Property (Vintage Contemporaries) (21 page)

“Do you never think of quitting it yourself?”

“I should,” he said. “I hate it. I never go to Rivière. But I’m continually advised to wait, as the economic tide will turn, or the weather change, or the negroes all get well by some miracle and start doing a decent day’s work. What else can I do? I’m not fit for business. Half the time I live on credit from my factor.” He sipped his coffee, resting his eyes on the portrait of my father, whom he never met. “It seems the happiest years are behind us,” he said.

I set my cup on the side table and leaned back into the cushions, seeking to ease the pain in my shoulder. “I’ve never known you to be melancholy,” I said. “I was counting on you to cheer me up.”

Joel opened his eyes wide, as if he’d just glanced at his reflection and seen someone he didn’t recognize. “As you have every right to expect,” he said. “You must forgive me.”

“I do,” I said. And I did, but the effort fatigued me. It seemed that happiness must always be just beyond me and I should always stand gazing in at it as through a shopwindow where everything glittered and appealed to me, but I had not enough money to enter. It was money, only money, that would keep Joel from ever being more than my friendly admirer.

Joel struggled to rise above the somber mood that had fallen upon us. “I have some excellent gossip for you,” he said. “Pierre Legrand has finally gotten his comeuppance.” He launched into an amusing story about a man we both despised whose wife had discovered his craven efforts to seduce her niece. After that he went on to another hilarious account of a distinguished lady who had proved a poor loser at bezique. “You are a tonic,” I said, when I had paused from laughing. “And I must pay for my medicine. May I offer you some champagne?”

“It is what the doctor recommends,” he exclaimed.

“Ring for Delphine,” I said, and he rose to pull the cord. She came in, wiping her hands on her apron, her chin tucked nearly into her breastbone. I gave her my instructions— there were oysters as well; I’d had Rose buy them in the morning—and she went out hurriedly. “She’s not accustomed to serving,” I said. “She is mortified to leave the kitchen.”

“What’s become of Peek?” he inquired.

“I had to give her away. She was getting on and her cooking really is abominable. Delphine is an accomplished cook. In a few weeks I will give a small dinner party and you may sample her daube.”

“Gladly,” he agreed. Delphine came in, desperately clutching a tray, in terror that the glasses must tumble over. Joel directed her to the desk, clearing away the few papers scattered over it. “Well done,” he said, as she backed away. “No need to stay. I’ll serve your mistress with pleasure.” She hurried out, casting me a cautious look, but I waved her away. Joel struggled with the cork, then there was the sharp pop that is the signifier of gaiety. He turned to me, holding the bottle close over a crystal flute as the golden liquid frothed inside. His eyes were bright, his smile infectious. He was turning his own pleasure over in his mind. My mother had offered maternal kindness, boundless admiration, and the occasional dinner. My tenure would be more enticing. He handed me a glass, filled one for himself, and proposed a toast. “To this house,” he said, “which is for me the sweetest refuge in the civilized world.”

It wasn’t long before the bottle was empty and the refuge, at least for one evening, no longer requisite. There was a dinner engagement and after that gambling or dancing; a city full of amusements to tempt my guest from my cozy parlor. At the door Joel took my hands and gave me a brotherly kiss on each cheek. “I am dining at your aunt’s on Saturday,” he said. “Will you be there?”

“I will make a point of it,” I said. Then he went out into the street.

I bolted the door and leaned against the wall, light-headed but not lighthearted; in fact a considerable darkness descended upon me. I went back to the settee and sat gazing into the fire.

Standing in the doorway, bidding Joel good-night, had made me think of my husband, of his visits in this house so long ago, when I was too naïve to understand the nature of the bargain I was making. I was young, I was pretty, and I had no money. My husband was of a good family, had expectations and a large house. I didn’t find him particularly attractive, but I felt no positive revulsion, and I enjoyed how strongly he seemed to be attracted to me. His eyes were always moving over me. If I let him touch my hand or my waist, I could feel his struggle to refrain from pulling me to him. Mother observed this and, as it didn’t disturb her, I took it to be in the proper order of things. “Mr. Gaudet is taken with you,” she said. “I think we needn’t worry too much about the dowry.” I had in myself, I concluded, some value, something more desirable to my husband than money. At the time, this struck me as unusual.

My invincible stupidity was revealed to me on my wedding night. My mother’s house having been reckoned too small, when the wedding celebrations were over I was arranged upon the bed in a room at my aunt’s house. The servant was sent away; my husband came in unfastening his cuffs. He pushed the door closed with his boot. Mother’s entire advice had been the word “submit,” but I had no more idea of what I would be submitting to than I had of the workings of a steam engine. A likely metaphor! My husband roared over me like a locomotive. There were moments when it seemed to me his object was to pull my limbs from their joints. I glanced over his shoulder at the mantel clock, anxious to know how long the operation might take. My breasts, which had never been touched by another, save a servant with a sponge, were so kneaded and sucked upon I feared they would be blackened by bruises. I wanted to shout to my mother, “Why did you not warn me?” but then it occurred to me that Father would never have subjected another creature to such an assualt. I looked into my husband’s reddened face, at his eyes, which seemed to start from their sockets, at his lips swollen by his passion. Was there to be no trace of feeling for my helplessness, no tenderness in my marital bed? The answer to both these questions was no, none. Afterward he was silent, not critical, there were no harsh words. He did not appear to be displeased. He had exhausted himself and within a few minutes was sound asleep. I touched the damp sheet beneath my hips and found my fingertips reddened with blood. I am married, I thought, looking at his sleeping face. His mouth was open, his breathing as easy and peaceful as a child’s. This is my husband, I thought.

