Lies Agreed Upon (9 page)

As the walk continued, the guide highlighted various landmarks with the occasional titi
llating tale for people with minimal interest in architecture or history. The group was more fascinated by Bourbon Street’s bars, strip clubs and souvenir shops. Unimpressed, Tess assumed the street needed dark and neon to disguise its seediness. Tess only half-listened for much of the walk and took occasional cell-phone photos, but she did not feel she was really capturing the essence of the Vieux Carré with her pictures.

The Quarter was a fascinating study in time and timelessness, she decided. In most U.S. cities, the past was constantly swallowed, digested and repurposed into the foundation of the next generation of urban growth. Maybe Europeans or Asians were used to city architecture that incorporated millennia, but, as an American, she experienced the Quarter’s static survival as both time-defying enchantment and eerie mummification.

Pretty flower-bedecked balconies and bright Mardi Gras trinkets certainly did not disguise more than 200 years of heat, humidity and abuse. The faded paint, eroded brick, sagging roofs, and heaving sidewalks were undeniable proof of decay. Yet in spite of, or because of, time’s erosion, the fine bones of the city emerged, like an aging but still beautiful courtesan. It made the place mysteriously seductive. She could not imagine either her bland grandmother or hard-charging mother in this exotic setting. They had obviously left it behind in every way.

Tess peeked curiously into a fortuitously open carriageway
arch as the tour group strolled obliviously past. She caught a glimpse of the interior courtyard of a private home—and stopped in surprise. She had been instantly overcome by a strange sense of recognition. There was something familiar yet disturbing about the place, like a half-remembered dreamscape.

Through the portal, she could see a portion of brick paving and one faded gray-white stucco wall draped in a shawl of dark leaves starred by white jasmine. The vine had crawled upward to twine around the tattered iron-lace balustrade of a balcony. The jasmine’s sweetness combined with the dank tang of moss-covered brick to create a strangely erotic scent. A faint breath of this pe
rfume brushed Tess’s cheek coyly as she stood momentarily transfixed in the sunlit street.

Although Tess could feel the sun’s heavy warmth on her head and shoulders, cool shadows beckoned under the courtyard’s balcony, and long black-shuttered windows created a withdrawn, secretive aura. In the middle of the court was a large stone fountain, its basin rest
ing on four time-eroded, winged beasts. Water rose in a weak arc from a central spout, its burbling fall absorbed into the dark glisten of an obsidian pool.

Slightly melancholy at the sun’s zenith, the courtyard would become downright sinister by moonlight, Tess mused. The damp, cloying perfume that beckoned in the day’s heat would shiver the flesh like a tomb’s sigh. The thickened darkness would stir and whisper with the lingering energy of generations of past lives.

She felt a shudder of apprehension, but she immediately rejected the inexplicable malaise and hurried to rejoin the group. As she arrived, Casey was cheerfully suggesting the visitors try a “haunted history” or voodoo tour of the city, or one of the “excellent cemetery tours of our ‘cities of the dead.’” Tess ruefully acknowledged how easy it was to embrace the gothic romanticism the city seemed to inspire.

“Superstitious idiocy.”
Her personal ghost was oblivious of any irony.

As the tour group began to disperse in front of the 1850 House
Museum, someone asked Casey a question that Tess had been too shy to pose: “Why are you carrying an umbrella?”

“Good question,” Casey replied unfazed. “You see, nearly every day at this time of year, we get a violent thunderstorm, usually at about 3
p.m. Invariably, it catches me on my way home, so I come prepared,” he smiled. He saluted with the umbrella and departed, calling back a jovial “Have a pleasant day in the Crescent City.” Tess wrongly assumed it was the last she’d see of Jack Casey.

As soon as Tess entered 1850 House, Mimi Walker began waving from the rear of the shop. “You’re just in time to join the next tour,” Mimi warbled and gestured for waiting tourists to follow her into the residential museum’s entry corridor. Tess was eager to complete her mi
ssion to see Josephine’s portrait, but Mimi brought everyone to an immediate halt before an idealized portrait of the building’s creator, the Baroness de Pontalba, and Tess was forced to shift impatiently at the rear of the group.

