Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (30 page)

“The observed fact,” retorted Madame Genevieve, “is that I mistrusted the girl from the start, and for very good reasons!”

“You thought in fact that Celie Gerard was attempting to ensnare your son for what he might inherit?” asked Greenaway smoothly. Granville frowned in grave agreement, evidently seeing his dreams of his own banking establishment ripening satisfactorily: Blodgett flipped up another page of his notebook and bent over it like a starving man devouring a cream pastry.

“Yes,” said Madame Genevieve. “That is what I thought and what I still think.”

“Thank you,” said Greenaway. “Your witness, Mr. Villardang.”

“Madame Jumon,” said Vilhardouin. “Did you not, on the nineteenth of June of this year, the day after a probate jury awarded your son Isaak approximately five thousand dollars' worth of property and income from his late father's will, swear out a warrant distraining your own son Isaak on the grounds that he was your slave, in order that the property would then pass to you?”

“And in what other fashion,” returned Madame Genevieve, “-oh, all right!” She folded her hands with a martyred air as the translator interrupted to repeat Vilhardouin's question in English for the benefit of jurors Shotwell, Quigley, Templeton, and Barnes. “In what other fashion could a mother protect a young man bent upon a foolish course that would only end in his ruin?”

“And did you, Madame,” continued Vilhardouin, “inherit so much as a sou from the man who left you fifteen years previously?”

“I object!” Greenaway sprang to his feet. “I object to this blatant attempt to destroy Madame Jumon's credibility!”

“You mean you object to showing up this woman's harassment and greed for what it is?”

“It is not she who is on trial.”

“Gentlemen!” shouted Canonge.

“It is she whose lies will blacken and perhaps condemn to death an innocent girl!”

“That girl's `innocence' is precisely the issue here!” “The crassness of your credulity, sir, cannot surely extend to belief that this girl would have-”

“I should say that your stupidity in considering every pretty cocotte an innocent astounds me, sir, but in fact it does not!”

“Gentlemen, sit down, both of you!”

The lawyers turned, panting, to meet the Judge's glare.

“Objection sustained,” declared Canonge. “What Madame Jumon inherited or didn't inherit from her protector is irrelevant.”

Greenaway sat down. Vilhardouin turned back to Genevieve Jumon in time to catch her smug little satisfied smirk. While Vilhardouin continued his questioning (“My son was, as anyone can tell you, foolishly in love. Isaak would have handed over everything he owned not only to his-wife-but to the management of her father . . .”) January saw the doors at the back of the court open, and Rose Vitrac step through. Celie Jumon turned her head, throwing Rose a look of pleading desperation. Rose made her way politely to Basile Nogent's side, in keeping, January realized, with her persona as the sculptor's sister.

Celie glanced at her father, glanced at Rose-“. . . legally a man in years, but he was at heart very young for his age, and easily swayed . . .” Genevieve continued and Gerard, who had been watching Genevieve on the stand with poisoned eyes, laid a hand over his daughter's arm and closed it with such brutal tightness that Celie bit her lip in pain. “I acted wholly for my son's benefit in this,” Genevieve Jumon was saying, clasping her kidgloved hands before her well-corseted heart. “The chance circumstance of my having purchased my son, at the orders of his father, showed me the easiest way to save him from himself. Would that I had thought of it earlier.”

“Have you seen this?” Rose slipped up to January's side and passed a folded newspaper to him.

TRIAL OF A VOODOO QUEEN, announced the lead line on the second page. January closed his eyes and groaned. Every member of the jury would have read itthose who could read. He wondered if Mamzelle Marie or Dr. Yellowjack could be convinced to bury bottles of red pepper and pins in Burton Blodgett's dooryard.

Looking like an undertaker's mute, Antoine Jumon was called to the stand and entered into his recital of the events of the night of the twenty-third. He was interrupted promptly by Fragonard, the foreman, evidently, of the French side of the jury: “If it please Your Honor,” said the shoemaker, “it is, as Your Honor said, extremely warm in here, and this pigeon looks to be singing for a while. Might those of us who do not speak the language step out for some cold punch in the arcade and come back when it's time to hear all this again in French?”

“Do!” said the stevedore cheerfully-thereby destroying his own earlier assertion that he neither spoke nor understood French. “That way we can take a bit of a stretch whilst you're listening.”

