The Seamstress of New Orleans

by Diane C. McPhail

Genres: Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction; General Fiction

Synopsis

The year 1900 ushers in a new century and the promise of social change, and women rise together toward equality. Yet rules and restrictions remain, especially for women like Alice Butterworth, whose husband has abruptly disappeared. Desperate to make a living for herself and the child she carries, Alice leaves Chicago far behind, offering sewing lessons at a New Orleans orphanage.



Constance Halstead, a young widow, has thrown herself into charitable work. Meeting Alice at the orphanage, she offers lodging in exchange for Alice's help creating a gown for the Leap Year ball of Les Mysterieuses, the first all female krewe of Mardi Gras. During Leap Years, women have the rare opportunity to take control in their interactions with men, and upend social convention. Piece by piece, the breathtaking gown takes shape, becoming a symbol of strength for both women.



But Constance carries a burden that makes it impossible to feel truly free. Her husband, Benton, whose death remains a dangerous mystery, was deep in debt to the Black Hand, the vicious gangsters who controlled New Orleans's notorious Storyville district. Benton's death has not satisfied them. And as the Mardi Gras festivities reach their fruition, a secret emerges that will cement the bond between Alice and Constance even as it threatens the lives they're building . . .

Release date: May 31, 2022

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

At the first thought of following him, fear so overwhelmed her that she had to remind herself it was only a thought. But that thought persisted, beyond and over her fear, luring her like a child provoking a dog with a snatched-away crust of bread. Now Constance was prepared. A menswear suit lay on her bed, waiting for her. Today she would follow him, would hopefully relieve her rising anxiety under the burden of Benton’s penchant for secrecy and his persistent demands for money from her trust. She would not wait longer to expose his secrets. She had her suspicions, but she needed certainty.

Downstairs, the front door slammed as Benton left the house for the depot. Obsessed with punctuality, her husband was eternally early. Now she just had time to disguise herself, reach the station, and board the train before it pulled out. The difficulty would be to slip from her own home unnoticed. The unseasonable late autumn heat impeded her haste. Outside her open window, the birds chirped and fluttered as if nothing in the world were amiss. Constance retrieved the trim sack coat, designed for a young man, and slipped her arms into the sleeves, then tugged the lapels close in front. The suit fit her narrow body well, especially the slim trousers. Only the waist was too big. By an inch or two. She cinched the belt tighter and smoothed the fabric around her, leaving the gathered excess concealed in back, beneath her jacket. At the dressing table, she opened a small box and retrieved a bottle of spirit gum. Hands trembling now, she applied a line of it above her brows. While it grew tacky, she repeated the process with a thicker application above her lip. She tested the brow line with her finger and prayed the wide ash brows would adhere. A wave of relief washed through her when they stuck like her own, though her skin felt as if it would peel right off. She pressed again. Then the tapered mustache was over her lip. Could the image in the mirror be her? Could it not be her? That was the crucial point.

She slipped a gray fedora over the ash-brown wig. Ah, now. There he was. That young boy-man she needed to be, even if the mustache seemed a bit heavy for one as young as she appeared. Constance rose, then turned back to snatch up a bottle of alcohol, which she would need to remove the spirit gum, and dropped it into her satchel. Its buckles defied her. She stopped. Took a deep breath, buckled them more slowly. There. It was done. Upstairs she heard the girls waking and Analee bidding them a good morning. She picked up the satchel and slipped hastily from the house. No one saw her.

The air was clear; the day bright. Nothing in it seemed amiss. Ticket in hand, Constance stepped aboard the Illinois Central Chicago–New Orleans Limited just before it eased out of Union Station, its pulsing cadence gaining velocity, its momentum quieting into a settled tempo as the fleeting byways of the city gave way to the countryside.

