Masquerade (18 page)

"You mean when I argued with him about going to the clinic," Remy guessed.

Sibylle threw a startled look over her shoulder, then quickly tried to cover it with a hasty, "Yes, that too."

Remy knew immediately that she had guessed wrong. "You were referring to when I asked about Brodie Donovan, weren't you?"

After a brief hesitation, Sibylle admitted, "Actually, I was." She turned back to the flowers. "I do wish you hadn't asked your father about him —although it wasn't really your fault. That Cole Buchanan's responsible for resurrecting that whole thing. He had no right to take your grand-père's portrait down and put that other one in its place. It may be a terrible thing to say, Remy, but I hope you never remember any part of the attachment you once had for him. I was so afraid you were going to do something foolish—" She let the rest of the sentence hang unfinished.

"Like marry him?" Remy suggested, suddenly realizing that Sibylle Jardin would find it impossible to approve of a man with Cole's background.

Her mother turned from the vase of tulips. "Remy, is it so wrong for me to want to see you safely married to a good man?"

Remy had the feeling "acceptable" should have been parenthetically inserted after "good." "Mother, I could never marry
safely,"
she protested with a faint laugh.

"Security is not something to be scoffed at. Marriage comes with no assurance of happiness, Remy. For a woman it's always better to love wisely."

"Is that what you did, Mother?" She found herself becoming angry.

"I am devoted to your father, and he to me. We have had thirty-five wonderful years together," she replied in quick defense. "And a great part of that is due to the many things we share in common—the same backgrounds, the same set of friends—"

"The same views on what and who is acceptable," Remy inserted. "Forgive me, but I find this conversation disgusting."

She turned on her heel and started from the room. But before she had taken three steps, her mother was there, catching her arm.

"Remy, I'm sorry. I truly didn't mean to offend you with the things I said," she declared, looking genuinely contrite. "I may have sounded like a snob, but I've seen what happens when two people from vastly different backgrounds marry. I've seen the embarrassment, the gaucherie, the stiltedness at social gatherings, and the valiant attempts to bridge the two levels. Soon it doesn't matter how exciting the marriage may be in the bedroom. In reality, the bedroom makes up only a small portion of a marriage. If it can't survive outside the bedroom, ultimately it won't survive at all. That's why I'm glad you didn't make a disastrous mistake with that Buchanan man. Do you understand?"

Remy nodded, slowly, a little stiffly. "I understand."

"I hope so." She curved her hand along Remy's cheek. "I know you're finished with him, and I'm sorry I brought up his name."

She was finished with him. Everyone was saying that, including Cole. Yet this morning on the dock, when she'd seen that container ship and recalled their previous visit to it, she'd remembered how completely she had loved him and how furious she'd been at his insinuations that his background was somehow a barrier between them. And she'd remembered, too, how his mouth had come down on hers in a claiming kiss. Even now she could feel the sensation of its lingering heat.

Afterward, when he'd lifted his head and she'd seen his dazzling smile, she'd forcefully declared, "I love you, Cole Buchanan. Nothing and no one will ever change that."

But something
had
changed it. And that part of her memory was blank.

"You look tired, Remy. It's to be expected, though, considering you were up and about before the sun," Sibylle chided gently, and she tucked a hand under Remy's arm, guiding her toward the hall. "Why don't you lie down awhile and get some rest?"

"Maybe I will." But Remy wasn't sure it was fatigue she was feeling as she let Sibylle walk her from the study to the entrance hall.

Her mother stopped at the base of the curved staircase. "You do that, and I'll go take care of my flowers. The house will be brimming with them when you come down—the way I wanted it to be when you came home."

Remy watched her move off in the direction of the solarium, then turned and climbed the winding steps to the second-floor hall. The door to her bedroom stood open. As Remy approached it, she heard someone moving around inside, humming an old jazz tune and injecting a lyric here and there. She immediately recognized Nattie's voice and smiled, entering the room as the woman proclaimed in song, " 'I got Elgin movements in my hips with twenty years' guarantee.'"

"Only twenty years?" Remy teased as Nattie reached for the remaining pillow lying at the head of the antique tester bed. "That's a shame."

