I Am Madame X Read online

  A group of chattering adults rounding the corner of the house from the garden gasped to see the pile of satin on the lawn. Grandmère, her coffee-dyed brown hair tucked under a straw hat, ran to Julie, knocking over a butler’s tray holding brown-sugar lemonade and a cornmeal pound cake. Others followed, hovering, crying. Someone called for Dr. Porter. The priest approached, but Grandmère pushed him away with her wiry arms. “Keep back!” she cried.

  I stood frozen on the lawn, until a soft voice whispered in my ear, “Come with me.” It was Charles, Julie and Mama’s half brother. His eyes were red and filling with tears. Clasping my hand tightly, Charles led me past the murmuring circle of dark figures and up a back staircase to his room in the garçonnière. He removed a checkerboard and a box of checkers from a mahogany bookcase and arranged a game on a wicker table. “Let’s play,” he said.

  Charles was a large boy, with a big head and a smooth, intelligent face. His blue eyes were fringed with curly black lashes the color of his straight hair—Julie’s hair—and his mouth was a red bow. All his clothes came from Paris, and though I’m sure at times he wore homespun flannel like the other planters’ sons, I recall him only in fancy breeches, broadcloth waistcoats, and stiff white linen collars. He was just six years older than I, but he had a sure sense of self and a serious manner that made him seem beyond his years. “You first,” he said.

  With a shaky index finger, I pushed a black checker forward. Charles responded with a red. For five minutes, we stared at the board and moved checkers silently. Finally I found the strength to ask, “Do you think Tante Julie is dead?”

  “Probably,” said Charles. He was trying to act manly, to speak flatly and show no emotion. But his voice came out in gulps. “The heat must have made her crazy. It’s always horrible on the feast of Sainte Claire.”

  Charles was obsessed with the weather. He watched every change and spent hours studying the sky and the clouds. Several times a day, he consulted his Almanach français—the American Almanac was worthless, he said—which gave the saints’ feast days and, he insisted, provided clues to weather patterns.

  “Then we’ll see her in heaven,” I said hopefully. I knew from The Gates Ajar, an American book Papa read to me, that the gates of heaven were always open to welcome new arrivals. When I died, I would be reunited there with my lost loved ones. We would be happy angels, an unbroken circle of love, the book said, free from all trouble and harm.

  Charles slid a red checker forward with two square fingers. “If only Julie had waited a few days, cooler weather would have come with the Feast of Chantal, and then she would have felt better,” he said.

  I placed my finger on a fat black checker, but this time I couldn’t move it. The thought of waiting until my own death to see Julie—impossibly distant, I assumed—had stolen my resolve.

  “Mimi, go on!” snapped Charles, fighting for his equilibrium.

  My tears erupted in a single burst. I ran from the room, down to the end of the hallway, and hid in the large linen closet, intoxicating myself with the cool, soft linen sheets and the deep, sharp fragrance of vetiver sachets.

  Parlange was Grandmère. She had won it, and she had willed it to survive. Even today, more than fifty years later, though it still stands and she is long gone, no one who lived through those times can think of the plantation without conjuring an image of her.

  Grandmère’s parents were Canadian immigrants who died in one of the many yellow-fever epidemics that raged through Louisiana with the summer heat. She was adopted by the plantation’s original owner, Marquis Vincent de Ternant III, the descendant of a French nobleman, and his childless wife. Soon the wife died, and a few months later de Ternant married Grandmère. She was barely fourteen.

  She quickly had four children—Mama was the first. But Grandmère was an indifferent mother and thought nothing of leaving her babies behind to go off to Paris for the social season. People still talk about the stir she caused boarding steamers in New Orleans, corseted nearly to suffocation in a brocaded gown and trailed by ten slaves dressed like African royalty in silk turbans and robes. In Paris, she kept an apartment at 30, rue Miromesnil and went to theaters and the opera, where her box was next to the box of Charles Parlange, one of Napoléon’s colonels. After the marquis dropped dead of a heart attack one evening in the middle of dinner, his head falling into a plate of oysters, Grandmère married Colonel Parlange and brought him to Louisiana. She renamed the plantation in his honor.