“You'll do nothing of the kind,” snapped Canonge. “And I don't care what other justices of this Court have done in the past. That's why Mr. Doussan is here: to translate as we go.”

“That ain't hardly fair.”

“If you make one more remark out of turn, Mr. Barnes,” said the Judge, “you shall be expelled from the jury, and we'll start selection once again.”

“Shut up, you idiot,” hissed Shotwell, as his compatriot opened his mouth to protest again. “You want us all stuck here another golblasted day?”

“Monsieur Jumon.” Vilhardouin stepped up to the box. “On the night this-mysterious woman-came to fetch you at your mother's home, had you been imbibing anything?”

Antoine's eyes shifted. “Imbibing? No.”

“No alcohol?”

“No, nothing.”

“No opium?”

“Really, sir!”

“I object!” protested Greenaway. “This is a blatant attempt to damage the credibility of yet another witness, and, by implication, to damage the credibility of the Bank of Louisiana, at which he is employed. If a man has had a drink or two, that would in no way impinge upon his ability to observe and understand what goes on around him.”

“I'm sure you would prefer to think so, runt.”

“Gentlemen-”

“Runt?” Greenaway screamed the word as he lunged to his feet, face mottling. “You Gallic hypocrite! You who do nothing but guzzle and fornicate and attempt to seduce innocent widows, dare to imply an American cannot hold his liquor?”

“Imply? I have seen you facedown in a gutter on Tchoupitoulas Street too jug-bitten to do up your fly buttons!”

“Whoreson puppy!” Greenaway had by this time reached his opposing counsel before the witness stand, in which Antoine still sat, wide-eyed with alarm. “I wouldn't take words like that from a real man, let alone a wine-sodden monarchist pansy frog!” Seizing his rival by the lapels, he backhanded Vilhardouin across the face with a violence that rocked the Frenchman on his feet. “Name your friends!”

“Gentlemen!” roared Canonge, and Monsieur Gerard, pale, lurched to his feet and raised a protesting hand, though he dared not remonstrate against a white man.

Both attorneys whirled on the Judge. “That is precisely the point, Monsieur,” said Vilhardouin in a tight, deadly voice. Greenaway's blow had left a pink welt across his cheek, just above the neatly shaven dark line of his side-whiskers. “As a gentleman-the only gentleman involved in this altercation,” he glared from his sixfoot elegance down at the panting Greenaway, “-I have received provocation which cannot be ignored. Your Honor will appreciate that I cannot be seen to take unchallenged a blow from any man, particularly not one such as he, and have any hope for advancement in this city. And perhaps this,” he added viciously-speaking in English, January noticed, though Canonge's native language was French-“is precisely what my opponent intends, having no more evidence to argue his case than he has inches.” He stepped gracefully back as Greenaway lunged at his throat. “I request a continuance of this trial until such time as I have had satisfaction from this bastard pipsqueak.” He turned to the crimson-faced prosecutor. “Tomorrow, then.”

“Where and how you please, you fornicating French liar!”

Canonge rolled his eyes and banged the gavel. “This trial is continued over until Monday morning. And I hope the two of you come back in a better frame of mind.”

Paul was on his feet, struggling to reach Olympe as the bailiffs led her from the room. Through the tumult in the chamber as messengers were dispatched to locate the various candidates for seconds, January saw his brother-in-law's lips form his wife's name. Gerard pulled Celie to her feet, thrust her before him toward the door, cursing as he did so at Blodgett, who interposed his slovenly form before them, pad in hand. Rose, too, was making her unobtrusive way toward father and daughter, but Gerard caught sight of her, glared furiously and, seizing Celie by both shoulders, dragged her through the door.

“The imbeciles!” Vachel Corcet's hands shook as he gathered up his notes. “Fools, both of them. . . .”

“But gentlemen.” Abishag Shaw slouched over to January and the lawyer, putting on his wretched hat. “Maybe just as well. Gives me more time to ride on up to Baton Rouge and see if'n I can find our gal Zoe. This ways I should be back, easy, by Monday morning.”

“Thank you.” January clasped his hand. “Thank you.”

The chill gray eyes studied his face. “I tried just now to get in a word with Mathurin Jumon. He skinned out of here like he had a creditor in the room. Maybe he had, though damned if I could find a word about it from any of the bankers I talked to. I must admit I'm right curious about what this Miss Zoe'll have to tell. You don't get yourself shot 'fore I get back, Maestro.”

