Iron Lace Part 32

Aurore looked down at the sleeping child in the Silver Cross perambulator Henry had ordered from England. Hugh's hair spread like silk ta.s.sels against the linen cover. His hair was a lighter brown than her own, but when his eyes were open, they were the same pale blue. There was nothing of his father in his face, as if Henry hadn't even been present at her son's conception. She spoke to the woman beside her. "Do you have anything to tell me today?"

"A thing or two."

Aurore reached into her handbag and pulled out a folded bill. She laid it on Hugh's cover. Since her marriage, she was no longer as concerned about money. The merger of Gulf Coast with Gerritsen Barge Lines had been a success, even if her merger with Henry had been a failure.

Lettie Sue stepped forward as if to admire the white woman's baby and slipped the money inside her dress. "Business's down. Ain't half so many men coming, and two of the wh.o.r.es got sent packin'. They's a couple streets over in a parlor house now."

"Why? Do you know?"

Lettie Sue shrugged. Her shoulders and arms were as substantial as cypress trees from years of scrubbing floors and washing clothes. In contrast, her neck was long and graceful, and the shape of her head under the colorful tignon that hid her hair was majestic. "Don't know. Mebbe the men are gettin' tired of payin' for what they can git for free if they's just nicer to their women."

"Or if they threaten or hurt them badly enough." Aurore stared at her son.

"Ma'am?"

"What else have you noticed, Lettie Sue?"

"You wanna hear about Mr. Rafe?"

Aurore leaned forward to straighten Hugh's covers. He smiled in his sleep, but she didn't smile back. "Yes."

"He's not there much. Girls say that's just as well. Mr. Rafe keeps things quiet, and the girls don't like that. Girl gets sick or goes a little crazy, Mr. Rafe sends her off."

"Where does he go?"

"Don't know. Comes back most nights, though. Didn't used to, but now he does. Little girl of his, she's a sa.s.sy child."

Aurore pondered what Lettie Sue had told her. Henry didn't know that Aurore kept track of Rafe's activities. But even though she had a new house and a baby, Nicolette was constantly on her mind. She had found Lettie Sue, who kept house at the Magnolia Palace, and she paid her well to bring back information about everything that went on there.

Lettie Sue was desperately poor, and much too astute to be a perfect source. Aurore knew she couldn't show more than a pa.s.sing interest in news about Nicolette, or Lettie Sue might deduce why she cared.

She risked a question now. "Trouble? What do you mean?"

"Does what she wants. Goes here. Goes there. Found her hiding under a tablecloth in the parlor last week, just so she could listen to Professor Clarence play his music. Mr. Rafe's locked her in her room every night since."

Aurore didn't dare reply. She stared at Hugh, willing herself not to show any emotion. "Anything else of interest?"

"What you want to know all this for, Miss Gerritsen?"

In the months that Lettie Sue had been reporting to her, Aurore had waited for this question. Lettie Sue wasn't looking directly at her, since any white woman would consider that insubordinate, but there had been a challenge in her tone.

"I won't lie," Aurore said. "I want the district closed down, and so do a lot of other women in New Orleans. It will close. It's just a matter of time. You might as well make as much money answering questions as you can now."

"What's finding out about Mr. Rafe got to do with closing down the district?"

"The more we know about what happens inside the houses, the sooner we'll get our wish."

"Mr. Rafe wouldn't like it, he knew you was asking questions."

Aurore understood Lettie Sue, and wished she could tell her so. She knew what it was like to have to measure every step toward security and every mile away from it. "No. And he'd like it less if he knew you'd answered my questions. I'll be sure he knows it was you, Lettie Sue, if it ever comes to that."

"Nic'lette don't have a mama. I tell you that?"

"You did. Some time ago."

"Always wondered what happened to her mama."

Aurore's voice didn't waver. "You have to ask? A woman's lucky to survive a year in a house like that."

"You close down the district, I ain't got no place to work."

"I'll find you work when that happens, but I don't help anybody I can't trust."

"You can trust me."

