Lies Agreed Upon (20 page)

“You’re an impatient miss, aren’t you? Didn’t anyone ever tell you a fairy tale when you were little? Before we get to the happy endin’, we have to escape the enchanted castle and the wicked witch. In this case, my
Grammaw Thérèse is the witch. Moonin’ over Thérèse for 30 years isn’t a love story, just the hopeless fantasy of a lonely man. You need to understand my daddy was shy and not much in the looks department even before he lost an eye and got his face pocked by buckshot,” said Miss Gloria. Then she leaned forward, her beady eyes shining. “But lemme tell you, my daddy was smart and hard-workin’. That should count for a lot more than looks and slick manners. He just needed someone to see his hidden value.”

Tess felt embarrassed by the old woman’s intensity; clearly
, unkind fate had not sent Charles Donovan’s daughter anyone who could get past her off-putting looks and manner.

“So I assume your father met your mother at Thérèse’s party,” prodded Tess, remembering Cha
rmaine’s advice to keep the old woman on track.

“At this rate, the lovers will never consummate their happy ending.”

“Oh, my poor daddy went up to Thérèse to express his heartfelt gratitude, but he was
over 50 by then, a little paunchy and gray, with a limp and an eye-patch, so grande dame Thérèse didn’t recognize him. Stammerin’ and shufflin’, my shy daddy reminded her of how she rescued him. The whole time, his angel gave him an icy stare. Then what did she do?”

Miss Gloria lifted her wobbling wattles in imitation of her grandmother’s aristocratic hauteur and spoke in a cold mincing voice, “
She said, ‘Sir, we paid a high price for my unwise kindness to an enemy. Do not add insult to injury by remindin’ me.’ Then she turned her back on him. My momma heard every word, and her heart ached for the poor man. Well, my daddy’s dream of reunitin’ with his angel was spoiled, and he went to sit alone and mope by a courtyard fountain. That’s when my momma came to him.

“
Now, Momma wasn’t a dainty beauty like Grammaw Thérèse, but she was darn attractive. If she was a 30-year-old spinster, it was ’cause she had a stronger personality than Southern male egos could handle. I reckon I’m like her. My momma told Charles Donovan to hold up his head and come dance with her, Elaine Cabrera, daughter of his ‘angel.’ So they danced all night and fell in love. Grammaw Thérèse was against the marriage, of course. She said she didn’t want a Yankee in the family, but I think the vain old witch hated to see her daughter win away a man, even one she didn’t want.”

“You describe the scene with such emotion. Did you hear it from your father? You seem to have great empathy for him,” Tess soothed.

“What?” blinked Miss Gloria as if jolted from a trance. She frowned. “I barely even remember my daddy. My parents were older when they married. They tried 11 years to have children until finally Dan came along in 1912, and then I was born four years later when my momma was already 46. By then, my daddy was elderly, and he died when I was very small. But I’ve heard my momma describe their first meetin’ many times. I guess I have ‘empathy’ for him, even though I’m not that much like him. I’m more like Momma. She was a tigress. She had to be.”

“Why do you say that? Because her marriage wasn’t accepted by the family? Did that cr
eate social and financial problems?” asked Tess.

“Her marriage wasn’t the problem. A stolen birthright was the problem. Injustice was the problem. Her marriage was just another excuse to cheat her! Thérèse and Ben made sure my momma inherited only a little dab of swamp, and
gave her brother Louis’s son, that pampered Armand, all the rest,” snorted the old woman.

“
But Momma had the last laugh. In 1919, she found oil under her soggy acres. With two wildcatters named Dreux and Cowell, she drilled until they struck a gusher. Momma had more business savvy than the wildcatters. She leveraged her profit and brought in investors to build a refinery. That way, she minted money long after the well stopped pumpin’. It was called Donovan Refinin’. You maybe guessed from the names, but one of her oil-well partners was Alphonse Dreux, that lawyer Phil Dreux’s father. One was George Cowell, and his daughter Cecilia married my brother Dan.

“
Momma’s refinery did so well in the end she could thumb her nose at the snooty Cabreras,” said Miss Gloria with a triumphant smile. “Momma made Dan president, since he was her only son, but she kept the reins as chairman till the day she died. And I was the vice president of finance there. After Dan lost his boys, he sold his interest and retired, and I did, too. That’s when it became Gulf Coast Refinin’.”