Placid as the woods and intermittent farmland seemed, inside those sooty cars Constance noted a range of human emotion that vibrated in the closed air, a vibration like that in her own being. As she made her unsteady way from one car to the next, a harried mother under a thin shawl lifted her breast to soothe a fretful infant. One car back Constance cringed as a young wife, stylishly clad in a velvet-trimmed amber suit, lowered her head and wiped a gloved hand across her cheek at the hissed reproach of her husband that she had packed five shirts rather than six, in case one should get soiled. At the last seat an elderly man rested his half-bald head against the window, the waves of his white walrus mustache bouncing erratically in tempo with his intermittent snores. Across the aisle a man laid aside his book to gaze at his two children, who were giggling wildly as they pointed his Kodak box camera at the old man. A woman two seats away frowned at him as the children continued running up and down, snatching at the camera and arguing about whose turn it was.

At last, in the gentlemen’s lounge, Constance spied her husband, seated with two other men at a card table. Trying to attract as little attention as possible, she settled herself in a leather armchair, opened the Times-Picayune to shield herself. She peered past the loose edge at the table of gamblers but was torn by the dire headlines of the paper: DIAMOND CITY, NORTH CAROLINA, DESTROYED BY HURRICANE: LOSS OF LIFE COUNTED IN THE THOUSANDS. Such ominous news, an unprecedented hurricane gathering strength across the Outer Banks, destroying an entire town, coffins and houses floating across the sound. Her stomach contracted at the death toll and the details of destruction. Perhaps the worst yet in history. And yet so far New Orleans had been spared from this year’s storms.

In her peripheral vision she scanned the men hunched round the table, each focused on his hand of cards. Benton, his back to her, visibly intense, was thrumming the edges of his cards in silence. On the table in front of him, a meager little stack of chips. How much had he lost? In so little time? It couldn’t have been more than half an hour. He fingered the pocket where she knew he kept a roll of money—when he had any. The other men waited, one with a strange mustache—she tried to remember the complicated term for it—that swept down and around his chin. A palpable tension vibrated in the air.

Beneath them, she felt more than heard the monotonous undertone of metal rumbling on metal. She heard the quiet dealing of cards, the muttered bets, the hard click of chips as she tried to concentrate on the hurricane. Suddenly, she jumped, the newspaper crackling, as Benton slammed his cards onto the table in furious resignation. The other men closed their hands, their cards unrevealed. No one spoke. After picking up his one remaining chip, Benton flipped it like a coin, slapped it on the table next to the burgeoning pile in the center.

“Might as well filch it all,” he said. “Just for fucking luck. Yours, that is, goddamnit. Sure as hell ain’t mine.”

He rose, lobbed his money onto the table, stretched his back and neck to collect himself, and glanced around, disregarding the men’s continued gaze on him. Constance ducked her head as he stared at her momentarily. He edged toward the far end of the car, then halted long enough to order a whiskey from the bar and pick up a folded newspaper. He dropped into a nailhead leather armchair, sipped at the whiskey, tapping the unopened paper against his knee, rage and despair rigid behind the flat line of his lips and the twitching of his closed eyelids. Then, slipping a pack of Picayune Extra Milds from his pocket, Benton watched the two men exit the car. He tossed the remaining whiskey down, slammed the glass on the table.

In no hurry, Benton, with a defeated air, rose and laid the still-folded paper on the chair. Again, he stretched his neck and back, then turned toward the opposite exit. Slipping an unlit cigarette between his lips, he stepped out the door to the open vestibule. Where was he going? Constance crumpled her paper, then tucked it carelessly between the seat and the arm of her chair. She rose, brushed at her suit, holding the hard edge of the seat back for stability before she made her way up the aisle, adjusting her gait to the rocking of the train. A blast of hot air and the sharp rumble of the wheels sheared into her as the door released onto the open vestibule, then clanged shut behind her.

Benton was just standing there. He flipped his wasted cigarette out into the wind, watched it fall, still glowing, onto the gravel. It disappeared, became invisible as the train passed on. Constance averted her face, focused on a high trestle coming into view up ahead. Her body taut, she clasped the vertical brass handrail. Benton eased closer, cleared his throat.