We stayed in town for two weeks. I was given to understand by my aunt and my mother that these would be the happiest days of my marriage. That turned out to be true. I was not unhappy. There was the novelty of being greeted by friends who clearly thought I’d done well for myself. My husband had not yet begun his long descent into bankruptcy, so there was money to spend. We gave a dinner at the hotel which was heralded in the journals as one of the most delightful of the season.

The fury of my husband’s nightly assaults did not abate, but they interested me, and I soon discovered I was strong enough to withstand him. I persisted in the delusion that the intensity of his abandonment was the direct result of some power I had over him, which must somehow accrue to my benefit. I went so far as to anticipate his pleasure, I encouraged him, and found some pleasure in it. I entered the fray. Later, when I understood that my sense of having some particular value to him was a delusion, this willingness on my part became a source of deep humiliation.

I found our conversations more trying than those hours we spent in what passed for conjugal embracing. My husband could talk about sugar, he was knowledgeable about wine and spirits, he liked to shoot animals; this was the range of his interests. Art and music meant nothing to him; he could not concentrate on a picture long enough to see it. Five minutes of my performance upon a piano put him into a deep sleep. Whenever he spoke in company, I noticed the other young men politely waiting for him to finish so that the subject could be changed. When their repartee became sprightly, he looked from one to the other with a dumbfounded expression. He rarely laughed.

That he was dull, that he was without tenderness: was this reason enough to hate him? Surely not, but by the time we left the city, I had come to dread the feelings that must arise in my own breast when I was dependent on my husband alone for whatever joy life might have left to offer me. And I was right to be afraid. In town he was unsure of himself, but in his own home he was a tyrant. He drained the color from every scene, the flavor from every bit of food, the warmth from every exchange of sentiment. He had not so much destroyed my life as emptied it, and now that he was gone, I had to pretend there was something alive in me. Joel had sensed this. My laughter was too ready, and it was hollow. When he looked into my eyes, it must have been like staring through the windows of a burnt-out house. Doubtless, he attributed this to the ordeal of the insurrection, and it didn’t occur to him that what had left me with ashes for a heart was not murderous negroes, but my marriage.

The coals had crumbled in the grate and a chill rose up from beneath my feet. Images from the night I wanted to forget flickered across my mind: the horse champing the grass, the sharp blow to my jaw, the flare of the torch, Sarah pausing to point into the darkness, my husband’s startled face as his murderer pulled him up by his hair. I examined his expression as if I were looking at a painting, and I discovered a detail I hadn’t noticed before. The moment before the fatal blow was struck, my husband called Sarah’s name.

I heard the gate open, the sound of footsteps in the alley: Rose and Walter returning from their excursion. There was the repeated slapping of a hand against the side of the house, all the way to the back. Walter, I thought. My husband’s curse, as impossible to accustom myself to or rid myself of as my own crippled right arm.

“HOW CAN A light woman and a dark child disappear without a trace?” I complained to my aunt. We were seated in her drawing room. On the table between us lay a much-crumpled, atrociously written letter, the report of Mr. Leggett on his efforts to secure the runaway Sarah.

“He has been up the coast as far as Savannah,” my aunt said, “quizzing the captains and the stewards of every ship.”

“Has he located the brother?”

“I’m afraid not,” my aunt said.

I bent over the offensive scrawl, trying to make out a sentence.
Captain Wash ceen only won child as caut
. “What does this mean?” I exclaimed.

My aunt examined the sentence. “Mr. Leggett takes an original approach to spelling and punctuation,” she observed.

“It’s appalling.”

“Yes. It is, isn’t it? It took me some time to make any sense of it at all. Your uncle is nearly an adept. He was able to give me a summary within twenty minutes of first viewing the document.”

“What must his speech be like?” I said.

“Not much less recondite, I’m afraid. However, he’s good at figures. He can compose an excellent invoice.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said.

“No,” she agreed. “What he says is that a Captain Wash, that’s probably Walsh, your uncle thinks, has seen only one such dark baby girl in the last month, and it was in the company of its mother, equally dark, a servant traveling with her owner, who was an elderly white gentleman en route to visit his doctor in Philadelphia.”

“Well, that is certainly useless information.”

“There were no free women of color on that trip. Might she have separated from the child?”

“It was weaned. It’s possible.”

My aunt turned the page over, skimming the lines. “Mr. Leggett did find a report of two free women, sisters, traveling together, about the right age, but he traced them to St. Louis and found they were well known in their neighborhood.”

“Perhaps she is disguised as a servant and some northerner is playing her master.”

“Or she may not be traveling by boat, or she somehow contrived to blend in with the other passengers, or she is still here among us, but we just don’t see her,” my aunt said. “There’s no way of knowing.”

“No,” I agreed. “Should we increase the reward?”

“I think so,” my aunt said. “And we’d best insert the notice in the papers in a few of the larger towns.”

“Very well,” I said.

“I don’t despair of Mr. Leggett’s finding her,” my aunt assured me. “He has a marvelous persistence.”

“So has she,” I said.

When I left my aunt’s, I walked to the Faubourg Marigny to leave a pair of shoes with the shoemaker there. That neighborhood is populated largely by free negroes, and a more arrogant and supercilious group could hardly be found. As I went among them, I found myself turning again and again to follow a figure or face that resembled Sarah’s. A man in a bright yellow frock coat approached me, his eyes meeting mine with perfect insolence, and for a moment I thought it must be Mr. Roget, though I had had such a brief glimpse of this person it was unlikely that I would recognize him. Was Sarah in hiding behind one of these simple house-fronts? Was Mr. Roget even now writing to her with further instructions for their eventual reunion?