Queen of the Mardi Gras Ball Read online

  “Yeah.” Burke came swaying up behind them. “If you had married Pierre, his family would be sending iron gumbo pots.” Buster laughed heartily at his own joke. “It’s time to go up to the suite, Rosie-posey, and make sure you never ever think of Pierre Landry again.”

  “We have to say good-bye to our families and our guests, Buster. I think there is supposed to be some throwing of rose petals at midnight.”

  “Now. We are leaving now.” Dragging Rosamond along, Buster staggered toward the bandstand and heaved himself up beside the leader. “A drum roll please, my good man.”

  “Atten-shun! My new wife can’t wait for the honeymoon to begin. She’s hot to trot. So we’re going up there,” Burke pointed his thumb toward the bridal suite, “and get started. All of you, stay, enjoy the party.”

  He tripped coming down off the bandstand, but caught himself on Rosamond’s shoulder. She buckled slightly under his weight. Nearby, she saw the shock on her mother’s face and the distaste with which Genevieve Boylan regarded her son.

  Recovering quickly, Emmaline St. Rochelle gestured to the guests to form two lines down the dance floor. Roxanne and the bridesmaids darted down the rows handing out small net bags of dried rose petals.

  Behind them, Buster Boylan dragged his wife along with an iron grip on her wrist that he didn’t release until they stood before the door to the suite. He fumbled with the key, finally turning it in the lock, and shouldering open the door, banging it shut with his heel. Immediately, he pawed at the wedding dress.

  “Buster, please. Let’s slow down. It will be better for both of us.”

  “How would you know, my pure queen of the Mardi Gras, my virgin bride? Did you sleep with other men when you went traveling in Europe?” he asked, suspiciously.

  “No, of course I didn’t sleep with them. Buster, I have a surprise for you. Hazel DuLac gave me the most naughty negligee at my shower. It’s all laid out in the bathroom. If you’ll only let me go, I’ll put it on for you. Black lace, Buster…it’s black lace.”

  “Yeah, I can wait for that. Not too long though.”

  As soon as his fingers released their grip, Roz ran to the bathroom and locked herself inside. She could take her time and let Burke get some of the alcohol out of his system. She struggled from her dress and took the pins from her hair, rubbing her neck to ease the tension. Standing there in her straight slip with its wide lace straps, she felt the pressure of the box she’d stuck in her garter. Thank heaven Buster hadn’t groped her legs. Anything regarding Pierre Landry was bound to set him off.

  Roz took the plain white box—held shut with only a single blue ribbon—from her garter. The object inside did gleam silver, but it wasn’t made of precious metal. Resting in a purple satin holster with a strap to wear around a thigh lay a small two shot pistol. No antique derringer purchased from a shop on Royal Street, the gun and the slightly soiled holster looked as if the gift had been redeemed at a pawnshop or won in a poker game. It came with a box of bullets no bigger than one joint of her little finger and a simple pasteboard card that read, Roz, Take Care, Pierre.

  Aunt Harriet had worn a similar weapon on their jaunt across Europe. She called it a “discourager,” not big enough to kill a man unless you got in a lucky shot, but certainly dangerous enough to be discouraging. Aunt Harri hadn’t used the little pistol. European men tended to be charming.

  A fist hit the bathroom door. “Hurry up in there!”

  Roz tucked the strange gift into the bottom of her makeup case, tore the card in tiny pieces and flushed the bits down the commode. Pierre persisted in being as melodramatic as he had been on Mardi Gras by insisting they not unmask during their tryst. If he cared for her all that much, why hadn’t he said to hell with the conventions of society instead of leaving her to Buster?

  Her new husband paced outside the door, his breathing loud and his footsteps heavy. Roz remained under no illusions that Buster loved her despite his jealousy, but he did want to possess her, and as a prized acquisition, he would do her no harm. She finished her toilette, brushing out her long hair down the back of the negligee. The gown came only to mid-thigh and was largely transparent except for the bodice and a deep black lace trim that started several inches below her navel, a far cry from a silly pair of yellow pantaloons and a red silk blouse that would probably be wasted on Buster.

