.” He bit off the word as if it hurt to say it.
“I haven’t seen her since the night she was here with you. Maybe she’s using the Mardi Gras break to visit family out of town.”
Phillip stood and began to pace the narrow strip of carpet in front of the sofa. “We didn’t part on the best of terms.”
“That could be fixed.”
“What have I got to offer her?” He stopped in front of her, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his dark slacks. “The world’s going up in smoke, and I don’t know where it’s going to end. Somebody killed Malcolm X last week. We’re bombing North Vietnam now, and that war’s only going to get worse. There’s going to be a civil rights march next week starting in Selma, and already people are talking about what to do when it gets violent. Not if,
Mère,
but when. What kind of world is this? Am I supposed to settle down and make a life with Belinda in the middle of chaos?”
“You’re not supposed to do anything except what you know is right for you. But don’t wait for the world to be safe and comfortable, Phillip, before you make your choices. Because it never will be.”
“Look at yourself. You can’t even talk about your childhood. Your memories are so painful you’ve locked them away. What kind of world were you brought into? What kind of world would a child of mine be born into?”
“Yes, look at me.” She stood, too. “What do you see? Someone who suffered? Welcome to the human race. Someone who’d rather not dredge it up? Welcome to the human
race. But how about someone who persevered and led a good life in spite of everything?”
He didn’t smile. “Welcome to the chosen few.”
“I’ve been wrong not to tell you more about my childhood. Some wounds bleed no matter how old the scars that cover them. Even at my age, it’s easier not to remember some things.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Come sit with me.” She settled back on the sofa and patted the space beside her, as she had when he was a little boy. “Because I’ve been thinking about this since the last time we talked about it. And I want to tell you about your grandfather. I always planned to, but I told myself the time was never right. Well, it’s past right. Way past it. You can be proud of the people you’ve come from, even if you’re not proud of the world that they lived in.”
He took her hand and squeezed it. “I’ve always been proud of you.”
“Someday I’ll tell you what little I remember about my years here. But not now. You asked about Chicago.” She took a deep breath, as if she might not have the chance again. “We left New Orleans for Chicago when I was eleven. When I say we, I mean my father and me. I loved my father. And you know how I adored Clarence. When Papa and I got on that train to Chicago, all I could think about was that I was going to see Clarence again. He wasn’t really my grandfather, Phillip. My father’s name was Cantrelle, Rafe Cantrelle, and Clarence was just a good friend. Clarence had gone North a year before, because the money was better. Seemed like New Orleans jazz just packed its suitcase and started toward Chicago about the time of the first World War.”
She waited for Phillip to question her about that, but he seemed willing to let her warm up slowly.
“It was a different world. I don’t even know how to tell you. My father had money, from investments in New Orleans, I suppose. We bought a house in a neighborhood on the South Side, outside the Black Belt. Negroes were just starting to move in. There’d been trouble about it, I think. I remember talk of bombings. But by the time we got there, things were quiet, and if we weren’t welcomed, at least nobody burned a cross in our yard. There weren’t many other places to live. Black people were living ten to an apartment. The only way to change that was to spread into white neighborhoods. Clarence refused to. He didn’t mind the crowding. He grew up in the worst New Orleans slums. The Black Belt felt just like home.”
She slipped her hand from his and folded her hands. “I don’t know how to tell you what I felt. The air was different there, and I’m not talking about the weather. In New Orleans, Papa and I kept to ourselves. I wasn’t white, and I wasn’t black. I wasn’t even a colored Creole. I didn’t fit anywhere except with Papa.”
“And suddenly you belonged?”
“Belonged? I don’t know about that. But Chicago was like a light coming on. There was energy there, a different kind of energy. In New Orleans our energy was all in our music. We knew we were going no place fast, and we sang about it, blew our frustration into pawnshop coronets and banged it on the keys of barroom pianos. But up North there was hope. I sat anywhere I wanted on the streetcars and trains, went to school with white kids, said hello over the back fence to white neighbors. I’m not saying it was perfect. But it felt like a place to start. Do you understand what I mean?”
“It’s still just a place to start.”
“My father got involved in the community right away.
There weren’t any Jim Crow laws to make it hard for him to do business. He bought into a real estate company, made investments. I don’t know how many, but we lived well, and we were accepted in a way we never had been before. I can’t tell you what my father felt, but I can tell you what I saw. He got quieter in those first months away from New Orleans, and he turned into someone else. It was like he decided he needed to change the world.”
“He was right.”
“Problem is, I think he began to believe he could. Then it turned into summer. Everything changed, all right. And he was caught in the middle of it.” She stopped, stopped talking, even stopped breathing for a moment.
Then she faced Phillip and touched his cheek. “That’s when he was killed—saving my life.”
Nicolette was an avid reader, and she was aware of some of the worst effects of racism. In 1917, resentment over Negro employment in East Saint Louis erupted into violence, and when the fury spent itself, forty-seven people, mostly Negroes, lay dead.
Racial hatred continued to simmer wherever Negroes moved into jobs vacated by the whites who had gone to fight. But not all Negro men stayed behind. At the war’s end, the return of proud black doughboys, men who had served their country and risked their lives, fanned the flames of prejudice. In Georgia, a Negro soldier was beaten to death for wearing his uniform home from the train station. By the summer of 1919, race riots had broken out in the North and the South alike.
Nicolette read about lynchings and riots in the
Defender,
one of Chicago’s Negro newspapers, but they were horror stories
from far away. She preferred to study what musician was playing what music where. Names like Keppard and Oliver, Ory and Armstrong, sent songs trilling through her head, and she dreamed of nights at the Royal Gardens or the Lincoln Gardens Café.
Clarence was playing with a band at the Dreamland, and she had been there once to see him, but only before the night really began for everyone else. A singer—not much older than she was, and not nearly as good—had come to their table to wiggle her hips and serenade them, and when the song ended, Nicolette had wanted to follow her right around the room, collecting her own tips.
Her father always insisted that he understood what music meant to her—just before he reminded her that school was more important. She liked school, and she haunted the library because she loved to read. But music was different. It throbbed inside her, building until it had to escape. She breathed it in with every breath, tasted and touched and saw it in bursts of radiant color. Sometimes the voices of her teachers became songs; sometimes the words on a page changed to notes, and she could chart the rise and fall of a story like the wailing of the blues.
As the temperature soared in July, her father spent more time away from home. She didn’t know exactly where he went, except that his meetings had to do with improvements for Negroes. People listened to him when he spoke, even though he hadn’t lived in Chicago long. But a lot of people hadn’t lived there long, and sometimes it seemed like most of them had come from Louisiana.
The lazy summer days ended abruptly on a Sunday afternoon in July. Nicolette had gone to spend the day with a new friend who lived nearby, because her father was away on
business. The temperature had hit a record high, and she and her friend Dolly were too hot to do more than sit under the shade of a tree in a nearby park and complain because no one could be coaxed to take them swimming at the lake.