“The Donovans once owned Gulf Coast Refining?” exclaimed Tess. “That’s the company that wants to buy my property. Do you know about the offer? Does Mr. Dreux have more than a legal interest in the refinery because of his father?”

“I’ve got nothin’ to do with Gulf Coast Refinin’. I stopped carin’ about it when Dan and I sold out—and they chopped Donovan off the company name,” said Miss Gloria with a bitter twist to her quivering lips. “As for Phil Dreux, he just does lawyer work for the refinery, and that’s only because he was a so-called ‘friend’ of my nephew Desmond way back when. He’s a real little boot-licker. His daddy was never involved in the refinery and drank away his oil-well money when Phil was a boy.”

Miss Gloria squinted at the old letter’s fragile pages on the table and began to carefully fold and store the sheets in the shoebox, sighing over the revival of old grievances.

“As long as she lived, Grammaw Thérèse bore a grudge against my parents,” nodded the old woman. “When we visited Alhambra, we were always treated like unwanted guests. When I felt especially rejected there, I would go sit in the Myrtle Court in the moonlight—that’s where my daddy was sittin’ when he first met Momma. It was called the Myrtle Court because there were two myrtle trees. And there was a big stone fountain with four jumpin’ stone fish, with each spittin’ a dribble of water. Silly lookin’ fish really. It was a child’s craziness, but I guess I hoped to feel my daddy’s spirit there.”

Miss Gloria paused, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “I never saw his ghost, of course, but I knew just what he felt, alone in the dark with the Cabreras laughin’ inside.”

She glanced up and gave Tess a hard, knowing look. “I bet you’re thinkin’ that I relate so much to my father because I’m an ugly outsider, too. And maybe you’re right. But you don’t need to feel sorry for me. Let me tell you a story.

“
Once I was at a party and standin’ with Armand’s boys—Roman, Alan and Michael—when a fancy lady friend of the Cabreras came up and commented on what good-lookin’ young gentlemen they were. She ignored me, so I piped up that I was cousin to the young gentlemen. The lady looked surprised and said, ‘Really? But you’re nothin’ like these attractive boys.’ I ran to my momma, thinkin’ she’d reassure me that the lady didn’t mean I wasn’t attractive, too. I’ve never forgotten what she told me. She said, ‘It’s true you’re on the plain side, Gloria, and you can’t change that. But time will level the playin’ field. When beauty fades, those with money and power come out ahead. So work on havin’ more guts, more brains and more energy than all these pretty people. Then you can make even the handsome Cabreras eat your dust.’ And she was right. I ended up with more power and money than Armand’s pampered sons. No one dared snub me then.”

“Your mother sounds like a formidable lady,” remarked Tess, although she felt a growing pity for Miss Gloria, which the old woman probably would have been insulted to hear expressed. “I’m often shocked at the thoughtlessness of
people, even supposedly educated adults,” she added.

“If the adults were mean, the children were meaner,”
barked the old woman. “Armand’s boys never included me. It was always ‘no girls allowed’ with them. I could shrug it off, but poor Dan. As a baby, he had a bout of measles that left him with bad hearin’ damage, you see. He really struggled to keep up and be accepted by other boys. And the Cabreras were always teasin’ him and makin’ him the butt of jokes. If he ran cryin’ to Momma, they went at him harder the next time.”

Tess restrained herself from mentioning her
childhood memory of Gloria’s brother and his cantankerous deafness. Had years of rejection and isolation created the temperamental ogre of Tess’s bayou house visit?

Miss Gloria asked suddenly,
“Would you like to see photos of my momma at Alhambra?”

“I would love to see photos,” said Tess, excited to get a look at the legendary Alhambra.

“Well, these photos are from the 1920s. Like I said, I visited from time to time as a girl. Once Thérèse died and the house passed to Armand, no one stayed year-round anyway. Armand and Ben lived in the city, and we lived in a house down the road from the refinery. But we all used to go to Alhambra for special occasions. Charmaine, get me the photo album from the bedroom,” she screamed, as if Charmaine were on the other side of the street instead of calmly washing dishes a few feet away.