  “Do I have to knock down this door?” he roared.

  “I’m ready. I’m coming out, Buster.” She posed in the doorway to appease him.

  He jumped her like a feral dog on a purebred bitch in heat. Pulling her head back by her hair, he forced her mouth to take his tongue, ran his other hand over her breasts, squeezing tightly the way he always did. On the bed, he held her down with one knee while he divested himself of his evening clothes. His penis throbbed hard and thick against her leg.

  “Buster, shouldn’t we be taking precautions?”

  “Precautions? What do you know about precautions? Aren’t you a good Catholic girl, Rosie?”

  “I thought we might wait a while for children. Travel, have some fun, get to know each other better. There’s plenty of time for kids.”

  “Your old man gave me one piece of advice, Rosie. He said give my daughter a baby the first year. That will settle her down. I can’t disappoint your papa, now can I? My brother was born nine months to the day after my parents’ wedding. Got to keep up the old traditions. You’re fighting me.”

  “No, no, I’m not,” she said, aware for the first time that she did push against his chest with both hands. “I only need more time.”

  “Time is up. Been waiting eight damn months, and don’t tell me I couldn’t have had you sooner. Let’s get it over with quick. Quick and hard, that’s how the girls in the Quarter like it.”

  He forced her legs apart and thrust himself inside in one brutal stroke. He went as fast as he promised, but unready, she cried out in pain. He pounded away mindlessly toward his release which came in one great heave. Burke collapsed over his bride, not bothering to shift the weight of his body for her comfort. At last, he rolled aside and searched his clothes for a pack of cigarettes. He took casual notice of the tears rolling down Rosamond’s cheeks.

  “Hurt, huh? A little blood on the sheets. So you were a virgin. I have to tell you, Rosie, I had my doubts. Cigarette?”

  “No. I gave up smoking.”

  “Good. Burke Boylan’s wife should never be seen smoking in public. I feel like a million dollars. I think I’ll take a shower.”

  When Buster returned to the bed, Roz lay huddled beneath the covers pretending to sleep. He soon snored beside her, a heavy sleeper who wouldn’t wake until morning.

  Chapter Nine

  Rosamond still huddled on the far side of the bed when morning came, and she felt the weight of Buster lift from the mattress. She feigned sleep while he shaved, perfected his hair, and dressed. When the door closed behind him, she got up to bathe and scrub herself clean of her husband. She covered her bruised body in a thick robe provided by the hotel and let the black negligee lay in a heap in a corner of the bath. When a respectful knock came at the door, she hesitated to answer, but then, Burke would have the key, wouldn’t he?

  A waiter wheeled in a breakfast cart holding flaky croissants, a covered dish of eggs Benedict, the makings for café au lait, and a single red rose in a silver bud vase. Roz read a message from her husband as the waiter made a show of blending the rich coffee and steamed milk into an oversized cup.

  My Dearest Rosie—Sorry about last night. I was hot for you. Maybe I was too rough. Let me tell you, I got a lecture about it this morning. Tonight will be better. I promise. Your loving husband, Buster.

  Dear God, he’d bragged to someone—his older brother, his father or hers—about their wedding night. Roz shook as she searched the pockets of Burke’s evening clothes, still in heaps around the room, for a tip.

  “No need, Madame. Your husband has taken care of it. If I can be of service in any other way?”

&nb
sp; “Thank you, no. It all looks so wonderful.”

  After the door shut, she forced herself to eat a croissant and finished the coffee. The two poached eggs riding on a muffin and the slice of ham in a puddle of yellow sauce, she covered with a linen napkin, unable to bear the sight of them. Still, she had a very long journey ahead and must prepare for the trip. Roz picked up the second croissant and pulled it into tiny, bite-sized pieces.

  ****

  The newlyweds were to travel on the sleeper train with the Boylans to Philadelphia and endure a second reception for friends who had not made the trip to New Orleans. Afterward, the bride and groom would embark on a liner for France. All had been planned out for them. In the narrow bed provided by the railroad, Buster stayed swift and silent in his sexual demands and soon snored. In his parents’ house, he bothered Roz not at all.

