Louis laughed, and Henry thought that laugh might be the best sound he’d ever heard, better even than the jazz.
“You like beignets?” Louis asked shyly.
“Who doesn’t like beignets?”
They went to Cafe Du Monde, where they chased the sugared, fried dough of the beignets with cups of strong chicory coffee. Afterward, they strolled along the riverbank, listening to the gulls and the call-and-response of distant ships. They stood beside each other for some time, waiting until the others had drifted off and they were alone, and then, after several exchanges of sheepish glances, Louis leaned over and kissed Henry softly on the lips. It wasn’t Henry’s first kiss; that honor had gone to Sinclair Maddington, a school chum back at Phillips Exeter. Their kissing had been awkward and fumbling and a little desperate. It was followed by weeks of mutual avoidance forged by shared shame. There was no shame in Louis’s kiss, though; just a sweetness that made Henry’s stomach fluttery and his head as buzzy as champagne. He never wanted to stop.
Louis placed the boater on Henry’s head. “Suits you better.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. That, my friend, is gon’ be your lucky hat.”
After that, Henry was never without it.
“What is that thing on your head?” Flossie, the cook, asked as Henry swept through the kitchen on his way out, the boater cocked at a rakish angle.
“My lucky hat,” Henry said.
She shook her head as she floured the chicken. “If you say so.”
That summer was the summer of Henry-and-Louis. Henry learned that Louis was seventeen and as much a part of the river as the fish and the moss-slicked rocks. Before he’d died, too young, Louis’s Cajun father had given him a love of music and the gift of a fiddle. His mother had given him an appreciation for self-reliance by leaving him first with distant relatives and then, finally, when he was barely seven, at a Catholic orphanage in New Orleans. Louis had run away when he was twelve, preferring life on the streets, the fishing camps, and the riverboats. A case of tonsillitis had given him a raspy voice that made everything he said, from “Fish are biting” to “Dit mon la verite,” sound like a flirtation. He lost money at Bourré and played the sweetest fiddle in the French Quarter. He never stayed in any one place for long, but for now, he was bunking in a hideously hot attic garret above a grocery store on Dauphine. He was crazy about his hound dog, Gaspard, whom he had found abandoned by the river. “Just like me,” Louis said, scratching the slobbery pup’s fuzzy ears. They took Gaspard with them everywhere. No one in the Quarter seemed to mind, and often there was a bowl of scraps set out for him.
Henry confessed to Louis something he hadn’t told anyone else: Ever since he’d been sick, he’d developed a curious habit of lucid dreaming. One night while sick with the measles, he woke gasping for air as if he’d nearly drowned, a terrifying sensation. When he settled, he realized that he hadn’t woken. Instead, he was fully conscious inside the dream.
“Did it scare you?” Louis had asked.
“Yes,” Henry said, enjoying the feel of his lover’s arms around him.
“Could you do whatever you wanted?”
“No,” Henry answered.
“If I could dream of any place, I’d dream of a cabin on the bayou,” Louis had said at the time. “A little cabin. Fishing boat. A newspaper fulla crawfish ready to eat.”
“Would I be there?” Henry asked quietly.
“Wouldn’t be a good dream if you weren’t.”
And just like that, Henry knew what it was to be in love.
That night, he walked in Louis’s dream. There was a rustic cabin on a sun-dappled river where ancient live oaks trailed braids of Spanish moss into the water. A hickory rocking chair sat on the front porch, and a fishing boat bobbed nearby. It was a brief walk—the dream shifted, and fight though he did, Henry was unable to stay in that beautiful spot. Still, it made Henry happy to have glimpsed it, even for a few minutes.
In June, they signed on for a stint aboard an excursion boat, playing for their supper. When they’d stop at various sleepy southern towns along the river for the night, Louis and Henry would buy food for the Negro musicians who weren’t allowed into the white hotels and restaurants.
“Doesn’t seem fair,” Henry had said to Louis.
“That’s because it ain’t fair.”
“There’s a lot of that,” Henry said. He wanted to hold Louis’s hand, but he didn’t dare out in public, where anybody could see them. Instead, they’d wait until the judging world fell asleep, then they’d sneak away and kiss till their lips, already weary from the southern sun, would make them quit.