Mimi used to steal into the room in her nightdress and crouch in the shadows back of the door and watch him, fascinated by his varying moods. One thing only was constant, as soon as his glass was emptied Jean reached down, hooked the first two fingers of his right hand in the handle of the gallon container. Steadying it with his thumb, he raised the demijohn up and over with a flip until its bowl rested on his biceps. Pouring his glass full, Jean lowered the jar to the floor again. The process was repeated at regular intervals. In time Jean’s head would sink lower and lower until it rested on the table, his arms his only pillow. Mimi would then cover his shoulders with the damask cover from the couch and creep back to her own bed.
Mary Robertson did not herself know why she had been attracted by Jean Daquin. She knew that, in part, she had been drawn by his gentle manner, so different from the blustering, raw, at times tiresome aggressiveness of her own Chicago. Even to herself she sternly denied that this had caused her interest in Jean to grow. Her father had used his earnings as a physician to speculate in real estate. Through shrewd and clever means he had accumulated considerable wealth in Chicago’s fast-growing Negro settlement on the south side, and this wealth had given him great political power among his people.
Mary Robertson had no recollection of a time when she did not hear from morning to night endless discussions of money and of politics. If her father was not talking of the sums he had made or expected to make from this piece of property or through that election, he usually was conjecturing as to the wisdom or folly of associating with this man or that one, of joining one fraternal order or the other one, of doing this thing or the other, all these speculations revolving around the one desideratum—will it pay?
Jean Daquin, improvident, oblivious of material advantage or disadvantage of any act of his, had opened to her eyes a new world filled with romance, with colour, with beauty. This, combined with the stories told her of his grief over Margot, had appealed to her feminine love of the unstable, the exotic, the unusual. Unconsciously she associated with Jean the exciting revelry of Mardi Gras, and found herself in love with him.
Jean, floundering in the abyss of sorrow, was, in his more sober moments, beginning to develop a new fear when he met Mary Robertson—an apprehension regarding Mimi.
“I’m a poor excuse for a father, chérie,” he told her a score of times a day despite her sincere protestations that he was the best father any girl ever had. “Here I am, drinking every night until I’m beastly drunk and forgetting Margot would want me to brace up for your sake. I’m no good at all—you’d be better off if I were dead, too.”
Here he would pause for the denial of his words which Mimi never failed to furnish. He would listen comfortably while she pointed out his virtues as a paterfamilias—and an hour later would be as unconvinced as ever. Mary determined she would capture Jean, distaste for her life in Chicago growing daily as she stayed on in New Orleans long after she had originally intended to leave. She was beguiled by the romance and languorous charm of the Creole quarter where she, for the first time, could forget the petty meanness and prejudice she felt as a Negro elsewhere in America. Mary Robertson swiftly but without Jean’s realizing it led him to propose to her.
To him, blundering along like a pilotless balloon, blown unresistingly this way or that by every passing breeze, she seemed the embodiment of all the virtues he himself lacked. Energetic, purposeful, dynamic, she supplied a driving force which smoothed out numerous little difficulties which to him had seemed insurmountable. Under her influence he walked with her in the evenings, methodically answering the soft “Good nights” which floated down to them from shadowed balconies or from doorways, instead of sitting at home drinking his usual half-gallon of double port. His mind clearer from alcohol, he brought some semblance of order to his insurance business, which had suffered greatly during his year of neglect.
He resisted sturdily and successfully her slightly less than tactful suggestions that more modern business methods be installed.
“No, Mary, I don’t want a big business—then I’d be only a slave to it, just a creature run this way or that by the machine I’ve created. I get my living as things are—and I’m satisfied.”
She was too wise to pursue the matter further but his adamant resistance did not prevent her from resolving, silently of course, to bide her time until she had the right and the power to have her way. Her intention was not consciously unkind nor meddlesome. He’s got a gold mine practically untouched, she thought, and I’ll convince him he can make ten times as much as he does. Jean, meanwhile, thought he had ended the discussion for all time.
Mimi, christened “Annette Angela Daquin” but thereafter known only as “Mimi,” was eleven when Mary Robertson entered Jean Daquin’s life. From the beginning Mimi had felt a barrier within herself arising
