The Seamstress of New Orleans
Diane C. McPhail
CHAPTER 1
At the first thought of following him, fear so overwhelmed her that she had to remind herself it was only a thought. But that thought persisted, beyond and over her fear, luring her like a child provoking a dog with a snatched-away crust of bread. Now Constance was prepared. A menswear suit lay on her bed, waiting for her. Today she would follow him, would hopefully relieve her rising anxiety under the burden of Benton’s penchant for secrecy and his persistent demands for money from her trust. She would not wait longer to expose his secrets. She had her suspicions, but she needed certainty.
Downstairs, the front door slammed as Benton left the house for the depot. Obsessed with punctuality, her husband was eternally early. Now she just had time to disguise herself, reach the station, and board the train before it pulled out. The difficulty would be to slip from her own home unnoticed. The unseasonable late autumn heat impeded her haste. Outside her open window, the birds chirped and fluttered as if nothing in the world were amiss. Constance retrieved the trim sack coat, designed for a young man, and slipped her arms into the sleeves, then tugged the lapels close in front. The suit fit her narrow body well, especially the slim trousers. Only the waist was too big. By an inch or two. She cinched the belt tighter and smoothed the fabric around her, leaving the gathered excess concealed in back, beneath her jacket. At the dressing table, she opened a small box and retrieved a bottle of spirit gum. Hands trembling now, she applied a line of it above her brows. While it grew tacky, she repeated the process with a thicker application above her lip. She tested the brow line with her finger and prayed the wide ash brows would adhere. A wave of relief washed through her when they stuck like her own, though her skin felt as if it would peel right off. She pressed again. Then the tapered mustache was over her lip. Could the image in the mirror be her? Could it not be her? That was the crucial point.
She slipped a gray fedora over the ash-brown wig. Ah, now. There he was. That young boy-man she needed to be, even if the mustache seemed a bit heavy for one as young as she appeared. Constance rose, then turned back to snatch up a bottle of alcohol, which she would need to remove the spirit gum, and dropped it into her satchel. Its buckles defied her. She stopped. Took a deep breath, buckled them more slowly. There. It was done. Upstairs she heard the girls waking and Analee bidding them a good morning. She picked up the satchel and slipped hastily from the house. No one saw her.
*
The air was clear; the day bright. Nothing in it seemed amiss. Ticket in hand, Constance stepped aboard the Illinois Central Chicago–New Orleans Limited just before it eased out of Union Station, its pulsing cadence gaining velocity, its momentum quieting into a settled tempo as the fleeting byways of the city gave way to the countryside.
Placid as the woods and intermittent farmland seemed, inside those sooty cars Constance noted a range of human emotion that vibrated in the closed air, a vibration like that in her own being. As she made her unsteady way from one car to the next, a harried mother under a thin shawl lifted her breast to soothe a fretful infant. One car back Constance cringed as a young wife, stylishly clad in a velvet-trimmed amber suit, lowered her head and wiped a gloved hand across her cheek at the hissed reproach of her husband that she had packed five shirts rather than six, in case one should get soiled. At the last seat an elderly man rested his half-bald head against the window, the waves of his white walrus mustache bouncing erratically in tempo with his intermittent snores. Across the aisle a man laid aside his book to gaze at his two children, who were giggling wildly as they pointed his Kodak box camera at the old man. A woman two seats away frowned at him as the children continued running up and down, snatching at the camera and arguing about whose turn it was.
At last, in the gentlemen’s lounge, Constance spied her husband, seated with two other men at a card table. Trying to attract as little attention as possible, she settled herself in a leather armchair, opened the Times-Picayune to shield herself. She peered past the loose edge at the table of gamblers but was torn by the dire headlines of the paper: DIAMOND CITY, NORTH CAROLINA, DESTROYED BY HURRICANE: LOSS OF LIFE COUNTED IN THE THOUSANDS. Such ominous news, an unprecedented hurricane gathering strength across the Outer Banks, destroying an entire town, coffins and houses floating across the sound. Her stomach contracted at the death toll and the details of destruction. Perhaps the worst yet in history. And yet so far New Orleans had been spared from this year’s storms.
In her peripheral vision she scanned the men hunched round the table, each focused on his hand of cards. Benton, his back to her, visibly intense, was thrumming the edges of his cards in silence. On the table in front of him, a meager little stack of chips. How much had he lost? In so little time? It couldn’t have been more than half an hour. He fingered the pocket where she knew he kept a roll of money—when he had any. The other men waited, one with a strange mustache—she tried to remember the complicated term for it—that swept down and around his chin. A palpable tension vibrated in the air.
Beneath them, she felt more than heard the monotonous undertone of metal rumbling on metal. She heard the quiet dealing of cards, the muttered bets, the hard click of chips as she tried to concentrate on the hurricane. Suddenly, she jumped, the newspaper crackling, as Benton slammed his cards onto the table in furious resignation. The other men closed their hands, their cards unrevealed. No one spoke. After picking up his one remaining chip, Benton flipped it like a coin, slapped it on the table next to the burgeoning pile in the center.
“Might as well filch it all,” he said. “Just for fucking luck. Yours, that is, goddamnit. Sure as hell ain’t mine.”
He rose, lobbed his money onto the table, stretched his back and neck to collect himself, and glanced around, disregarding the men’s continued gaze on him. Constance ducked her head as he stared at her momentarily. He edged toward the far end of the car, then halted long enough to order a whiskey from the bar and pick up a folded newspaper. He dropped into a nailhead leather armchair, sipped at the whiskey, tapping the unopened paper against his knee, rage and despair rigid behind the flat line of his lips and the twitching of his closed eyelids. Then, slipping a pack of Picayune Extra Milds from his pocket, Benton watched the two men exit the car. He tossed the remaining whiskey down, slammed the glass on the table.
In no hurry, Benton, with a defeated air, rose and laid the still-folded paper on the chair. Again, he stretched his neck and back, then turned toward the opposite exit. Slipping an unlit cigarette between his lips, he stepped out the door to the open vestibule. Where was he going? Constance crumpled her paper, then tucked it carelessly between the seat and the arm of her chair. She rose, brushed at her suit, holding the hard edge of the seat back for stability before she made her way up the aisle, adjusting her gait to the rocking of the train. A blast of hot air and the sharp rumble of the wheels sheared into her as the door released onto the open vestibule, then clanged shut behind her.
Benton was just standing there. He flipped his wasted cigarette out into the wind, watched it fall, still glowing, onto the gravel. It disappeared, became invisible as the train passed on. Constance averted her face, focused on a high trestle coming into view up ahead. Her body taut, she clasped the vertical brass handrail. Benton eased closer, cleared his throat.