Botany Lessons

“You’re not keeping it.”

Lisette cupped the kitten in her soil-covered hands. He sniffed her palm, his

sandpaper tongue lapped at the moisture that had settled in the creases between her

fingers. “I’ll take care of him,” she said. “He won’t get in your way, ever. I promise.”

Mother remained seated at the vanity with her tapered back turned, perfectly

upright with the poise that Lisette had never been able to emulate. Rémy stood at her

side, rifling through a carved ivory box of jeweled hatpins and brooches. He flashed a

smug smile at Lisette over the top of Mother’s head.

"She was trying to sneak it upstairs. I caught her just in time," he said proudly. To

Lisette he added, “I told you she’d say no.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” Lisette said. “You just went and told Mother that I

brought a cat in the house.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t been so loud, I wouldn’t have caught you. Tromping up and

down the stairs like a rhinoceros while I’m practicing piano, with dirt on your boots –”

“You weren’t practicing. Mother, I’ll take good care of him. He’ll sleep in my

bed, I’ll bathe him myself and –”

“I was practicing,” Rémy said. “And you interrupted as usual. Mother, she

interrupted.”

“Yes, dear, you’ve said so,” Mother said absently. Her eyes, painted blue and

lined with black over deepening wrinkles, glanced briefly at Lisette in the vanity mirror

reflection. “It has a mother.”

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“But he doesn’t. I waited for her all morning, just to make sure. I checked again

after lunch.” The kitten rolled onto his back like a stuck turtle, his soft striped belly filling

with breath each time he mewed softly. Lisette wondered how he’d found his way over

the high walls of the garden, whether a mother-cat carrying him in her mouth had found a

secret place to squeeze in and squeeze out and never return. “She must be dead.”

“Maybe you scared her away,” Mother said. The massive spiral of her hair bun

resembled the prehistoric snail shells Lisette had seen in Papa’s collections, now locked

away among the dead ferns and potted palms that lined the office on the top floor.

“Or she abandoned him,” Lisette said. “By accident, maybe.” It would’ve been

easy to lose such a tiny thing in the jungle of wisteria that had expanded far beyond the

garden’s corner gate over the last six months. Lisette couldn’t imagine why a living

mother would purposely leave her helpless infant behind; yes, she must have died,

crushed by a carriage while hunting for mice, perhaps, or succumbed to wounds after

coming to blows with the Grenières’ nasty wolfhound.

“If I can’t have a bird,” Rémy said, “then you can’t have a cat.”

“Birds are stupid,” Lisette muttered. “All they do is make noise.”

“Just like you.” He smirked. “Maybe if you’d been quieter, I wouldn’t have

caught you going up the stairs. To the third floor.” He narrowed his eyes. “Mother, I

think she was headed to the study.”

Mother turned to Lisette for the first time, her face heavy with warning. “You

were going to the study?”

“No,” Lisette said, casting her eyes down. “How could I? Not without a key. Not

since –”

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“I know. But I can never tell with you sometimes.”

“I’m sure she has the key,” Rémy said. “I bet it’s not lost. She’s probably had it

all this time.”

“Rémy, go and get dressed for your lesson. Monsieur DuBourg will be here

soon.”

“I promise I’ll take good care of him,” Lisette said when Rémy was gone.

Mother slipped her hands into white silk gloves. “I haven’t any time for this,

Lisette. I’ve tea with the LaFources in an hour.” She plucked a cameo brooch from the

ivory box and fastened it at her throat. Everything about her was sharp and pointed. Her

skirts rustled like old book pages as she stood and crossed the room without glancing at

Lisette, breezing by without a scent. “Where did that girl put my hat?”

“I’ll feed him pieces of chicken from my own supper,” Lisette said. “Milk from

my own breakfast. I won’t take food from anyone else.”

“I returned from the Van Sants at eleven, and she took my hat, and she put it

somewhere else. Always somewhere I don’t want it, where I can’t find it when I need it.”

The snail’s shell bobbed as she rooted through a trunk of parasols and lace shawls.

