Chapter Two

Suzanne’s story

As it turned out, Suzanne did not have to avoid awkward conversations with George Washington St. Julien. The man, slightly absurd like his name, always left for his office on the main street of Port Jefferson before 8:00 a.m., lunched downtown in the home of his great-aunts or at the Roadhouse—Port Jefferson remaining undiscovered by Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken—and seldom returned home before 7:00 p.m., if at all. An accountant, a licensed CPA, the small stack of business cards he left on the hall table proclaimed to visitors who never arrived. He handled the books for all the businesses in Port Jefferson large enough to need the service, but had to travel frequently into Lafayette to audit the larger accounts that paid the bills at Magnolia Hill. Often, he stayed overnight.

She learned all of this and more within two days of her arrival from Birdie, whose only birdlike qualities were her tendencies to sing and nibble all day long. She wore the headset of the old Sony Walkman stowed in her apron pocket like a headband as she cleaned her way around Magnolia Hill. Birdie had a strong voice and an amazing repertoire. Best at doing the blues, she could handle Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and old spirituals equally well. Rap, in her opinion, was trash music. On days when her batteries ran low and she could not get the all black R & B music station out of Baton Rouge, Birdie sang a cappella.

On her first morning at the Hill, Suzanne woke to a powerful and sultry version of “Stormy Weather,” instead of to her little, plastic travel alarm sitting incongruously on a massive marble and mahogany nightstand. Birdie sang as she made up “Mr. Georgie’s” room across the hall. The song was apt. Outside, a warm, heavy rain fell, churning the bayou a deeper shade of coffee brown. A baritone rumble of thunder accompanied her song.

Ashamed to be sleeping late on the first day on the job, Suzanne put on a robe and stumbled toward the bathroom where Virginia Lee’s hands had recreated turn-of-the-nineteenth-century luxury. The walls wainscoted in cherry wood matched the tank and seat of the commode. A crystal pull chain on the water closet made it a pleasure to flush, and the marble pedestal sink was almost too lovely for toothpaste spit. With the deep ceramic tub encased in more cherry, clearly no showers were intended to be taken to wet the cabbage rose-patterned wallpaper. A concession to practicality had been made in the tile floor, mostly hidden by a bath mat resembling a small oriental rug. As impressive in its own way as the parlor, this bathroom was not place where one would want to be ill for fear of spoiling all the pretty things.

Suzanne hesitantly used a crystal tumbler from the nickel-plated rack by the sink to rinse her mouth after brushing her teeth and winced at the white ring left on the expensive glass. Birdie knocked politely.

“Sorry to wake you, Miss Suzanne.”

“It’s okay. I overslept.”

“Here’s clean towels. Mr. Georgie just has coffee and biscuits most mornings, but I’m about to do a little cooking for myself. Can I make you some grits and eggs, maybe a little sausage?”

“No, thanks. Coffee and biscuits are enough for me. I’ll be right down.”

She did come down fairly quickly as there wasn’t much reason to primp over hair and make-up and clothes. Doing the minimum to be presentable, Suzanne passed down the mahogany staircase and enjoyed the silky feel of the waxed, wooden handrail from first step to last. A place had been set at one of the twelve chairs around the immense table in the formal dining room. Beneath the chandelier with its tiers of electrified candles, her plate with two large baking soda biscuits, a pat of butter, a jam caddy set to one side, and a single steaming cup of coffee sat seeming slightly ridiculous in the grand setting.

Suzanne took a seat between two empty chairs and looked across three empty chairs toward a massive mirrored and crested Renaissance revival sideboard with a pink marble top. Even though she loathed watching herself chew in the mirror, she did appreciate the fact that the twelve crested and leather-seated chairs and the matching glass cabinet were a rare find, probably original to the house. She would certainly find out when she tackled Mrs. St. Julien’s files. Ignoring the wonderful sounds and scents of frying coming from the kitchen, she wiped her lips on a real linen napkin and started for the room belonging to the Mistress of Magnolia Hill. George had neglected to show her its location, and she hated to interrupt Birdie’s breakfast, but finding the place would not be hard.

