CHAPTER 29
CAFé AU LAIT
POV: NOEMI
I wear black.
It's the first time. The closet on Prytania has two black dresses in it, at the very end of the rail, behind all the grey and white and the one red.
Ansel brought them over to the rectory on Sunday with the rest of my things.
I didn't ask him to bring them. He brought them anyway, and hung them on the back of the door, and didn't say anything.
Wool crepe. Long sleeves. A high neck that closes with a row of tiny black buttons up the back, like a cassock. Plain as a widow's.
I button it myself, reaching behind my own back, in front of the mirror in the priest's room.
Gideon watches me from the bed.
He's propped on three pillows with his left arm strapped to his chest. He's grey under the tan, and there are shadows under his eyes, and he's been watching me since I got up at six. He hasn't said anything.
I put up my hair. No veil. Six pins.
I put the halo on my left hand.
I put my knife in the right pocket of the dress and the tin in the left.
Then I turn around.
"Well?" I say.
He looks at me for a long time.
"You look like a woman on her way to a funeral," he says.
"I am."
Something happens in his face. It isn't a smile. It's the thing underneath where a smile would go, if he had one.
"Come here."
I go to the bed. He reaches up with his good hand and takes my chin, the way he did in the sacristy the first day, and turns my face to the side, and looks at the bite on my throat. It's nearly faded now. Yellow at the edges.
He doesn't say anything about it.
He pulls my face down and kisses me, hard, with his hand on my jaw, and then lets go.
"Come back," he says.
"I always come back."
***
Ansel drives me to the Quarter himself.
He doesn't talk. He never talks. He drives with both hands on the wheel through the Marigny and down Esplanade and into the Quarter, and I sit in the back in my black dress with my hands in my lap, and the tin in my pocket is so light I keep touching it to make sure it's there.
At the corner of Chartres, he stops the car. He doesn't turn around. He looks at me in the rearview mirror.
"Madame."
"Yes."
"If you need me to stop it," he says, "at any time, for any reason, touch your left ear. I'll be at the door. I'll come."
I look at his eyes in the mirror. Grey. Gentle. The only gentle thing in his whole broken face.
"And if I don't touch it?"
"Then I'll stand at the door," Ansel says, "and look at the wall, and not see anything."
I sit for a moment.
"Did he tell you to say that?"
"No." His eyes don't move in the mirror. "He told me to stand at the door. The ear is mine." A pause. "Delmar stood at your chapel door every day for a week. He'd want somebody to."
He gets out and opens my door.
***
Café Sainte-Anne is six tables and a zinc bar and a chalkboard, on the corner of Chartres and Saint Peter, in the shadow of the cathedral.
It smells like chicory and burned sugar and the river.
There are tourists at two of the tables, a couple with a guidebook and a man alone with a newspaper.
There's a radio on a shelf behind the bar playing old jazz, low.
The owner is a small bald man in a white apron. He sees me come in and puts down the cup he's drying.
"Madame Valcourt."
It's the first time anyone's called me that.
"Good morning," I say. "I'll take the table at the back. When my guest arrives, I'd like two café au laits. I'll come to the counter for them myself."
He looks at me. At the black dress. At Ansel, who has taken up his place just inside the door with his hands folded in front of him, looking at nothing.
"Of course, Madame."
I sit at the back table with my back to the wall and my face to the door. The way Gideon sits. I put my hands on the tablecloth and look at the halo and wait.
At three minutes to ten, the bell over the door rings.
***
He looks older.
Thirteen days. That's all it's been since he sat across from me at the Beauregard in a white dinner jacket and raised his glass and called me Sister.
Thirteen days, and he's aged ten years. The white linen suit hangs on him.
His face is grey and gone loose, like a sack with the grain let out.
The three gold rings are still on his fingers, but his hands are shaking.
He isn't alone.
Clémence comes in behind him. She's in black too.
Not a dress. Trousers and a black silk shirt, and her hair cut blunt at her jaw, and sunglasses pushed up on her head. She sees me at the back table in my black dress, and her eyebrows go up, and something like a smile touches the corner of her mouth.