“You’re very young for such a fine mustache,” Benton murmured. “Still got that fine, soft boy skin. Mighty young to be traveling alone.”

When she did not respond, he laid one hand on her shoulder, the other on her hip. Immobilized, she felt him rotate himself around her slight body, his back to the water now, obstructing her view. She turned her face as Benton touched the mustache.

She opened her eyes, stared into his. Benton froze, paralyzed by those eyes.

“You,” he gasped. His hand gripped her arm.

She tore herself free, her hand pushing against him, as he stepped back, floundered on the edge of the step as he grasped at the handrail. The car door swung open. A man raced through the vestibule, arm outstretched. A flash of disorientation. A child’s face at the window of the adjoining car. Off-balance, she threw up her hand. Benton’s slipped from the brass handrail, and his body tilted backward, arms and feet floundering in the open air.

Constance pressed her back hard against the wall, gripping the handrail, as if the passing wind might lift her behind him. She stared at the passing terrain. The fields, the woods, a turn-row here and there, a fence, a barn—all tranquil. As if nothing had transpired.

At the next stop Constance dismounted with her valise. Fear wrenched through her like a knife ripping through tangled yarn. What had she seen? What had she done? Was he dead? Was he injured or mangled and struggling even now for help? The terrible smack of his body hitting the water reverberated in her ears. She envisioned him below the surface, arms akimbo, eyes open, staring back at her.

Outside the depot on a hard wooden bench, Constance sat, struggling to quiet her breath, heaving in shock. The false eyebrows felt as if they might peel her flesh away. She could feel her skin ripped, blood flowing into her eyes like tears, her face a mask of horror. She raised her fingers to touch. The brows remained firmly in place and would until she deliberately removed them and the rest of this disguise. Finding a place to do that consumed her, to become herself again. Fear consumed her. She would never be herself again.

Hand trembling, Constance slid her money beneath the ticket window for a return to New Orleans. A washroom on the train would be less obvious than one in the station. She could shed these tainted clothes and change into her dress, but she must first find a corridor with no witnesses. Her steps mounting the train were unsteady. She tripped and instinctively reached for the hem of her nonexistent skirt. She glanced around in alarm, but no one seemed to have noticed. In fact, there were few other passengers boarding. As the train pulled out, the washroom in that car proved vacant; she entered, heart pounding, and locked the door. The space was cramped, making changing awkward. The floor was dirty where the now discarded trousers lay. The train lurched, and she banged her elbow on the sink, grimaced, grabbed its edge to hold her balance. She felt that her chest might cave in as she struggled into her petticoat, then the seven-gored green skirt. Her hands trembled almost to the point of impossibility as she strained to button her shirtwaist. A sudden horror overwhelmed her, pulsing like the rails below. Her mind saturated itself with the sight of his fall, the look of his eyes, the flailing arms. Constance lowered the wooden seat of the water closet and sat there, her face in her hands, until someone knocked at the door.

“Just a moment, please,” she said as audibly as she could muster.

She rose, smoothed her skirt, buttoned three remaining buttons, and tied the bow at her neck. The remaining spirit gum lifted off with the alcohol, though her forehead was red where she had scrubbed. A bit of skin itched at the corner of her left eyebrow. Removing the man’s wig mussed her hair, hard as she had tried to hold it tight to her scalp with a hairnet. In any event, she had to pull out the soft rolls of her own blond hair around her face and smooth it as best she could.

Another knock.

“I’m sorry. Please. Just one moment.”

Straining to see her reflection in the cracked, heavily smudged mirror, Constance patted the fallen strands of hair into place, hairpins between her teeth, then anchored them in her high chignon.

The knock came again. In haste, Constance mounted her small green feathered toque and rammed the hatpin through. She crammed the man’s fedora atop the rumpled suit and closed the leather case, leaving one buckle half done. Her gloves now donned, Constance opened the washroom door. Clutching the half-secured valise, she murmured apologetically to the elderly woman waiting in the vestibule.

