Love Finds You in New Orleans, LA Page 13
Lottie forced the words, “Pleased to meet you.”
“A pleasure to be introduced to you,” Nathalie oozed and then glanced at Gabriel, who cleared his throat.
The chime saved them from the space of awkward silence.
“We must return to our seats,” said Gabriel. “Good to see you, Lottie.”
She felt her heart constrict, hearing her name wrapped in his voice, and all she could do was nod. Nathalie responded in kind, and Lottie watched them walk away. She saw Gabriel’s broad hand pressed against Nathalie’s bare back, his body leaned toward hers. Lottie imagined his touch and felt her skin ripple in response.
She watched until the crowd swallowed them.
* * * * *
Finally, I can go home.
Until the third act, Lottie related to Lucia, the young woman duped into marrying another man while thinking her marriage to the love of her life had ended. But after the experience with Nathalie and Gabriel, she found herself grieving with Edgardo, the husband who came home only to find the woman he loved exchanging vows with another man, not knowing that her brother had forged a letter. Edgardo believed the deception was her choice, but by the time the betrayal and pain expressed in rage diminished, it was too late. Lucia was dead.
The despair of watching someone lead the life you wanted. That, Lottie understood.
Bundled into the carriage once again, the group carried the quiet of not yet ridding themselves of the carnage of the drama. It was Isabelle who broke through and asked if the girls wanted to stop at Vincent’s before going home. She listed the options—“Brioche, pâtes, éclairs, meringue.…” And when the temptation of food didn’t lure them, Isabelle resorted to, “It is the place to be seen after performances.”
Justine’s eyes sparked with excitement, so Lottie spoke before she could. “Vincent’s sounds good, but if you don’t mind, I’m actually tired and would rather not be out any later.”
“It’s barely one o’clock,” Justine whined. “We wouldn’t have to stay very long.”
“There’s no point in going if we can’t relax and enjoy ourselves,” Isabelle said.
Lottie hated disappointing people. Some, like Grand-mère, proved nearly impossible to please. But she’d found she would rather keep the peace than start a war, so she preferred sacrificing what she wanted to make that happen. The problem tonight was she had been dishonest about the reason she didn’t want to be at Vincent’s. She feared Gabriel and Nathalie would be there, and she dreaded feeling trapped, as she had been during the intermission. If they were there, she would not only be trapped, but she’d be more miserable than she was even at this moment. But she didn’t want to admit that to Justine, much less Isabelle and François.
The carriage had not yet moved, and Lottie knew Vincent’s was too close for her to procrastinate making a decision. Her mind dashed back and forth between the going and the not going until each pulled so tightly it seemed her limbs ached. The notion that she and Justine might have fewer opportunities once she married weighed the heavier over her wanting to save herself from an encounter with Gabriel. Surely, with three friends surrounding her, she could survive his being there. Stop being so selfish. Why should you be the reason everyone else is not enjoying the evening?
Lottie squeezed Justine’s hand. “How silly of me to think I couldn’t stay awake long enough for a café au lait and an éclair.”
“You are such a wonderful friend.” Justine reached over and hugged her. “Isabelle?”
“If Lottie is certain she is not too tired, then we shall go.”
* * * * *
The murky amber of early morning had not yet given way to the sun’s rays when Lottie arrived home—where she wanted to be and wished she had been hours earlier. Even her gown appeared as exhausted as she felt, losing its elegance somewhere between the constant crushing of being seated and the remnants of powdered sugar lingering on the skirt.
Though she chatted merrily in the carriage on the return ride to her house, Lottie’s conversation with herself was anything but merry. Once again she’d subjected herself to the very situation she wanted to avoid, and she had no one to blame but herself. Of course, moments after they were seated at Vincent’s, Gabriel, Nathalie, and two other couples entered. Other than a weak smile of recognition, there had been no communication between them. But simply knowing that he was mere tables away, enjoying himself with someone else, disturbed her.
Agnes was carrying fresh coffee into the dining room when Lottie entered. “ ’Bout time you dragged yourself home. I suspect you must be having a good time, out so late.”
“I’ll have a better time when I am out of this dress.” Lottie swiped at the small spots left by the sprinkles of sugar. “And it is going to need some cleaning in places.”
Agnes placed the coffee on the sideboard, wiped her hands on her apron, and lifted Lottie’s chin with her hand. “Honey, you don’t look like a girl coming in from having fun. Whatsa matter?”
“Everything.” She yanked off her gloves then twisted them in her hands. She really wanted to throw something. Something that would shatter into pieces on the floor, just like her heart.
Chapter Twenty
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The party was five days away, and the frenzy of activity at the LeClerc house should have made the shutters rattle. Agnes, who’d never met a crisis she could not manage, became sharp-tongued and impatient. Grand-père ducked and dodged to avoid anyone female, and it seemed he elicited Abram’s help in leaving early and arriving home late. Grandmère remained exactly the same, as if her imperial attitude awaited this time and place.
Lottie devised as many excuses as possible to detach herself from the inevitable misery that awaited her on Saturday night. She slept, she read, she even pretended to work on her sampler. She learned from Penelope in The Odyssey, who wove by day and unwove by night to forestall her suitors’ intentions to replace her husband, that she could avoid finishing her sampler. Except that, unlike the clever Penelope, she could prevent nothing.