“If I don’t take care of him, who will?” The kitten’s paw stretched up toward

Lisette’s nose. She lifted him closer to her face and bent her head over his tiny grey body.

His paws batted at a tendril of her uncombed hair.

“Marguerite!” From the bedroom doorway, Mother’s call thundered through the

house. The kitten flinched and shrunk to a fuzzy ball in Lisette’s palms.

“He’ll die,” Lisette said. She pursed her lips and pecked the kitten’s head, directly

between the tiny suede ears that trembled at Mother’s voice.

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“Madame Frenisseau?” The girl stepped timidly into the room, wringing her

hands. Mother’s presence blustered over her like a squall.

“My hat,” she said. “I’ve told you, time and again, always hang it on this hook

and this hook only.” The rebuke was supplemented by vigorous gestures toward the

empty peg on the wall.

“Pardon me, Madame. I placed it in your wardrobe by accident.” Marguerite’s

freckled face retreated into the shadow of her cap as she rummaged in Mother’s armoire.

“You’ve had that accident quite a few times.” Mother extended a slender arm and

briskly took the hat. After the girl left, she balanced the fanfare-laden thing atop the

snail’s shell and slid in a hatpin. Fishing a shawl from her trunk, she spoke to her

daughter over her shoulder.

“Behave yourself while I’m gone. Yesterday Rémy said you kept coming in and

out of the parlor during his lesson and that it was disruptive.”

“I was working in the garden,” said Lisette, knitting her brow in irritation. “I kept

coming in for drinks of water. And I didn’t go into the parlor.”

“He said you were being too loud for him to concentrate. I’m not paying

Monsieur DuBourg so you can distract them for two hours.”

“Rémy’s lying. He just wants to get me in trouble.”

“You know he has the audition coming up. And, for heaven’s sake, how do you

think you could care for a pet when you can’t even keep yourself looking decent?” She

had finally noticed Lisette’s grass-stained stockings, the filthy handprints smacked onto

the fabric of her dress, the uncombed hair and streaks of sweat that smeared mud across

her forehead.

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“I’ve been weeding. That’s how I found him.” Lisette nodded down at the kitten,

who sniffed her dirt-caked thumb. “Under the hydrangea.”

“You know how I feel about you spending all your time out there.”

“Madémoiselle Célie says gardening is a respectable hobby.”

Mother sighed. “Maybe if you spent as much time on your math problems as you

do in that garden, Mademoiselle Célie wouldn’t keep complaining to me about how

terribly you’ve been doing on your workbooks.”

“I told her I hated math. She keeps trying to make me learn it anyway.”

“You hate every subject she tries to teach you. Don’t think she hasn’t told me

about your attitude during Latin lessons –”

“It’s not my fault she’s boring.”

“That’s enough. Now look,” she tutted as she reached in her handbag and drew

out a little gold watch on a chain. “You’re making me late for the streetcar. I have to run.

Do behave this afternoon.”

“Maybe she’ll teach me about plants instead,” Lisette blurted out. She kept her

gaze on the laces of her boots for as long as she could. Mother was shooting her another

warning glare, she knew.

“I don’t want that thing in the house when I get back.”

This time Lisette looked up at Mother’s impatient face. “Papa would have let me

keep him.”

Mother set her teeth. “You’re not keeping it,” she repeated before sweeping out of

the room.

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“Mother will take a liking to you eventually, Achille,” Lisette told the kitten as

she lowered him into an empty hatbox she’d lined with her own crumpled handkerchiefs.

She chose a cream-colored ribbon from her small collection and gathered her hair off her

shoulders, carefully fastening the ribbon around the clump of unwashed tangles.

“Well, no, she won’t. But she doesn’t have to know about you.” With the scuffed

toe of her boot, she kicked the displaced hat under her bed. It was a smaller version of the

one Mother had put on earlier, with the same garish ostrich plumes and complicated

twists of loud-colored silk ribbon.

