Lies Agreed Upon (4 page)

“But let’s get to the dramatic moment,” continued the lawyer as he meandered past the clumps of suitcases and chatting groups at the hotel reception. “Deep in conversation, the men approach the market. Then young Antonio is distracted by the twirl of a white lace parasol. U
nder the parasol is a woman with a tiny waist and soft swaying hips.” The old man smiled, apparently amused by Antonio’s male susceptibility.

“Of course, Antonio slows to look at the shapely lady. Her back is to him, and she is speaking with her octoroon maid.” He then paused briefly and added in a lower voice, “Oh, I know octoroon is not a ‘PC’ word as they say now, but it was a term used at the time for those of African-American descent
—mulatto for half white, quadroon for a quarter white, octoroon for an eighth, etc.” He continued in a normal tone, “Anyway, the lady turns, and Antonio sees her face. The rest is history, as they say.”

They had reached the revolving doors at the entrance to the hotel, and Dreux returned to the present to push through the doors and hand a bag check stub to the bellman. He continued briskly, “So Antonio became enamored with Josephine Chastant. She was the daughter of a French Creole planter and another neighbor of young Cabrera. There is a little portrait of her on loan to the 1850 House
Museum on Jackson Square if you want to see how attractive she was. The lady is probably flattered with the idealized look of the period, but there is something in the painting that tells you why she was described as ‘fire and ice’ in Antonio’s love notes to her.”

Tess assumed the story had concluded and that Dreux was going to take his leave. “So Antonio and Josephine married, and that’s the beginning of my family line and th
is inherited property,” she summed up.

“You are correct that their marriage is one source of the pr
operty. Some of it came with Josephine when she married,” agreed Dreux. “But you are not a descendant of Josephine and Antonio.”

“What do you mean?” Tess asked in surprise.

“Let me say that I would not have mentioned Paul Arnoult if he weren’t important. The meeting in the city was unfortunate indeed in the view of Arnoult. Antonio’s land was flanked by Arnoult’s plantation on one side and by the plantation of Josephine Chastant’s father on the other, and all three ran down to the Mississippi. Josephine, an only child, was already 30 yet had refused to consider any suitor. If there was any claim to her affections, it was her land. She loved the business of sugar planting. Her father’s plantation was one of the most successful concerns on the river due to her astute management.” Dreux shook his wobbly old head, but Tess was unclear if it was in admiration or censure of the lady planter.

“Josephine had her own sugar mill, and an alliance with young Cabrera would have pulled necessary capital out of Arnoult’s refinery project,” the lawyer explained. “But Arnoult had a more personal reason to dislike Josephine, and that was Josephine’s close relationship with her servant and confidante, the octoroon Solange Beauvoir.”

He leaned toward Tess and spoke more softly. “Solange Beauvoir was a free woman of color of West Indian origin, and she had been a lady’s maid to Arnoult’s deceased wife and later, briefly, a nurse to his infant daughter. It was said Arnoult’s sickly wife was unnaturally dependent on Solange. You see, Solange was famous as a ‘conjure woman.’ It was said she sold folk remedies and Voodoo gris-gris, or magic charms. Arnoult had disliked Solange’s domination of his wife and wanted to prevent his motherless daughter from falling under her control as well. So, once his wife died, Arnoult sent Solange packing, and it was known that the spurned servant put a curse on Arnoult. Solange was said to have an unnatural influence on her new mistress Josephine as well, and Josephine had made clear her dislike of Arnoult. As you can imagine, Arnoult did not want his young friend to fall into the clutches of a team so inimical to his interests, but—”

“But he failed, since Josephine and Antonio married,” Tess interrupted as the bellman appeared with a single black rollaway suitcase and was generously tipped by Dreux. “So how can I inherit their property and not be their
descendant?” she asked. The old man smiled, turning to signal an idling taxi with a trembling hand.

