we can’t. And we don’t know which are which; that’s frightening sometimes, yes, but it’s also liberating. I say learn and live. Begone, all monsters under the bed! Scram, all you skeletons in the closet!”
He’d produced the intended reaction in Zola. She smiled tentatively.
“So what’s going to happen to the little chateau?” he asked.
“Do you know, she didn’t allow me out there? Her ‘special place,’ she called it.” She sighed, shaking her head. “Oh, I’ve given it to Freret University, along with those atrocious pictures and sculptures. Part of the deal with the government. But I’m really not supposed to talk about that.”
“Hey, I know how it is. Got a few secrets, myself. What about the genealogical treasure trove in those cases? The European stuff. I suppose you’ll be sending that to the places I suggested.”
He wanted it all himself, but he knew it had to be repatriated. Zola had solved his anxiety over returning the Natchitoches material by offering to pay for the relocation of the courthouse’s neglected subbasement archive to the Plutarch Foundation in New Orleans, where future genealogists would have the opportunity to scurry around in it like happy dung beetles. Nick’s pilfered Balazar documents were unobtrusively added, and no one was the wiser.
“Well, not exactly,” Zola said. “My lawyers have told me not to reveal where I’m going, or what I’m going to do, but between us,” she drew closer, continuing in a whisper, just a glimmer of her old fun-loving self in her eyes, “I’m bound for Europe to deliver those items myself. I’ve decided to take some time off, figure out a new direction. In the meantime, I intend to devote my energies to the study of–drum roll please!–genealogy. Learn and live, isn’t that what you said?”
“You know,” said Nick, “maybe I should have been a teacher.”
She gave him her address in the small alpine country where she would be setting up house–or castle, rather–and made him promise to visit.
“Oh, wait.” She ran into another room and returned with a gift-wrapped package. “Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday! I was going to send it to you. Go on, open it.”
It was a Breitling wrist chronograph so complex he was afraid he’d never be able to make out the time, much less the altitude–a negative number in New Orleans, anyway.
“No microchip. Excellent!” he said.
“Slightly antiquated, but very charming. Like you.”
“Hey, no fair. I didn’t get you anything.”
“This is all I want,” she said, and kissed him.
Eventually the moving men gave them unsubtle hints that they were about to be loaded onto the truck.
Nick crossed the street, heading for St. Charles and the downtown streetcar. His car had received terminal injuries in its joust with the iron gate. He stopped on the opposite sidewalk and faced the house.
He recalled a particularly important passage from Ivanhoe’s diary, possibly written on a typical dreary Louisiana winter day like this one.
“Zola, my love,” Nick said softly, “may you safely cross all the impossible gaps on your journey.”
.
30
From The Diary of Ivanhoe Balzar:
Mulatto Barber of Natchitoches
December 21st 1873. Jacob, my half-brother, passed today. I was with him at his deathbed. He held my hand. Maybe he did not recognise me. Maybe he did. The Lord Almitey forgive his sinning soul! Euphrozine, my half-sister, would not let my Mary come in the big house, making her keep to the kitchen with the servants. The plantation house look very bad indeed, and the fields gone to seed mostly. I don’t even beleve Jacob saw to planting anything this year at all, cept for some vegetables that critters got. Euphrozine married a man from up East a few years back, and spend most of the time over in New York. But lately I hear tell she and her husband doing some cofee trading down in New Orleans. His family can’t deal in slaves no more, like they did before the War. But I think Euphrozine is not as bad as Jacob; nobody has to be bad, unless they want to be. She says to me, after we bury’d poor Jacob–I hate this cankrous, rotting, barren place, Ivanhoe! I don’t care what happens to it. It makes me so melonkolie.–Well, I wager we won’t be seeing much of her round here nomore. I’ll miss her. She never hated me, tho, least not as much as that devil of a man Jacob. These past few years been almost enuf to make me deny my dedly pedigre. I’m ready for some Peace. The influenca broke out again,