The Grand Duchess had started feeling poorly not long after Mardi Gras. By May they both knew it couldn’t be arthritis, or the flu, or age. Sloane finally forced her to see her doctor. The diagnosis was devastating: Lou Gehrig’s disease. While Jane’s mind was as sharp as ever, a creeping paralysis had gripped her body. Her skin and limbs were going to die from the outside in, inch by agonizing inch. Eventually the paralysis would reach her heart, or her lungs, and she would die. The disease seemed to be progressing unusually fast; the doctor was worried there might be a thread of magic complicating its progress. Jane wasn’t much taken with that idea. “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, eh? Good grief.”
Sloane helped her mother reposition herself more comfortably in her wheelchair.
“I know you scheduled feeling sorry for myself from ten-thirty to ten-forty-five this morning,” Jane said after a pause, “but my meeting with Randall Denton ran late and I just haven’t had a chance until now.” Her way of apologizing.
“If feeling sorry for yourself is too much bother, I can do it for you.”
“Ha.” Jane looked at her daughter and shook her head. “You look nice, dear. Not gaudy. Beats me what you do that takes so long, though. With the fine folk coming, do you suppose we better have Sarah polish up my chrome?” she said, glancing at her wheelchair. “That was a joke.”
Sloane tried to smile. Her mother’s speech had begun to slur, just the tiniest bit. Probably nobody else could notice it yet, the softness creeping into her consonants as it got harder and harder for her to make her tongue and teeth do exactly what she wished them to. Sloane helped her mother take off her workday clothes. She could still manage most of it herself, but certain movements were pretty much beyond her now, particularly putting her arms behind her back to slip out of a sleeve or do up a zipper.
Down to her underwear, Jane grabbed a cane and shambled to the bathroom. When she emerged again, Sloane had a couple of outfits on the bed, waiting for her. “I figured the black gown might be good.”
“A bit startling against this skin, don’t you think?” Immured in the house for months by the disease, Jane Gardner’s skin had grown pale and wrinkled, like an old mushroom.
“I brought some foundation—”
“No.”
“For God sake’s, Mother, you’re going to look—”
“Like I’m dying?”
“You can’t just give up!”
Her mother sank unsteadily onto the bed, took a breath, and rested her cane against the nightstand. Then she turned and studied Sloane for a long time. “It would be so much more comfortable for you if I pretended nothing was wrong. If I made like I would always be here to do the crap I do, and you would never have to.”
Sloane said nothing, transfixed by the horrible feeling she had been caught out. Jane Gardner finally let her gaze drop. “I didn’t do you any favors, letting you hide so much. You were such a scared little girl. But there are some things you can’t run away from.”
Sloane helped her mother into a charcoal pantsuit. Halfway through the effort Jane stopped wasting her breath complaining. Her face was drawn by the time she dropped back into her wheelchair. She sat resting with her eyes closed as Sloane slipped a pair of black pumps onto her feet.
At last she opened her eyes. “You remembered to invite everyone I told you to?”
“And the ones you forgot.”
“Who did I forget?”
“Kyle Lanier.” Ugly little bandy-legged man, Sloane thought. And then, You are so superficial.
Her mother tsked. “Quite right, Jeremiah’s new deputy. He’s a climber, isn’t he?”
“His grandmother was a Rosenberg, but she married badly and they fell out of society. He’s hungry to get back in.”
Jane nodded. She respected Sloane’s opinions on people. “It’s the Fords and the Dentons who are key, still. Jim Ford’s a good guy, but old and a bit of a softie.” Sloane picked up the case of foundation. “Stop that,” Jane said. Sloane put it down again. “You won’t have any trouble with Jim, but his kids are a different story. He spoiled them rotten. You’ll have to be careful how you handle them when Jim steps down. And Randall Denton is a snake with a spare set of fangs.”
I’m not you, I’m not you, I’m not you. “At least some blush?” Sloane said.
“For Christ’s sake, Sloane, I’m not going to my prom. I’ve spoken with Jim Ford and Jeremiah Denton. They understand the need for the Krewe to preserve a stable, united front after I die. Especially with this drought.”
“Mom, I can’t be you. Please listen to me.”
