Although she earned straight A's, Priscilla had remained restless and melancholy, and upon completion of her freshman year had returned to New Orleans, claiming that she was through with college and wanted to take over Parfumerie Devalier. In the meantime, however, Madame had accepted as her assistant a young black woman from Belle Bayou, the plantation owned by a branch of the Devalier family. V'lu Jackson was eager and bright, though almost laughably countrified, and Madame had grown fond of her. She wasn't going to kick V'lu out the door in favor of Pris when Pris was liable to change her mind at any moment and go chasing after a fortune, an older man, or both. Moreover, V'lu functioned as Madame's maid as well as her shop assistant, a duty for which Priscilla would have neither instinct nor inclination. And when it came to loyalty and respect, V'lu was more like a daughter to her than Priscilla had ever been.
Madame informed Pris that she could stay for the summer, providing she earned her keep, but that come September she would have to make other arrangements. Pris was none too happy with that, but Effecto's settlement was fast dwindling and she hadn't much choice. She worked diligently, if clumsily, and minded her manners, although she often walked around with her lower lip sticking out so far she could have eaten tomatoes through a tennis racket.
It was during that summer, yes, that was when it was all right, that there arrived the bottle over which there has been such a silly commotion. Some beachcombers brought it in, Madame recalled, a retired couple. They had dug it out of the mud near the mouth of the Mississippi, and since it was obviously quite old, they thought it might be of interest to someone in the perfume trade. Having recently moved into a mobile home, they had little room for bric-a-brac, and besides, the fellow on the side of the bottle was some sort of devil whose image didn't belong in a Christian household. They were donating their find to the Parfumerie Devalier, they said, because they had purchased a small vial of scent there forty-five years earlier on their honeymoon.
Yes, yes, it was as clear to Lily now as dew on a shoelace; Pris and V'lu had been standing behind the retail counter, and Paris was saying, “College is fun and you can learn a lot of interesting stuff, but if you really want to get rich, you've got to get out in the world and start something up on your own.” Sniffing her handkerchief, Madame could hear those words as plain as if they were on Buster's menu. And it was right then, she remembered, that the beachcombers had come in with the bottle and made their little presentation.
She'd been busy at her desk, working on the books, figuring if there was any way to put the shop back on its feet, put it back to showing a profit from perfume so she wouldn't have to dabble in that. . that other work. From the rear of the shop, she thanked the couple for their nostalgic gesture, but she didn't get up. She could tell at a distance that the bottle was too large to have held a truly fine perfume; that, in any case, there were only a few drops left in it, and time and tide had no doubt rendered those drops impotent long ago. It had a pleasing shape, all right, and its bluish tint lent it a mystic aura. What with that weird horned figure embossed on the side, it would make an excellent container for mojo lotion or moon medicine were she forced by cruel circumstances to add to the hoodoo pharamacopoeia. She would examine it at her leisure, evaluating then its possible use to her. Meanwhile, speaking of hoodoo, she had some red ink to turn black.
Her face was deep in the ledger, as it was now deep in her scented hankie, when Pris and V'lu pulled the stopper out of the bottle and began oohing and aahing over the aroma it released. What did they know, a rustic plantation pickaninny and a dropped-out college girl? She would put her professional snout to the vessel when she had a moment, but really, what olfactory excitement could there be in a virtually empty curiosity exhumed from the mud?
Having wrestled with the balance sheet until dinner, Madame had begun to nod almost upon swallowing her last spoonful of gumbo. She went to bed without ever having tested the depleted contents of the antique. And during the night, Priscilla had eloped with the bottle much as she had with Effecto Partido (only this time nobody had had to play an accordion outside her window). Well, summer was ending, anyway, so good-bye, Pris, honey, and God bless. Her exodus was probably for the best. As for the bottle, it was unimportant, although in the ensuing three years, V'lu had found endless occasions to squawk about it.
When Lily removed the hankie from her face and snapped out of her trance, she found V'lu gnawing delicately at the corner of a rib. Diners who had been staring returned to their meals. One, with a mouthful of cornbread, whispered to his companion, “That ol' Madame D. got plant powers.” He didn't specify which plant.
“V'lu, I don't especially approve of what you've done. It was dishonest and unnecessary. That bottle obviously meant something to Priscilla, it was part of her fantasy. Little value it is to us.”
“Ah doesn't wants you to say anubber word until you smells it, ma'am. You ain't nebber smelled it!”
“Well. .”
“It gots a jasmine theme, a mighty jasmine theme, near bouts as good as our Bingo Pajama flowers. It gots a citrus top note, lak our boof gots. And it gots something else, ma'am, it gots a bottom note. It gots a base whut does dee job!”
“Just the same, Priscilla was—”
“Smell it.”
“But—”
“Smell it!”
“All right. But not in here.”
They walked out onto Burgandy Street as the sun was setting. It was late November, and there was a chill in the air, but there were people on balconies and people on stoops. They were in one of the few sections of the French Quarter where blacks still lived, most of them having been driven across the North Rampart Street boundary by escalating rents. It seemed the sleazier the Quarter got, the more it cost to live there.
Of the buildings on Burgandy, most were four-room Creole cottages that lacked the shady courtyards where, out of sight of tourists and photographers, the true social life of the Quarter transpired. Here, residents sat on their stoops instead, yet even thus exposed, they managed to protect their privacy. A stranger could watch their languid movements, hear their laughter and music, smell the spicy foods they ate, but could never expect to be a part of those things. And when they went inside and shut their doors, their habits became as unknowable as those of ancient Congolese. The historian Kolb has called New Orleans “a city that has never truly been in the mainstream of American life.” Although an indoors city to a large extent, New Orleans watches less television than any town its size in the nation. What does it do, then, behind those closed shutters? What, indeed?
If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being — ever mindful of its personal style.
Turning down St. Ann Street, toward Jackson Square and the river, the two women — the older, white, painted, and bejeweled one simultaneously lumbering and waddling, as if the bear and the duck on the animated Hamms beer commercial had coupled and issued an illicit offspring; the younger black one wiggling pertly on sleek hams — were together an expression of the city's style. And it was completely in character when they stopped beside a tall wrought-iron gate, spiky with fleurs-de-lis, so that the younger could remove a bottle from her weekend bag and pass it furtively to the other.