Nattie shot a startled look at her, then straightened up and moved her hands onto her hips. "Have you come up here to lie down?" she challenged. "Because if you have, there's no sense in me making up this bed."

Remy glanced at the bed, all its covers thrown back and its feather pillows piled on the floor. She couldn't imagine herself doing anything but tossing and turning in it, regardless of what she'd thought when she came up here.

"No, I think I'll shower and change into something else," she replied, and she began unbuttoning her double-breasted jacket of black wool. Nattie leaned across the mattress again to pull the last pillow off the bed. "Do you do all the housework too, Nattie?"

"Me? Clean this big house?" Nattie shook and punched the plumpness back into the pillow, then tossed it on the floor with the others. "There wouldn't be enough time in the day. No, you've got dailies that come in twice a week to do all the cleaning and washing. Me, I make the beds, cook the meals, and keep things tidy."

"I wondered." Shrugging out of her blazer, Remy walked to the closet, crossing the Aubusson rug, patterned in the room's soft greens and golds. She opened the door and walked into the large closet. As she took down a shaped coat hanger, she looked around the closet and frowned. "I thought these old homes didn't have closets."

"That used to be an alcove. Back in your grand-pere's day, his daddy boxed it in and made it a closet." Nattie's answer was accompanied by the sound of the top sheet being whipped over the mattress.

Remy fitted the jacket onto the hanger, fastening a button and hanging it on the rack with other tops. "How long have you worked for the family, Nattie?" she asked when she emerged from the closet.

"Come the third of November, it'll be twenty years." She smoothed the top sheet and deftly turned its hem back in a precise crease.

"The third of November. Is it so memorable that you know the exact date?" She walked over to the bed and leaned a shoulder against one of the carved mahogany posts at the foot of it.

"I know because I went to work for your family two days after I lost my restaurant, and that was on All Saints' Day." She said it very matter-of-factly, yet her long fingers hesitated in their edging of the sheet.

"You had a restaurant." Remy wondered if she'd known that.

"For six months I did. It was a fine place, too. I called it Natalie's—'course I gave my name the French pronunciation. I thought it would make a better impression on folks." She paused a moment, her expression taking on a faraway look, and then she laughed, and the laugh had a self-deprecating ring. "Why, when I opened those doors, I thought in no time at all folks would be saying Natalie's in the same breath with Antoine's and Brennan's. Which shows what big ideas I had."

"What happened?"

"I went broke, that's what happened. All that schooling I had in France in haute cuisine, all those years working in the kitchens of those other fine restaurants doing prep work when I knew I was better than those men chefs, all my dreams"—she lifted her shoulders in a shrug that Remy knew couldn't be as indifferent as it appeared—"gone."

"Why?" she protested, experiencing some of the hurt Nattie must have felt.

"It goes back to that same old thing—you put a man in a kitchen and people call him a chef; you put a woman in a kitchen and she's a cook. And when you put a black woman in a kitchen, people expect her to cook soul food. They want to see neck bones, gizzards, oxtails, and dirty rice on the menu, not potage of cauliflower with caviar, roast duck in port sauce, or feuillet of squab. There I was, broke, in debt up to my ears, with a nine-year-old girl to raise. My grandma had worked for your grand-père for nearly forty years. She got me this job here, and here's where I've been ever since."

"I'm sorry, Nattie."

Again she shrugged, pulling the quilted comforter over the sheets. "That's the way it goes sometimes."

Remy shook her head in vague bewilderment. "How can you sound so casual about it? You have to be disappointed, hurt, angry, bitter—something."

"I feel all those things and a few more," Nattie admitted. "I just don't show it like you do. People who are born poor and raised poor don't. It's been bred out of us, probably because there's too many things that can break our hearts. Having crying jags, throwing tantrums, getting all blue and low, that's for wealthy people who can afford it."

Remy immediately thought of Cole, remembering that steel control he had over his feelings —so much control that she'd wondered if he felt anything deeply. Maybe Nattie had just given her the answer to that as well as to his cynicism.

