Mortal Sins

On the day Maeve Rourke first looked into the eyes of the man who would become her lover, she had come into the St. Louis Cathedral to get out of the bruising summer sun. Four years already gone from Ireland, four summers lived in New Orleans, and she still hadn’t become used to the terrible heat.

She sat down on a pew near the altar of the Most Blessed Virgin of the Rosary not to pray, but because her feet were hurting like the very devil. She did say a couple of Hail Marys, though, as penance for what she was about to do. No sooner was the last amen past her lips than she was unhooking her stiff new high-button shoes and wrenching them off, along with her black lisle stockings.

She wriggled her bare toes as she leaned over to rub the ache out of her blisters, and saw a pair of plaster feet hanging off the end of the pew in front of hers.

She half stood up and peered over the pew’s high round wooden back. The Most Blessed Virgin of the Rosary lay stretched out the length of the seat, as if she had just climbed down off her marble-slabbed altar to take a little nap.

A heel scraped on stone, and Maeve looked up. A man stood in the aisle and he, too, was staring at the statue lying on the pew. He raised his head, and their eyes met, and they shared a slow smile.

Maeve’s gaze fell back down to the prostrate virgin. Her white plaster hands were folded in prayer on her plaster chest, her plaster blue eyes stared up at the vaulted ceiling. She had, Maeve noticed now that she was getting such a good up-close look at her, a rather pink and prissy plaster mouth, but then she had probably never suffered from blisters.

The thought nearly startled a laugh out of Maeve. She bit her lip and swallowed hard. She pressed her hands together as if in prayer and covered her face.

The man in the aisle did laugh, trying at the last moment to turn the noise into a cough. Maeve snorted.

She snatched up her shoes and stockings and her shopping basket, and she ran, banging her hip on the pew arm so hard she would find a bruise a couple of days later and wonder how it had come to be there. She was laughing so by the time she burst back out into the sun-drenched square that she couldn’t stand up anymore, and she had to sit down on a wrought-iron bench and grab at the stitch in her side.

He followed her out; well, she had known he would. His face was flushed and slightly damp. His eyes, looking down at her where she sat, gasping, on the bench, were bright with his own laugh tears. It hadn’t been that funny, surely, the sight of the Virgin Mary taking a nap on one of the pews. Maeve couldn’t imagine why they both had carried on laughing so, two strangers together.

He was still smiling as he waved a hand back at the cathedral. “How do you suppose she …?”

Maeve shook her head and pressed her lips together to keep from smiling back at him. “Oh, the saints do preserve us. It must’ve been the sight of my bare feet what did her in.”

He laughed and that set her off again too, and their laughter mixed with the jingle of streetcar bells, the ring of mule hooves on cobblestones, and the echoing booms of ships unloading bananas at the wharf.

When their laughter died, it seemed all the world hushed as well. The quiet that followed held a weight to it that came from the intimacy the shared moment had stirred.

She slanted a look up at him. He was jauntily dressed in a tight-buttoned linen jacket with a high collar. He had the look of the Creole about him, in his dark hair and eyes, and in the way he held himself—old blood, old money, old name.

She had chosen a bench next to a blooming magnolia tree, and the air around them was cloyingly sweet. Beneath her bare feet, the stones of the square burned hot from the sun. She liked the feel of it, soothing and exciting both at once. “You wouldn’t happen to be having a button hook along with you?” she said.

He actually patted down his pockets as if there was a chance he might find one, then he shook his head, smiling.

She smiled back at him this time, and longer than she should have. “Never you mind. I’ve blisters on me blisters, as ’tis.”

She stood up, smoothing down the crisp white apron she’d put on that morning for going to the French Market. In just that instant her smile had gone. She felt a scratchiness in her throat now, and her nose had grown pinched. She was ridiculously close to tears for no reason she could name, and he was looking at her as if he knew what she was thinking, which was so unfair since her thoughts were a mystery to herself.

“I’ve my shopping still to do,” she said.

He tipped his straw hat at her, but instead of turning away he stepped closer. So close his shoulder nearly brushed hers, and she could see the smile creases at the corners of his mouth and a little mole the size of a cinder above the flush of color along his cheekbone.

“May I come along?” he said. “I can carry your shoes for you.”

He held out his hand. It was a beautiful hand, slender and long-fingered, and he wore a wedding ring. But then her finger sported a ring as well, and he could see it plain since she’d had to take off her gloves to unbutton her shoes. She thought she would tell him no thank you and send him on his way.

She put her shoes into his hand.

The sky above them was hard and bled nearly white by the relentless summer sun. They walked together through the market, beneath the shade of the scrolled colonnades, past crates of cantaloupes and strawberries and plump Creole tomatoes. Past shallots hung in bouquets and big silver bells of garlic. Past bins of shrimps on ice and pyramids of oysters and latanier baskets of blue-clawed crabs. She carried her own little shopping basket over her arm, but he walked beside her, and so she was too flustered to buy anything.