Tess had to grudgingly acknowledge that Mimi was a raconteur as the little woman seized the group’s attention by pointing to a handkerchief covering the lady’s hand in the po
rtrait. “That handkerchief hides the mutilated evidence of an attempted murder,” intoned Mimi, eyes twinkling. She then recounted the melodrama of the Baroness’s life as a pampered Creole heiress who, after an arranged marriage to a French aristocrat, miraculously escaped being shot to death by her crazed father-in-law, who was seeking to seize control of her fortune.

Mimi’s clear enjoyment of her tale of scandal and mayhem gave Tess pause. Was there some similar horror that made her eager to arrange a gossip fest about the Cabreras?

Once her dramatic stage was liberally drenched in blood, Mimi chirped, “After she escaped death and her wicked father-in-law committed suicide to escape justice, the Baroness regained control of her fortune and commissioned construction of these elegant townhouses in the late 1840s. So let’s see the lifestyle of that time.” She hopped up the steps with impressive spryness.

Tess gave the
Victorian period furnishings in the second and third floor rooms only desultory glances, lagging the group in frustration. Finally, Mimi gave her a quick, surreptitious nod and pointed wordlessly at a small, age-darkened oil painting in one of the bedrooms. She hustled the rest of the tour into an adjacent nursery, and Tess was left alone with Josephine.

Tess was disappointed to see that Josephine’s portrait was
hardly realistic. It was primitive in its perspective, and the human figures were marked by stiff anatomical distortions. Still, the painting had a weird affect. The oversized, central figure, who must be Josephine Chastant, was posed flatly on an undersized rose-silk settee and exuded a Byzantine iconicity. Behind Josephine were a black velvet drape and a fluted Greek column. The column apparently supported a front portico because an outdoor scene stretched out, tilted up like a map on a drawing board to show first a road with a liveried hostler and prancing horse, then a square of green cane field, and last a wavy brown line that could be identified as the Mississippi because of a tiny steamboat set upon it. There was also a distant building with two brick smokestacks, which Tess assumed was the estate’s sugar mill.

It was clear that realism was less important than illustrating the subject’s status and possessions. In the shadow of the drape b
ehind the queenly Josephine, there was even a brown-skinned female servant or slave in attendance, seated on a matching pink-silk ottoman.

The long-ago painter had given Josephine a perfect oval face with dainty nose and chin, large black-lashed sherry eyes, and a pink rosebud mouth. The face was so doll-like and expre
ssionless that the artist was either untalented or paid to idealize his subject. However, there were odd details that jarred the conventional flattery. Josephine wore a high-necked riding habit of forest green silk. A matching silk top hat with trailing black lace veil perched jauntily on her head. The opulent gown and hat were carefully rendered, so that the dress fell in lustrous dimensional folds, unlike the flat green field in the background. The lace veil swirled behind the head and spilled over the back of the settee to create an intricate dark aura. While Josephine’s left hand rested limply on her bosom and piously fingered a gold cross on a thin chain, the right hand rested on her thigh and firmly gripped a riding crop.

The clothing was a clear reference to the subject’s active personality and contrasted oddly with the insipid femininity of the face. The whip, though it lay quiescent across her lap, was a slash of power and even violence against the sensuous green silk.

The other oddity was the treatment of Josephine’s auburn hair. It was combed flat, parted in the middle and bunched into neat, sausage curls on either side of the masklike face. Yet two curls closest to the face were subtly different. The one on the right sent a wayward tendril squirming outward, while a disobedient strand on the left wriggled inward to caress the neck. Tess wondered if the artist had slyly added a hint of rebellion to his depiction of the proper ingénue.

“What do you think?” Tess startled as Mimi Walker spoke quietly behind her. Mimi a
pparently felt strongly enough about Josephine’s story that she would briefly risk allowing the tour group to explore on its own.

“Well, I don’t know much about the portraiture of the time, but it seems to be more fla
ttering than realistic,” Tess replied with a vague smile.

