Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (7 page)

“C'mon back, honey, I'll make you scream another tune!”

“You holler like that when ol' Sambo's on top o' you?”

Rose stumbled, but pulled sharply clear of his steadying grasp.
January could feel her trembling as they turned the corner onto Rue des Victoires.

He was shaking, too, with rage and panic and emotions impossible to name. In any neighborhood in the city, a black man who struck a white one would be lucky if he lived long enough to be whipped at the Cabildo. Here, near the wharves, the action would be suicide, especially at this time of night, with every man in the tavern half-drunk and eager for the excitement of legitimized brutality. What would have happened to Rose in the melee he didn't even want to think.

“Wait.” She stopped, leaning against the wall. He heard her gag, fighting not to be sick. Struggling to breathe, hands pressed to her corseted sides.

“Rose, we've got to get you out of here,” he said, not meaning the immediate vicinity of the alley but the whole neighborhood in which she lived: he felt her stiffen under his hand.

After a few more breaths, she straightened and walked on. They were only a few score feet from Vroche's Grocery, behind which she lived in a rickety outbuilding that housed the kitchen and a laundry on the ground floor, and four rented chambers above.

Tallow candles and a lantern burned in the yard, for the fire in the kitchen had been banked. Around them a gaggle of men were drinking, two of Rose's fellow lodgers and their friends. Though free colored-libres-weren't allowed to buy alcohol, the beer-stink was strong, and a man's voice ragged drunkenly about how that lout Shreve had cheated him out of his share of the cargo, cheated him like a dog. January felt Rose try not to flinch at the slurred rage in that declaration.

“I'll be tutoring Artois for another year.” Her voice fought for its usual matter-of-fact tone. “Until he goes to University. By Christmas I'll be able to afford-”

“You can't put up with this every night until Christmas!”

“It doesn't happen every night. Or every other night, even.” She stopped on the rickety gallery before her door. “And right now I don't have any choice in the matter.”

In the next room, Marie-Philomene groaned, “Oh, give it to me! Give it to me hard!” The French doors were open; the creak of the rope bed was audible, the smell of the room salt and beery and foul.

Rose's hand fumbled with her latchkey, dropped it with a tinny metal clink onto the gallery planks; she bent swiftly to retrieve it before January could do so. In the shadow of the abat-vent above, her face was hidden, her tignon only a white blur framing a fleeting flash of oval glass.

January caught her hand. “Rose...”

She pulled away, hard, almost wrenching it out of his grasp. “Good-night,” she said quickly.

The door closed.

“What the hell does she think Im going to do?” demanded January after he'd told Dominique about it the following day. “Rape her too? Beat her up?”

“Yes,” said his sister simply, and January, furious and caught off-guard, stared at her open-mouthed.

“You're not serious, Minou.”

“It's not what Rose thinks, p'tit.” His youngest sister folded her slender hands over her belly and sat back in her chair of white-painted willow, her dark eyes sad in a face too thin, January thought, for a woman in her eighth month with child. “It's what she feels. What she fears.”

“Are you telling me Rose is afraid of me?” All the exasperation he felt poured out of him like blood from a severed artery. He remembered how for so many months she'd drawn away from his touch, how warily she'd kept her distance from him.... After months of gentle patience he had been rewarded by the touch of her hand, only to have her turn cold on him and draw away once more. Last winter they had kissed, with tenderness and passion, for the first time, and he had forced himself to patience while longing to crush her to him, to taste not only her lips but her throat and her breasts.

And then she would shy off yet again, for no reason he could discover, like a bird deciding not to come to hand after all.

Sometimes he would go home angry, as he had last night. Angry and baffled and wanting to shake her, to ~ shout at her, I'm not the man who hurt you! Don't keep punishing me for what that other bastard did!

Wanting to tell her, We can't go on this way. Make up your mind.

But he knew it wasn't her mind that made her thus, but her heart. And if he said, Make up your mind, she would turn away in that furled silence of hers, and that would be the end. He knew that as surely as he knew his name.

But the thought that she might fear him was a dagger in his heart.

