On this day in 1881—seventeen years and half my life ago—I left boarding school. My mother, who has never hesitated to request favors of friends and friends of friends, had asked Miss Emily Mason, who lived in Paris and would be traveling in Germany at that time, to collect me in Karlsruhe and take me to the glorious City of Light, where I would live under her wing until they came to get me. I could hardly sleep the night before; the departure I had looked forward to ever since I arrived at the Friedlander Institute was finally about to happen—unless there was some last-minute complication, such as the elderly spinster I was to be released to having a change of plan or heart. Varina’s letter had described this chaperon as “quite sprightly for her sixty-odd years.” I took that to mean Miss Mason was only slightly bent over and got around reasonably well with a cane.
I was waiting anxiously on the front gallery with my trunk, portmanteau, and hatbox when she arrived at precisely the time her note had specified. To my surprise, V.’s description was not euphemistic: Miss Mason was indeed sprightly, and also caneless. She walked with long strides and with purpose, as though each step she took was important. She smiled at my self-conscious curtsy and told me to call her Emily. Her gloved hand tilted my face. “The picture your mother sent was of an adolescent girl. But you, my dear, are on the verge of becoming an extraordinarily attractive young woman.” For the first time, I realized the term woman has more dimension and possibility than the pallid noun lady.
While Emily supervised her driver’s stashing of my luggage, I scrutinized her angular profile and smoothly coiffed, iron-gray hair and noted the smartness of her slim-skirted, pin-striped suit and the crisp white blouse that resembled a man’s shirt. The headmistresses loomed like Valkyries in the doorway. I knew they were glad to be seeing the last of me. The other new graduates had departed the day before, after the awarding of certificates. (The one I received had my name wrong—Verrine Anna Davies—but the error would not be discovered until my mother unfurled the scrolled document months later, in Mississippi. At first she was furious, then she laughed so heartily I heard a seam rip.)
As the cab clattered down the cobbled drive, I had no desire to look back at the dreary, gargoyled stone mansion that seemed out of place in that hospitable, fan-shaped city of neoclassical architecture and beautifully laid out parks. Emily had instructed the driver to take us to the railway station, where we would board a carriage train for Paris.
I was aware that my companion was a highly regarded scholar, the former headmistress of an elite school, and the author of several books. In our first conversation, which was timid on my part and enthusiastic on hers, I learned that she had lived in Paris for years but intended to move back to the United States eventually. And she has done so. At present, Emily divides her time between her country house in Maryland and an apartment in Georgetown.
After sharing a compartment in a train that looked like its miniature counterpart in Black Forest shops, we arrived the next morning in the city that five years before my father had deemed too morally decadent to entrust with a young girl whose parents would not be close by. Probably by dint of her having involved Emily, Varina had got him to agree to my having this sojourn in Paris.
By the time we were settled into a cab with a French-speaking driver, my companion had made it clear she would not be an overly attentive chaperone. She casually outlined how I would spend the weeks before my parents would arrive to take me off her hands: “I’ve signed you up with Antoine Duval, who directs an art school, which is conveniently located a few blocks from my apartment building. I suggest you take a studio class and a lecture series. Also within strolling distance is a small conservatory, should you desire to further your musical vocation, as your mother suggested; and a dear friend of mine has offered to tutor you, at his house, in the French language and literature. You may decide how much time and energy you will expend on these pursuits, Winnie. Be sure to save some time to educate yourself with visits to the Louvre.” She smiled widely, as a boy would. “Now that business is out of the way, and you’re still a captive audience, I have a need to speak of the famous old times in our native land.” Not for herself, as she implied, but for me: She must have sensed how I needed to have gaps filled in.
Like my father, Emily was a native of Kentucky; her father had been the first Secretary of the Michigan Territory. She had become acquainted with Jeff in Detroit, when her brother was Governor of Michigan. “This was just after the Black Hawk War. Your father was in charge of a detachment to escort the defeated but proud chieftain, Black Hawk, through the country. Jeff would not permit bystanders to gawk at the prisoner when the riverboat made stops. During that excursion, he allowed some of Black Hawk’s braves who had cholera to be put ashore, as they requested, so that their spirits might travel together to the sacred hunting grounds. Jeff was amazingly poised for such a young man—he carried himself straight as an arrow, and he was quite handsome.” She had next encountered him in Washington. “While serving in President Pierce’s Cabinet, your father earned the reputation of being one of the country’s best Secretaries of War. I heard his eloquent farewell speech to the Senate after Mississippi elected to secede from the Union. And of course, I saw your parents frequently in Richmond, during the War.” Emily shook her head as if to clear a vision. I would come to recognize that gesture in others when they simultaneously referred to that city and that time. “We next encountered each other in Paris. Jeff was greeted with much affection by the large contingent of Confederates who had moved abroad—among them, John Slidell, formerly of Louisiana, whose daughters had married Frenchmen, and across the Channel was his old friend Dudley Mann, who adored your father. Dudley offered to set Jeff up in the horse business in England. … You’ve probably heard all this many times before.”
“No, I’ve not heard very much from him or my mother about those times. I have been aware of my father’s fondness for Indian lore—He would sing their songs and tell me their myths—but I have never heard him mention the Black Hawk incident.” Having gathered my nerve, I implored her, “Please tell me all that happened to him after the War ended. Most of what I know about my earliest years came from my sister. Maggie described how we had to flee Richmond, when the Union troops were moving in on that city, and about the family’s clinging to each other and crying when the soldiers took Father off the ship. But I didn’t know where he went. It’s been five years since I’ve seen my sister. The letters Maggie wrote to me in Karlsruhe seemed forcibly light, as though she was determined not to reveal anything that could upset me while I was so far away.”
Emily said, “That was a kindness. Your sister had been sent away to school also, so she knew what you were going through, missing your family.” She reached out and touched my cheek gently. “As for what happened to your father after he left the ship, you must understand, it is not my place to discuss that subject with you. However, I shall tell Jeff when I see him in a few weeks that, in my opinion, you are mature enough now to hear him talk about it.”
I did not have to remind her. Soon after my parents arrived in Paris in late August, Emily spoke privately with my father, then repeated his response to me verbatim: “The past is unalterable. I don’t wish the girl to grieve on my account, and I cannot risk prejudicing her against the United States. I want Winnie to love her country.”
My disappointment must have shown, as Emily continued calmly: “The President of the Confederacy was imprisoned for two years at Fortress Monroe. He was never brought to trial and was finally released. Your father may never bring himself to discuss that humiliating experience with you, but you should know that your remarkable mother lightened his load then—indeed, she may have saved his life—by persisting until she obtained permission to move into that compound with him. And of course she brought you with her, and your presence provided the only delightful moments he had there.”
I managed to smile. “Thank you, Emily. You’ve relieved my mind tremendously. I had been taunted by a girl at school who said my father had been thrown in jail and left to rot and just missed being hanged. But Fortress Monroe has a dignified sound, as though it’s not a real prison—”
“It seemed very real to him. With the addition of iron bars and concrete, a gun casemate had been turned into a cell. The fort was encircled by a moat over a hundred feet wide,” Emily said. “However, when I visited your father there, I noted he could glimpse Chesapeake Bay through the bars. I did not see you that day; I believe you were sleeping. I was told the guards were entranced by the prisoner’s little daughter, who would compliantly dance a jig for them whenever they asked.” She must have heard that from Varina. Jeff would never have made such a lighthearted remark about that most onerous period in his life.
