I see you everywhere Read Online Free

Broadway costume designer. Sometimes I worry that artistic grandiosity runs in our blood. Which isn’t to say my cousin has no talent. It’s me I worry about. Do I feel I am somehow entitled to live with an immunity to rules? There’s a lot of that in our family. Sometimes when I’m at the wheel, mesmerized yet alert to its rapid spin, hands shiny with cocoa-colored mud, I wonder. Am I talented? Am I a fraud? Am I grandiose? In Vetty’s room, the only other sign of change was a faintly darker oval in the wallpaper over the bed: the ghost of Vetty’s husband, according to Dad. Aunt Lucy, he says, took the cad down when her sister was dead, face turned up toward that picture, not even an hour. Dad says she actually scolded the picture. When he tells the story, he holds the imaginary Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 15 I See You Everywhere
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    portrait before him and whispers, with the utmost contempt, “Begone, poltroon.” We don’t laugh, because we know what Aunt Lucy sacrificed on account of that man.
    In our family lore, she is a saint, a crackpot, or a militant lesbian ahead of her time; take your pick. If she had stayed where she was meant to stay—if she had married as she was expected to marry, raised a family, and ushered her offspring into society—she would have reigned over a sun-filled French Quarter town house, complete with lacy gridwork, gilt chairs, a world veiled by white oleander. Tante Lucidité, we might have called her. Or maybe she wouldn’t have lived so long. Maybe we’d never have met her.
    It starts like a fairy tale. There were, once upon a time, three sisters in the Jardine family: Vetty, Amy, Lucy. Vérité was the oldest, Amitié followed two years behind, and Lucidité, spark of sentiment, trailed them by twenty more. There was also a son, Vetty’s twin brother, Aristide (my father’s father’s father). Aristide had the anxious honor of being the first Southerner accepted at West Point after the Civil War. As the only member of his class to inherit the pain of cultural as well as military defeat, Aristide was an object, variously, of his fellow cadets’ pity, esteem, and scorn. His eventual popularity was hard won and, as a result, never taken for granted. After rising through the ranks faster than any of his classmates, he wore four stars by the time he was fifty and, on November 11, 1918, in Rethondes, France, played a critical role, with his plantation manners and flawless French, in closing the deal on the Armistice. For Aristide’s graduation, the family commandeered a first-class train carriage north, the women flaunting every amber bead and tiny pearl that remained of their semiravished sugar fortune (that blue cameo, I imagine, riding the proud throat of my great-great-grandmother Théa, barely pregnant with Lucy). They’d stuck it out beyond the terrible losses of the war, refusing to turn tail and head back to France, as so many of their compatriots did. They would show these Northerners that they had done far better than merely survive.
    During the festivities, the Jardines must have stood out like peonies Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 16 16
    Julia Glass
    in goldenrod, strolling the campus and praising the sights, exclaiming at everything in their patrician drawl, fussing with fans and parasols. Aristide’s best friend, Josiah Moore, squired the two sisters about with their brother whenever the parents’ energies flagged. Bantam-chested and big-chinned, blond but with a Venetian’s dark eyes, Josiah looked tremendously virile in his uniform. (Who can know what his smile was like, how devastating, when all that remains to us now is a shady quicksilver image on glass, a portrait taken the day of commencement?) A week after the Jardines returned to New Orleans, Vetty fled north again to elope with Josiah. She wrote to her family from Boston, requesting their love and forgiveness.
    What she got was a thorough