Chapter Eight

Laura sat by her open French doors and hemmed the new skirts she suddenly had the urge to buy this morning from Helen’s Boutique. Deep into October, Louisiana offered its most clement weather free of humidity and insects. She watched the Saturday afternoon procession of pickup trucks on Main Street from her chair placed a safe distance from the fragile balcony Mrs. Domengeaux kept assuring her was absolutely safe. Now and again, its rusty wrought iron creaked in the autumn breeze.

The new skirts were not merely an impulse buy. They had become a necessity because of Mrs. Domengeaux’s persistent and generous feeding. As Laura cut through the shop each evening after work, her landlady thrust bowls of potato salad heavy on the mayonnaise and wedges of outrageously rich pecan pie into her hands.

“You can’t get a man if you stay so thin,” the robust Mrs. D. would say, slipping a praline into Laura’s purse. The older woman nodded approvingly as Laura’s cleavage deepened.

To her own disgust, Laura gobbled up the offerings. Her appetite after the months of depression had returned begging, pleading and urging to be fed. Now the gray V-necked sweater Jay Geiger had ogled, spanned tight across her breasts, and her casual jeans fit snug in the bottom. Laura bemoaned her loss of fashionable thinness and the return of what her mother called an old-fashioned figure with its wealth of curves—like Marilyn Monroe. Ha! Back to her old dress size and determined to diet before she went beyond it.

The skirts were to be an incentive to remain no more than a size eight. Besides, their fabric swayed when she walked, such a good feeling for a change. She wanted them shorter than the matronly length stocked by Miss Helen.

“I don’t want a man,” she’d sworn to Mrs. D., but gradually, it became important to have men to look at her again. This disgusted Laura more than her craving for pecan pie. David had been gone for five months, only five months.

She had to get her mind off David. Laura’s eyes turned toward the Main Street parade. Two farmers in overalls got out of their vehicles to chat while the stoplight on the corner remained red. Behind them in a familiar truck, Angelle LeBlanc waved enthusiastically and called, “Come see, Miss Laura, come see!”

Laura set her sewing aside. A playful Snake, plunging from a covert spot under the sofa, immediately attacked her spool of thread. The kitten had grown as fast as Laura’s appetite. She stood in the French doors holding on to both sides of the frame as she leaned out toward Angelle. The child frequently came to the library after school and rode home with her great-aunt. Though she was supposed to do her homework while waiting for five o’clock, the little girl dogged Laura’s steps, straightening shelves and putting up magazines. The child had a touching hunger for a woman to emulate. Obviously, neither Pearl nor Tante Lil satisfied her need.

Behind the dusty windshield, Robert LeBlanc spoke to his daughter and continued to show no impatience when the light turned green and the two farmers kept up their conversation in the middle of the street.

“Can you come with us for some ice cream, Miss Laura? Please come!” shouted Angelle.

Hungry again, all resolutions vanished, Laura returned the shout, “Sure, why not?”

She bolted down the stairs, over to the idling truck and slipped into the cab just as the overall-clad men finally returned to their vehicles and drove on. From the balcony, Snake, switching his tail, watched their departure.

Thoroughly ashamed of herself, Laura studied Robert LeBlanc’s features while his eyes stayed on the road. Ever since she heard Tante Lu’s tale, she’d secretly studied his physique for signs of a black heritage. He had none as far as she could tell, even when applying old wives tales about the whites of the eyes and other nonsense. Swarthy and tanned with the dark hair and eyes of most of the men in town with a French or Cajun heritage, in her opinion he was considerably better looking than the majority.

She hated to admit the folk tale made T-Bob a more romantic figure in her eyes. That probably applied to most of the young women in town. One svelte blonde coming out of Helen’s Boutique directed a wave at him now. Her green eyes distinctly excluded Laura and Angelle, although the child waved back. Of course nothing showed. No black blood had been added to the French and Spanish since 1830, if then, if at all. Along with her dieting, Laura resolved to stop studying Robert LeBlanc.

With fine weather and good company, the conversation flowed easily that afternoon. All in the small party agreed on chocolate as the best flavor, and chocolate ice cream dipped in a chocolate shell even better. Strolling along the sidewalk with their cones in hand, Robert remained as lightly amusing as he had been while guiding his facetious tour of Chateau Camille. He pointed out the town fossil, Aldus Thibodeaux, deep asleep in a lawn chair in front of his gas station.

