A Million Nightingales (4 page)

Then I left Mamère amid the clothes, and she turned away without a word.

I waited in the yard. The carriage had been put away. The governess's voice was steady as a trail of ants while she read. Lines of words with no object to avoid.

Mademoiselle Lorcey was the second governess to live in the room beside Céphaline's. The first one lasted a long time, with her thick spectacles like tiny ponds of clean water over her eyes. Céphaline loved her. She taught Céphaline about the numbers and how they could be multiplied and divided forever.

I entered the house like a fly, back then, when I was eight and ten and twelve. I landed in each room long enough to deliver clothes, to clean shoes with blacking, to touch a few tables and the closets with my fingers while I put away linens.

I heard the lessons. That governess, Madame Lustgarten, was a widow from New Orleans who had never had children. “You are nearly like my own,” she said once to Céphaline. “Your mind is so quick. And girls—they never love numbers as you do. They are afraid of science. But not you. I have never had a pupil like you.”

I listened while lost to everyone's sight in the long hallway where the floor gleamed like a molasses river and the portraits on the wall stared at one another and not down at me.

“Rust. Iron oxide. Look at the elements.”

Mamère knew the mixture to take rust away from the white shirts of Msieu, if he'd been inspecting machinery from the sugar mill.

“Look at how the elements must react if we put this nail inside a jar with a few drops of water.”

Now, on the back stairs, I remembered listening to them both. Mamère and Madame Lustgarten. Varnish and lemon oil. Rust and metal. Soap made of tallow and ashes.

But Msieu sent that governess away after three years, because Céphaline spent all her time in her room, with her papers. She would not sew or play the piano or dance. She would not speak to Grandmère Bordelon at all, only stared—not even at a person or wall or window. When I saw her eyes focused on the very air in front of her, I knew she was doing sums and experiments inside her brain.

After Madame Lustgarten, no one came for a long time. We were thirty miles south of New Orleans, Madame Bordelon used to fret. “No one of any stature wants to live in Plaquemines Parish now.”

I remembered when Céphaline learned the names of the bones.

Under my dress was nothing but my ribs and skin and stomach. Céphaline had told me about the body while I hung up her clothes. Last year, in winter. It was as if she had to tell someone of the lessons, after Madame Lustgarten had been sent away.

She said we were bones and ligaments and tendons and fat and muscle and organs. She said to look at the pig's body when it was killed; we were the same except for measurement.

“Of what?” I asked, setting down her shoes.

“Of those things. Of brains, bones, stomachs. Mammals have almost everything in common. Look—” She was at her desk. “Mammals give birth to live young. Reptiles lay eggs. Fowl, too. Look at the classifications.” Her book had gold-edged pages.

She knew I couldn't read all those words. But from her child's picture books, I learned other words quickly.
Chat, cheval, chien.
Cat, horse, dog.

That day, she was putting animals into columns. Cow. Pig. Horse. Snake. Turkey. Chicken. “Where is mule?” I asked.

She frowned, and pushed her finger across the columns. “A mule is the offspring of a horse and a donkey. It's a hybrid.”

Madame called me now. I carried the pressed table linens, wrapped with red ribbon. Mamère always tied the clean clothes in square bundles with ribbons, at first so I knew whose were whose, but then because Madame liked it.

Madame and Msieu were leaving the table. The small splinter of wood between his teeth.

“That's why she is valuable,” Madame said, glancing at the linens in my arms. I was thinking of the words.
Mammal. Hybrid.

“That one?” He stared at me.

Cold trickled across my back. Your shoulder blades, Cépha-line had told me. Not angel wings. That is foolish. They are bones. We are humans, not angels.

“No,” Madame said, taking the bundles. “The mother. Marie-Thérèse. She does the laundry perfectly and sends it back tied up beautifully like that.”

He looked not at me but at the ribbon. He said, “It is clean. How laundry is delivered is not important.”

Madame sounded impatient. “It is the presentation of beauty,” she said. “It is more important than you know.”

“For who?” His voice was louder now. “For you?”

Her voice was soft as steam. “For the women who come here and see tablecloths and napkins and judge us. The women who have sons. Unless we can spend weeks in New Orleans this winter, we have only the Desjardins and Auzennes to think about for husbands. Don't you see them looking at this house? At her?”

