Chapter Four

Suzanne’s story

What a totally boring weekend. George was gone as much he had said he would be. Suzanne saw him briefly Saturday morning when she stood in the kitchen scrambling some eggs. Trying to mend fences, she offered to do the same for him. Looking surprisingly scruffy and masculine in old jeans and a stained, gray university sweatshirt, he turned her down and left the house. He came back after midnight. Hoping he noticed she was still up and working, she clacked away on her computer, entering his mother’s inventory.

She swore she could smell beer fumes emanating from his room when she went down the hall the next morning. Sunday, George slept in until eleven, and then took off again more neatly dressed. He said he had been invited for Sunday dinner at a friend’s house. Suzanne thought this a strange lack of the southern hospitality that she hadn’t been invited, too. So, she ate Birdie’s leftovers, not too shabby, out of the refrigerator and sent messages home to pass the time.

She gave Dr. Dumont a dry, academic overview of what the house contained. Since her mentor would want to know, she added that George St. Julien bore very little resemblance to his fiery father and mostly took after his mother, except for his dark hair. Unfair of course with George being more quiet than cold. If he wasn’t the master of Magnolia Hill she had envisioned, not his fault. Mentioning George’s affair ten or more years ago with a black girl, now a married mother of twins, would have been entirely out of line.

For her mother, she gushed over the Belter settee and the Wooten desk. Converting her interest to the Victorian era had brought them closer. Instead of lurking in galleries displaying art beyond her mother’s comprehension and definitely not to her taste, they’d begun spending weekends haunting antique shops together. If she did not experience the same thrill as Mom over finding a mother-of-pearl handled fish fork in a New Hope tourist trap, she did begin to develop an eye for the flawed and the fake as she compared the goods on sale to the real items she’d been allowed to touch at Winterthur or tout during her duties as a guide.

She told Mom about the “lovely” magnolias that had given the house its name and about the “charming” basket maker in his shop on Main Street, hardly believing she used those words. At the moment, the trees seemed like black growths on a dead lawn sweeping down to the brown bayou, and the basket maker a prime example of rural poverty. Before her mood could infect the upbeat tone of the letter, she signed it off with a “Love, Suzanne.”

She’d considered adding a note about George, his quaint manners and protectiveness, the temper he had so quickly subdued, but didn’t want to get Mom started on another man. Mom still asked about Paul, the steady fellow with the good job. Right now, her mother was probably online selling some of her antique finds on eBay, her mailbox open. No, Mom would get too inquisitive about her boss if they started to chat. She didn’t feel like talking about George at the moment. After all, Suzanne Hudson was a twenty-first century woman who does not need a man on a white horse to rescue her, a castle to live in, or even someone to open doors for her—but the last was sort of nice along with Magnolia Hill.

Instead, she scribbled off a few picture postcards of the Hill she’d found at the pharmacy to friends so they could see where she’d landed. She debated whether to send Paul a conciliatory e-mail note saying something like “you are a nice guy; it just wasn’t meant to be,” but doubted if the note would do any more than make him angry again in that red-faced, snarling way.

The cards written, she turned back to the computer and contacted her brother, asking Blake if he had ever heard of a basketball star named Linc St. Julien or an old college player called George St. Julien, because she was living right in their hometown where nearly everything except the town itself seemed to carry their name. In the short time she’d been offline, a message from Mom had popped up beneath the half dozen from Paul she hadn’t opened or answered. Suzanne did not open any of them now, either.

The afternoon wore on. Somehow, she rebelled against working on her project. Sunday, a day of rest, a day off even for non-churchgoers—she loathed Sundays featuring the stuffiness of a church service followed by a big meal and a boring afternoon when most of the more interesting non-mall shops and galleries stayed closed. Wondering what the people of Port Jefferson did on a Sunday afternoon, she found the telephone book and called Willie’s Taxi Service. Willie knew how to get to Magnolia Hill, good because she doubted if he could have heard directions over the background noise of the television set and the clamor of dogs and children in his house. Willie said he would be right over, and forty-five minutes later, he arrived.

“Had a little trouble gettin’ up the hill, ma’am,” he explained, “but we can coast back down. I never been up here befo’, but I sure know where it at.”

She studied Willie’s vehicle, a ’56 Chevy Bel Air spray-painted a bright yellow to resemble city cabs. The upholstery appeared to be the original blue plaid, she discovered when he opened the back door. By sliding to the center of the seat, she avoided snagging her slacks on any protruding springs. Willie gunned his engine. It responded with a series of pops.

“Where to?” he said in the best tradition of cabbies.

“What’s open on Sunday?”

“Here in Port Jefferson, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Dairy Queen out by the highway and the museum about all. I could take you into the city to see a show for forty bucks.”

“Let’s try the museum.”

The cab stalled on the way downhill, but Willie popped the clutch and had it going again by the time they got to the traffic light where, fortunately, they did not have to stop. Main Street sat deserted except for a few cars at the Methodist Church. Willie swung up in front of the Port Jefferson Museum without mishap.

“How much?” Suzanne asked. The cab had no meter.

“Six dollar,” said Willie sizing her up, a smile on his shining black face.

She paid and threw in a dollar tip even though she suspected just having paid the out-of-town stranger rate. Coming from a city where simply turning on the cab came to more than a dollar, she wasn’t appalled. Maybe, Willie could save up for new brakes.

