Feast of All Saints (19 page)

Marie did not think in words as Marcel did. She did not talk to the mirror, nor write out “thoughts” on paper, and even in the Cathedral where she often went alone on Saturday afternoons to kneel for an hour in a pew nearest the altar of the Virgin Mary, there was no outpouring of her soul that was articulate, she did not pray in words.

And those rote prayers she uttered at such times—as she did each morning and each night and with the ringing of the Angelus, or when the beads of her rosary passed through her hands—those rote prayers had precisely that effect they were intended to have when invented centuries and centuries before: they ceased to be language and merely became sound, a rhythmic repetitious sound that lulled the mind and slowly allowed it to empty itself. So that divorced from what others call thought it was free to know itself in terms of the infinite, in terms of that which language has only begun to approximate if not destroy. Marie saw images at such times like blazing icons. Eyes fixed inwardly on the sufferings of Christ, she pierced all the mundane visions of the dusty Jerusalem streets through which He dragged His Cross and felt with a violent chill what was beyond the words of the missal in her hands: the pure nature of suffering for others, the meaning of the Incarnation:
and the Word was made Flesh
. The concept of goodness was real to her, as was the concept of the good life.

She understood this, just as throughout her life she knew her own feelings, was not given to self-doubt, spoke with quiet confidence, and seemed to possess no need to confide. In crowded rooms she could often through her own veil of silence perceive keenly the feelings of others—this one’s hurt, and that one’s anxiety—and the meaning of rapid verbal exchanges here and there, their injustice, their superficiality, their basic lie.

But when she was confused, when some emotion swept her violently for which she was utterly unprepared, Marie became lost in it, groping for a language that might help her discuss it in her own mind, and finding none, was shaken as if some force inside of her might rend her limb from limb.

It had been this way for her that morning, as she pushed steadily with the note through the muddy streets, toward the office of Monsieur Jacquemine, stopping mechanically at curbs for carts she did not see, oblivious to the shouts from a gallery doorway, her eyebrows raised, her lids lowered, in what seemed between the long shadows of her shimmering hair the very countenance of calm.

Envisioning over and over her mother’s face, hearing again and again that hiss of her words, she felt once more that extraordinary chill
that had come over her at the
secrétaire
, the very chill she felt at keen moments in her prayers, a tiny rising of the delicate down on her flesh, a shock that seemed to paralyze, though somehow the body moved, step by step with unerring instinct, on its way.

She could not abide what she felt; yet she could not stop it. All she could do was continue her violent pace, and that movement alone soothed her, seemed constructive, though the nature of the errand filled her with loathing and with fear.

There had never been closeness between them, Marie and Cecile. They had never talked to each other, did not seek each other’s company, and moving swiftly through what had to be done in life—sewing, dressing, straightening, the preparations of a fine feast day table—they fitted hand in glove in the cottage, knew nothing of argument, and held for each other not the slightest surprise.

Childhood had seemed timeless in this regard. It was the way it was. But of late, a shadow was between them, growing in depth, a shadow thick and cumulative like a cloud. It was perhaps that Marie had begun to think about their life, and roaming sometimes after school through rooms of other families, mothers and daughters at cluttered dressing tables with pins and cologne, had begun to see beyond the seemingly inevitable fortress of family to other worlds.

It was little things. Gabriella Roget with her fingers clasped tight to her mother’s eyes, steering her with waltzing flounces to the mirror, saying, “Not yet, not yet, very well now, look!” Peals of laughter at a birthday table, brothers and sisters quarreling for the last bit of cake with pinches and mischievous looks; or young Fantin on Gabriella’s bed, teasing, “I know what Maman wants to do, Maman wants to get ahold of that hair,” so that “Maman” turning from the dresser said, “Oh, do let me brush it, Marie, just let me take it down once, your mother won’t know, oh, just look at that thick straight hair.”

Things that ran to nonsense, kisses, defied memory or made up afternoons unmarked, so that a vague feeling collected in Marie, something that felt subversive, must stop, but did not.