I could not then and still can’t visualize that silly little girl who whirled like a dervish, trying desperately to entertain men who had shackled her father in leg irons.
Prior to that conversation, I wondered if Emily had been enamored of Jeff, because she spoke of him more often, and with more affection, than she did my mother. But even before I observed her around him, I knew that romantic infatuation had not entered into their relationship. The men she invited to her literary salons appeared to admire her unconditionally, but it was evident to me and no doubt to them that, for Emily, emotional attachment to the opposite sex had never been part of the equation. This remarkable, independent woman has been a role model for me in many ways, with one significant exception: I cannot imagine how it would be never to have thrilled to the touch of a man.
During the summer Emily generously shared with me, we resided in an ivy-encrusted building near the Right Bank. Traditionally, the Southern expatriates who left after the War (and some during it) flocked to that area of Paris. She had secured a two-room pension on the fourth and top story for me; her apartment was on the second. I liked the idea of having my own space, but I worried that my parents could not afford for me to have this luxury. V. would have taken it for granted that I would be Emily’s houseguest and not be charged for my lodging. When I was at school, the dismal fact that my parents were constantly strapped for funds seeped through the ink of their correspondence to me. On several occasions when my tuition and board were past due, the Misses Friedlander had deprived me of milk and dessert until the tardy payment was received. As Emily unlocked the door to what would be my quarters, I asked her if my father had made provision for the rent. She had already told me he’d sent a sum to be parceled out to me for spending money.
“There is no charge for the apartment. My friend who has the lease is spending the season in Venice. She’ll be happy her rooms are being occupied.” She drew the skimpy curtains apart and cranked open the casement windows. “There. When you feel lonely, the city will keep you company.”
As if responding to a command, stale air scurried out like an animal, and in wafted a scent of recently rained-on foliage and fragments of a language in which I was not yet proficient. That first night in Paris, I hardly noticed the rank odors of refuse and garbage that floated up from the street below. I was filled with nostalgia for someplace I could not name, where the warm, heavy air was intoxicatingly sweet, and white, tan, brown, and black people all spoke softly, stretching vowels into diphthongs and slurring consonants, so that words conveyed meaning even if they sounded unintelligible.
Although I was anxious to see my parents, I was also eager to make the most of this unexpected interim of independence. I quickly adjusted to the routine. In the mornings, I walked five blocks along the banquette to the art school; in the afternoons, in the opposite direction, I cut through a park (where lovers entwined, as though choreographed, on benches and on the ground beneath trees and behind shrubs) to Monsieur Elliard’s cottage, which smelled of cinnamon and garlic, for two hours of instruction in the French language. The first session dealt with vocabulary and speech, the second with literature. At the end of the week, kindly, white-haired Monsieur brought in small cups of chocolate and allowed me to choose a book from his overflowing shelves to take with me, for practicing the art of translation. I selected Maupassant’s new novel Une Vie (A Woman’s Life) and became so immersed in that saga of a frustrated wife it was as if I had created the character and determined her fate.
Emily approved of my decision not to take singing or piano lessons. “Germany is excellent for music. Here, there are many other areas to occupy your attention before you return to your country.”
My country. I could not imagine myself ever saying the phrase. I had never thought in that context before.
Frequently, Emily and I dined at the Café Guerbois with her friends and acquaintances. The group included several brusque, opinionated females who spoke English as fluently as their own language. The first time, after I was introduced, one of them said to Emily with a wink, “What a pretty bauble you have there.”
Emily replied, “Winnie is not an adornment. She is the daughter of the most brilliant man I have ever known and a gifted person in her own right.”
My instruction had not officially begun, but I was already learning. Pretty can be a meretricious, demeaning adjective, and women who do not need men in their lives can be just as spiteful as those who do.
During that hiatus in Paris, I made one significant friendship on my own. Claudia Leveque, from New Orleans, was in my art appreciation class. She was sixteen, a year younger than I. At midday, we would sit together in the school’s courtyard and share whatever was in our luncheon boxes. Mine contained simple enough fare: Each morning, I purchased a roll, a piece of fruit or a cluster of grapes, and a small wedge of cheese at a market on the way to the school. Claudia would bring beignets, pâté, pralines, jellied chicken or boiled sausages, all prepared by her mother, whom she referred to as Mama, with the French pronunciation. “Mama has nothing else to do here but cook and sew. She does not like to wander about on her own, because she is afraid of being accosted by men,” Claudia explained. “I tease her: ‘Mama, do you really think you are that irresistible?’” The two of them had come to Paris for Claudia to acquire, as she put it, a smattering of culture.
I told Emily I would like to invite my friend to tea. “Claudia is from New Orleans, but speaks the French language as though she’s lived here all her life. She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. Her hair is the color of midnight sky and very glossy.”
“Ah.” Emily busied herself opening an envelope as she asked, “Is your friend a Creole of color?”
“I don’t know.” I wasn’t familiar with the term, but the implication was clear. “Her skin is not dark. In Memphis, I used to reach that shade of brown from playing outside in the summer months. Claudia’s mother is here with her.”
“I look forward to meeting your friend. Ask her for Thursday afternoon, and of course, include her mother in the invitation.”
I followed Emily’s instructions, but Claudia came alone, noting vaguely that her mother was indisposed. When Emily remarked that her fine posture suggested she might be a dancer, my friend replied, “I had lessons in ballet until I turned thirteen. Then the ballet mistress said I had grown too tall.” She confided to Emily what she already had to me, “I would like to be trained in the cancan while I’m in Paris, but my mother and our patron would have fits if I so much as mentioned that idea.”
“And your patron is …?”
“Mr. Roger Fontaine, of New Orleans.”
Emily smiled brightly and stirred her tea. “I see.”
And despite my naïveté, so did I. I had begun to wonder if the man Claudia spoke of often to me—at first as “Mr. Fontaine” and then as “Roger” and always with excitement in her voice—had initiated her into the rites of physical love. I never would have asked her, but a week or so later, she informed me. “I have not been alone with him. However, there is an understanding. When Mama and I return to New Orleans, we will move into a commodious maison on Rampart Street, and Roger can stay overnight with me there whenever he wishes.”
“What about your father?”
“He lives with his wife and their children.”
At the time, Claudia was peeling an apple with a tiny silver knife. As she answered my question, the knife slipped and nicked her finger. The wound was slight; she wrapped the handkerchief I handed her around it and said, “That was a reminder I am not supposed to think about them. But now that I’ve started to tell you, I shall finish. Winnie, I have two half-brothers I have never met. The day before I turned ten years old, I told my mother all I wanted for that birthday was to see Papa, who had not been coming around for some time. The next morning, a Sunday, my mother took me to watch my father and the lady he had married several years before and their two young sons emerge from a large Protestant church in the Garden District. We remained inside the carriage, peeping through drawn curtains, so they would not spot us. From that distance, they looked like a dollhouse family: perfectly formed, and white. Mama said, ‘Now that you have seen these people, forget about them. Whenever they come to mind, dismiss them and wish them well. Otherwise, you will bring misery on yourself.’” Claudia tucked her head and appeared to be intent on smoothing wrinkles out of her skirt. I recognized the diversion as one I used when overcome with emotion or a shame I did not understand. Just as I was about to put my arms around her to comfort her, Claudia lifted her chin and said, “I have not seen my father or his family since that day. Although he does not maintain contact with us, he has made provision for our welfare. My mother bears him no ill will; therefore, neither do I.”
