House of Rougeaux(37)

“Martine Rougeaux, is that you?”

Blinking furiously, she quickly recognized the approaching figure. It was Lucille Travis, her old school friend.

“It is you,” cried Lucille, seizing Martine’s hands. “My, it’s been so long!”

“Lucille,” said Martine. The nightclub dancer who had quit church two or three years ago. The wayward one, the older people called her. Lucille’s older brother had died a soldier in the Great War, and her father had passed on right after she left school. Martine had heard lately that her mother was ailing, and that her youngest brother Tony was struggling to stay in school. People shook their heads over that.

Martine had imagined that Lucille went off to cheapen herself in those clubs, and as her parents discouraged the friendship she had let it drift. She remembered with a sudden shame how she had quit going by Lucille’s house, had once even pretended not to be home when Lucille had come by.

But Lucille didn’t look like a lost woman now, standing there right before her on the sidewalk. Her face looked healthy and open, if a little tired, and happy to see her old friend, as if Martine had never done her any wrong. Martine took in the stylish hat with a dark red ribbon that matched her dress and handbag, but it was the smile that outshone everything else.

“I can’t believe it,” said Martine. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, just fine,” said Lucille, “but I’m late. Can you walk with me a minute?”

They turned the corner onto St. Laurent. Lucille asked Martine what she was doing downtown and how were all her family, and Martine asked her the same. A moment later they stood before the Club Marcel, an upscale place with a couple of side doors down a little alleyway.

“Rehearsal,” Lucille said, with a note of apology. She was not unaware of the attitudes that surrounded what she did.

Just then one of the side doors flung open and another young woman appeared.

“There you are,” she said, heading for Lucille. “Mr. Alain is having a conniption. The piano player showed up drunk, and he threw him out on his ear!”

“Hey, Donnae, this is my old friend Martine,” said Lucille.

The young woman nodded at Martine over her shoulder and turned back to Lucille. “You better come in, we’ll have to do what we can without him.”

Lucille looked at Martine. “Are you busy right now? You want to fill in for an hour? I know you play. Mr. Alain will give you five bucks.” Lucille’s eager tone pulled on Martine’s heart, as if they were still children and her friend wanted her to visit.

Martine sucked in her breath. “I don’t know,” she hesitated, “I don’t have to be anywhere, but….” What would her parents think? Not only socializing there on the street with Lucille, but walking straight into a nightclub? On the other hand, it was daytime, just a rehearsal, just an hour, and maybe they need never know….

“Come on,” said Donnae, catching one of Martine’s arms. And with that she was inside Club Marcel.

The three women hustled down a corridor and up some stairs, pushing through a door that opened into a large hall with a stage, a long bar to one side, and an open floor full of tables and chairs. Five or six other women in partial costume milled around or practiced steps. Lucille and Donnae took Martine over to one end of the bar where a tall white man with slicked-back hair shouted in French into a telephone. Donnae interrupted him.

“Mr. Alain, we’ve got a piano player,” she said, loud enough for him to hear.

He turned around, looked Martine up and down rapidly, said something curt into the telephone and hung up.

The next thing Martine knew she was seated on the lacquered bench of a massive grand piano, looking over the sheet music. She spent a few minutes warming up, getting it right. Mr. Alain leaned down and snapped his fingers, telling her to up the tempo. Martine had never touched a grand piano before. She played the spinet at home, of course, and the old upright belonging to the church, but never had music come to life under her fingers in such large and sonorous tones as these. The sound filled the hall around her, and seemed to fill every hall that echoed inside of her too.

Every now and then she looked up at the dancers, who flowed and hopped and turned with the music. They were dancing in their drawers, but not any kind of drawers Martine had ever seen. None of the women in her family had undergarments studded with rhinestones, that was one thing she could be sure of. Lucille was the most luminous of all. For every resonant tone of the piano, Lucille responded in the suppleness of her movements. Nothing lewd in it at all. If anything it was grace Martine saw, and fun.

Before she knew it, it was over.

The dancers dabbed at themselves with towels and Lucille took Martine’s arm and led her over to the bar. “Well done!” she told her several times, “you played that thing right out!”

Mr. Alain was leaning on the polished surface of the bar smoking a cigarette. He reached into his coat and pulled out a billfold, from which he withdrew a five-dollar bill and held it out to Martine with two fingers. This was more than she made in a week working at the Braddocks’. Taking the money, she spotted a row of beer bottles just behind him on a shelf, bearing the familiar Rougeaux label. She sent them a silent message: Don’t tell Papa.

Lucille put a coat on over her dancing costume and walked Martine outside. It was quiet in the little alleyway outside the door, removed now from the music in the hall and the traffic from the boulevard.