CHAPTER 31
VOWS
POV: NOEMI
The chapel is full of candles and five people.
It's midnight. Every candle Madame Odile could find in the house on Prytania is burning, on the altar and the side altars and the window ledges and in rows along the floor on either side of the aisle, so the whole chapel is gold and shaking and warm.
The saints on the altarpiece look down with their faces clean, the rain and smoke of ten years washed off them, and the halos I laid back on every one of them shining.
Father Duclos stands at the altar in white vestments, holding his book in both hands so it won't shake.
Sister Perpetua sits in the front pew with a handkerchief already out.
Madame Odile and her sister Clothilde sit behind her, side by side, in their good black dresses with white collars, both of them with their hands folded the same way.
Ansel stands at the altar rail on the right side. On the left, across from him, Clémence Boudreaux, in black, her father's rings on a chain at her throat, not looking at him.
And at the altar rail, between them, waiting, the Deacon.
***
A week ago, I sat in the nave of a church with no pews and watched a room full of men look at me and look away.
A week ago, I put arsenic in a man's coffee.
Tonight, I'm standing in the door of his mother's chapel in a dress I chose myself.
It's the first thing I've ever chosen. Madame Odile took me to Canal Place on Thursday and I walked past the white ones, all of them, rack after rack of lace and tulle and beading, and at the very end, on a hanger by itself, there was one the color of old ivory, heavy silk, plain as a church candle, with long sleeves and a high neck and a row of covered buttons down the back like the black dress.
It cost more than my father owed Ambrose.
I didn't look at the tag again.
On my head, I'm wearing my veil.
Not a bridal veil. Mine. Grey cotton, thin at the edges from washing, with a mend near the hem in my own stitches. The one he took off the floor of this chapel the morning after the first time and folded into a square and locked in a velvet box in the bottom drawer of his desk.
He gave it back to me this morning.
He came into his mother's room at six, when I was still in bed, and he sat down on the edge of it and put the folded square of grey cotton in my hands.
"It was always yours," he said.
"You took it."
"I kept it," he said, "until you didn't need to hide under it."
I held it in my lap for a long time.
Then I went down to the chapel in my nightgown, barefoot, and I went to the brass offering dish on the altar rail, where they'd been sitting for three weeks, where nobody had touched them.
Six pins. Black glass heads. Shining.
I pinned my veil with them tonight, standing in front of the mirror where he bit me the night of the ball, and Madame Odile stood behind me and handed them to me one at a time.
Clothilde sat on the edge of the bed with the ivory dress across her knees, sewing the last covered button back on where it had come loose in the car from Canal Place.
She's lived in this house for nearly two weeks.
Gideon hired her the morning after River Road burned, when Ansel told him who had washed the blood out of my hair.
She has the room at the end of the second-floor hall, next to her sister's.
They talk to each other in French at night through the wall.
"Madame Hélène," Clothilde said, without looking up from her needle. "She wore her mother's veil. Lace, from Lyon. Very old. Mr. Augustin had it burned after she died, with the rest of what he didn't want."
"I know," I said.
"Yours is better." She bit off the thread. "Yours is only yours."
Madame Odile handed me the fifth pin.
"When she married him," Madame Odile said, "she was twenty. She walked down the aisle at the cathedral with four hundred people watching and she was so frightened her bouquet shook the whole way." She handed me the sixth. "I was eighteen. I carried her train."
"Was she happy?"
Madame Odile was quiet for a long time.
"For a year," she said. "Maybe two." She stepped back and looked at me in the mirror. At the grey veil, the six black pins. "You're not frightened."
"No."
"She'd have liked you," Clothilde said from the bed. "She'd have been afraid of you. But she'd have liked you."
***
I walk down the aisle alone.
There's no one to give me away. My father's at the bottom of a ditch on the Chef Menteur. My mother walked out a door when I was six and never looked back. The man who gave me to Saint Veronica's is standing at the end of this aisle, waiting.
I don't need anyone to give me away. I'm not being given.
I'm walking.
The candles shake as I pass. Sister Perpetua sobs, once, into her handkerchief.
Madame Odile puts a hand on her sister's arm.
At the altar rail, Clémence turns her head and looks at me, and something in her face goes soft, just for a second, and then she looks at Ansel, and he's already looking at her, and they both look away.
Gideon doesn't look away.
He watches me come down the aisle the way he watched me from the last pew for twenty-nine days.
The way he watched from a car on the Chef Menteur.
From a choir loft. From a leather chair by a window.
His arm is out of the sling, but he holds it close to his side.
He's in black. The rosary is on his wrist.
His face.
I've seen it wrecked, on an altar step, in the candlelight. I've seen it grey with blood loss on an iron bed. I've seen it look at a girl on a ladder at the top of a wall of photographs.
I've never seen it like this.
He looks like a man watching the only thing he's ever prayed for walk toward him on its own feet.
I stop in front of him.
***
Father Duclos clears his throat. His hands are shaking so badly the pages of his book rattle.
"Dearly beloved," he says. "We are gathered here—"
"Father," Gideon says.
Father Duclos stops.
"The vows," Gideon says. "Hers first."
Father Duclos looks at me. He's said a thousand masses in the chapel at Saint Veronica's with me kneeling in the second row, and he's never once looked me in the face. He looks at me now. He looks at the grey veil. He opens his mouth and closes it again.
"Of course," he says faintly.
I turn to Gideon.
I didn't write them down. I didn't need to. I've been saying them in my head for a week, in the bath, on the scaffold, lying awake in his bed with his hand on my heart.
"I, Noemi," I say, "take you, Gideon."
My voice is steady. It fills the chapel. I've never heard my voice fill a room before.
"I won't obey you," I say. "I've obeyed my whole life. My father, the sisters, God. I'm done. I won't obey you."