“Honey, when I was your age I wasn’t me either.” Sloane’s mother turned her head to look at her daughter. “One of the hardest lessons we all have to learn is how few choices life gives to a civilized woman with any conscience at all.”
SLOANE wheeled her mother into the Gold Room where she would hold court, parking her beside the famous square piano on which the ghost of Bettie Brown still played a few nights every year. Since Jane Gardner had moved into Ashton Villa after the Flood, the Gold Room, with its towering gilt-framed mirrors and French settees, had once again become the center of Galveston’s social scene. Sloane was sure this must please Miss Bettie’s ghost. Her mother thought this was being fanciful, which mostly proved that Jane Gardner, though a great leader, was still a woman of her time. Unlike Sloane, she had been born into a world almost without magic, whose assumptions she would never entirely shake.
Jim Ford was the first of their guests to arrive. Since the death of his first wife, Clara, there had been nobody to keep Jim from showing up for dinner parties at exactly the time written on the invitation. It was an open secret that he and his black housekeeper, Gloria, were now a couple, but he wasn’t brave enough to bring her to this kind of soiree, despite the gentle encouragement of the Grand Duchess. A wise move, Sloane thought; his unpleasant children would never let him hear the end of it.
The Fords had controlled Galveston’s wharf since the Civil War, and Jim carried his money with unthinking grace. Like a lot of men whose sense of style had been set before the Flood, he favored trousers with braces, comfortable boots, and light suit jackets. And a string tie! Sloane noted. Thank God Clara didn’t live to see this.
Meow. Sloane reprimanded herself as she escorted him into the Gold Room. Bad girl. No mouse. “Rice wine?” she asked, walking to the giant cherrywood sideboard across from the piano.
“Thank you, Sloane.” She poured him a drink and put in an ice cube, which she knew he liked but was embarrassed to ask for. He smiled when she returned with his drink. Glancing across the room to where her mother was consulting with Sarah, their housekeeper, he lowered his voice. “How is she?”
Dying. “In good spirits, as you can see.”
“Your mother is an extraordinary woman.”
“So she tells me.” Sloane smiled. “Nobody believes it more than me, either. You know, this morning we were worrying about whether there would be enough gunpowder to trade into Beaumont, but Mom told me not to worry. ‘Jim will handle it,’ she said.”
He grinned, passing his hand over what had once been hair. Jim Ford was one of the three directors of the Krewe of Momus, along with her mother and Jeremiah Denton. Jim was so modest, and so happy to be well thought of, that flattering him was one of Sloane’s most pleasant duties.
“Oh, don’t you worry,” Jim said. “Production is down a bit here, but the cannibals on Bolivar Peninsula are so bad this year that Beaumont’s desperate for all the powder it can get. We’ll up our price by a hundredweight of rice per fifty cartridges, say, and come out better than last year. As long as those cannibals don’t start building boats, we’re in good shape.” He lowered his voice again. “Do you know…how much longer?”
Six months? Or weeks? Or days? “She hasn’t said.”
“It must be hard on you.”
Not as hard as dying. Sloane shrugged.
Jim glanced around reflexively, making sure he was not standing next to a w
indow or beneath a skylight where, unnoticed, a beam of moonshine might finger him. It was said Momus could see and hear anything lit by the moon. “Has he given you any sign?”
Ask me in six hours. Sloane shook her head. A tricky moment here, as Jim looked at her with such sympathy that it was hard not to break down, but she let the panic pass under her like a wave rolling in from the Gulf. “Would you excuse me, Jim? I need to consult with Sarah,” she said, escaping under the cover of her practiced smile.
Guests trickled in and Sloane plied them with appetizers: oysters on the half shell, spicy tomato-pepper antipasto, rings of petite rice crackers, popcorn shrimp in silver bowls of crushed ice, and little sushi wraps made by a Japanese woman the cook knew, seaweed around rice and stuffed with crawdad meat.
Sheriff Denton arrived, gracious as always, with Kyle Lanier at his side. Kyle was an ugly little schemer, with small brown eyes and a badly pocked face. When they had first met in their late teens, Kyle could never lift his gaze above Sloane’s breasts, but she noted with some amusement that now that he had risen high enough for her political connections to matter, he did a very fair job of making eye contact. She ditched him as quickly and gracefully as she could.