Aurore's friends, the young New Orleans matrons who served on committees with her and chattered gaily in the call-out sections of the best carnival b.a.l.l.s, would have said that Lettie Sue was like all blacks who didn't have a large enough dose of civilizing white blood, that her Christian exterior barely hid the African heart of a voodoo priestess. But Aurore understood what made Lettie Sue the woman she was, and she knew how closely she was bound to her. Under their thin veneers, they were sisters.

"You'd better go now. We've talked long enough." Aurore grasped the carriage and began to push. "If you have anything to tell me again, you know how to reach me."

"Yes'm."

Aurore pushed the carriage down the path that wandered through Audubon Park. She came here often. The park, once the site of a sugar plantation, had always served the city well, and it served Aurore better. Under the ma.s.sive live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, she could escape the scrutiny of her husband and the servants he paid to keep watch over her.

She had nearly reached the lagoon where she would rest before she dared a look behind her. Lettie Sue had vanished.

While Hugh slept on, she spread a quilt in the dappled sunshine beside the lagoon. Ducks filed past, and a crow just as large cawed to her from the low-hanging branch of a tree before it flew away. Far in the distance, from the direction of the zoo, she thought she could hear the trumpeting of an elephant. Henry disapproved of her taking Hugh there, but she had, twice, and would continue to. She wanted her son to learn everything about the world except what sadness it could hold.

She stripped off her gloves. The April sun was warm against her bare arms, and she removed her hat to let it warm her face. She sat on the blanket, covering her white-stockinged legs with her skirts, and thought about everything Lettie Sue had said.

She hadn't seen her daughter, not even from a distance, since her marriage to Henry. She was carefully watched, and going to Basin Street would enrage him. Despite her threats, Aurore knew that if Henry thought her sins were serious enough, he would punish her by hurting Nicolette. She had to content herself with Lettie Sue's information, as scant as it was. At least she knew that Nicolette was alive and still in New Orleans.

It wasn't enough. Everything that Lettie Sue had reported churned through her mind. Nicolette was a troublesome child, so much trouble that her father had to return home each night to supervise her.

Aurore could imagine the lively, spirited child she had so briefly held on her lap alone in a locked room. Nicolette's spirit could be destroyed by isolation, if it hadn't already been destroyed by proximity to the evils of Basin Street. Which was worse, her daughter alone and frightened, or her daughter in the clutches of the men who frequented the Magnolia Palace? Men like Aurore's own husband.

Alone in the sunshine, she gave in to the tears that Henry never saw her cry. She had thought the birth of another child would fill the empty s.p.a.ce inside her. How could she have fooled herself? How could she not have realized that having Hugh would only expand the wound? That watching him grow, watching every sweet, indescribably perfect thing her son did, would remind her that she had lost these years with her daughter and would lose all the years to come?

Her cheeks were still wet when he awoke. He didn't fuss. He always announced he was awake with laughter. He was only five months old, and he had probably been conceived during the horror of her wedding night. But she was closer to him than she had ever been to another human being. When he was out of her sight, she felt as if part of her were missing.

She lifted him from the pram and smiled through her tears. "Mama's dearest," she said softly. "Did you have a good nap?"

He cooed at the sight of her, batting his hands against her nose and mouth as if he were asking her to smile. Already he could make noises that sounded as if he were calling her.

She had refused to find a wet nurse for him. She wanted her son to be nourished on her milk, and although Henry had threatened her, she had stood firm. She had agreed to let Cleo watch over him when she couldn't be there. But she, and she alone, fed him. Surprisingly, Henry had given in, although he delighted in keeping her from Hugh when it was feeding time. He was not pleased with their son. Hugh's good nature seemed to prove that the child had none of the s.p.u.n.k a son should evidence.

Aurore changed him, then settled back on the quilt to nurse him. No one was about, except a Negro nurse with two small children several hundred yards away. She was well hidden by trees and shrubbery, and she threw a shawl over her shoulders and wrapped Hugh in its folds for modesty. As his tiny lips began to pull at her breast, she shut her eyes and willed herself to believe that, someday, loving this child would grow to be enough.

