Crescent City (50 page)

On the following day the pass arrived. She turned it over in her hand, this miraculous, flimsy slip of paper that permitted her to see her David again.

They said: “All you need to do is to know the right people, and André Perrin knows them.”

The loss of his teeth had altered David’s face, giving him at certain angles the sunken features of an old man. So thin was he that his cheeks sloped inward, and Miriam supposed, trying not to look too searchingly to reveal her pity and shock, that when he had first come to the hospital, their color must have been gray. A faint bloom now touched this meager flesh; the eyes were clear, so strength, she saw, must be on the slow return.

It was a mild day of thaw. All the benches which had been set out on the hospital’s wintry lawn were occupied. Over the pale, soggy grass, the Stars and Stripes drooped from the pole in windless air. A steady dripping, like the tick of a metronome, came from the trees, and the weak sun was pleasant, falling like a benison upon this reunion.

“You’re thinking I look like a skeleton. I’ll look a lot better when I get some teeth,” David said. “You ought to have seen me three months ago. No, I’m thankful you didn’t.”

She pressed his hand. “I’m just thankful you’re alive.”

“Yes, and to think I owe my fife to André Perrin! A man I scarcely knew! When I saw him that day, you know, I’m sure I was running a high fever. I wasn’t
entirely sure I understood what was real and what I was dreaming. At the same time I felt it was real. It’s hard to describe.” He frowned with the effort of recollection. “Yes, when I saw that man, I knew—I knew I’d seen him somewhere before! He must have made a strong impression on me that first time, don’t you think?” And in puzzlement, he shook his head. “One sees so many passing faces in a lifetime! Why should I have remembered his?”

She could have said, but did not, Because his is an extraordinary face; one remembers it as one remembers the flash and fire of an extraordinary jewel at a stranger’s throat. Because he is ardent and vivid and never tired .…

Then, still showing that perplexed expression, David asked, “Why should the man have gone to so much effort for me? Just for me? That’s what I don’t understand.”

She flushed. It angered her that she was never able to control this sore, red heat, which rose now from under her sleeves to flood past her collar and into her cheeks. David’s sharp, curious look upset her further.

At last she murmured, “You don’t know about André and me.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh,” and looked away, past Miriam to where other couples and families on other benches were revealing their own, their often secret, joys and griefs.

Then he brought his gaze back and focused it considerately, not upon his sister’s face, but rather on her hands, which lay twisted nervously on her lap.

“So that was it! Of course, you were not well married .… Yet I always had a feeling that there was something else, too. I even asked you about it more than once, do you remember? But you would never tell me.”

“Are you angry?”

“Angry? I’ve no right to say whom you should love or hate. I don’t even know the man. To me he’s only the man who saved my life. What can you say about someone who saves your life? Still, I should like to see him face to face.” He looked up then with his old smile—wise, curious, and gentle. “Tell me, what
is
he like?”

Why should it be so difficult to find words for something which had so long filled every private recess of her mind? She could only stumble.

“He is … the way it is … he loves me. I am … was … happy with him.”

And with the thought that David might be imagining what she had meant by “happy,” the bed in the white room so long ago, so long—came a second rise of blood, burning her face.

“Tell me about him,” David said again.

His kindly insistence made it rather easier to answer now.

“I should like to do him justice .… Well, to begin with, he’s so very generous! He likes to be generous, as you see by what he’s done for you. There’s a softness, a gentleness, even in the way he speaks .… You feel cheerful when you’re with him, glad to be alive! To wake up in the morning and know you’re going to see him that day …” She clasped her hands in a passionate gesture. “It was so different, such a change for me, David, you can’t know! To be so loved and praised! Do you understand?”

“I do, my dear. I do.”

“I feel so much better,” Miriam said earnestly, “now that you know! It’s troubled me to have kept such an important secret from you.”

David looked thoughtful, his forehead wrinkling into worry lines. But he spoke quietly, asking only,
“What is to happen? What are you going to do? You will have to do something, one way or the other.”

“We were hoping, we were thinking—André thinks perhaps Marie Claire will want a divorce.”