“When will you marry Mr. Fontaine?”
The question seemed to irritate her. “I don’t know. But I shall have a good life. Roger is kind and generous and he loves me.”
A few days later, when I arrived at the lecture class, Claudia said casually, “I did not bring a lunch today. Mama has instructed me to bring you to dine with us in our suite. Then we’ll send you off in a cab, so you won’t be late for your French tutorial.”
Of course, I accepted. The small lobby of their hotel exuded an air of jewel-toned elegance, despite the tawdriness of grime-encrusted window ledges and threadbare carpets and draperies. When I met Claudia’s mother (who insisted I call her by her first name), I understood why she had declined to come to tea at Emily’s. Elaine Leveque, a handsome woman, was considerably darker-skinned than her daughter. Cheerfully friendly without meeting my glance or taking my hand, she immediately occupied herself with the mechanics of getting us fed. She poured wine into glasses and ladled a thick, steaming concoction of fish and vegetables into large, almost flat bowls from an ironstone tureen that had the name of the hotel imprinted on its lid. She urged second helpings on us in an almost scolding voice (while I tried not to show my mouth was on fire from the finely minced peppers) as she replenished the bread-and-butter plates. When she explained the technique of getting sugar to caramelize on the crème brûlée, it sounded as if she were reciting poetry. Later, when Emily asked me what we talked about, I could not think of anything the hostess had said directly to me other than to ask where my home was. I had replied, “Memphis, Tennessee, is where we lived before I went to Germany. My parents now reside on the Mississippi coast, near Biloxi.”
“Not far from New Orleans, then,” Elaine had said, and frowned.
Claudia immediately chimed in with, “Isn’t that wonderful, Mama? Winnie and I can be friends forever.”
As Claudia accompanied me to the street floor that day (I had declined the offer of a cab; I have always liked a brisk walk, especially after a rich meal), she explained what I had not asked: “Both my mother and I were fathered by white men. One of Mama’s maternal grandparents was half-white, which puts her between mulatto and quadroon. And I am very nearly full-octoroon.” At the time, I was not familiar enough with racial terminology to realize being seven-eighths white was the ultimate level—any more dilution and a person would not have to add that qualifying phrase person of color beside his or her name.
“Your mama is quite vivacious,” I said. I had noted their resemblance to each other, although Elaine Leveque’s nose was wider and her lips were fuller than Claudia’s. The woman’s proud, almost angry demeanor proclaimed her awareness of who she was and how she came to be that person.
“Thank you for seeing that in her,” Claudia said, as though she were responding to my thought rather than the spoken compliment. She added, after a moment, “A child of mine could have light-colored eyes and fair skin that turns golden in the summer—like you, Winnie. If her hair is amber and gently curls like yours, she will not be compelled to press it straight with a hot iron. And she can pass.”
“Pass?”
“Would you want your child to pass for white?”
She stared at me. “Mon Dieu! How long did you say you’ve been away from that country?”
“Five years.”
“That’s not long enough to forget what it’s like there. If you really don’t have any idea why I would want a child of mine to pass for white, I suggest you ask your parents or Miss Mason to explain.” As though deliberately masking her natural grace of movement, Claudia stalked ahead of me, kicking small stones off the sidewalk.
I watched this flaunting of temperament with a mixture of exasperation and appreciation. I thought, If I were Berthe Morisot, I would want to paint this girl, who is the pale beige color of Parisian buildings and of milk that has been enhanced with a few spoonfuls of coffee, right now, in the exquisite, near-sepia light of early afternoon. I had spotted the artist twice that summer—once at the Louvre, when she appeared to be studying Correggio’s work, and the other time in a park, executing a plein air scene with such concentration she seemed oblivious of everything else. (This remarkable woman, who died a few years ago, was my favorite among the Impressionists. I admired her perseverance in a field dominated by men, and for being known by her maiden name, although she was married to Édouard Manet’s brother.)
As I was contemplating my vision of a self-assured artist rendering immortal her impression of my beautiful friend, the latter said exuberantly, “Winnie, don’t you wish we could stay here forever? Paris is a soufflé of a city. New Orleans is a mysterious gumbo, like Mama’s soup; strange things lurk below the surface. You can be surprised at what turns up on your spoon.” Claudia added in an exaggerated drawl, as though parodying someone, “Yes, ma’am—have to watch yo’self in N’Waleans.” Shards of sunshine sliced through the density of leaves and branches, depositing copper glints in her hair. She put an arm around my waist and pressed her firm cheek to mine. She smelled earthy and sweet, like the gardenia shrubs my mother planted around the house we rented in Memphis. “Darling Winnie,” Claudia whispered.
Flustered, I said what I was thinking: “Your face reminds me of the way a peach feels.”
“Really? Then from now on, whenever you bite into that luscious fruit, you will think of me and send me good wishes.”
I asked her seriously, although she may have thought I was being flippant, “Are you invoking some aspect of Voodoo?” I knew little about the superstitious practice, other than it was prevalent in New Orleans.
“Heavens no. Roger has forbidden me to have anything to do with what he calls ‘that silly mumbo jumbo.’”
“How can he forbid you?” I almost added, Since he’s not your father and not yet your husband.
“His terms are reasonable. He doesn’t want my curiosity about the supernatural to lure me into trouble. Although my mother insists that Voodoo is primarily a healing art—she claims that Marie Laveau, a devout Catholic, had permission to hold rituals behind the St. Louis Cathedral—I have no desire to dabble in it. And I hope Roger doesn’t suspect, as I do, that Mama had a conjure woman put a spell on him.”
“Why would she do that?”
“To make him fall in love with me.”
“Have you asked her if she did?”
“No, because I would rather believe this romance with Roger is my divine destiny and not contrived through magic. Roger has also instructed me not to frequent Congo Square, where I learned, as a child, to dance without constraint, as the spirit moves me.” A wide, secretive smile transformed her face. “Of course, he will like seeing me dance that way, if it’s just for him.”
“But he should not deprive you of visiting a place that’s part of your heritage.”
Claudia was weaving her heavy mantle of hair, which the wind never seemed to disturb, into a loose chignon. “It’s of no real consequence, since he has agreed that we will live in the old French Quarter—Vieux Carre—from which I can be aware of the rhythm of the drums.”
I persisted, “Are you going to let Roger dictate what you can and cannot do?”
“I have no choice in the matter. Isn’t it the same for real wives?”
“Not always. My mother, who has a fierce streak of independence, has been known to defy my father’s wishes.” The last time I had seen V., she had come from London to my school in Germany to tell me she was going back to the United States. “But not to that awful woman’s house in Mississippi,” she’d said. “I shall never spend a single night under Sarah Dorsey’s roof.”
Claudia said, “So, when your mother refuses to do his bidding, does your father beat her?”
