Iron Lace (30 page)

Introductions were made, and everyone was seated. Sam and Vivian were a striking couple in their early thirties, and from the conversation, it was clear this was a rare night away from their two children. Sam was a junior high school principal, and Viv designed and sewed costumes for carnival floats, something she could do while their children were in school.

Debby and Jackson weren’t married. Debby, who looked like a teenager, taught sixth-graders at Belinda’s school, and Jackson worked in a bank. They were an unlikely couple, Jackson with a bulky, powerful physique suited for a Mississippi River longshoreman, and tiny Debby, who didn’t weigh as much as a bale of cotton. But from the way Jackson hovered over her, it was clear that he intended to make their relationship permanent.

“We’ve heard about you,” Sam said. “Belinda’s told us about your work, and I read your interview with Martin Luther King last fall. Very impressive.”

Phillip was used to hearing that his work was impressive. He wasn’t used to hearing that Belinda had told anyone about him. He wondered how the subject had come up, and exactly how she had characterized their relationship.

The food arrived with a round of drinks for everyone, and the talk was as satisfying as the crawfish. Phillip hadn’t really been in the mood for company. He had met most of the local people who were active in civil rights, and some of those who were vehemently opposed, as well. But he’d never had a desire to make friends in New Orleans or to involve himself in any way in daily life here. As the evening progressed, however, he found himself warming up to the two couples. He had rarely experienced this instant camaraderie.

Watching Belinda with people who obviously cared about her gave him new insight, too. She blossomed under their attention, like a flower preening in the sunshine. He hadn’t even noticed how quiet she was tonight until she wasn’t quiet anymore. As he watched her, he realized how much he had come to depend on her understanding, and how little understanding she demanded of him. She was a complex woman, but her complexity was part of her charm. He could live with her forever, delve into her mind and soul for a hundred years, and there would still be uncharted depths.

Nicky’s band played for most of an hour before she finally appeared. The club, always crowded, was busier tonight than Phillip had ever seen it. Mardi Gras was still weeks away, but the carnival season was in full swing. By the time Nicky came out onstage, the celebration was at a high pitch.

Nicky, dressed in an emerald satin sheath, took the mike off the stand. “Now all you good people got to simmer down just a bit so you can hear what I’ve got to tell you.”

The room went wild. It was always this way. Phillip had seen his mother perform beneath the harsh glare of a bare lightbulb, as well as the diamond light of a dozen crystal chandeliers. Always, sometime during the evening, when the crowd realized the immensity of her talent, there would be a tribute like this one.

This crowd knew exactly what they would be getting. Nicky was theirs. She belonged to them, a child of Storyville, a child of their beloved city. It was the New Orleans in her voice that had made her famous, and the New Orleans in her voice that made them love her.

She launched into a song, her own rendition of “Heat-wave,” obviously aware that they wouldn’t quiet down until she did.

There was an edge to the excitement tonight, an electricity that crackled through the crowd. In the past, Phillip had always avoided the carnival season in New Orleans, but now he felt its effects. Carnival was a primal, emotional celebration, and that spirit infused the room tonight. Everyone was reaching for something, for a brief taste of joy, for a connection, for sustenance. Lent was learning to live without, but carnival was asking and receiving. And tonight the patrons of Club Valentine were asking Nicky to fill the holes in their lives with her talent and her presence.

“She’s the best,” Viv said, during the applause. “And the best thing that ever happened to this city. Why did she come back here, Phillip, when she could have lived anywhere in the world?”

He thought about everything he’d learned. “I don’t know. Maybe it was in her blood.”

“She came back because she knew we would love her like nobody else ever had.” Belinda was looking straight at Phillip,
and she wasn’t smiling. “She looked around one day and knew it was time to go home. And that’s what she did.”

He thought about Belinda’s words during the remainder of Nicky’s set. Belinda’s own life had been an eternal Lent, forty days of deprivation, then forty more, until she had learned to expect nothing else. She had been deprived of most of the things people needed to grow strong and emotionally secure, yet she had. With very little help, and very little reassurance.

But what about now? Belinda didn’t expect anything of him. That had always been perfectly clear. But in the spirit of carnival, was she reaching out to him? Was she telling him that it was time for him to come home, and that home was right here, with her?

The room seemed to grow smaller and more crowded. His mother’s voice soared above the whispers, the clatter of silverware. The beat grew steadily faster; the volume rose higher and higher. His head began to pound, and he closed his eyes for a moment against the smoke of a dozen cigarettes.

He missed seeing the man leap up to the stage.

Belinda put her hand on his arm. “Phillip…”

He opened his eyes and saw a fat middle-aged man who had clearly had too much to drink, swaying just yards from his mother. No one from the band had reacted yet, it had happened so quickly. Phillip sat forward, ready to spring if necessary.