Commodore Travis Perry of the Krewe of Thalassar was next to arrive, still smelling faintly of the sea, water-stains on the cuffs of his pants. Then came Horace Lemon, the chunky old black director of the Krewe of Togetherness. His curly hair was turning white at the ends, as if singed. Then Jane’s doctor and her husband came, shortly followed by Ellen Geary, the current head of the Krewe of Venus.
The Krewe of Harlequins was last to be represented, Dietrich Bix arriving just before nine in a cap and bells. “Glad you could come,” Sloane said as the elderly Bix kissed her knuckles. His was one of the invitations she had sent out on her own. The older Jane Gardner got, the more she avoided the Krewe of Harlequins. They were tiring and unpredictable, she said, which was true. “The Krewe of Momus wants to divide the pie by merit,” Jane had once said. “Thalassar wants to divide it by risk. Togetherness wants everybody’s share to be equal. Venus doesn’t care what size the slices are, as long as a woman gets to serve it. But the Harlequins just want to pick the pie up and throw it in your face, and too bad if everyone goes hungry.” More to the point, the Harlequins, alone of the five major Krewes, had always been dead set against Jane and Odessa’s strategy of keeping the two Galvestons separate, with all the magic confined to the dark Carnival where Momus was king.
“You expecting the Recluse tonight?” Dietrich asked, bells jingling as he raised his lips from Sloane’s hand. “I had a prank or two I meant to pull.”
“I imagine Odessa will come.”
“I reckoned as much. Thanks for the heads up,” Bix said. “Don’t want the witch to catch me doing a card trick and send me to Krewes for it.” Sloane watched the Harlequin plunge into the crowd, wishing that daughters of the Ancient and Honorable Krewe of Momus could escape from Mardi Gras as easily as rumor said the Harlequins could.
She very badly wanted a drink.
Odessa made her entrance just after nine, preening like a peacock and pausing to frame herself dramatically in the doorway to the Gold Room. The crowd of guests went still. Dietrich Bix, who had been pulling a coin out of Commodore Perry’s offended nose, palmed it and stood with his hands behind his back and his eyes downcast. There was no trace of sly defiance in his stance. Despite his joking earlier, he knew perfectly well that he was a marked man in Odessa’s book, living in Galveston, like all notable members of his Krewe, on the witch’s undependable sufferance.
Galveston’s last angel had outdone herself: a plum-colored satin brocade sheath and sleeveless vest, over which she had draped yards and yards and yards of a fantastical sari of wafer-thin cotton, hand-painted with scores of miniature birds—a print that only a slender woman could possibly survive. On Sloane it would have looked like an explosion in an aviary. The draping was brooched into a graceful swirl at Odessa’s hip, but as soon as she was inside she stopped, unpinned the brooch, and let the material fall, revealing a three-foot train that everyone else was going to have to spend the rest of the evening trying not to step on. Sloane winced.
Odessa caught Sloane’s eye, smiled, and mimed throwing back a quick drink. The room emptied around her. Jim Ford stopped to chat with her for several minutes; he had known her before the Flood. But everybody else feared her much too much to make casual conversation. The other Krewe leaders, exquisitely polite, paid their cautious respects and escaped as soon as decorum would allow.
As Commodore Perry excused himself from Odessa’s company at a (prearranged) signal from one of his subordinates, Sloane approached and handed her godmother a tumbler with two fingers of palm whiskey inside. Odessa leaned back, studied Sloane’s outfit, and cackled. “It’s the poor little rich girl!” she cried, waving her drink. “You sly little mouse, you. And, doll! Your eyes! They’re beautiful! They must have taken hours.”
“Of course not.” A hot prickle of embarrassment crept up Sloane’s neck.
“The application of time and skill to frivolous things is the hallmark of civilized society,” Odessa remarked. “Any savage can face down a lion or suckle a baby, but History begins with Cleopatra dyeing her hair, if you ask me. Another dreary day of toiling and spinning on Jane’s behalf successfully concluded, I trust? How wonderful for you.” Odessa presented her aging cheek for a kiss. “What do you think of my train? Too tasteful, yes?”
