Madeleine's Ghost (29 page)

“What about your sisters?”

She shrugs and is silent.

I turn and take her carefully by the shoulders. “Those pills,” I say. “Maybe they have something to do with you not sleeping.”

She won't meet my eyes. “Don't you worry about me,” she says. Then she leans up, kisses me quickly on the lips, and is gone. Out in the lagoon the alligator sinks back beneath the black water, silent as a stone.

W
HEN I
wake the next morning, the cabins are empty, and I hear the click and whine of cicadas from the jungle green of the bayou. A lone nutria snuffles around the patio, then scuttles away. The screen door of the central cabin hangs ajar, creaking in a slight wind, and for a moment there is the creepy feeling that everyone has been kidnapped by Indians. I think for a moment of the famous Lost Colony. How in 1591 the returning English ships found the settlers' homes abandoned, the only clue an Indian name carved into the bark of a tree, and rosy-cheeked Virginia Dare, the first Anglo-Saxon baby born in the New World, vanished forever into the haunted depths of the forest.

I pull on a pair of ragged cutoffs and a T-shirt and go down to the landing, where Papa Rivaudais is dozing in his canvas chair, fishing pole in hand, in the warm morning light.

“Sir?”

He stirs and looks up, pale watery blues focusing with difficulty.

“Huh?”

“The others?”

It turns out they've taken the pirogues and gone off on an early-morning expedition to Coeur de France and won't be back till later this afternoon. “But my daughter, she left you some breakfast in the main house,” the old man says. “She's a good girl, Antoinette. Always thinking of somebody else.”

I find the Saran-wrapped plate set out on the table in the old kitchen. There's leftover black-eyed peas, cold muffins with marmalade, cold bacon, two boiled eggs, a glass of cranberry juice, and a note.

The prospect of a day with the old folks is not as tedious as it sounds. I have never been a good traveler because I rely too much on schedules and routine. A good traveler puts his schedules aside with his expectations and lays himself open for whatever comes to pass. I eat and brush my teeth; then I spend an hour with the old man. His eyes are bad today. He asks me to read a few passages from Pascal aloud which I do in a rusty French.

“My father used to read me the comics every Sunday, when I was a little kid,” I say when he has had enough. “
The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, Terry and the Pirates.
Remember the Phantom? He lived in a skull cave in a hidden forest in Africa, and he had this special skull ring. Whenever he punched out the crooks, he left the imprint of a skull right on their jaw.”

The old man nods and squints up at the sun. “And now you're reading to me,” he says. “It's the wheel. Keeps turning. Pretty soon you're back where you started from.”

At about eleven o'clock I grope for a couple of cold Abitas in the ice chest on the patio and head off on the route Antoinette described. The path winds away through the trees for a mile, and there's the sound of strange birds and the thick, loamy smell of the swamp. Crawfish scuttle out of my way, and once or twice I see a snake sinew through the algae-covered water. After a while I pass across a well-kept footbridge and come to the white parish marker and find the shell road. The terrain is wider here and open to the sky. A stand of tall live oaks heavy with Spanish moss moves to the grave and serious music of trees in the wind. Soon the shell road branches off. Then, on a rise overlooking the river and the levee below, there is a white-washed mausoleum surrounded by an ornate wrought-iron fence.

One of the Rivaudaises' shiny Range Rovers is pulled up to the fence, its tailgate open. A variety of painting and gardening supplies lies arranged on the brick walk that circles the tomb. Mama Rivaudais, in white painter's overalls, kneels in the shell border between walk and fence, painting the iron curlicues with a can of black Rust-Oleum. She stands and wipes her hands on her pants when I approach. Green-lensed sunglasses and a painter's cap shield her eyes. The women of this family age well. She's over seventy, but her hair is just now turning salt and pepper, and her face shows few lines.

