Renée Fontenot kept her arm around my shoulders. “Mr. Broussard, I will answer that,” she said to the old man who owns the dealerships on Youree Drive. “When I was seventeen, I was too shy to say my own name in class. Miss Clarice let me read the evening news aloud in her school every day, in front of the mirror, between finger waves. She paid for my first headshots. I would not be standing here without her.” She looked out at three hundred guests. “And I came tonight because I heard that Clarice Batson sold her academy this summer, for three million six hundred thousand dollars. I wanted to say thank you in person.”
Terrell tried a smile that did not reach his eyes. “Clarice, you should have told us. We are family.” “Family, Terrell?” I said gently. “Two years ago my daughter put you on my checking account so you could help with the bills. Five withdrawals since then, thirty one thousand dollars in all. The last one was fourteen thousand, the week you ordered your campaign signs.” I took the bank slip out of my pocket and laid it on the punch table, beside the ladle. “You told this room that you built everything with your own two hands. The hands I see belong to a man who reached into my purse.”
Monique took a step across the ballroom floor toward her husband. “Terrell, you told me that money was a loan from the campaign committee. You said Mama knew.” “I thought she would not mind,” Terrell said. Mr. Broussard, who had written the largest check of the evening, folded his arms. “Son,” he said, in a deep and quiet voice, “a man who runs for office on the promise of honesty, and takes a widow money, is not a man I will be endorsing.” The jazz band lowered their instruments. Somewhere a woman in sequins whispered, “The poor thing, it is her own son in law,” and the whisper spread across the room like spilled wine.
A finger wave set in nineteen ninety one gave one son in law the weekend to bring his mother in law back to the ballroom in Shreveport.
I kept my voice as warm and steady as a press comb. “Here are my terms, Terrell. By the end of the week you will repay every dollar to the account at the bank, in full, and you will do it from your own pay, not from the campaign. You will give up the authority on my accounts tonight, in writing, with the bank manager present. And you will stand at that microphone, this very minute, and tell the people who came to hear you the truth about where your money came from.” Terrell stood frozen. Monique laid her hand on his arm, not to comfort him, but to hold him in place.
Terrell did it. He walked to the microphone with his head down, and in a rough voice he told three hundred people that he had taken money that was not his. It took less than a minute. When he finished, there was a silence you could have cut with a comb, and then Renée Fontenot began to clap, slowly, once, twice, and the room joined in, not for him, but for me. A line of women formed beside the punch bowl. Graduates of my school, fifty years of them, in evening dresses, each one waiting to say a word. A woman named Gloria whispered, “Miss Clarice, you taught me to look a customer in the eye.”
The money consequences came without delay. Terrell withdrew from the city council race within the week, and his campaign signs were taken down from the lawns of Shreveport by volunteers who had put them up. Mr. Broussard asked for his donation back, and the committee returned it. The bank gave Terrell a repayment schedule that he would be paying until the spring after next. He sold the boat that he had bought with the first withdrawal, and he took a night job at a warehouse by the river. Nobody called him the Councilman anymore. They called him Terrell, and he had to learn to answer to it.
I did not want to carry any bitterness into my old age. With part of the sale money, I started a fund in the name of Herman. The Herman Batson Fund pays for cosmetology school tuition, a kit of scissors and combs and a pair of good shoes for any young woman in Caddo Parish who wants to learn the trade and cannot afford it. We held the first class in the old academy on Line Avenue on a rainy Monday. Thirty one girls came, in jeans and braids. A shy one named Tamika picked up a comb as though it were a sacred object. I knew exactly how she felt.
Monique came to see me alone on a Sunday afternoon, carrying a pound cake in both hands. She sat at my kitchen table and said that she had been ashamed since the night of the fundraiser, ashamed that she had put her husband on my account, ashamed that she had not asked. I told her that trust is not a crime. We ate the pound cake with a pot of coffee and talked about her father, and about how she used to sit under the dryers at the shop doing her homework. By the end of the afternoon, we were both laughing, and she was wearing one of my old smocks over her sweater.
Terrell took longer. For two months he did not call. Then one Saturday morning he appeared at the academy in a plain shirt and asked if there was a broom. I handed him one. For three hours he swept the floor of the school he had once called a beauty parlor, collecting hair from under thirty chairs. By the end of the morning, his hands were blistered. One of the students, a girl of nineteen, gave him a cold glass of water and said, “Mr. Pierce, my mother says you are a good man who made a bad choice.” He sat on the stairs and covered his face.
In the spring, Renée Fontenot returned to Shreveport to give the commencement speech at my old academy. The new owners had kept the name on the door, and the students wore white smocks and gold tassels. At the podium, Renée spoke for ten minutes about finding your voice, and then she called me up and handed me a bouquet of yellow roses. I stood at the front of that auditorium with Monique beside me and Herman on my mind, and the whole room rose to applaud. I touched my hair, set in a perfect finger wave, the way I did on the first day I opened the doors.