Her was Céphaline. I had to learn to make her beautiful.

“Moinette,” Madame Bordelon called from the dining room. “Take the gingercake and tell them I'll be in shortly. I don't know where Félonise has gone. She's getting so old she can't move.” Madame Auzenne, her curls like caterpillars along her cheeks, her dress maroon silk, studied something on the buffet.

I carried the platter into the parlor, where the girls had to play piano for an hour after lunch.

The Auzenne girls were on the settee. They were twelve and fourteen and sixteen. Their hair was black and curled at their temples, their cheeks white and smooth as the curve of eggshells. They sat like the dolls on Céphaline's shelf, heads erect, hands still during history lessons, and when Mademoiselle Lorcey asked them for the name of a governor in New Orleans or a king in France, they didn't move anything but their eyebrows and shoulders to say they didn't know and didn't care.

Céphaline took a piece of gingercake right away. “Ginger is a root, not a bean like vanilla,” she said, and the Auzenne girls smiled politely as if she'd stumbled on the grass.

Céphaline's boutons glowed on her cheeks and jaw like tiny berries inserted under her skin. I waited near the door, thinking of the cloves Tretite slid under the collar of the ham.

“Lessons are finished for today,” Mademoiselle Lorcey said, and the Auzenne girls smiled faintly. But they didn't reach for the gingercake until their mother came in and said, “Yes, petites.”

Mademoiselle Lorcey sighed. “At least the names of royalty would help you make conversation with someone at a dinner.”

The oldest Auzenne girl raised her brows again. “Must Céphaline play the piano today? Perhaps the hairdresser could
help
her now. With her—toilette. Then we wouldn't get home so late.”

Céphaline's mouth was set in a thin line like a nail scratch of blood. She had rubbed scarlet geranium petals on her lips, as her mother had told her. “You cannot be
helped,”
she hissed, and moved her skirts around me when she left.

Madame Bordelon watched, her own face unmoving. “Moi-nette, come upstairs,” she said. The hem of her dress collected cake morsels Céphaline had dropped.

Last winter, to prepare her for the winter season of dinners and dances in New Orleans, Madame showed me how to dress Céphaline and style her hair. Céphaline should have had a maid before, but she wouldn't let Félonise touch her. She refused to wear her corset and pulled her hair into a ball at the back of her head.

She was always hunched over her desk. Back then, I practiced putting on her corset and pulling the stays, and her curved back would lift. But her hair began to fall out—a bird nest of dull brown in the brush, strands on her pillowcase—and Doctor Tom came from New Orleans on his horse. He brought tonics and medicines, as he always had for Grandmère.

Msieu told Madame, “I don't trust him—an English doctor. No one wants the English here. Maybe we should take Céphaline to Paris.”

Msieu had looked anxiously into the bedroom where she lay. He loved Céphaline, even though he never smiled. His face was dry and chapped under his black hat, from riding the canerows.

I curled up on a pallet in the corner, but she wouldn't sleep, her head down in the dandelion-ball of light from her candle while she read. “I can't study while you breathe,” she said at last. I let my air in and out, only my own air, my cheeks pressed against the plaster where the walls met. But she had sent me to the kitchen for milk and then locked the door and refused to let me or anyone else in. No one could touch her anymore, she'd said. No poking and lacing.

Now she read at her desk, her back bent like a heavy shawl weighed on her shoulders. She turned when I came inside the bedroom.

Céphaline's eyes were glowing blue as the lowest flames, the cooking fire under Tretite's pine knots, and inside the blue were bars of black like wagon-wheel spokes. Her eyes were like nothing anyone had seen.

But the skin around her mouth and the edges of her hairline was red and swollen with boutons. Her hair was thin at the temples and dull brown as faded pecan shells. Not Creole black like the Auzenne girls, thick and lustrous down her spine so we could gather and pin and curl it—so that a man could unpin it.

The hairdresser from New Orleans was named Zerline. She carried two bottles, cut glass decanters as if for brandy and cognac, but smaller, with wider mouths.

She was paler than me. Which of Tretite's words fit her? Quadroon? Hair straight and shiny black as bootleather, pulled so tightly into a knot it was as if she had no hair at all.

