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other, looking for all the world like a matched pair of salt and pepper shakers. Following them were Aunt Kitty and her friend Sam. They were all here to watch her get dressed and keep her company while drinking champagne and eating turkey sandwiches.
    Close behind was the dressmaker she’d seen for a thousand fittings, who’d made the incredible white and silver gown she’d wear tonight with its mantle and a twenty-foot train. It was resting in a room of its own across the hall. The hairdresser was trailed by a makeup artist. Mr. Adler insisted on coming himself from his Canal Street store, carrying dark blue velvet boxes holding the diamonds and pearls her daddy had bought her. A lady from the newspaper asked a million stupid questions. She grinned for a photographer.
    They would comb her and curry her and document her and then, for the last time this season, fold her into a limo. This time she’d be all by herself, she and The Dress (there would be room for no one else) and whisk her off to view the parade and on to the ball. And finally, except for the Queen’s Breakfast, another meal , it would all be over.
    Unless she stayed in New Orleans, of course, where no one would ever forget or let her forget she’d been Queen of Comus. Not for the rest of her life. Not for one red-hot moment.

Five
    SAM STOOD TRANSFIXED at the edge of the glittering ballroom. And she’d spent no little time at fancy-dress affairs, having grown up in the white-gloved, I’m-so-charmed-to-meet-you Piedmont Driving Club, Sweet-Briar-or-Randolph-Macon-for-school, Smith-or-Vassar-if-you-were-smart set in Atlanta. She’d worn more than a few silver slippers and full-skirted ballgowns, but none of it held a candle to this Maskers Dance of the Mystick Crewe of Comus.
    Just for starters, the security at New Orleans’s Municipal Auditorium was drum-tight. Compared to this, the White House dinner she’d once attended with her uncle George was loosey-goosey.
    The evening before, Kitty and Ma Elise had primed her with more details on the enormity of Carnival, the preparations for one beginning as soon as the previous year’s was done.
    “Every year each krewe—that’s a carnival organization—” said Kitty.
    “I know ,” said Sam.
    “—has to pick a theme. The newer, tackier ones choose things like TV shows or cartoon characters, pop stuff. The Old Guard sticks to the classics, mythology. Then, once you have a theme, there are the parade floats to be designed and built. Costumes to be made”—she ticked them off—“invitations, party favors, and doubloons to throw off floats for the crowds. And, of course, invitation lists to scrutinize.”
    “Courts to be chosen—and queens,” piped up Ma Elise. The still-beautiful old lady was wearing a purple lace dressing gown, tucked into a wing chair, and sipping cognac half as old as she was. “Did Kitty tell you the one about the Queen of Rex whose pushy father insisted she be crowned? So that year’s Queen of Comus, to whom she’d have to pay her respects when their balls ended, quietly resigned, and they replaced her with a shopgirl? So Miss Upstart Queen of Rex had to bow to a—well, she was from a decent family—but to this Uptown crowd she was a nobody?”
    Sam and Kitty laughed.
    “What?” Ma Elise said.
    “I think you just told her, Meems,” said Kitty.
    “Oh, well, anyway, where was I? Preparations—there are decorations for the balls, of course. Then scripts, sets, and costumes for the tableaux—those are where members of the krewes and their ladies pose like living dioramas, acting out stories. It’s silly, really, you’ll see. And, my goodness, music, food—lunches, dinners, post-ball breakfasts. All sorts of people to be seen to—float drivers, flambeaux carriers, cooks, waiters.”
    “It’s like each krewe,” said Kitty, “having at the most a couple hundred members, building the Rose Parade, a ballet, and an opera rolled into one every single year. And these