Feast of All Saints (63 page)

“You are too young.”

He could see that Richard had expected this. His son lapsed into his characteristic posture of acceptance, eyes down.

“There’s only one sure test of love that I know,” Rudolphe said. “That’s the test of time. If this girl’s affection for you is equal to your affection for her, then it will stand that test, and be all the stronger for it when you’ve reached the proper age.”

“Then you will consent. You will give your blessing…in time.”

Rudolphe’s gaze was steady, thoughtful.

“You can be certain of one thing,” he said. “Whatever I decide it will be for you. For your happiness, for your good.”

He reached up. His hand closed on the back of Richard’s neck and he held him for a moment, eyes calm as before. Richard was astonished. Then the hand tightened affectionately, and leaving the room, Rudolphe said softly over his shoulder, “I have never, never been disappointed in you, my only son!”

I
T WAS IMPOSSIBLE
, she couldn’t have run off at a time like this! Not even Lisette, bad as she’d been all year and getting worse all the time.
Marcel dressed hurriedly. It was July and unbearable, he had spent a sleepless night on moist sheets, mosquitoes droning about the netting, and now as he drew on his limp white shirt, he realized it was already too small for him, and he threw it aside with annoyance. He would have to be visiting the seamstress again. Monsieur Philippe stood on the gallery of the
garçonnière
, his back to Marcel’s door.

“If you don’t find her in an hour, just come on back here,” Monsieur Philippe said disgustedly. They had been arguing all morning, Lisette and Monsieur Philippe, a mystifying but familiar sound. Marcel had heard her low, rapid voice, muffled so that he could only catch an occasional word; and Monsieur Philippe’s replies, a steady rumble from the kitchen before he finally left it, slamming the door.

He had been drinking beer since breakfast, and drank it now from an earthen mug, his vague blue eyes weary. But he held it well, considering that he had spent the night with Zazu who was so sick now that she thought she was at Ferronaire, Monsieur Philippe’s old home downriver, where she’d been born.

She had been failing at Christmastime, and then when a stroke crippled her left side, Monsieur Philippe had moved her up from the damp brick room beside the kitchen into the
garçonnière
. All through the spring and early summer Marcel had heard her wracking coughs through the walls. The warming weather had not improved her, and unable to move for the paralysis and the congestion in her lungs, she had soon wasted from the tall handsome black woman she had been to a wizened crone. It was the worst of deaths, Marcel thought, gradual, but not gradual enough. Madame Suzette Lermontant had sent maids to help; and after Madame Elsie died Anna Bella sent Zurlina whenever she could. Lisette was patient one minute and then wildly afraid the next.

“Do you have any notion where she’s gone?” Monsieur Philippe gestured vaguely, contemptuous of the whole affair.

“I know a few places,” Marcel murmured. But this was foolishness. Lisette knew dark alleys and dark secrets of which he had no more knowledge than a white man, in fact, in the past few years, he had steadfastly guarded that ignorance, shaking his head to see Lisette’s puffy face on Sunday morning, and to mark the new earrings, silk
tignons
. She had money in her pockets whenever she wanted it, and stole nothing from them, he was sure. “I’ll do my best, Monsieur,” he said now. Then he stopped. The door of the sickroom was ajar and he could see that Marie had just lit the candles. The articles for Extreme Unction were set out. So it had come to that. Marie emerged and gently touched her father’s arm.

“Shall I go now?” she asked. Marcel knew that it was for the priest.

“You find her!” Monsieur Philippe said to Marcel. “You tell her to get back here!” he muttered.

“I’ll do my best, Monsieur,” Marcel started off. Never in his life had he seen Monsieur Philippe even mildly angry, and he was surprised at the vehemence with which the man behind him swore, “Worthless, worthless girl!”

But it was more than an outburst of temper, it was fast becoming the truth. And there had been no real beginning to it, Marcel reasoned as he hurried toward the Place Congo, no real provocation for Lisette’s behavior which he could fix, in his mind. She had always been the grumbler, sullen, and sharp of tongue when she chose. But with Zazu’s illness and all the burdens of the cottage descending upon her alone, she had become outright rebellious in the last fall. On her twenty-third birthday she had taken the silver dollars Marcel gave her and thrown them on the floor. He would have liked to be angry with her, now and then, but he was afraid. He loved Lisette, she’d been there when he was born, was part and parcel of his life. And in some private unconfessed way he had always felt painfully sorry for her, sorry for the keen mind behind that brooding, contemptuous face, for the shrewd and secretive person locked within the sulking slave.

