Rising Tides. Emilie Richards
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was worldwide, thanks to the press.”
“If effective is a synonym for tragic.”
“And some of the people who mourned him mourned more than the death of a saint. They mourned a man they’d always loved.” She pulled the stopper and let the water drain away.
“I know.”
“Do you?” She rinsed her hands and dried them, rubbing Jergens lotion into them in a final ritual. “Did you love the man or the saint, Ben? Because they weren’t the same.”
“Maybe that’s part of the reason we’re here. To discover how much of each he was.”
“Why are you here?”
“To discover how much of each I am.”
She realized she had been avoiding his eyes. She gazed into them now, searching for answers. Nothing there explained his words. “Would you mind putting the shrimp in the refrigerator when you’re finished?”
“Of course not.”
“Then I’ll see you in the morning.”
Upstairs, her room was still hot. At sixteen she had been far too reserved to sleep without clothes, no matter what the temperature. Now she peeled off everything and stretched out against the relatively cool surface of the sheet. She didn’t expect to sleep at all, but sleep came quickly. And in her dreams she heard applause.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dawn knew she wasn’t the daughter her mother had hoped for. As an infant she had cried frequently. As a little girl she had been a timid shadow who suffered from nightmares and fears that almost paralyzed her. She had spent many of her early years with her grandmother, and only Aurore’s patience and praise had helped build her courage.
Aurore’s huge house on Prytania Street in New Or leans had been filled with wonder. The rooms had been pools of light, with walls painted in seascape pastels and ceilings so high they floated like clouds above her head. Satyrs’ faces had hidden in the decorative plaster arches that separated the rooms, and gnomes and elves had peeked from the gleaming legs of tables and chests.
Her own room had had cypress floors so slick with wax that she could skate across them in ankle socks. Aurore had agreed that violet would be a lovely color for the walls and daffodil yellow exactly the right choice for bedspread and curtains. Dawn could go to her room when the world seemed too large or small and come out to find it was just the right size again.
Her room, the house, the gardens of camellias and wisteria, none of it would have meant anything if Aurore hadn’t been there to share it. Her earliest memory was of sitting in her grandmother’s lap in the courtyard just off Aurore’s bedroom. The sun had been warm, and a breeze had tickled her cheek. Bees had buzzed around Lady Banksia roses as her grandmother whispered their secrets.
“Bees,” she’d said, “only make noise to warn you away. Flying from flower to flower is their work. They’re asking you to let them do it. See? They’re saying please.”
She’d listened in the haven of her grandmother’s arms, and the bees had no longer frightened her. Aurore had smelled like the flowers in her courtyard. Her hair had been laced with light, and her eyes had been the pale blue of Dawn’s own. Dawn had known that in her grand mother’s arms, she would always be protected.
There was no protection now. Grandmère was gone, and in her place were questions about a life that, on the surface, had never seemed extraordinary. But what an extraordinary thing her death had become.
Dawn lay in bed and watched morning light creep through the sheer curtains of the cottage bedroom. She heard a soft rapping at her door, guaranteed not to wake her if conflict and turmoil hadn’t done so already. She pictured Ben on the other side, the Ben who had talked with her in the kitchen last night.
She rose and put on a robe, but her father was at the door. She stepped aside to let him through, but he shook his head. “I’m going for a walk on the beach. Would you like to come?”
She was touched that, despite everything, Ferris would want her company. So rare had their private moments been that she had kept them in a mental scrap book throughout her childhood. “I’ll meet you downstairs in a minute.”
He kissed her cheek before he left. She fumbled as she dressed, all thumbs and anticipation until she realized exactly how she was behaving. She was twenty-three, and she was still thrilled by a few minutes of Ferris Gerritsen’s attention.
At the last moment, she grabbed her camera. Capturing some people’s souls on film took studios of equipment, elaborate backdrops and countless heart-to-heart talks. Others could be frozen for all time with the care less snap of a Polaroid. She didn’t have studios full of equipment to draw from here at the beach. But she wanted some photographs of her father at this critical juncture in his life. She could hope for a miracle.
They were on the beach before he uttered more than a few idle words. “Last night was a strain.”
“For everybody.” She walked on Ferris’s right, away from the waves. She was terrified of deep water, and had been as long as she could remember. Self-help books hadn’t lessened her fears. She took showers instead of baths, and conveniently got her period when she was forced to visit a beach. The phobia was an odd one for the heiress to a shipping company.
Ferris had never understood her fear, but he pandered to it now. “I imagine you don’t think well of me for the way I behaved with the Reynolds family.”
Dawn loved her father’s voice. Rich, slurred and art fully southern, his accent was more North Louisiana than New Orleans. It was bourbon and branch water on a summer night, a voice that could round the edges of the sharpest conflict. She thought of her hitchhiker and understood why she had initially found him appealing.
“No, I didn’t,” she agreed. “You were pompous and high-handed. Did you think well of yourself?”
“There’s more here than you know.”
“More than not liking the Reynoldses and Phillip be cause of the color of their skin?”
“I’ve always had colored friends. I’ve eaten with colored people, slept under the same roof, kissed their babies and their grandmothers.”
She lifted her camera and wished she could record his voice on film, the sincerity, the arrogance. He paused for her, but didn’t smile, as if having his photograph taken were natural.
“You won’t go down in history as a friend to the civil-rights movement,” she said when she had finished.
“That’s right. I won’t go down in history as a man who supported what he didn’t believe in.”
She gave him credit for honesty. His values had al ways been conservative. He believed in states’ rights. He represented thousands of people who believed just as he did, and he was a better, fairer representative than many of his colleagues.
But was he a racist? In his anger at being trapped by the wishes of a dead woman, he had acted like one last night. But Dawn believed her father lacked the passion for true racism. He was sloppy-sentimental about the Negro servants who had tended him as a child. Even now, he paid for a nursing home for one of them, al though the family debt to her had ended long ago. And he felt obligations to his Negro constituents. He wanted their schools to be good ones, their businesses to thrive. And now that integration was sweeping the state, despite his belief that separate but equal was fair enough, he was encouraging citizens to abide by the law.
The moment seemed too important to spoil. And for what purpose? How could Dawn change a mind made up by years of experiences and propaganda she would never understand?
“What do you mean, there’s more than I know?” she said.
He stooped to retrieve a piece of driftwood. She snapped another photograph of him with his arm extended, reaching for something outside the camera’s range. If the photograph turned out well, she