Iron Lace Part 25

"And your father?"

"Died when I was young."

"What about relatives?"

"Not a one that I ever met."

"And you don't know anything about your family?"

"I've told you about my grandfather. The rest of my family were the people who helped raise me along the way. They were all the family I needed. I never missed the other kind."

Nicky's answers were familiar to Phillip. They were the same answers she had always given him. She had always been generous with information about her life after his birth, but her early years were a mystery.

"You really don't like talking about this, do you?"

She looked up from a sheet of music. "I can't talk about what I don't remember."

"Do you remember anything about being a child here on Basin Street?"

"Not much. I can't even tell you how old I was when we moved away. But I was still young. I remember missing the music. There was always music on Basin Street."

"There wasn't music where you moved to?"

She looked past him, as if she were trying to remember. "There were music lessons." She looked back at him. "My father paid for them. Funny, the things that stand out in a little kid's head."

"Then your father was still alive?"

"Yes."

"Do you remember when he died?"

She hesitated just an instant too long. "No."

Nicky was almost compulsively honest. The only punishments Phillip remembered receiving as a child had been for telling lies. Now, for the first time he could recall, Nicky herself was lying. Whatever pieces of the truth she remembered, she didn't want to share them with him.

"Sometimes I feel like I didn't come from anywhere at all," he said. "Like I sprang from the air. If I have children, what will I tell them?"

She lifted a brow. "Are you going to have children?"

"I don't know."

"But you're thinking about it?"

"Right now I'm thinking about the past, not the future."

"I would help if I could."

This time Phillip knew she was being honest. For reasons he didn't understand, Nicky couldn't tell him more.

"Were my grandparents good people?" he asked. "Do you remember that much?"

"I really don't know anything about my mother. But my father was a good man. He would have been proud of you."

He thought carefully about his response. "Well, if you're ever ready to tell me more, I'm ready to hear it."

She didn't deny that there was more. She reached across the table and placed her hand on his. "Why don't you bring Belinda by one of these nights? I'll reserve a table up front."

"I'd like that."

"You've got family all around you, Phillip. It's not who you come from, but who's standing right beside you, that counts most. Remember that."

Phillip had been gone for an hour when Nicky finally put her papers away. She had accomplished little after his visit. He had done something she had believed impossible. He had made her remember.

Early in her life, she had learned not to look behind her. She suspected she was that kind of person naturally. She had been a carefree child who moved from one experience to the next without worrying about what had come before. Her world had been filled with color and music, with women who fussed over her and men who gave her money just because she was pretty.

In later years, looking back had been too painful, so she had kept her eyes forward. She had done the things she needed to in order to survive, and she hadn't regretted any of them.

But sometimes, when she least expected it, a memory crept in. A song, the scent of magnolias in May, a humid summer night, and she was back in the district.

She rose and went to stand at the front door. The sky was beginning to darken, and down the street the small children who had crowded the Iberville sidewalks-or banquettes, as the native-born New Orleanians called them-were beginning to be replaced by older children, children just on the verge of becoming adults, children who, even if they didn't yet realize it, were trying to discover who they were.

Her son was thirty-seven, long a man. But, like the children across the street, he needed to discover himself. She had given Phillip everything she could, but she had not given him what he needed now, not even the fragments of truth about her past that she remembered. There was no foundation and no sense of continuity to Phillip's life. And if he was going to continue on from here, if he was going to build a family of his own, he needed to know where he fit.

She walked slowly down the street, her arms crossed in front of her. The city of New Orleans had done its best to erase all signs of Storyville. For a time, even Basin Street, synonymous with the district itself, had been renamed North Saratoga, and not until the forties, when the memory of what had gone on here had acquired new l.u.s.ter, had the name been changed back. But by then there had been little else that was fit to save.

It was an accident that Club Valentine was on Basin Street. Years ago, when she and Jake decided to settle here and open a nightclub, they had looked at all manner of property, and the location they chose had been the best available to them.

But now she wondered if it was an accident at all. Had childhood memories, so long suppressed, surfaced as she had considered the building? Had nostalgia colored a decision that at the time had seemed merely practical?

She stared at the other side of the street. She didn't know exactly where on Basin Street the Magnolia Palace, her childhood home, had stood. She supposed there might be a record at City Hall, but it was of no consequence anymore. Identical two-story redbrick buildings sprawled in every direction. There was nothing left of the Magnolia Palace.

