Page 1 of Meet Me in the Garden

PART ONE1944–1945

ONE

DELPHINE IS WAITINGfor me in the garden. Inside the iron gate, deep into the courtyard, past the vines and the shade flowers and the ferns that grow up to our waists, she sits reading. She makes room for me on the bench, says she’s learning to interpret dreams, asks if I’ve been remembering mine. I tell her I haven’t. Not one since Papa died.

“Can I draw you?” I ask.

“Of course.”

I tear two pages from my sketchbook and fish two pencils from my bag. “Here. We can both do it. I’ve been practicing a technique from one of Papa’s old books. We look at each other and imagine that our eyes and our pencils are one. We don’t even glance down at the paper as we go. That’s a rule.”

“All right,” she says. “I’ll try.”

It becomes easy after the first minute, looking at each other’s faces and nowhere else. Whenever our gazes meet, it’s a surprise. I spend a long time on her fawn-brown eyes and her full lips and the curve of her chin. There’s an ever-present crease between her brows from how seriously she takes the world. My cousin, closer to me than either of my sisters, as close as any person could be. We’re quiet as we work, just the scratchesof our pencils across the paper and the familiar garden sounds. Rustle of leaves, occasional flapping of wings. We’ve been meeting here almost daily for the last two months, ever since we stumbled upon it by chance one day after Mass. We’d never noticed it before. Now it’s our place. “When we’re finished,” Delphine murmurs, “I have a secret to tell you.” I nod, but I’m focused on the exact spot where her earlobe meets her jaw. I almost forget that I’m drawing at all. It’s more like I’m running a finger across her face. I could go on for much longer, but then—

“Wait,” I say. “You’ve kept a secret? From me?”

“I know. It’s just… You’ve been mourning. There hasn’t been a good time to tell you.”

“Tell me now.”

She’s frowning. She says, “You know the photographer’s studio on Magazine Street? The one with the portraits in the windows?”

We’ve passed it together, dozens of times. She says she stopped to look at a portrait about two months ago, of a young boy. “Hisintensity,” she says. “I couldn’t tear myself away. And then the door opened, and the photographer was there. Very tall. So handsome. Just standing, sort of amused, watching me. I remembered theWhites Onlysign in the window and thought I was in trouble.”

“We’re allowed to stand on the street and look,” I say.

“I know. I just didn’t understand what was happening, why he was staring at me. And then he invited me in to have my portrait taken.”

“What about the sign?”

“He said it wasn’t meant for Creole girls like me. I didn’t like it. If I’d been darker, I doubt he’d have felt the same way. But I’ve always wanted to go in.”

She waits for my reaction. A few months ago, my sister’s husband, Al, got turned away from a Creole dance for being too dark. Before his anger came a flash of humiliation that Delphine and I both saw and couldn’t shake. We left the dance in protest, spent the night talking about how we’d been complicit, years of showing our fair wrists at doorway after doorway, thinking nothing of it. We weren’t going todo that anymore. Now she’s done it again. So that’s the secret. But she keeps talking.

“I said I didn’t have the money, but the photographer told me it wasn’t a problem. He had an hour free and he wanted to take my portrait. I can’t begin to describe what it felt like. Bill has these giant painted canvases lining the walls. You would love them. Tropical scenes, and garden scenes. Ruins, like in Rome…”

“Bill?” I ask. She takes my hand. A flicker of a smile, a deep blush, the same relief I felt when I told her about Hattie, right after it first started, and I thought saying it out loud would kill me, but Delphine wasn’t shocked. She said that if it felt right, itwasright. “Bill,” I say again. Not a question this time. “Go on.”

She wanted to sit in front of the tropical scene but he set her up against the plain gray. She asked for a mirror to touch up her hair and put on some lipstick, but he wanted to capture her just as she was. He was stern, had her sit in various positions, tilt her head in certain ways. Sometimes she didn’t understand his directions and he’d cross from behind the camera and touch her face to guide it.

“I hated when it was over,” she says. “But he told me to come back the next day to look at the proofs, so I did. I went in, and he had portraits of me spread out across his table. They’re beautiful portraits. I can’t really express it. How it feels to suddenly see yourself in a whole new way.” She stands, circles the bench. Pink dress, bare feet, hair falling in dark curls down her back. “Odette,” she says, stopping in front of me again. “The way I saw myself. I was spectacular.”

“You’ve always been spectacular.”

“He said he had to photograph me again, right then, and we stayed there for hours, and I had some of his bourbon, enough that when he did kiss me, finally, I didn’t worry about the fact that he’s white, and older. I didn’t think about any of that at all. Except now I’m in trouble. No, no! Not that. We’ve been careful.”

Her shy smile. A churn in my stomach. The last few weeks, meeting here day after day, and she didn’t tell me, and I didn’t notice. It stings, butI’ve been mourning, she’s right. She thought she was being kind. “How was it?” I ask. “The first time?”

“It hurt. But he was very slow and patient with me. Now it’s wonderful. I’ve been jealous, you know. Of you, with Hattie. A love affair.”

“Now you have one,” I say. “But what do you mean, in trouble?”

“I mean in love. I know it’s only been a couple months, but they’ve changed me. He wants to see me all the time. He isn’t ashamed. Yesterday, he hung my portrait in the shop window.”

“Aren’t you afraid someone will see it?”

“You know our mothers. They never go to Magazine Street.”