"Yes, darling sister. Now you tell us about this blind grandson and what really went on between you two or I'll be the one who spreads the gossip and gets Mrs. Penny in trouble," she threatened.
I sighed and shook my head.
"You're impossible, Gisselle. I told you everything. I heard the music, looked into the room, and spoke to him for a few minutes. That was all."
"Did he tell you how his parents died?"
"No."
"Well, what do you think happened?" she asked.
"I don't know, but it must have been something horrible." Abby agreed.
"Well now," Gisselle said, smiling from ear to ear, "at least we have something to find out and something to hold over Mrs. Penny if she ever so much as threatens us with a demerit."
"Stop it, Gisselle. And don't start anything with your fan club either," I said, but I might as well have been talking to myself. The moment the other girls set eyes on us, Gisselle was ready to tell all, from Buck to Mrs. Clairborne's grandson.
Alone back in our room, after we had taken off our nice clothes and put on jeans and sweatshirts, I did tell Abby more about Louis. We lay on our stomachs, side by side on my bed.
"He doesn't think much of Greenwood girls," I explained. "He thinks Mrs. Ironwood and his grandmother turn us all into puppets."
"He might not be too far off thinking that. You heard Mrs. Clairborne's speech about the traditions we must uphold and how we must behave."
"Did you notice that all the clocks were stopped, even the watch around her neck?"
"No," Abby said. "Were they?"
"All at the same hour and minute: at five after two."
"How strange."
"I was going to ask Mrs. Penny about it, but when she became so agitated over my side trip and my meeting Louis, I decided not to add anymore pepper to the gumbo."
Abby laughed.
"What?"
"Every once in a while your Cajun background sneaks back," she said.
"I know. Louis could detect my accent and knew I was from the bayou. He was surprised I was permitted to enroll, considering I wasn't a true blueblood."
"What do you suppose would happen to me if they found out the truth about my past?" Abby said.
"And what truth is that?" Gisselle demanded.
We both spun around and gasped at the sight of her in our doorway. We were so engrossed in our conversation that we hadn't heard her open the door-- or else, knowing her, she had opened it softly just so she could spy on us. She wheeled herself into the room, and I sat up in my bed.
"Having a heart to heart, girls?" she teased.
"You should knock before coming in here, Gisselle. You want your privacy, I'm sure."
"I thought you'd be happy to have me come by. I happen to have found out the story of poor Louis," she said, smiling her Cheshire cat smile. Actually, she reminded me more of the sort of muskrat Grandpere Jack trapped.
"And how did you do that?"
"Jacki knew. Seems it isn't all as big a secret as Mrs. Penny pretended. There are skeletons in Mrs. Clairborne's closets," she sang gleefully.
"What sort of skeletons?" Abby asked.
"What's your secret first?"
"Secret?"
"The thing you don't want Mrs. Ironwood to discover about you. Come on, I heard what you said."
"It's nothing," Abby said, her face turning crimson.
"If it's nothing, tell it. Tell it or I'll . . I'll make up something."
"Gisselle!"
"Well, it's a fair trade. I'll tell you what I learned, but you've got to tell me something too. I just knew you'd share secrets with her and not with your own twin sister. You probably told her things about us too."
"I did not." I looked at Abby, whose face was drooping with sadness, both for me and for herself. "All right, we'll tell," I said. Abby's eyes widened. "Gisselle can keep a secret. Can't you?"
"Of course. I know more secrets than you'll ever know, especially about the kids back in our old school, even secrets about Beau," she added happily.
I thought a moment and then blurted something I knew Gisselle would accept.
"Abby was suspended once for being caught with a boy in the basement of one of her previous schools," I said. Abby's surprise worked perfectly, because it looked like I had betrayed her. Gisselle gazed from her to me skeptically for a moment and then laughed.
"Big deal," she said. "Unless," she added, "you were naked when you were caught. Were you?"
Abby looked to me for a moment and then shook her head. "No, not completely."