“The smell goes into my brain,” Céphaline said without looking up. Then she lowered her head onto the pages, and when her mother lifted her, smudges of oil were left on the paper.

“The price of beauty,” her mother said softly. “In France, our hair was so heavy and high, we knelt in our carriage. Be grateful you have only the curls on the sides to arrange.”

The curling tongs sat next to the lamp, sharp as black scissors.

“This comes from New Orleans, madame,” Zerline said in her soft, pinched voice. “Made special for the ladies there, for the balls and parties. I will send it on the boat, if you approve.”

She dipped a silver comb into the bottle, and the black liquid clung to the teeth until she pulled the comb slowly through Céphaline's hair. The strands stood alone, tiny black canerows, until she smoothed her palms over the hair, pushing the color into a glossy helmet.

“So, là, wait some time. The skin is next.” From the other bottle, she poured liquid into a bowl and made a paste with alum from the kitchen. The smell of camphor rose from Céphaline's hair, and her cheeks and forehead were covered in the white mask.

She stared at me, her eyes fierce. I turned away. Someone was supposed to pull our hair from the pins, put his mouth on ours, and then reach to move our dresses.

What was supposed to happen then, I didn't want to know.

“Nothing Céphaline say help you. When you were nine, she say cane is a grass, and you cut the little grass near the house and mash up and boil. Then you throw up.”

My mother was angry. I had no words for her. I had said the word
patella
aloud to myself, while sewing.

Who first ate the grass, in India? Céphaline said the sugarcane had come from there. Who saw a tall, waving stalk and thought to grind it green in his own teeth, to find the juice sweet?

What if he had died?

“She say the names of the bones. How that help you?”

Clavicle. Femur. Cranium. The bone around the brain.

“I like to know the words.”

“You know nothing yet.” She moved the needle into the sleeve. Now that the mattresses were done, we had to sew new coats for the men, for Christmas. The coarse cottonade was already dyed black.

“Doctor Tom said fingernails and hair grow but they are dead. They are not living. That's why it doesn't hurt when you cut them or burn them. The curling tongs are hotter than your iron.” I had to make Céphaline's hair into black spiraled curls. Curls just larger than mine.

“You don't be in the room with that doctor,” she said. “Nobody trust Englishman with voice like that. Old and no house. Just a white horse and all them bottles. You don't listen to him.”

Doctor Tom had two eyes in a jar. When I hung his clothes in the armoire of the guest room, and he was gone to help old Msieu Lemoyne, whose breath was not working, I lingered to see the jars and books.

What made the disk of color on the edge of the white ball? I didn't touch the glass. Whose eye, this murky green? Whose brain? What was the pale fist in another jar?

In a dish lay teeth, their whitish roots like thorns, which he kept to show slaves who didn't believe teeth should be so hard to pull.

“You wouldn't believe those were from a child,” he said behind me, and I dropped the packet of white shirts.

“I'm sorry,” I said, but he laughed.

“I need a clean shirt,” he said, pulling salve-stained fabric away from his body. “It took me all night to calm Lemoyne's lungs.”

I untied Mamère's ribbon around the shirts. “Are the lungs white, like that?” I pointed to the jar with the pale fist, hoping he would say what that was.

Doctor Tom spread his hands on his own chest. “Lungs are large and grayish pink, guarded under the ribs,” he said. “Lemoyne is old-fashioned like all the French. He believes that when the grinding begins, the vapors from the sugarhouse will clear his lungs. A lovely Creole superstition—when the first cane is cut, all will be well.”

“Maybe if he believes it will cure him, he will be correct,” Madame Bordelon said coldly from the doorway, tilting her head to study me. My fingers raked up the dirty laundry from the floor.

Doctor Tom rode his white horse between New Orleans and the houses south along the river, the only doctor willing to come this far down the Mississippi. Msieu paid him to take care of Grandmère and Céphaline and any slaves who were sick or hurt, and as Azure was large, he stayed here while he worked. At the next place south, Bontemps, Msieu LeBrun raised hunting dogs: some for deer and fox, some for slaves. At LeBrun's hunting parties, men would get shot accidentally or fall off their horses and break a leg. “I am the stolid, dull repairer of drunken French-Creole carelessness,” Doctor Tom would say, showing me the blood on his pants leg from a hunter's bullet wound.