Designed on simple neo-classical principles, Magnolia Hill was capacious but not ostentatious. Unlike the multi-roomed piles constructed by wealthy late Victorians, Eli Jefferson deemed five bedrooms upstairs, two parlors and a large dining room to be enough. Of course, the place once had a detached kitchen, rooms for servants under the eaves, and outbuildings aplenty, most of them now gone except for an old stable visible from her side window. The upstairs room that had possibly been a nursery housed the elegant bath. Her room and George’s room faced the gallery and the bayou beyond. Mrs. St. Julien’s sleeping quarters had to be either to the left or the right of the bath. On the left, she guessed, by George’s room.

As soon as Suzanne turned the brass doorknob and walked into a place of classical revival elegance, she knew she’d found the place. Virginia St. Julien favored the style of Louis XVI, one-hundred-fifty-year-old imitations of a two-hundred-fifty-year-old style. The upholstery on the gilded chairs matched the yellow brocade covering the walls. A fanciful brass bedstead bedecked with curlicues and cherubs sat between the two windows overlooking the parking area and the long row of young magnolias.

Suzanne went directly to the spindly-legged secretary near a corner étagère holding an extensive collection of porcelain figurines. Virginia Lee kept her notes in very functional metal index card boxes, one for each room including the kitchen. Each item in the house had a card of its own with a brief description, a possible date, and the provenance of the piece. She found a small key in the back of the first box clearly labeled “Safety Deposit—Docs.”

With records so disappointingly complete, Suzanne believed she would find nothing much new to discover about the collection. Mrs. St. Julien had attempted to create a room for each one of the rapidly changing Victorian styles. Personally, she objected to the concept. A better plan would have been to take the house back to a definite date in its history and furnish the place accordingly if she intended to give tours. As for making Magnolia Hill a home to live in and raise a family, Suzanne would have furnished it with a few heirlooms, comfortable favorite furniture, and some contemporary additions. But if George wanted a Victorian showcase to lure the public, he was nearly there.

Taking the appropriate file along, she inspected the master bedroom of the late Jacques St. Julien. His wife had decorated his personal space in that rare and currently unpopular style of furnishings known as Gothic revival. Virginia Lee must have gone to some trouble to assemble the half-tester bed with enough pointed arches in its makeup to satisfy a cardinal. A rather ghastly carved bureau retained a set of silver-backed men’s brushes. Several rigid side chairs capped with crosses sat against the walls like worshippers in the cathedral-like gloom of the dark and heavily draped room. A pope might have lain down here to die and felt perfectly at rest. Given Jacques’ romantic reputation, Suzanne appreciated the irony.

Examining George’s room gave her a different feeling. She opened the door with hesitation. It was one thing to enter the museum quality room of a deceased man and another to barge into the space where a living man sleeps. Unlike the dead rooms in the rest of the house, this area held bits and pieces of George St. Julien’s life.

The simple cottage style bed with its spooled maple head and footboard looked too short for the length of the man who slept under its quilts. A faded university sweatshirt drooped over the golden pattern on a Hitchcock chair. Stenciled linoleum covered the floor as if this were the one place Virginia Lee despaired of keeping clean. Instead of the period prints or sconces holding knick-knacks adorning the walls in other rooms, George had tacked a few school and sports pennants to the paneling. They’d faded with age.

In one corner, a baby’s crib in the style now called Jenny Lind overflowed with dusty basketballs and dirty sneakers. The plain pine dresser held mementoes: a few old sports trophies surmounted by leaping men balancing balls; a formal wedding photo of a tall, slim bride with a wreath of orange blossoms crowning her veil and her groom, a short, broad-chested naval officer with his hat worn at the same jaunty angle as his crooked smile; a small snapshot of a little boy wearing thick, round glasses and balancing precariously on one of the rococo petticoat chairs in the parlor. The child’s forehead wrinkled with anxiety. Was this the picture of the solemn son Dr. Dumont had seen? She left the room quickly to rid herself of the feeling of invading her employer’s privacy, as if she had been looking into his personal records without consent.

