Madeleine's Ghost (50 page)

Antoinette and her family spared no expense on this funeral. Final cost for the arrangements came to over two hundred thousand dollars. They hired a construction crew and crane in Brooklyn to remove the obelisk from the churchyard at St. Basil's, a special team from the coroner's office to exhume the body, and lawyers to file the papers for removal at the Statehouse in Albany.

I provided the historical research for the project free of charge. The state required a complete genealogy, and there was at first some difficulty in proving the Rivaudais family's claims to the body. It was during the course of my research that I discovered a curious fact: Since Madeleine's day, there have been no male heirs. Not a single one. Descent has passed exclusively through the female line. The odds against this, biologically speaking, are unusually high. If it is a sort of curse, an assessment Mama Rivaudais ascribed to her grandmother, then it is a curse that has long benefited the men of Louisiana. For this sunny part of the world has seen generation after generation of gray-eyed, black-haired beauties, women who as a sort of added bonus are often graced with a languid and pliant temperament.

It is difficult to escape New York, even in death. But finally all papers were stamped and filed, all fees paid, and Madeleine was allowed to come home. Last week she was brought south around the Florida Keys and into the Gulf of Mexico's blue water on a boat full of computer parts and plastic sandals, not too different in spirit from the New Orleans packet of 150 years ago.

A special jetty has been constructed along the levee at Belle Azure, and a road paved with shells and gravel cut through the underbrush and forest up the rise to the crypt. A derrick and flatbed truck wait to transport the casket and obelisk this last half mile. At noon the guests and musicians and journalists and caterers disembark to the green smell of newly cut wood and the wide, dirty reek of the river. I join Antoinette for the funeral procession. We walk hand in hand in the mournful cadence of slow jazz through the heat. The ceremony is short, a bare fifteen minutes.
It doesn't take long to put somebody in the ground, especially if they've been there since the 1840s, at least in the flesh.

Afterward, Mama Rivaudais, still healthy and sleek despite her husband's death, stands on a chair, steadied by her daughters, to deliver a short eulogy to the crowd.

“One of our girls has come home to rest,” Mama says, her eyes vague and sympathetic through the sea green of her shades. “She has been lost to us for many years. We found her quite by accident through the help of a friend and decided to bring her back to Belle Azure, where she was born and where she fell in love. Her life was not a happy one. She suffered greatly, and resting in foreign soil up North, she has suffered ever since. But now her suffering is over.…” With this Mama turns toward the coffin resting on a black catafalque before the door of the crypt. “Sleep well, Madeleine. You're home now, honey. We'll see you again on Judgment Day.”

Then the coffin is borne down into the darkness and anchored in its niche. The great stone bearing the arms of the Prasères and the shields of allied noble families going all the way back to El Cid, Pacifier of the Moors, is rolled into place over the opening and sealed forever, and the iron-studded door is closed on the moldy dampness and on the dead that lie within.

Fifteen minutes after the obelisk is raised on a new brick foundation near the gate, the caterers have set up the food, and the liquor flows, and there is livelier music from the musicians and much drinking and eating in true Louisiana style until the sun sets into the river in the west.

Antoinette finds me at dusk, the horizon a thin strip of vermilion over the dark contours of the bayou. She slips her arm into mine and kisses me on the cheek.

“What are you brooding about now?” she says. She takes a taste of my warm gin and tonic, makes a face, and dumps the rest into the grass. “Come on,” she says.

“I'm really not brooding,” I say, but I shrug.

“I can always tell when you've got something on your mind.”

“O.K.,” I say. “I'm a historian. I tell stories about dead people. It's
Madeleine. Her story got told. Great. But what about all those people who don't get their stories told, who end up in a ditch somewhere, forgotten?”

Antoinette shakes her head. She laughs; then she is serious. “You've got to pray for them,” she says quietly. “Even though you don't know their faces, even though you never heard their voices. You've got to pray for the whole suffering world. But you can't take care of them all, Ned. You know that? You can only take care of your own family. You take care of your family first, and that takes care of the world.”