His presence beside her disturbed her, and not because of the wrongness of the moment—her, a married woman, walking barefoot through the market with a strange man. He disturbed her because he made her want something from him, although what that something was she couldn’t even formulate into a thought, let alone put into words.

He didn’t cast quick looks at her, the way she was doing with him; he studied her openly. She knew what he was, and she knew what he wanted.

They came to the end of the colonnade, where a Negro woman sat on the sidewalk balancing a big basket of rice fritters on her head. “Bels calas,” she cried with the voice of an opera singer. “Bels calas, tout chauds.”

He bought them all a fritter to eat, even the cala woman herself. Maeve thanked him and smiled, and then as if he’d only just thought of it, as if it hadn’t mattered before this, he asked her what her name was. She stumbled over the giving of it as if wasn’t really hers, or shouldn’t have been.

“Maeve,” he repeated after her, rolling her name around on his tongue as if tasting it. “How lovely.”

She felt another strange smile come over her face at the compliment.

Out on the river a tugboat tooted its horn, and a great flock of seagulls rose up from the market’s tiled roof. Together they tilted back their heads and watched the birds fly off between the spires of the cathedral. She thought she should tell him that she had to go back home now, that she was late as it was.

“Some days, after I’ve done with my shopping,” she said, “I go for a walk along the levee.”

The levee had always fascinated her, from the first moment she’d set foot in New Orleans. From the road you could look up at the tall grass bank and see masts and smokestacks floating disembodied across the sky, as if the sky itself were a river.

They walked along the spine of the levee for a while and then sat beneath the lime green shade of some willow trees, among a splattering of buttercups. He had taken off his fancy jacket for her to sit on, so then he rolled up his shirtsleeves and rested his forearms on his bent knees. He had taken off his hat, too, and it dangled from his long fingers.

The sheen of his hair was like the purple and black colors of a crow’s wing. His mouth looked soft, and full enough to belong to a woman.

She looked away from him, at the gray mud banks of the river. The batture was covered with hundreds of little mud chimneys, which were built by mud-divers—those ugly, crusty bugs that turned into locusts and made so much noise she couldn’t sleep at night. Some people had fashioned houses out of driftwood among the cane brakes and the mud-divers’ chimneys. It seemed a whimsical way to live, in those driftwood houses. She would never have chosen such a way for herself.

His voice broke into her thoughts, asking her what she saw when she looked at the river.

And she said, without thinking, “It’s a mud-diver’s heaven that I see.”

He threw back his head and laughed. She stared at his throat, at the way the strong muscles moved and the sweat glistened on his skin. His skin wasn’t olive like so many Creoles; it was deeply golden, the color of apple cider in the sun.

She liked it that she had made him laugh, and when he was done laughing he told her what he saw when he looked at the river. His words sounded like poetry; she didn’t try to make any sense of them.

When he asked about her husband and children, she told him about her Mike and their two boys as if she felt no shame. She knew what he was, all right, and what he wanted from her, and still she was letting him steal her innocence and her honor, though he had yet to touch her.

He said, “My wife and I are about to have our first. I hope for a son, of course.” He smiled, and his teeth were white and even in the dark gold of his face. “But I will settle for what she gives me.”

Maeve wrapped her skirt tighter around her bent legs. She thought she ought to get up and wish him a good day and walk away. She thought that, but she never did it.

By the time she got home, she was so late for her baby’s feeding that her breasts ached and were leaking milk. Still she lingered on the stoop a moment. The sky had darkened with rain clouds, but the house glowed golden as if it had saved up the morning’s sunshine just for her. The red bougainvillea that clung to the trellis over her front door trembled in the wind.

Her Mike made a good living as a city policeman and he was proud of how he had provided for her. He had provided her with a home, one-half of a shotgun double. He had provided her with shoes so new they gave her blisters, and a colored girl named Tulie to come help with the cooking and the cleaning and to watch her babes for her while she went walking the levee with another man.

In her hand she carried a key, and it pressed into her flesh like a brand. A key to a house on Conti Street. She thought she ought to have thrown it in his face. She thought she ought to go around back now and throw it into the cistern, where it would be lost forever.

She slid the key deep into her pocket.

She walked through the house and back into the kitchen. Her firstborn son, Paulie, had gotten into the dish cupboard and was banging pot lids together. Somehow Tulie’s new baby was managing to sleep through the racket in a basket, which had been set on top of the icebox. A pot of red beans bubbled on the stove.

Tulie sat at the pine table with its blue-checked oilcloth and the yellow crock of lard and the shaker of Morton salt that always sat in the center of it. The girl was nursing Daman for her, and her baby son’s pink lips were pulling on the girl’s nipple. His tiny hand grabbed at her breast, which was round and brown and soft, like a baked apple.