“She’s got it under control,” Belinda said, holding him back.

Nicky had her hands on her hips, and she was shaking her head at the man like a tolerant schoolmarm. She had stopped singing, but they were close enough to hear her tell him to get down and stop making a fool of himself. It was the same voice she had used on the rare occasions when Phillip got into trouble as a child.

The man swayed, as if he planned to obey if he could just remember how. The sax player, who rivaled Jackson for size, started toward the man to help him off the stage, and from the corner of his eye, Phillip could see Jake heading their way. That would have been the end of it, and should have been. Except for the cops.

Phillip wasn’t sure where the two policemen came from. They were white, which put them in a distinct minority tonight, and they were young enough to be new academy graduates. The cop with the blond crew cut looked uncomfortable, as if he knew that there was no reason to interfere. The other, dark-haired and flat-featured, was obviously in his element. He pushed his way past people who didn’t need to be pushed, shoving tables as he made his way up front. He had his nightstick in his hand, and he thumped it against his thigh as he walked.

Phillip could see the next few seconds as clearly as he could see the dark-haired cop stomping his way to the stage. Club Valentine was a neutral zone in the conflict between the races. A truce had been declared here, led by his mother and defended by everyone, black or white, who walked through the front door. But the cop, this cocky, reckless representative of the outside world, could undo all that. If he dragged the drunk off the stage and roughed him up in full view of everyone there, all hell would break loose. It was carnival season and tolerance was a Lenten virtue.

Phillip was on his feet and blocking the cop’s progress before he’d even made a conscious decision to interfere. “Officer.” He stood his ground, and he didn’t smile. “There’s nothing to worry about. We’ve got this under control.” He had his back to the stage, but he knew that behind him, the drunk was being hustled away.

“Get out of my way!”

Phillip moved closer and lowered his voice, holding out his hands to make sure that the cop knew he wasn’t a threat. “I’m Phillip Benedict. My mother and stepfather own this club. We appreciate your concern, and we’re glad you’ve got the courage you need to do this job. Because it takes courage. If you lift a hand to that man, all these people are going to come down on you like gravy on rice.”

The cop put his palm against Phillip’s shoulder and shoved, but Phillip was prepared. He didn’t budge. “Look,” he said, just loud enough for the cop, and no one else, to hear. “You push me again and I go down, you’re going to be at the bottom of a pile of bodies six feet deep. And I know what the mayor would say if you caused that kind of problem here. Nicky Valentine draws people to this city, especially this time of year. You want to be known as the man who started trouble at her place?”

For a moment Phillip thought the cop wasn’t going to listen. He wanted a fight, and he wanted to be the one to spark it. Worse, he wanted a fight here, in a place renowned for tolerance. That was why he was in this room, to prove something to himself and everyone else like him. To prove that black and white could not enjoy themselves together without an explosion.

“You see your people stay in line,” he said. “We don’t want nig—”

“I wouldn’t use that word right here and now,” Phillip said smoothly. “Or my people, as you put it, might stand in line to have first chance at you.”

The cop with the crew cut came up behind his partner. “Come on. There’s no problem now. Let’s go.” He shook his
head once for Phillip’s benefit. It was almost imperceptible, but more than Phillip had expected. This cop knew what his partner was, and he didn’t approve.

“I’ll sing you out, gentlemen,” Nicky said from the stage behind them. As if it had been planned, she swung into “The Times They Are A-changin’,” a Bob Dylan song that Phillip had never heard her perform, but which she performed tonight with feeling. The cops were gone by the second verse, and Phillip took his seat.

The crowd whistled and stomped their approval at the song’s conclusion, even after Nicky had left the room. Sam leaned across the table, his face serious. “You ever thought about going into politics?” he asked Phillip.

“Last time I looked I was still black.”

“The times are changing. It won’t be long before we’ll need men like you to run for office here. This city’s about to bust wide open.”

“If I’m not mistaken, I’d have trouble voting in New Orleans, much less making a bid for mayor.”

“Sam’s right,” Jackson said. “We need you here. We’re looking for men who don’t back down and don’t kiss up. Educated men who can stand tall.”

“Not my city, and not my home.” The words came as naturally to Phillip’s lips as any he’d ever spoken. The episode with the cop was symbolic of everything he despised about the South. He had been forced to become involved, something a good journalist never did. And now he felt a connection he didn’t want to feel. He had taken stands every day of his career, but they had been impersonal and rational, and his stomach hadn’t churned afterward with emotions he didn’t want to recognize.

“It could be your home,” Sam said.

“No. I don’t think it ever could.” Phillip looked at Belinda and saw his answer written in her eyes. Her expression didn’t change, but he knew that something had changed between them.

And that, too, stirred up emotions that he didn’t want to recognize.