Bringing the boxes to the rococo parlor, Suzanne began her inventory there. In the evening, she’d enter the confirmed information on her laptop computer for easier reference and indexing. The settee and side chairs proved to be absolutely real John Belter, see documentation folder #1, and score one for the art history major.

Around noon, Birdie called her guest to lunch. Suzanne found a ham po-boy sandwich large enough for two and a glass of iced tea occupying the lonely space on the dining room table. She took her meal into the parlor and continued to crawl under and squeeze behind furniture looking for identifying marks. Toward six while she worked on the dining room, Birdie came to set a place for dinner.

“I swear ya’ll as bad as Mr. Georgie when it comes to eating. Most nights I have to wrap his meal in foil and put it in the oven. Now you just leave off working and sit down a minute.”

“Honestly, I hate to eat alone.”

“Well, Mr. Georgie won’t be back ’til late.” She hesitated a moment. “Come on in the kitchen, then. I was having a little something before I go home to my own.”

Suzanne followed Birdie through the connecting door and down two steps into the kitchen, somehow not raised to the same level when attached to the house after cooking became a less smoky and hazardous duty. A steaming bowl that looked like a chipped serving piece already occupied one of the places at a small oak table, its leaves folded down to make it fit under the square of window where the last light of a gloomy day faded.

Birdie opened a glass-fronted cabinet and selected a porcelain soup dish from one of the four sets of china. She scooped into a red-enameled rice cooker and filled the dish with a mound of white rice, then turned to a stockpot bubbling on a huge professional gas range. A few spatters of brown roux dripped off her ladle as she fished out a piece of chicken. She carefully removed the spatters from the stainless steel before serving. A loaf of French bread lay on the wooden counter. She sliced off enough pieces for the two of them and brought the basket to the table, along with the butter dish straight from a refrigerator paneled to look like an antique icebox. While Birdie fetched two small plates of potato salad and left a third covered with plastic wrap on the counter, Suzanne studied the old pieces of cookware mounted on the walls above the china cabinets.

Birdie sat down, jiggling the table a little as she landed. “Good gumbo night,” she said, staring out at the weather.

Suzanne took a sip of the thin brown broth and gasped on the pepper, took a quick swallow of water, followed that up with a bite of potato salad, and ate more cautiously. Her piece of chicken, boiled nearly off the bone, had absorbed the spiciness of the gravy and the smoky taste of the bits of sausage. Eaten slowly, the gumbo warmed the insides on a dismal evening. The drizzle outside thickened into rain again.

“I’m sorry if I’m keeping you,” she apologized, not knowing how far Birdie had to drive in the mess outside.

“No bother. Now that Mister Jacques is dead, Lionel, that’s my husband, he ain’t so likely to fuss. My boys are grown. I got two in the service, three married, and just two grandbabies. Those boys of mine is mighty slow on starting families. My youngest is going to business school.” Her large chest puffed up, and she smiled, showing one gold tooth.

“When Mr. Jacques lived, he was a devil with the ladies. Lionel said, ‘I want you home every night ’fore dark, woman!’ even after having babies took my figure. Lionel says now there’s just more to love. Oh, he’s a devil, too. But Miss Virginia wouldn’t have none of that under her roof, so I never had no trouble with her husband.”

“So it’s okay to be here alone after dark now?”

Birdie missed the intended humor. “Oh, Mr. Georgie won’t bother you none. It’s only me who saved him from being one of those sissy boys, but he don’t have much of his daddy in him neither. I used to bring my sons up to play with him out on the lawn. They’d roughhouse and get good and dirty. Then, I’d scrub him all clean before his mama got home from one of her club meetings. It was one of our secrets.”

