CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
T he convent infirmary had bare walls and a tile floor scrubbed clean each morning and evening by a postulant who moved back and forth on her hands and knees, her white robe fluttering about her. Sister Marie Baptiste had told Aurore not to speak to the postulant, not even to ask her name. Aurore had lain in silent agony each time and struggled not to inhale the fumes of the disinfectant.
She had no doubt that this was part of her penance for bearing a child out of wedlock. Five months ago the sisters had taken her in because she had paid them well and because they had been persuaded it was their Christian duty. They had given her a room, meals and endless hours of contemplation, but there had been no attempt to ease her suffering when labor finally commenced yesterday. This was something Aurore must undergo alone, and if she felt great pain, that was so much the better. Was not woman’s lot to atone for the sins of Eve? And was not Aurore’s particular lot to labor for days to bring this child into the world, a child she must then give away?
Aurore squeezed her eyelids tight and wished for death. The pain was unrelenting. There were no moments when she could escape into sleep. She had lost track of time, and there were no windows in the room to help her gauge. She had been forbidden to eat or drink as she labored, so there were no meals to mark the hours. The sisters who checked on her came and went without speaking, and when she begged for reassurance, they only told her that the baby was not yet ready to come.
étienne had done this to her. He had taken her virginity, her wealth, her father, and her youth. He had left her with his child and marked it with his blood, so that even if Aurore had wanted it, she couldn’t keep it. Now she struggled in agony to bring into the world one more life that would have to be lived behind unimaginable barriers.
Unless the child showed no signs of its heritage.
Sweat poured onto the sheets, and despite the last sister’s warning, she kicked off the blanket that covered her. Under the best of circumstances, the windowless room would have been unbearable. In August, it was a hell of temperatures and humidity so high that water hung in the air to choke her if she cried out.
Months ago, Cleo had taken her to another room, not a room with clean white walls and a scrubbed floor, but a room with roaches that sailed like small birds from corner to corner and cobwebs that hung from ropes of herbs festooning the rafters. She had lain on another bed and smelled an abortionist’s evil stench. And she had learned that no matter how much money she had paid, no matter how much she hated étienne Terrebonne, she could not go through with killing his unborn child.
Instead, she had turned to God. She had come to the convent and promised that after the baby’s birth she would don the mothlike robes of a postulant and dedicate what was left of her life to cleansing her soul.
She had believed the last might be possible, but now, after hours of agony, she knew differently. She would never be free from hatred. Prayers and endless good works would change nothing. She hated étienne Terrebonne. She would never forgive him. And if cleansing her soul meant she must forgive, then she would die uncleansed and unrepentant.
The door opened. She could not suppress a groan. The sisters were competent and thorough. They took no notice of her cries or protests, going about their business as if she were an animal in the field. She wanted to believe their presence meant the end was near, but she was afraid it was only time for another agonizing examination.
“Ro-Ro?”
She opened her eyes and saw Ti’ Boo’s face. For a moment, she thought she imagined it. “Ti’—?”
“Don’t try to talk. It’s all right now. I’ll stay with you.”
“How—?” Pain knifed through her, and she struggled against it.
“Shhh… Don’t fight so. The pain, you make it worse when you fight.”
“I can’t—” A scream escaped, despite the sisters’ stern warnings that she was not to indulge in self-pity.
“Take a deep breath and squeeze my hand.” Ti’ Boo grabbed hers and held it tight. “Someone’s coming to look at you soon. Sister Mathilde got a message to me this morning. I made her promise she would, when your time came.”
Aurore grabbed Ti’ Boo’s hand as another contraction peaked. Ti’ Boo had arranged Aurore’s stay in the convent through her parish priest. The small brick building was on a secluded bayou, and it housed a strict, cloistered order of French-speaking nuns with few resources and even less hope for expansion. But it was close enough to C?te Boudreaux that Ti’ Boo had been able to visit twice, and far enough from New Orleans that Aurore had been confident étienne could not track her there.
“étienne. Have you seen étienne?”
“He won’t find you. Ro-Ro, squeeze harder.”
“He wants this child!”
