“Did it scare you?” Louis had asked.
“Yes,” Henry said, enjoying the feel of his lover’s arms around him.
“Could you do whatever you wanted?”
“No,” Henry answered.
“If I could dream of any place, I’d dream of a cabin on the bayou,” Louis had said at the time. “A little cabin. Fishing boat. A newspaper fulla crawfish ready to eat.”
“Would I be there?” Henry asked quietly.
“Wouldn’t be a good dream if you weren’t.”
And just like that, Henry knew what it was to be in love.
That night, he walked in Louis’s dream. There was a rustic cabin on a sun-dappled river where ancient live oaks trailed braids of Spanish moss into the water. A hickory rocking chair sat on the front porch, and a fishing boat bobbed nearby. It was a brief walk—the dream shifted, and fight though he did, Henry was unable to stay in that beautiful spot. Still, it made Henry happy to have glimpsed it, even for a few minutes.
In June, they signed on for a stint aboard an excursion boat, playing for their supper. When they’d stop at various sleepy southern towns along the river for the night, Louis and Henry would buy food for the Negro musicians who weren’t allowed into the white hotels and restaurants.
“Doesn’t seem fair,” Henry had said to Louis.
“That’s because it ain’t fair.”
“There’s a lot of that,” Henry said. He wanted to hold Louis’s hand, but he didn’t dare out in public, where anybody could see them. Instead, they’d wait until the judging world fell asleep, then they’d sneak away and kiss till their lips, already weary from the southern sun, would make them quit.
July saw hot days of fishing and swimming. Most nights, they’d prowl the nightclubs and speakeasies of the French Quarter, from Joe Cascio’s Grocery Store, where all the bohemians came to dance and drink, to Celeste’s, where the proprietor, Alphonse, served them bootleg beer in teacups. Sometimes they’d buy a jug of homemade hooch, strongly scented with juniper berries, from an Italian widow who’d taken over the bootlegging business from her late husband. Then they’d take the Canal Street trolley out to the cemeteries to drink, talk, and dream. Surrounded by stone angels and appeals to God’s mercy set in marble, a half-drunk Henry would spin out grand plans for them both: “We could go to St. Louis or Chicago, or even New York!”
“What’d we do there?”
“Play music!”
“Same thing we’re doing here.”
“But no one would know us there. We could be anybody. We could be free.”
“You’re as free as you decide to be,” Louis said.
“Easy for you to say,” Henry said, hurt. “You’re not a DuBois.”
Being a DuBois wasn’t a legacy; it was a noose. They were one of the first families of New Orleans society, with a grand antebellum mansion, Bonne Chance, to show for it. White-columned and flanked by strict rows of stately oaks, Bonne Chance had been built by Henry’s great-great-grandfather Mr. Xavier DuBois, who’d made a fortune in sugar off the backs of slaves. His heir, the first Henry DuBois, grabbed land from the Choctaw during the Indian Removal Act, and Henry’s grandfather had accepted a commission as a colonel in the Confederate Army, marching with General Lee to protect all that stolen land and the stolen people who came with it. Henry often wondered if there had ever been a DuBois who’d done a single noble deed in his life.
The only war Henry’s father seemed interested in fighting was the one with his son. It was a bloodless war; his father’s infallibility bestowed a certain calm confidence. He never questioned that his edicts would be followed, so there was never any need for him to raise his voice. That was for lesser men.
“Hal, you will not upset your mother.”
“Naturally, Hal will matriculate from Ole Miss.”
“Law is what you should pursue, Hal. Perhaps a judgeship from there. Music is not a noble profession.”
“These jazz and riverboat riffraff are not suitable companions for a young man of your breeding and position, Hal. Remember that you are a DuBois, a reflection on this family’s sterling reputation. Comport yourself accordingly.”
Henry’s delicate, unbalanced mother had long since been worn down by his father’s domineering manner. When she’d had her first breakdown, Henry’s father refused to send her to the sanitarium for fear of gossip. Instead, the family doctor had prescribed pills, and now his mother wandered the endless halls and rooms of Bonne Chance, a lost bird unable to alight in any one spot for long, until, finally, she’d take refuge in the family cemetery. She’d sit on the weathered bench, staring into the garden, thumbs working the beads of a rosary.