“I can hide you under the trellis. It’s dry under there. That’s where Mother and

Papa were married a long time ago. It rained that day and neither of them got wet. I saw

the pictures once. I’ll show them to you when you’re older.”

Rémy was in the foyer when Lisette came down the stairs with the box tucked

under her arm. He was dressed for DuBourg’s arrival: like every day, he wore a silk tie

fastened at the base of his scrawny throat, a brocade waistcoat tailored to a sixteen-year-

old with considerably wider shoulders. Arms behind his back, he paced the polished

wood floor, muttering to himself in French, repeating a certain inaudible phrase over and

over. DuBourg preferred French to English, and Rémy was always teaching himself new

phrases, always looking for idiotic ways to impress him. When he heard Lisette’s boot

heels clomping down each step, he whirled around, his suspicious little eyes landing

immediately on the hatbox.

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“What’s in there?” His face held the same permanent look of haughty prim

distaste that Mother’s had. Nothing about Papa was evident in his avian features, his sour

demeanor.

“None of your business.” Lisette mumbled to her brother’s waistcoat buttons the

way she mumbled to Mother’s snail-shell hair, the way she mumbled to Mademoiselle

Célie’s pale pudgy hands.

Rémy crossed his arms and sneered. “Mother says I have to tell her if you disrupt

my lessons again. So don’t make any noise.”

“You know I didn’t even go near the parlor yesterday. I went in the kitchen.”

“Well, wherever you were, I could hear you. I don’t know how many times I have

to tell Mother on you before you stop being so loud.”

“It’s my house, too. I can make all the noise I want.”

He snorted and brushed his hair away from his forehead, the loose waves like

feathers around his ears and collar. “I’m sure Mother agrees that my lessons are more

important than your ability to be obnoxious.”

“You can stop lying so much. She doesn’t like you any more than she likes me.”

“Speak for yourself. You’re not the one going to Peabody.”

“Neither are you. Just because you have an audition doesn’t mean you’re going

there.”

“At least I’m talented at something,” he snapped. “At least I can look people I the

eye while addressing them. And read, and do math, and play an instrument. You couldn’t

play the piano if you tried.”

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“Good,” said Lisette, “because I don’t want to.” She pushed past him and headed

for the glass doors that led outside.

Together, Lisette and Achille slipped onto the patio, where Spanish moss and

overgrown ferns dripped from the balcony above and met the weeds where they sprouted

from the crumbling brick, faster than Lisette’s gauche fingers could tug them out.

There were plenty of places to hide a tiny animal in the garden. Chrysanthemums,

star flowers, Angel’s trumpets, begonias – Papa had taught Lisette about them all, though

by now they had all died and yielded to the heartier plants that didn’t require constant

care. Six months ago, he left for his final botany exhibition, a field collection trip to the

jungles and lowlands of the Mosquito Coast, and he didn’t return alive. Since then,

Mother had kept the groundskeepers from maintaining the garden in any way and

attempted to apply the same rule to Lisette, though she didn’t have quite the same

success. So nature had taken over the property, even as the Fressineaus still inhabited it –

the humidity and heat prevailed and the garden became a primeval forest the night they’d

received that telegram, the one that relayed vague details about an illness that killed four

of the scientists in 72 hours. From that balmy night onward, the vines grew relentlessly,

wrapped over the wall like long green fingers that sought to pull the whole property back

into the earth and leave a vacant lot where a gingerbread mansion with a mansard roof

once stood.

Lisette plopped in the dirt where she’d been weeding before and set the hatbox

beside her. She channeled her frustration into the ropelike stems that taunted her from

between the nascent flower buds. Through the closed doors, she heard Rémy playing

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etudes in the parlor, pounding arpeggios and scales into the keys to prove to his ten-year-

old sister that he was indeed worthy of Peabody.

“Papa wouldn’t have let him talk to me like that,” Lisette said.