“He would never raise a hand to her. But he lets her know of his displeasure.” He punishes her with verbal rebuke, silence, and hardest of all on her, his absence.
“If your mother wants to be independent, why did she marry?”
“She was very much in love with him.”
“It sounds as if your mama is one of those hysterical women who thrive on making life complicated. I don’t want turmoil. I yearn for peaceful companionship with a man who will protect me.” She shivered, involuntarily. “I just felt a cat walk over my grave. Are you familiar with that expression?”
I guessed its meaning. “A foreboding that something unpleasant is about to occur?”
“More than unpleasant. Sinister.”
“My nurse, Mary Ahearn, believed turning around three times could dispel a bad omen.”
“Really? Was Mary Ahearn your black mammy?”
“No, she’s fair-skinned and Irish-American. She’s retired now, but I stay in touch with her.”
“She can’t be both Irish and American,” Claudia scoffed. “She has to choose which she will be called.”
“No, she doesn’t. Mary was born in Ireland and she lives in America.”
“Then should people who were born in Africa, but live in America, call themselves African-Americans?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Winnie, you are even more naive than I thought. Why would anyone, especially me, want to label herself as African?”
“I never implied that you would or should.”
As we approached the corner where we would part, the brushing of our skirts against each other seemed to stir up friction between us. Claudia had not spoken in several minutes. “Are you irritated with me?” I asked.
“No, I am not thinking about you at all. I am praying. When I attended the convent school of the Ursuline nuns in New Orleans, I imagined myself joining their order when I grew up.”
I almost laughed. Then I decided she was serious. Her hands were pressed together in prayerful alignment, and her lips moved silently.
That night, Emily attempted to explain Claudia’s situation to me. “In New Orleans, the elite system of concubinage known as placage does not carry the stigma of prostitution. It’s feasible, even likely from what you’ve told me of your friend’s mother, that she would insist Mr. Fontaine sign a contract with specific guaranties, such as his continued financial support of her daughter in the event he should decide to end the relationship.”
I could not imagine Claudia’s being abandoned by a man she’d given herself to heart and soul. I said firmly, “I’m sure he will marry her.”
“Dear, don’t get your hopes up there. Although it occurred occasionally during the chaos of Reconstruction, biracial marriage is illegal in New Orleans.”
“Claudia has said the house will be in her name. And Mr. Fontaine will provide for their children’s education, and they would inherit from his estate.”
Emily nodded her approval. Her smoothly coiffed gray hair reminded me of a barrister’s wig. She said, “It used to be a tradition that the placee’s children were assigned scraggly lots in town, and the man’s legitimate offspring would inherit the sugar cane plantation. Then after the War, those small parcels of property on Canal Street became more valuable than the homestead acreage on the bend of the river. Apparently, from what you’ve told me, Claudia is pleased and optimistic about the arrangement her mother and Mr. Fontaine have made, which is probably as good as it can be under the circumstances. Be happy for your friend, Winnie, and wish her well.”
Three days before my parents were due to arrive in Paris, Claudia’s mother took her away. I wondered if Elaine Leveque pushed up their departure schedule to avoid any possibility of encounter with the man who had been the leader of the Confederacy. I assumed she would have stronger feelings on that subject than Claudia, who had informed me their ancestors who came to New Orleans from Saint Domingue and Cuba were not slaves, but gens de couleur libre. She had introduced the topic offhandedly, although her voice revealed her pride: “My great-grandfather, whose name on the register was followed by ‘f.m.c.,’ which stands for ‘free man of color,’ was a prosperous silversmith. His daughter Agatha married a French Creole, Phillipe Guillot, in the Church. Despite being ostracized by the gentleman’s family and most of his white friends, Agatha and Phillipe stayed together, and now they lie, one above the other, in a mausoleum in the Saint Louis Cemetery.”
I had the feeling then that Claudia knew whose daughter I am. Hoping to offset any preconceived image she might have of Jefferson Davis as the enemy of black people, I said, “Robert Brown, a man who was a slave before I came into the world and who insisted on remaining with our family after he was emancipated by the Proclamation, has been like a grandfather to me.”
“But that former slave is not your grandfather,” Claudia said. “None of his blood flows in your veins.”
I tried again. “When we were living in Richmond, a baseless rumor went around that my mother was part Indian. And my mother’s response was, if that statement were true, she would not owe anyone an apology. Toward the end of our time in that city, she rescued a young mulatto child from a bad situation and brought him home to live with us.”
“In the servants’ quarters, you mean?”
“No, he slept in a room with my brothers. He was called Jim Limber. My father had made application in the courts to adopt him, but at the War’s end, Jim was taken away. My parents tried to discover his whereabouts, but could not.”
Claudia sighed with exaggeration, as she often did before making a point, and said, “That boy is old enough now to get in touch with your family on his own. If he hasn’t he must have figured those white people really didn’t care much about him one way or the other.”
At that moment, with her lips pursed unbecomingly, she reminded me of girls at school. When I first arrived at the Fried-lander Institute, a student from Charleston had whispered behind my back, “Winnie Davis has delusions of grandeur. She believes her father was King of the South. But he wasn’t king of anything, and now he’s nothing but a pauper. The Davises have to depend on the charity of their friends.”
Claudia asked—and I detected a note of compassion in her voice—“Do you ever dream about that little darky who was almost your brother?”
“No. All that happened before I was two years old.” Jim was a photograph on Varina’s shrine shelf: a small brown boy in a velvet jacket and breeches, standing on a chair looking sad and solemn, as though he knew his time in that household was running out.
Claudia had met Roger Fontaine on her sixteenth birthday at a Bal de Cordon Bleu. I didn’t know how that structured system worked until after I returned to the United States and became a frequent visitor to New Orleans. From a book I found in my father’s library at Beauvoir, I learned that the custom began late in the last century, when drums would beat on street corners to send the signal that a ball for “colored ladies and white gentlemen” would be held on a certain night at the Salle de Condé. In addition to the gentlemen, those early events attracted an undesirable element of the white male population, so the price of admission was raised enough to make the balls unaffordable for men who “smelled bad and would start fights.” By 1815, quadroon balls were held in all the public hotel ballrooms in New Orleans and became as much an institution as Mardi Gras. To qualify for the selection process, a girl could not be more than one-quarter Negro (preferably less) and should be well-mannered, poised, and intelligent. The only men of color allowed to attend the balls were the musicians who played in the dance bands.
Justin Charles, a not overly serious suitor who was one of my escorts during my coming-out season, bragged that he had attended blue-ribbon balls with a friend who was seeking “an amorous liaison of that sort,” which, however, he himself “most certainly wasn’t.”
I said, “But you must have entertained the idea.”
“Truthfully, I did not. On each occasion, I was empathetically embarrassed for those beautiful, demure creatures who were put on display by their mothers to be haggled over as though they were prize fillies.” Just when I was thinking Justin had more character than I’d given him credit for, he added, “Besides, if my father thought I was involved with a gal who’d been touched by the tarbrush, he would flat out disown me.”