Somewhere in the distance, Rafe heard the trumpeting of an elephant. He took two dollars from his pocket. "Don't bother coming to work tomorrow. d.u.c.h.ess doesn't want spies working for her." He handed the money to Lettie Sue. "That's what you're owed. And don't look for a job anywhere else on Basin Street. You won't find one."

"I never told that lady nothing that mattered," Lettie Sue said. She didn't look down. She stared straight in his eyes. "I was just makin' a little money. Don't get paid enough for what I do. I can't feed my children meat no more, just beans and rice. And they git tired of beans."

"You should have come to me if you needed more money."

Lettie Sue gave a harsh laugh. "Why? So's you could work me twice as hard and give me half as much? You think you're something, Mr. Rafe. Struttin' 'round this town like you owned it. But you're the same as me, not one drop better, even if your skin's whiter. You don't remember what it's like to be poor. Somebody oughta beat you good and make you remember!"

He started around her, but she grabbed his arm. "No, you're not the same as me," she said. "You're not half so good. I take care of my children, give 'em whatever I can. I take 'em to church and send 'em to school, and at night, Mr. Rafe, I put them in bed and listen to their prayers. You treat that little girl of yours like she was the devil. Well, she ain't no devil. She's a little girl, same as mine, and someday, when my children remember me and feel sad 'cause I'm dead, Nic'lette won't feel nothing about you. She won't even remember what you looked like!" She dropped his arm, then she wiped her fingers on her ap.r.o.n.

He walked on, but he heard her spit on the path behind him.

He had followed Lettie Sue to the park. This morning she had gone to the d.u.c.h.ess with one more in a long series of trumped-up excuses to leave the house, and he had become suspicious. Aurore had not come near the Magnolia Palace in the past year, at least, not to his knowledge. But he doubted she had given up watching over the daughter she hadn't wanted to keep. Now he knew for sure that Aurore had been using Lettie Sue to gather information. Aurore was here, in this park with her new baby, a child whose skin was white enough to suit her.

He hadn't come to confront her. He did that in his dreams, angry, violent dreams in which he forced her to listen as he detailed Lucien's sins. Revenge was a strange thing. He had thought that seeing the Gulf Coast empire burn would give him victory over his hatred of Lucien. Then he had thought that taking Nicolette would give him victory over Aurore. Instead, in his dreams he raged and swore, and for what? Understanding? Did it still matter that Aurore learn why he had acted as he had?

Aurore was married now, to a man despised by all those Gulf Coast employed. Rafe had heard stories about Henry Gerritsen, both from men he had known when he worked on the river and from the women who worked at Magnolia Palace. The d.u.c.h.ess claimed that when Henry Gerritsen visited he paid well, but not a woman wanted him in her bed. He was cruel, but never quite cruel enough to bar from the house. He was too powerful to trifle with, and a friend to those who were even more so.

Aurore had chosen to marry someone like her father, more transparent perhaps, but with the same soulless disregard for others. If Rafe had forced her into this marriage, then his revenge had been even more complete.

And yet still he dreamed of her.

He walked in the direction he had seen her go. He wanted her to know that she had no listening ear at the Magnolia Palace now, that Nicolette no longer wore her locket or even remembered that one had been given to her. He yearned to see Aurore in defeat one more time. Perhaps then the dreams would stop.

He found her in a sheltered grotto where she sat on a blanket, holding her baby in her arms. She was the very picture of young motherhood, dressed in the softest lilac, with lace ribbons woven into her collar. The intervening years seemed to have left no mark; if anything, she was more beautiful. He stood silently and watched her for a long time before she looked up.

He saw her cheeks flush with color. She didn't hurry to cover herself more thoroughly with the shawl; she didn't straighten her dress to hide her ankles. She stared at him, and her gaze never wavered. "So," she said finally. "You know."

"Lettie Sue no longer works at the Palace."

"There are better jobs than keeping house for thieves and wh.o.r.es."

"I suppose she'll find out if that's true."

"I'll find her a place with one of my friends."

"A legitimate wh.o.r.e? A useless creature who gets on her back for her husband twice a week and does her Catholic duty?"

