A Separate Country (28 page)

When we were married in the church, John had said it
stunk of smoke and wine,
which I was to understand applied to the entirety of the Church and its thousands of years, its art, its music, its saints. Smoke and wine and the Devil, that’s all it was to John. He was such a perfect Protestant, such an ornery and joyless defender of the faith, his faith, the faith of discretion and chaste glances at the Perfect Christ, who was never human and rarely spoke. The crucifix above the altar of our wedding embarrassed him. He spoke the wedding words through that apostolic beard of his, which moved as he spoke as if trying to block the sound from his mouth. John would have climbed up and put more clothes on the muscular and bloodied Christ, maybe a uniform, if there had been time. But no, there He was above us, half nude, a man. Once, long afterward, in our courtyard sharing a flagon of Father’s wine and crowded upon by hibiscus, he told me he could die like that, nailed for his sins, if the Lord asked him. I asked him if he would die for the remission of
our
sins, and it took him two days—two days!—of pondering the question to arrive at an answer, which he delivered as if addressing the Congress instead of the rolls, the marmalade, and the sleepy eyes of children at the breakfast table.
No,
he said, in short. I think he was ashamed to say it. I was surprised that he had thought much about my question at all. I had meant it as a joke, I’d meant to make him laugh at his own portentousness. This will tell you much about how each of us treated the Everlasting. I was in love with Christ and the Holy Mother and did not fear them. John obeyed God.

Now, in those strange days after they hauled Paschal away, John became filled with the stink of smoke and wine under the tutelage of my brutish friend the priest. I was angry with him often, I wanted him all to myself. That’s not true: I wanted more of him to myself. But he had taken up with the fallen angels Rintrah and Father Mike, the bug and the beast, and I knew how they could take over a life, several lives.

It was Rintrah who introduced them, Rintrah who has done everything and been everywhere. He always had his little fingers on everything. The first day John disappeared, I received this note from Rintrah.

Dearest Anna Marie,

Your man lies at my feet, which is to say he’s sunk mighty low. I found him on the street jabbering off like a monkey in heat. I have brought him back to the old place, you know where, and here he lies. I’ve drugged him so he would sleep, and that, lass, is one of the good things about living in a charnel house. There is concoctions and tinctures and potions always about if you know which drawer in which chest to pull on.

It was right nearly too much to be asked of me, Lady Hood of the Uptown Hoods. Too much to be asked to befriend your man, this oaf, this half-feathered peacock, the battlefield murderer.
Yes General, no General, aye, that’s funny General.
I will admit he amuses me from time to time, and after a while he may even be tolerable. But now, must I also drag him off the street so he ain’t picked up by the constable for being pickled or brained or mad or whatever it is that afflicts him? Must I also nurse him, must I make him a bleeding bed and tuck him in nice and sweet like? Why have you thrust this man upon me? Is it not enough that I know you are gone from me, that my infatuation was fool’s gospel? I thought it was my deformity, but now that I see you mooning over this dour, insufferable, and foolish cripple, I know that it was not the way I was born but the man I became. Regret and recrimination now, that’s all. And Lord knows how you bed him but apparently you do, forgive me my coarseness but I must say it, it’s been on my mind. All those children. I would protect them with my life, but damn, woman.

Your peckerwood general snores. I’ll wager you’re dozing right now in the silence of his absence. I have no such luxury, he’s loud like a boar.

I could have very easily poisoned him, and you know this. You also know that I am very capable of that, I am not squeamish. I have not poisoned him, however. You may consider this my wedding present a few years late, lucky there was anything at all to get from me. I considered poisoning him, and I also considered beating him with his own cane. It hefts nicely. He is spared. Come get him.

Your little friend,
Rintrah

Before I could arrange for a carriage, I received a second note:

A.M.,

Disregard letter of morning. Was drunk. All forgiven. A fine man.

Even so, need to sleep. He’ll be back soon, I reckon.

R.

