Cajun Waltz (5 page)

*   *   *

L
EOPOLD, WHEN CUSTOMERS
entered the store, had developed a tendency to rock aggressively in his chair in order to propel himself to his feet. Richie got a kick out of seeing him, at the ring of the front bell, gather momentum with his face turning red and his white hair flying. One day the old man launched and kept going, hurtling forward like a toppled tree and smacking the floor face-first. The comedy of the pratfall preceded its seriousness by several seconds. Richie was still laughing when the realization dawned that his father-in-law was badly hurt. It was markdown day at the store. The crowd of shoppers recoiled in horror from Leopold's lifeless body and Richie's pealing laughter.

Block's Dry Goods was a Lake Charles fixture and Leopold an eminent figure. Dozens of mourners came to Orange Grove Cemetery to pay respects. Richie felt them eyeing him at graveside as the lout who'd found this funny. The feeling got worse during the reading of the Kaddish prayer of mourning. The strangeness of the Hebrew spoken by Leopold's temple colleagues brought home to Richie how bizarre it was that he should have wound up connected to this old dead foreigner.

He studied Leopold's uncovered granite casement. It was built half out of the ground on account of the region's high water table, the varnished casket inside looking like a long shiny shoe in a shoebox. He wondered what he was doing here, how in hell he'd fathered two children with a woman he barely knew, and did he really see himself running a department store for the rest of his life? The questions posed their own answer. He would escape first chance he got.

The Kaddish was gibberish to him, what he imagined Apaches or Zulus talked like around their heathen fires. The lingual murk set his thoughts adrift. He heard a woman's murmur inside the Kaddish's monotone. He turned to the sound with hazy joy that some angel had come to save him. It was only Esther whispering, “I don't get a word of it.” He blinked at her as if unsure who she was.

“Amen,” several men said abruptly. Richie thought the Kaddish was over and chimed in, “Amen.” But the responses were part of the ritual, standard avowals of something, and the prayer resumed with no end in sight.

“Lord,” Esther said under her breath. “Could it be any drearier?”

“That kinda day,” Richie said.

“Was Papa's time. Gotta accept it.”

Her composure spooked him. “Your time now,” slipped out accidentally.

She put her hand inside his. “Thanks for saying that, Richie.” She rarely addressed him by name; it seemed a warning of sorts. “But really it's
our
time.” She brought his hand to her lips and kissed his fingers one by one.

Two hours later they were having intercourse in their bedroom at home with clothes thrown around and Esther heedless of the bedsprings groaning or the nanny she'd hired being just down the hall with the kids. Richie was torn between self-consciousness over their racket and fright at his wife's weird passion on this fraught afternoon. She clamped him so hard into her breasts that he had trouble getting air. Things were slippery down there as never before. Her cries in his ear became continuous. He looked over his shoulder to make sure the door was shut. He caught a glimpse of her bare legs, thick, pale, bent at the knees, jutting upward around his hips in the afternoon light. The sight astonished him, her open thighs flexing each time he pushed into her. He heard his own cries mingle with hers.

They retreated to separate sides of the bed. At length he asked, “Gonna tell me why?”

“A wife needs a reason?”

“A daughter kinda do, day like today.”

“Not one no more. Could be that's why.”

Dusk in the window signaled the end of a long day. Richie pictured the fresh-laid slab on Leopold's tomb going dark on this first night of many. A baby's yelp in the nursery startled him. Esther began to get up before falling back on the pillow. “Help's here now, I forgot.”

“Who she again?”

“Sallie Hooker. Told you ten times.”

“Surprised you went with a colored.”

“She's half only. Bayou gal. Up from trouble, lookin' for better.”

“You know some man got to do with it.”

“Long as she's straight now.”

“Ain't like we need her,” Richie said.

“I'm back the store tomorrow.”

“Your father did not want that.”

“He's got no say anymore, God rest him.”

“I don't want it neither.”

Esther tucked against him. “Don't start, Richie. Not after such sweetness.” One breast lay huge across his chest. Moments ago he'd been trying to inhale it into his mouth. Now it made him feel queasy.