Henri Goulard, a vain young instructor who seized any opportunity to speak English, gave me the news of the Leveques’ departure from Paris. I had just taken a seat in his lecture class and placed my luncheon box on an adjacent chair to save it for Claudia. Henri (he insisted I call him by his first name) leaned over me and said softly, “I have been informed that your—chum? Is that the word?—has withdrawn from the school and will not be returning.” He pulled a gaudy fob watch out of a vest pocket and pretended to consult it. “At this moment, Mademoiselle Leveque and her mother are likely boarding the ship that will take them to Nouvelle-Orleans, in the United States of America.” He could tell from my expression (which must have been a pastiche of shock, hurt, disbelief) that I was more than merely surprised, but he continued relentlessly, “I realize you have tender feelings for her. Such crushes are part of growing up. But you and Claudia are meant for the opposite sex, and would have parted soon, in any case. Win-nee, you must learn to be more discerning. That girl is not on your level. You are gifted in sketching and painting, but she? Not in the slightest! And she is not capable of the subtle aesthetics of art comprehension. Of course, Claudia has an abundance of personal charm—that spontaneous laugh, and the way her derrière bounces as she walks—”
“Did you hope to seduce her?” I heard those words as though someone else spoke them and wondered which was worse, my audacity or his.
“What a delicious question! Oui, absolutely, of course!” Henri stroked his face with one hand, which made me think of my father, trying to stroke away the pain of neuralgia. My father would be appalled at this arrogant dandyisme who chattered on, ridiculously, “I should have approached her early on, after she first arrived. I do believe she had an eye for me. Did she ever mention me to you?”
Only to make fun of your efforts to get her attention. “Not in that way. Claudia is engaged to be married.”
“Ah, well, it’s water over the reservoir then. But there’s still time for you and me to become more deeply acquainted—perhaps you can dine with me this evening? Can you slip away from your guardian to meet me?”
“Probably, but I would not wish to, since I, too, am in an arrangement.”
“And what would that be?”
“I am promised to a gentleman who owns half the state of Texas.”
Henri laughed as though the fabrication were more preposterous than I intended it to be. “You Americans are so heartless, always joking about serious matters.” As he turned toward the lectern, his hand grazed my breast. I pretended not to notice.
I did not let his boorishness keep me from the few remaining class sessions. I was interested in his topic, “Jacques-Louis David and the Neo-Classicist Style of Painting,” and I was determined to get Emily’s money’s worth for this enrichment. However, from then on, I made sure to be among the last to arrive and the first out the door of the arrogant Frenchman’s class. There was no further conversation between Henri Goulard and me until I was about to leave after his final lecture. Assuming he had just included me in the perfunctory best-wishes-and-good-bye speech to students he did not expect to see again, I was startled when he pulled me aside as I was about to pass through the doorway. Keeping his hand firmly on my arm and addressing me by a name he knew was not mine, he said, “Winifred, I shall miss you and that tempting Negress friend of yours. I wish I could show both of you, together, what Paris is really all about.”
“You’re fortunate my hands are full of books,” I said. “Otherwise, I would slap your face.”
Later, after I saw that Monsieur Goulard had given me the lowest mark I ever received in a course of study, I wished I had informed him that in America, unless they are professional actors, men do not wax their mustaches and eyelashes. The report card was of no consequence, as my parents considered my academic education over and done with when I finished school in Karlsruhe. They had arranged for me to have the summer in Paris for the same reason Claudia’s mother had brought her there. We were gems in the rough, to be polished for acquisition. Claudia, of course, had already been marketed. In my case, the honing was speculative, with loftier aim. I was not to be some man’s discardable mistress, but his lifetime appendage.
Claudia had said her birthplace was “a charmed and blessed city, favored by the angels as well as by the spirits of Voodoo.”
My father would have agreed with her that the city was blessed. He had deemed it a miracle that New Orleans, which was commandeered by the Union Army early in the War—in April 1862—did not suffer massive destruction in that conflict as other Southern cities and towns did. New Orleans’s population had been assimilated from several nationalities, each with its own caste structure. A blend of French, Spanish, Acadian, African, and English—spoken, shouted, and sung in a variety of accents—floated over courtyard walls and levees. I found it strange that the embankments that kept the river from inundating the city were called levees, the same word my mother used in referring to daytime social receptions.
Soon after I returned to this country and became acclimated to life at Beauvoir, my parents and I took a steamer from Biloxi to New Orleans on a Friday, to pass the weekend at the St. Charles Hotel, where they had spent their honeymoon. The next day, while Varina shopped at the French Market, Jeff took me on an educational horse-car excursion. Actually, the tour was a repetition of one he had taken me on shortly before we embarked for Europe; but on the earlier occasion, I had sat on his lap and almost drifted off to sleep enjoying the comforting drone of his voice. This time, I took the seat by a window of the trolley and paid attention to what he was saying.
“Canal Street is the widest business-district street in the country—over 170 feet across. This area, which New Orleanians refer to as ‘neutral ground,’ began as a commons between the original city, the Vieux Carre—which extends from downtown to Esplanade and from Rampart to the river—and the newer American Quarter upriver. An artificial waterway was to be constructed in the middle of the thoroughfare to connect the river to the Basin, which connects to Lake Pontchartrain. However, the plans did not materialize, so Canal Street is named for something that was never built.”
The area he referred to was a parklike preserve of grass and trees, in the center of which parallel rows of track framed narrow beds of pebbles, so the horses and mules that pulled the cars would not slip in wet weather. On the sides of this commons were roadways paved with large stone blocks, which had crossed the Atlantic on ships, as ballast. “Perhaps the route is lovelier without a waterway,” I said, remembering the sight and smells of floating debris on the Seine.
An attractive, middle-aged woman in a plumed bonnet was sitting across the aisle. Although she appeared to be reading a magazine, it was clear to me that she wanted to speak to my father. As though prompted by an offstage director, she leaned toward him and said, “Mr. Davis, the residents of New Orleans hope you will decide to make your home here.”
Jeff replied noncomittally—he was a great admirer of New Orleans and enjoyed visiting there—then snapped open his folded newspaper and used it as a shield. The woman flushed slightly over the dismissal and gave me a speculative glance. I could read her thought: Is that young woman his latest romance?
Ever since I learned she had left Paris, I had assumed Claudia and I would reconnect in New Orleans. By the time I got my bearings there and could navigate the city on my own, I had lost my nerve about seeking out the Leveques. I had mentioned my new friend in letters from Paris to my parents, but her name had not come up since I was reunited with them. Jeff would be so dazzled by Claudia, he might miss the clue that her skin was a shade too caramel. Varina would see immediately that Claudia was delightful and bright and good-hearted—everything she would want in a close companion for me—but would the shrewd, practical Mrs. Jefferson Davis risk alienating the prominent families of New Orleans by allowing her daughter to associate socially with someone of mixed race, if such were not an acceptable practice?
I had no idea what the protocol was, and Emily Mason was not around to advise me. Since I could not bear the thought of Claudia’s being snubbed on my account, I decided not to try to find her. If she happened to turn up somewhere at the same time I did, we would rush to each other with arms outstretched, and she would give that whooping laugh: “Win-nee! Mon Dieu! Is it really you?” Yes, that was how it should happen—naturally, uncontrived, and without awkwardness. A chance encounter on a busy boulevard, in a restaurant or streetcar, or at the bustling market on the corner of Rue Decatur and Esplanade Avenue would be a sign that Claudia and I were meant to resume our bond of friendship, and everything would work out fine.