A very odd set of letters indeed. Not unexpected though. Not from Rintrah. Not from Rintrah, in the presence of Father Mike, the bear-headed troublemaker. We were one being in four parts, we had known each other since we were children. Three parts, three parts, three parts. I sometimes forget that they lynched the fourth.

For months afterward John only occasionally came home to change clothes, though he always smelled as if he’d just washed, reeking of sour water and lye. That spring I saw the flashes of his anger that must have terrified his troops, and I found in myself the corresponding urge to sting and stab, to cause hurt. Most of the ladies I knew were glad to have their men off somewhere else so that they could command their worlds undisturbed. Finally, he didn’t speak and I didn’t either. I had you children to attend, I was too busy! Noses to wipe, lessons to administer, and above all, protection to give. Protection from animals and their teeth, strangers in the street, sharp knives, mosquitoes, snakes, illness, sin, melancholy, rotten bread, broken toys, cruel humor, and death. I forgot to sleep and when to eat. I dismissed the cook for serving tea too hot, and the chambermaids for laughing at John Junior when he fell from the porch into the roses, scratching his pale and flaking arms. I would not let a thing inside, nothing would touch you children.

Toward the beginning of last May, John came home briefly and told me he would be spending another day with Father Mike, wiping drool from the dying. I thought we had plenty of drooling children he could stay home and help.

“They aren’t dying, Anna Marie,” he said, drinking the last of his coffee, grounds and all. His horse was already saddled and ready, I could see it sweeping flies away and twitching its ears just outside the dining room window. His clothes didn’t match and were threadbare at the elbows. Why hadn’t I noticed that? I should have fixed it, or had someone fix it. I wanted to take them off him just then, tie him down until I had patched them.

“Would you wipe their drool if they were dying?”

“Of course.”

“But not until.”

He put his coffee down on its saucer with a small, gentle clink, as if restraining himself.

“The disease, the fever, it’s starting, and I am needed. There are families dying. This one is not. The children are safe. I am being a Christian.”

“Not much of a man, though.”

“Because I do not do a woman’s work here at home? Because I do not nurse the children?”

“No, because you do a woman’s work out of the home, nursing strangers with a crazed priest and a dwarf.”

“Your friends, or so you say.”

“They have been my friends since I was a girl, and will remain so. They have been your friends for a month. And yet you court them like someone lovestruck.”

“I work with them. Do not be insolent with me.”

“You work like a guilty man.”

“I am not guilty.”

“So you tell yourself.”

I’m not sure what I meant by that. I suppose I meant that he ought to feel guilt for abandoning his family who loved him. But that wasn’t the guilt he felt, and I knew that. (What man
did
feel such guilt?) No, the guilt I meant, I believe, is the guilt of having presided over the killing of young men, thousands and thousands. And that’s one of the ways I learned to cut him down.

“I’ll have no more of this,” he said. “Know your place.”

“Oh, I know it quite well. I know every inch of it, and every child who runs through it. But do you know
yours
?”

He stood up, wiping his mouth and tossing the napkin carelessly to the floor, watching me.

“Mine is with the sick right now. I can do good there.”

“Yes sir, General.”

It was as if I had been conjuring, working spells. The minute I mentioned the General, there he was standing before me. His eyes on fire and wide open, as if to take in every detail of the situation before attacking. His chest rose up, his fists flexed, and his spine straightened. He cast his eyes down at me as if from a great height.

“Do not call me that,” he said. “Not ever again, not once. You will obey me, and shut your damned mouth. I make the plans here, I carry them out. You are to support me. No more talk.”

He was daring me to talk back to him. What punishment he thought he might administer, I don’t know. But he expected to be obeyed, and I was never a woman who appreciated being told my place.

“You go to the sick house as if you are going to war, John. You talk of the yellow jack as if it is something you can overcome, something you can pin down and defeat. Something you can attack and fight. Is it any wonder I call you by your name, General?”

He ignored me and gathered his coat. I didn’t care, I talked to his back.

