Les Fleurs du mal slid from my knees to the pavilion house floor when I saw him—a big black butterfly pushing his way through Saturday twilight, crunching things underfoot in the grove. One arm flapped in rhythm with the movement of his head, and the other carried a traveling bag. I came out to the edge of the pavilion house and forced my attention through a cluster of sassafras trees, through summer dusk, hoping, in spite of reason, that the ladies had won, that they had burst Jerome’s screen of prohibitions. Who else could this man be? I was so certain it was Maurice LeFleur that when he came to the smooth clearing on the lawn, I waved to him, ran to him, extended my hand. “Mr. LeFleur?”
His hand: pale, icy, blue-veined, full of bones, goose-fleshed, large appendages to his arms. And his arms were stuffed into a suit of midnight blue. He was of medium height, medium weight, and quite ordinary, except for his head; that was big. And at the top of his big head there was a wide forehead, covered in Hitler fashion with straight inky hair, and the forehead protruded like a canopy over his small black eyes. His nose was Roman, and it hovered, like some proud guardian, over his mouth (which curved in wet Picasso loops), over his watch chain (which curved over his small belly and blue vest), over his patent leather shoes (pointed and full of dew). He was proud of his Roman nose, this Mr. Maurice LeFleur was.
I removed my hand from his and at once became aware that his breath smelled of mint. “I am looking for the lady who owns this place. A Mrs.”—he pulled Mrs. Klein’s pink stationery (crumpled but clean) from his blue vest pocket—“a Mrs. Etta D. Klein, Green Acorns, Allegan.”
“This is the place. Didn’t you get a telegram, though? From Kalamazoo? From a Mr. Jerome Klein?”
Maurice LeFleur picked up his bag, of expensive black leather, and marched towards the house. “Several letters. Come. Don’t come. Then please come. People hesitate. People are hesitant. I know people. You’re Libra aren’t you?”
“I’m Oliver. Oh, you mean, yes, Libra. How did you know?”
His small eyes squinted, like a rabbit’s. “I just know these things.”
Prickly stinging came in waves across my scalp. How could he have known? A wild guess? But when he told Mrs. Klein between spoons of tomato aspic that she was Gemini and just as affirmatively that Aunt Harry was Aries—well, nobody’s that good a guesser. He’d done some research… yet it was puzzling: Aunt Harry was born in Springfield, Ohio, and I doubted if his research on birth dates had been that thorough. My ladies, however, were convinced, as though the hand of God touched them. Admiration mounted, and so did Maurice LeFleur’s cockiness.
“You must be weary, Mr. LeFleur,” Aunt Harry said. “We won’t keep you up tonight. You can go straight to bed if you want. Room’s all nice and ready.”
“Northern exposure?” he asked. (There was so much of his head sitting at the table.)
Mrs. Klein brightened. “Yes, yes. The best summer breeze in the house.”
He folded his napkin and took a toothpick out of his vest pocket. “Oh, I don’t know. It might do me harm.”
“What might?” Aunt Harry asked.
“Northern exposure.”
The ladies conferred, silently, and turned to me. I shook my head furiously: that sonofabitch wasn’t going to take my room.
Squint-eyed with toothpick rolling over his Picasso lips, he said, “Who was it? Who passed on to the other world? Your relative? Or your relative?”
“My son Sargeant. Five years ago.”
Maurice LeFleur’s blue hand picked up a glass of ice water. “Anything to drink? Any cognac?”
“No, no,” Aunt Harry told him, “but some rum. In fact”—the pause was of unkind length—“lots of rum.”
“Won’t do, won’t do. Well, we’ll have to get some cognac on Monday, won’t we? All right? In fact, there’ll be a number of things I might be needing. All right? Now, as for the room, I need to sleep in his bed. A night or two. For contact. All right? I need to have—”
“Oh, but Sargeant never had a room here, Mr. LeFleur. We were living in Kalamazoo for a long time and we were in New York when my son committed—when Sargeant passed away. He—he—”
The ladies gathered themselves: dress-adjusting, turning of rings, crossing their ankles. Aunt Harry said: “We could close the drapes if it’s the draft you’re worried about. Green Acorns may look old and tumbled down, but the rooms are quite—”
“No, no,” he said, his eyes appraising every object in the room, “it should be his bed.”
Mrs. Klein was nearly in tears. “But that’s impossible, Mr. LeFleur. Sargeant never had a room here. We weren’t here when he passed away.”
“Well, well, dear lady,” he said, not concerned in the least that his hocus-pocus had come to naught, “we’ll arrange something, now, won’t we? Now, let’s see. Your room. I’ll need to look at your room for a bit.”
“My room?” said Mrs. Klein. “See my room?”
“Yes, yes… By the way, I think I’ll have a little of that rum if you don’t mind… and a few of the other rooms, if I may.” He drank every drop of the rum down in one swallow. “It’s a technical problem. The rooms, I mean. Is it a bother?”
Mrs. Klein was not a selfish woman, but her objects, her things, cluttered in her room, were a comfort to her, a source of security. She lifted her hands to the air, twice, and said, “I guess it’s all right. It’s really such an old lady’s room, Mr. LeFleur. I’m sure if you need to see it for a while I—”
“And you can draw my bath now.” This was directed to Aunt Harry, who trembled, drew up her mouth in preparation for a retort that never came. Slowly her pony jaws relaxed, and much of the light of admiration went out of her eyes.
To her rescue, Mrs. Klein said, “Mrs. Gibbs isn’t—she isn’t exactly—we’ll get Della to do it. Della! Della!”
Della was in the room a fraction of a second before she was called. “Will you draw Mr. LeFleur’s bath, dear?”
“Draw it?”
“Yes, Della,” Aunt Harry said. “You heard her.”
“Draw it?”
“Yes, girl,” said Aunt Harry. “Just don’t stand there like something simple.”
“You mean fix it, don’t you?”
Mrs. Klein glanced at Maurice LeFleur. (It wasn’t a glance actually; it was more of a quick sneak over the edge of her handkerchief.) With a certain amount of bite to it, she said to Della, “Why, of course, dear, that’s what I mean.”
Della spun out of the room but managed to close the door slowly enough for us all to hear her private grievance: “Fix a bath I’ll fix, but, Good Lord, I never in my life drawed a bath…. You need a dictionary to navigate your way around this…”