"The word is wife-one you're probably not familiar with."

He leaned against a tree and folded his arms. "My daughter no longer has your little gift."

She looked down at her son. "I know."

"Do you? Do you know she has no memory of you, or of it, either? What had you hoped to accomplish, Aurore? Had you thought to make her love you a little? How could she love the woman who abandoned her at birth?"

He got the reaction he'd hoped for. She flinched and grew paler. "You haven't told her that?"

"Haven't I?"

She put her son over her shoulder and began to pat him. She looked at Rafe again. The defiance in her eyes had waned a little. "You hate her so much that you'd hurt her that way?"

He wanted to tell her that he hated Nicolette's mother that much, but something inside him refused. He didn't answer.

"She has so little. You've given her almost nothing. Not a mother to love her, not a home where she can be safe and secure. Nothing of yourself. Isn't there anything inside you to give our daughter?"

"How can you ask? Don't you remember who I am and what I've done?"

"She's beautiful. You know I saw her. Do you know I held her on my lap? Just for a moment." Her voice caught. She looked over his shoulder, as if she couldn't meet his gaze. "She looks like you. But there's a little of me in her, too."

"Inconvenient for you. That might make it harder to deny her again, if the opportunity arises."

"If I had the opportunity, I would take her and run away!"

"You had that opportunity."

"And I'll pay forever...for not having done it."

"She's dead to you. Don't try to see her anymore, and don't pay anyone else to answer your questions. If you don't want Nicolette to know that her mother gave her away because she wasn't good enough to keep, then stay away from her."

She squeezed her eyes shut. "How can you? No matter how much you hate me, how can you think of hurting her that way?"

"It's the truth."

"A part of it, and I hate myself for it." She opened her eyes, and they were filled with tears. "You're all she has now. Can't you stop trying to hurt me? What's to become of our daughter? I know as much about her as you do. I've spied and lied to find out about her, but she lives with you, and you know nothing!"

"I know she's too much like her mother."

She gasped. "No! She's a wonderful little girl, full of spirit and laughter and music, and you lock her in her room like an animal! Do you know her dreams? Do you care that she's living in the most depraved area of the city? That she's growing up to think that wh.o.r.es and the men who frequent them are normal?"

He pushed himself away from the tree and turned. He had said everything. He started back the way he had come, but her words followed him. "How soon before she sells herself, too, Rafe? And why wouldn't she? There's no one who loves her! She doesn't know what it's like to have a mother or father touch her in love! She'll look for it from the first man who smiles at her, just like I did! She deserves better!"

He could hear her sobbing now. The baby began to cry, too, upset by his mother's distress. "How can you hate her so?" she sobbed. "How can you?"

He still heard her questions when he was nearly a mile away. Although he walked faster, ignoring the streetcar that thundered past, her questions kept pace.

He didn't hate Nicolette, although he hated her mother. He made sure his daughter had enough to eat and a warm place to sleep. He isolated her from the worst depravities of the Magnolia Palace, and as landlord there he made certain that the Palace was as clean and safe a house as any on Basin Street. He had done more for her than her mother had been willing to do. At least he did not pretend she was someone else's child.

But he did not give anything of himself to her, and he never had. Aurore's final words haunted him. The picture of his daughter searching for love in the arms of a stranger haunted him.

The afternoon sun was high overhead by the time he reached Basin Street. He was a.s.saulted by the fragrance of sweet olive and the tinkling of an out-of-tune piano at the end of the block. He pa.s.sed a house with three yawning residents in dressing gowns on the front stoop, and one of the women called to him.

At the Magnolia Palace he heard children's voices behind the house. He moved quietly toward the back, avoiding the crunch of oyster sh.e.l.ls under his shoes. Beside the back gallery, in the shade of a magnolia, he watched his daughter at play.

Her middy dress flapped against her bare knees as she ran, screaming with laughter, from tree to tree. Violet, skirts. .h.i.tched above her ankles, chased her, and Tony Pete, busy weeding the garden, made the occasional pretend grab as she pa.s.sed. Nicolette's curls flew in disarray, and she was smudged with dirt.