The sight of her corner house in the Marigny made Constance weak. How could she greet her children? Analee? She struggled up the steps with packages she had picked up from the church, grappled with the knob, and pressed her hip against the heavy leaded-glass door. A waft of damp heat rushed in before her. With the toe of her sealskin boot, she slammed the door shut, her chin atop her armload of packages in an effort to prevent them from falling. As several toppled onto the wide plank hardwood, Analee scurried out from the kitchen. Scooping up the fallen packages, she stacked them on the polished marble console in the hallway.

“Here now, Miss Constance,” she said, “give me the rest of that load out your arms.” Analee bustled to arrange them on the console. “Now, that’s a good sight better. Want to hand me that satchel?”

Constance’s heart pounded. “No,” she said. “It’s all right.” She shoved the valise against the console, stricken now with panic as she glanced at the hall clock. “Oh, my. I am so behind. Is everything ready for the ladies?”

“Yes, ma’am. All gone be all right. Baking done and everything set on the dining room table with the pink Limoges, like you said.”

“Oh, Analee, this heat is unbearable. I must freshen up. How did I ever allow myself to run this late?” Her mind felt incoherent.

“You be fine, Miss Constance. You just need to cool yourself down a notch.” Analee rebalanced the packages in two separate stacks. “You looking a might peaked, Miss Constance. Mayhap you done tried to do too much. What you need is rest. Only so much time in life, you know. Can’t do everything in one day by yourself.”

Constance knew Analee was studying her. She tried to calm her breathing.

“Something got you upset.” It wasn’t a question. “I bet you run into that old Mrs. Duncan. One what always got something nasty to say, even when she ain’t got nothing to say. She coming this afternoon?”

“No, Analee. I’m just rushed. And hot and tired. Mostly rushed. Or maybe mostly tired.” Constance straightened the small valise beside the console. She needed to get it up the stairs. “And no, Mrs. Duncan can’t be bothered with the orphanage. Too busy playing bridge.”

Suddenly little hands and feet were all about them, dancing and tugging and pulling for attention.

“Mama, Mama,” Delia’s voice squealed up at Constance, “did you bring us chocolates?”

“Did you, Mama? Did you?” a second little voice chimed in. It was Maggie, tugging at her skirt.

Constance laid her hand on Maggie’s soft blond curls, then bent down to kiss both girls. As she put her arms around their trusting shoulders and pulled them to her, she fought back her tears.

“No, angel. Mama didn’t have time for the candy store today.” No, she had killed their father. Trying to steel herself, Constance brushed a loose curl behind Delia’s little ear, straightened her ever-crooked hair bow.

“Oh, Mama.” Two voices at once, disappointment palpable.

“Can we have cookies, then?” said one from sudden inspiration.

“Analee made a lot,” chimed in the other. “We helped. It’s a whole big platter full.”

“Yes, you may have a cookie. One each. If any are left from my orphanage auxiliary meeting, you may have another after supper.” Constance kissed the top of Maggie’s head, unlatched the tight little hands from her skirt. “Have you been good girls today for Analee?” She raised her questioning face to her housekeeper.

“Yes’m. They always good girls.” Analee hesitated. “Had to stop Delia from shaking her doll, so she don’t break it. She kept saying, ‘You hush now. You just hush that crying.’ She say that baby making too much racket and she had to make her stop crying. I scolded her some. That’s about it.”

Constance stiffened. Her heart was exploding. “You were shaking your doll, Delia?” Her voice came out edged and tight. “Why were you shaking your doll?”

“She wouldn’t stop crying, Mama.”

“Analee is right. You’ll break her, honey.” She managed words that would make sense. “Then it would be you crying. Shaking your doll is not the way to make her stop crying.”

“Well, Daddy did it.”

“Daddy shook your doll?”

“No, Mama. He shaketed baby David a lot, and he stopped crying. Maybe he breaked baby David?”