When he arose the next morning, Belinda was gone. She always left early for school, but this morning she had probably left the house just after dawn. The sun was barely over the horizon, and only the call of a mockingbird broke the neighborhood’s stillness.

They hadn’t fought after they returned home last night. Phillip had tried once to explain what he’d said to Sam, but he hadn’t been able to explain what was behind it. He hadn’t been able to tell Belinda about Aurore Gerritsen and the prejudices that had caused her to abandon his mother. He hadn’t been able to tell her about his own revulsion at being descended from a man like Lucien Le Danois, who would murder his own child rather than admit to her existence.

What had he learned about his Louisiana roots that would make him want to stay?

He found coffee brewing, but no note. He drank a cup over the morning paper, but by the time he went to the closet to get clean clothes, he was no closer to knowing what he should do that day than he had been upon waking.

He opened the door and stared at his suitcase, lying prominently on the closet floor. It was fully packed, although last night his clothes had been hanging beside Belinda’s.

He had only to snap it shut and he could be on his way again.

T
here were azaleas blooming at the end of the garden path. Azaleas in February, but only because the new gardener had mistakenly planted them on the south side of Aurore’s garden. Now the crimson blossoms lifted their glorious faces to the New Orleans winter sun, like bathing beauties on the French Riviera, but by August the shrubs would have shriveled and died.

The warm afternoon had drawn Aurore outside to spend an hour on a stone bench beside her goldfish pond. She had brought a book to read, but instead she had stared at the fish and the fat brown toad who drowsed in the cool shadow of a rock and dreamed of mosquitoes.

She heard Phillip’s footsteps before she saw him. When she looked up, he was standing several yards away, his arms folded across his chest.

He had left town several weeks ago, the day after he learned the truth about who she was. She knew he had been to New York and California chasing stories. There was little that went on in New Orleans that was a secret, and little Aurore couldn’t
find out if she asked the right people. She hadn’t been surprised. She had expected Phillip to go away. She had also expected him to return.

“What made you come back?” she asked. “A journalist’s curiosity? A duty to your mother?” She didn’t add her final guess out loud. Had he been influenced by a young woman named Belinda Beauclaire, who was simply too perfect to leave behind?

“You won. Just like you knew you would.”

She patted the bench beside her. He moved forward and sat reluctantly. “At my age, and in my condition, I’m allowed a fault or two. Forgive me for being smug.”

“Are you really dying? Or was that a way to assure my presence here?”

Aurore didn’t answer directly. She pointed to the azaleas with the tip of her cane. “I really should have those moved. They need protection in summer, but I wanted so badly to see them flower.”

“You said you probably had six months.”

“I would like to live until summer,” she said.

“Most people would prefer to die rather than face the heat and humidity here.”

“I’ll miss breathing steam.” She smiled. “I suppose I’ll miss breathing in general.”

“Are you in pain?”

“Blessedly, very little. But I can feel death settle over me. I sleep less, eat less. When I move, I feel the way I did as a little girl when I walked out into the Gulf and the water sucked at every step.”

“None of that means that death is just around the corner.”

“When I do sleep, I’m visited by those who’ve already died. I dream of them, and when I wake up, they’re still with me.”

“Your husband?”

She shook her head. “Never Henry.”

“From what you’ve told me, I suppose you’re grateful.”

She smiled again, this time sadly. “Perhaps Henry went to a place with no visiting hours.”

“The marriage never got better?”

“You’re beginning to sound like a journalist again, Phillip. Does this mean you’ll hear me out?”

“When I write up your memoirs, I’ll say that you were an old woman who always got what she wanted, no matter who she had to manipulate, no matter what she had to do.”

She was silent for a moment, considering his words and somehow liking the sound of them. “And will you also say that I was an old woman who did what I thought was best, even when it might have been easier to spend my last days watching goldfish and toads?”

“I don’t know.”

She used her cane to stand. She was increasingly unsteady on her feet, and more disgusted daily that her body could fail her so completely. “Walk with me, Phillip.”

He had already gotten to his feet. “I don’t have my tape recorder with me now.”

“Oh, I think you’ll remember what I tell you.”

“I already know there’s no happy ending to look forward to.”

“Perhaps not for me, not in the way you mean. But there are compensations for almost everything that happens in life.”

“Are there?”

She held out her hand. “May I lean on you?”

He hesitated. She could see him struggle; then he shrugged. He moved closer. She rested her hand on his arm.

As she thought about how to begin, she stared at the azaleas
at the end of the garden path. They were blooming now, but in a month, when their blossoms had faded, she would have the gardener dig them up and plant them in the proper spot. Perhaps she would not be alive next spring to see them bloom again, but she would know that they bloomed for those who came after her.

“Let me tell you about my garden,” she said. “And about the ways my life changed in the years when this garden first began to grow.”