CHAPTER 14
RED
POV: NOEMI
He takes me to six o'clock mass on Sunday and sits me in the last pew.
It's still dark when we pull up on Dauphine Street.
The gate is open. The bell is going. I've heard that bell every morning for three years from the inside, from cell nine, from the scaffold, from the second row where the novices kneel, and I've never once heard it from the curb, getting out of a car.
He opens my door. He offers me his hand.
I'm in the grey wool with the high collar. No veil. Madame Odile pinned my hair up this morning, low at the neck, and I felt naked walking down the stairs, and I feel more naked now on the sidewalk in front of the only home I've had since I was nineteen.
He doesn't let go of my hand when I'm out of the car.
We walk in together.
The chapel is the same. It smells the same, beeswax and damp stone and Sister Perpetua's lavender.
Eleven sisters in the front two rows. The one novice left, Sister Marie-Claude, alone in the second row where there used to be two of us.
Father Duclos in green vestments at the altar, fumbling with his book.
We sit in the last pew.
It's hard. It's the hardest pew in the chapel. The wood is split along the back where somebody's knee went through it during the hurricane. Nobody ever sits here but him.
I look at the back of Sister Marie-Claude's veil, two rows from the front.
At the white line of neck between the collar and the grey cotton.
That's what he saw. Every morning. That's all he had.
The Kyrie. The Gloria. I know every word. My mouth moves, and no sound comes out of it.
At the Confiteor, I wait for the weight on the back of my neck, and it doesn't come, because the man who brought it is sitting beside me. His thigh is against mine on the hard wood. His hand is on my knee.
In church.
In front of God and Father Duclos and eleven sisters who taught me that a woman's knee is an occasion of sin.
Sister Perpetua sees his hand. So does Sister Marie-Claude, two rows up, who turns her head and forgets to look back at the altar.
They know whose I am now, all of them, the whole front of the chapel.
He wants them to know. That's why the hand stays where it is.
Through my fault, I pray, and I strike my chest, and his hand stays on my knee.
At communion, the sisters file up to the rail. Sister Marie-Claude. Sister Perpetua, who turns her head as she passes the end of our pew and sees me and nearly walks into a pillar.
Gideon doesn't move. He never goes up. He never has.
I don't go up either.
It's the first Sunday in three years I haven't received. I sit beside him in the last pew with my hands in my lap and watch the others kneel, and I feel it go, like a coat sliding off my shoulders.
I don't pick it up.
***
After the final blessing, the sisters find reasons to walk past us.
Sister Perpetua comes first, pink to the ears. "Noemi," she hisses, delighted and scandalized in equal parts. "Your hair."
"It's just hair."
"Where have you been? Mother said you'd been called to other work. She wouldn't say what work." Her eyes go to Gideon and away, fast, like he's the sun. "Is this the work?"
"Sister Perpetua."
Mother Agathe's voice comes from the aisle.
Perpetua goes. She goes so fast her veil flaps.
Mother Agathe stands at the end of the pew with her hands folded over her rosary. She looks older than she did a week ago. Older than she looked the day the hurricane took the roof. There are new lines around her mouth.
She looks at me. At my hair. At my hand, which is in Gideon's hand, on my knee, in her chapel.
"Are you well, child?" she asks.
"I'm well, Mother."
She looks at Gideon.
"The boiler will be installed on Thursday," he tells her. "They'll need access to the basement from seven."
"Thank you, Mr. Valcourt." She says it to the floor between us. "God bless you."
She turns to go.
"Mother."
She stops.
I don't know I'm going to say it until I do. It comes up out of me the way the bite came up out of me in the chapel on Paris Road, without deciding.
"You told me to pray on it," I say. "The commission. You told me to take the night."
She doesn't turn around.
"You'd already told him Friday at seven," I say. "I heard you through your door. You never needed my answer."
Her shoulders move under her habit. Just once.
Then she walks away down the side aisle toward the sacristy, and doesn't look back, and I sit in the last pew and watch her go, and I don't feel sorry.
I wait for it. I don't.
Beside me, Gideon hasn't said anything. His thumb moves once across my knuckles.
***
When the chapel is empty, I climb the scaffold in the side chapel.
The Virgin is where I left her a week ago. Half a crown. The gold on the left side bright and new, the right side still bare grey gesso, flaking at the edges.
My kit is where I left it too. Someone put the pot of size back upright and scraped the spill off the tiles.
"I need leaf," I say.
