I took her into the ladies’ parlor, and we sat till she’d caught her breath. Then I took her up to the suite, and when I’d put her things away, she sank down on the sofa and said: “I ran so hard, trying to catch you before you went in, I’ve got a stitch in my side.”
“Want me to rub it?”
“Just hold your hand there, please.”
I pretended her dress was in the way, and reached my hand up under it, expecting her to resist. But she reached her hand under too, and undid the knot of the tape, to loosen her pantalette waist so my hand could slip inside. It touched soft, warm skin and soft, warm fuzz. As I pressed the stitch, she relaxed in my other arm, and pretty soon whispered: “You were so wonderful, Willie! Just like a bull! Same as a rampaging bull!”
“I’m sorry about the cussing.”
“I’m not! Oh, don’t worry, I know all the words — and I loved it when you told him ‘you stupid son of a bitch!’ It was just thrilling to hear! Willie, I never knew a bull could mean something to me, but now I do! He can be the most beautiful thing there is! The most beautiful—” She broke off and started to cry.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Nothing! I’m just happy, that’s all!”
For quite a while she sobbed, snuggled close, and kissed, so I inhaled her, the Russian Leather, her spit, and her tears, all in one fragrant cloud. Then I asked: “Stitch any better?”
“All gone! You made it well!”
I started to move my hand, but she grabbed it and held it to her. I picked her up and carried her to the bedroom.
The rest of the day was wild, if that’s what I wanted, but it was other things too — sad, intimate, holy, and just plain silly. We lay close for a while and whispered, and then she started exploring — every part of me, including especially my scar. She wanted to know how I got it, something a soldier likes to forget, but I told her: my dive for the rear when the Rebs burst out of the woods, my stumble, the Reb’s lunge with his saber, the pistol-shot in my ear as one of my men got him. She listened, kissed it, then snuggled to me, patting it. Then she jumped up, slipped bare feet in her shoes, and paraded in front of the pier glass. “You think,” she said, “that it’s you I came here for — that’s a mistake. It’s this full-length mirror, so I can see if I’m getting pot-gutted. Well?”
“No,” I said, “you’re not.”
“You better say so.”
“I can only speak the truth.”
“Ever notice how a girl without inny clothes is nothing but a thing? Just a bunch of dabs, dewlaps, and dimples shaking up and down? But lift her heels with shoes and then you got a nymph — a regular stone nymph in a garden, pouring water out of a cup.”
“I never saw a girl without any clothes.”
“You’ve been missing something.”
What I’d been missing was so beautiful I had to look, even though I felt I shouldn’t. And it wasn’t all full, round curves, but partly the way she moved. That, she said, came “from the way they beat it into me, at the convent in Grand Coteau — they make you walk like a lady, whether you want to or not, and won’t have you walking like a camel.” I asked if she was Catholic, and she said no, “but the sisters will take you in, whatever you are, if you’re worth taking, and they seemed to think I was. I’m Episcopalian.” She was pleased that I was Episcopalian too, and asked where I went to school. I told her St. John’s College, and that started her on her childhood in Alexandria — especially Hilda Schmidt, the girl who’d lived next door to her, and how they had played, chasing each other around, “before she died of the fever, up and down the cistrens, over the roof, and down through the skylights.” It seemed that her father’s store was a double one, half of which, with the flat above it, he used himself, and half he rented to Mr. Schmidt, who had a sugar-mill supply place. Alexandria seemed to enchant her, and suddenly she asked: “Where you taking us?”
“Tonight? You know the places. Say.”
“How about Galpin’s, then?”
“Galpin’s is fine.”
“It’s just a few steps from us, Willie, and after we’ve finished dinner we can all three go to the flat and I’ll show you some pictures I have. Of Alexandria. Then you can see what it’s like.”
“I’d love it.”
“Incidentally: I’ve been working today.”
“At Lavadeau’s, you mean you’re telling your father?”
“That’s it — I’m all tuckered out, but will go home to dress and we’ll come to you. And, incidentally, if I’d known what was scheduled today, at headquarters and all, I’d have put something on. Better than what I’m wearing. At least I have a few things left from before the war.”
“I haven’t complained, have I?”
“No, but I have my pride.”
She stared as I talked about her dress, giving the fine points on why I loved it. Then she kicked off her shoes and came close to hear more about it. I don’t think she really believed all I said about its lines, and the way it swung so soft from the swell of her bottom, but how much I’d thought about it seemed to touch her. Around five she gave me one last kiss, then got up to dress.
“I hope they hang that Burke.”
We’d had quite a dinner, with cocktails, a soup called crayfish bisque, some kind of chicken with white wine, and ice cream with brandied cherries — and as we ate we talked. I told Mr. Landry of the way I’d smashed up Jenkins by making use of Olsen, and he made acute observations, comprehending at once the tactics I’d had to employ. She filled in with details on the way I “whipped — that was the thing, he whipped!” I mentioned in passing the twenty-five thousand dollars I must find, but didn’t get much reaction. He named a banker he’d take me to, but didn’t really show much interest, and I saw the reason was that — to him as well as to her — a channel out to the Gulf cut by the river itself didn’t mean a great deal. Alexandria was what they lived for, so Alexandria was what we looked at as soon as dinner was over. We walked a block to their flat, which was on the second floor of a house between two saloons, a toasty-warm little place from heat coming up through a register, because, she explained, “the landlord’s wife has palsy, and he must keep the fire up for her.” It had walnut-and-horsehair furnishing, a potted rubber tree, and framed mottoes on the walls. While he was lighting candles she was getting her album out, and then we sat with it in front of us on the table, she turning the pages.
She had photographs, water colors, and plats, and they both seemed to take a delight in pointing everything out — the four wharves the town had, ramps up the riverbank, with railed platforms up top, “nice, well-built structures,” as he put it, “not like those Teche wharfboats, all full of bugs and rats, or those Mississippi levees, with their rum holes, gambling dives, and cathouses”; the “cistrens,” as they called them, just visible through the trees, “as there’s no wells in Alexandria — it’s all rainwater, which we run off the roofs and valve to our various cisterns, these big ones that you see, which stand on trusties so they warm in the light of the sun, and the drinking ones underground, where the water keeps fresh and cool”; the big, new hotel, a three-story, brick affair, “one of the finest in the land, except just as it was getting finished the dayum war hit, and their furniture never came”; most lovingly noticed of all, the line of stores on Front Street, looking out on the river, as the bank itself had no structures on it, with of course the Landry store, near the corner down from the hotel, so it faced the lower end of Biossat’s, or the upper wharf, and its twin next door, the Schmidt van, pipe and kettle house; Mrs. Landry’s grave, in Pineville, which seemed to be a little town across the river. When I’d got so I thought I knew Alexandria better than I knew Annapolis, he closed the album and mused: “What I miss most, living here in New Orleans, is the cleanliness of it — but of course that’s a natural thing. Alexandria’s where the Southwest begins.”