Dollbaby: A Novel (23 page)

“There’s another room up here?”

T-Bone pointed behind him. “Just on the other side of this wall. Nothing to it. See for yourself.”

Ibby followed T-Bone into the adjoining room. It was octagonal, no larger than her own room, with one small window facing the front of the house. Her eyes inadvertently landed on T-Bone, who was standing over in the far corner. She was surprised at how tall he was, well over six feet, and how muscular his arms and shoulders were. His hair was cropped close to his head.

“You grown right pretty,” T-Bone said.

She was sure he was just being polite, his way of getting rid of the awkwardness that filled the tiny room. She changed the subject. “They must have shut this room off for a reason. I wonder why.”

He scratched his head. “Don’t rightly know.”

Next to his feet was a small door, no more than two feet wide. She walked over and opened it. When he crouched down next to her, his thigh brushed hers.

He reached in. “Looks like somebody was trying mighty hard to hide this box, all tucked away in the corner like it was.”

Ibby plopped down cross-legged on the floor and opened the box as T-Bone came and sat next to her. Inside, she discovered a photo album covered in a faded pink taffeta, the lace edging hanging off the side in places where it had come unglued. She gently lifted the album from the box.

There was an inscription on the inside of the front cover. “Look. It says ‘To Pearl, the most beautiful woman in the world, from the luckiest man in the world.’”

“Who’s Woody?” T-Bone asked, pointing to the signature below the inscription.

“My grandfather’s name was Norwood. Maybe that was his nickname. But why would it say ‘To Pearl’?”

Ibby flipped through the yellowed pages of the album, pretending not to notice the sound of T-Bone’s breath and the smell of his musky cologne.

He leaned in closer. “What’s that?”

Ibby picked up the newspaper clipping stuck in the creases of the album and examined it. It was an ad for the Starlight Jazz Club on Bourbon Street and contained a photograph of two women—one sitting provocatively inside a giant oyster shell in a satin bathing suit, the other, scantily clad, standing with her foot atop a papier-mâché alligator.

“Looks like an ad promoting a couple of dance acts. One for Miss Pearl the Oyster Girl and one for Gertie the Gator Girl.”

T-Bone pointed to the picture. “I believe that there is Miss Fannie sitting in that oyster shell.”

The woman in the photo couldn’t have been more than about seventeen years old. Ibby gazed at the long legs and the ample bosom. It was the beauty mark on the side of her face that gave it away. Ibby let out a gasp.

“She sure was something,” T-Bone said after a while.

Ibby couldn’t take her eyes off Fannie. “She sure was” was all she could manage.

D
oll’s words ripped through the air. “What are you two doing in here!”

T-Bone scrambled to his feet. “Nothing.”

Doll waved a finger at him. “How’d you get in here, boy?”

“I run across a window. Pried the shingles off. Found this here empty room. I didn’t know . . . I mean, I thought . . .” T-Bone was talking so fast his words ran together like one long sentence.

“And what? You thought what?” Doll snapped. “How long you been up here?”

“Just a minute or two.”

“You better not be lying to me, Thaddeus Trout.”

“I ain’t lying,” T-Bone said as he cast his eyes down.

“Get on out a here.” Doll jerked her head toward the open window. “And don’t let me catch you up here again. You hear?”

“I’m going,” T-Bone said, one leg already out the window.

As Ibby stood up, Doll noticed she was trying to hide something behind her back.

“Now, missy, what you got there?” She motioned for Ibby to hand it over.

“I found it hidden in the little closet in the corner.”

Doll turned the album over in her hand. “Anyone else know about this?”

“Just T-Bone,” Ibby replied.

“Come on out of this room,” Doll said.

Ibby slid past Doll and went over and sat on her bed. Doll came and sat next to her and opened the album.

As Doll was looking through it, Ibby asked, “Have you ever seen this before?”

“No, baby, never laid eyes on it until just now. I suspect it been locked away for a good long while. That turret room’s been locked up ever since Master Balfour fell out the window.”

“That
is
Fannie in that photo, isn’t it?” Ibby asked after a while.

“Yes, baby, believe it is.”