  The colonel didn’t last long in the choking Louisiana heat. He died two years after the wedding, leaving Grandmère with another baby, Charles. After losing two husbands, Grandmère set out to run the plantation herself. During the next year, though two of her middle children—a boy and a girl—died, she didn’t let grief stop her from learning everything there was to know: she pored over the plantation’s ledgers and diaries at night, studied weather patterns, repaired the levees and irrigation canals, and organized the army of slaves for the fall harvest.

  Grandmère considered herself French, but when it came to slavery, she was an American Southerner to the marrow of her bones. She did not believe slavery was evil, even though it had been outlawed in France. She thought Negroes were ignorant savages incapable of living on their own, and she took pleasure in the failures of those who had run away from Parlange or managed to buy their freedom.

  She drove her slaves hard, though she was not gratuitously cruel. She wouldn’t have dreamed of selling a mother away from her children, as some planters did, and she reserved beatings for serious offenses like stealing. She rewarded industry and once sent a slave who showed a talent for carpentry to New Orleans to apprentice with a famous ébéniste. He returned to make Grandmère’s massive, intricately carved bed and most of the armoires in the house. Grandmère took care of her slaves when they were sick, fed and clothed them well, and gave them Saturday nights and Sundays off.

  Grandmère and Mama were only fifteen years apart. They looked like sisters, both small and wiry, with pale skin, delicate features, and masses of dark hair. By the time I came along, Grandmère’s hair had turned a dull, muddy brown, the result of rinsing it once a week in coffee, and there was a hardness around her mouth and eyes, as if her determination had finally etched itself on her face.

  Mama and Julie were raised at Parlange and took lessons from a French tutor. They didn’t learn to speak English until they were adolescents, and they never learned to read or write it well. Of the sisters, Mama was the more robust, but Julie was the one who enjoyed roaming the fields and playing with the dogs that were always lounging on the grounds. Mama disdained the slow, uneventful pace of plantation life. “Even as a child I was bored by it,” she confessed to me once. “I was born sophisticated.”

  During frequent trips into New Orleans with Grandmère and Julie, Mama walked on the narrow banquettes of the French Quarter, past the rows of old houses with their lacy wrought-iron balconies. She was dazzled by the gaslights, the expensive trinkets behind the glass storefronts, and the elegant couples she glimpsed through carriage windows and hotel doorways.

  When Mama was eighteen and Julie sixteen, Grandmère bought a house on Burgundy Street, a headquarters from which she launched her daughters into Creole society. She hosted teas and dinners and took the girls to the opera, where they sat sipping champagne in a loge lined with red velvet. Julie was indifferent to the social hurly-burly and often declined invitations to parties. But Mama never missed one.

  At a dance at the St. Louis Hotel, she met Papa. She said they fell in love the moment their eyes locked across the ballroom. The orchestra was playing a waltz, and candlelight from two enormous crystal chandeliers flickered over the twirling couples.

  Papa was perhaps the most eligible bachelor in town—tall and handsome, with flashing dark eyes and auburn hair that rippled from his forehead in glossy ridges. He was also brilliant, having studied the law and set up a practice on Camp Street by age twenty. And he was rich. His father, Philippe Avegno, had ar
rived in New Orleans from Italy in 1823, already wealthy from his Italian shipbuilding operation. After marrying the daughter of one of the city’s most prominent Creole families, he amassed a new fortune in real estate and built a high-ceilinged mansion on Toulouse Street. The couple had ten children; Papa was the seventh.

  He married Mama two months after they met, and took her to live in his father’s house. “I felt like I was home for the first time in my life,” Mama told me later.

  It’s hard to imagine what Papa saw in Mama, beyond her beauty. She was gorgeous—with large black eyes, flawless white skin, and a slender, graceful figure. But she was prickly and prone to imagining disasters. She also was a relentless complainer, always snapping and picking at Papa. Frequently, he lost his temper with her. I’d often awake in the morning to their loud, violent shouting. I remember the servants scurrying down the hall away from my parents’ bedroom, the slammed doors, and my mother’s pathetic crying when the storm was over.

