Joe and Eleanor walked along trying to find Preservation Hall, the venerable home of New Orleans jazz. Joe didn’t care for New Orleans jazz—he found it hokey and good-timey—but was determined to salvage the trip by seeing something of historic value. Eleanor followed, her feet sinking into the hot asphalt with every step.
“You think Bucky would have married her if she weren’t descended from a president? Remember at the wedding when everyone was congratulating me on the Emmy nominations? I was watching Bucky. He couldn’t stand it! He’s never once acknowledged what I do. But of course he’ll boast about his friend Lester from Vanderbilt. And what is Vanderbilt? I’ve barely even heard of it.”
“Before you met the guy, all you heard was that he was an asshole,” Joe said. “His cousin warned us he was an asshole. At his wedding, every toast alluded to him being an asshole. And now you’re surprised he’s an asshole?”
“I wish I’d never given them those derringers,” she said.
“I can’t talk about the derringers.”
They arrived on the corner of Bourbon and St. Peter under a sign, MAISON BOURBON FOR THE PRESERVATION OF JAZZ. Eleanor started inside.
“This isn’t it,” Joe said.
“It says ‘Preservation’—” Eleanor said.
“It’s not Preservation Hall.”
“But there’s a band—”
“Preservation Hall wouldn’t have neon frozen daiquiris with names like Irish Car Bomb. And its band wouldn’t be playing ‘Sara Smile.’”
“You don’t have to yell at me.”
Joe’s jaw was going.
“I’m going to find Preservation Hall,” he said. “Come with me or don’t. But of all the things that odious buffoon has gotten away with, I won’t let him add to the list causing me to fight with my wife in the middle of Bourbon Street!” He stalked off.
Eleanor might have gone after Joe, but she spotted Lorraine and her two boys crossing Bourbon Street a block away. Eleanor couldn’t tell if Lorraine had made eye contact under her hat.
A moment later, Eleanor saw an older woman in a long Pucci dress headed down the same side street. She remembered the dress from the church.
Strange. Eleanor walked to the corner. Both women were gone. Perhaps they’d slipped into a place called Antoine’s.
Under the restaurant sign, a door led to a cavernous dining room with mirrored walls, tile floors, and tables for ten with white tablecloths. It was empty but for waiters in black bow ties and waistcoats sitting in one corner folding napkins. In the opposite corner, a door with yellow glass. Behind it, the movement of people. Eleanor’s steps echoed as she clacked toward the door. The waiters looked up and continued folding.
Deeper in was an even larger dining room with a carved wooden ceiling, this one pulsing with patrons, the clang of dishes, and good cheer. Celebrity photos in dusty frames covered every inch of the red pillars and walls. Waiters with aprons down to their shins carried trays with one hand and blotted their brows with the other.
Eleanor’s eyes raced from table to table. No Lorraine, no woman in Pucci.
Behind her, a white glass globe, lit from within. On it, the silhouette of a woman with high-piled hair. FEMMES.
Inside the ladies’ lounge, Eleanor slumped into a tired velvet chair and closed her eyes. She wasn’t thinking straight. The fight with Joe. The scrum with Bucky. The goddamned heat.
She opened her eyes.
A woman in a wrap dress washed her hands. The counter was so worn that a puddle had collected across its expanse. The woman dried her hands and dropped the paper towel on an overflowing trash can. In the mirror, her plastic tiara. On it, in fake jewels, the reverse letters J.T.
There was no way.
The door shut.
Eleanor went after her. The tiara’d woman was halfway across the noisy dining room. Before Eleanor could catch up, she vanished into a wall of newspaper clippings. A jib door. Eleanor pushed it open.
She found herself in a dim hallway even denser with photos and made narrow by display cases on either side. The floors were shellacked brick, the walls dark wood. Doors made of thick red glass and elaborate wrought iron. To her left, a photo of Pope John Paul II standing in the kitchen with Antoine himself. On display, the plate the Pope had eaten from.
The woman had disappeared again, this time into the shadow at the end of the hall. Eleanor felt herself pulled toward voices. Above the doors on her left and right, plaques reading REX and PROTEUS. One room was green, the other purple. Eleanor could make out gilded displays of queens’ costumes: ermine capes, crowns, and scepters. Even in the dark, their jewels threw off glints of light.
Around the corner, at the end of the hall, a cracked door. Above it, in ghostly white letters, KHAOS.
News of Eleanor’s presence had preceded her. Ivy appeared in the doorway, blocking Eleanor’s view of the sheer number of people in attendance, many more than at the christening.
“You said—” Eleanor stammered. “I thought the three of you were going home.”
Through the crowd, Bucky, with Mary Marge tucked in his elbow, offered the hint of a smile and returned to his conversation.
“I didn’t know how to tell you,” Ivy said. “We decided this should be family only.”