Nothing except her memories.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

New Orleans 1913 When Violet moaned, she sounded like the low note on Manuel Perez's trumpet. Violet was a tiny woman who waltzed through the dogwood parlor in short ruffled dresses, shiny buckle shoes and no underdrawers. If a man knew just how to bend his head and squint as Violet glided across the room, he could glimpse in the patent-leather reflection the pleasures that awaited him.

But this morning it was Violet's moan, her musical baritone moan, that held Nicolette's attention.

"How long's she gonna keep it up?" Nicolette whispered. "She's gotta have air, don't she?"

"The way that man's pumping his man-thing into her, he's blowing her up like a balloon. She won't need no air for a long, long time."

Nicolette tilted her head and frowned. Although she wasn't yet six, she had already begun to read and do simple arithmetic. What little she knew of science she had learned from watching the world around her. She thought her friend f.a.n.n.y was wrong. "No, look there. She breathed. She stopped moaning, and she breathed!" Her voice rose. "I heard her!"

"Shhh..."

But it was already too late. Nicolette felt a hand at the back of her neck, a hand that rarely touched her. Fear magnified all her senses. She was acutely aware of the sharp tang of floor wax, the musty, mingled odors of body powder, tobacco and sweat that always lingered in the house. She felt the agonizing tug of a curl trapped in her father's stern grip and the imprint of his fingers against her throat. As he dragged her away from Violet's door, she could hear the thunder of f.a.n.n.y's footsteps fading down the hallway.

"What are you doing here?"

Tears sprang to her eyes. She was afraid to speak.

"Nicolette?"

"Listening," she whimpered. "I wasn't hurting nothing."

"Are you supposed to be here?"

She tried to shake her head, but his grip tightened. "No." Tears began to run down her cheeks.

"Have I told you not to come up here?" The curl was suddenly freed, springing against her neck where his hand had just been. "Look at me."

She turned slowly and saw how angry he was. She knew, having seen and compared him to the hundreds of men who strutted or staggered down Basin Street, that Rafe Cantrelle was the handsomest man in New Orleans. But when he was angry, he terrified her. She tried to look at him, but her eyes kept turning to the ground.

"Suppose you tell me why you decided to come anyway?"

She was too frightened to answer. She scuffed her bare toes along the edge of the Persian carpet. The moaning stopped in Violet's room, and the hall was very quiet. She waited for her father to hit her. She was no stranger to violence. Sometimes the men who visited the Magnolia Palace to sample the pleasures of the city's most beautiful octoroons thought the greatest pleasure was to leave a woman bruised or bleeding.

"Did f.a.n.n.y put you up to this?" he demanded.

"No. I wanted to see if Violet would fix my hair." She peeked at her father from under her lashes. "That's all. I didn't think Violet would be 'taining this early. I didn't, Mr. Rafe." She reached into the pocket of her pinafore and retrieved calas, rice cakes folded neatly in a linen napkin. "I was bringing her something to eat, so's she'd help me."

"That's no excuse."

The carpet was patterned, with a bloodred border that was a shade lighter than the wallpaper. Nicolette hooked her toes under one edge and felt the cool, smooth wood beneath it. "I been up a long time." She risked another glance at his face. "I got lonely."

"You are not to come up here. Do you understand me?"

For just a moment, she wondered what would happen if she said no. Would he hit her then? She thought he wanted to. He always looked as if he wanted to, although he never had. Sometimes she wondered how it would feel if he did. Sometimes it seemed it would be better. "I know," she said.

"Go on, then."

She started after f.a.n.n.y, who had long since disappeared. At the stairs, she turned for a quick look at her father. He was standing exactly where she had left him, staring at her.

She found f.a.n.n.y cowering in the butler's pantry, behind sacks of rice. "Come out now," she coaxed. When f.a.n.n.y refused, she began to sing the words. "Come out, come out," she sang. "Come out from behind there."

"Mr. Rafe's gonna get me for sure."

"Mr. Rafe went away," Nicolette lied.

f.a.n.n.y peeked around the rice sacks. "There's a mouse in here, I seen it."

"Where?" Nicolette squeezed in beside her.