  Decades later, long after my parents’ death, I was astounded to find a copy of divorce papers in Mama’s desk. A few months after Valentine was born, she’d sought to end her marriage—an almost unthinkable act for a Catholic Creole. According to the court papers, during one of their arguments, Papa had socked Mama in the eye, drawing blood, and Mama had fled her father-in-law’s home, taking Valentine and me to live in Grandmère’s townhouse on Burgundy Street.

  I vaguely recall moving there after Christmas one year, but I have no recollection of Papa not joining us. In fact, I have a distinct memory of him playing with me on the parlor carpet. He always was gentle and affectionate with his children. I don’t believe he ever once spanked me.

  Before anything could come of the divorce, the war broke out, and Papa left to fight. Grandmère thought we’d be safer at Parlange, so Mama agreed to join her.

  But she didn’t fit easily into the role of adult daughter living in her childhood home. Mama took no interest in helping Grandmère run the plantation, and she spent most of her time sitting on the back gallery, rocking Valentine’s cradle with her foot and complaining loudly about the dearth of “congenial people” to call on or to pay calls on us. She had more grievances: the mosquitoes, the killing heat, the paucity of servants to help with the children.

  Then Rochilieu arrived. With the excitement of the wedding, Mama perked up and helped eagerly with preparations, selecting the china and crystal to be used during the reception and dressing Julie’s hair a few hours before the nuptials. I didn’t understand why Mama was so happy about marrying Julie off to a fat, ugly old soldier. “Julie doesn’t even like him!” I pointed out to Mama as I helped her collect plates from the cupboard in the dining room on the morning of the wedding. Mama looked at me sternly and said, “In the name of our family Julie must make a good match.”

  As it turned out, Julie did not die. She survived, though in very bad shape, with two broken legs, several cracked ribs, and a severely strained back. Each morning, Alzea picked her up and carried her from her bed to the parlor settee or to a wicker chaise on the front gallery, where Grandmère gave her the responsibility to watch for Yankee soldiers. At night, Alzea carried Julie back to bed. One day, one of the Negroes staked a pole with a white towel tacked to it on the road near our front gate, a signal to old Dr. Porter to come up to the house when he passed on his daily rounds. He fitted Julie with an elaborate steel brace that she wore under her clothes. The awful contraption chafed her skin, causing terrible sores that had to be washed twice a day.

  I spent hours by her side, holding old copies of La Vie Parisienne up to her face so she could read it to me. Julie never complained about her infirmity, and seemed as cheerful and playful as ever. She composed a little English verse, which she recited to me every day:

  A six-year-old child,

  A six-year-old child

  Is a wonderful thing to behold.

  I love you, Mimi,

  My six-year-old child.

  Please never, ever grow old!

  There was no more talk of marrying her off to Lucas Rochilieu, who had left grumpily the day after the aborted wedding.

  Forever afterward, Grandmère and Mama spoke of Julie’s leap from the gallery only as “a terrible accident.” One day, Mama took me aside. “You must never say a word to anyone about Tante Julie’s accident,” she warned. “And you must never, ever ask Tante Julie about it.”

  Of course, I had already asked Julie why she did it. She looked at me ruefully and sighed. “Someday you’ll understand, Mimi,” she said. “There are things worse than death.”

  Though Julie’s spirits stayed high, to the rest of the household her suicide attempt seemed a gloomy presage of future disaster. Even as a child, I knew that trouble was coming, that life was changing. Though the war hadn’t yet stretched beyond New Orleans, Grandmère believed it was only a matter of time before Yankee soldiers marched through Parlange. Alzea made a French flag out of some old dresses and hung it from a cypress post on the front gallery as a signal of our neutrality. Still, Grandmère buried four metal chests full of cash in the garden and hid her best jewels in the hollow of an ornately carved bedpost. And she started carrying a large dagger in her belt.