  Once in the stateroom of the liner as the couple steamed toward France, Rosamond learned what she had to know about her husband in order to survive. If she encouraged him like a two dollar whore saying, “Oh, Buster, you’re so strong. This is the way I like it, hard and fast,” he finished quickly, the only difference being she wasn’t paid and no other customers waited.

  If Burke drank until his nearly colorless eyes glazed—and she encouraged him to do so—her husband would be asleep before she came out of the bath. On nights when she gauged his condition poorly, intercourse became hell. He’d be brutal. She would struggle. In the morning, bruises ringed her wrists where he’d held them over her head, marked her breasts and thighs. Once, he’d wrapped her long hair around her neck and pulled until she’d seen purple.

  The many diversions of Paris worked their magic on Burke. While he had no interest in the museums, the artists of Montmartre, or the cathedral of Notre Dame, Buster took full advantage of a city where Prohibition was nonexistent and even ridiculed. Once he discovered the pleasures of the Folies Bergere and Josephine Baker doing her notorious banana dance, Rosamond’s evenings became easier. While watching the topless Baker stomp and gyrate in her skirt of rubber bananas increased Buster’s desire, his drinking decreased his abilities. He bought his wife a souvenir doll of the dancer in her suggestive skirt, then bought more for his friends. Roz wondered if she should offer the doll bits of food and drink out of thankfulness, the way practitioners of voodoo did to their statues.

  On a side trip into Spain, Buster gloried in the gore of the bullfights, but they lacked the soporific effect of Baker and French spirits. In a dusty cantina near the bullring, he jerked his wife by the hair into a back room holding casks of wine and pottery jars of oil and punished her sexually for an imaginary flirtation with a slim, olive-skinned man, mustachioed and dark of eye, who sat at the next table. As Burke pounded against her body pinned to the whitewashed wall by his hands, it slowly dawned on Roz that the man who had paid a compliment to her beauty in Spanish resembled Pierre Landry. She had given the stranger only a small, polite smile, but now she closed her eyes and imagined another man’s face as Buster reached his climax.

  When Buster finished, he pulled up her drawers and yanked her, wobbly-legged back into the bar room. The two other women in the place turned their eyes away from the white smudges on the back of her navy blue dress and her straggling yellow hair from which all the pins had been ripped. A group of men made obscene comments in their own language. Burke smirked, enjoying what he thought they said about his manhood.

  Paris was better. While Roz shopped she could count on Buster to find his own amusements. Certainly, he sampled the goods of French courtesans just as she selected silk scarves, exotic perfumes, and strange pieces of art portraying women that looked as if they had been taken apart and put together again wrongly. In Paris, his appetite for her blunted, but the long sea voyage home loomed ahead.

  The seas turned choppy on the return trip. Roz suffered terribly from mal de mer, though by evening she could usually keep down the light foods the ship’s physician recommended. Still, the illness put off Buster who worked out his frustration in the gymnasium, slamming his fists into punching bags and lifting weights to maintain the physique that French foods had increased by several pounds. At her most miserable, Roz cheered herself with the thought that if she were always sick, Buster might take his interests elsewhere.

  ****

  Back in Philadelphia, Mother Boylan, as she wished to be called, observed that her daughter-in-law seemed even paler and punier than before the trip while Buster obviously thrived on marriage. She watched Roz shed the gray wool coat with the silver fox fur collar and its matching cloche hat and hand them to the maid before Burke could assist her.

  “How stylishly thin you’ve become, Rosamond. That is a very elegant outfit, I must say. Let’s have tea, just the two of us, in my rooms and let the men to their brandy and cigars,” the former Genevieve Renard said, looking at Rosamond from head to toe, her pale blue eyes assessing and finding fault as they had done since their first meeting a little over a month ago.

  They went to her motherin-law’s personal sitting room in her private wing of the monstrous brownstone paid for years ago with Renard money. The room had windows enhanced with Tiffany side panels and a wonderful view of anyone coming and going in Genevieve’s household. Surrounded by antique Chippendale, the silver tea service sat on a piecrust table centered on an oriental rug. The red velvet draperies could be pulled if privacy was desired, but today, Mother Boylan preferred to allow the clear October light to pour in. As Roz unbuttoned her gray kid gloves, the lace on her long sleeves falling back, Gen Boylan noted the yellowish bruises around both wrists.