But she was out of hand now. What did she want? Complaining of the simplest orders, she lavished all her attentions on Marie of late as if to say: I do this of my own will. Of course she obeyed Marcel, he had always had a way with her, but more and more, she flaunted, aggravated, provoked Cecile. And at last over some trivial matter of hairpins, mistress and maid had quarreled and Cecile in a unique display of temper had slapped Lisette’s face.

“You pray your mother gets up from that sickbed,” Cecile’s words had flashed through the small rooms of the cottage, “or so help me God, I’ll see you on the block. I’ll sell you downriver, do you hear me, I’ll sell you myself into the fields!”

Even Lisette had been appalled. And a frantic Marcel ushered his sobbing mother from the room.

Of course it had been nonsense, vulgar, monstrous, but nonsense all the same. Talk of the block to Lisette who had grown up in this house, her mother born on Ferronaire land. Nevertheless it had lacerated the fabric of domestic tranquillity and there had been the unwholesome ring of long-repressed rage in Cecile’s voice.

She had wept after that by the grate, Marcel stroking her hair. And that image came to him, an image which, in fact, had never really left him of the little girl rescued in Saint-Domingue from the blood-drenched street. “Maman,” he said gently. He wished that he could somehow stroke her heart.

But he had been helpless. And helpless, too, later that night before a silent Lisette bent over Marie’s dress on the ironing board who would not so much as look him in the eye.

This would pass, he told himself, but it did not. As the months
moved into spring, Cecile sent out her garments to the laundress, and had the hairdresser twice a week. Marie laced her mother’s corsets, gave the orders at the kitchen door. While Lisette went about the careful care of the two children as she had always done ever since they had been in the crib.

It wearied Marcel as it must have wearied Monsieur Philippe, who effected a chilly order by his presence, Lisette ministering in grim silence to a flint-hard Cecile. But sometimes the image of Lisette bent over Marie before the mirror, her yellow face slack with adoring preoccupation, etched itself on Marcel’s heart. It seemed Lisette dreamed with Marie as little girls dream with pretty dolls. And Marie who had found these months of soirees since the opera rather agonizing had never needed Lisette more. Yet it was Marie who sought over and over to reconcile them both, attending to any small matter that she might herself, ashamed it seemed sometimes of Lisette’s loving care.

“In time, in time,” Monsieur Philippe whispered to Cecile softly, “I promise you another girl.” But he was sad now over Zazu’s worsening illness, he had always had a special affection for Zazu and wanted only that she should die in peace. In fact, Monsieur Philippe showed such devotion to her in these months that Marcel had not resented his presence in the house. And he was there so often now as spring moved into summer and summer to its peak, that his presence ceased to be the exception and became the rule.

No one had expected him that Sunday morning only a week after the opera last November when he had come back, riding his favorite black mare, having brought the horse down with him on the boat from
Bontemps
. He had parcels for everyone as though he hadn’t been there only the Saturday before, and hardly a month went by, it seemed, when he hadn’t come for days, even weeks. There were those slippers on the hearth, layers of pipe smoke floating at the dinner table, and empty kegs of beer in the yard.

He had even appeared the day after New Year’s when everyone knew this was the greatest feast on the plantation, saying “As soon as I could get away,
mon petit chou,”
while he pressed Cecile to his chest. And she in a perfect ecstasy had spent a winter of ordering special dishes, rushing out to shops to find him rare blends of tobacco, selecting for him new and fancily carved ivory pipes. Lisette was sent at dawn to market for the best oysters, and new dresses had been ordered for Cecile from her aunts. Monsieur couldn’t have enough wax candles, tallow was intolerable, bought an argand lamp for the parlor, and a new Aubusson carpet for the boudoir. And in bed till afternoon on Sundays had Marcel read him the papers while he sipped his brandy, or his sherry, or his bourbon, or his beer.