Father Duclos makes a small sound.
"I won't honor your father. I held his hands while he died."
Sister Perpetua's handkerchief stops halfway to her face.
"I'll keep you," I say. "The way you kept me. Every day. Every night. I'll keep the things you drop and the things you're ashamed of and the things you've never let anyone see in the light. I'll keep your back in gold." I take a breath. "I'll kneel for no one but you. And you'll kneel for me."
I stop.
The candles shake.
"That's all," I say.
He doesn't say anything for a long moment.
Then he takes my left hand, the one with the halo on it, in his.
"I watched you for three years," he says. "I'll watch you for the rest of them."
That's all.
It's enough.
***
"The rings," Father Duclos says, very faintly.
Ansel takes a small box from his pocket. Blue leather. The same jeweler on Magazine Street. He hands it to Gideon, and Gideon opens it, and inside there's a plain band of twenty-three karat gold, soft as butter, burnished by hand to match the halo.
He slides it onto my finger, under the halo. It fits.
Of course it fits.
Clémence steps forward from her side of the rail. She takes something out of the pocket of her black trousers and puts it in my palm without a word, and steps back.
A ring.
I had it made on Thursday, at the same jeweler, while Madame Odile waited outside the dress shop.
The old man didn't ask any questions. He didn't ask how I'd come to have what I brought him, or why.
He only held it up to the light for a long time and said, very quietly, This is the rosary.
Madame Hélène's rosary. I restrung it for him this month.
A plain band of heavy gold. Wide. A man's ring.
And set into the top of it, where a stone would go, one bead.
Onyx. Worn smooth by two sets of fingers.
The loose one. The one that came off the cord in a lawyer's office on St. Charles Street the first night, and rolled under a credenza, and that he's carried in his coat pocket ever since and rolled between his fingers when he thought I wasn't watching.
I took it out of his coat on the night of the Press Street wharf, while Dr. Roux was sewing up his shoulder and he was too far down in the morphine to notice.
I hold it up.
He looks at it.
He looks at it for so long that Father Duclos shifts his feet and Sister Perpetua stops crying to watch.
He knows what it is. I watch him know it. The bead. The cord. The door on the third floor of this house, and a woman's hand pushing it under the crack to her son.
His hand, when I take it, is shaking.
It's the only time I've felt it shake that wasn't blood loss or the belvedere.
I slide the ring onto his finger.
"Now she's yours too," I say quietly. "All of her. Not just the part he didn't get."
He doesn't say anything.
He can't. I watch him try.
"I now pronounce you," Father Duclos says, in a voice like a man stepping off a ledge, "husband and wife. You may—"
Gideon takes my face in both his hands and kisses me before Father Duclos finishes the sentence.
***
We don't stay for the champagne.
Madame Odile has laid it out in the courtyard by the fountain, with little cakes, and Sister Perpetua is still crying, and Clémence and Ansel are standing on opposite sides of the fountain not looking at each other with such concentration that Clothilde has started to laugh behind her hand.
I take my husband by the hand and walk out of the chapel and across the courtyard and in through the kitchen door and up the back stairs.
Two flights.
His mother's room. The grey silk walls. The bed with its four posts. The door in the middle of the wall.
I walk straight to it.
I open it. I go through, into his room, and pull him through behind me.
Then I turn around and shut it, and put my hand on the bolt on his side, the heavy iron one, the one he turned the first night, when I lay in his mother's bed with my face burning and heard it slide home.
I turn it.
It slides home with the same sound.
He's standing behind me. I feel him. He doesn't touch me.
"That lock was for everyone else," I say, with my hand still on the bolt. "You said so. The first day. In the chapel."
"Yes."
"And this one was for you. So you'd be the only one who could open it."
"Yes."
I turn around.
"Now it's for us," I say. "Nobody opens it but us."
He looks at me in the lamplight. At the ivory silk and the grey veil and the six black pins.
"Leave it on," he says.
"The veil?"
"Leave it on."
***
He undoes every button down my back.
It takes a long time. There are forty of them. His left hand isn't steady yet and he won't let me help, and he does every one, from the top of my neck to the bottom of my spine, and kisses the skin under each one as it opens.
The silk falls around my feet.
I stand in my husband's room in nothing but a grey convent veil pinned with six black pins, and he looks at me like I'm the thing at the top of the wall in the choir loft come down off the plaster.
"Mine," he says.
"Yours."
He lays me down on his bed with the veil spread out on the pillow around my head like it's laid out on a bier.
It's slow.
It's the slowest it's ever been. Slower than the altar step.
He moves in me like he has the rest of our lives, because he does, and I hold his face and look at him the whole time, and the veil slides and catches in my hair and he doesn't let it come off.
His ring is on my hip. The bead. I can feel it, small and hard and warm, every time his hand moves.
"Say it," he says.
He doesn't have to say what.
"I'm yours," I tell him. "I'm your wife. I'm your queen." I pull his mouth down to mine. "I'm yours."
"Again."
"Yours. Yours. Yours—"
It takes us both at the same time. It's never done that before. It comes up from somewhere under the bed, under the floor, under the whole house, and takes us both down with it, and I hear him say my name into the veil at my throat like a man saying it at the altar.
After, he doesn't move off me.
He lies with his weight on me and his face in the grey cotton at my neck, and I lie with my hands in his hair, and the candles are still burning down in the chapel across the courtyard, and I can hear Sister Perpetua laughing, finally, somewhere by the fountain.
Three years ago, I walked into Saint Veronica's at six in the morning with blood on my chin and knelt at the altar rail and promised God I'd give Him everything, if He'd only let me stop being afraid.
He didn't.
Someone else did.
I took vows after all. Just not to God.