“It makes a very graceful loop when you brooch it.”
“Brooched, you think? That seems like a waste.” Odessa sipped her whiskey. “I expect you’re right, but not all of us have your assets to work with, you voluptuous young thing.”
Good grief.
“EVERYONE is always very keen to praise you Gardners for your public spirit,” Randall Denton was saying to Sloane fifteen minutes later. “But the truth is, you’re the least democratic gang on the Island.”
She had just caught him staring at her breasts. She decided against making it obvious that she had caught him, because she knew that it would be not Randall but herself, annoyingly, who would end up blushing and embarrassed. “Wine, Randall? Or will you not drink the liquor of tyrants?”
“Oh, we Dentons have never had any problems with tyrants,” Randall remarked, accepting a glass of rice wine. He was a slender man in his late twenties, already balding. He had been one of the young men who set the current fashion for severe, tightly cut evening clothes: a narrow black fitted jacket over a collarless mandarin shirt, pants tailored skintight around the calves and ankles, and pointy black dress shoes so polished Sloane could see the chandelier reflected on their uppers. Sloane always thought the effect of the ensemble was to give Randall a predatory look, like a black-and-white wasp. The only splashes of color in his outfit came from the small gold and scarlet scorpions painted on the silk scarf draped around his shoulders in complete defiance of the sweltering Texas heat outside.
“For a hundred and fifty years you’ve managed to hoodwink this Island into calling ‘civic leadership’ what is actually the uncontrollable Gardner urge to run other people’s lives,” Randall continued. “As if the sun wouldn’t recollect to rise without your benevolent reminders.”
This so exactly articulated a thought Sloane had suppressed as disloyal dozens of times that all she could do was blink.
“What I. H. Gardner and the City Club did to this Island after the Hurricane of 1900 would have been called a ‘bloodless coup’ if it had happened in some swarthy banana republic,” Randall added pleasantly. “Excellent mussels, these,” he said, spearing one with a little two-tined oyster fork. “After 2004, your mother did the exact same thing. Did you think nobody noticed the parallel?”
“Then why didn’t someone oppose her? Why didn’t your father say something, or Jeremiah?”
“It seems to amuse Gardners to run things, and they do a tolerable job of it. We Dentons aren’t keen on democracy either,” Randall said with
a smile. “We’re just not hypocrites about it.”
And so it went. Within an hour Sloane had spoken to everyone, been asked the same questions and given slightly different assurances, pleasant but impalpable in the manner of a good hostess. She waited until Sarah was in the Gold Room, passing through with a tray of pickled mussels, and then slipped back into the kitchen. From there she walked quickly along the covered walkway that led out to the stables.
Outside it was hot and breathless. She followed the walk around the front of the carriage house and then passed the public garden, its flowers wasted in the cracking earth. The centerpiece of the garden was a raised platform from which rose an open latticework dome. This was supposed to be wound about with flowers, but the vines had died and no petals obscured the motto old George Ford had ordered built into the iron tracery a century before: One generation passeth away and another generation cometh: But the earth abideth forever.
Apparently the author of Ecclesiastes had not shared her mother’s vision of the march of civilization. But really, if you felt God, or gods, you couldn’t believe in Jane Gardner’s world, could you? That great order the older generation had grown up with, before the Flood, was based on the idea that the world was inanimate: a giant machine from which an intelligent person could assemble other machines, like cars and schools and child labor laws. But in a world alive, where that car might have a will and the gods would have their way…? Jane Gardner would have said the twentieth century was founded on reason, but Sloane wondered if vanity might be closer to the truth.
Broadway, the boulevard that passed in front of Ashton Villa, had been the widest street in America when it was first built in the 1800s. Palm trees and live oaks grew by its sides and along the center median, creating a double tunnel of leaves. Tree roots had long since made the sidewalk a nearly impassable jumble of tilting concrete slabs. Sloane walked in the road itself, not far from the gutter, feet brushing through the thin covering of wilted salt grass, shepherd’s purse, live-oak leaves, and brittle palm fronds that lay over the asphalt. There was no traffic. People preferred to stay indoors on nights when the moon was full. Only the Krewe of Momus would schedule business for such an evening.