“My family?”

“That's right.”

“So how many kids you figure in this family of mine?”

“Well—” she smiles into the darkness—“I'm thirty-two now. I figure we get started right away … oh, eight, ten …”

“Jesus.”

“Why not? Got a great big old house on Esplanade. Might as well fill it up.”

Then she leans up and kisses me hard on the mouth and pulls me into the underbrush until we are deep into the bayou, and the music and the sound of human voices come to us faint and far away. It is dark here, I can barely see Antoinette's face, but we go farther still, until there is blackness all around, and we can no longer hear the music or the voices and there is only the reedy sound of the wilderness like a rushing in the water. Somehow, Antoinette finds a dry spot against a tree and lifts up her dress.

“I said I figured we'd get started right away, I meant right now,” she says, and when I find her body in the tree darkness, it feels like home.

S
IX MONTHS HAVE PASSED
. Antoinette is six months pregnant, and it looks as if she conceived the night of the funeral—whether in the woods or at the fishing camp afterward is hard to tell.

We were married at the St. Louis Cathedral when she was just starting to show. There was a reception for family and friends at the New Orleans Yacht Club afterward. Given the circumstances, we were going to do a small ceremony, something brief and civil, but at the last minute Antoinette changed her mind, and with the help of four sisters sent out 350 invitations and made all the arrangements in two weeks.

“What the hell,” she said to me, “I don't know about you, but I'm only going to get married once.”

The wedding made the society pages of the
Times-Picayune
, with pictures of the happy bride and dazed, sedated groom. The paper announced kindly that the groom looked nervous but resolved, that the bride looked lovely and pregnant in her dress of pale blue—it was hard to pull off the virginal white with her stomach showing like that—and that sonograms had revealed the sex of the child as male, the first boy baby in the family in over two hundred years. This came as a shock to me.
I
was counting on one of those beautiful girls for which they are famous and am secretly a little disappointed. But if we are going to have ten, as Antoinette says, there is plenty of room for several of both kinds.

Father Rose flew down to assist at the wedding mass and looked very priestly indeed in his vestments at the altar. He has given up golf entirely, he told me later at the reception, and has instead gone into the business of saint management full time. The strange case of Sister Januarius has received quite a bit of attention in the press lately. Miracles have been reported in Brooklyn. Cripples are walking; the blind are seeing; crutches litter the steps of the cathedral. A few of the youths of the Decateur Projects have even come to turn in their guns at the altar. Who knows what could happen next? Father Rose says the good sister is already more than halfway toward beatification. The Congregation of Rites
in Rome is investigating, but it is now only a question of legal processes and canon law. Still, it could take a year or two or two centuries. The Holy See is inscrutable in these matters, Father Rose says. And the issue is complicated by the fact that Sister Januarius's cultus was celebrated in secret for almost eighty years.

Meanwhile, Father Rose has become something of a celebrity. He has appeared on
Good Morning America
and on the Regis Philbin show. His picture, along with a scandalous close-up of the shrunken, mummified head of Sister Januarius, was featured on the front page of the
New York Post.
The headline read
A SAINT GROWS IN
BROOKLYN
? Perhaps it wasn't success in golf he had wanted all along, Father Rose confided to me as a guilty aside, but a little bit of fame.

Work on the house on Esplanade moves forward at a good pace. Antoinette hired an army of carpenters, electricians, and plumbers to do the specialty work, and last week we moved into the big bedroom on the second floor, which is still a little like camping out. I am having a hard time getting used to the idea that we are rich and still plan to finish my thesis one of these days and apply for a position teaching history at one of the local colleges. After so many years of hardscrabble living, Antoinette's money is impossible to imagine. I find myself making the most absurd economies, though I am told that after taxes our share of Papa's assets comes to something around seventeen million dollars. I say our share because Antoinette has refused to draw up a prenuptial agreement, cutting me out of a share in the loot in the case of divorce or abandonment.