“Well, Paul Arnoult ended up playing a key role in his friend’s happiness and your ance
stry after all, and so did Solange,” responded Dreux. A taxi glided up to the curb and stopped. The taxi driver swiftly loaded the old man’s light suitcase in the trunk and then rounded the vehicle to open the curbside rear door. “Antonio’s marriage to Josephine was cut short by her untimely death. Their only son never married, so there were no descendants of that pair. But Antonio eventually married again, and his second wife was Thérèse Arnoult, Paul’s daughter. It is from Thérèse that you are descended. Perhaps you are even named for her,” concluded Dreux as he quickly tucked his bony knees and age-deflated torso into the taxi.

Stunned that she was the unknowing namesake of a long-dead Creole lady, Tess almost let the old man escape without further questioning.

“Wait. What about the maid Solange? You indicated that she was more than a footnote in all this,” blurted Tess hurriedly.

Looking up at her as she stood above him on the curb, Dreux answered with an apparent
non sequitur, “Did I mention that Solange was very beautiful?” He smiled and blinked. Or did he wink? It was hard to say whether the flutter of his crepe eyelids was voluntary tease or involuntary twitch.

“I don’t understand your point,” responded Tess with an irritated frown. “And how do you know all th
ese details about the family anyway?” she demanded. “It’s not normal legal research.” She firmly held the taxi door open as he reached for the door handle to pull it shut.

“
A family may die out, but there are memories and documents that survive. Love stories and ghost stories are always favorite topics,” Dreux replied, forestalling any further questions with a shake of his head. “If you want to know more, you really must come to New Orleans. Talk to Samuel Beauvoir, Solange’s descendant, about your ancestors. You can find him by asking at the Beauvoir Bar on Canal Street. He knew your grandfather by the way. Au revoir, Miss Parnell,” Dreux said and quickly closed the taxi door against further interrogation.

His taxi pulled away, and Tess watched the enigmatic Philip Dreux vanish into the slow arterial flow of Los Angeles traffic.

“Definitely au revoir, we’ll see you again, Mr. Dreux.”

That night, disturbed and anxious after learning of her family’s hidden past, Tess sat on her bed and flipped numbly through th
e contents of Dreux’s envelope. It was overwhelming in its detail, and she began reinserting the documents, vowing to make a careful review the next day when she was rested and calmer. A yellowed, folded newspaper clipping fell back out onto the bed. She frowned at it, recalling that Dreux had added a newspaper clipping just before handing over the envelope. She could see from the masthead it was from an October 1958 edition of the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
newspaper.

Tess unfolded the brittle old paper careful
ly. At the top, a headline read “Garden District Doctor Murdered in Home, Pregnant Wife Wounded.” Tess read the news story with increasing shock:

Residents of the Garden District were shocked to learn Thursday that a popular young doctor had been shot to death in his own home there by an unknown assailant, who also wounded the doctor’s pregnant wife.

Police received reports of gunshots at the doctor’s res
idence on Coliseum Street at 6 a.m. Thursday. Four officers responded and found a pregnant woman kneeling in the front doorway and a man lying on the entry hall floor. The woman, identified as Emily Cabrera, 22, was taken to Charity Hospital with a gunshot wound in her shoulder, said police. She is expected to recover fully, and her unborn child was unharmed, according to the hospital. Her husband, Guy Cabrera, 24, was declared dead at the scene from a single gunshot to the chest, said Lt. James O’Boyle of the New Orleans Police Department Homicide Division.

Guy Cabrera was a graduate of Tulane University School of Me
dicine and a first-year resident at Charity Hospital here.

According to O’Boyle, Mrs. Cabrera said she was awakened in her upstairs bedroom at approximately
6 a.m. by the sounds of an altercation between her husband and an unknown person in the front hallway. As she descended the stairs, she heard a single gunshot and ran into the hall, where she was also shot. According to her statement, she did not see her assailant clearly in the unlighted entry, and the gunman did not speak. There were no other witnesses. The motive for the attack is unknown, said O’Boyle.

As police pursued their investigation on Friday, the front porch of the couple’s home was quickly turned into a spontaneous memorial and gathering place for friends and co-workers. ‘Guy was a great doctor who really cared about every patient,’ said Donald Lepore, 25, a friend and physic
ian colleague at the hospital. “We are all in a state of shock.”