Constance gasped for breath, grasped the edge of the table, elbows locked. Her baby, her David. She had touched him, patted him, thinking him asleep. No response. No breath. No life. She knew babies sometimes died in their sleep, but who would anticipate such a thing? No one. Who would even think of such a thing? No one. She had returned home from errands for the orphanage, picking up hand-me-downs from a woman who had recently taken an interest in those children. The little dresses had been lovely, far fancier than those her own girls wore. She had greeted her girls then as she’d greeted them now, their excitement running through her, buoying her spirits. Hugging them tightly, yet eager to mount the stairs and peek in at David, her precious son, her boy after two girls. She had put no greater value on a son than her girls, but she had loved the balance of both in her life.

Her joy at his birth had overwhelmed her. More so than it had Benton. That had surprised her, puzzled her all those months. He had not been eager to hold this baby boy in his arms, as he had the girls. She had thought it a male characteristic to be prouder of sons than daughters. Yet somehow Benton had seemed less interested, more ill at ease with this precious boy than with the girls. So she had been surprised to find him standing there in the nursery, staring out the window, like a statue on guard. He had turned when she whispered to him, so as not to wake the baby. He had nodded and left the room, more quiet even than usual. She had glanced into the crib to be sure they had not disturbed the sleeping infant, then had followed him out and closed the door.

A bit later, her small bosom tight with milk, she had gone to wake him from his now too-long nap, touched the back of his silky fine hair, laid her hand on his back. He had not moved, even when she’d jostled him slightly. He had not opened his eyes. How many eternities had it taken her to absorb the absence of his breath?

Dr. Birdsong, her childhood friend, her doctor, her children’s doctor, had held her and had simply said over and over, “It happens, Constance. Sometimes it happens.” Had reassured her she was not to blame. The baby had not suffocated. “Thymic asthma, most probably,” he had said, and he’d written it on the death certificate. “It happens. It just happens.”

Now Delia’s words struck her like a blow. “Daddy shaketed baby David a lot, and he stopped crying.” Her infant son shaken till he stopped crying? By his father, now lying deep under some unknown water. Dead, like his son.

Analee shooed the girls from the room. Reluctantly, they backed away, their eyes bright with curiosity and fear.

“You ain’t going down, now is you?” Analee took firm hold around the back of Constance’s waist. “I got you, Miss Constance.”

Constance shook her head but did not raise it. Her legs were failing her. Had Benton meant to do it? Impossible. He was not that kind of man. Benton had been broken by David’s death. She had consoled him as best she could in her own grief, but he had been so distant. He had clung to her only once, his face buried against her waist, while she stroked his hair, where her own tears fell like slow rain. When he’d choked on his words, pleading, saying he should have known, she had repeated the doctor’s words: “It happens. Sometimes it just happens.”

“I got you now.” Analee locked an arm around Constance’s waist, holding tight. She stretched out her foot to scoot a side chair close and eased Constance into it.

Constance sat, hands limp in her lap, head rolled back, eyes locked above her, looking at nothing. Minutes passed before she spoke, and then, as if addressing no one, her eyes on the plaster above, she said, “They saw him?”

“I don’t know, Miss Constance. I don’t know.”

“She couldn’t just make that up, Analee.”

“I don’t know. Childrens is apt to make up most anything, do they get a mind to it.”

Constance lowered her head and turned, her face blanched of color, the anger rising like a razor through her. “And just how would she get a mind to that, Analee? That’s not a thing you just get a mind to.”

Analee wiped at the sweat across Constance’s brow, tugged at a fragment of something stuck to the skin at her eyebrow. “Them ladies gone be here right soon, Miss Constance. I’m taking you up. I’m gone put you down to rest. I’m gone tell them you took sick. Got a headache come on of a sudden. Them ladies can handle it all without you.”

“No, Analee.” Constance pulled herself upright. Testing her balance, she glanced at the valise on the floor, then accepted Analee’s hand for security. “Give me a moment to gather myself. I’ll be all right momentarily.”