“You know he seen a lawyer.” Esther rose on one elbow as Richie spoke. Her blond hair framed her face and he appreciated how flawless her complexion was up close. This accounted for his hesitation, as of a gently applied knife, when he added, “'Bout me takin' over the business.”

After a pause she said, “Please tell me that's a lie.”

*   *   *

L
EOPOLD'S WILL STIPULATED
that Block's proceed under Richie's control with Esther as a limited partner. When the children turned twenty-five, they would share in the operating profits or the net proceeds should the business be sold. Abe Percy, wearing his usual linen suit with a pastel shirt and matching pocket square, explained the terms to Richie and Esther in his office.

Richie had expected to inherit the store outright. In his mind he'd already sold it and banked the money after leaving, as he saw it, a fair fraction to his wife and kids; now he'd have to stick around to gather his cut piecemeal. Esther saw betrayal where her father had seen tradition. “I don't understand how he can reach out the grave and make me do what he wants even then.”

“You could file an objection with the court,” Abe said.

“Kinda shit is that?” Richie said. “You wrote the will, now you wanna tear it up?”

“I say it
because
I wrote it and
because
it's a fact. I warned Mr. Block that churches and government can mandate perpetual property rights, but not always individuals.”

Esther clasped Richie's hand. “Then we'll fight it.”

Richie pulled free. “Your father had a right—”

“Block's is
my
right!”

Richie turned to Abe, a fellow man in the room, like-minded and sensible. The lawyer acknowledged, “Be hard for her to prevail without your consent.”

The subsequent silence said everything. Richie talked anyway. “I run it. Kids get it. Wife stays home.” He turned to her with the calm of a man holding aces. “Like Papa wanted.”

“Let me just work the store like I always done.” Tears came. “You need me there, you'll see.”

It occurred to him she was talking sense. “Long as I'm boss.”

Her sniffling quieted.

“Make suggestions, okay. No opinions.”

She nodded.

“Because I
will
be the goddamn boss.”

“Whatever you want.”

“Whatever I want.” Richie pointed at Abe. “You heard it.”

“I did.” Overweight himself, Abe had sympathy for Esther on many levels, marriage to this grabby hayseed heading the list.

“Little test,” Richie said. “We been callin' her Justine, don't ask me why.”

“Her? You mean your daughter.”

“Well, that's just it. I wanted Bonnie, but I got overruled at the time.”

“Because you were out drinking,” Esther said.

“I'm talkin' to the lawyer here.”

She lowered her eyes. Abe hurt at the sight of it.

Richie went on, “And I cannot get right with Justine. Bonnie's my girl. Miss Bonnie Bainard from Lake Charles, USA.”

“You're saying you want the name changed,” Abe said.

“In the paperwork, yes I do. Make it official here on out.”

Abe looked to Esther. Her face was splotchy from crying earlier, as if slapped by a clumsy master. “Justine was my mother's name,” she said.

“Then surely out of respect—” Abe began.

“No,” she cut in. “Bonnie's fine.” Abe saw that she had little choice but to feed her husband this concession, but that she felt obliged to sweeten it with “In fact I like it better” made his heart sink.

“See,” Richie grinned. “I was right all along.”

Abe leaned back in his chair. When Richie took Esther's hand in a possessive grip, Abe's gaze was there to meet hers as she mutely begged him to pity her plight. Recognition lit their faces too tenderly for Richie to notice. You could say Abe and Esther found each other at that moment, as friends rather than lovers—but either way, for life.

*   *   *

W
ITHIN A YEAR
of taking over Block's, Richie opened stores in Shreveport and Baton Rouge, closing the latter after a few months but opening three more around the state in 1937 and 1938, when the worst of the Depression seemed past. Tailoring their wares to the needs of each locale, he otherwise patterned the establishments after the original. The sign and outside façade were indistinguishable among them. Even their staffs were alike. Richie hired female managers, an idea he got from watching his wife run the main store while he concentrated on the big picture. He judged candidates on the basis of his image of Esther. Salesmen needed charm and brass. Managers had to be diligent, organized, and invisible. Like her.