“Even older than Tante Lil,” he whispered to Angelle with awe in his voice. “Probably as old as the bayou itself.”

They stopped in front of Purdue’s Bed & Breakfast. Previously, the old frame house with its odd tower room had been a boarding house, but the owner, Miss Lula, decided to go upscale, redecorating with antiques and advertising in slick travel magazines.

“She started a rumor the place had once been a fancy bordello.” Robert glanced at Angelle to see if she had picked up on the strange word, but the child stayed busy trying to keep the chocolate shell from sliding off her ice cream, her face a happy mess.

“To draw tourists. As a child, Tante Lil knew the Widow Purdue who first opened the boarding house. She said that straight-laced old woman was probably spinning in her grave.”

Pausing, he wiped Angelle’s face free of chocolate with a paper napkin and scrubbed at a spot on Laura’s sweater just below her chin. Shame on her for wishing the ice cream had dripped lower down her chest. The heat rising inside her felt fiery enough to melt the remainder of the scoop in her cone.

“You’re looking good—better than when we first met you,” he said, smiling into her gray eyes.

“Fatter, you mean.” Laura rejected the compliment. “But at least I’m not covered in mosquito bites now, though I still do have stains on my clothes.”

He looked her up and down. “If that’s fat, it went to all the right places. No, I meant more alive, inside and out.”

“You didn’t even notice me at Miss Lola’s place my first day in town, just clomped right by me with a nod and a ma’am.”

“I noticed you. You stared at my backside, but there we were with Miss Lola in the kitchen and not a bed in sight. What was a man to do, sweep the hot sauce bottles off a table and go at it right there? I, being the perfect gentleman, got the hell out without coming on to you.”

Laura noticed the heat moving up her neck and into her cheeks. Some of that warmth went the other way and kindled between her thighs. She turned aside, pretending to attend to her dripping dessert, and leaned over the curb away from him. Both forgot about the presence of the child, but Angelle would not be ignored. “Why don’t you come stay with us again?”

“I have my own place now, Angelle.”

“Well,” said the child with a petulant ring. “I could make you come stay with us.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, I could. I know a traiteur who could put a spell on you so that you would come stay with us and never go away.”

“Angelle! That’s about enough nonsense for the day.” Her father cut into a conversation rapidly getting out of hand. Laura tried to assist him, adult helping adult.

“Tell me, what’s traiteur?”

“A faith healer, a sort of white witch, I guess you could say. They claim to cure warts and drive snakes from your yard, using the power of God of course.” Robert dismissed such claims with a wave of his hand.

“Well, I lack warts, a yard, and my only snake is really a cat. Would you like to see him, Angelle?”

“Madame Leleux could make you come if I had enough money for a charm,” replied Angelle, who seemed to have a stubborn streak beneath her black curls. “Pearl said she went to a traiteur once to get a man to love her, and it worked so well she can’t even talk about it.”

“Look, let’s go to my place. Angelle can see my cat, and I’d like to show you an old armoire that I think is very valuable.”

“Antiques, despite my residence in a place full of them, are not my strong point. Now if you had a sick cow up there…”

Angelle laughed, and the tension dwindled away.

The child charged up the old staircase when they reached Domengeaux’s store. Mrs. D, busy behind the counter, nodded her blessing on Robert LeBlanc as he followed his daughter up the stairs. She called Laura aside and put three pralines in her hand.

“For dat child. Now you could do worse den Bob LeBlanc. You being a Yankee and a Protestant, you won’t mind about the divorce and dem other t’ings. Invite him for dinner. If you can’t cook, I’ll bring you up somet’ing nice from da store.”

“They can’t stay, Miss Lola. I’m sure about that.”

Laura escaped into her apartment finding she had forgotten to lock it in her haste to join the LeBlancs. Even the French doors stood open as if an invitation for ice cream addled her brain. Snake had made a mess of the sewing basket and scrap cloth and as if evading a scolding, tried to ingratiate himself by winding around Angelle’s legs. The girl threw an empty spool for the kitten and became engrossed in play, the grown-up world fading for her.

“Since we have become dispensable, the armoire is in here.”

Laura moved to her bedroom. David’s old shirt lay draped on the bed, and she knew Robert LeBlanc had taken notice of it. She threw open the doors of the armoire quickly.

“Look, ‘C.S.’ I am sure this is a genuine Celestin Segura cabinet.” She ran her fingers over the initials carved in the honey-colored wood.

