Mardi Gras Madness Page 23

  “He must have been a good man.” Laura averted her eyes from the old woman’s face because tears washed down its wrinkled grooves now, but she continued to hold the fragile hand. She kept expecting her own Robert to come from his desk and break the moment as he bundled Angelle off to bed. Laura remembered, then, that tonight it would be her duty alone. She loosened her grip on Tante Lilliane, but the old woman wasn’t finished with what she had to say.

  “I wanted you to know about one truly good LeBlanc man. There’s a lot of my father in T-Bob, though he never knew him. But make no mistake there is some of Adrien and Charles in him, too. He won’t be shut out much longer.”

  Laura stooped to lift Angelle, but now she turned to resume her old battle with Miss Lilliane. Before the acid could flow, the old woman held up the hand that Laura had been clutching. “I can say that because you’re family now. You’ve read all the ­diaries. I know it because I had Pearl bring me the locked one. I was going to give it to you with the key, but I saw the scratches on the brass. It doesn’t matter. You’re a LeBlanc, too, and won’t betray us.” Tante Lilliane wheeled toward her room, and then paused.

  “Maybe it would have been better to burn the diaries. They blighted my life, and I know their secrets hurt T-Bob and caused Angelle, innocent that she is, real harm. Maybe they should still burn.” The old woman glanced at Laura’s shoulder where Angelle rested her head, more than half asleep. “Good night, cher heart.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The two weeks of Robert’s absence should have passed quickly enough. The calves began to come, and he phoned daily to check with Tony or later in the afternoon to say “hello” to Angelle, but he never called in the evenings when Laura was home. With all the pressure removed, she began to resent her husband’s neglect. Laura laughed at herself. Now that she had the time to think about what she wanted, she no longer wanted the time and space he had given her. Laura waited with toe-tapping impatience for the day of Robert’s return to tell him yes to the marriage, yes to staying at Chateau Camille.

  She smiled on the last evening of their separation when the telephone rang at eight p.m. She allowed Angelle to scoot ahead and grasp the receiver. He was surely as eager to have her answer as she was to give it. Pressing her lips together to suppress a smile, Laura calmly followed Angelle into the hall. The child’s look of disappointment caused an identical emotion to well up in her stepmother.

  “It’s a strange man asking for Mrs. LeBlanc.” The little girl handed over the receiver abruptly and giving Laura a pouty look, returned to her television program.

  “Mrs. LeBlanc?”

  “Yes,” replied Laura, thinking the name sounded strange and he must mean Miss Lilliane.

  “This is Dr. Alvarez calling from Ochsner Hospital in New Orleans. Your husband was brought in a little while ago, a ­hunting accident. He’ll be fine.” The doctor spoke smoothly but in haste to quell the fears of the next-of-kin. Obviously, he had done this often.

  “What happened? May I speak to Robert?” Laura’s mouth had gone dry and her pulse pounded. The call was too similar to the one she’d received telling her David’s helicopter had crashed.

  “He’s sedated right now, but he was conscious when they brought him in. He had all his papers, driver’s license, insurance card, wallet, so it wasn’t necessary to call before we made him comfortable. He was fishing near some heavy brush by the edge of the lake, and some kid hunting out of season mistook him for a deer.

  “It would have been a minor accident if the boy had called an ambulance, but he ran off and left your husband to walk back to his car alone. Seems Mr. LeBlanc thought he could drive himself to the hospital. He might have gotten killed when he blacked out and hit that embankment. Fortunately, he was driving very slowly. The police called for medical assistance and wrote up a report.

  “What we have here is mostly blood loss. A shoulder wound, no major organs were pierced. We’d like to keep him under observation for a while, at least until his blood pressure stabilizes, and we’re sure we’ve headed off any infection.”

  “Certainly.” Laura gave the consent automatically, all the while wanting to jump into her own car and go screeching off into the night toward New Orleans.

  “As I said, your husband will be fine. There’s no use your making the trip to New Orleans tonight. Mr. LeBlanc gave us the name of some relatives in the city. Their doctor is going to examine him in the morning. Why don’t you call around noon and check his condition? I understand you have a young daughter to take care of. The Montleons said they would keep a good eye on your husband if you can’t get away.”