Before I went away to school, I had learned from my father that most of the urban area streets were on a parallel bend with the river or in spokelike right angles to its curve, which is how New Orleans came to be called the Crescent City. Now that I had accepted the probability (there were no premonitions) that one day I would be numbered among the population of this complex metropolis, I set out to find out more about it from my parents, books, and articles, and also from new acquaintances who took for granted their birthright privileges as multigenerational New Orleanians. Soon I began to feel as though I had been born and reared there too. One of my favorite spots is Jackson Square, in the Vieux Carre. Originally called Plaza d’Armas or Place d’Armes and utilized as a military parade and execution ground, the section was renamed almost half a century ago to honor General Andrew Jackson, who saved the city in the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812. The magnificent bronze statue of this hero on horseback has him waving a tricornered hat in triumph. “Or perhaps,” my father added slyly, “he’s tipping his hat to the Baroness Pontalba, who might be looking through one of those lace-curtained windows across the way.”
The story of Micaela Almonester de Pontalba fascinated me. On land she had inherited from her father, the Frenchwoman had constructed, in fine European style with shops on the ground floor, the first apartment buildings in this country. The initials of her maiden and married names are woven into the design of the iron railings on the balconies. The Baroness supposedly supervised the design and the construction and fired any architect or workman who did not do exactly as she wished. Legend also has it that only a few years before, in France, while trying to divorce her husband, she had been shot four times by her father-in-law—but the Baroness Pontalba survived, won her divorce in the French courts, and got back the money her husband and his father had stolen from her.
After New Orleans was founded in 1718 to enforce the French claim to the Mississippi Valley, French colonists arrived by the thousands. Their settlements extended to all the nearby bayous. Next to arrive were Acadians who had been expelled from the lower east coast of Canada. The city was passed back and forth between France and Spain for most of that century. When colonial trade restrictions were lifted, steamboats flocked like ducks to the Mississippi River, bringing goods from the eastern seaboard and Europe. The sudden spurt of prosperity also brought an influx of Americans from the Northeast to an area dominated by proud descendants of Europeans who had settled Louisiana. Although ruled for forty years by Spain, New Orleans received its cultural temperament, as well as its name, from the French component. The aristocratic Creoles, who were used to controlling the commerce and civic affairs, branded les Américains, who caused the population to double in the 1830s and ’40s, as unwelcome opportunists. It didn’t matter whether they were bankers, architects, engineers, and entrepreneurs who would contribute substance, style, and structure to the existing mores or grubby sorts like gamblers and pirates—all were disdained. For the next fifty years, the old and new factions vied with each other for supremacy. Realizing they were not wanted in the Vieux Carre, the Americans began an expansion uptown, purchasing, subdividing, and developing the plantations along the crescent of the river. One of the new sections, Faubourg St. Mary, soon competed with the French Quarter as the main business district.
Concurrently, the port city had taken a prominent role in the slave trade and become a haven for free persons of color. After the War, with the immediate formation of the Reconstruction government, universal suffrage, marriage between races, and equal civil and political rights for all citizens were legalized. A decade later, when the siege officially ended, Federal mandates that had protected black people during that postwar era gave way to a new Louisiana State Constitution, which retracted citizenship rights so recently granted to the ex-slave population. Also affected by this reform were the freeborn people of color, who were reduced to a status lower than what they had before the War. And still to come—in 1890, almost nine years after Claudia Leveque and I parted in Paris—the enactment of Louisiana Legislative Code 111, spurred by a group of prominent Creoles, would define all persons of African ancestry as “legally and in fact Negro,” thereby stifling any claim Creoles of color might harbor to being eligible, by virtue of their mixed ancestry, for privileged treatment under the law.
Before that time, however, I had learned enough of Claudia’s story to know that she would not be affected by this edict.
On the way to the initial meeting of debutantes and their mothers, Varina gave me a tutorial. “Since you’ve become acclimated to living in the South again, you appear to be quite comfortable around our friends, but standoffish among your contemporaries. Winnie, you must realize that, in this kind of society, being accepted by your peers is of vital importance.” Tiny beads of moisture, which must have been due to nervousness since the weather was still cool, collected on her forehead and upper lip as she continued. “As the outsider coming into the group, you will have to befriend these girls on their terms. You must act as though you’re interested in whatever they have to say, but do not inject a serious topic into what may seem frivolous conversation. And please, Winnie, remember not to lapse into German.”
“Would French be permissible?”
“Well, yes—most of these families are of French extraction— but don’t be the one to initiate it.”
My question had been intended as mild sarcasm. Normally, V. would enjoy such banter, but now she was deadly serious. “In this initial phase of your association with young women who have known each other since they were born, you will be judged on the way you express and present yourself. On the other hand, do not worry, as any anxiety will be reflected on your face.”
I was curious as to how long the trial period would last before I was granted or denied the approval of this peer group, but not enough to ask Varina. She squeezed my hand, I supposed to give me courage, as the driver brought the carriage to a stop in front of an imposing residence on Prytania Street, at the head of the Garden District. I wished I had come there with easel, canvas, and paint box, to attempt an Impressionist-style rendering of the double-galleried house in its verdant setting of trees, vines, and shrubs. As we walked up the brick-paved pathway to the entrance gallery, Varina whispered the names of plants she recognized— Confederate jasmine, tea olive, bougainvillea, pomegranate, plumbago, rice paper, palmetto, elephant ear—as though reciting a mantra. I was thinking both of us would be more at ease among this placid vegetation than we would be inside that houseful of women. Also, more pleasantly, I was reminded of Berthe Morisot’s painting of her sister holding a butterfly net and the sister’s family taking their leisure in a jardin such as this one.
After the greetings and introductions, the mothers congregated in a parlor that resembled an antiques emporium, and their daughters were directed to another, which was furnished sparingly and charmingly with wicker chairs and settees. Those in the latter group stared at me, exchanged knowing glances, and stared at me again. Irene, the most self-assured of these girls and obviously the leader, twisted her rope of pearls and said, as though her mind were really elsewhere, “Winnie, I understand you were at a boarding school in Germany for several years. Did you feel completely lost in that strange country?”
I wanted to say, “Yes.” Instead, I said, “Only until I learned to speak the language.”
“And how long did that take?”
“By the end of the first month, I could fend for myself.”
“Heavens. Imagine learning that difficult tongue in a month!” She stuck our her tongue and rolled it suggestively. Two of the others giggled, as though she’d made a joke at my expense. Irene said, “Well, Mama says your parents are brilliant people, so it’s logical you are quite brainy yourself. Did you have a sweetheart over there?”
“No.”
“No?” Irene said, as in exaggerated disbelief. She took a sugared strawberry from a silver bowl and daintily devoured it in three bites, then dropped the stem end into a waste dish, before returning her attention to me. “But you’re quite pretty. I should think you would have sparked considerable interest from the boys’ academy.”
“There wasn’t a boys’ academy. The only option for romance was to cuddle with girls, and I didn’t fancy any of them.”