“I think you’re right. Despite what I said about antiques, I did take an interest in the black Seguras at one time in my life. This is fine work. Should be in a museum, or at least out at my place.”

“Mrs. Domengeaux doesn’t want to sell. I just thought you would be interested.”

“Because of old stories?”

Deciding not to be a total hypocrite and feign, “A story? What story?” Laura replied, “No, not at all. Something that happened so long ago should have no bearing on the present or the future.”

“But it does. Was this your husband?” Robert pointed to the wedding picture. The man was becoming dangerously serious. Laura sat on the edge of her bed and tried to break his gaze.

“Yes,” she answered without elaboration.

“What you do about your life from now on will always be affected by a man who is as dead and gone as Celestin Segura. Whether you marry or not, have children or not, will depend on how much he influences your future.”

“I think that is very cold and uncalled for.” Laura’s hand stroked the comfortable, soft texture of David’s old shirt.

“Listen, I have a point to make. I first heard the story of Marie Segura and Aurelien LeBlanc when I turned thirteen. Maybe Pearl told me, but it might have been before she came back from California. Funny, I can’t recall who told me. Everyone in Chapelle knew the story except for me, it seemed, and talked about it behind my back. I kept thinking if the babies had not been switched, I might have been out there in the fields planting cane, watching my own relative, the great Judge LeBlanc surveying his arpents on horseback.

“I know it isn’t likely. The black Seguras were craftsmen, and nearly white. They say Pearl’s sister went to California and married a white man. That’s why no one ever hears of her. Now days, it wouldn’t matter much, but in her youth, passing meant giving up your family. As for myself, I would have been a member of the black elite, the high yellows, the almost white. But at thirteen, all I could see were the cane workers, their sweat for my profit, their shacks for my big white mansion. That old story became an obsession for me.”

“I refused to honor family tradition and study law at Tulane. To my father’s horror, I took agricultural courses at the state university. After he died, I switched our land from cane to cattle. There is more dignity in raising cattle, but much less money.

“I followed in my family’s footsteps in only one way. I married out of the parish. I really believed no one in Chapelle would have me and never tried to find out. I brought home a girl from New Orleans who turned out to be my very distant cousin. We met at a fraternity party and found out we had Caroline Montleon in common.” Robert smiled ruefully and studied the picture of David with his sandy hair and light eyes.

“That gave me my pickup line, ‘Vivien Montleon, I have a Montleon somewhere in my family tree—we must be kissing cousins.’ Clever opening, don’t you think? I neglected to tell her about Marie Segura. When Vivien became thoroughly enchanted with my big plantation, my waving stands of cane and my father, the judge, I got her pregnant. Not exactly an accident on either side. I thought this way she’d be mine forever and would never leave me, even when she heard what people said about the LeBlancs of Chapelle. Later, much later, I found out she thought she had tricked me into marriage and deeply regretted her success. So did I. Would you, knowing the stories?”

Laura, listening intently, aware he had shut the bedroom door to prevent Angelle from hearing, found herself unprepared for the question and mistook his meaning.

“I don’t know. I’m not ready to make that kind of a decision yet.” She clutched David’s shirt to her chest.

“That was a rhetorical question, not a proposal. Perhaps I should have gone into law. I have just made my point. The past does matter. You cannot escape it. It can ruin lives.”

Laura wanted to offer this bitter man, who usually covered his feelings with a smile and a joke, some comfort, some hope, but the right words would not come. Dropping David’s shirt, she reached out a hand to him, but he turned before she could touch his arm and opened the door.

They spotted Angelle playing with Snake on the old balcony. The child’s father crossed the room in three strides and pulled his daughter to his side.

“That’s a poor place to play, Angelle.”

Laura, just behind him, murmured, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have locked the door.”

“She’s not your problem, Mrs. Dickinson. Come on, Angelle. It’s too late. We’ll catch it from Tante Lil if we aren’t home for dinner.”

As they moved to leave, Angelle returned to her old theme. “I could make you come to stay with us. I could.” Her father pushed her ahead to the doorway. The group collided with Lola Domengeaux carrying a large enameled pot up the narrow stairs.

“Leaving so soon? I was bringing up dis nice gumbo for dinner. Stay a while, why don’t you?”

“It’s too late, Mrs. D,” Laura said. “They need to get back to their place.”