Achille’s head popped over the rim of the hatbox, his enormous blue eyes

winking in the afternoon sunlight. From the back wall, the wrought iron gate squawked,

the gate which Lisette and Papa had only ever used when they stepped out for their

evening walks together. Bewildered, Lisette wondered if she had carelessly left the latch

undone, considered that maybe a large female cat was capable of pushing it open if it was

already ajar.

“Perhaps your mother’s come back,” Lisette said. “Shall we have a look?”

She picked up the hatbox and stepped over heaps of browning weeds, swept aside

armfuls of wisteria like drapes.

“Le soleil c’est trop brillant aujourd’hui, n’est-ce pas?” Monsieur DuBourg

marveled to himself, shielding his bespectacled eyes with a slender hand. A slim leather

satchel swung from the other. Shrouded by the wisteria, Lisette watched him, stared

disdainfully at the tassels of his loafers.

“Dieu.” Mother and Rémy spoke to DuBourg only in French – something about

how he was an accomplished young musician, fresh out of a Paris conservatory, who

deserved the utmost respect for agreeing to take on Rémy as a pupil at a hefty price.

Lisette hated using French and wasn’t interested in these accolades; she was distracted by

his nonexistent lips, the gold tooth that winked suggestively when he spoke. He adjusted

his disheveled coat over his thin frame. It was far too warm for a coat, Lisette thought.

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“Je n’ai jamais vu ce jardin,” he went on, surveying the greenery, the grimy north

wall, the weathered stone fixtures, like a man appraising an apartment in the French

Quarter. “Mais, dieu, personne ne s'occupe de ce lieu.”

“I take care of it,” Lisette said, stepping forth to strike down that latter remark.

“And you’re supposed to come in through the front door. Only Papa was allowed to come

in this way. And me. No one else.”

The man was about as proficient in English as Lisette was in Latin. He lifted his

floppy Panama hat off his head in greeting, the brilliantined blonde hair almost white in

the sunlight.

Lisette pointed to the gate, speaking to the man’s gold tooth as he scowled at the

sun. For someone who complained about its brightness, she didn’t understand why he

stared directly at it. “Rémy is in the house. Warming up. But you should go in through

the front door instead. Marguerite will let you in.”

DuBourg floated past her, stepping over the piles of weeds like a danseur noble.

“You’re not supposed to come in this way,” she shouted after him, her eyes hot

with tears as he made his way through the garden and disappeared into the house. Rémy’s

playing ceased after a moment, then started up again.

Lisette scooped Achille from the hatbox and ran to the trellis. She sunk into the

dirt, held the warm little creature to her chest. She let out three sobs into her muddy bony

knees, stopping herself before she let out any more. Afterwards she sat while Achille

chewed at a squashed ruffle on her collar.

The anger simmered at the back of her throat. She yanked hunks of grass from the

ground, flinging them over her shoulder. When Father had been alive, Rémy’s piano

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lessons weren’t the axis on which the Frenisseaus’ world rotated. That was before that

telegram arrived, before the body arrived home in that long box and was deposited in the

family tomb in Saint Louis Cemetery, that tiny death city of cement and miasma that

Lisette hated. She knew he would’ve preferred the garden, under the trellis, but

Grandmother Françoise had shoved in and made the arrangements while twisting her

glass pearls around her knobby fingers. When Mother sent Marguerite up to his study on

the top floor with an armload of his affects, the girl returned still holding everything,

saying that the study was locked, the key missing. The items – a plain waistcoat and

jacket, a pipe, a few battered ledgers containing field observations – were relegated to the

bottom of a steamer trunk in the cellar.

Lisette ran her fingertips over the teeth of the key, which hung from a frayed hair

ribbon around her neck. She dropped it back to her chest and lifted the kitten until his

comically large head was even with her eyes.

“Papa wouldn’t have let Rémy talk to me that way,” she said.

