Honor Bound (Honor Bound 1)

He even went back to his hotel and put his uniform on for that. Protesting, of course, and telling himself at the time that he was doing it only to indulge Beth and Marjorie, who actually wept when they saw him standing in the foyer of the sorority house. They were going to miss their father at least as much as he did, he told himself then. And since there was little else he could do for them, putting on his uniform so they could display their Brother the Hero seemed not so much of a sacrifice.

When the brunette proved to be fascinated with Marine Green and Wings of Gold, it seemed for a moment to be a case of casting bread upon the water. But he didn’t pursue it. For one thing, he wanted to spend as much time alone with the girls as he could; and for another, they had enough trouble without being labeled as the sisters of that awful fellow who took Whatsername out and tried to jump Whatsername’s bones in the backseat of his Buick.

Perhaps he’d have a chance in New Orleans to make a few telephone calls and do something about his celibacy. It was a very long time since he’d even been close to a woman. On the ’Canal, he thought a good bit about a nurse he’d “met” in San Diego…that is to say, he walked into the hospital cafeteria and the nurse who thirty minutes before had drawn his blood asked him to share her table. She was also a brunette, deeply tanned, and magnificently bosomed. Her uniform was very tightly fitted; and if you looked—and he had—you could see a heavenly swell at the V neck of her whites.

There hadn’t been time to pursue that—he’d boarded the Long Island the next morning.

He hadn’t even gotten close to a woman at Pearl Harbor.

He switched on the turn signal, waited for a St. Charles Street trolley to clatter past in the opposite direction, and headed up St. Charles. Then he turned off the street onto the drive of a very large, very white, ornately decorated three-story frame mansion.

No car was parked under the portico, which probably meant that his grandfather, Cletus Marcus Howell, was not yet home from the office. He glanced at his watch; he’d probably be home any minute. That meant he would be greatly annoyed when he drove up and found another car occupying the space where he intended to park the car and get into his house without getting rained upon.

Clete stopped under the portico and stared unhappily at the garage, a hundred yards behind the house. The three doors of the former carriage house were closed. Unless things had changed, they were closed and locked. He couldn’t get inside even if he drove there. All he would do was get wet.

“To hell with it!” he said aloud, then turned off the key and opened the door. He reached across the seat and picked up his Stetson, put it on, and got out. He was wearing khaki trousers and boots and a faded, nearly white shirt frayed at the neck. The sheepskin coat was in the backseat. After a moment, he remembered that, and reached in and got it.

The Buick would eventually go into the carriage house. Despite the best efforts of New Orleans’ best exterminators, there were rats in there, and he didn’t want them eating the jacket. Or gnawing through the Buick’s roof to get at the sheepskin.

Was all that concern about the old man’s convenience the normal behavior of a Southern gentleman? Or am I still afraid of him?

He was almost to the mahogany-and-beveled-glass door when it swung open to him.

“Welcome home, Mr. Cletus,” Jean-Jacques Jouvier greeted him enthusiastically. The old man’s silver-haired, very-light-skinned Negro butler was wearing a gray linen jacket, which meant it was not yet five. At five, Jean-Jacques would change into a black jacket.

“J.J., it’s good to see you,” Clete said, and wrapped his arm around his shoulders. This seemed to make J.J. uncomfortable, which was surprising, until Clete looked past him into the downstairs foyer and noticed Cletus Marcus Howell, Esquire, standing there with his hands locked together in front of him.

“Welcome home, my boy,” Cletus Marcus Howell said.

Cletus Marcus Howell was tall, pale, slender, and sharp-featured. He wore a superbly tailored dark-blue, faintly pinstriped three-piece suit, with a golden watch chain looped across his stomach.

“Let me have your things, Mr. Cletus,” Jean-Jacques said. Clete handed the Stetson and the sheepskin jacket to him, then started toward his grandfather.

“Grandfather,” Clete said.

“You could have telephoned,” the old man said as Clete approached.

“I hoped to be here before you came home from the office.”

“I telephoned to Beth,” the old man said. “She told me when you left Houston. I arranged to be here for your arrival.”

Clete put out his hand, and the old man took it. And then, in an unusual display of emotion, took it in both his hands.

“You don’t look as bad as Martha and Beth said you did,” the old man said. “Both used the same term, ‘cadaver.’”

“How is your health, Grandfather?” Clete asked, aware that the old man was still holding on to his hand.

“I am well, thank you,” the old man said, and then, as if suddenly aware of his unseemly display of emotion, let Clete’s hand go. “Why don’t we go into the sitting room and ask Jean-Jacques to make us a drink.”

He didn’t wait for a reply. He turned on his heel and marched across the foyer through an open double sliding door to the sitting room. It was a formal sitting room, furnished sometime before the War of Rebellion and unchanged since…with one exception: over the fireplace, the oil painting, from life, of Bartholomew Fitzhugh Howell (1805–1890), who had built the house in 1850, had been replaced by an oil painting of equal size, painted from a photograph, of Eleanor Patricia Howell Frade (1898–1922), who had been both born in the house and buried from it.

Clete followed him. The old man walked to a cigar humidor on a marble-topped cherry table, opened it, and took from it a long, thin, nearly black cigar.

“Will you have a cigar, Cletus?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Would you like me to clip it for you?”