Feast of All Saints (100 page)

“Eh bien,”
Picard shook his head. “Pity you don’t want to make your fortune with the Daguerreotype, Marcel.”

It was noon when Anna Bella left her house, entrusting little Martin to Idabel so that she had to carry the small kettle of soup herself. But she had sealed its lid with a bit of moist dough and nothing would spill as she carried the iron handle easily at her side.

There was no answer when she knocked at the cottage in the Rue Ste. Anne and this produced in her neither disappointment nor surprise. She entered quietly and surveyed with an impassive face the dirty plates here and there, boots in the middle of the rug, a shirt dangling from the back of a chair. And as there was only enough coal to last a few more nights at best, she lit a very small fire, setting the kettle over it in the little parlor grate, and went to work slowly but steadily with a dust rag and a broom.

And as she moved about the small rooms, she made little discoveries that stopped her, so that she would stand for long periods transfixed, the dust swirling about her in the pale rays of the winter sun. A stack of bills lay on a chair-side table which at a reserved glance indicated an enormous debt. And Cecile had taken her mahogany bed with her to the Cane River along with the carpet from the back room. But in the middle bedroom, where Marcel was now sleeping, little had changed. Marie’s clothes were still in the armoire, and on the dresser lay her hairbrush and mirror as if the girl she had been had died as surely as Lisette.

But it was another aspect of the cottage which caused Anna Bella finally to give up her small tasks and to sit oddly stranded at Marie’s dresser staring at the reflection of the unmade bed. For everywhere—in the handkerchiefs strewn about, the brass ashtrays, the cluttered desk moved down from the
garçonnière
—everywhere she felt the presence of Marcel. And for a protracted moment she looked at a black
silk tie that lay on the floor, then gathered it up, and catching a breath of the masculine cologne that permeated the cloth, she felt the chills rise on her neck. What would it be like to live in this little house, to see through these windows the sky and the trees? To hear the sounds of the block on which she’d grown up, to be at home with these frock coats bulging from the armoire door, this particular white washbasin, pitcher, marble stand? But a numbness overcame her when there might have been a longing, and she pondered that Michie Vince had never left his imprint on her own house. He had come and gone repeatedly without a trace. No matter, her thoughts now had nothing to do with him, and she felt powerless to move, powerless even to raise her eyes when she heard a step at the front door.

A moment later, Marcel was standing on the threshold of the room. And again she felt that chill on her neck. She didn’t rise to greet him, she said nothing, she merely watched him come near.

His arms were full of bundles, one hand clasping a bottle of wine, and he had a large Daguerreotype in its pressed paper case which he laid on the dresser in front of her. Her head was bowed. “It isn’t often that I find a beautiful woman in my boudoir,” he whispered. “And what of ‘Michie Vince,’ Madame, how is it he let you slip away?”

She didn’t answer for a moment. She was deep in thought. It was almost as if his words didn’t make any particular difference. And chilled again, she rubbed the backs of her arms. She saw him very distinctly as she raised her eyes.

“There isn’t any more Michie Vince,” she whispered. “Had you come an hour after, you would have known.” But this was not a recrimination, it was merely a fact.

She studied him, thinking how his face had changed. How the roundness of the cherub was quite entirely gone, he was a tall, lean young man, and in some particular way his expression was softer for all its sobriety, its reflectiveness, as if suffering could soften, not just twist and destroy.

“But you love that man, don’t you?” he whispered, the lips barely moving, the flesh as smooth as wax. And the eyes alone radiated feeling, brilliant as blue eyes so often are, brilliant as two lights.

“I’ve never in my life stopped loving anyone once I started,” she answered. She lowered her lids and raised them again slowly, oddly aware of their effect. “I don’t guess I ever will stop loving…once I’ve started…whether it was yesterday or a long time ago.” And she felt keenly the house around her, the unmade bed with its velvet curtains, the peculiar stillness of noon, the secluded and sunny little room. It seemed he had stepped closer to her, that his shadow fell over her face. She felt such an overwhelming desire to touch his hand then that she shut her eyes as she rose and feeling him enfold her, she
listened to the beat of his heart. It was suddenly just as it had been so long ago in Christophe’s house when the Englishman lay dead, and just as it had been only a short while before after they had taken Lisette away, that they were alive and in one another’s arms, and though some sorrow threatened them, surrounded them, they were touching each other, and the hunger, the waiting so terrible for so long, made it less pleasure than pain.