“Thank you, ma’am. You jus’ call when you ready to go back, now.”

“Sure,” she answered and went through the gate in the rickety sticks of pieux fencing. The hollow sound of her steps on the broad boards of the porch must have awakened the guide.

The woman suddenly straightened from a position of nodding over the table containing the guestbook and a Plexiglas box with “donations” stenciled on the side. She wore a red volunteer button stuck on the chest of her yellow gingham costume. The sunbonnet shoved back from her badly dyed or unfortunately natural orange hair slid off of the guide’s head and dangled by the strings. The volunteer wrung her hands in her white apron and began. “My name is Evelyn Patout, and I am your guide,” she announced, coming to attention but avoiding her visitor’s eyes.

“Hello,” Suzanne said. As if this were a magic word that set off a chain reaction, Evelyn Patout began her tour by rote. “We are standing in the living quarters of the Jean-Baptiste St. Julien home built, we think, about 1794. The home is constructed of cypress timbers and bousillage. That is mud, moss, and animal fibers packed into the walls.”

Marching to the fireplace, Evelyn pointed to a glass plate covering a hole in the wall. “This here is a section which has been cut way to show the thickness of the wall. Bousillage made excellent insulation in this hot climate.”

Past the opening sentences, Evelyn’s voice continued on in a very un-French twang. “The chimney and fireplace are also made of mud because we got so much of it ’round here. Now the family of ten slept in these here two rooms mostly. Not all at onct. Some of ’em died young. People did that then.”

Beads of sweat began to form between the freckles stretched across the guide’s cheekbones. “Now the mama and the papa slept here with the babies. See the cradle hand hewn from cypress. This was the girls’ room. There ain’t no other door but through the parents’ bedroom. The boys slept up in the loft called a garconierre entered by the stairs on the porch. Tells you something about those times, don’t it?”

“All the furniture in those days was handmade and very simple. Here is where the family ate. See the cowhide, hair and all, stretched over a frame to make a seat. And what did they eat? Corn ground up in this here stump and lots of rice.” Evelyn raised a large wooden pestle and let it fall with a thump into the hollowed log. Chips of cracked corn scattered through the air, pelting Suzanne like rice at a wedding.

“Lots of wild game and fish, naturally. Chickens, too. They raised chickens.” Her guide began to look tearful. “Oh, and I forgot. This was the birthplace of one of our state senators, Victoir St. Julien. From these humble origins sprang a long line of prominent politicians. Any questions?”

Without pausing, Evelyn raced on. “Please stop to look in the glass case which contains pictures of Port Jefferson one hundred fifty years ago. The Port Jefferson Museum is operated entirely on your donations. Please feel free to browse in the rooms and stop at the other points of interest in our town.” Evelyn exhaled. “How did I do? This was my first tour.”

Suzanne understood. Four years of college and several public speaking courses had not made her first tour of the historic home where she worked in Philadelphia last summer any more relaxed. “Fine,” she said, smiling. “What are the other points of interest?”

“Uh, they didn’t tell me. I mean the Historical Society ladies. See, I’m from north Louisiana, up by the Arkansas border. I come here when I married Billy Patout last year. He’s real good with my boys. Billy said get out, join some clubs, do something. So I volunteered for here. I had to get this costume made, and this ole bonnet here is just driving me crazy.” Evelyn pulled the bonnet up on her orange hair where it cast a sallow pall over her freckles and pushed it back again.

“I’m a stranger here myself.” Suzanne walked over to the glass case and viewed the pictures of very unglamorous steamboats laden with mountains of cotton bales and a Main Street of dirt and board sidewalks, but full of mule and wagon traffic. “There’s not much to do here on a Sunday.”

“You’re telling me!” Evelyn sympathized. “But you should have been at Joe’s Lounge last night. As they say around here, you can pass a good time at Joe’s. Say, if you’re still here next week, Billy can fix you up with a date. He got a slew of brothers and cousins, all good dancers, these Cajun boys.”

“I might take you up on that.”

Suzanne put a couple of dollars in the donation box where a handful of change rested. Evelyn wrote her number on the back of a Port Jefferson Museum brochure and handed it to her as she escorted Suzanne to the door of the cabin. Even the cars at the Methodist church had gone by now. She decided to walk up the hill. Not only would it be faster, cheaper, and safer, but the walk would consume the remains of Sunday afternoon.

While Suzanne toiled along the narrow gravel strip between the deep drainage ditch and the macadam at the crest of the hill, George pulled over in his gray Honda. She would have liked to refuse the ride and assert her independence again, but the early winter dusk began to settle over the landscape, and she had out-walked any lingering issues she had with her boss.

“I brought you some fried chicken and a piece of yam pie for dinner.” He nodded in a shame-faced way toward a bag on the front seat.

“Thanks. Were you at Mrs. St. Julien’s?” she asked, trying not to show any curiosity about where he had been all day.

“No, not at Odette St. Julien’s place.”

End of conversation. At the Hill, George went directly to the Eastlake parlor for a nightcap. Suzanne ate her chicken and pie cold in the kitchen and pondered deep thoughts: how similar yam pie was to pumpkin, one of her favorites; how even the fried chicken batter had the bite of red pepper in it; whether or not to go to Joe’s Lounge next Saturday night with a blind date. She liked the pie, disliked the chicken, and could not make up her mind about Evelyn Patout’s offer.