“It’s an odd coincidence: Her name was mentioned to me some time ago. Some doctor I met had heard her in recital in Paris. He said she was making a name, she was glorious.”

“Whatever brought up the subject?”

“He knew I’d lived in New Orleans and he asked, the way people always do, whether I happened to know this one or that one in the city, and then he mentioned this remarkable singer.”

So Marie Claire, that odd, reclusive little person with the ambition that had always seemed much too large for her, had after all been right about herself! Miriam felt suddenly a singular admiration, a new respect, for the woman with whom her own life had been so peculiarly entwined.

“I can still see her quite clearly, although I never really knew her that well. She’s clearer to me than the girls whom I sat with every day in school. She seemed so dull, and yet there was all that ambition inside.”

“The outside and the inside are two different things,” David said somberly. “One should remember that .… As for me,” he said then, changing the subject with some abruptness, “the face I see is Pelagie’s. I can’t get out of my mind the way she must have looked when they told her Sylvain was dead, and how he died.” He broke off. “How is Pelagie?”

“She’s with us, as I told you. Holding together. Women usually do, don’t they? Even the timid ones stand up after a while when they have to. It was horrible. They lost everything, that grand house, a treasure house, gone up in smoke. Even so,” she said, “one should be ashamed to speak of houses and things after
what you have been through. And all these men,” she finished, lowering her voice as a man was carried past on a stretcher.

“You’ve had more than your share, too. The way Eugene died—he didn’t deserve an end like that, either.”

“That’s true, he did not,” Miriam said quietly.

They were still a moment.

Then David asked, “And Papa?”

“Papa’s all right. I don’t think he still quite believes what’s happened to his promised land.”

She looked away over the grass where a flock of pigeons were pecking bread crumbs at the feet of a soldier in a wheelchair. In Richmond, she remembered suddenly, they had told her there were no more pigeons in the parks; they had all been eaten.

“I haven’t asked about the most important people of all, my twins. You know, I think about them all the time. I think, no matter how long I live or what work I may do, bringing them into the world will still be my triumph.”

“Oh, Angelique is going to be beautiful! Sometimes I imagine she must look like our mother, she doesn’t look like either me or Eugene. And my boy—oh, I am so afraid, if this war goes on any longer, they will take him.”

“It won’t go on much longer. It’s almost over.” And David said fiercely, “I think if I’d known what war really is, I’d have left things alone.”

Miriam smiled. “You wouldn’t have.”

“Tell me, do you know anything about Gabriel?”

“No one’s heard in almost a year. We don’t know whether he’s dead or alive. Rosa asked me to try to find out something in Richmond. They all want me to look for their men, for Rosa’s Henry, too, and Pelagie’s
boys. But it’s like looking for needles in a haystack.”

“Perhaps not quite that hopeless. There have been prisoner exchanges lately. When you go back to Richmond, you might inquire at the War Department. Do you know which outfit he was in?”

He did not have to say he meant Gabriel. Gabriel was the one he would care about.

“The Tenth Louisiana.”

The air had smelted of heat and dust, the day the Tenth Louisiana left. The delirium of noise had pounded in her head: the brass band and shrieking children, drunken laughter, weeping and clinging. He stood on the step as the train began to move. He had raised his arm in good-bye to the group, but his eyes had been on her. She could still see him distinctly.

“He hated the whole idea of fighting,” she said. “And he didn’t have to go. He could have stayed in the government. Yet he went. I don’t understand it.”

“Of course you understand! It’s not that difficult. He always had his convictions, he acted on them, and I love him for that. I only hope that if he is a prisoner, he’s in a better place than I was in, that at least they might have medicine and morphia for the dying.” The vision of what he had lived through must have come flaring back, for David’s face darkened in a grimace of pain.

The mention of medicines brought something to mind.

“The other night at dinner in Richmond they were talking about women, visitors like me, bringing medicines back under their dresses. It’s dangerous, the Federals search you, but still some get away with it. So I was thinking that I—”

“What?” David interrupted. “You smuggling for the Confederacy? My sister, become a Rebel?”