An hour later, it was Marcel who, throwing back the cover gently, rose first.

He put on his clothes quickly and then bending over her as she lay still in a torpor, whispered, “Come into the parlor, there is something I must say to you, and it can’t wait.”

For a long time she didn’t move. She lay staring at the tester, that same quietness which had been in her all day, all the days since Michie Vince had left, in fact, that wordless wondering, holding her there. Then she dressed without the slightest indication of anxiety and for want of anything else drew Marie’s silver-handled brush through her hair.

He was standing by the fire, having built it up and he had put the Daguerreotype on the mantel, and had set out the food he had brought home with him, and the wine. The glasses had been filled, and he himself was dressed again even to his silk tie. A ruthless and irrelevant thought came to her as she seated herself and lifted the glass. Had it been a pleasure to him, with the women he had known, that beautiful Juliet Mercier? For her it had been a surrender of the body and the heart. She had devoured him utterly, his honey-brown skin, his clumsy passion, his feline grace, and it had cast into dim light forever those many nights with Michie Vince when, so eager to please, she had never once thought of herself. It wasn’t her custom to drink wine in the day, in fact, it wasn’t her custom to drink it at all, but she drank this wine now.

Marcel was staring at her with that remarkably intense expression that so often came over him, and she thought, either he is going to kill me or say that he loves me. She filled the empty glass again.

“I’m going to say something to you right now,” he began. “I am going to ask you a certain question. And I’m afraid that you won’t believe how much I want you to say yes. You’ll only remember the way I let you go before, you’ll think of the boy I was then and not the one who loves you now. Loves you and wants you.” He stopped. “The fact that I’ve got nothing to offer you, nothing but faith in myself and some indistinct future which has never done anything but disappoint me, well, that makes it harder, because I am keenly aware that you just may be better off by yourself.”

“Don’t ask it,” she said.

He was stunned. His eyebrows came together, the blue eyes firing slowly as the mouth went slack.

“Because,” she said looking up at him, “the answer is no.”

The pain in his face was more than she could bear. It was as if she’d slapped him, hard, and he was nothing but a child and he stared at her, uncomprehending, wounded to the soul.

“Well,” he whispered, “no one can blame you for that.” But he was brutally hurt, and his posture, his expression, everything about him belied the resignation in his voice. “I suppose I deserve it.”

She watched him retreat to the mantel. His back was to her and he put his foot on the brass fender, and she could see the flicker of the fire on the edges of his yellow hair. He didn’t know that she was trembling, he couldn’t see it, he couldn’t see the breaking of that numbness which had gripped her since Michie Vince had left.

“What you don’t deserve,” she said, “is to reach out blindly right now and take that millstone you once told me about and put it around your neck. What you don’t deserve is a wife and a child to worry about—a passel of screaming children, matter of fact—and a stack of bills three times the size of that one over there, and problems you can’t even imagine becoming so regular that they’re like supper on the table every night and the wrinkles in your brow. That’s what you don’t deserve, and that’s what you’re asking for, along with the love and the comfort you need right now.”

He didn’t answer her.

“Don’t think it wouldn’t be easy to say yes to you, don’t think I haven’t been thinking of it night and day for six months. God, I can remember times when if you had only said those words to me…but best not to think of that now, best not to think about how if we were married I could help you, I could give you what income I’ve got and…”

“Never!” he whispered. He turned to her, the smooth face convulsed with rage.

“Shush, I know all about pride,” she shook her head. “Just because I don’t have much of it doesn’t mean I don’t know about it, I’ve lived around it all my life. And I’m not talking about your intentions, or your honor, I’m talking about what would be so easy for me to do! But the fact is, I don’t want to talk about that either, I don’t want to talk about me at all, I want to talk about you. You’ve got to make something of yourself, by yourself, and while you’re still young and still free. You take this step now and you’ll despise me in the years to come. I’ll be all mixed up with your broken dreams and the terrible things that happened to you and your sister at this time. You’ll wonder, as the years pass, how come you ever got entangled with me, with the children we’ll have, with us! No. I won’t have it happen. Not for your sake, and frankly not for mine. And you know why? Because I love you, and I
know if you don’t use the talent God gave you, if you don’t do something with that talent then I’ll never have you. But when you have done that, well, then, I’ll be here.”