"Not completely? How much then? Did you take off your blouse?" Abby nodded. "Your bra?" Abby nodded again. Gisselle looked impressed. "What else?"
"That's all," Abby said quickly.
"Well, well, little Miss Goody Goody isn't so pure after all."
"Gisselle, remember, you promised."
"Oh, who cares? That's not enough to interest anyone anyway," she said. She thought a moment and then smiled. "Now I suppose you want me to tell you why Louis is blind and what happened to his parents."
"You said you would," I replied.
She hesitated, enjoying her hold over us. "Maybe later, if I feel like it," she said and spun herself around in her chair and wheeled herself out of our room.
"Gisselle!" Abby cried.
"Oh, let her go, Abby," I said. "She'll just tease us and tease us."
But I couldn't help wondering myself what it was that had turned that handsome young man into a blind, melancholy soul, revealing his feelings and thoughts only through his fingers on the keys of a piano.
6
A Surprising Invitation
.
Despite my having enough curiosity to fill the
eyes of a dozen cats, I didn't give Gisselle the satisfaction of pleading with her to tell us what she had found out, and I certainly didn't go to Jacki. But as it turned out, I didn't have to beg anyone in Gisselle's fan club.
Right after breakfast the next morning, I was called to the telephone to speak to my art teacher, Miss Stevens.
"I was on my way out today to do some work and thought of you," she said. "I know this place just of the highway where we can get a wonderful view of the river. Would you like to come along?"
"Oh yes, I would."
"Fine. It's a bit overcast, but the weatherman guarantees us it will clear up shortly and warm up another ten degrees. I'm just wearing a sweatshirt and jeans," she said.
"So am I."
"Then you're ready.I'll be by in ten minutes to pick you up. Don't worry about supplies: I have everything we'll need in the car."
"Thank you."
I was so excited by the prospect of drawing and painting scenes in nature again that I nearly bowled Vicki over in the corridor. She had her arms filled with books she had just taken out of the library.
"Where are you going so fast?" she asked.
"Painting . . . with my teacher . . . sorry."
I hurried into our room and told Abby, who was curled up on her bed reading her social studies assignment.
"That's great," she said. I started to change from loafers to a pair of sneakers. "You know, I never noticed that string around your ankle," Abby remarked. "What is it?"
"A dime," I replied, and I told her why Nina had given it to me. "I know you think it seems silly, but . . ."
"No," she said, her face dark, "I don't. My father secretly practices voodoo. Remember, my grandmother was Haitian. I know some rituals and . . ." she said, getting up and going to the closet, "I have this." She plucked a garment out of her suitcase and unfolded it before me. It was a dark blue skirt. I thought there was nothing remarkable about it at first, and then she moved the skirt through her fingers until I saw the tiny nest woven with horsehair and pierced with two crossed roots sewn into the hem.
"What's that?" I asked.
"It's for warding off evil. I'm saving this for a special occasion. I'll wear it when I fear I am in some sort of danger," she told me.
br />
"I never saw that before, and I thought Nina had shown me just about everything in voodoo."
"Oh no," Abby said, laughing. "A moma can invent something new any time." She laughed. "I was hiding this from you because I didn't want you to think me strange, and here you are, wearing a dime on your ankle for good gris-gris." We laughed and hugged just as Samantha, Jacki, and Kate came wheeling Gisselle past our doorway.
"Look at them!" my twin cried, pointing. "See what happens when you don't have boys at your school."
Their laughter brought blood to both our faces.
"Your sister," Abby fumed. "One of these days I'm going to push her and that wheelchair over a cliff."
"You'll have to get in line," I told her, and we laughed again. Then I hurried out to wait for Miss Stevens.
She drove up a few minutes later in a brown jeep with the cloth top down, and I hopped in.
"I'm so glad you can come," she said.
"I'm glad you asked me."