“It was the vitamins. I never should’ve taken them,” she’d say to Henry in a nervous voice. “I was afraid I’d lose another baby. So many lost babies. The doctor said the vitamins would help.”
“And they did. Because here I am, Maman,” Henry would say.
“She sent me a letter and told me I have to hide the bird,” she’d say, worrying the black beads between her frantic fingers.
Flossie would come out and lead Henry’s mother back to the big white house. “Come on, now, Miss Catherine. The saints won’t mind if you have your lunch.”
Henry would sneak away to Louis once more, and the two of them would hop the Smoky Mary out to the West End of Lake Pontchartrain, where they could fish from a pier in Bucktown, take a picnic near Old Spanish Fort, or play music in the Milneburg resorts and camps.
Louis never called him Hal. It was always Henri, said in a drawl as sultry as the air over the Quarter: “Let’s get us a mess of crawfish, Henri.” “You hear the way he laid out that line, Henri?” “Henri, don’t be a slowpoke. Ever’body’s waitin’ on us down at Celeste’s.”
And Henry’s favorite: “Moi, je t’aime, Henri.” Henry never wanted the summer to end.
Then, on a terrible, still day in August, Gaspard died. Before Louis could stop him, the sweet hound tore after an alley cat and was struck by the ice man’s truck as it rounded the corner of Rampart. There was a screech of wheels and one awful yelp. Louis and Henry pushed their way through the crowd. With a howl of his own, Louis sank to his knees and cradled his dead dog. The driver, a kindly man with a jowly face, removed his hat and patted Louis’s shoulder like a father, sorry as could be. “He just come outta nowhere, son. Wadn’t time to stop. I’m real sorry. Got three dogs, myself.”
Louis was inconsolable. Henry bought a bottle from the Italian widow and they took refuge in the attic garret, Gaspard’s body wrapped in a blanket on the bed. Henry held Louis while he cried, feeding him sips of strong drink till Louis was glassy-eyed. Later, Henry borrowed a car from one of the patrons at Celeste’s, and they buried Gaspard out in bayou country under a lacy willow tree and marked the grave with a roast bone stolen from Flossie’s kitchen.
“She’d kill me if she knew I took her best soup bone,” Henry said, taking off his sweat-drenched shirt.
“He was a good dog,” Louis said. His eyes were red and puffy.
“The best.”
“Why do all the things I love gotta leave me?” Louis whispered.
“I’m not gonna leave you,” Henry said.
“How you gonna get your father to let you stay?”
Henry chewed his lip and stared at the freshly tilled earth. “I’ll think of something.”
“Promise?”
“Promise,” Henry said, but he had no idea how.
Late August settled in, bringing a bank of hazy clouds that promised but did not deliver rain. After a day of stifling heat, Henry and Louis sat on a blanket beside a cascading vine of morning glories, their mood tense. There’d been a cable: Henry’s father was returning from Atlanta the next day. School would start the week after Labor Day. Henry would be miles away from Louis.
“Why don’t you just tell your father you don’t want to go?”
Henry laughed bitterly. “No one says no to my father.” He yanked a morning glory from
the vine and crushed it between his fingers.
“What that plant ever do to you?”
But Henry wouldn’t be joked out of his misery. At boarding school, Henry would be stuck in a regimented, colorless life of morning chapel, Latin, bullying upperclassmen, and innuendo about the way Henry walked and talked. There’d be no jazz or crawfish boils or fishing from the pier. There’d be none of the eccentric characters they knew from their haunts in the Quarter, men and women who looked after the two boys as if they were delightful nephews. There would be no Louis. Henry felt it as a physical ache.
In the dirt, Louis scratched a heart. Inside, he wrote L + H. Henry went to erase it before someone saw. Louis stayed his hand. “Don’t.”
“But—”
“Don’t,” he said again.