“Was Fannie really a stripper, like Annabelle Friedrichs said she was?”

Doll glanced over at her. “Wouldn’t exactly call her a stripper. More like an exotic dancer.”

“Did my mama know about Fannie?” Ibby asked.

“No, baby. I don’t even think your daddy knew.”

“How’d you find out?”

“Well, baby. It’s like this. Back when Queenie first started working for Miss Fannie, and Mr. Norwood would go off on one of his stints on the river, Miss Fannie would often take to drinking to keep the loneliness away. Sometimes she let her lips flap.” Doll turned and looked at Ibby. “Now I know what you’re thinking, but don’t go judging too harshly. Things was different back then. Them fools in Washington went and passed a law called Prohibition, making it illegal for people to buy liquor. Then the stock market crashed—people lost their homes, their jobs. Nobody had two wooden nickels to rub together. Your grandmother, she come from a family of sharecroppers. Her daddy had to give up his land, had no money coming in. So Miss Fannie, she had no choice really. She left home at sixteen, all on her own. Now, Miss Ibby, try to imagine how hard that was for a young girl.”

Fannie marched off into the night, away from the sharecroppers’ shack, made of hobbled logs and a rusty metal roof, down a long dirt road cloaked in darkness from the towering pine trees. She’d done it many times before, making her way sleepily toward the sugarcane fields before sunrise. Most mornings she could hear the shuffling of the other field workers and the occasional cough from one of the children trudging solemnly beside their parents. She remembered the first time she’d made this trip, at the ripe age of five. From sunup to sunset, her job was to gather the cut cane and load it onto the waiting donkey carts at the end of the row, weaving and ducking as she went along to avoid the sharp edges of the cane knives being wielded by the field hands.

On this late September morning, Fannie’s muted footsteps were barely distinguishable from the whispering of the pine needles high above her head. She was making an extra effort to be quiet. She didn’t want her father to catch her sneaking away in the middle of the night.

She walked nearly an hour before she reached the deserted highway. The sun was just peeking over the horizon marked with miles of green sugarcane fields. It was harvesting season, and white smoke from the burning of the cane before the harvest, something they did to make the cane cutting easier, billowed up from the fields, leaving a pungent scent of burnt sugar in the air. Fannie hated that smell.

When she reached the train station, a good five miles down the road, the front door was padlocked. She went around the back, climbed the steps to the train platform, and sat on the wooden bench by the back door to wait for the ticket master to arrive. She had no idea where she was going, but she prayed she had enough money to go far enough away that her father wouldn’t come looking for her.

As soon as she heard the rattle of the door being unlocked, she jumped up.

“My, ain’t we in a hurry this morning,” the stationmaster said as he opened the door.

She gave him a minute to settle himself behind the ticket window. “Where’s the first train out going this morning?”

“New Orleans.” The bleary-eyed man peered over the ticket counter. “Say, I know you. You’re Jake Hadley’s daughter, ain’t ya?”

“Yes sir.” She had hoped he wouldn’t recognize her.

The man behind the counter, O. D. Landry, also ran the only grocery in town. She was feeling a little guilty standing there in front of him, given that she had stolen an orange out of his store just last week.

“How much is a one-way ticket?” she asked.

He tilted his black visor back on his head. “One way, you say? Cost you about . . . well, let me see . . . how much you got?”

Fannie counted the coins in her hand. All she’d been able to scrape up for her journey was seven dollars and some change.

“Sorry about your mama,” Mr. Landry said.

“Thank you kindly.” She counted the money in her hand for the second time, trying hard not to think about her mama.

Fannie’s mother, Clara, had taken ill a few weeks ago, after she developed an infection and then a fever from a cut on the back of her leg she’d received from a cane knife while out in the fields. It festered, no matter how much Mercurochrome Fannie swathed on it. The Hadleys were too poor to afford a doctor, and within a few days, her mother was dead. With no money for a proper burial, her father covered Clara in a blanket and carried her out to the woods, where he buried her next to a tree with nothing more than two twigs tied together as a grave marker. When Fannie went to look for it the next day, the grave was covered in leaves, the twig marker gone, probably carried away by squirrels. She never forgave her father for burying her mother out in the woods like a wild animal, and that very day she swore on her life that she’d never suffer the same fate.

