Mardi Gras Madness Page 19

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Laura wandered the recreation hall trying to find a table with a free chair and a few acquaintances where she might sit for the pageant. She gave up and resigned herself to a solitary seat along the wall where many of her elderly library patrons gathered in dresses as crepey as their skin. Some wore real jewels on their spreading bosoms and others outmoded tiaras bobby-pinned to their sparse white hair. They welcomed Laura among them, reaching out withered hands to feel the fabric of her gown and nodding approvingly at her necklace. Miss Lilliane sat in the group among the wallflowers, but gave Laura only one venomous glance before the pageant began.

  A skillful decorator had dressed the recreation center for the event. The basketball hoops were raised and obscured by a dropped ceiling of gold painted latticework from which hung the royal banners of purple, green and gold. Regal red runners covered the boundary lines on the gymnasium floor except for the area reserved for dancing. Every other inch of space held tables and chairs packed with local citizenry. The curtain on the stage in the rear of the gym rose to reveal three golden thrones.

  The center throne held Queen Victoria, alias Iola DeGravelle, whose sheer bulk made her the obvious choice for the part. The matronly queen, dressed in purple and gold, and crowned with a reasonable facsimile of the imperial jewels, stood and welcomed her subjects to the presentation of her honored guests, King Louis and Queen Marie Antoinette. The royal couple appeared opposite each other, paced toward the center of the ballroom and crossed so that everyone in the audience could view the magnificence of their capes held up by two small pages each. Then, ascending ramps on either side of the stage, radiant Denise DeVille and courtly Dr. Bourgeois took seats on their thrones with the pages clustered at their feet.

  From her space on the sidelines where it seemed Queen Marie Antoinette had thrown an especially vivid smile on seeing her among the old ladies, Laura observed the entrance of the Court of Spring, two young women decked in capes and voluminous ball gowns portraying the flowers of the season. Each wore a towering headdress of stylized cherry blossoms and carried a staff wrapped in ribbons like a small maypole and topped with a nosegay. Following each princess, a little girl came holding the edge of the heavy cape off the runners and displaying its embroidered pattern of pink and green flowers to the crowd. Laura had pricked her fingers over one of those children’s gowns swagged with rosebuds, but she did not recognize the girl wearing it.

  As the Maidens of Spring came from opposite doors and progressed slowly toward the center of the room, young men in pale green tuxedos, pink rosebuds in their lapels, appeared beside them and took their arm, a gesture more practical than romantic. The young women needed more help in balancing their enormous headdresses and heavy capes than the staves and little girls could offer. Still, the gorgeous couples made an excellent show.

  Jules Picard, his tubby body enclosed in his own tuxedo, served as captain and announced the members of each court as they appeared, giving not only real names but royal titles and elaborate histories to each princess. He proclaimed the Maidens of Spring to be the fair flowers of the Netherlands, the Princesses Helga and Beatrix, portrayed by Renee Landry and Louise Theriot.

  Summer’s princesses came from Spain with headdresses like radiant suns and gowns of red and gold. Their escorts wore pale yellow dress suits with small white daises in the buttonholes. Autumn’s ladies arrived clad in yellow and orange with rustling headdresses of colored leaves, each supported by men in dark brown tuxedos decorated with one yellow mum. All were purported to be from Italy. Lastly, arrived the Court of Winter, the royalty of Germany.

  Laura craned from her seat to see Angelle’s entrance, but the rotund Princess of Winter obscured the child who carried her cape. Up until now, the magnificence of the regalia covered up any physical flaws the princesses might have had. No one really looked at the small oval faces beneath the headdresses or at the bodies dutifully dragging the weighty capes and gowns about for display, but there was no hiding the fact this princess of winter was fat. Her small eyes, sunk in a doughy face, blinked incessantly, betraying the fact she had gotten contact lenses just for this occasion. Beads of sweat on her temple reflected the light as if they were a planned part of her lofty tiara of silver snowflakes.