“You look like you could use some help,” I say. She studies me curiously through her green shades for a moment, then nods, and I exchange my last warm beer for the bucket and paint the fence for the next couple of hours as she squats behind in true maternal fashion, handing out much annoying instruction. At about two we break for sandwiches, and she walks me around the tomb to show off the improvements she has implemented in the last few years.

“The first thing you learn as a Creole is you better take care of your people,” she tells me. “Your dead got to be tended to just like your children. Used to be every Feast of All Souls, you'd see whole families in New Orleans out whitewashing the tombs, planting flowers in the planters, tidying up. Now you're likely to get shot out there or robbed or whatever. Especially at Old St. Louis number one and two. I feel sorry for
those old families with bones in the city. It's a shame. Can't even take care of your dead anymore. We're lucky to have most of ours all the way out here.…”

The tomb is a square monolith of brick and plaster. Mama Rivaudais has planted a border of gladiolus, which bow their heads as if in mourning against the mortuary walls. There are narrow iron grille windows on each side, and at the front, a Greek Revival portico surmounted with a cross. The heavy ironbound door is closed with a new silver padlock. On the lintel above the door is a carved coat of arms showing a palm tree and three crescent moons, bar sinister, and the Latin motto
Non duco, non sequor
, which means, if first-year Latin still serves, “I do not lead, I do not follow.”

“Antoinette tells me you're something of a historian,” Mama Rivaudais says.

“Well, almost,” I say. “I'm just an inch away from my Ph.D.”

“Good enough. Let's try you out.” We step up beneath the portico to escape the hot sun.

“They stuck this on the front in the 1840s,” she says. “During the Greek craze, when they were putting columns on everything, even outhouses. The tomb itself was raised about thirty years earlier over the family crypt, which was just a dank hole covered with a slab. It is one of the only below-ground crypts in the whole of South Louisiana; a geologist told me that this here hill is what's left of a huge rock dragged down by a glacier umpteen million years ago. Now, the crypt itself dates back to the late 1730s, about fifteen years after the French came to New Orleans. That was when my people came. They were Franco-Spanish, from Gascony, which is in the south. Been around these parts ever since. See, all this land”—she gestures out toward the bayou and the river below—“used to belong to us. It was the most prosperous plantation along this part of the river. We grew sugarcane and indigo. Not cotton. Cotton was for the no-class nouveau riche bunch, like at Nottoway or San Francisco upriver. There was a beautiful plantation house, one of the largest in Louisiana. Of course, it got burned down during the war.”

She pauses, and we gaze down at the river and the concrete levee,
which extends into the distance like the Great Wall of China. There is something familiar about the bend of the river here, the way it curves out in a loop and the gentle rise of bank on the opposite side.

“Yes,” I say, “the house was down there, where the river bells out …” but I stop. I don't know this. There is an odd prickling sensation at the back of my neck. Mama Rivaudais eyes me curiously for a moment.

“You're right,” she says quietly. “But I suppose that's obvious to a historian like yourself. The path of the river made a perfect landing for steamboats coming and going to New Orleans.”

Suddenly I am very hot, even in the shade, and there is sweat on my forehead.

“You look a little flushed,” Mama Rivaudais says. “You should have worn a hat out in this heat if you're not used to it.”

“I suppose so,” I say.

“Here, let's go inside and cool off.” She takes a key from the pocket of her painter's pants and unlocks the padlock on the heavy old door. The air in the mausoleum is stale and full of the charnel house smell of old bones and funerary linens, but it is at least twenty degrees cooler than the ambient temperature. My eyes adjust to the dim light from the windows. The flooring here is made up of worn black and white marble cut into octagonal tiles. An old iron lantern hangs from the ceiling. At the far end there is a small marble altar backed with a slab bearing the palm and crescent moon coat of arms and what looks like an elaborate apple tree hung with tiny worn shields instead of fruit.

“This was the original crypt slab,” says Mama Rivaudais, her face in shadow. “The genealogy cut here supposedly traces our family back to Spain, to Rodrigo Diaz del Vivar, otherwise known as the Cid.” She laughs at this. “You remember that movie with Charlton Heston, and was it Sophia Loren?”