He had gone on an expedition in the French Sudan long before she’d even been

born, when Rémy was only just beginning to play his first sonatinas. He’d brought back a

ceremonial Dogon mask, a grotesque black wooden thing with brilliant crooked white

teeth set in a grimace and hollow eyes rimmed with bristly white hair. When Rémy was

horrid to Lisette, Papa would take her onto his shoulders and let her don the mask,

cloaking himself in a black lace tablecloth. Together they encountered Rémy when he

least expected it – they hid in the tub when he went to the toilet, behind the door when he

retired to bed, behind the drapes when he sat at the piano to practice – and leapt out,

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roaring like lions, at precisely the right moment. It terrified him every time, sent him

sprinting down the hallway yowling for Mother. Later on Papa would take Rémy into his

lap and deliver a gentler lesson about how brothers should treat their sisters, reach into a

mysterious pocket and draw out a small sweet to mollify him. Then he would slip two to

Lisette, who sat at his side, still clutching the mask. The thing was still in Papa’s office,

hanging on a wall above a wedding photo; every time Lisette went up there it had faded a

little more in the sunlight.

“He would’ve let me keep you.”

Lisette tucked Achille into her collar so that his head and front legs poked out.

She stood and marched across the garden to the kitchen door, stamping her feet on the

flagstones before entering. She crept up the two flights of stairs, any faint sounds

drowned out by the careful chords of a distant Chopin prelude. This time she slipped in

and out of the office without swatting at the dust moats that swam around the floor-to-

ceiling windows, without savoring the weakening scent of his vanilla pipe tobacco or the

faint musk of his favorite cologne. The desk chair was still pulled out, a half-addressed

envelope still sitting atop a stack of leatherbound books.

She blew a film of dust particles from the grooves and curves of the demented

face, slid the thing over her head, and stole out, as if her Mother could’ve returned at any

moment and caught her – Papa understood her clumsiness, he’d always told her not to go

in there unless he could hold her hand while she took in all the exotic artifacts, admired

each plant.

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The chords swelled as Lisette silently descended the stairs, her body tottering

under the weight of the great thing. Achille, now in her hand, studied the strange foreign

face with unafraid curiosity. Lisette tiptoed into the open parlor doorway and stood stock-

still, anticipating the perfect moment.

DuBourg sat next to Rémy on the piano bench with negligible space between

them, his lithe arm draped over the boy’s narrow shoulders. He faced the concentrating

boy, eyes closed, nodding dreamily as Rémy played the final cascading triplets with his

right hand, as they dissolved into a conclusion that diffused into the air like the scent of

Father’s cologne – until it was gone. Achille dangled from Lisette’s right hand as it hung

at her side. She poised herself, waiting to roar like the African lions her father had taught

her about, always accompanied with enthusiastic demonstration.

The piece ended.

“Magnifique.”

DuBourg took Rémy’s chin in his pallid hand, tilted his face slightly upward, and

kissed his lips, the way Lisette had only ever done with animals, her plants, her own

reflection in the vanity mirror. She held her breath, the bellowing roar plugged up in the

back of her throat, the same place where the sobs had been shoved down into. She began

her stealthy retreat, her soles suddenly like ballet slippers against the oak floor.

Then Achille decided to roar for her.

“Miaou,” he said, his pink mouth like a tiny blooming rosebud. “Miaou.” And

again, and again, and again. “Miaou, miaou, miaou.” Lisette froze.

Rémy and DuBourg whirled around. Inches of space appeared between them

instantly. The looks of horror on their faces seemed familial, as if some relative of

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DuBourg’s back in France could’ve easily been related to the Frenisseaus’ French Creole

forefathers who’d emigrated to the Louisiana Gulf Coast a century before. Then they

were indistinguishable, the same horrified face on two heads like doll faces.

“Lisette –” Rémy’s face took on the same grotesque fearful look he’d displayed as

a child, each time he came face-to-face with that ghastly mask. And there it was again.

“Qu’est-ce qu’elle fait?” DuBourg asked Rémy, clutching at the boy’s arm.

“Lisette –” Rémy stood joltingly, his face white as the ivory piano keys, the

horrible teeth of the mask. He slowly moved toward Lisette, who backed away, holding

Achille snugly to her chest.

“You won’t tell Mother, will you?"

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