“If we sink, we sink together,” she says. “Anyway, what's a million or two more or less to me now?” I have to agree with this assessment, but in my case it is God's truth that I would take her barefoot and destitute without a rag to call her own, and all this newfound wealth embarrasses me just a little. After the child is born, we're going to give some of the money to the poor, I tell her, and she folds her hands across her belly and gives a smile worthy of the Madonna herself.

Still, like Henry Murger, after the success of
Scènes de la Vie de
Bohème
, I am lifted from a life of bohemian penury and suffering in a single brilliant stroke.

One of my economies has taken the odd form of landscape gardening. I am redoing the courtyard behind the house on Esplanade, drawing on experience garnered as a summer landscaper during high school. It is miserable, backbreaking work, but it eases my conscience a little. I've got a pile of old bricks from a demolition yard, and today I am rebuilding the planter walls around the live oak when I hear the crunching tire sound of a heavy vehicle pulling into the porte cochere.

It is a vintage fifties era Bentley Continental, with a two-tone paint job of glossy black and deep burgundy and lots of polished chrome. When the chauffeur comes around to open the passenger door, I see the cross keys and miter insignia on the door and begin to brush the dirt off my knees. An older man steps out, wearing the red-trimmed skirts and cape and red skullcap that is the insignia of a cardinal of the Catholic Church. I am dumbfounded as the man approaches. His heavy gold crucifix gleams in the sun of three o'clock. His shoes are patent leather, Italian, handmade. He is short and plump, with odd square sideburns and a mole like a beauty mark on his left cheek. He smiles pleasantly when he steps up, but his eyes are grave and serious and conceal unknown depths.

“Excuse me, I am looking for a Mr. Edward Conti,” he says in a measured English that shows its Italian accent through the pronouncement of my last name.

“Yes?”

“I am Monsignor Antonio Ruccia, attached to the Congregation of Rites at the Vatican. Can you spare a moment?”

We sit at the cast-iron table beneath the live oak. Cardinal Ruccia carefully dusts the seat with an embroidered handkerchief, and when he sits, his skirts spread delicately over his knees, but there is nothing frivolous about the man. He has the assured gestures of someone who is used to the exercise of unquestioned authority. He brings out a small cassette player from a fold in his cassock, places it carefully on the table between
us, and begins to ask questions about Sister Januarius, about the apparition in the hospital, about the long and arduous progress of my research over the course of last summer.

When I am finished telling him what I know, he clicks off the tape recorder and leans close. His aftershave smells slightly of gardenias, but something about his eyes make me sweat.

“I ask you, Mr. Conti, to swear upon the fate of your immortal soul and on your love for the church, that the things you have told me are true and do not represent fabrications or elaborations on your part.”

I am flustered and for a moment think of Galileo standing before the Inquisition. “Word of honor,” I whisper, “it's all true.”

His eyes narrow for a moment. Then he nods and seems satisfied, and the tension lifts off into the afternoon like smoke.

“You must forgive me if I am too serious in my work,” he says. “But the creation of a new saint is a very serious matter. We must be sure you are telling the truth.”

I blink an agreement, and the cardinal is quiet for a moment. He looks around the courtyard, scratches his chin, smiles.

“This will be a beautiful house when you are finished with it,” he says. “I like the style of architecture here. It's open yet private. European but not quite.”

“Creole,” I say. “French, Spanish. With a little solid American Federal style thrown in.”

“A felicitous mix,” he says.

“Thanks,” I say, because I don't know what else to say. The guy makes me nervous. At that moment Antoinette emerges from the kitchen with a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses in hand. She is barefoot, and her skirt is pulled up and tied around her thighs. She's been wallpapering the room adjoining our own that will be the nursery. Her arms are speckled with paste. When she sees the cardinal, she nearly drops the pitcher of lemonade.

“Oh, I didn't realize,” she says weakly. “You've got company.”