The spontaneous remark elicited a wave of melodious laughter. Irene composed herself first and held her hands out to quiet the others. “Winnie, none of us has been so far away from home for as long a period as you have. We insist that you share some of your unique experience with us.”
Assuming she meant something titillating, I was about to improvise on the Sapphic theme when I heard myself say, in the slightly guttural accent my mother had been trying to rid me of, “The only boy who befriended me in Germany looked as if he had been created by Michelangelo. His name was Hans, and he worked in the school’s dairy.” Then the flow of memory banked as quickly as it had begun—an intuitive warning that I should not share my introduction to Eros with these girls who watched me as though snakes might crawl out of my mouth.
Earlier in this notebook, I decided to postpone getting into that subject. Now, for whatever reason—the impetus may be the way this particular pen fits my hand, as though it has become part of me—I am ready to record my impressions of that milestone event.
The first time I was aware of Hans, I felt a connectedness with him and wondered if we might be distantly related. He looked at me with a depth of affection I had never come across outside the realm of family. I was fifteen; he was a year older. Our names and ages and his avowal of passion for me were the sum of our verbal exchange on the only occasion we were together. After strolling past the school’s barn every Tuesday for several weeks with a nature-walk group, I realized this beautiful, fair-haired boy always came out of the building just as we approached, and that his attention, like a capricious sunbeam, would dance lightly over the group of girls, then focus on me. That day, I returned his gaze so intensely he blushed. The following Tuesday, he was standing diffidently aside as the line of girls came by in single file, some with handkerchiefs clamped over their noses to deflect the stench from the barn. As I drew level with him, a scrap of paper moved as though of its own accord from his hand to mine. I furtively read what he had written in a childish scrawl in his language (he did not know a word of mine): “Lovely girl, please to come home with me Thursday. Is my day off. I meet you at back gate at two o’clock. My mother will make us tea.” With a furtive nod, and without breaking pace, I accepted the invitation. After we turned onto a side path, a girl behind me tapped my shoulder. “The stable hand could get in trouble for staring at you, Winnie. He must have heard the silly rumor about you.”
“What would that be?”
“That you’re royalty.”
“What makes you think I’m not?” I turned my back to her, but I wanted to butt my head into her. Maggie said I used to do that as a small child so often other children would refuse to come to play with me.
At the appointed time two days later, I waited for Hans at the gate in the wall that bounded the school property. There was not anyone in the immediate vicinity to notice as this boy and I tacitly, silently, our arms touching like hot logs in a fireplace, made our way along a jagged path through weeds that rustled like cornstalks. The pace he set was too fast for conversation. I was slightly behind him when we arrived at a small house, which looked as though it belonged on a cobbled street instead of at the edge of an uncultivated field. His mother opened the door, bowed as though she were a servant, and said not a word. She placed a plate of cakes and two cups of dark, steaming tea on a table beside the straight-backed chair where, she indicated with a gesture, I was to sit. Then she scurried away and I heard an outside door creak open and shut.
The woman had left her son and me alone, except for a caged finch, in the tiny, steep-roofed house that smelled of turnips cooked sometime in the past (or countless times: the aroma had a ghostly quality). Neither of us ate a crumb of those cakes. As Hans knelt beside the chair and kissed and fondled me with what seemed reverential adoration, the little bird made excited noises with his wings but did not chirp. During Hans’s ministrations to my body (which he concentrated on as though doing lessons for a master), I could see, through a narrow-paned window, his mother toiling doggedly on her knees in a stony patch of ground, and I thought longingly of my own mother, who at that moment might be strolling along a garden path in her floppy straw hat, humming and talking to roses and gardenia blossoms as she severed them from their bushes and dropped them into her basket. When Hans walked me slowly back across the field to the school, he kept a damp, glowing arm tight around my waist and repeatedly kissed my mouth and neck. Then, through the cloth of my dress (which when I put it on had been pridefully stiff with starch and now was limp, as though in shock), he pressed his face into the hollow between my embarrassed, upstart breasts. As we approached the gate between that field and the school’s property, he put his open mouth on mine for the last time and groaned as though he knew it would be just that: the last time. I returned to the dormitory in a daze and was glad I did not have a roommate for that term, so I could be alone with my feelings. I threw myself across the cot and imagined Hans thinking of me in the same way I was thinking of him, and I wondered when we would be together again.
At the sound of the supper bell, I hastily rubbed flesh-colored chalk from my paint box onto the flower-shaped bruises on my face and neck. On the way to the dining hall, I was intercepted by a smirking girl who said I was to report immediately to the office. There, the Misses Friedlander took turns chastising me about my regrettable behavior. I had left the premises without permission and in the company of a hired peasant, with whom I engaged in wanton caresses, in full view of passersby! If I signed a prepared statement of apology, which included a promise never to have another rendezvous with Hans Bruehoff (that was how I learned his last name), they would not report the shocking and shameful incident to my parents.
Hans was ordered never to set foot on the premises again. I gleaned that information in harsh fragments from his mother two days later, after I sneaked out of a chapel service and ran all the way to their house. I did not have to use the door knocker; the woman was waiting in the doorway. She began to screech at me with such agitation it was difficult to translate what she was saying. When she raised an arm as if to strike me, I fled and did not look back until I had almost reached the gate. Then it was Hans who was standing in the doorway of the house, but I could not tell from that distance whether he was smiling or weeping. I remained in Karlsruhe for two and a half more years, during which time I never had a glimpse of him, or a message from him, or any news of him.
I came out of my brief reverie when Irene said, in a languid voice, “Well? Don’t keep us in suspense, Winnie. Did you have a torrid love affair with Hans?”
I wanted to tell her an impertinent question does not require an answer, but I remembered Varina’s admonition—I was to make friends of these girls, not antagonize them. So I told a truth: “We spent one afternoon together, which resulted in his banishment and a big tongue-lashing for me, from the headmistresses. I did not care about myself, but I felt badly about his losing his livelihood because of me. However, I was able to put the episode behind me by concentrating on other things.” By other things, I meant my studies, but Irene took it differently. Her face lit up and her auburn curls bobbed with what even Varina would have agreed was approval. “So, you could rise above the incident and your crush on Hans in short order, because you knew there would be other fish to fry. Welcome to our inner circle, Winnie Davis. You are proud, passionate, and a risk-taker, yet you are also hard-nosed and practical. All of which makes you one of us.” She gave me a sisterly, jasmine-scented kiss on the cheek. The other girls fluttered around us like exotic moths.
During that year’s Mardi Gras revelry, these young women individually and collectively projected a starlike force of privileged innocence and sophisticated élan. They knew how to sip champagne over a course of several hours without becoming tipsy and how to look deeply into a man’s eyes without seeming brazen. I could imagine my friend Claudia in this company. They would admire her guileless bravado, even as they secretly denigrated her for thinking she could ever be completely de-Negroed. That first afternoon, I asked my new inner-circle friend, when we were not within earshot of the others, “Are you acquainted with Roger Fontaine?”
“I know who he is. Why?” Irene shrugged as if the subject were boring.
I shrugged to shake off the feeling I was about to indulge in gossip. “Two years ago, in Paris, someone told me he is a very attractive, worldly man.”
“Winnie, you would not want to become involved with Roger Fontaine. He’s too old for you, and he would not be considered a proper escort. He is known to frequent houses of prostitution, and he makes no secret of it.”