That night, they’d lain together in the narrow bed, listening to the swooshing tide of Lake Pontchartrain eddying about the pilings beneath the cabin. Louis’s stubble rubbed Henry’s cheeks raw, but he wouldn’t have stopped kissing him for anything. There were hands and mouths and tongues. They were sweaty with exploration and pleasure. Afterward, they lay entwined, Henry falling asleep to the soft warmth of Louis’s breath on his shoulder, while out on the streets of the West End, the party raged on.
Henry’s father returned on a Friday in August as the summer was dwindling to a close. From his chair in the library, he appraised his bronzed and freckled son. “You seem to have recovered your health, Hal.”
“Yes, Father,” Henry said.
“The school will be pleased to hear it.”
Henry’s heart beat so quickly he wondered if his father could hear it from across the broad expanse of Persian carpet. “I was thinking that perhaps I could finish school here. In New Orleans.”
His father peered around the edge of his open newspaper. “Why?”
“I could help with Mother,” he lied.
“We have servants and a doctor for that.” The newspaper barrier went back up.
“I’d like to stay,” Henry tried. He willed himself not to cry. “Please.”
“I’ve posted the check for your tuition already.”
“I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I will! I’ll take on whatever work I can. I’ll—”
“The subject is closed, the matter settled.” His father gave him one last, curious look. “Where do you go evenings?”
“I go for a long walk. Dr. Blake advised it. For my health,” Henry lied, feeling, for once, power in the secrecy of his other life.
His father had continued squinting at him for only a moment more. “Well,” he said, returning to his paper, “I suppose Dr. Blake knows best.”
It had been a stupid mistake that trapped them.
Louis had written Henry a letter. A beautiful letter. Henry could almost recite it; he’d read it that many times. He could barely stand to be parted from it, and so he transferred it from pocket to pocket, always keeping it on his person so that he could read it whenever he wanted. But one night, he’d been too tired and had forgotten it in a jacket pocket. The laundress found the note and took it to Henry’s father.
Henry got a sick feeling in his stomach as he remembered being summoned to the parlor, their butler, Joseph, closing the doors behind Henry. It was the only time his father’s calm had ever threatened to become something else, something violent.
“Do you recognize this?” his father asked, holding up the offending love letter. “What is this filth?”
Henry’s fear robbed him of any answer.
“Has this”—his father’s mouth struggled to form the word—“boy… compromised you in some way?”
Louis had made him laugh. Louis had kissed him. Loved him. There had been no compromise in any of that.
“Have you thought that he might blackmail our family, tarnish our good name, in pursuit of money?” his father continued. “Do you assume it is only homely heiresses who may fall prey to fortune hunters?”
Henry wanted to tell his father that Louis was kind and good, romantic and gentle. What they shared was real. But telling his father such a thing was impossible. His disapproval was so powerful it paralyzed Henry, strangled him in shame.
He’d never felt like more of a coward.
“You will not be returning to Exeter,” his father announced.
“I won’t?” Even in his fear, new hope surged in Henry. He could stay here. With Louis.
“If you are unconcerned with protecting your family’s reputation, I shall be forced to do it for you. I’ve made some calls. At nine o’clock tomorrow morning, there is a train bound for Charleston and the Citadel. You will be on that train. Perhaps they can make a man of you where I have failed. You will never speak to this boy again.”
As Henry watched, his father tore up the beautiful letter and set the pieces ablaze with a match, tossing them into the fireplace, where they flared and curled into ash.
Henry had been banished to his room, where he found that his suitcase was already packed for him. Military school. If things had been bad at Exeter, the Citadel would be worse. Henry would never survive that. He could save himself, make up a lie: “I had nothing to do with that boy! It’s all a misunderstanding!” Then he could do as his father commanded, give up everything he loved, Louis and music, and go back to Exeter, become a lawyer, then a judge. He could marry the right girl and have a Henry Bartholomew DuBois V and see the same people at the same society balls and dinners, all the while knowing that he was still a disappointment to his father, that this would never be forgotten, only denied. Or he could strike out on his own, be his own man. Wasn’t that what his father was always telling him to be?
