Big Easy Bonanza

it for her. No, not Bitty; Bitty never had, that she could remember. It was Louise, maybe, who had made the
pain perdu
, or Tonetta, one of the ever-changing stream of black women who worked for the St. Amants. They were always leaving for better jobs, Bitty said, and nothing could have been more true, Marcelle was sure. They always left partially crippled or maimed, with Henry grinning evilly in the background.
    When Louise bent down for her dustpan, Henry had jabbed a hatpin half an inch into her ample behind. Marcelle was next door at the time, with a playmate, Betsy Labadie. When the screams went up, she was so sure her mother was being murdered she had wet her pants. Instead of calling the police, Mrs. Labadie picked up an iron frying pan, just in case, and flew next door herself, probably more out of curiosity than anything else.
    She certainly wasn’t worried about Bitty, as she had stopped long enough to reassure Marcelle that there was no possibility her mother’s life was in danger, since Bitty would never have hollered, “Oooohhhhh, sweet-Jesus-gracious-Lord-Holy-Father, my black ass! Oh, Lordy, my black ass hurts!”
    Bitty, as it happened, had been “lying down” at the time, having had a long lunch that apparently had indisposed her. Hearing the screams she had gotten up, of course, but had been put back to bed and fussed over by a reassuring Henry, who explained that old lazy Louise had sat down when she ought to have been working and impaled herself on an upholstery tack she had dislodged with her huge bulk.
    It was left to Mrs. Labadie to nurse Louise’s posterior with ice wrapped in a towel. Marcelle herself had first found a pair of dry panties, then phoned Chauncey, panicked and crying, to race home and rush Louise to Touro for a tetanus shot. Louise came back just one more time, to learn that Henry’s story and not hers had become St. Amant Family Truth. She left once again remarking upon her lower anatomy, but in a different context. Her exact words had been, “Upholstery tack, my ass!”
    Later Marcelle had sneaked into Henry’s room and searched it, finding the hatpin in an envelope marked “Louise” in a leather stud box his grandfather had grown tired of and given him. She could have shown it to her parents, but if she had, one of two things would have happened. Henry would have denied ever seeing it before and claimed Marcelle must be really sick and crazy—you could tell by the way she was always trying to get attention. Or, if that hadn’t worked and Henry got nailed—say his handwriting was recognized—he might have gotten revenge, and Marcelle had some theories about the dangers of being the object of Henry’s wrath, especially after what happened to Tonetta. So Marcelle had kept quiet about it—tattling wasn’t going to bring Louise back anyway.
    As for Tonetta, she fell down the stairs one day. Fortunately it was only the fifth step from the bottom that she tripped on, and she ended up with nothing worse than a broken ankle. She said she stepped on a toy truck and lost her balance when it flew out from under her. No toy truck was found in the vicinity (though there had been plenty of time for retrieval in the ensuing confusion) and, under questioning, Henry was shocked and hurt that anyone could imagine he would be so careless as to leave his toys on the stairs.
    He said simply that he had been taught the dangers of carelessness from early babyhood, had learned his lesson well, and had never been known to leave toys on the stairs—had he? The argument was completely convincing, of course, to a pair of parents to whom the idea of a planned accident simply didn’t occur.
    It had certainly occurred to Marcelle, though. She knew she wasn’t the one who’d killed her own goldfish by putting purple ink in the water, though she’d been punished for it. If you put that together with certain other incidents, like the time one of her tricycle wheels unaccountably fell off, or the broken glass she’d found on the floor of her room one night when she came out of her bath, pink-cheeked and barefoot as usual, you’d conclude it was best to be very wary of Henry.
    Oh, hell! Why couldn’t she shake this mood? Probably because it was so unfair, so unexpected about her father—he had been the only normal one in the whole family.
    Daddy’s funeral is today. How in hell could I have forgotten?
She knew how she could have. The shrinks called it denial. Okay, fine. So she was