Dominique's cottage stood on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain in a grove of cypress and willows. Shade dappled the back gallery that stood out over the water, and veiled his sister's face and hair like Venice lace. Across a curve of the water the red roofs and white-painted galleries of the Washington Hotel showed through the trees, and voices carried to them from the ninepin alleys and the kiosks where girls sold Italian ice.

The world smelled fresh here in Milneburgh. A mockingbird sang in the trees. The smells and heat of town, the clattering wagons and drunken Kaintucks and gritty filth of steamboat soot seemed part of another world.

As did last night's threat of violence, and the broken sleep and angry dreams that had run in its wake.

“I thought she was over it,” said January quietly. “Her fear of men.”

“Oh, p'tit.”
Dominique put out her hand, cool and slim, on his.

He had taught his piano-lesson that morning to the daughters of a plaqee who was grooming them in “accomplishments” with an eye to attracting protectors of their own as soon as they were of an age for it. It was one of two weekly lessons that continued into the summertime, the woman's protector having left her in town while he himself went to stay with his wife and white children at one of the stylish residential hotels by the lake. Riding out to Milneburgh on the steam-cars-in the last car of the train, which the free colored were welcome to share with the servants of the whites who occupied the rest of the equipage January had felt only a kind of exhausted anger as he watched the green monotony of cypresses and magnolias pass by.

Anger at himself that he had not sprung instantly to bludgeon the man in Rose's path before he so much as touched her (and that would have accomplished what?). Anger at the faceless shadow in the tavern door, reeking of forty-rod and spit tobacco, who'd assumed he had rights over any woman of color who came his way. Anger at Rose, who had repeatedly refused his offers to lend her the money to find other quarters than those she could afford. Who had closed the door behind her last night without even saying Thank you, Ben.

Anger that the world should be as it was. I should never have come back from Paris.

Or, since he would have gone mad from grief in Paris, he told himself, he should have gone elsewhere: Venice, Naples, Vienna, Milan. Anywhere but back here-

-where Rose was teaching her school, and studying electricity and Homer and how to make mummies and bombs.
Alone and aloof and as unconscious of his presence in the world as he was of hers.

He closed his eyes, letting the cat's-paw breezes trail over his face. Seeing her as first he'd seen her, a stranger-a tall, thin woman in the heat and stench of a cholera ward, who moved as if she was always about to trip and never did: I need a doctor, she'd said. Three of my girls are down sick....

Her beloved students, all of whom had died. He tried to imagine what it would have been like to gather up the strength to start fresh in an unknown city in the wake of Ayashas death rather than come back to this place, where there was a woman named Rose whom he'd never met.

I did what I had to....

Tried to imagine not knowing Rose.
Not seeing her every day.

He couldn't.

“Last year,” said Dominique, “when you were trying to rescue Rose's friend Cora from her masters, and were beaten, and hurt ... suppose that instead of just beating you, they'd cut up your manhood with a knife? How long would it have taken you to stop having nightmares?” She leaned forward in her chair, one hand resting on her swollen belly. “Or suppose that instead of dying, your wife had ... had run away with another man? Not only run away with him, but stolen all the music you'd written, and given it to that other man for him to publish as his own?”

January's eyes flared in surprise. Dominique had been only four when he'd left their mother's house to go to Paris. He didn't think she'd remembered that he used to write music.

“How long would it be, before you trusted a darkhaired woman again? Or any woman, ever?” Dominique looked up at him gravely, all the lightness, the frivolous patter that characterized her absent now as she willed him to understand. “And if you did fall in love with some dark-haired lady, and she wore the same perfume as Ayasha did, or liked the same colors ... Wouldn't the pain come back and hit you sometimes, when you didn't expect it, and undo everything she was patiently trying to heal in you?” January turned his face away. Two boys rolled hoops along the shell paths by the lake. Under a tree a little girl served imaginary tea to her friends and their dolls.

“Does it take so long?” he asked.

But he knew that it did. He knew there were women who never got over being raped.

Dominique broke a tea-cake in two, crumbled half of it into bits that she dipped into her tea and then left untasted on the edge of her plate. “Honestly,” she said, and her voice regained its old bright chattiness, “the way people tiptoe around me, youd think I was the first woman in the world whose protector took a wife! Iphigenie and Phlosine were here this morning”-she named her two best friends, plaçees whose protectors likewise had bought them cottages on the lakeshore-“and to watch them fetching tea for me and glancing at me sideways whenever they thought wasn't looking, youd have thought I was going to hang ayself from the rafters the moment they turned their backs.”