“Where are these houses?”
“The most well known are in the Vieux Carre.”
On the way back to the hotel, I asked Varina what a house of prostitution was.
She said wearily, as though it pained her to talk, “Oh, Winnie. I am not surprised to learn that you picked up that sort of terminology in Paris. But it is not a topic for young ladies to discuss in polite society.” She closed her eyes, shuddered to emphasize how distasteful the subject was to her, and did not answer my question.
The next day, after the pleasant ferry ride back to Biloxi and a dusty buggy ride to Beauvoir, I immediately went to my room to look up the word prostitution in my dictionary. It wasn’t until I had absorbed the more fulsome account in Jeff’s heavy, gold-tooled encyclopedia that I thought, What an amazing and ingenuous way for women to earn their livelihoods.
When I am lucid, as now, my memory is on fire. I have re-read what I’ve written here, and it makes sense. I try to edit my work objectively, and I realize that in this story of my life—which now appears to be fiction, since it is all in the past—I must tie up a dangling cord about my friend Claudia.
It had been five years since the Leveques left Paris. She—not Claudia, her mother—recognized me before I did her. “Miss Davis?”
“Yes? Oh, my heavens, is that you, Elaine?” I hugged her, and I felt her tense up, then relax into the embrace. I quickly looked around, expecting her daughter to be in the vicinity.
The woman said so softly I barely caught the words, “Claudia is no longer with us, except in spirit.”
At first, I thought she was implying archly that Claudia had run away. Then I read the real meaning in her sorrowful eyes. “Oh, no. Oh, my dear Elaine.” We were standing beside an outside table of a café near the entrance of Lafayette Park. I put an arm around her waist and said, “Can we sit down here, or should we go somewhere else?”
“Here is fine. I am fine. I can tell you everything now without wailing or making a scene.”
A waiter was hovering. “Shall we have coffee, or tea?” I said. “Are you hungry?”
“No. But yes to coffee.” After it arrived, she poured the steaming liquid inside each of two cups, then did the same with the warmed contents of the cream pitcher, and stirred sugar into hers before she enlightened me further. “Claudia was happy. She loved the house Roger had provided for us. At first, he would come there for dinner, and stay for awhile. Then, after a few weeks, he began spending one night a week there, then two nights, then three. Claudia knew I missed my own cottage and neighborhood, and she insisted I move back there. She said, ‘Roger and I are like a married couple now; we do not require a chaperone.’” Elaine paused and took a few sips of her coffee.
I did not prompt, nor did I try to imagine what she was going to tell me. It occurred to me then that I had been carrying on conversations with Claudia in my imagination whenever I had occasion to visit her city.
As Elaine resumed, her voice hardened. “Roger Fontaine was not as much in love with Claudia as she chose to think. He was enchanted by her youth and beauty and her elegant manners, but he had no intention of having a family with her. He had expected me to enlighten my daughter about contraception, and I had done so. That is, I had tried my best to make her aware of what was available.”
I nodded. I could not murmur politely, “I understand,” although I thought I did: Claudia had wanted the ultimate respectability. She thought the quickest way to get Roger to marry her would be to become pregnant with his child. I said, carefully, “I seem to recall Claudia’s having said that children born of their union would inherit from him.”
“I did manage to get that concession from Roger, but during the bargaining, he made it very clear to me that he did not want children, at least not anytime soon. Winnie, I had told Claudia not to tell you, but while we were in Paris, I took her to a special class where a highly respected French courtesan demonstrated the various devices, methods, and techniques that thwart conception yet enable a man to have his pleasure.”
“She did not tell me,” I said truthfully. My thoughts were now in turmoil: I was shocked and saddened about my friend, anxious to know how she had died, yet also curious as to how she had reacted to that class taught by the French courtesan.
“When we returned to New Orleans, I reminded Claudia that she must initiate a frank discussion of her new knowledge with Roger and let him choose the method of contraception they would use. She said she did not care to discuss the subject with me and asked that I not bring it up again. You may not have been aware that Claudia, by nature, was very modest.”
“Yes, I believe I sensed that about her,” I said, although I had not.
Her mother continued, “She was uncomfortable when I tried to give her practical advice about how to make love to a man and how to please him, in the hope that she would become indispensable to him. She wanted romance clothed in mystery, not details and instructions—but it was my duty to see that she understood the rules, and the responsibility that rested on her. What could I have done differently? I ask myself that question every day.”
“I’m sure you did everything you possibly could, under the circumstances,” I said mechanically.
“Within a few months after the liaison began, she became pregnant. Roger was not at all pleased. He told Claudia she must have the pregnancy terminated.”
Elaine twisted a spoon in her hands. I wondered if she wished it were Roger’s neck. She said, so softly I had to lean forward to hear, “Although I was seeing my daughter almost every day, I was kept completely in the dark. Claudia did not tell me she was expecting, and I failed to see the signs. Neither did she inform me that she had told Roger the news. Apparently, she had thought he would be as happy as she was. It must have crushed her to realize that was not the case; Roger told me later she had assured him the matter had been taken care of. He assumed I had made the arrangements and been with her during the procedure. That’s what he called it—‘the procedure.’ But she had done nothing about her situation, other than to lie to him. Then one night when he was away on a business trip, she began to hemorrhage, and a servant came for me. The first I knew of my child’s being with child was when she began to miscarry. We took Claudia to the hospital, but she had bled too much. In her delirium, she asked me if the baby was a female. What had come out of her was a bloody mass, but I told her yes, I believed it was a girl. Claudia said, ‘She is to be baptized Winnie Davis Leveque. If she lives and I don’t, I want her to be brought up by the nuns. And if I live, and she doesn’t, I will become a nun.’”
In the bustling ambience of that public square, Claudia’s mother and I sat with our faces in our hands and sobbed together. Tears fell like rain into the snowy-white napkins on our laps. Then, wiping her eyes and recomposing herself with a fierce, grave majesty, Elaine said, “Enough of this sad business. Let’s talk about you, Winnie. Are you in love, or have you been?”
“Alas, I am not, and have not been.”
“Well, you will be, and soon,” Elaine predicted. “Take my word for it: I know these things. You are ripening, and glowing; you’re a peach, waiting to be plucked. And now, you must come with me to my house. Claudia told me that you love to learn; she said you were the most conscientious student she’d ever known. So I am going to instruct you in a way you likely have not been educated before. I will teach you how to take care of yourself, Winnie Davis. Tall, slender girls like you and Claudia are not ideally suited for having babies. And even though you may decide you want ten children, you shouldn’t have to become pregnant until you’re ready.”
I accompanied Elaine Leveque to her house and paid close attention to all that she showed me and told me. A few weeks later, I met Fred, and fell in love as swiftly as one might fall down a flight of stairs. Although I disregarded Elaine’s first cardinal rule—“Don’t rush love; let it happen of its own accord”—I have heeded the second: “Should for some reason beyond your control the relationship be severed, wish the other well, and do not harbor jealous thoughts, for after all you have shared something wonderful together.”
Whenever I think of Fred Wilkinson, which is often, I wish him well. If I could, I would will my love to him and trust that in some way, after I die, it will multiply in his life.