“Well, one of the interesting things about this painting is the prominent presence of
a nonwhite,” replied Mimi, pointing at the servant in the background.

“Oh, I was so focused on Josephine that I didn’t really look at the other figure,”
remarked Tess. As appropriate to a supporting cast member, the servant’s brown dress and navy head wrap blended into the dark curtained backdrop, and the features of her shadowed face were not clearly detailed.

“Why do you think the picture included the servant?” puzzled Tess.

“Well, my friend told me a little of the history,” replied Mimi. “As the story goes, Josephine’s father commissioned the portrait and then went up river on business. He had approved initial sketches that included Josephine in a white-lace tea dress with no servant. While her father was gone, Josephine insisted that the painter portray her in riding attire and that he add her personal maid, a free woman of color. By the time Monsieur Chastant returned, Josephine had paid off the artist and dismissed him.

“Some people said inclusion of the maid showed the two women had an ‘unna
tural’ closeness,” added Mimi. “But, for myself, I think Josephine just wanted to include what she cared about—her house, her land, her horses and her servant. It makes for a more interesting painting, doesn’t it?”

When Mimi mentioned that the woman in the background was a free woman of color, Tess realized with excitement that she was probably looking at a portrait of Solange Beauvoir as well as one of Josephine.
The portrait of Solange was relegated to the background shadows, but there was a clear hint of her beauty, and her mixed racial heritage showed in her café au lait complexion and light eyes that were a tawny artistic muddle with gold and green reflected highlights.

“Well, I’m glad I could show you this,” Mimi interrupted Tess’s study of the painting. “Now, please do come to my house tomorrow around
5 o’clock in the afternoon and meet my friend. She can tell you some very interesting things about the early Cabreras. Here, I’ve written down my address in the Garden District for you,” she said and handed Tess a little index card. “Now I really must get back to my tour.”

The little woman bustled away, and Tess departed for a light lunch in the old French Market. Dreux had said she would walk in the footsteps of her
ancestors here, but she could not imagine Josephine or Solange amid the current era’s flea markets, candy shops hawking “genuine pralines,” and open-air cafés touting po’ boy sandwiches.

To cap her French Quarter outing, Tess stopped for café au lait and beignets at the famed Café du Monde on Jackson Square
. Just as she was served her fried dough under a white drift of confectioner’s sugar, she was startled by a rumble of thunder. Glancing at her watch, she realized it was almost 3 p.m., and the storm forecast by Jack Casey was galloping toward her.

Soon the streets were dimmed by a sulfurous gloom that made the flower-laden balconies glow strangely neon. An ozone-scented wind swept in, swaying the hanging
floral baskets on the balconies and swirling trash in the street. White incandescence suddenly illuminated the scene as a net of lightning was flung across the sky. A crack of thunder shook the roof.

Tess sipped her hot, milky coffee appreciatively and swallowed warm fried-dough as oversized rain bullets began to explode around her haven. The drops quickly shrank, multiplied and coalesced into grey hissing sheets that undulated in the thunderstorm’s gusts. Occasionally, a spray of rain whisked under the café’s canopy to dampen her face and bead her hair, but it was strangely pleasant after her sweaty rambles.

As suddenly as they arrived, the dark clouds sped off, trailing shafts of Elysian sunlight. Tess strolled back to her hotel in bright sunshine that polished the damp brick and drew steam from puddles.

That evening
, Tess returned to Bourbon Street to see it without sunlight’s cruel exposures. Now vaporous air drew opalescent haloes around the neon, shadows hid deterioration, and chattering tourists filled the street with carefree pleasure. Per Christina’s admonition, Tess ordered a Hurricane cocktail in a plastic “go cup” from the first bar she passed, but the drink resembled cloying fruit punch, and she threw it away unfinished.

Tess had no use for Christina’s second piece of advice to find a “hunk.” The unattached males seemed to fit two categories: business-suited conventioneers smiling widely in an intox
icated release from corporate shackles, or packs of younger males trooping in and out of bars and strip clubs. The young men jostled, hooted and yelped with a testosterone-fueled excitement that made Tess keep an uneasy distance.