  The girl trudged along hopelessly, leaning heavily on her white staff with its garland of silver holly and willing the eyes of the audience elsewhere. Without warning, the stout princess tripped on the red runner. The cape matching her silver and white gown and carried by Angelle who had only now appeared within the doorway ripped from the child’s hands. Small gasps from the onlookers predicted a disaster for the pageant, but Robert LeBlanc caught her arm and steadied his maiden, smiling and whispering to reassure her no harm done. The Princess of Winter turned red, but smiled timidly. Angelle, at a nod from her father, picked up the cape, and all three resumed their march across the hall.

  Near Laura, a fleshy matron in a red dress with a spangled bodice suitable for a circus performer announced loudly, “That’s my little grandbaby, T-Michelle. We proud of you, honey, and you got the best lookin’ man, too.”

  Little Michelle on Robert’s arm paced well past their group, but the back of her neck between her headdress and gown blazed crimson. Miss Lilliane, offended by the woman’s lack of decorum, replied in an equally loud voice, “T-Michelle looks exactly like her memere.”

  In a lower voice she told Laura, “Emilie Boudreaux’s daughter married up, you know. Roger Maturin was so homely no one else would have him. Poor Michelle has her father’s face and her grandmother’s figure.”

  The two old women began a match of shooting each other poisonous glances while Laura sat between them and concentrated on the stage where Robert bent as solicitously over T-Michelle as the younger escorts did over their more willowy princesses. As the lights came up, the overheated crowd made their way to the restrooms or the punch bowls and refreshments set up in an adjoining room. Family photographers flocked to the stage where a professional attempted to take the official pageant pictures while flashes from small cameras went off all around him.

  Laura found herself alone when Miss Lilliane wheeled off in search of a restroom and the heavyset grandmother sought some punch and sandwiches. Waiters with trays of champagne glasses began to serve those preserving their places at the tables. Laura seized a glass and wandered out to the lobby to stand in the long line of women forming at the ladies’ room door. As usual, the men’s room had no queue. Laura speculated over why this was always the case—larger bladders, greater fluid retention, less to take off, who knew?

  By the time she accomplished her mission, not so easy in a wide gown, and returned, the court had left the stage. A band tuned up in their place. One by one, the princesses reappeared minus their headdresses, capes, and staves. The wisest maidens had looped their hair into tiny, uncrushable displays of braids. Michelle Maturin’s head, whose close cut style brought out the pumpkin-like roundness of her head, was still damp with sweat where the headpiece rested. Robert did not escort her. Instead, her portly grandmother chaperoned. A tall gaunt man with small eyes set close to a large beaked nose and ears that would have flapped in the breeze had there been a breath of air in the hall trailed them. This gentleman, no doubt, must be the homely father, here in a rented tuxedo to do right by his equally homely child.

  When the music began, the hall filled again. King Louis and Queen Marie Antoinette led the dance and were joined by Queen Victoria and Jules Picard. In pairs, the princesses and their escorts came out on the floor. Robert appeared in time to guide the stout Michelle around the other couples. Gradually, the onlookers entered the dance.

  Laura, who had lost her seat, found herself holding up a section of the wall and trying to avoid the crushing footsteps of small pages rampaging around the gym like normal children, free at last from all the restrictions of the pageant. She wondered irritably if Robert had to spend the whole evening with his princess. It looked that way as he began anoth
er dance with the ecstatic Michelle in his arms. Even Angelle found a partner, a little Bourgeois boy imitating his father.

  The dancing continued. Wedged in by the proud grandmother and on her third glass of champagne, Laura watched as Robert turned Michelle over to Jules Picard and claimed Denise DeVille. They made a handsome couple, he so dark, she so fair. Resolutely, Laura struck up a conversation with Emilie Boudreaux, complimenting her on how bravely her granddaughter had handled that little stumble. Mrs. Boudreaux gave credit where it was due.