“He wants nothing but to make you unhappy.”
Tears streamed down her face and mixed with drops of perspiration. “He…has succeeded.”
Ti’ Boo wiped her forehead with a handkerchief. “I’ve found a home for the baby. A place he’ll never find it.”
“Do they know… Do they know…” She couldn’t make herself finish the sentence. Did the family know the child wasn’t white? That its father had only passed for white until discovered? Even the thought sent deep shame through her.
“They are light-skinned people of color who live on the Delta,” Ti’ Boo said. “They can’t have children, and want to raise this one.”
Aurore had a thousand questions. She hated this child’s father with the intensity with which she had once loved him. For a time, she had hated the child, too. She still hated the child’s race, if for no other reason than that it was not her own. She could escape to the North with her baby and hope that its racial heritage would never be detected. But whose face would she see looking back from the cradle? What excuses would she make as the child matured and questions were raised?
And what kind of mother could Aurore Le Danois, once the heiress to Gulf Coast Steamship, be to the grandchild of a slave?
She rested a little, trying to draw strength from somewhere to survive the next pain. “Are they…good people?”
“Of course. Would I send your child to bad?”
“What…what if the child looks white? Wouldn’t it be better…a white family?”
“It’s better that the child be what it is, Ro-Ro.” She murmured something low.
Aurore heard her. “Blood will tell.” She sobbed out the last word.
“There have been enough lies.”
Aurore knew the life to which they were dooming her child. She knew the plight of Negroes, no matter how light their skin, although she had never given it more than a passing thought. She had always been surrounded by them, nurtured and attended and advised, but she had never imagined herself tied to them in any way. Now she was to give birth to one.
And would her child suffer the humiliation of always serving and submitting to the white man and woman? Would her child forever ride in the back of a streetcar, say its rosary in the back of a church, have no voice in politics and little or nothing to say about its future? Her child, a Le Danois, no matter what the hue of its skin, the texture of its hair. Her child.
“They are good people, happy people,” Ti’ Boo assured her. “They will raise your child to be good and happy, too.”
“That’s not enough!” She gripped Ti’ Boo’s hand. In the same moment, she felt an overwhelming urge to expel the child from her body. “No!”
“What is it?” Ti’ Boo leaned over her, saw her expression, and guessed. “I’m going to get Sister Marie Baptiste. I’ll be back, Ro-Ro. I’ll be right back!”
“No!” Aurore had prayed for nothing more than this. Now she was paralyzed by fear. Until this moment, she had been able to protect her son or daughter from what lay ahead. She had felt the child grow inside her, felt her own concern grow until it overshadowed the hatred she felt for étienne. Now she could protect it no longer.
She felt another urge to bear down, and even as she struggled against it, she knew there was nothing she could do. The baby would become the son or daughter of light-skinned strangers on the Delta. The child would be lost to her forever. She would never be allowed to protect it from a world that wished it had never been born.
“No!” But even as she screamed her final protest, the child began to emerge.
Clarissa lay quietly in the basket that the sisters had provided for her. She had cried little since her birth twelve hours ago, and she had rarely slept. She lay with her eyes open and her fists and legs waving spasmodically, as if to challenge the air she had only recently begun to breathe.
Aurore bent over her, defying the orders of Sister Marie Baptiste, who had told her not to get up or hold the infant. Clarissa was to be brought to her at regular intervals to nurse, then she was to be put back into the basket. Aurore wasn’t to look at her as she held her; she was not to attach herself to the child in any way.
Clarissa was the most beautiful baby Aurore had ever seen. Her eyes were an indeterminate color, a hazy, smoky hue that would not be brown like her father’s or blue like her mother’s. Her skin was light, though it might darken with time, but it was not the rose-tinged white of Aurore’s. It had a warm golden tone, as if she had already been kissed by the sun. Her head was covered by a mop of brown curls, soft as a duckling’s down.
Aurore carefully lifted her new daughter and cradled her in her arms. Clarissa gazed somewhere in the direction of Aurore’s face. Aurore held her tighter. “What do you see, Clarissa? The woman who tried to kill you? The woman who doomed you to a shack on the Delta and a job in a white woman’s kitchen?”