“I’ve got a new pup at
Bontemps
, thinks he wants to play the
master,” he had remarked once with a confidential sneer to Marcel, “so let him get a taste of it. He’s at odds with the overseer, nothing’s done right, has to mend the levee his own way, let him get a taste of it. What are those cakes I like, you know, with the chocolate and the cream, get those for after dinner, here, take this, go yourself, Lisette’s got her hands full with Zazu, here, buy yourself something while you’re out.”

So it’s that black-haired white man with eyes like the devil, Marcel was thinking, “the young pup.” And a vision disconcerting in its clarity visited him of Anna Bella in that man’s arms. He could not think about it, Anna Bella puttering about her own small house, how soon would she be…would she be with…child? He wouldn’t think about it. His mother was so happy these days, all was going too well.

Cecile in black lace cut low over her full bosom presided at their private midnight suppers, and seemed to Marcel in these months a perfect rose, the petals at their fullest with no hint of inevitable fall. Some unnatural froth or forced gaiety might have ruined this, but she was too clever for that, his mother, her instincts were too sound. She leaned against Monsieur Philippe when he had to go, and wept when he returned, unexpectedly and so soon! And “at home” with her, cherishing her, Monsieur Philippe dropped his ashes on the carpet and snored till noon.

Now and then, drunk and forgetting himself, he would ramble about that white family that Cecile had never seen. Marcel, bolting his dinner with a book at table could hear the deep voice in the afternoon quiet of the other room. His son, Leon, had just left for the continent with his great-uncle, it seems that opera gowns are made of money, why does every young woman these days have to have her own tilbury, and those trips to Baltimore were costing him a fortune, what with accommodations for five slaves. Cecile marked all this quietly, never uttering a question or a word.

And he was all the time urging money on her, would she like a new pearl necklace, then she should have it, he liked her so in pearls, but then she wore diamonds so well. Only a beautiful woman could wear diamonds, he whispered the words, Venus in Diorite, in her ear. On his return from
Bontemps
one week, he bought her a new ring. Marcel must go the theater whenever he wished, and take that Lermontant boy with him if he liked, or his schoolteacher, yes, take the schoolteacher, how could anyone make a decent living as a teacher, here, they’re playing Shakespeare aren’t they, and Marie should have new gowns. He picked the cloth himself once or twice, of course Tante Louisa should charge him the full amount, why not, send Monsieur Jacquemine the bill. There was a slight defiant lift to his chin as he peeled off the dollar bills.

And meantime he teased Marcel about his books, admitted airily
that he could not read a word of English, and seemed vaguely amused by the recitations of Latin poems. Marcel had won every prize in Latin and Greek that Christophe offered and would not have minded the nickname, “my little scholar,” if he had not gotten it already from the boys in school. But even the older boys had said it with some measure of respect for him, while Monsieur Philippe’s manner hinted that all these academic matters were foolishness really, they hadn’t the pungent reality of horses’ hooves beside the stalks of ripening cane. He swirled his bourbon in the firelight, slapping the cards down on the dining table. “Marcel. Come here, you play faro? Well it’s time to learn.” Even in ballooning sleeves, shirt open at the throat and tight black pants tapering to those soft blue slippers, there was an arrogant glamour to the man always, never dulled by the liquor that clouded his eyes. Marcel could see him sauntering among the fencing masters of Exchange Alley, a silver rapier clanking at his side. His spurs had rung on the flags when he came in one afternoon, and children up and down the Rue Ste. Anne hung on the gates to see his sleek black horse.

One’s own world could shrink in the face of all that, Marcel mused. It was bitter to feel apologetic for the yearnings of one’s soul. It seemed a miracle had been worked for Marcel in Christophe’s class and Marcel, seeking the Mercier house whenever he could, slipped into his own skin there where he could be proud.

Because all the struggle of those early months, the books open past midnight, the hand cramped from the pen, all that struggle had indeed borne its fruit. History, that dark chaos of sublime secrets was at last yielding to Marcel a magnificent order; and the heavy classics that had once frightened and defeated him came clear under Christophe’s light. But grander, more important, and so important in fact that Marcel shuddered to think of it, was simply this: Marcel had learned how to learn. He had begun to really use the powers of his own mind. He could feel the sheer exhilaration of his progress in all the subjects he had undertaken and his day-to-day world of lectures, books, and even the old street-roaming, was one of momentous and meaningful shocks.