  Mother Boylan poured the scalding tea into two cups. “You will take cream and sugar. You need building up, my dear.”

  “I suffered from seasickness on the return voyage. My stomach is still unsettled. Thank you for your concern.” Roz picked up a piece of Melba toast spread with cream cheese and a small garnish of red caviar and ate it while waiting for her tea to cool. The sweets presented on small silver plates did not appeal to her.

  “I am concerned. Of course, you realize by now that my son is a vainglorious bully just like his father at his age. Oh, Baxter Boylan was big and blond and domineering in a way no southern man could match. He exuded power, which I found very attractive. Like many young women, I made a foolish choice.”

  Genevieve Boylan sat regally in her chair as if still enthroned next to the king of Rex. Her hair retained its pale blonde color thanks to a skillful beautician, but she wore it atop her head in a thoroughly dated fashion. Her face showed no wrinkles, perhaps because she never smiled. She sipped the steaming tea prepared with one slice of lemon, no sugar, as if it were a chilled beverage.

  “He hit me only once while we made the rounds of family visits after our marriage. I was already expecting my first son—as you might be.”

  Rosamond shook her head. “It’s just the aftereffects of the sea voyage. That’s all.”

  “Time will tell. I had the sense to insulate myself with old family servants and the power to demand a suite of my own when I agreed to come to Philadelphia. I let Baxter Boylan know that if he ever touched me again, I would return to New Orleans with his child and never grant him a divorce. As for mistresses, I didn’t care how many he took. Shocked, poor child? No wonder when you grew up with that pussycat of a father, Laurence St. Rochelle, all bluster and no bite, and Emmaline Fabre who had four children and two miscarriages before she figured out where babies came from. And dear Gilbert, marrying that raging suffragette who probably remained childless by choice. How handy being married to a doctor must have been. I had to resort to locking my bedroom door.”

  “But you had a second son,” Rosamond rushed to point out, wanting to defend the St. Rochelles.

  “The result of a terrible lapse on my part. Burke was a mistake. He has always been favored by his father. They have the same looks, the same brutish nature. He has been encouraged from childhood to use his fists and his power over others. If he failed to win, Baxter disciplined him in th
e same way. My first, Roland, is cool-natured like myself, an exemplary young man. You will note Rolly is in no hurry to marry. Burke, on the other hand, we sent south with an ultimatum to curb his temper and settle down. The incident with the maid was the last straw, so to speak.” Mother Boylan selected a cherry cordial from a dish of chocolates, sucked out the center and popped the rest into her mouth.

  “The maid?” Rosamond questioned.

  “Well, you’re family now, and really should be told for your own sake. We’ve paid out a great deal of money over the years to people Buster has damaged—his several nannies, a boy at boarding school, the young man at Princeton he nearly killed in the boxing ring—but the maid was the worst. Deirdre, such a sweet Irish lass, became pregnant. She claimed Burke raped her.” Gen Boylan fluttered a long-fingered hand.

  “The Irish, you know how they lie. Burke is an attractive man used to getting his own way. We had already arranged for a discreet delivery and an adoption into a good middle-class family when Buster came home from Princeton for a visit. He beat the poor girl senseless, not because she had gotten herself pregnant, but because she’d cried rape, a blow to his vanity, I suppose.” Mother Boylan observed her daughter-in-law’s face taking on a faint green tinge.

  “What became of Deirdre?”

  “Oh, she lived, but ruptured her womb. She won’t be troubled by childbearing in the future. The small fortune we gave her along with a ticket back to Ireland should buy her a husband no matter what condition her face is in.”

  Rosamond glanced frantically around the sitting room with its three exit doors, not knowing which one would be closest to a bathroom.

  “Here, my dear child.” Mother Boylan held out the silver waste bucket from the tea tray.

  What little she had in her stomach came up immediately, but the dry heaves continued for some time afterwards. She could feel Genevieve Boylan patting her back in a way that did not comfort.