“Unfortunately I do,” I say.

“I know. God-awful. Even if it was about family.”

I nod.

To the left of the slab is a shallow flight of stone stairs leading into
the darkness. The atmosphere out of that hole is dank and damp as the grave which, in fact, it is.

“It's a little spooky down there,” Mama Rivaudais says. “But we've come this far.” She takes a flashlight from a steel toolbox behind the altar and leads the way. The steps are slippery with mold. We descend slowly, sticking close to the wall. At the bottom of the steps on a narrow landing, we stop, and she shines the flashlight into the gloom. We are looking at a low barrel-vaulted chamber of brick and plaster. Its floors are covered with a half foot of water. Cinder-block stepping-stones recede in the darkness. The walls are lined with plastered-over niches four to a row, one on top of the other.

“Meet the family,” Mama Rivaudais says, a lightness in her voice. She is used to this place, these familiar bones. “We've been meaning to pump the water out of here and get an engineer to shore up the walls, but that's next year. A big project.”

“Unh-huh.” I experience an odd sensation that manifests itself as a deep rumbling in my bowels.

We cross the cinder blocks carefully to stand on a raised slab at the center. As she shines the flashlight, I make out names and dates ranging from the 1740s through the 1890s. “Look at them,” she says. “Scoundrels, slaveowners, duelists, and their ladies. Romantic, eh?”

All the niches are full except for one, a conspicuous gaping hole about waist level, halfway down. Mama Rivaudais pauses her flashlight on this absence.

“Sad story there,” she says. “The details are sketchy, but the sense is this—one of the mistresses of Belle Azure just up and ran off one day. This is a good twenty years before the Civil War. She left behind a husband who was famous for being a real bastard and two beautiful girls. It was quite a scandal. Even my aunt Tatie Louise, who knew everything about the family and would talk about anything as long as it was scandalous, wouldn't talk much about it. They never knew what happened to the woman. She never came back to be buried here in her place with the rest. Still, they kept the niche empty, waiting for her. One of those family skeletons you hear about.”

All this is very interesting, but I am feeling a little sick. I am used to such sad stories and crypts and graveyards and the bones of the past, but this is my vacation, and just now there is a thick feeling of dread crawling up my spine like a cold hand. I beg out of further explanations, and in the Range Rover an hour later, on my way back to the fishing camp in the cheery sunlight of the afternoon, I can still feel the chill of that place as a shiver along the skin.

I
N THE
evening there is another family barbecue. The husbands hold forth on some topic of current interest with the pompous assurance of property owners, Papa is asleep again, and the women talk quietly among themselves. I lean against the railing in the shadows, another Louisiana Lemonade in hand, watching Antoinette move from one end of the patio to the other, caught between the green light of the bayou and the yellow light of the house.

She is a member of this healthy, rich, complacent clan, but she is also apart. She possesses a nervousness that the others do not possess, an edge. Perhaps it is a secret ennui that eats at her, or a painful self-awareness, or something as simple as ambition—the same demon that drove her father up from the poor shack-trash bayou town of his birth in the years after World War II. But it's hard for me to tell. I suppose I don't know her that well anymore, and we haven't had much chance to talk alone.

Now the conversation turns to Mardi Gras. The husbands divide the exalted krewes of Comus and Rex between them. Jolie was Queen of Rex as a debutante.

“It must all seem pretty weird to someone from the outside,” Paul says to me. “Mardi Gras and all the craziness and the homosexuals dressed as women in the Quarter.”

“Nothing seems all that weird after New York,” I say, smiling grimly.
“Especially the East Village. We've got a few weirdos of our own running around.”

“I just bet you do,” Jim says.

“You see more and more of that,” Charles-François says. “I mean, just in the last few years.”

“Of what?” Sean says.

“Of the men dressing as women, that whole thing,” Charles-François says.