Tess felt the blood drain from her head into her chest, making her heart struggle painfully to pump against the sudden weight. Dreux clearly had wanted her to find this. He had slyly alluded to a “tragic” death and inserted the news article. Of course, he would suspect she was ignorant of her grandfather’s murder; after all, she did not even know his real name. How could such secrets have been kept from her? Why had they been kept? “Damn it, Mom,” she muttered, but her ghost was stubbornly unresponsive.

3
memory

Tess was unable to sleep following the discovery of her grandfather’s murder. She
did not understand why there had never been even a hint to her about her Louisiana relatives or the crime. It was hard to believe her whole ancestry had been willfully erased by her grandmother and her mother. Was it to protect her? Was it to protect themselves?

She had to admit that she had always known her family was different. It was very female and very small. Her father, an only child without living parents, had been 20 years older than her mother and had died of a heart attack when Tess was in kindergarten. Her mother never remarried, and so her only family members, as far as Tess had known, were her widowed mot
her and widowed grandmother.

Tess’s early years were rootless as the widowed Joanne Parnell embarked on a career that took her to a different city every few years. Her mother started as an accountant at a co
mpany selling industrial shelving in Texas and proved herself at a series of regional facilities until she rose to Chief Financial Officer at corporate headquarters in Los Angeles. By that time, Tess was ready to start high school. Tess then earned a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in library science at the University of California, Los Angeles. After UCLA, she got a teaching credential and landed her first job as a high school librarian. Though living in the same area, the adult Tess and her mother moved on independent, rarely intersecting tracks after Tess went to work and rented her own apartment.

Tess’s widowed grandmother, Emily Reid, had always lived with her daughter
—until she entered an assisted living facility in her final years. Her presence was ostensibly needed to help with child care, but it also allowed Tess’s mother to care for Grandma Emily, who had been frail and dependent as long as Tess could remember.

Joanne Parnell had been forced out of her job just five years before her death when her firm was sold and a merger of the finance departments eliminated her position. But she received a “golden handshake” and declared herself glad to “retire” to focus on care of Grandma Emily. Tess’s mother had seemed well off, unconcerned about the expenses of Grandma Emily’s care or Tess’s college tuition. She had even embarked on a high-end lifestyle, including purchase of a
Beverly Hills mansion, in the two years between Grandma Emily’s death and her own suicide. She had left Tess shockingly little to inherit when she killed herself. It was almost as if Joanne Parnell planned a short post-work lifespan, Tess thought bitterly. Her mother definitely would have been interested in selling ancestral land to Dreux’s client, Tess concluded. Tess was perhaps lucky her mother had not closed a deal and devoured that piece of her inheritance, too.

As the digital clock’s glowing green numbers edged past midnight, Tess’s mother, u
nmoved by her daughter’s angry thoughts, calmly reappeared.

“If you’re looking for the past, why don’t you check that box of old photographs?”

Tess sat up in bed with a frown. She was surprised she had forgotten the box—except that her mother and grandmother had discouraged curiosity over its contents. They only reluctantly provided names and dates, as unrevealing as tombstones, when a curious young Tess pawed through old photos. Now Tess thought she recalled at least one formal portrait identified as her grandfather.

She leapt from her bed and hurried to her bedroom closet, where she had shoved the box into a far corner after cleaning out her mother’s house. She dragged it out carefully. Age had so
ftened and warped it, and the musty scent of decaying cardboard marked it as one of memory’s untended graves.

She sat down on the carpet and began to rummage through school portraits and folders marked “Letters” or “Vacations.” There was even an old day planner of her mother’s, saved for the networking contacts perhaps. The sight of the handwriting
in the planner somehow affected Tess more than the photos, causing a surprise pang of grief that made her blink back tears.