  Laura obediently wrote down the telephone number given by the doctor.

  “Any questions I can answer for you, Mrs. LeBlanc?”

  “No. Yes. When will he be home?”

  “That’s hard to say. A week or so depending on how well he responds.”

  “Of course. Thank you, doctor,” Laura said without thinking. She stood listening to the dial tone for a moment before she realized the conversation had ended. She went for a glass of water in the bathroom before facing Angelle and Tante Lilliane.

  The child, too young to fathom the meaning of medical complications and secondary infections, accepted Laura’s assurance that her Daddy would be “fine soon” and “home again in no time at all.” Angelle did sulk when told that seven-year-olds, even on their best behavior, were not encouraged to visit hospital rooms.

  “It’s not fair!”

  “I know, but that’s the way it is,” Laura told her.

  So far she had focused all of her attention on her stepdaughter, reading a message from Robert into the doctor’s words that the child was to be her special concern. Turning to Tante Lil for reinforcement about hospital visiting rules, Laura was shaken to see the elderly woman trembling and on the verge of a coughing fit.

  Miss Lilliane, oblivious of the child, wondered aloud, “What if he dies? If T-Bob dies, what will happen to us? Cane, I know about cane. I grew up with cane. Oh, Daddy wasn’t much of a manager. He had too many Yankee scruples about exploiting the blacks, but he hired an overseer to do for him. We could handle cane. But cows. Cows don’t make enough money. We’ll lose it all, the house, the gardens, the damn cows!”

  Seeing Angelle’s eyes grow wide with alarm, Laura rushed the child to bed. The inevitable question came as she snugged the blanket around her stepdaughter.

  “Is my daddy going to die?”

  “No way, honey. And until he gets better, I’ll be here. I guess I can take care of a few cows.”

  “Do they teach you that in library school?”

  “Well, no, but I can always look it up in a book.”

  A small smile and a relaxing of the little body rewarded Laura’s feeble joke. She sat for a few minutes with the child until Angelle curled into her favorite sleeping position. Then dutifully, Laura returned to care for her elderly in-law.

  Miss Lilliane had gotten herself more or less in control. She poured sherry from the decanter that usually gathered dust on the sideboard. Her shaking hand kept missing the lip of the petite glass making up part of the set. Droplets of wine spattered on her robe like blood from a nosebleed. Laura took the glass, poured and handed it to the woman.

  “I’m sorry, truly.” Tante Lilliane gulped her sherry and asked for more. “If anything happens to T-Bob, you and Angelle will inherit his share of the house. Like as not, you’ll pack up and leave, and the Montleons will come for Angelle. I can’t buy you out. I can’t do for myself. It scares the hell out of me.”

  The old woman stared at her glass of deep amber sherry, not at Laura. “I wish my brother were alive. He was the best of my daddy and old Charles LeBlanc put together, a good lawyer, a fair judge, even the blacks trusted him. He mechanized those cane fields, and the hands he kept on got a decent wage during cutting season, but T-Bob couldn’t see it. Those family stories turned him from cane the way they turned me from marriage.”

  “Robert will be fine
and until he is, I’ll be here.” Laura echoed the words just said to a small child.

  “Still undecided? Make up your mind girl! You get on my nerves!” Miss Lilliane slammed the fragile sherry glass back on to the sideboard, hard enough to make her point, but not hard enough to damage the crystal.

  “I want to tell Robert face to face before I speak to anyone else.”

  “Ah. So for tonight you’re still family and will be for a few more weeks at least. Pour me one more sherry, please. Want to hear another family story, one not in the diaries?”

  Thinking the wine had addled the old lady’s brain but willing to go along with any distraction, Laura nodded.

  “My daddy, old A.A., had this craving in his youth to go to Paris, but every time he tried to get away, his grandmother Caroline would think of a reason he had to stay on the plantation. ‘You can go after this year’s planting,’ she would say. Then, it was after this year’s cutting, then after graduation from law school. She was feeling poorly and just might die with him so far away. Of course, he knew Adrien LeBlanc had died over there, so finally he said he would put a wreath on Adrien’s grave for her if she’d let him go. How Caroline laughed, he told me. ‘It’s not likely you’ll find a marker on a pauper’s grave,’ she said. ‘But you might find a few cousins. Look up Martine LeBeau and her family when you arrive.’ With that comment, she gave her consent at last.