He let underlings do the daily retail slog while he hobnobbed with bankers and local bigwigs, a crowd he was pleased to discover enjoyed a drink and a laugh same as him. Esther planted herself at the Lake Charles store, squeezed into her father's old rocking chair with a ledger in her lap, monitoring accounts from throughout the Block's chain. Richie did the hands-on management, driving store to store in a canary Packard, striding in slick as a Federal agent and peppering staff with questions supplied by his wife. His black workers out back in the storage yards enjoyed his banter and the dollar bills he put in their hands. Whites in the front showroom remained gratifyingly cowed. His wife urged him to fire weak performers, but at worst he only cut their wages. Letting them keep their jobs allowed him to think well of himself and less of Esther, the heartless sow.

Neither had any touch for parenting. Richie's affection for his daughter began with her name, “Bonnie Bainard” meeting his ideal of the saucy all-American gal that any daughter of his surely must be. Esther's sense that the girl was a sourpuss was closer to the truth. The genetic misfire that caused Bonnie to shoot up in height to where she stood a head taller than the tallest boys in her class didn't help. Being neither cute nor popular despite belonging to one of Lake Charles's most successful families was bound to promote a glum attitude.

Her brother R.J. was more personable but rare to show it, a genuine loner but for interaction with the nanny, Sallie Hooker, who stayed on as the Bainards' live-in help as the children grew. Sallie, out of fondness, mistook R.J.'s quiet for introspection and his time spent with her in the kitchen and laundry as showing sensible regard for her hard-won country wisdom, rather than what it was, a way to hide out from his family. R.J.'s one certifiable virtue concerned the money she mailed each month to her home in Hancock Bayou down on the coast, the purpose of which, she let slip one afternoon, was to help her daughter being raised there by Sallie's mother. It didn't occur to R.J. to ask about the girl's father, but Sallie told him anyway. “He gone. Dead in a ditch.”

“Fell?”

“Or got push. The drink done it either way, you can bet.”

R.J. was too young to give this fact its full due. But keeping secrets was natural for him, and, compelled by Sallie's grave expression, easy in this case.

*   *   *

R
ICHIE WASN'T ONE
to mark turning points or reflect on the past. His memories of the war in 1918 meant no more to him than the steak he had last night or the whiskey he shortly would quaff. A whore, afterward, was the same as his hand, and the esteem of his family was less a factor in maintaining his mood than having a nice automobile to drive and at least twenty bucks in his pocket at all times. But in the summer of 1938 he received two jolts that put him in mind of regrets and desires not even a new car could assuage. It felt like the hand of fate in action, spurring him to better his life while giving pardon in advance for any outside hurt it caused. Like a dog that somehow learns to read, Richie underwent a miracle. A simple man became less so.

It was a Wednesday in August when Joe Falcon entered the Lake Charles Block's with a guitar in one hand, a suitcase in the other, and a length of rope looped around one wrist. Richie, who rarely came to the store and was only there to get some petty cash out of the register, recognized him at once despite the musician's thinning hair and ratty suit. Joe's singing partner Cleoma Breaux walked a few steps behind him. Richie wouldn't have recognized her if they hadn't been together. Her hair was a tangled bird's nest and she wore an ill-fitting dress and dirty tennis shoes. She carried a baby of maybe six months in the crook of one arm, carried it with unnerving vigilance, like a girl so afraid of dropping her doll that she almost breaks it from squeezing. Cleoma's free hand gripped the rope tied around her waist, by which Joe led her as if on a leash.

Richie stood behind the store's front counter. Joe dropped his end of the rope to the floor and stepped on it while he opened the guitar case. Cleoma continued past him with a rapt expression until the rope tightened and tugged her back like a balloon on a string. Richie wondered what had happened to the lively girl with the knowing smile he'd met ten years ago. Her gaze drifted to his.
“Mes compliments,”
she said before looking off elsewhere. He felt sick to see such strangeness.

“My wife tell that to everyone,” Joe said. “She mean only kindness by it.”