At the bottom of the box, she reached her goal: a formal black-and-white portrait in a black cardboard folder. There was no date or name, but she was certain it was her grandfather. He had dark hair and a wide white smile between his aquiline nose and strong jaw. Smile lines
accented the corners of his dark eyes and bracketed his mouth, etching the young face with the evidence of laughter and sunny days. He did not look like a man to inspire violence.

What ha
d they told her about him? She racked her brain yet came up with platitudes. Her grandmother: “I was widowed very young, before your mother was born. He was a good man, and he would have been proud of you both.” Her mother: “Your grandfather’s name was Guy, and he was a respected doctor in Louisiana.”  When Tess asked how he had died, her mother had replied simply, “It was his heart.”

There were no stories of things he said or did, and no treasured m
ementos. He was a photo with no connection to the living. They had not even told her his real name. She had assumed it was Guy Reid.

She shuffled through more fading photographs. There was no wedding photo of her grandparents, Guy and Emily, she realized. There were no pictures of them together at all. As a child it had
not struck her, but now it seemed telling. There were only a few pictures of her grandmother in her youth. Tess flipped over a shot of a slim teen in high school graduation robes. “Emily, 1954” was penned on the back.

Tess returned to bed and stared at the shadowed ceiling as she began to inspect her memories once more for clues. As she dived into the colder depths of remembrance, she heard her mother’s voice faintly saying “
the bayou house
.”

Louisiana was a place of bayous, and Tess realized that she did have memories of a ba
you. When she was 6 years old and living in Houston, they had all taken a trip to “the bayou house.” Her child’s knowledge of geography was minimal, focusing on her street and her school, but it had taken more than a day to get there by car. It must have been in Louisiana, Tess decided. An image flashed into focus, as if her policing mind had swept a bright searchlight across an innocently slumbering nightscape and suddenly captured a fugitive in its beam.

The house
shimmered at the edge of her inner vision. She frowned and focused her whole attention until it emerged like a photo print developed into clarity.

It was a wood-framed square, with heat-blistered white siding and a back screened porch under an asphalt-shingle roof. The
rusty-hinged back screen door screeched and banged as people moved in and out. The house was raised up on concrete pillars, and the black musty space underneath had disturbed her, she recalled suddenly. Worn wooden latticework kept unwanted animal trespassers from entering under the house, but at night Tess was certain that she heard stirrings in the void beneath the creaking floorboards.

Tess had
not liked the house at all. Even during the day, it was dimly lit, with drawn aluminum blinds to keep the heat out. Weak bars of light slipped between bent slats and sparked floating dust motes in stale air. It smelled of age and mildew. All the adult conversations were tense and hushed, sometimes stopping abruptly when Tess entered a room.

Now she wondered about the identity of the people in that house. They had seemed a
ncient to her. When she timidly asked her mother about them, her mother snorted, “They are from your grandfather’s past. Be respectful. It’s only a short visit.”

The old people had odd names and odd natures. There was a tall, regal woman with si
lver hair in a thick plait wound around her head like a crown. Everyone called her Bee, and she pronounced Tess’s name in a funny, foreign way: Thérèse. Bee dressed in dark old-fashioned clothes with long hemlines, and she always wore a gold necklace chain with a gold cross pendant. She constantly stroked and twisted the cross with the gnarled fingers of her right hand, whether sitting in the dim parlor with the others or on her frequent “evening walks” in the twilight. Tess found it strangely disturbing to see the straight black silhouette drifting back and forth against the red-gold backdrop of the bayou dusk. Bee spoke often and forcefully, and her knowledge was encyclopedic—including instructions on proper dress and behavior of little girls. Tess tried to avoid talking to her.

There was another elderly woman who was crooked and shuffling like the witch in Snow White. She was called Cee, and she called Tess “Angel.” Cee seemed to have lost the habit of h
uman interaction and drifted silently in the middle of the chatter and bustle of the others. Tess tried to avoid looking at her because whenever Cee did emerge from her interior world, her gaze was intense and pain-filled, as if on the verge of tears.