He's standing at the foot of the scaffold with his hands in his pockets. He looks up at me.
"Where?"
"The blue tin. By the step."
He brings it. He climbs the first three rungs, carefully, favoring his side, and holds it up to me, and I take it out of his hand.
I mix a quick size. Not oil. Water gilding, the old way, gelatin and water, because I can't wait until eleven tonight. I paint it onto the gesso in small strokes and lay the first square.
I don't hear anything else.
The bell stops. A car goes by on Dauphine. Somewhere in the house, a door closes. I lay the second square and the third and I hold my breath so they won't lift away, and I tamp them down with the tip of the brush.
I don't hear him move.
When I finally breathe out and sit back on the plank, the Virgin has a whole crown.
I look down.
He's still there, at the foot of the scaffold, looking up. Not at the crown.
At me.
He has the same look on his face that he had in the choir loft, looking at the photograph at the top of the wall. The girl on the ladder.
"You didn't hear the band," he says.
"There's no band."
"You wouldn't have heard it if there was."
***
That afternoon, I find Madame Odile in the kitchen, shelling pecans into a crockery bowl.
I don't know why I go down. The house is so big and so quiet, and he's in his study with the door shut, and I've never in my life had an afternoon with nothing to scrub or gild or pray through.
She looks up when I come in. She doesn't stand.
"Sit, Miss," she says. "If you like."
I sit across the table from her. After a minute, I take a handful of pecans and a nutcracker, and she doesn't stop me, and we shell them together without talking. The shells crack. The kitchen smells like coffee and the chicory she puts in it.
"They closed the canal," she says, after a long time, to the pecans. "To the Boudreaux boats. My nephew works the locks. Six shrimpers sitting out there since Saturday with their holds full and nowhere to unload." She cracks a shell. "It's all rotting. The whole October."
I stop.
"Because of me."
"Because of you." She says it like she's telling me the time. "Mr. Gideon's never closed that canal for anybody. Not when they shot at him. Not when they burned his warehouse on Tchoupitoulas."
I look down at the pecan in my hand.
"Madame Odile," I say. "His mother."
Her hands stop moving.
"The room I'm in. The door in the wall." I make myself keep going. "Mr. Augustin locked her in, didn't he."
She's quiet for so long I think she isn't going to answer. Then she puts down the nutcracker and folds her hands on the table.
"She was a good woman," she says. "She loved God.
She went to mass every morning at Saint Stephen's and she prayed in that little chapel every night, and she gave money to the sisters, and Mr. Augustin didn't like any of it.
He said she loved God more than she loved him.
" Her mouth thins. "He was right. She did. "
"So he locked her up."
"The last year. He locked the hall door and kept the key on his watch chain. I was the only one allowed to bring her trays." Her eyes are wet, and she doesn't wipe them. "I left them outside the door. Three times a day. And I knocked, and I said your tray, Madame, and I walked away. For a year."
"You couldn't have—"
"I could have. I had a hairpin, same as anybody. I was afraid of him." She picks up the nutcracker again. "Mr. Gideon was afraid of him too, then. He walked past that door every day. She'd call his name sometimes. He walked past."
I sit very still.
"And then she died," Madame Odile says, "and Mr. Augustin put her ring on his little finger and closed the chapel and let the roof rot. And three years ago Mr. Gideon came back to this house, a grown man, and walked in the front door, and told his father to get out. And Mr. Augustin got out."
She cracks a pecan. It splits clean.
"And the first thing Mr. Gideon did," she says, "was take the lock off that hall door and throw it in the river. And put a door in the wall between his room and hers." She looks at me across the bowl. "With the lock on his side."
"Why his side?"
"So nobody could ever lock her in again but him," Madame Odile says, "and he'd never do it. Only one who could open it."
She goes back to shelling.
I sit there with a pecan in my hand for a long time.
***
On Tuesday, a dressmaker from Canal Place arrives at two with a garment bag over each arm and a mouth full of pins.
Madame Odile shows her up. She doesn't introduce herself. She looks at me for about as long as it takes to thread a needle, up and down, the way the sisters look at a bolt of cloth to see if it's worth cutting, and then she unzips the first bag.
Red.
Not bright red. Deeper. The red of the glass lamp that hangs beside the tabernacle and burns day and night so everyone knows God is at home. Silk, heavy and liquid, so dark in the folds it's almost black.
"No," I say.
"Mr. Valcourt was very specific," the dressmaker says around her pins.
"I don't wear red."
"You do tonight."