Birdie sucked the meat off a chicken bone and rattled on. “For awhile there, they thought Georgie was slow, but I knew that wasn’t so. He sat up and crawled around just when little ones are supposed to and, having three boys of my own by that time, I knew when. Mr. Jacques wanted him to be doing everything early, and Miss Virginia feared Georgie had gone wrong because he was a hard birth. Mr. Jacques insisted she deliver up in the four-poster instead of a hospital. Doc Sonny was kind of young then, inexperienced. We all thought Miss Virginia was gonna die the way she screamed all night. Mr. Jacques didn’t want no drugs used. Natural was best for his child, he said. Georgie came at dawn, a skinny thing with these red marks on his head where the doctor pulled him out with forceps. By night time, Miss Virginia took her dinner on a tray, and her breasts filled with as much milk as a baby could use, but she didn’t nurse. Put her foot down there.”

“She had no other children?”

“No, ma’am! Doc Sonny said there was something wrong with her female parts that made the birth so hard, and he took ’em out a year later.”

“What a shame!” Suzanne made sympathetic noises as a contribution to the conversation.

“No, no, it weren’t. I wouldn’t call Miss Virginia a natural born mother. Raising a child came hard to her, but she fussed over Georgie like a hen with one chick. You should have heard the screaming when Mr. Jacques decided to send the boy off to St. Mark’s Academy. As much howling and carrying on as the night he was born, but the boy went. By that time they had figured out only his eyes was bad, and what’s why he bumped into things and didn’t read so good. After he got glasses, he turned out to be right quick. Then, the other boys began calling him Four-eyes instead of Dumb George. The first time he licked ’em, I said, ‘Good for you, Georgie!’ His daddy took him for ice cream, but we had to keep that a secret, too, and get the glasses fixed on the sly. We told Miss Virginia he fell down since he did that often enough. Just after, Mr. Jacques sent him away to school. A good thing, I guess.”

“He was all right after that?”

“Sure. He grew up. But he was such a loving child before, always wanting hugs. Afterwards, he came back as this tall, skinny kid who barely spoke to anyone. He got on the St. Mark’s basketball team because of his height, but he was no good the first year, so Mr. Jacques stopped going to the games. Then his senior year, there’s Georgie on the front page of the sports section of the Port Jefferson Sentinel along with Linc St. Julien, them’s the black St. Juliens. ‘Local Sons Lead Leagues’, it says. And we never knew ’til then how good he could play. ’Course, Linc played in a tougher league, all big public high schools, but they was both good. Went to the university together, played together. The coach over there made Georgie a guard, said he wasn’t skilled enough for forward. Linc was the star, but they got along…still get along.”

Suzanne stifled a yawn. Gloomy weather and basketball talk, not her kind of things. She changed the subject. “So, George has no family.”

“‘Course he got family. All Cajuns have family. There’s the old ladies in town, Aunt Esme and Aunt Letty, great-aunts really, which is like having grandparents. His own passed on young before Mr. Jacques got done sowing his wild oats. Well, maybe he never got done, but they was plain folks and wouldn’t have got on with Miss Virginia, so just as well. And then there’s the uncles, Claude, Jean, and René. Vincent died fighting overseas. Only Claude came around much after Mr. Jacques bought out their shares in the house with Miss Virginia’s money. The brothers have kids all over the parish, but Georgie keeps to himself.”

Birdie dumped some of her potato salad into the remains of her gumbo and went on talking. “Don’t you listen if they tells you Georgie is one of them gay guys. He’s just shy. If his mama hadn’t broken up an engagement to Miss Cherry, he’d have a family right now. I didn’t think that girl was good enough for him either, but when my Earl wanted to marry up with Lucerne Narcisse, I kept my mouth shut. It’s all worked out. She give me my only grandson so far, and I see him all I want.”

By now, they were down to the part of the gumbo you can’t get at without tilting the dish. Birdie mopped hers up with the last of the bread.

“I have to get on now. Just leave the dishes.” She stocked a straw carryall with a quart jar of the gumbo and a plastic container of rice. After tying a plastic rain bonnet over her head, she motioned toward the refrigerator. “There’s a banana cream pie for dessert. Store bought, but good. We got a nice bakery here in town, and it’s their specialty.”

“Later, maybe.”

“Good evenin’, then.”