  “My little Michelle is blind as a bat without her glasses. Good thing her escort caught her, or she would have gone splat. That T-Bob is a nice boy—unlike some of his family I could mention. But, you know they got crazy people and all kinds of bad blood in those LeBlancs. In some, it comes out.” She stared at the back of Miss Lilliane’s head while her victim obliviously supervised Angelle from the edge of the dance floor.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this to you, but you got to live with her, poor heart, so I’m just warning. Things must be real serious between you and T-Bob for you to be wearing his mama’s heirloom necklace. I ain’t seen that out the box since way before Auree LeBlanc died. You got her coloring. It suits you. But Auree was only a slip of a woman. That’s why the cancer took her so quick. No meat on her bones like you and me.”

  Mrs. Boudreaux pinched Laura’s bare arm, but she barely felt it. She wanted to shove through the throng, take off the necklace and offer it to Denise DeVille. She wanted to create a big scene. She wanted to get Robert’s attention.

  Before Laura could move and carry out her champagne inspired act, Robert began dancing with Iola DeGravelle. She settled back into her place and learned the true meaning of the word “wallflower” as he chose Angelle for his next partner, then several elderly women, Michelle again, and then Angelle once more.

  Finally, Laura said goodnight to Mrs. Boudreaux. The waiters had not passed her way for quite some time, and her champagne-fueled impulses faded. Though still before midnight, she thought she would return to Chateau Camille, leave the necklace in Pearl’s room and go to bed. That seemed safe and sensible. As she pushed near the dance floor to tell Miss Lilliane her intentions, a man seized her from behind and whirled her around in time to the music.

  Jules Picard, a short man, breathed heavily into her cleavage and questioned her as they danced. “Why you hiding out with all the old ladies way back in the corner where no one can get at you? Did Robert make you promise not to dance with anyone but him? Well, you dance with me while he does his duty. I done mine!”

  Laura wondered if she really had been hiding, waiting for Robert to make some grand gesture. Jules Picard exercised her vigorously, then took her to his table for more champagne and handed her off to another member of the Mardi Gras Association. After that, she had no chance to escape and go home. The array of partners seemed endless, thanks to Jules. They ranged from young members of the court, who disguised their age with slim moustaches and slight beards, to her undertaker trustee whose hands were not at all cold this evening. Laura lost track of dances danced and champagne consumed. She waved gaily to Angelle when the child departed with Tante Lilliane and laughed at everything Jules Picard said to her when he seized her for a second dance.

  “I like my ladies to have a good time. Laissez le bon temps rouler, as we like to say. Let the good times roll!” Her trustee gave her a small squeeze and appeared a little annoyed when a masculine hand tapped on his shoulder.

  “Now look here, we just started this dance! Oh, it’s you, Bob. I guess you got prior claim. I been keeping her warm for you. Well, laissez le bon temps rouler, Laura.” Jules danced himself off the floor and went to get a fresh bottle of champagne for the table.

  Dizzy with drink and dancing, Laura’s impulses returned. When Robert held her close, she pulled him even closer and whispered, “Why did you give me this necklace?”

  “I wanted to give you the ring that matched it.”

  “But you took the ring back.”

  “No, you dropped it.”

  “I came to you in the barn.”

  “And I ruined the moment. But not tonight, Laura. Tonight, I will give you romance. Tonight, I shall whisper amorous French phrases in your ear.”

  He did. His French even worse than Laura’s, he began with “La plume de ma tante”—the pen of my aunt—murmured passionately into the hollow of her neck. She laughed, and her laughter took her back to the first day in Chapelle: ogling his ass in Domengeaux’s café, calling him Little Bob and treating him like a hired hand in his own barn, going on his irreverent tour of the Chateau. For a while, all that kept them apart vanished.

  No one interrupted them as they danced all the remaining dances together, sometimes with champagne flutes in their hands, sometimes sipping wine from each other’s glasses. A fairy tale night, Laura reflected. Not a Barbie doll night, she thought, as Denise whirled by propelled by a pimply youth. She and Robert were like Cinderella and her prince on the old music box she’d had as a child. When wound, it played Someday my Prince Will Come as the couple twirled under a glass globe nothing could penetrate.

  They took a bottle of champagne outside and danced beneath the stars. The night remained strangely balmy for February, and other couples stood here and there in the dark until people began to leave the hall.