“Do you know,” she replied indignantly, “that fully a third of the men in the Confederate army are not slave owners at all? Why, even Gabriel—I don’t know what makes you say such a thing.”

“Come, I’m only teasing you. I’m well aware everything’s all mixed up. Rabbi Raphall’s son—remember Rabbi Raphall?—well, his son joined the Union army! Lost an arm at Gettysburg, too. Tell me, are you serious about”—he whispered—“about taking some medicines back?”

“I am.”

David whistled. “It’s very, very dangerous, Miriam.”

She wanted to do it. She felt a need, a reckless one, perhaps, to take some risk, to have a part, however small, in correcting the overwhelming chaos of the war.

“Usually a lady sews the package in her bishop,” she said thoughtfully.

“Her what?”

“Bishop. The little silk pillow that goes in back of your belt under your dress. It lifts up your petticoats.”

“I can manage easily enough to get stuff out of the pharmacy, but it’s dangerous,” he repeated.

“I know. I’ve heard they stick a pin into the bishop to see whether anything is concealed. So I thought before I go back I could get myself a hat all heaped with flowers, and I’d hide it there. Oh,” she cried, “if you could see what it’s like in Richmond! So starved, so sick. I keep seeing the woman who asked for money to buy milk. And the wounded lying on the dirty, cold floor of the hotel. What do words mean then? ‘?nemy.’ ‘States rights.’ ‘Contraband.’ They don’t mean a thing. Not to me.”

‘“She reaches forth her hands to the needy,’” David said, and smiled and kissed her.

There were riots in Richmond. Hungry women, infuriated by the lavish displays which had so troubled Miriam, had now armed themselves with axes, and in desperation, had gone on a round of window-smashing so wild that only the government’s threat to call soldiers out had scattered them.

Other crowds of women, consumed by another kind of desperation, had gone searching for sons and husbands among the ranks of prisoners in the last exchange.

“They brought a group in while you were away,” Mr. Hammond told Miriam. “Came from Elmira by train, then took ship in Baltimore. It was a tragic outrage. They told me that even the Federal doctors were shocked that so many were in such terrible condition. On top of that they were seasick on the way south.”

“There are so many thousands, I know that,” Miriam said, “but just on the off chance, I thought I would inquire at the War Office. There might be a way, my brother said, of finding out whether some of the men I’m to search for have been brought back.”

“No need for you to go. I’m there every day, and I know whom to ask. Just give me the names.”

And, indeed, that same evening Mr. Hammond had news.

“I found one. Gabriel Carvalho. He’s not in the hospital. He’s apparently not sick. They’ve put him up in a boardinghouse. I’ve the address here.”

He was thin, but he was whole. They had already given him a new uniform; its smartness contrasted sadly to the neglected, shabby room. Here, in a once prosperous home from which gentility had long vanished, the two sat facing an unwashed window which
overlooked a grimy alley and a yard full of wet, rotting weeds.

“You’re smiling,” Gabriel said.

For some reason or other the image of Rosa’s Belter parlor with its gold Napoleonic bees flying on blue satin had come to Miriam’s mind. And the irony of that memory appearing to her in this place had brought a wan flicker to the corners of her mouth.

“I was remembering Rosa’s parlor where we used to go over the accounts. And now here we are!”

“Her last letter—that was more than a year ago—was full of your goodness to her.”

“She’ll want to know more about you when I go back. You haven’t told me very much yet.”

He gave a little shrug, as if to deprecate his sufferings.

“There’s not much more to tell. My wound healed and I survived Elmira. So many died there, one out of three, that I could almost feel guilty over being alive. One out of four had scurvy. Rats, cold, smallpox, the filth—but what’s the use of telling Rosa all of that?”

“She’ll ask me.”

So, in the flat voice that conceals unbearable emotion, Gabriel continued.

“We got two meals a day. Wormy crackers and coffee for breakfast. A cup of bean soup and more crackers for supper. You know, I believe when the final tally is made, they’re going to find that more men died in this war from sickness than on the battlefield. I do believe that.”