"In here." f.a.n.n.y began to dig between baskets of onions. "What'd Mr. Rafe do?"

"He told me not to go up the stairs again."

"Oh."

"I like it up the stairs," Nicolette said.

f.a.n.n.y began to lob onions into the corner behind the baskets. "You won't listen."

Nicolette didn't bother to answer. She would go up again, of course, as soon as she knew her father was gone-which he usually was. During the day, up the stairs was the best part of the house. Violet and Dora, Emma and Florence, all her favorite people lived there. They had mirrors on all four walls of their rooms and armoires filled with dresses covered with feathers and things that shimmered under the red Venetian lamps in the Azalea parlor. Violet let Nicolette dress up in any clothes she liked. Sometimes they dressed alike and pretended they were sisters.

f.a.n.n.y's efforts were rewarded with a terrified squeak. The mouse scurried over Nicolette's foot and disappeared behind a basket of peppers. "Caroline finds that mouse," Nicolette said, "she'll chop it into bitty little pieces."

f.a.n.n.y had lost interest now that the mouse was out of easy reach. "Go see who's out there."

Nicolette obliged. She peeked through the wooden slats. "n.o.body." f.a.n.n.y gave her a shove, and Nicolette opened the door.

The kitchen was steamy-hot and smelled of coffee. Early in the morning, Nicolette had watched Caroline grind the beans. Under Caroline's supervision, she had poured the boiling water over them herself, a little at a time, until there was enough for Caroline to take a demita.s.se to Mr. Rafe. When she returned, she'd heated her big iron skillet and fried the calas, made from yesterday's rice.

Now Caroline was at the market with Arthur, the butler and carriage man, but a stockpot of sc.r.a.ps bubbled enticingly on the back burner. Except for the d.u.c.h.ess, the women in the house didn't rise until late afternoon, but when they did, there was always a big meal waiting for them. While they slept, f.a.n.n.y's mother, Lettie Sue, and two maids carefully scrubbed away signs of last night's trade, rings on the d.u.c.h.ess's prized furniture, overflowing cigar trays, mud or worse on the carpets. The house was as quiet as it would ever be.

"Your papa's as mean a man as I ever saw," f.a.n.n.y said.

"Is he?" Nicolette thought that was interesting.

"He's got devil eyes."

Nicolette had never seen the devil, but she thought he must be a sight, if his eyes were like Rafe's. Nicolette could hardly wait until she knew things like f.a.n.n.y did. Of course, she wasn't sure f.a.n.n.y knew a lot, just because she was older. It might be because she didn't live in the district. She lived back of town, in a place called the Battlefield, one streetcar ride away. She even went to school with her brothers and sisters when she wasn't at the Palace helping her mother. She didn't like school, but she told Nicolette stories about it, just to make her jealous.

Voices drifted in from the hallway. Nicolette recognized the growl of her father's. The woman's was unmistakable, too. "d.u.c.h.ess's up," she said.

"You lied. Mr. Rafe's still here."

"Hide if you want." Nicolette went out the door and stood on the side porch, where she was screened by a vine Caroline had planted at carnival time. Shiny green mirlitons hung from it now, heavy and ripe for the picking. In a few minutes, she saw her father walk past alone.

She stayed where she was and watched Basin Street begin to crank up for the day. From a saloon up the line, she could hear music, bra.s.s and piano and the faint, faint warble of a woman's voice. A horse-drawn wagon rattled as it rode slowly over the pockmarked street, and the driver, a withered old man with skin as dark as Caroline's stove, shouted that he had blackberries to sell. Almost immediately his cries were drowned by the shrill steam whistle of a train pulling into the station.

Three women in wide feathered hats, inhabitants of another district residence, strolled down the banquette, arm in arm. They weren't cheap crib girls. Nicolette knew the difference. The crib girls didn't dress like ladies. Some of them lived back of town and just came into the district to work, often sharing a rented room with another girl so it could be used day and night.

The crib girls didn't need fine clothes. From what Nicolette could tell, most of the time they didn't need clothes at all. She had seen them nearly naked in their doorways on Iberville and Conti, talking low and dirty to every man who pa.s.sed by. They weren't like the women at Magnolia Palace, who took their clothes off upstairs, and then only for gentlemen.

"He gone?" f.a.n.n.y asked from the doorway.