She had her hair in a ponytail and the sleeves of her sweatshirt pushed up to her elbows. The sweatshirt looked like a veteran of many hours of painting, because it was streaked and spotted with just about every color of paint. In her beat-up jeans and sneakers, she looked hardly more than a year or two older than me.
"How do you like living at the Louella Clairborne House? Mrs. Penny is sweet, isn't she?"
"Yes. She's always jolly." After a moment I said, "I switched roommates."
"Oh?"
"I was rooming with my twin sister, Gisselle."
"You don't get along?" she asked, and then she smiled. "If you think I'm getting too personal . ."
"Oh no," I said, and I meant it. I remembered Grandmere Catherine used to tell me your first impressions about people usually prove to be the truest because your heart is the first to react. Right from the beginning I felt comfortable with Miss Stevens, and I believed I could trust her, if for no other reason than the fact that we shared a love of art.
"No, I don't get along with her," I admitted. "And not because I don't want to or I don't try. Maybe if we had been brought up together, things would be different."
"If?" Miss Stevens's smile melted with confusion.
"We've only known each other a little more than a year," I began, and I told her my story. I was still talking by the time we arrived at the place that overlooked the river. She hadn't said a word the whole time; she just listened quietly.
"And so I agreed to come to Greenwood with Gisselle," I concluded.
"Remarkable," she said. "And I used to think my life was complicated because I was brought up by nuns at an orphanage, St. Mary's in Biloxi."
"Oh? What happened to your parents?"
"I never really knew. All the nuns would tell me was that my mother gave me over to them shortly after I was born. I tried to find out more about myself, but they were very strict about keeping confidences."
I helped her set up our easels and put out paper and drawing utensils. The sky had begun to clear, just as the weatherman had promised, and the thick layers of clouds separated to reveal a light blue sky behind them. Here at the river, the breeze was stronger. Behind us the branches of some red oak and hickory trees shuddered and swayed, sending a flock of chirping sparrows off over the riverbank and then into a quieter section of cottonwoods.
An oil barge and a freighter moved rapidly downriver, while off in the distance, a replicated steamboat carrying frolicking tourists churned its way lazily toward St. Francisville.
"Do you think you'll ever find out about your parents?" I asked.
"I don't know. I've sort of accepted that I won't?' She smiled. "It's all right. I have an extended family: all the other orphans I knew, some of the nuns." She gazed around. "It's pretty here, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"What catches your eye?"
I studied the river, the boats, and the shore. Downstream I saw the spiraling smoke from the oil refinery stacks get caught in the wind and disappear against the clouds, but it was a pair of brown pelicans bobbing on the water that held my attention. I told her, and she laughed.
"You're like me. You like to put some animal in your settings. Well, let's begin. Let's work on perspective and see if we can capture the feel of movement in the water."
We started to draw, but our conversation didn't stop as we worked.
"How was your tea with Mrs. Clairborne?" she inquired. I described it and how impressed I was with the house. Then I told her about Louis.
"You actually spoke to him?" she asked, pausing.
"Yes."
"I've heard a great deal about Mrs. Clairborne and her grandson from the other teachers, but there are teachers who have been here for years and never set eyes on him. What's he look like?"
I described him and his beautiful piano playing.
"After I told him I was an artist, he suggested I go down to the lake at twilight and try to paint that scene. He wasn't always blind, and he remembers it vividly," I told her.
"Yes. What a tragic story."
"I don't know it."
"You don't? Yes, I understand why. It is one of the unspoken tales, one of those secrets everyone knows but pretends not to," she said. "It has been made clear to me by the old-timers here on more than one occasion not to be caught gossiping about the Clairbornes."
I nodded.
"But I can tell you the story," she said with a smile. "Even if it does seem like gossip. We're simpatico artists and we're permitted little
indiscretions." She grew serious for a moment as she focused on the river. Then she began. "It seems Mrs. Clairborne's daughter, Louis's mother, was having an affair with a younger man." She paused and swung her eyes to me. "A much younger man. Eventually her husband discovered it and was so emotionally wounded and embarrassed, he committed what is known as a murder-suicide. He smothered his wife to death a la Othello, using a pillow in their bedroom, and then he shot himself in the head. Poor Louis somehow witnessed it all, and the traumatic effect put him into a coma, from which he eventually emerged blind.