And there was the old man, and Tess tried to avoid him altogether. They all called him “Dad,” but when she asked her mother whose dad he was, she was told that he wasn’t a
nyone’s father or grandfather. Tess assumed he was married to Cee because they shared a bedroom. He called Tess “Little Gal.” He had long-lobed ears from which nasty black hairs sprouted, droopy dog jowls and baleful brown eyes. He was very hard of hearing, so everyone had to repeat themselves loudly and make sure he could see their lips when they spoke. He moved in his own confused, sullen orbit, either interrupting in an over-loud voice or sulking silently in a lair of dark, saggy upholstery.

There was nothing to do inside the house. There were no toys, and there were no picture
books, just tattered copies of
Reader’s Digest
. There was not even a television. When she asked about TV, Bee replied, “We come here to get away from that rubbish. Go play outside. But stay close to the house.”

She was restrained by invisible boundaries into aimlessly orbiting the house’s
unhappy gravity. Bee warned her to stay away from the water because of child-eating alligators. Her grandmother warned her to avoid the high grass because of hidden poisonous snakes. Her mother warned her away from the empty asphalt road in front in case a truck roared around the bend to mow her down.

It was frustrating because a fascinating world lay so close. A few yards away from the back door was a brown waterway with a weathered wood boat dock to which a flat-bottomed metal skiff was tethered. The area by the water was shaded by trees that leaned low to the cu
rrent and held out bent branches draped in long gray moss that swayed like a ghost lady’s hair. A tall cypress crouched off the bank, with knobby black knees thrusting up from the slow opaque flow. By the bayou, the air was cooler and smelled of mud. At night, fireflies blinked under the trees in erratic mimicry of the stars, and hidden frogs and crickets created a strangely lulling music.

Tess especially liked it when they all sat outside on plastic-
strap aluminum folding chairs, even though her mother was forever coating her in some protective film—a layer of coconut-sweet sunscreen by day and tarry mosquito repellent at evening. Day or night, the air was thick and warm. It made hair limp and movement slow, but it also sucked the disturbing energy out of the old people. They sat quietly and drank lemonade or iced tea or something called Jack Daniels.

Then one afternoon, the grown-ups brought out two fishing rods and a white Styrofoam cup with wriggling earthworms.

“Come help us catch some catfish for dinner,” shouted Dad to Tess in one of his rare jovial moods. “Who knows, maybe we’ll hook the Ole Gar. I bet you’ve never seen a gar fish. It’s got a long body and a big bony head with a needle nose. Its jaws are full of razor teeth. It’s evil lookin’ and evil tastin’.”

“Then why do you want to catch it?” Tess asked.

“Well, that Ole Gar’s been king on this stretch of water a long time, and he prob’ly thinks no one can haul him in. He’s wily and strong. He’s about 5 foot long—a real big fish. I hooked him once out in the boat, but he just stole my bait and snapped the line,” concluded Dad with a tight-lipped smile.

Imagining a titanic battle between the monstrous fish and the monstrous old man, the child edged closer to her mother. But Tess’s
mother snorted and scolded Dad, “Don’t scare her with one-that-got-away stories. Besides, you know we’re baiting hooks for catfish.” The old man glared but said nothing.

Dad wound worms onto the piercing hooks
. At Tess’s wincing, he grinned and reassured her that worms “don’t got nerves to hurt.” One after another, he sent the lures flying out into the sluggish current and then jammed the poles into holders set in the bank beside the lawn chairs. Dad gave Tess the job of watching the floating bobs for any telltale jiggles or dips that would show a fish was taking their bait.

The older women went inside to make lemonade, leaving Dad, Tess and her mother to sit in the lawn chairs and tend the fishing lines. Suddenly they could hear the swell of angry voices and the crash of breaking glass from inside the house.

Tess caught only a few sentences from the heated exchange between the three older women inside. She heard her grandmother shouting, “What about the child then? I might forgive, but I can’t forget!”

Tess wondered anxiously if she was the child in question. She turned
to her mother for reassurance, but her mother had already jumped up and was marching tight-lipped toward the back door. The old man, though probably deaf to the argument in the house, could read trouble in his companions’ expressions and followed hastily.