Suddenly, Suzanne sat alone in a large, dark, and strange house, so not the same as being on her own in an apartment or the house where she grew up and knew what each odd noise meant—more like being locked in a museum after hours. She stayed in the coziness of the kitchen, had a slice of the banana cream pie, made a cup of tea, did the dishes, and still lingered until she saw the headlights of George’s car peering down the lane. When he came in by way of the screen door, he seemed surprised to see her. Not wanting to be banished into the darker regions of the Hill, she offered to heat his dinner.

He said, “No, thanks. You probably have important work to do.”

Suzanne took the hint she should get back to work and felt her way from light switch to light switch, first turning on the brilliant dining room chandelier, then an electrified wall sconce in the hall, and next the gasolier with its ornamental grapevines illuminating the upstairs hall. In her room, a fake kerosene lamp by the bed chased away the boogeyman. She watched a little television, tried to read one of her reference books on southern antiques, and finally decided on another piece of banana cream pie. Nothing like sugar overload to make a person groggy enough for sleep.

The hall lights still burned and more brightness flooded onto the stairs from the open door of the second parlor. Since it would be rude to pass by without speaking, she poked her head in the doorway. The room overflowed with large Eastlake pieces in light woods. George sat stretched out in a deep leather chair with his feet on an ottoman. He had a little rolling bar full of decanters with silver tags designating “Bourbon” and “Scotch” and “Brandy” drawn up next to him and was indulging in one of the brown liquors over ice and reading the Times-Picayune. In stocking feet, without a coat and tie, a little rumpled, George appeared younger than she first thought, around thirty, instead of pushing forty.

He didn’t notice her presence until she exclaimed, “A Wooten desk!” just spotted across the room. She was pawing at the latches of the bullet-shaped antique by the time George got to his feet and wiped at the whiskey he’d spilled on his white shirt when he jumped at the sound of her voice.

“The desk was my father’s, but it’s empty now. Mother cleaned it out after he died.”

The desk was truly empty, every little drawer and cubby in this organizer’s dream bare, and not even locked by the brass key that held its two halves together.

“I’ve seen only one other. This might be your most valuable piece, and you do have some great ones.”

George took off his glasses and rubbed the red ridge on the bridge of his nose. Glasses that strong had to be irritating. She wondered if he could see her now, so she spoke to give him an idea of where she stood.

“I’m sorry to barge in. I craved another piece of pie. Would you like some?”

“No, thank you.” He held up what was left of his drink. “You go ahead. Birdie will eat it in the morning, and she is supposed to be on a diet because of her blood pressure.”

Suzanne moved for the doorway and then gave into another impulse. “Is that your ancestor?” She pointed at the portrait over the mantel. Its dark eyes seemed to be following her.

“I guess so. My father.”

“Oh, I thought he might be some Civil War hero.”

The man in the portrait sat astride a white horse that looked much more patient than its rider. Jacques St. Julien wore a deep purple cape with a golden lining thrown back over his shoulders and a Jeb Stuart hat with a black plume in the band. What appeared to be a powder horn hung from a strap across his chest. The likeness was poor if it portrayed the man in the wedding picture, but the artist did capture the essence of his personality. A crooked smile dominated the face, and the black eyes seemed to rove the room in search of the prettiest girl.

“He’s wearing his captain’s costume for the Courir de Mardi Gras. You’ll be here when they come to get a chicken in a few weeks. For the gumbo. For the last party before Lent.”

“I see.” Really, she did not.

“A local artist painted this right before my father died and then moved on to better things.”

Looking closely, she noticed a little gray in the subject’s curly, black sideburns. A vague Magnolia Hill partly obscured by dark trees, filled the background along with some minuscule clowns cavorting with a rooster on the lawn, way too strange for her taste.

“I should move on to better things, too. Your mother’s notes are in such good order I think I will concentrate on the history of the house. Could I go into town with you in the morning, check out some of the documentation at the bank, and spend the rest of the day in the library?”

“Fine.”

“See you then.” Committed to early rising, Suzanne decided to skip the pie and go to bed. After all, George St. Julien stood guard in the second parlor against any boogeymen.