“ ‘Meanwhile, it had become the scandal of the parish that Manfred kept Rebecca in his own bedroom—and that was your room, Quinn, the room with the front parlor to it; it became your room as soon as you were born. Pops, as you know, wants the back room upstairs so he can see out the back windows and keep an eye on the shed and the garages and the men and the cars and all that. So you inherited that front room.

“ ‘But I digress, and it will probably happen more than once. Now, let me see. We left Rebecca, with a cameo at her neck, in her fancy clothes, pacing the floor up there crying and murmuring for Manfred, who was gone for as long, sometimes, as two weeks.

“ ‘And, happy with his new retreat, he often took expensive provisions with him, while at other times he said he would hunt for what he ate.

“ ‘Now, it couldn’t have been a worse time for her to do it, but Rebecca wanted Manfred to marry her—make her an honest woman as they used to say in those days, you know—and she told everyone that he would. She even got the priest up here to accost him on one of his rare visits home and talk to him about it, how he ought to do it, and how Rebecca was a proper wife for Manfred no matter what her past.

“ ‘But you know, Quinn, in those days, what man was going to marry a prostitute from Storyville with whom he’d been living for over two years? Bringing the priest proved a terrible mistake, as Manfred was ashamed and annoyed. And the rumor spread that Manfred beat Rebecca for doing it, and Ora Lee had to interfere to make him stop.

“ ‘Somehow or other they made it up, and Manfred went back out into the swamp. Thereafter, when he came back from these forays into the depths of the bog he often had gifts not only for Rebecca, to whom he gave lovely cameos, but gifts of pearls and diamonds for Camille, and even fine stickpins and cuff links with diamonds for William to wear.’

“ ‘So he was meeting someone out there in the swamp,’ I said. ‘He had to be. How else could he come back with gifts?’

“ ‘Precisely, he was meeting someone. And his absences from the house grew longer and longer, and his conduct at home reclusive and peculiar, and when he was gone, William (my father) and Camille suffered downright meanness and heavy abuse from Rebecca, who grew to hate them for what they were—part of a family to which she did not legally belong.

“ ‘Imagine it, the poor children, now adolescents, at the pure mercy of this young stepmother, all left alone in this house with only the colored servants, the devoted and loving Jerome and Ora Lee and their niece, Pepper, trying to interfere.