First Five Pages of Chapter One

October 29, 1872

2306 Esplanade Avenue

1872. Edgar was at her house and in New Orleans for the first time!

That morning, Estelle Degas couldn’t see him, but she could feel him, smell him. He moved inside her bones. An artist, who read every book on sex, saw every photograph, drew every posture, who ran nude on the beach.

Guilt tore up the sleazy gallery, past columns greasy with early morning dew, piercing her thighs. Last night she couldn’t rest next to her husband, because of her raw dreams of Edgar and their affair ten years ago. His big hands had made her feel butterfly-like quivering .

But now when he squeezed her hand, she would be his sister-in-law and cousin, Mrs. Rene, not Mrs. Edgar Degas as his hushed voice had once insisted. She loved her husband and couldn’t let old emotions surge.

Vegetable vendors drove their carts past the homeless lining Esplanade Avenue: “Beans,” they incanted, “Tomatoes. Okra for sale.” Ripe magnolias, bananas, and overgrown vines clawed at the gallery.

She remembered a quiet stillness when she walked down Esplanade ten years ago, before the Civil War. Not like now her heart dragging with each careful step, fear guiding her as hands clutched together.

Would water rats get into Edgar’s room behind the kitchen if he left the door open? Had spoilt food made him ill? So much typhoid, malaria on ships. Some men arrived in boxes.

Vagrants cried for food, invading the porch steps. Shamefaced, she shooed him off. His alcohol smell lingered and he threw a bottle across the lawn

The year 1872 was one of unparalleled loss. New Orleans, more than any city, had depended upon slavery and cotton. Now, Yanks on horseback trotted past gates, strewn with honey suckle. Dead animals, lying by lush greenery, were allowed to rot for day; the garbage boat lay idle. Taxes had risen; work evaporated; ornate doors and windows were bolted; men starved in the picturesque streets.

Oh, how could Edgar come now when the city was falling apart? Could she smile at him as before with sickness, dying all about? She herself at 27 half blind, a mother of three, and again pregnant. She who had once been the most sought after widow in Paris—having first married the nephew of the president of the confederacy.

Why had she and her sisters ever left France? They had gone there with their mother like many Louisiana girls did to ride out the Civil War. Those three years with her cousins, the Degas brothers, were the happiest in her life: the laughter, the outings, the beauty of Paris. Rene was the best looking of the Degas boys, but Edgar had the most character.

Sounds came from the kitchen. Servants yelling, a child squealing, the sizzle of bacon frying.

Estelle hoped to rekindle her love for her husband Rene. With poor sight had come time for meditation. She found herself thinking about honesty, integrity, kindness, virtues that before the war had been assumed. As she saw greed overcoming New Orleans, virtues of kindness, responsibility and diligence had acquired greater importance.

Estelle ducked inside their Greek Revival rental house on the outskirts of the French Quarter. Bankruptcy had forced her family from their upriver plantation and their city house in the Garden District. Disgraced, they had fled to Esplanade Avenue, a fringe area between the Mississippi River and Bayou St John where immigrants and the homeless abounded.

How Estelle missed her old Garden District home, blocks from the Mississippi River. The L shaped house had three storied cast-iron balconies, wrap-around galleries and was a steamboat ride from the family’s plantation upriver. Leveled by the Yankees, that plantation had been backed by a compact snug miniature village: kitchens, smokehouses, storehouses, chapel, and slave cottages forming a long street. Her mother had ruled an extended family of 100 servants, orphans, old aunts, uncles.

The front hall swelled around her. Perspiration clawed the air from eighteen relatives squeezed inside that box tomb rental house: busybody sisters, drunken in-laws, sickly nieces and nephews, a demented father, all broken since the Civil War and looking for Edgar’s visit from Paris to right their wrongs with money from his father’s banks. Her husband wrote that Edgar’s career was at a standstill and he was now ready to leave Paris, something he had sworn never to do.

Six-thirty a.m. The grandfather’s clock by the front door rang as she rushed inside. A husky smell filled the hall as if their few overworked servants swept dust under the carpets, never opening the curtains to let a breeze seep through from front to back. Dirt grew under furniture, and caked in the crevices behind the pictures. No time left after caring for children to clean the house.

Estelle wasn’t entirely blind. She saw blurs! But could she fool Edgar?

Of the Degas brothers, Estelle had chosen René because he’d headed to New Orleans after the Civil War while Edgar refused to leave his painting and Paris. Her father had needed help with his collapsed cotton business, but Rene had botched it even further. Estelle bumped into the commode, rattling a metal-lined urn and bruising her hip. Lord. She could no longer tell marble from wood when she looked down.

Her vision had failed in New Orleans from some awful infection in the now rancid city. Would she need to clutch Edgar’s arm, make him walk slower, and guide her along like a baby in a pram or a blind man on a rope? Oh lord, no!

Light rippled down the Rococo mirror from the sconces flickering along side. Even though the hall was practically black, her father insisted on using as little fuel as possible.

Estelle squinted at herself in the stern gilt-frame mirror. How she hated the new walking costume her husband had brought her from Paris: the pink flounced skirt that skimmed the ground; the tunic with apron front, the tight bodice and sleeves with small epaulettes. How could she enjoy the dress with her tummy starting to grow and so many bills? Besides, she was more comfortable in black, black for her first husband, her sister’s baby, her mother, dead last year.

She leaned into the mirror trying to see herself in the dim light. She was still young, dark hair, full lips, long swan neck. But how long would she look this way after another child.

“Mama,” a wee voice cried out.

Estelle dove through the gray parlor with broad emphatic shadows, spectral colors luminous on her brow.

Ah there was her ten-year-old curled in creamy cotton sheets on the floor, her long blonde hair thrust back in a pink ribboned ponytail. She was never so happy as when she was breaking rules.

Smells of lemon oil, and freshly cut magnolias filled the air. Estelle tripped on something and grabbed for a corner table. A rug? A broom? No, a puppet. Snatching it up, she tossed it across crystal dishes, floating magnolias—ornaments disguising faded furniture.

“Jo!” Estelle shouted. “You can’t leave puppets about! If anything is out of place, I’ll fall.”