There was a gathering that night of his father’s business associates. Henry listened to them downstairs, chuckling with their port and cigars. If that was what “being a man” was, he wanted no part of it. With his father and the servants occupied, Henry knew it was time. He stuffed what he could into a knapsack, climbed out his bedroom window, and shimmied down the tree, sneaking through the cemetery. Henry froze when he came upon his mother sitting with her rosary before a statue of Saint Michael. For a long moment, his mother regarded him, her eyes moving from Henry to his knapsack, then back to his face as if she were trying to memorize it.
“Fly, fly, sweet bird,” she whispered and turned back to her saints, letting her son slip away from the prison of Bonne Chance.
Henry had sneaked down to the Quarter, to Louis’s attic garret, but he wasn’t there. He tried Celeste’s next. Louis wasn’t there, either.
“I heard him say he might play on the Elysian,” Alphonse said.
But by the time Henry made it to the docks, the Elysian was well upriver. Henry was near tears. He thought about waiting for Louis to get back, but he had no idea how long that would be, and Henry couldn’t afford to wait. His father would be out looking for him. Once he got safely settled in his new life, he’d get word to Louis somehow.
Luck had been on Henry’s side. A steamer was just about to head up the Mississippi, so Henry talked himself on board, promising to play piano in exchange for a ride to St. Louis. In St. Louis, he posted a letter to Louis care of Celeste’s, along with the address for the Western Union office there. No telegram came. None came in Memphis, Richmond, or New York, either. Henry thought about the day they’d buried Gaspard. Louis had extracted a promise from Henry that he wouldn’t leave. And what had Henry done but run away? Did Louis hate him for leaving like that, without saying good-bye? Did he think Henry a coward? If only he could find Louis, he could explain what had happened.
Henry didn’t give up. He wrote to a few journeymen musicians from the Elysian. Only one answered, a cornet player named Jimmy. He said he’d heard from the cousin of a friend that Louis might’ve left New Orleans and found work with a territory band, but he couldn’t remember the name of the outfit. Henry groaned when he heard that—territory bands traveled all over the country. Louis could be anywhere.
That was when he remembered walking in Louis’s dream. If this was the only way to make some sort of contact, then so be it. All he had to do was give one suggestion: “Why don’t you speak with Henry? He’s waiting for you at the Bennington Apartments in New York City. The Bennington Apartments. Don’t forget, now.”
But first he had to find him.
Every week for the past year, Henry had tried to do just that. He’d walked through landscapes familiar and odd and sometimes downright frightening, chasing after any clue that would lead him back to the boy he couldn’t forget, the boy he’d loved and left. The boy he hoped would forgive him.
Henry checked his wristwatch.
Five minutes until three.
He wound the alarm clock and set the metronome to ticking.
“Please,” he said and closed his eyes.
Ling’s eyes had barely fluttered open inside the dream world when someone tapped her shoulder, and she yelped. She turned to see a startled Henry beside her, his hands up in a gesture of apology.
“Don’t ever”—Ling let out a shaking breath—“do that again.”
“I’m sorry,” Henry said, but he couldn’t hold back his grin. “The hat worked! You found me.”
“Yes. I did,” Ling said in wonder, her mind already at work trying to understand how it had happened. She’d located the living inside a dream. This was a first. “Where are we? Whose dream is this?”
Like magic, the noises began: the clop-clop of horses, the distant rattle of an elevated train, the shouts of people hawking wares, and the thin, high squeal of a factory whistle. The bank of fog thinned, revealing the same jumble of worn city streets as in the previous night’s dream walk, but now there was action: Two men fell out of a pair of saloon doors, fighting while a crowd egged them on. Half a dozen street urchins pushed after a hoop with a stick. “Anthony Orange Cross…” Their excited shouts lingered after they’d disappeared like wisps of smoke. A ghostly horse-drawn wagon trotted past. “Beware, beware, Paradise Square! The Crying Woman comes!” the driver called just before he was swallowed by the mist.