“Miss Constance, you ain’t gone be all right. But I know you ain’t gone give up living . . .” Analee laid her hand on Constance’s shoulder. “Mayhap they gone be times like this, long as you live.”

Constance closed her eyes and shook her head. Her fingers clasped the water glass Analee slipped into her fingers. The water was cool and braced her some. She needed to get that valise out of the way. Out of sight. She needed to hide that disguise. But she could not lift it herself. Her small remainder of strength now failed her.

“Would you bring that valise up for me, after all, Analee? I’d as soon not climb the stairs by myself.”

A day’s tardiness for Howard was not unusual; in fact, given her husband’s erratic work schedule, it was far too frequent. An overextended meeting might easily cause him a missed train, resulting in a day’s delay returning to Chicago. The occasional locomotive breakdown might result in almost as lengthy a holdup. Two days had once given her serious concern. Now three days with no word from him threw Alice into alarm.

The leftovers from the dinner Alice had splurged on for Howard’s return, the dinner for which he had never appeared, lasted her two and a half days. The last of the roast chicken, squash, potatoes, and spinach were gone by the time she resigned herself to his disappearance and mustered the courage to go to the police.

The day was hot—no hint yet of fall weather—the heavy heat like wet clothing drooping on a line across the alley, like all those clotheslines across all those alleys dripping on the pedestrians hurrying to do whatever worrisome errand awaited them. Alice tugged the muslin sleeves of her lightest dress over her damp arms and buttoned the high collar. In reluctant surrender, she hesitated, touching the chifforobe where his few garments hung. After locking the apartment door, Alice descended the stairway and stepped out to the perpetually muddy street. The odors of horse dung, waste, rotting garbage, and offal assailed her. Raising her skirt, she looked both ways and balanced on the sagging planks of the boardwalk that pretended to give protection from the pervasive mud.

Two streets over she encountered a mounted policeman shouting instructions to a group of children racing along the street.

Alice called up to him. “Could you direct me to the nearest station, please, sir?”

The officer bent toward her, pointing, and spoke too quickly for her to clearly understand—but his extended hand at least gave her a sense of the direction in which she should head. She would ask again when she was nearer to the station, if need be. Holding her already mud-tinged skirt, Alice made her uncertain way to the station house.

Alice had never even seen a station house before. In spite of her uncertainty, this one could not be missed. Her apprehension rose as she neared the towering brick façade and stared up at the high arch rising half a story above the daunting reinforced doors. Her legs grew leaden as she mounted the imposing stairs. She put her foot on the last step and reached for the door just as a tired-looking uniformed policeman, hardly more than a boy, burst through it. Without changing his expression, he held it open and nodded before releasing it. Through the dirty cross-barred windows, she watched him race down to the street. When she turned, it was to face the intimidating height of the front desk, its dark, wide-rimmed wood scratched and worn. The officer on duty gave her no notice. He finished whatever he was writing before raising his unreadable face to stare down at her. Uncertain, she gazed first in one direction, then in the other, along the empty hallways. Somewhere far into the building, a hard slam reverberated.

The officer cleared his throat but said nothing, only waited. Alice realized he was expecting something from her.

“Good afternoon, Officer.”

He nodded.

“Please, sir, I need to report someone missing.”

“Someone?”

Alice assessed the hallways again. “My husband,” she said.

The officer scratched something into his book, then waited.

“You see, he was due home three days ago.” She felt the strength go out of her voice.

“Three?”

“Yes, sir. Three. And I have had no word from him.”

“And you wish to file a missing person report?”

“Yes.”

The policeman scratched something else, then said, “If you will wait, please.” He disappeared. Another officer took his place and nodded, unsmiling. What were they doing?

Alice stood, with nothing better to do than examine the cool stone floors of the hallways and the high windows, which were covered with heavy metal screens. Anxiety flooded her. Perhaps she should not have come. After a bit, she began to walk back and forth, but soon she heard a heavy knocking at the high desktop. She looked up to see the second officer’s scowling face. With one finger he motioned her back into place. S. . .