She laughed, but her laughter was brittle, as it had been since she had first learned of Henri's engagement. “Poor Henri! When he was last here he looked just wretched. And who wouldn't be, who has to visit every single member of that family before the wedding? I wonder if he even got in to see their crazy old uncle Joffrey? I understand the man hasn't been off his plantation in twenty years-literally twenty years, p'tit!-and is crazy as a banana.... His sons, too. No one in the family has seen any of them since I don't know when. And that dreadful grandmother of Henri's ... the one who insists she's about to die and has to see her niece and her grandson married right this minute, before she does; and never mind that everyone has to come into town again, because God forbid any grandchild of hers should be married by anyone but the Bishop-and I'm sure His Excellency would much rather stay out here at the lake as well. Do you know she has four footmen to carry her around in a palanquin like a Roman empress? It's the truth, p'tit, I've seen her. She has two or three of the things palanquins, I mean-all of them draped in black, to match her dresses.... Not that she has a gown newer than the reign of Napoleon, honestly! I can't imagine what she's going to wear to the wedding....”

January let her chatter, drank his tea, and listened, knowing that it was all that he could do. Her friend Iphigenie, he guessed, had been full of advice-as far as he knew she was still trying to get Dominique to abort the child that would certainly be a desperate liability should Henri in fact be forced by his new bride and her family to repudiate his mistress. And Phlosine, with her own second child on its way, was a wellspring of well-meant tricks to hold Henri and deceive his wife. And their mother, January knew, would 6e no help. Other people's problems bored her, except as a source of gossip with her own friends.

So he listened, hearing how many times Dominique spoke Henri's name, as if repetition would serve as proofor conjuration-of his continued devotion. And he won dered where hope ended and folly began. His own love for Rose, maintained in the face of her fear that might prove too strong for him-or her-to conquer ... What of that? Was it madness to love a woman who could not respond?

Would that love turn to hate when he finally came to understand that there truly was no water in that well?

But there is, he thought, recalling the passion of her kisses when times were gentle and good. I know there is.

“I was saying to Henri only... only last week”-her voice hesitated a little-“that there is no reason on earth for his poor sisters to be stranded all the way downriver at Bois d'Argent for the summer. Poor things, they're all starting to look exactly like his mother's sisters! The family has four plantations, after all, and Viellard itself is only across the lake. And Henri agreed with me that the older three are never going to be married if their mother persists in dressing them in that petunia-colored gauze....”

Before he left Milneburgh, January walked along the lakeshore to the handsome boarding-house where his mother rented rooms every summer, so that the lakeside cottage St.-Denis Janvier had given her could be let out to a white sugar-broker and his wife. His mother had offered to let him stay in her house in town-at only the smallest of rents and could not understand why he had refused, any more than he could understand, he supposed, why Rose would not be beholden to him, who loved her.

“Oh, it's Henri this and Henri that now,” sniffed Livia Levesque, after January had delivered an account-unsolicited-of how he'd found his sister. “Sneaking away from that mother of his, and the St. Chinian girl, to see her. They'll put a stop to that, and so I told her, though, of course, she wouldn't listen.”

She fanned herself with a round of stiffened and painted silk, as beautiful as she had been on that night twenty-three years ago when she'd dressed before her mir ror for General Humbert's birthday dinner. There were more lines around her enormous pansy-brown eyes, and at the corners of her wide, secretive mouth, but a steady regime of crushed strawberries and wafer-thin slices of raw veal had so far held Time's more serious graving-tools at bay. She dressed as exquisitely as ever, in delicate shades of turquoise and buttercup-she'd worn mourning for the late Christophe Levesque for precisely the prescribed year and then had put it aside with the comment that black did not become her-and still kept the slender upright figure that was the envy and despair of her contemporaries. The only difference between that slim, elegant plaçee and this slim, elegant widow lay in her eyes, and the briskness of her voice and movements, at variance with the languid gait and murmur of a rich man's concubine.