After two days of watching her grandmother move furniture—that is, watching Grand-mère watching Abram move furniture—Lottie decided she needed a change of scenery. “I’m going to visit Justine,” she announced to whoever might be listening, and left.
The two girls had not spent time together since the night of the opera. Before the party plans, being surrounded by the chaos of the Dumases’ house provided a reprieve from the deafening silence of her own. Today, it would be a relief to be in someone else’s confusion and know she didn’t have to participate.
The shutters weren’t opened, so Lottie knocked on the door. She picked up a wooden doll and a child’s shoe on the top step and handed them to Madame Dumas when the woman opened the door.
“Lottie,” she whispered, “the baby is sleeping, but please come in.”
The Dumas family always seemed to have a sleeping baby, so much so that they were the only family Lottie knew that actually kept a tester baby bed in their study.
“Isabelle’s oldest two aren’t feeling well. No one else is home,” she told Lottie as they tiptoed past Rosalie. The child slept on her stomach, noisily sucking her thumb, with her knees pushed up to her chest and petticoats and dress at full tilt. Her blond hair covered her head like a bonnet of curls.
“Justine should be home soon. She’s…” Madame Dumas looked toward the ceiling and tapped her cheek as if that would expel the answer. After several taps, she shook her head in defeat, pulled out a dining room chair, and sat. “She’s at a class, somewhere with someone. Who isn’t you, apparently.” She motioned for Lottie to sit, plucked a pair of boy’s breeches out of a basket of jumbled clothes on the table, and pulled out the threaded needle in the waistband.
“No, I haven’t been to many classes lately. I suppose with the party, Grand-mère’s been too occupied to keep up with my schedule.” Lottie didn’t so much mind the break, figuring the classes would resume after the party.
> Justine’s mother attacked the rip in the pants. “I would think that your grandmother has a number of details to attend to,” she said, snipping the thread loose and grabbing what appeared to be a petticoat from her basket. “You must be quite excited about Saturday night, yes?” There was the genetic tie she had with Isabelle, that way of making a question seem like an answer.
Lottie picked at imaginary lint on her new silk taffeta day dress, a dizzying tartan, and responded, “Of course.” When she looked up, she found Madame Dumas staring at her with her head tilted and her mouth skewed to one side.
“Now, dear, that did not sound like an enthusiastic answer for a young lady on the verge of her coming-out party,” she said. “When Isabelle had her debut—”
Then Justine shut the front door and called out, “I’m home!” and Rosalie responded with a howl.
* * * * *
“If you had arrived even two minutes later, I would have been facing the Dumas interrogation,” Lottie said.
“You don’t need to spare my feelings by attempting to be funny. You most certainly would have been,” said Justine.
The two sat on the balcony off Justine’s room, drinking lemonade and nibbling on brioche that Maisy, the cook, had brought them.
“I forgot how entertaining it could be to sit here,” mused Lottie as she gazed over the black wrought-iron railing down to St. Louis Street. Wagons groaning with produce and swaying carriages competed for passage on the narrow street…the occasional vendor singing, “Oyster man, oyster man, git your fresh oysters”…water being sold from barrels in the street for those without cisterns…. “Doesn’t the noise keep you awake at night?”
“No. In fact, I find it rather comforting. Sometimes quiet can be louder than noise.”
Lottie pulled her capelet tighter, though she doubted it would help the chill she felt inside. “Maybe quiet simply means having nothing to say.”
“Perhaps that would be true for someone else. Someone not sitting on my balcony pretending that her life is without complaint.” Justine tore off a piece of the brioche and chewed.
It made Lottie laugh inside to think that only Justine would use eating as a way to test whether Lottie would answer. “It seems pointless to discuss a situation over which I have no control. You already know my feelings about this. I have never tried to hide those from you.”
“Well, I suppose this is a beginning. But when are you going to share Gabriel’s involvement in this?”
Lottie allowed the laugh she harbored to reveal itself. “Involvement? Gabriel’s involvement? Whatever do you mean?”
“Don’t be foolish. Your faces glow like the gaslamps on the street at night when you see one another.” Justine shook her head. “Though I do not understand why you allowed it to happen.”
I allowed it to happen? Maybe she’s right. But can you help who you fall in love with?
“Again, what is the point of talking? This”—Lottie swept her arm toward the street—“none of this will ever change.”
“Exactly. It won’t change. Neither the city nor the state will dismiss the law to accommodate you. So that means it’s up to you. You are the one who needs to change.”
“And how am I supposed to accomplish that? I can’t simply toss my feelings into the Mississippi River.” How much easier for Justine to have an opinion, having no one in her life she cared about as deeply as Lottie did for Gabriel.
“No, but you can drown them when you are faced with the impossibility…when the evidence is right there.”
The image of Gabriel’s hand on Nathalie’s back surfaced. “Simply because your eyes see something, that does not mean your heart does,” said Lottie, aware that her voice conveyed irritation. “It gives me cause to wonder, Justine, if you invited me to the opera knowing Gabriel would be there with Nathalie.”