"From what I've been told, there was a major effort to cover it all up, but the story leaked out over time. To this day, Mrs. Clairborne refuses to accept the actual facts, choosing instead to believe her daughter died of heart failure and her son-in-law, unable to accept her death, took his own life." She paused and then widened her eyes when she looked at me.
"After orientation for the new members of the faculty, we were all invited to a tea at the Clairborne mansion. When you were there, did you notice anything unusual about the clocks in the house?"
"Yes. They're all stopped at two-oh-five."
"That's when Mrs. Clairborne's daughter supposedly died. When I asked one of the older teachers about it, he told me Mrs. Clairborne thinks of time as having stopped for her and makes it appear symbolically that way in her home. It's really a very sad story."
"Then there is nothing physically wrong with Louis, nothing wrong with his eyes?"
"From what I've been told, no. He rarely emerges from that dark section of the mansion. Over the years he's been treated and tutored there, and as far as I know, there have been only a handful of people with whom he has carried on any sort of conversation. You made history," she said, and smiled warmly. "But after knowing you only a short time, it's not hard for me to understand why someone reluctant to talk would talk to you."
"Thank you," I said, blushing.
"All of us have trouble communicating with each other. I know I do. I'd rather communicate through my artwork. I'm especially bash-fill when it comes to men," she confessed. "Maybe because of how I was brought up." She laughed. "I suppose that's why I feel so comfortable at Greenwood, why I wanted to teach at an all-girls school."
She smiled at me again.
"There. We've traded secrets about ourselves, just like sisters in art should. Actually," she continued, "I've always longed for a sister, someone in whom I could confide and someone who would confide in me. Your twin sister doesn't kn
ow what she's missing, treating you the way she does. I envy her."
"Gisselle would never believe anyone envied her. She doesn't want envy anyway; she wants pity."
"Poor dear. A severe handicap after being so active would be devastating. I suppose you'll just have to put up with her. But if there is ever anything I can do to help . . ."
"Thank you, Miss Stevens."
"Oh please, Ruby. Call me Rachel when we're not in class.
I really would like to feel we're more friends than simply a teacher and her student. Okay?"
"Okay," I said, surprised but not displeased.
"Oh, look: We've been talking so long we've hardly done anything. Come on. Let's shut our mouths and put our fingers to work," she said. Her soft, happy laughter caught the attention of the pelicans, who looked up at us with what seemed to me to be expressions of annoyance. After all, they were here to fish so they could eat.
"Animals know when you sincerely respect them," Grandmere Catherine once told me. "Too bad people don't."
We worked for about two and a half hours, after which Miss Stevens thought we should go for lunch. She took me to a small restaurant just outside the city. Even before we entered, we could smell the delicious aromas of the crab-boil, sauteed shrimp, and salami, fried oysters, sliced tomatoes, and onions that went into a po'boy sandwich. We had a wonderful time talking, comparing the things we liked and disliked about styles and fashions, food and books. I did feel as if I were with an older sister.
It was midafternoon by the time she brought me back to the dorm. She kept my work, promising to bring it to the art studio for me to complete in school.
"This was fun," she said. "We'll do it again if you want to."
"Oh yes, but I can't let you pay for my lunch all the time." She laughed.
"I have to, otherwise it might be construed a bribe," she teased.
I said goodbye and ran into the dorm, where I found Mrs. Penny wringing her hands and waiting for me. Her hair was unraveled, and she was biting her lip.
"Oh, thank goodness you've returned! Thank goodness."
"What's wrong, Mrs. Penny?" I asked quickly.
She took a deep breath, pressing her right palm to her heart, and sat down on the sofa.