Then she sees Ansel by the door.
The smile goes somewhere else. Her eyes stay on him a moment too long. Ansel doesn't look at her. He looks at the far wall so hard he could put a hole in it.
Ambrose comes to my table. He doesn't sit.
"Mrs. Valcourt," he says.
"Mr. Boudreaux. Please."
He sits. Clémence sits beside him, and crosses her legs, and takes her sunglasses off her head and folds them on the table.
"Mademoiselle," I say.
"Madame." She looks at my dress. "We match."
"I heard about your father's boats. I'm sorry."
"No, you're not," Clémence says pleasantly. "But thank you."
I get up.
"Excuse me," I say. "I'll get our coffee."
***
The owner has the cups ready on the zinc bar. Heavy white china. Hot milk and dark chicory coffee poured together from two pitchers at once, the old way, so it swirls and goes the color of caramel.
He sets them in front of me and turns away to the radio.
He turns it up a little.
My back is to the room. The bar is between me and the owner. There's a mirror behind the bar, old and spotted, with a gilt frame I'd like to regild if I ever have time.
I take the tin out of my left pocket.
The lid is stiff. It hasn't been opened in years. I work my thumbnail under it and it gives with a small sound that nobody hears over the radio.
Inside, white powder. Fine as flour.
Never more than a pinch.
I don't use a pinch.
I tip it into the cup on the right, over the long spoon, so it goes in without a puff, the way I'd lay leaf into size. It sinks into the foam and disappears. I stir. Slowly. Three times around, the way the sisters stir the soup.
Nothing. It's the color of caramel. It smells like chicory.
I close the tin and put it back in my pocket.
When I look up, I see Clémence in the mirror.
She's sitting at my table with her father's back to me, and she's facing the bar, and she's looking straight at me in the old spotted glass. She's watching my hands.
Our eyes meet in the mirror.
She doesn't say anything. She doesn't move. She looks at me for a long moment, very steadily.
Then she picks up her sunglasses and unfolds them, and folds them again, and looks away.
I pick up the cups and carry them back to the table.
***
"Let's be quick," Ambrose says. "I'm an old man and I've had a very bad week."
"Then be quick."
He puts his shaking hands flat on the tablecloth.
"The Boudreaux claims on the east bank docks," he says.
"All of them. I'll sign them over to your husband.
The warehouses in Arabi. The shrimp contracts.
What's left of the business." He wets his lips.
"In exchange, I want to live. I want my house.
I want a loan from Valcourt Savings to buy three boats, so my family has something.
And I want my daughter married to someone who can keep her safe after I'm gone. "
"Who?"
His eyes flick toward the door. Toward Ansel.
"Your husband's man," he says. "The tall one. She's asked about him. Twice." His mouth twists. "God knows why."
Clémence doesn't say anything. She's looking at the window.
I pick up my own cup. I drink.
"No," I say.
Ambrose goes still.
"No to the house," I say. "No to the boats.
No to the loan." I set my cup down. "Here's what happens, Mr. Boudreaux.
You sign over the east bank claims to my husband.
You sign over the rest of the Boudreaux business, everything that's left, the warehouses, the contracts, the name, to your daughter. Clémence runs it. She answers to me."
"My daughter?" He laughs. It's an ugly sound. "My daughter is a girl who went to Paris to look at paintings."
"Art history, Papa," Clémence says, without looking away from the window. "And accounting. Two degrees. You never asked about the second one."
He stares at her.
"And you," I say, "go home to your house in Chalmette, and sit on your porch, and drink your chicory, and never call my husband again."
He looks at me across the table for a long moment.
Then his shoulders drop. All at once. Like a man setting down something he's carried for miles.
"Fine," he says. "Fine. Yes. Whatever you want. I'm tired."
He picks up his coffee.
He looks at it. He holds it an inch from his mouth, and something in his face hesitates, some old animal instinct from forty years on the river. He looks at the cup. He looks at me.
"Drink your coffee, Papa," Clémence says quietly. "It's getting cold."
He drinks.
He drinks it all. Three long swallows, the way men drink when they've made up their minds about something. He sets the empty cup down on the saucer with a clink and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and his rings catch the light.