“You forget, I’ve lived with that sickness all around me, with the yellow jack and the cholera and the measles, I know them better than you, and I know they don’t stop and they certainly don’t go away because a man—you, Father Mike, a hundred other men like you—thinks he can beat it down. It’s always with us, it’s part of us and this place.”

“People are suffering.” He spoke with his back turned, poised at the door.

“I thought you’d be used to that.”

“Never used to it. Never get used to it. You would not know what I’m talking about, and I don’t care to discuss it with you now.”

He turned back around and his face was hard like stone, his beard like moss. He was a mountain, a rock, not a man.

“I thought you might understand penance. But you understand very little outside your gilded life, your flowers and petit fours and whatever the hell else you concern yourself with. You are a brat.”

Had I a rock, I would have thrown it at his head as he rode out, but I was frozen in place. Petit fours? Flowers? Where? In this house? And then I knew how sharp and mean he could be. There were no candies here, no flowers, no fine parties and dancing, but he knew how much I craved them and how much I loathed myself for it. How dare he? How dare he find the gap in my own armor?

The first of May I marched down Burgundy without a hat or an escort, collecting old lettuce leaves on the bottoms of my shoes, brushing the flies off my face, and wondering how in the Lord’s name the sun could come so close to the city without burning it, or at least instantly drying the pools of wash water and whatever else it was that collected here and there against the banquette.

I rapped on the door of the convent and soon a small wraith had opened the door, pushing the drapes of her habit back from her bony, veined wrist. I said I was there to ask about Paschal Girard and she quietly closed the door on me. Through the thin parapet windows on either side of the door I could see a whirling of black, sisters coming together and conferring and flying apart again. I pounded on the door but they did not answer again that day.

I went back once a week for three weeks, and on the fourth week they admitted me to the foyer. This time a big red-faced sister took me by the hand and into a chapel, where a funeral service was being conducted. All the nuns sat in rows in front of me. A repetition of black against candlelight, reminding me of the shadow lace casts. No one spoke to me, not even the red-faced nun who disappeared among her sisters.
They’re testing me,
I thought. But Mass didn’t scare me, and neither did the plain oak coffin at the front before the sanctuary. I began listening to the priest just as he spoke to Jesus of our crushed and dry hearts.
Oro supplex et acclinis, cor contritum quasi cinis: gere curam mei finis.
The nuns remained still, but I could see tears on some faces. I assumed this was a sister they mourned, but then I noticed that the coffin was oriented feetfirst before the altar. A layman, loved by nuns.

Then Michel, Father Mike, stepped out to assist the older priest with the Requiem Mass. I had been so thoroughly transported into another world, all smoke and light and silence, that nothing, not even the appearance of that great hulking thing at the altar, surprised me.

Together he and the priest attended to the business of the altar as if the rest of us weren’t in the chapel with them. If he saw me in the back he gave no sign. I don’t know how he could have missed me, clad in festive green and purple, my hair sprung in every direction. Had Father Mike asked the sisters to invite me in? I was still too young to believe in coincidence. The Mass ended and none of the sisters approached me, so I glided out of the chapel and down a hall to the side of the building. There I could see Father Mike hurrying out of the vestry toward a set of doors. I called out to him and he stopped as if someone had yanked a rope. His face lifted up toward the ceiling before he turned and faced me.

“Anna Marie.”

“Michel.”

“Are you joining the sisters?” I walked toward him until I could see the stubble on his cheek and smell smoke on his cassock. He hadn’t slept, I could tell. “You’ll have to explain your children, of course, but they’ve taken in fallen women before.”

“You are not funny, Michel.”

“No.”

“Whose death did I just mourn? Whose body did I just commend up to the Lord, with my prayers?”

“A friend of the order’s, that’s all. They wanted the Requiem Mass held here, and so here we are.”

“Where is this person’s family?”

He stroked his beard, cupped his chin in his big paw, and frowned. His mouth puckered and relaxed over and over. Michel, though smart, had always wrestled with thought. Then a light came up in his eyes, and I knew he was about to tell me a lie.