“Talent? What talent?” he whispered softly, incredulously. But he was not asking her. He wondered did she know the deep wound that she touched. Talent! There had never been any talent, any talent to draw or paint or to make music or to write or to make any of the wonderful and beautiful things he’d loved. There was only the keen eye to appreciate it, the heartbreaking capacity to perceive talent in others all around. No, she couldn’t know because he’d never told her, never told anyone, not even Christophe. And only a gentleman’s prerogatives, only a gentleman’s means could have kept him close to the talents of others, kept him close to all that was fine and enduring and filled life with daily grace. What do you pay your assistants, he had asked that irascible old Picard, the Daguerreotypist, the answer had been a dollar a day, and his mind worked with the precision of a clock measuring that against the common expenses of ordinary life, not the luxuries but the commodities, coal, food, clothing, and then the cost of a seat at the opera, the philharmonic, an afternoon of Shakespeare, the cost of books. The cost of some small statue or engraving glimpsed day after day in a shopwindow until it became a beacon in a dreary regimen and was then suddenly snatched from view by those who could afford to purchase it, to have it forever. He turned away from her. He couldn’t answer her. He couldn’t even shake his head.

“Do you remember,” she asked quietly, “what you said to me the night that Jean Jacques died?”

“God knows and you know,” he whispered, “but I do not.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what you said. You said, ‘Anna Bella, if I hadn’t been born rich I could have learned the cabinetmaker’s trade from that man and been happy making fine things till the end of my days.’ ”

It was a torture to him to hear this, it was a torture to remember the fervor and waste of that time. “Well,
ma chère,”
he said softly, “Jean Jacques is dead, and I never learned the cabinetmaker’s trade.”

“But don’t you understand, Marcel,” she went on, “you had an eye to see the greatness in that old man, when others just saw a workman on his knees. You had an eye to see the difference between an ordinary task and something beautiful, something fine.”

“An eye to see, yes!” he whispered. “I’ve always seen!” The proper little gentleman on that stool in Jean Jacques’ shop, the young man who had hovered over the country painters in Tante Josette’s house watching the colors form the life on the canvas, the young man who had pestered the Daguerreotypists relentlessly, arguing the time of the exposure, the importance of the preparations, the optimum light. Hadn’t he argued with Picard this very day, and hadn’t he seen as soon as the picture was in his hands that Picard had not…

She was watching him. She saw the subtle change in his posture, saw him turn slowly, saw the change in his face. It was struggle she witnessed, struggle and a slow, violent awakening which he appeared bitterly, obdurately to resist.

“Remember the first night you came to me at my house,” she went on gently, not sure of her timing now, the expression on his face so fierce. “The first time, when you knew Lisette was your sister and all, and we sat talking about Michie Vince. I told you Michie Vince reminded me of my Daddy, remember that, I told you how those two men were alike. They were men who worked, they loved their work, it took everything out of them, and there was one of them a fine gentleman with twenty thousand arpents of sugar cane, and the other a country barber in a dirt-road town…”

He was not looking at her. She wasn’t sure that he had heard. He was battling something deep in himself, the pupils of his eyes moving back and forth, his mouth frozen on the verge of speech.
As a matter of fact, you wouldn’t know anyone who wanted such an opportunity, would you? Oh, not you, of course, I can see you’re well fixed
. His eyes clouded suddenly, misted over, and it was almost with an anguished expression that he shook his head. What had stopped him then, what, Anna Bella was talking to him and he couldn’t hear. Why had he stiffened when Picard had asked him, why had he felt the stamina drain from his body while his hand clutched the back of that carved chair? He turned to the picture on the mantel, the perfect little gentleman staring back at him, against that flowered paper, that velvet drape. It was pride that had stopped him, pride as he stood on that ornate little stage.