  Our tutor, a young man who lived in one of the pigeonniers on the front lawn, had enlisted in the Confederate Army when the war started, and no one bothered anymore with our lessons. Charles and I were left on our own most of the day to roam the woods and meadows. Sometimes we’d ride in the cane wagon out to the most distant fields and watch the workers, their backs bent against the sun as they sliced cane knives through the tall reeds. We’d go to the garden for picnics of peaches and smoked ham prepared by Alzea. Afterward we’d try to catch frogs in the stream by the side of the house. Or we’d spend hours playing with our pets at the barn. I had two chickens, which I had named Sanspareil and Papillon. Charles’s pet was a brown bear cub he called Rossignol, who was chained to a thick post outside the barn. A slave had killed Rossignol’s mother with a scythe after she wandered into the fields one day. Another Negro caught the cub and gave him to Charles.

  The most tempting diversion of all, particularly on brutally hot days, was to sneak off to False River, a narrow ribbon-shaped lake that had formed from a bend in the vast Mississippi centuries ago. Mama had forbidden us to go near the water, even though we were good swimmers. She worried that we’d get eaten by alligators. But one day, when I was light-headed from the heat, I suggested to Charles that we go for a swim. Charles studied the sky, sniffed the air, and said, “There’s no need to swim. I’m sure it’s going to rain. Mama’s corns were killing her this morning.”

  “If you won’t go, I’ll go by myself. You just don’t want to swim because you know I’m a better swimmer than you.”

  “Mimi, you’re a deluded child,” he said in the formal, supercilious manner he used with everyone. “But if you want to be humiliated in a race, fine.”

  We ran down the straight driveway, across the main road, and up the bank to False River. “We’ll see who’s faster,” I said. I pointed out a starting point near a large oak and indicated a spot about fifty yards down the bank as the finish line. We stripped down to our drawers and chemises, jumped in the water, and swam as fast as we could, furiously churning our arms.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a female figure striding toward us. Her stiff broadcloth skirt swung like a bell, and the wide ribbons of her bonnet flapped around her shoulders. At first I thought it was Mama, but as the figure drew closer I heard Grandmère’s scratchy bark and saw the glistening dagger in her belt.

  Charles had seen her, too, and now we stood in the muddy water up to our waists, shivering from fear under the burning white sky.

  “Get out right now and put your clothes on!” Grandmère shouted. We scrambled into our things, and Grandmère pushed us up the levee, a bony, blue-veined hand on each of our backs.

  When we got to the house, she took one of the long, thin keys that hung from a large ring on her belt and u
nlocked a door under the front stairwell. “Get in,” she ordered. As soon as we were inside, she slammed the door shut and turned the key. The square enclosure was just big enough for the two of us. It smelled of damp wood. A shaft of sunlight slid under the door, providing enough light for us to see clusters of spiders and bugs.

  “Mimi, you’re always getting us in trouble,” hissed Charles.

  “And you’re so perfect,” I snapped.

  For the next twenty minutes, we bickered and poked and nudged each other. Just when I thought I couldn’t stand another second of it, I heard a rapping on the ceiling, followed by a loud plink. In the slice of sunlight at the door, I saw a key on the ground. Grandmère had left it on the table next to Julie’s chaise, and Julie had pushed it off the gallery. By lying flat on my stomach, I could stretch my hand under the door and finger the cool metal key. Another scraping push, and I had it. As Charles and I freed ourselves and ran to the garden to hide, we heard Julie chirping above. “You’re free, chéris! Free, free.”

  Our swimming adventure had put Grandmère in a particularly foul mood, and for the next week or so Charles and I stayed close to the house. One afternoon, we made a book for Julie, from a serialized novel in yellowed copies of L’Abeille, the Creole newspaper. We were cutting out the pages and sewing them together when a pale boy tore up to the house on horseback. He tied his mare to a cypress post and stomped up the steps. I went with Mama to answer the bell. The boy said nothing, but he handed her a white sheet of paper bordered in black. I couldn’t read the words, but I saw the drawing of a tombstone and a weeping willow, and I knew immediately what it meant. Papa was dead.

  Mama read the note with frightened eyes, then crushed the paper in her fist and fell to her knees. We both sobbed loudly, chokingly. Despite her broken relationship with Papa, or, perhaps, because of it, Mama was devastated. Grandmère, who was in the dining room helping Alzea set the table for lunch, heard us and ran in. “Papa! My papa is dead!” I cried. Grandmère crossed herself and knelt down to pray.