Justine finished her lemonade. “No, but if I thought it would result in your abandoning this impossible notion of yours, I would have.”
* * * * *
The days gave themselves over to a soggy gray and the kind of stinging cold that kept children from complaining about wearing mittens, because they used them to warm their pink, chapped noses or revive their pale cheeks. Then there were the children who would have happily joined the grousing chorus had they gloves to complain about. Gabriel passed a number of mothers and their children, mostly the darker ones, who were probably headed to or from the French Market. While most house slaves wore better clothes than their plantation counterparts, especially since some owners felt their slaves’ mode of dress reflected their own status, the plantation children’s garb, if they had clothes at all, consisted of worn-thin homemade shirts, entirely too big or too small, and brogans.
Several times he wanted to shrug off his own coat and wrap it around the shoulders of a child whose arms weren’t much thicker than twigs. But his two coats would have been quickly gone, and thirty times that many would have been insufficient. Alcee was right. Collecting gloves left at the café or from people who donated old ones was not going to be enough if they were going to clothe the children at the orphanages and the families in their reading classes. Of course, Alcee, for her own protection, knew nothing of those classes. But for the orphans, she volunteered to ask her classmates for old clothes. Gabriel told her he didn’t want her to be perceived as a beggar. Alcee had looked up at him from her book and said, “If I am helping children, I do not care if others think I am begging. Would it be better for them to be cold?”
Gabriel entered the café and tugged off his own gloves, putting them in the pocket of his coat. He shook his head and thought how his younger sister’s wisdom shamed his own at times.
“There you are.”
Joseph’s voice surprised Gabriel, who had arrived early and expected he would be there before the builder.
“Joseph.” Gabriel nodded. “How did you—?”
Joseph held up a key, which he returned to his vest pocket. “Rosette told me to just use this to come in through the kitchen area. In case you weren’t here yet.”
Gabriel didn’t hear an apologetic tone, and Joseph didn’t offer the key. So, not only did his mother trust this man, but Joseph was confident she did so. “I see.”
“Good. Then let’s get started.” He waved the rolled-up papers in his hand like a baton and walked in the direction of the kitchen. Gabriel followed him and listened while he pointed out areas where they could redesign the serving and cooking areas to be more efficient. Then Joseph walked around the seating area, showing Gabriel places he thought could be converted into counter spaces and where the seating area could be lengthened with awnings. He unrolled the papers on one of the tables. “Have a seat. I’d like to show you the plans I’ve designed.”
On a long sheet of foolscap, Joseph had sketched the original area then overlaid another sheet showing the changes he suggested. “Everything is drawn to scale, so the proportions would be the same. Of course, we would do the changes in phases so as to disrupt the business as little as possible.”
The designs evidenced Joseph’s attention to detail as well as his precise measurings and drawings. Gabriel had not considered building structures, such as homes or smaller buildings, to involve much more than ordering lumber and construction materials. Studying the plans before him, his interest was in more than the benefit to the café or even his house. It intrigued him to envision these spaces and remodel and repurpose them—using skills not so unlike those he would use in engineering. “How did you come to learn this?”
Joseph leaned back on the stool and seemed puzzled. “I thought you had seen me here at the café watching how you and your mother worked, and—”
“No, that isn’t what I meant. I know you have spent time here. How did you learn about designing?” Gabriel pointed to the plans on the table between them.
“Oh,” Joseph said, the confusion on his face dissipating. “Construction.” He rolled up the plans. “How much time do you have?”
“Until the first custo
mer arrives and all night,” Gabriel answered, his expression grim.
It was Saturday. The night of Lottie’s birthday and coming-out party.
Chapter Twenty-One
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Agnes carried Madame Olympe’s creation into Lottie’s room and transferred it to her bed as if the tulle was of thin sheets of glass instead of fabric.
“The dress weigh more than you. Guess they don’t plan on you moving much.” Agnes eyed the dress the way she eyed Henri when she’d find him lounging on one of the upholstered chairs in Lottie’s bedroom.
“Maybe Grand-mère had Madame sew weights into the skirt. She knows how awfully excited I am about this soirée, and she feared I would float way.” Lottie leaned against one of the bedposts, since she had already been too corseted to attempt sitting. She placed her hands around the waist of the black satin corset, and her fingertips almost met. “Agnes, this is unbearable, and the party is over an hour away.”
“You wearing six petticoats, Miz Lottie, ’fore we even get you in that dress. Dey so stiff, your grandmother said your waist hafta be at seventeen inches.”
“I should have dressed downstairs in the exact spot we will greet guests. Then I wouldn’t need to move.” Except for when she possibly fainted from lack of food or breath.
“Les’ just get it over with,” said Agnes, carrying the petticoats to Lottie.
Somehow they avoided disturbing the complicated hairdressing Lottie had sat still for that morning while the stylist twisted her hair into a pattern of braids and curls before finishing it off with a pair of diamond combs. While Agnes fastened the dozens of hooks and eyes from halfway between Lottie’s shoulder blades to the end of her hips, Lottie held on to the bedpost, already feeling the weight of the gown.