  “You going to midnight Mass?” Robert called to an acquaintance who passed waving a wine bottle.

  “Hell, no, we’re going to Broussard’s Barn! Come along!”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Robert took control of Laura’s car. They bucketed along the back roads, part of an entourage of well-dressed and drunken revelers. “I sent Tante Lil and Angelle home in the Lincoln. I thought tonight you might just give me a lift,” he said.

  Laura didn’t answer. Perhaps, the time had come to put a new man in the driver’s seat, but she wasn’t about to say so. Excessive indulgence in champagne had a way of making decisions much too easy.

  They came to a crossroad where an old country store stood, its flaking metal sign reading “Broussard Grocery.” Enough vehicles crammed the field next to the store it might have been mistaken for a used car lot. The sports cars and sedans of the Mardi Gras set joined the pickup trucks and motorcycles. Robert carried Laura across the muddy lot and up the creaking cypress steps, stumbling a little, and not nearly as agile as he had been during the pageant. Setting her down on the porch, he said, “Just practicing for later when I carry you off to have my way with you.”

  “Do it,” Laura challenged.

  “Not now! Later. I promise. Come on.”

  They entered through the store, a real country store with a grated window that served as a post office and had a small sign reading “Justice of the Peace” to the left of that, plus a jumbled array of canned goods, some with labels faded with age, to the right. The only sales taking place seemed to be for cold drinks and occasional jars of white liquid served from under the counter by a fat man in a soiled T-shirt with stained yellow armpits.

  Robert led her straight ahead down an aisle and into a huge metal building attached to the store. Here a mass of people danced spasmodically to the beat of an all black band playing an exotic blend of rock, Cajun, and country music. The crowd was mostly white, except for a few colored women in very short crocheted dresses with little on beneath, who passed in and out of two large open doors in the rear of the place. Laura could see the dim form of an old motel behind the building.

  Before she could take it all in, Robert’s friend with the wine bottle beckoned them to a table. He generously shared his bottle with the group. Laura took a big swallow. Not wine. The fire spread from her throat to her toes. She coughed and the friend snickered. “I had Broussard fill it with some of his white lightning.”

  A tall, brown-skinned woman, large in the breasts and barely covered by orange crochet that matched her hair, leaned over Robert. “How’s it hanging, Bob? You alone on Mardi Gras Eve? Need a date?”

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sp; “Not tonight, Sugar. Miss Sugar LeDoux, I’d like you to meet our parish librarian, Laura Dickinson. I guess you don’t get to the library too often.”

  “No, sir. I use the one at the university.” The hooker winked. “Anything I can do for the rest of you gentlemen?”

  “How about me, Sugar? I’m lonely.” The wine bottle wielder ran his hand under her short dress and snapped the elastic on her bikini pants. His petite blonde date, his wife actually, glared.

  “Well, maybe on my poker night.”

  Working the room, Sugar passed along to another table.

  “Hey, you know her real name is Beulah. I’d change that one, too. She took the LeDoux from the sheriff’s name. They’re not really related like everyone says. Good joke, huh, Sugar LeDoux, Sugar the Sweet.” The drunk laughed, and his wife speared him with another look he was too numb to feel.

  “That’s Pearl’s…” Laura said slowly because her lips felt ­clumsy and her mind slow. In a moment of insanity, she’d taken another sip from the bottle.

  “Just an old friend of mine,” Robert interrupted. “Let’s dance.”

  They danced now to a primitive rhythm as unlike the sedate music of the ball as possible. The band made the most out of a strange assortment of instruments: fiddles, two electric guitars, drums, a triangle and an accordion. One musician became an instrument himself, strumming a corrugated metal sheet worn over his shirt.

  “They call this music Zydeco, meaning string beans. I can’t even guess why,” Robert shouted over the beat.

  “The Broussards used to have a real barn out back, used as a speakeasy in the Twenties, but the place burned down in the in the Fifties when the family ran a little short on money. They got enough from the insurance company to pay off some debts to a group of pretty shady characters. Later, they put up this metal building. Everyone still calls it Broussard’s Barn.”