“You already had me
take it out, Miss Gloria,” replied Charmaine and shifted a battered leather-bound album the short distance from counter to table.

“Humph. Why didn’t you say so, instead of makin’ me waste my breath yellin’ for it?” groused Miss Gloria. “Here we go,” she muttered, carefully extracting a little pile of phot
ographs. She handed one to Tess, admonishing, “Keep your greasy fingers off. Hold it by the edges.”

Delicately pinching a corner as instructed, Tess looked down at what she assumed was a front view of Alhambra. A gravel drive led up to a
two-story façade topped by terra-cotta tile. The second story was pierced by a series of double-columned, lancet-arched windows, and the ground floor was dominated by a large horseshoe arch with round piers and ornately carved imposts. This central archway was high enough and wide enough to admit a mounted rider or a carriage (or automobile), and it led the eye from the exterior into an exotic, private courtyard. Tess could glimpse a large stone fountain, its bowl supported by crouching fantasy creatures (lions or sphinxes, perhaps). The courtyard walls were decorated by elaborate Moorish tile work whose vibrant colors Tess could only imagine.

But the house was
only a backdrop for what Miss Glory wanted to show. With a gnarled, trembling finger, she drew Tess’s attention to three figures. “That’s my momma with me and Dan. Everyone later took to callin’ him ‘Dad’ from his initials, but he was always Dan to me.”

Tess obediently studied the Donovan family. Elaine Donovan was a poised dark-haired Amazon with handsome features and a
voluptuous figure, but her children looked sullen and uncomfortable. The child Gloria, probably about 8 years old, stood awkwardly with one polished shoe toed in and the other cocked on edge. Small eyes squinted angrily. Her mouth was pulled down at the corners and shut mutinously, perhaps against the long-ago photographer’s command to smile. Daniel, who looked about 12, was more physically attractive, but he did not have a happier mien. His eyes were downcast and his mouth downturned. He had shoved his hands in his pants pockets and mulishly braced his feet.

The unhappy, vanished children gave Tess a melancholy feeling,
underlain by another uneasy sensation. She could not put her finger on it, but there was something eerily familiar about the scene, especially the Moorish courtyard.

Aware of the old woman’s anxious scrutiny, she set the photo down carefully, touching only the edges. She could
not think of a positive comment about the long-ago Donovans.

“There’s something carved in stone by the archway. Is it
the name Alhambra?” she finally asked.

“Of course
, Antonio and Thérèse put that name everywhere—in wrought iron, in stone, in pretty script on invitations to parties,” responded the old woman with a sniff for such pretensions.

She leaned forward and jerked the photo from Tess’s view, looking offended by the inte
rest in the architecture over her family. She carefully dealt Tess another from her pile.

“Since you’re so interested in Alhambra, you should see its pride and joy
: the gardens,” she said with a snide smile. “They’re copied from those Moorish gardens in Spain. That’s the view from the back gallery. See all the roses and water features, and even one of those darn peacocks. I hated those birds. They were ornery as chickens but bigger and scarier. They were always screamin’ like a horror show. At night, you’d think banshees were hauntin’ the walls.”

Tess studied the new image. It showed a long, central stone
water channel overarched by graceful jets of water. The water channel was lined by symmetrical plantings of roses in lush geometric beds with flowering borders. On either side of the roses ran high hedges clipped into arcades. Through the green arches of the left hedge could be seen flowery squares embedded with circular pools, each with its shimmering water spout. Through the right hedge arches lay a gravel path lined by potted citrus. The long central pool led the eye to a two-story, arcaded building.

“What’s that building?” asked Tess curiously. “Is it a sort of pavilion? It seems to have open-air galleries top and bottom.”

“That’s the belvedere,” answered old Gloria. “It had views all round and caught the breezes. From the top, you could see the old road and the river. We liked to play up there. And we liked the maze. You can’t see it, but, at the end of the orangery path, there was a boxwood maze. We used to take visitin’ children inside and get them lost. We laughed as they bumbled around and then rescued them. I heard Antonio once had a statue of a naked lady from the old Chastant gardens in the center of that maze, but Thérèse hated it. After Antonio died, she replaced the lady with a sleepin’ baby angel. We always called it the ‘dead baby’ statue to make her mad.”