Amelia's dear friend Lorraine Regal had met a man named Andres Palenzuela at a reception given by her boss, a New Orleans sugar broker. Andres turned out to be the chief of police for the city of Havana. When he asked Lorraine to come for a visit she saw promise in his soft brown eyes, said yes, got hold of Amelia and told her to quick pack a few summer things and a bottle of Ayer's pills, she had to come along. Not as a chaperone, or even to give the impression of two young ladies on holiday. Uh-unh, it was so Amelia could meet the police chief's good friend, Roland Boudreaux.
Amelia told everyone March fourth was her birthday, her twentieth, and watched Lorraine roll her eyes as the gentlemen raised their glasses of champagne. Boudreaux said to call him Rollie, please. He told Amelia he'd always suspected he was inordinately lucky and meeting her like this confirmed it. He told her he owned a sugar estate, a railroad, polo grounds and a lot of horses and a summer home on the Gulf coast of Cuba. Amelia said she loved to ride, asked if revolutionaries or anarchists interfered with his way of life. Rollie said no, he had his own army. By the end of the first evening aboard, the couples had paired off and were settled in for the short voyage.
A few days later at the Inglaterra, Lorraine said to Amelia, "Well, I won't be going back to the counting room, thank God. A police chief down here does all right; I'll have my own house." She said going to Soul Business College and getting a job was finally paying off.
Amelia said she could look at her prospects much the same way. If she hadn't quit going to Newcomb after a couple of years and spent her time horseback riding and being available to people, she wouldn't have been available for this trip. "Rollie wants me to stay," Amelia said. "As what?"
"His sweetie pie, what else? His wife won't set foot in Cuba, scared to death of yellow fever. They don't have children."
"What do you think?"
"Well, it isn't like the others."
She had been quite fond of a gentleman by the name of Avery Wild who was in coffee and kept rooms on Julia Street, where they'd meet Mondays and Thursdays in the late afternoon. It went on for most of a year. An executive with Maison Blanche she'd met at a Carnival ball was fun; he'd take her along on his buying trips to New York. Another gentleman had taken her to Saratoga by train during the racing season, and she accompanied still another gent to Tampa on his yacht. Amelia might have been in love with Avery Wild. Or she might not. She most definitely fell in love with Dr. Walter Guidry. He taught at Tulane Medical, had the bluest eyes Amelia had ever seen, and set her arm when she broke it in a fall from her horse. He was handsome. He was kind. He was patient. He was the most dedicated man she had ever known. Walter Guidry spent a week each month at the Louisiana Leprosy Home near Carville, a good seventy miles upriver from New leans. Took the train there every month. She said, "Walter, is it awful?" He told her they had close to fifty patients now, up from the five men and two women delivered there two years ago on a coal barge, the home's first patients. Now they came on a special train with the windows covered and sealed; once there, the patients couldn't leave. "It must be horrible," Amelia said. No, what it was, Walter Guidry said, it was frustrating, trying to get the public to understand that leprosy was not evidence of God's wrath, inflicted as punishment for a sinful life. Walter told Amelia that nuns, the Daughters of Charity, were taking care of the lepers, but the sisters were few in number and more patients were arriving daily. It came to Amelia all at once as she looked into his blue eyes, she'd go with Walter and help the sisters. She touched Walter's face. I'll wash the lepers' wounds, their sores, I'll change their dressings, empty chamber pots." She kissed him tenderly. "You're a saint, Walter. You were sent to me, weren't you? That I might see a purpose in life and dedicate myself to its end." Amelia said to Lorraine, "Do you remember my doctor lover, Walter Guidry?"
"Ah," Lorraine said, "do I. You'll never find another one like Walter."
"Rollie's better-looking."
"Some might say that."
"I had to think of a way to hold him off," Amelia said, "while I make up my mind. So I told him I'm still a virgin." "Well, if he believes you're only twenty…"
"He treats me like I'm recovering from diphtheria or tuberculosis. He's considerate… but he's so sure of himself and that's one of the things I wonder about. Is he confident because he knows what he's doing, or because he's rich and everyone agrees with him? He talks a lot, in that quiet way he has. He doesn't laugh much. Did you notice? He's fairly clever with words, but doesn't have much of a sense of humor. Does he? I can't imagine why he has a bodyguard. Not if he has an army."
They switched from tea to sherry.
"I could do without Novis hanging around. He's so serious, he's creepy. I was out on deck-Novis came up to me and said, "Mr. Boudreaux wants to see you inside," and motioned with his thumb, like he's telling me to get in there. I said to tell Mr. Boudreaux if he wants to see me I'm out here. Novis didn't know what to do. Go in and tell his highness I wasn't coming? He wants me to go with him to visit his estate, Rollie does, I think to impress me. Look at how rich I am, girl. What're you saving you're so proud of when you can have me? Take the train to Matanzas to look at the estate, then go up to Varadero to see his summer place. Lots of horses to ride. I've decided I have to be myself with Rollie, not some poor little girl awed by his attention. What would I be giving up if I exiled myself to this island? Well, living with Mama and Daddy, for one thing. Mama taking laudanum and whatever else she can get her hands on. Daddy coming home with an other woman's scent on him, what does he care, all the money he's made selling cotton abroad, he can do anything he wants. What I'd be giving up is boredom. Now, what I'd gain… If Boudreaux's wealth doesn't impress me, what would be my reward, living on a sugar plantation with the poor and deprived? Not a happy bunch, I'll bet, out in those cane fields."
Amelia paused to sip her sherry in the lobby of the Inglaterra Hotel with Lorraine, Lorraine quiet, no doubt thinking about her police chief, no longer giving Amelia her full attention. Or she didn't know what Amelia was getting at and wasn't interested enough to care.
"We had a housemaid when I was a little girl," Amelia said, "who was from the south of Spain, Jerez de la Frontera, where they make sherry. I loved to say her name, Altagracia. Are you listening?"
"Of course I am."
"She used to tell me bedtime stories about anarchists. I was eight or nine years old. How the anarchists got the vineyard workers to stand together and demand justice and higher wages. In her stories the landowners are all bad, but the real villains are the Civil Guards. They arrest and torture the anarchists and accuse them of forming a secret society called the Black Hand. They said its purpose was to assassinate all the landowners in the district."
Amelia paused again to sip her sherry.
"He's showing me the house tomorrow," Lorraine said. "It's in Vedado, a suburb. Just like a placd on Rampart Street Where gentlemen kept their mistresses in days gone by." She said to Amelia, "Are we living in the past?"
"Or we're ahead of our time," Amelia said. "I'm not sure which."
On the train to Matanzas, seventy miles east of Havana, Amelia would see people working in cane fields they passed and she would think of Altagracia's anarchists and vineyard laborers. She asked Rollie Boudreaux if he'd ever heard of the Black Hand.
He said, "Of course. It's a secret society of assassins." "Altagracia said the only people they assassinated were informers. In fact, she said there was no such organization as the Black Hand. The Civil Guard made up the story so they could persecute the anarchists." "You mean prosecute." "I mean persecute."