But even as she stared at her daughter, she knew the last would never be possible. With a mother’s wisdom, she saw that Clarissa was going to be beautiful, remarkable—and therefore dangerous—in the tradition of many women of mixed blood. No white woman was going to allow her in the kitchen or any other part of her house.
Tears ran down Aurore’s cheeks. “Do you see the woman who wants to take you and fly away to some land where nothing matters except that you’re her beloved daughter?”
Aurore realized she was crying. She didn’t know how she could have tears left. She lifted Clarissa to her shoulder and cradled her there. Slowly she began to rock back and forth.
She heard a noise in the doorway, but she didn’t turn.
“You were told not to hold the child.”
Finally she did turn. Sister Marie Baptiste, covered in sweltering black, stood in the doorway. Sister Marie Baptiste, who was to have control over every minute of the rest of her life, whose every whim would be Aurore’s cross to bear until one of them met God face-to-face.
“This is my child,” Aurore said softly. “In two weeks I will never see her again. Are you so heartless, so empty of human feeling, that you have no pity left?”
Sister Marie Baptiste didn’t answer. She dissolved into the darkness and left Aurore to wonder about the years ahead.
They had been given two weeks together, because it was deemed best for the child’s health that she be nursed that long by her mother. Aurore’s breasts had rapidly filled with milk, and each time Clarissa murmured, Aurore felt them tighten and throb unbearably until Clarissa began to suck.
She told Clarissa all the stories of her childhood. Of Ti’ Boo and the hurricane, of her grand-père Antoine, of her father and the proud steamship company that had been her heritage. She tried once to assure her daughter that she had been conceived in love, but the words caught in her throat. The night on the Dowager, other nights afterward, were the memories of another woman.
Ti’ Boo came again at the beginning of the second week, bringing Pelichere, who at eight months could negotiate Aurore’s tiny, airless room on her hands and knees. Aurore knew that Ti’ Boo meant to cheer her, but the presence of the two Guilbeau females, most content when they were only a short distance from each other, filled Aurore with despair. Ti’ Boo thought she knew the sorrow Aurore would feel when Clarissa was taken from her. But she had no idea how distraught Aurore felt already.
Nor did she know the hatred Aurore felt for Clarissa’s father. Each day she hated him more; each moment she grew closer to his child, she found herself wishing harder for revenge. His heritage separated her from her child. He had destroyed her future, and now it was to be spent behind the suffocating walls of a convent, with only the torpid waters of a bayou to remind her of the river her family had ruled and the life that had been taken from her.
Only one glimmer of light pierced the darkness of those weeks, étienne’s vow that he would raise their child. Aurore had stayed in New Orleans long enough to see her father buried and to be certain that Tim Gilhooley had the legal authority to salvage what he could from the catastrophe that had befallen Gulf Coast. Then she had begun a circuitous journey to the convent, crossing and recrossing her own path until anyone who followed would be hopelessly lost.
If étienne knew where she was, he would have appeared by now. His absence was proof that she had bested him. He would never see their daughter, much less have a voice in her future. She only wished that she could face him and tell him that in this, if nothing else, she had won.
On the evening before Clarissa was to be taken to the Delta, Aurore prepared herself for prayers in the chapel. Tomorrow she would give up her child. Next week, in a ceremony as old as the order itself, she would give up her freedom. She wanted to pray for understanding, to beg that the poison draining through her would one day abate.
She had prayers to say for Clarissa, too. She would say them each day for the rest of her life. Blessed Jesus, let Clarissa find peace and happiness. Blessed Mary, watch over her always. Blessed Father, let my daughter know that her mother loved her and did the best she could.
Clarissa was asleep when Aurore left their room. Aurore had just nursed her daughter, rocking her slowly afterward until her tiny eyes closed. Compline had ended. Since her confrontation with Sister Marie Baptiste, no one had demanded her attendance at scheduled devotions. But she knew that when Clarissa was gone, the demands would begin and never diminish.