“I won't.”

January watched the policeman's grimy hat disappear over the crowd.

“Ben. . . .”

He looked around, and saw Rose standing at his side.

“Did you get a chance to speak to Madame Celie?”

“Not now, no.” She drew him aside, into the corner of the jury box where Mr. Stefanopoulis was still dozing, abandoned by all his colleagues. “But I had a note from her early this morning, dropped from her window in a perfume bottle. Her father's been keeping her pretty closely locked up.” From her reticule she drew the bottle-attar of roses, sold by a woman named Loge in Rue Dumaine, one of the hundreds of self-proclaimed former aristocrats of the ancien regime who kept shops in New Orleans. Dominique wouldn't wear Madame Loge's perfumes (“They're very nice of course, p'tit, but so . . . obvious”), but gave them to her maid Therese.

The paper rolled up inside was small, a slip half the length of his finger.

It said, I have heard from Isaak.

“I've thought it prudent, on the occasions of my past two visits to Madame Celie, to lend her books.” Rose Vitrac pretended not to see the arm January offered her as they skirted the muck of puddles that constituted the Place d'Armes, using her hand instead to hold up her flowered foulard skirts. “Not novels, of course, though Celie loves them-she and Isaak used to read to one another in the evenings. Evidently Notre-Dame de Paris was the first fiction she'd ever read. Papa Gerard is rather strict about that. I lent her St. Lambert's Catechisme Universel yesterday. In an hour or so, after Papa Gerard has had time to cool down, I'll go by the shop and ask its return.”

They spent the hour in Hannibal's room, filling him in on the events of the trial. “Let's just hope our friend Vilhardouin made good notes for his defense,” remarked Hannibal, his thin, husky voice fairly steady and his words only barely slurred. Propped on every pillow and folded blanket in the house, he actually looked a little better than he had the previous night. His violin lay on the bed close to his knees, and the room was redolent of the black coffee January had made for them all, and of herbed steam. “Papa Gerard must be just this side of apoplexy.”

Paul had invited January to the Corbier house for supper again that night, an invitation January had turned down; when he walked Rose to the gate he met Gabriel, bearing a crock of beans and rice.

“We got too much,” argued the boy, when January tried to tell him to take it back for his family. “Papa figured this would take care of you and Hannibal both for a couple days.”

It would, and in the absence of other income-The Knights would not be finished until Monday at least-it was all that was likely to sustain them. January felt like a parasite but didn't argue very hard. He and Hannibal dealt with classical Greek syntax and the absurdities of Aristophanic logic until the creak of the yard gate alerted January to Rose's return. He stepped out on the gallery, only for the pleasure of watching her cross the yard: an absurd joy, he knew, more suited to some fair-haired Ivanhoe than to a respectable musician of forty-one. She moved like an egret in her strangely awkward grace, and paused in the middle of the yard to hold up a thick blue book.

“I'm surprised Papa let her learn to read at all,” remarked January dourly, as Rose halted at the top of the garçonniere steps to kick off the mud-crusted pattens that protected her shoes.

“You wrong him.” Rose steadied herself on the gallery railing. “Easy to do, I admit. Monsieur Gerard may be hot-tempered and opinionated, but he's very concerned that his daughter have every advantage-every advantage a woman of color in this country is allowed, at any rate. So many white men assume that any woman of color is a courtesan, or would become one immediately if offered money-an assumption they'd kill another man for, if he made it of their sisters. Papa Gerard wanted Celie to make a respectable marriage. No girl is able to do that if there's the slightest question about her reputation. And he wanted her to be able to manage her household, and her husband's financial affairs, to the best advantage. And he isn't a fool. He knows that if a woman is widowed she must be able to support herself. For that it does help if one is able to read.”

She followed January into Hannibal's room and took the chair he brought up for her, clearing some of the mess of foolscap and Greek lexicons from a corner of the fiddler's bed to take his own seat.

January was silent, remembering for the first time his own mother asking St. Denis Janvier to send her a tutor, so that she could learn to read. Livia had carried it with a high hand and turned it into a demand, as if it were a polite accomplishment and not a necessity, but he realized now that had her protector died in the first year or two of her plaçage, she might have had no recourse but prostitution for herself, and hard labor for the children she would have been unable to educate.