"Why were you so obstinate? If there was ever a time my mother needed the baby around her, it was now. How cruel of you two to make it difficult and force us to go to a judge." She glared at me and then turned directly to Beau. "I might have expected something like this from her, but I thought you were more compassionate, more mature."
"Toby," I said. "I'm not who you think I am."
She smirked. "I know exactly who you are. Don't you think we have people like you here, selfish, vain people who couldn't care less about anyone else?"
"But . . ."
Beau put his hand on my arm. I looked at him and saw him plead for silence with his eyes. I swallowed back my words and closed my eyes. Toby turned and left us.
"She'll understand afterward," Beau said softly. A good ten minutes later, we heard Gladys Tate's heels clicking down the stairway, each click like a gunshot aimed at my heart. Our eyes fixed with anticipation on the doorway until she appeared. She loomed before us, taller, darker in her black mourning dress, her hair pinned back as severely as Toby's. Her lips were pale, her cheeks pallid, but her eyes were bright and feverish.
"What do you want?" she demanded, shooting me a stabbing glance.
Beau rose. "Madame Tate, we've come to try to reason with you, to get you to understand why we did what we did," he said.
"Humph," she retorted. "Understand?" She smiled coldly with ridicule. "It's simple to understand. You're the type who care only about themselves, and if you inflict terrible pain and suffering on someone in your pursuit of happiness, so what?" She whipped her eyes to me and flared them with hate before she turned to sit in the high-back chair like a queen, her hands clasped on her lap, her neck and shoulders stiff.
"Much of this is my fault, not Ruby's," Beau continued. "You see," he said, turning to me, "a few years ago we . . . I made Ruby pregnant with Pearl, but I was cowardly and permitted my parents to send me to Europe. Ruby's stepmother tried to have the baby aborted in a run-down clinic so it would all be kept secret, but Ruby ran off and returned to the bayou."
"How I wish she hadn't," Gladys Tate spit, her hating eyes trying to wish me into extinction.
"Yes, but she did," Beau continued, undaunted by her venom. "For better or for worse, your son offered to make a home for Ruby and Pearl."
"It was for worse. Look at where he is now," she said. Ice water trickled down my spine.
"As you know," Beau said softly, patiently, "theirs was not a true marriage. Time passed. I grew up and realized my errors, but it was too late. In the interim, I renewed my relationship with Ruby's twin sister, who I thought had matured, too. I was mistaken about that, but that's another story."
Gladys smirked.
"Your son knew how much Ruby and I still eared for each other, and he knew Pearl was our child, my child. He was a good man and he wanted Ruby to be happy."
"And she took advantage of that goodness," Gladys accused, stabbing the air between us with her long forefinger.
"No, Mother Tate, I—"
"Don't sit there and try to deny what you did to my son." Her lips trembled. "My son," she moaned. "Once, I was the apple of his eye. The sun rose and fell on my happiness, not yours. Even when you were enchanting him here in the bayou, he would love to sit and talk with me, love to be with me. We had a remarkable relationship and a remarkable love between us," she said. "But you were relentless and you charmed him away from me," she charged, and I realized there was no hate such as that born out of love betrayed. This was why her brain was screaming out for revenge.
"I didn't do those things, Mother Tate," I said quietly. "I tried to discourage our relationship. I even told him the truth about us," I said.
"Yes, you did and viciously drove a wedge between him and me. He knew that I wasn't his real mother. Don't you think that changed things?"
"I didn't want to tell him. It wasn't my place to tell him," I cried, recalling Grandmère Catherine's warnings about causing any sort of split between a Cajun mother and her child. "But you can't build a house of love on a foundation of lies. You and your husband should have been the ones to tell him the truth."
She winced. "What truth? I was his mother until you came along. He loved me," she whined. "That was all the truth we needed . . . love."
A pall fell among us for a moment. Gladys sucked in her anger and closed her eyes.
Beau decided to proceed. "Your son, realizing the love between Ruby and myself, agreed to help us be together. When Gisselle became seriously ill, he volunteered to take her in and pretend she was Ruby so that Ruby could become Gisselle and we could be man and wife."
She opened her eyes and laughed in a way that chilled my blood. "I know all that, but I also know he had little choice. She probably threatened to tell the world he wasn't my son," she said, her flinty eyes aimed at me.
"I would never. . ."
"You'd say anything now, so don't try," she advised.
"Madame," Beau said, stepping forward. "What's done is done. Paul did help. He intended for us to live with our daughter and be happy. What you're doing now is defeating what Paul himself tried to accomplish."
She stared up at Beau for a moment, and as she did so, the gossamer strands of sanity seemed to shred before they snapped behind her eyes. "My poor granddaughter has no parents now. Her mother was buried and her father will be interred beside her."
"Madame Tate, why force us to go to court over this and put everyone through the misery again? Surely you want peace and quiet at this point, and your family—"
She turned her dark, blistering eyes toward Paul's portrait, and those eyes softened. "I'm doing this for my son," she said, gazing up at him with more than a mother's love. "Look how he smiles, how beautiful he is and how happy he is. Pearl will grow up here, under that portrait. At least he'll have that. You," she said, pointing her long, thin finger at me again, "took everything else from him, even his life."
Beau looked at me desperately and then turned back to her. "Madame Tate," he said, "if it's a matter of the inheritance, we're prepared to sign any document."
"What?" She sprang up. "You think this is all a matter of money? Money? My son is dead." She pulled up her shoulders and pursed her lips. "This discussion is over. I want you out" of my house and out of our lives."
"You won't succeed with this. A judge—"
"I have lawyers. Talk to them." She smiled at me so coldly, it made my blood curdle. "You put on your sister's face and body and you crawled into her heart. Now live there," she cursed, and left the room.
Right down to my feet, I ached, and my heart became a hollow ball shooting pains through my chest. "Beau!"
"Let's go," he said, shaking his head. "She's gone mad. The judge will realize that. Come on, Ruby." He reached for me. I felt like I floated to my feet.
Just before we left the room, I gazed back at Paul's portrait. His expression of satisfaction put a darkness in my heart that a thousand days of sunshine couldn't nudge away.
After the funeral drive back to New Orleans, I collapsed with emotional exhaustion and slept into the late morning. Beau woke me to tell me Monsieur Polk had just called.
"And?" I sat up quickly, my heart pounding.
"I'm afraid it's not good news. The experts tell him everything is identical with identical twins, blood type, even organ size. The doctor who treated Gisselle doesn't think anything would show in an X-ray. We can't rely on the medical data to clearly establish identities.
"As far as my being the father of Pearl . . . a blood group test will only confirm that I couldn't be, not that I could. As Monsieur Polk said, those sorts of tests aren't perfected yet."
"What will we do?" I moaned.
"He has already petitioned for a hearing and we have a court date," Beau said. "We'll tell our story, use the handwriting samples. He wants to also make use of your art talent. Monsieur Polk has documents prepared for us to sign so that we willingly surrender any claim to Paul's estate, thus eliminating a motive. Maybe it will be enough."
"Beau, what if it isn't?"