  “Daddy’s bags were packed when the general took ill, and Daddy lacked the heart to leave the old man who lingered on for several months. After General Moore’s death, A.A. inherited the law practice and never did get to Paris until the war. He looked for the family of Martine LeBeau without any luck in those unsettled times. He had never read the diaries, and really had no clues to go on. Still, Caroline’s laughter and words stuck in his head. When Brother went off to war, he told him the same thing, ‘If you get to Paris, look up the family of Martine LeBeau—you may have some cousins over there.’”

  Tante Lil helped herself to more sherry after a dry cough or two.

  “Well, Brother got to Paris after D-Day. He had a college degree and spoke the standard French they teach at the university, so he ended up as an aide to a general, but he never tracked down the LeBeaus. He came home, married a sweet girl from Lafayette and had a son to follow in his footsteps. Just about the time Robert, Jr. graduated from college, the Viet Nam war really heated up, and T-Bob’s future daddy got called up for service. Brother used all his influence to get his son sent to a European embassy rather than a battlefield. He knew refusing to serve would mean no political career for Junior, but he wasn’t about to let his only child be killed in a war everyone hated. Junior found the LeBeaus while he served as an aide at the Paris embassy.

  “Evenings, he’d go to these little cafes looking for companionship. One night he came across a bistro featuring a real chanteuse, Aurelie LeBeau. The bar was tacky and had bad wine, but a better than average singer. She liked those American blues and sang in English, which attracted a lot of students and servicemen, but she lured Junior with her name. This is the only family I know of where Aurelien has achieved any sort of popularity as a given name and linked with a LeBeau in Paris naturally it drew Junior’s attention. The chanteuse declined to drink with him or any other serviceman, but when he asked if she knew the family of Martine LeBeau, she greeted him like a long lost cousin—which he was.”

  Tante Lilliane took a gulp of sherry, hiccupped and pressed her fingers over her lips for a second. “Pardon. Turned out Martine LeBeau used Caroline LeBlanc’s money prudently, setting herself up as a high-priced courtesan and eventually becoming the mistress of one wealthy man. Adrien LeBlanc had acknowledged his daughters, and they bore his name. Beautiful women and well-educated in convent schools, they reigned as the toast of the demimode in turn-of-the-century Paris. On the advice of the wise Martine, each bore a son to their wealthy lovers, thereby insuring life-long income. The French woman, Caroline’s namesake, in fact gave birth to two sons. Old Martine cautioned her that while one child insured security, too many children would drive a man away. As an old woman, Caroline’s counterpart in Paris greatly regretted taking her mother’s advice because she lost both sons in the Great War and had to live off her sister Aurelie’s generosity. She served as nursemaid to the new Aurelie when her nephew’s wife gave birth. Nevertheless, she cherished the child as she had no grandchildren of her own.”

  Slopping some wine over the rim, Miss Lilliane refilled her glass. “By then, the family had achieved respectability, and their name was neither LeBeau nor LeBlanc. Her great-aunt saw that little Aurelie studied voice and the arts, but when the girl decided to sing in the cafes instead of going into opera, her grandmother accused her sister of bringing out the wild LeBeau streak in young Aurelie and threw the woman out of her house. Her devoted grandniece went with her and literally sang for their supper during the war in Nazi occupied France. The girl used Aurelie LeBeau as her stage name, partly to spare her family and partly to shame them. Singing wasn’t all she did. She slept with men for stockings and chocolate and just for the pure pleasure of it. She had a girl child, father unknown and raised her in the cafes and clubs, took over her mother’s act and adopted her mother’s name when the older woman’s voice began to fail.