After he buried Clara, her daddy took to chasing Fannie around the cabin at night. At first, Fannie thought the wildness in his eyes was from the liquor, but then he caught her and tried to force himself on her. That same night she packed her little bag, scraped up what money she could find in his pants pockets, and left.

“Tell ya what, sweetheart. Just give me a few dollars, and we’ll call it a day.” Mr. Landry gave her a friendly wink.

Fannie nervously handed over the coins.

“You ain’t changing your mind. ’Cause if you is, you can go on back home, and I won’t say nothing to nobody.” Mr. Landry set his eyes on her as if he understood her predicament.

She shook her head. “I ain’t changing my mind.”

“Okay then. You take care now, you hear?” Mr. Landry nodded.

The train was pulling up just as Fannie went out onto the platform. She hurried over to the door at the rear of the first car. She found an empty seat by the window and let her head fall back against the headrest as the train engine sputtered and the wheels squealed against the tracks. She pulled her worn brown leather satchel up on her lap. It held everything she possessed in the world—a pair of breeches, a few cotton panties, her Sunday church dress, a poplin shirt, a few undershirts, a nightie, and a small tattered prayer book that had been her mother’s.

Fannie rested her forehead on the window, watching the cane fields flash past—first green fields, then the burned fields dotted with the salt-and-pepper faces of the weathered field hands who would stop briefly from the cane cutting and look up with hollow glances, the same look she used to give the train as it passed, wishing one day that it would carry her away from all the misery. She turned away from the window and fingered the small gold cross around her neck, hoping that Mr. Landry would keep his promise not to let on where she’d gone. The last thing she wanted was for her father to come looking for her.

The swaying of the train soon sent Fannie into a deep slumber. She awoke with a start to a loud whistle as the conductor made his way down the aisle toward her.

“New Orleans!” the conductor called out. “The Crescent City. The City that Care Forgot. Last stop. All out.
Laissez les bon temps rouler
.”

Fannie grabbed her satchel and hastily followed the other sleepy-eyed people out of the train. When she emerged from the train station, she found herself on a wide boulevard called Loyola Avenue. Fannie
had never seen so many cars puttering along in either direction, honking at the train passengers who were trying to cross the street. She’d only ridden inside one automobile, a rusted relic of a pickup truck that her father had owned ever since she could remember that had a hole in the floor the size of a tire.

Fannie’s eye landed on a shiny red Packard. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen: long and lean, with a black leather top that was rolled down in the back. The passengers, a man and a woman, were chatting gaily as they drove by. Fannie took in a deep breath. Perhaps one day she’d own a car just like that one.

She followed some of the other train passengers a few blocks to Canal Street, which was bustling. Noise seemed to come at her from every direction—the clanging of the streetcars gliding past in the middle of the boulevard, the honking of the passing autos, the whistles bellowing from the ships on the river, the bells from nearby churches ringing in the noon hour, and the street vendors hawking waffles, pralines, and lemon ice. She walked past restaurants, cafés, and movie houses clustered between department stores.

Dozens of people hurried past her, bumping and pushing her along, every once in a while hurling a comment in her direction to watch where she was going. She paused on a corner to let a trolley go by. Intrigued by the name on the front of the streetcar, Desire, Fannie decided to follow it down Bourbon Street.

Many of the buildings on Bourbon Street were tightly shuttered and appeared derelict, yet there was a feeling of old worldliness about the French Quarter that made Fannie want to linger, a certain splendidness that somehow made up for the squalor of the crumbling buildings and the stench of day-old trash piled waist-high in the alleyways. She clutched her satchel against her chest and smoothed down her ragged hopsack shift, suddenly feeling self-conscious as well-heeled people brushed past her.

She wandered aimlessly down Bourbon Street, wondering how she was going to get along with no money. The run-down bed-and-
breakfast she just passed advertised rooms for three dollars a night. She only had enough for one night’s stay. Then what?