"There," he says. "Done. Draw up the papers."
"They're drawn up," I say. "Ansel has them."
He nods. He starts to get up.
"Mr. Boudreaux."
He stops, half out of his chair.
"The gilder in Chalmette," I say. "The old man on Paris Road, by the canal. You must have known him. Everyone did. He did the saints for the Blessing of the Fleet for forty years."
"Thibodeaux," Ambrose says, frowning. "Old Thib. What about him?"
"He taught me to put arsenic in the gesso," I say. "To keep the beetles out."
Ambrose doesn't move.
"A pinch," I say. "Never more than a pinch.
That's what he told me. I've carried his tin in the bottom of my kit for three years.
" I take it out of my pocket and set it on the tablecloth between us.
Dented. The paint worn off. ARSENIC in faded pencil.
"I've never once opened it. Until this morning. "
He looks at the tin.
He looks at his empty cup.
I watch it go through him. I watch it go all the way down, the way the water went up in the ditch on the Chef Menteur. His face, which was grey, goes white. His hands go to the edge of the table and hold on.
"You'll feel it in an hour," I tell him.
"Maybe two. You'll be home by then, on your porch.
Your stomach will cramp. You'll think it's the oysters from last night.
You'll go to bed. By tonight, it won't matter what you think.
" I fold my hands on the tablecloth, over the halo.
"They'll say it was the oysters. Bad oysters, this time of year. It happens every year."
"You—" His voice cracks. "You bitch. You— Clémence. Clémence. Call— get me to the hospital, get me—"
Clémence doesn't move.
She sits beside him with her legs crossed and her sunglasses folded on the table and looks at her father. Her face is very calm.
"I'll take you home, Papa," she says. "You should lie down."
He stares at her.
He understands. I watch him understand. He looks at his daughter the way my father looked at me through the broken window of the truck, when I stopped pulling.
"Why," he says to me. It comes out in a whisper. "Why."
"Twenty-two meat hooks," I say. "In your cold room on Paris Road.
I counted them all night with my bare feet on the tile.
A man named Lonnie who hit me across the mouth.
A man on my roof who told me they'd say I jumped.
Four men on the Press Street wharf on Saturday with rifles.
" I lean forward. "One of them put a bullet in my husband's shoulder, Mr. Boudreaux.
An inch lower and I'd be a widow in a black dress for real. "
"You're a monster," he whispers.
"I'm his," I say.
He sags back into his chair. His rings are white on the edge of the table.
Around us, the tourists are reading their guidebook. The man with the newspaper turns a page. On the radio, a trumpet climbs up into a high note and holds it there. Out the window, the bells of the cathedral begin to ring for the half hour.
I stand up.
Clémence stands too. She puts her hand under her father's elbow and helps him up, and he lets her. He's shaking all over now, from the inside out. He leans on her. He can't look at me.
At the door, she stops beside Ansel.
She doesn't look at me. She looks at him. Up at him, because he's a head taller.
"The papers," she says.
He holds out the envelope. She takes it with her free hand. Her fingers touch his on the paper, and neither of them takes their hand away for a moment longer than it takes.
"I'll need someone to teach me the river," she says to him quietly. "What's left of it."
Ansel looks down at her. His flat broken face doesn't change.
"Ask her," he says, and tips his head toward me.
Clémence turns and looks back at me across the café, over her dying father's shoulder.
"La reine," she says softly. Not mocking. Like a woman testing the name to see if it holds.
Then she takes her father out into Chartres Street, into the sun, and the bell over the door rings behind them.
***
I stand at the table for a moment.
Two empty cups. The tin. Ambrose's chair pushed back at an angle, the way men leave chairs when they get up too fast.
I put the tin back in my pocket.
I open my purse. Gideon gave it to me yesterday, black leather, with my four thousand dollars inside it and a card in his handwriting that said only Yours. Under the bills, at the bottom, there's loose change.
I take out a single dime.
I set it on the white saucer beside Ambrose Boudreaux's empty cup. It rings a little on the china, like a coin in an offering dish.
The tithe.