  “Jesus, this is dry work. Pour me another.” Tante Lil held out her glass with a trembling hand toward Laura who hesitated to refill it. “Pour! Okay then, where were we? Well, Junior and Aurelie spent nights trying to untangle the family tree and mostly likely doing other things as well. By the time they finished, Junior fell in love. He brought home his long lost, many times removed, cousin as a wife. When I met her, she said, ‘Aurelie, it is a dreadful name, no? Please call me Auree.’ That’s how the whole town knew her and little else about T-Bob’s mother.

  “At first, they all suspected she’d married to get out of France and perhaps, pursue a singing career here in America. Oh, but the woman possessed charm and good sense, inherited or learned from the LeBeau women. She valued the security Junior gave her and the home. She soon made herself adored by giving her husband one son, but not another to ruin her figure. Cigarette smoking eventually destroyed her voice and took her life, but she reigned as Chapelle’s one claim to sophistication during her life. She had style and wit, and I miss her to this day.”

  A coughing fit shook Miss Lilliane. This time Laura brought her water. The hour grew late, and she presumed the story to be over, its moral being that if Auree LeBlanc had lived, her son would not have tangled his life so badly. If Miss Lilliane intended the tale to raise sympathy for Robert, it did succeed. Mostly, Laura wished she could talk to someone as worldly wise as her long dead motherin-law. But, Tante Lil had not run out of air yet.

  “Only Junior and I knew Auree’s background. There was talk enough in Chapelle about the LeBlanc ancestry, so we kept Adrien LeBlanc’s little Parisian adventure to ourselves. Then along came Vivien, flaunting her lily whiteness, neglecting her child because of rumors heard. She knew nothing! One day when Angelle kept crying and crying in her room, Vivien forbid me to pick up that ‘little black bastard’. I told her it was true. Angelle had three streaks of blackness, one from Robert, one from Auree, and one from her, too, because she’d descended from Adrien exactly like them. I could prove it using the church records. What I said caused her to hurt Angelle, and I think Vivien tried to kill me in my bed. No cigarette fire flares up like that in a wall of flame. No cigarette fire leaves the smell of lighter fluid in a room. There, you know it all now, except maybe the part about Sugar LeDoux.”

  “I know all about her.”

  “Just make sure you know it right. T-Bob slept with her to get rid of Vivien. I’d have slept with the Devil myself to get that woman out of Chateau Camille. But you, I want you to stay and take care of the place after I’m gone…if the stories don’t scare you away. I’m going to bed now.”

  Tante Lilliane wheeled crookedly toward her room, hit the doorframe, then the wall and cursed. She rais
ed an imperious finger at Laura. “You may push my chair this evening and help me into bed. That’s what family is all about. Hurry up, girl. I have to pee!”

  Laura took her place behind the wheelchair. “You and all your stories don’t scare me one bit.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Laura called the hospital early and was told her husband’s condition remained satisfactory. She tried later, and they put her off with “resting comfortably.” At last in the afternoon, she reached Robert directly only to be shocked by the dullness of his voice like a knife that had lost its edge. Yes, he felt better. No, don’t make the drive to New Orleans. Yes, he would be home soon. Good-bye.

  Taking painkillers would account for the change, Laura assured herself while she told Angelle, Tante Lilliane and Pearl how well Robert sounded. He was not up to talking to them all yet.

  When Tony came in the night to report one of the heifers having trouble with her first calf, Laura called the veterinarian, pulled on jeans and trod the gravel paths of the garden to the cattle barns. The vet provided the skill to turn the calf, and Tony the muscle to pull it from the exhausted animal. Laura stood nearby providing permission, support, and buckets of warm soapy water while she learned a few things about livestock that might be of value if Robert did not recover. After all, she’d promised Angelle she could handle a few cows. She could not bear thinking about the rest.

  She overslept the next morning and berated Pearl for creeping into her room and turning off the alarm clock set for six a.m. Breakfasting on a biscuit, refusing grits and eggs in spite of Pearl and gulping strong black coffee to fuel her day, Laura raced to work. The coffee gave her heartburn all morning. She brewed tea for break, and after delaying as long as possible, called the ­hospital well into the afternoon. She dreaded hearing that lifeless voice again and prayed Robert would be better, more himself, knowing prayers are rarely answered, especially selfish ones.