Thinking of Cole reminded her of the things he'd said about Brodie Donovan—and Nattie's reaction to the explanation her father had given. "At the breakfast table, when my father was talking about Brodie Donovan, I had the feeling you didn't believe him."

"I didn't." She took the pillows from the floor and piled them two deep at the head of the bed.

"Why?"

"Because that's not the way it was."

Remy frowned at her. "How do you know?"

Nattie looked at her and smiled sagely. "The folks who come into this house through the front door, they see the big white pillars, the mahogany staircase, and the crystal prisms dangling from the chandelier. But the folks who come in the back door, they know where the dirt is."

Unable to contest such a keen observance, Remy instead asked, "But why would my father tell me something that wasn't true?"

"Probably a case of wishful thinking." She flipped the quilted coverlet over the pillows and tucked the edge behind them. "Sometimes you want a thing to be so, and you wind up pretending it is. A lot of families rewrite their history that way. Look at what happened back when New Orleans was struggling to become a town and the men were wanting women to marry them. The French government sent eighty-eight over here, all of them inmates from La Salpetriere. Correction girls, they called them. Then, seven years later, in seventeen twenty-eight, the government started sending girls picked from middle-class families, who had some housewifely skills. They were known as casket girls because of these little chests filled with their clothes and such that they brought with them. And today you'd be surprised how many fine old Creole families can trace their ancestry to one of them casket girls. But all of them correction girls must have been sterile—not one of them has any descendants. Amazing, isn't it?"

"Very," Remy agreed, smiling, then she became serious once more. "Tell me what you know about Brodie Donovan, Nattie. Who was he? Did he start the Crescent Line? How did the Jardins acquire it from him?"

"Let's see. ..." Nattie picked up a throw pillow covered in the same pastel yellow-and-green floral print as the coverlet, and paused as if gathering her thoughts. "I don't know how much you can remember about New Orleans' history, or whether that's been lost along with the rest of your memory, but back in the early part of the eighteen-thirties, shortly after the four-mile-long Pontchartrain Railroad between the city and the lake was built, some businessmen from the city's new American section decided to dig a canal through the swamps so the melon schooners and other ships from Mobile could have a shortcut to the Mississippi River. Raising the money for the six-mile-long canal wasn't a problem, but finding the labor to dig it was. They couldn't use slaves, for a couple of reasons. You see, by then it was against the law to bring Negroes from Africa into the country to be used as slaves, which meant they'd have to buy slaves that were already here. Considering that they needed thousands for the job, that was too expensive—especially because they knew a lot of the slaves would likely die from working in the swamp."

"Why would they die?"

"Well, think how miserable the working conditions were back then—the sweltering heat, thigh-deep mud, and swarming insects, not to mention the snakes and gators. And don't forget, yellow fever was the scourge of Louisiana in those days," Nattie reminded her. "It wasn't until after the turn of the century that they discovered that mosquitoes carried the disease. Before that, most people thought yellow fever was caused by 'effluvia' from marshy grounds like swamps.

"Anyway, they decided black slaves were too valuable to work in such a place," she continued. "So the next-best thing was to import laborers from Ireland. It wasn't long before ship after ship started arriving in New Orleans, crowded with Irish workers.

"Brodie Donovan was fifteen when he got here in eighteen thirty-five along with his father and three of his brothers. Like most of the Irish, they went to work digging the canal. Within a year he lost a brother to yellow fever and his father to cholera. In the seven years it took to build the canal, thousands died from cholera and yellow-fever epidemics. For a time there were so many bodies they just tossed them in wheelbarrows and dumped them in graves dug along the banks of the canal." Nattie paused a moment to reflect. "It's kind of ironic when you think about it, but the prevailing attitude back then was, who cared if an Irishman died? There was always another waiting to take his place.

"Brodie Donovan was an old man of twenty by the time that New Basin Canal was finally finished. He and his brothers went to work on the wharves. According to my grandma"—Nattie laid the pillow on the bed, propping it against the headboard—"Brodie Donovan first dreamed of owning his own ship during the voyage from Liverpool to New Orleans. That may be true, but I figure it stayed only a dream until he went to work on the riverfront."