The convent halls were empty and silent. The sisters had gone to their cells. She tried not to imagine what went on behind their doors, the prayers, the scourging. In time, perhaps, the endless rituals would bring her peace.
She covered her head with a scarf before she entered the chapel, tucking in all wisps of hair. For a moment, rebellion flared, and she wondered why the tyrant God who had allowed her to bring a child into the world only to give it away would be offended by a bare head. But she quickly stifled the feeling. It was she who was to blame, not God. She had lain with a man out of wedlock; sending Clarissa away was her punishment.
She dipped her fingers in the holy-water font and made the sign of the cross before she genuflected. The altar was illuminated by the vigil light. Head reverently bowed, she started toward the front.
She knelt at the railing, her head still bowed. She had so many prayers, so many sins for which to ask forgiveness. She crossed herself and folded her hands. Only then did she look at the altar. At first she saw nothing unusual there. It was starkly simple, covered with clean white linen and adorned with polished silver. The convent was a poor one, the order not well endowed. For the most part, the sisters were from poor bayou families who could provide little as a dowry. The linen had been patched by an expert seamstress, and the silver was only plate.
None of that mattered. God was present here, just as present as in the mightiest cathedral. He was present here to give her courage to face what she must and strength to live with her decision. She believed in his power, just as she feared that the poison inside her had extinguished his voice.
She lowered her eyes, but as she did, a flash of silver in the soft light caused her to raise them again. She stared at the cross, placed squarely in the altar’s center. It was not the one that had been there yesterday. She had seen this cross once before, had held it in her hands. It was solid silver, ornate, handcrafted in the Spanish style. She had last seen it on the night a man opened a chest of pirate treasure and promised her a new and perfect life.
étienne came the next morning. She was waiting for him beside Clarissa’s basket. Clarissa was asleep, but she found her fist and sucked on it from time to time, a substitute for the mother who had gently removed her from her breast.
Sister Marie Baptiste escorted étienne into her room. That morning she had answered Aurore’s questions about the man who had donated the priceless cross in memory of his departed mother. Aurore had told her that if the man returned and asked to see her, she would meet with him.
Sister Marie Baptiste left, and Aurore met his gaze.
“We have a daughter,” he said.
“I have a daughter. I share nothing with you.”
“I told you I would come for her.”
“Yes.”
“Did you really believe you could escape?”
“There seems to be no end to my stupidity.”
“Sister Marie Baptiste says you’ll soon take vows.”
“Sister Marie Baptiste is wrong. I’ve discovered that even God can’t help me escape you and the evil you’ve wrought.” She examined his face. It was unchanged. She wondered what she had thought she would see.
“And our daughter?”
“Ti’ Boo has found a family who will take her and raise her as their own. My father is dead, and my life is ruined. Can you find it in your heart not to take vengeance on my daughter, too?”
“She’s my child. You refuse to raise her. I will.”
“And if I had said I would keep her, would I have known a moment’s peace from you?”
He shrugged.
She had a thousand questions screaming inside her. But étienne had as many lies as she had questions, and she knew there was no hope now of ever hearing the truth.
“Where will you take her?” she asked. She heard her voice break.
“Where she will be cared for.”
“I want to know more than that. I want to know where!”
“Back to New Orleans.”
There had been no charges filed. After hearing her accusations, Tim had advised her not to implicate étienne, in order to save her own good name—if that was still possible. There was no reason étienne couldn’t stay in New Orleans. Except one.
“If you stay in the city,” she said, “I’ll be sure that your life isn’t worth living.”
His smile chilled her. “How do you intend to accomplish that?”
“Any way I can.”
He looked down at their child for the first time; then he touched a soft curl. “I’ll have to give her a name, won’t I?”
“Her name is Clarissa. In honor of my mother. She was baptized by that name!”
He looked back at her. She knew there were tears in her eyes, and she hated herself for them. Nothing flickered in his, and she knew he would not allow her even this small concession. “If you punish me, Aurore, you will punish our daughter.”
She knew she had been defeated. She closed her eyes without looking at the baby again. “Take her and be damned!”
When she opened her eyes, the room was empty.