At home with a rigid face Cecile watched the ticking clock over the covered dishes and when at last Marcel’s step hit the door, motioned again for the reheated soup to be served. He was animated, cross, picked at things; yet all the worse was his absence, when silence lapsed back like dreary waves on a winter beach. He must have his bath water hot, not so much milk in his coffee, you know how he dislikes it, call him again, did you forget to darn his shirt? So that at odd moments, when mother and daughter wandered alone from room to room with no sound but the soft closing of the armoire doors or the rattle of a rosary drawn from a small chest, a sense of dread overcame
Marie. It was awful this dread, it was like fear of the dark when she was a child, that amorphous something that lurked in shadow beyond the dull glow of the Virgin’s face above a vigil flame, or guardian angels in a brass oval on the wall paper, clustered with giant feather wings about the tiny figure of a golden-haired white child.

This dread. It called in question all that was warm, seemingly solid, and sometimes when it was at its worst, she felt a weakness in her toward all the world, as if she could not reach out for cold water right in front of her on a burning day.

“Come home with me,” Gabriella squeezed her arm too tight, and yet she felt powerless to do the simple thing of walking through the cottage door to ask her mother, “I should like, I should like to go…”

At times when Cecile thrust at her some ribbons or lace left by her aunts, Colette or Louisa, murmuring indifferently she should try this out, Marie would look at these bits and pieces numbly, from the center of that weakness, and finally only by an austere act of will, manage to touch them long enough to put them away.

In recent weeks there had been argument among the women, begun amid all the sherry and cakes of Marie’s First Communion while she sat alone at the foot of her bed, paging slowly through the prayer book given her by Marcel, running her fingers over its cover of laminated pearl. They talked of the opera, of Marie’s clothes, and like the nuns at school insisted it was time, surely, for corsets, and a change in dress.

“She’s thirteen, that’s sheer nonsense,” Cecile said coldly. “I’m weary of this subject, all this attention to an impressionable girl.”

“But look at her, look at her,” came the shrill voices beyond the closed door.

And Tante Colette that afternoon had flung a corset across the poster bed, laying out with ceremony a dress of pale blue flounces trimmed with the most delicate white ribbon, the center of each little bow a masterfully folded rose. She waved a warning finger as she left with heavy steps that made the mirrors shiver. Marie alone in the shadows, felt the backs of her arms, her hair shrouding her bare shoulders. And turning slowly to see if in fact her aunt was gone, encountered instead her own dark shape in the tilted glass, the swell of breasts against the white eyelet of her chemise.

Dress her properly, Cecile
, Mon Dieu!

Properly.

The word hung in the air. Cecile, slamming the fluff and whalebone into the broad armoire drawer, paused for a moment with a bent back adjusting the cameo on its velvet ribbon at her throat. Marie, in the corner of her eye, was not there.

On the streets she loomed monstrous, turned her head from the
darkened reflective windows of shops, could feel her stockinged ankles as though they were naked beneath her short girlish hem, and at night the pressure of her bosom, loose and large in her flannel gown against the mattress filled her with a vague disgust. She could see a dusky down on her arms, a bit of fleece on the backs of her fingers, and lay awake picking out of the dense gloom the distant roses on the tester of her bed, wondering vaguely what if Marcel had not finally gone to the
garçonnière
, had not left her the luxury of this small middle room, how could they have gone on, mother and daughter, sharing that other larger bed? It was as if they had never slept together, flannel against flannel, huddled in winter for warmth. Some splendid simplicity was gone, a surface broken. She did not sense as yet that it would never be mended.

But all this might have lain dormant within her. Mothers after all make mistakes. Gabriella laced to nineteen inches and in
décolleté
at dusk for the first soiree shook her head at the bad judgment of mothers, and with a furtive glance took the white camellias out of her hair, “Just too many!” And Sister Marie Therese taking girls aside at school had so often whispered, “And your mother said you might wear this, indeed I don’t think…”

But was it a matter of that? Kneeling at the small bedside altar her hands clasped against the marble top, feeling the barest warmth from the votive candle, Marie in the flickering dark forgot her prayers at times, sensing instead some terrible illumination that fell back, back through the corridors of memory where there was hardly memory at all, as she was overcome with a profound listlessness liken to that of the infant in its crib, who, fed only at the whim of others, soon ceases its own cries because those cries have never brought it anything at all.

Oh, this must pass!

But it did not.

One evening late she climbed the stairs to Marcel’s room and sat still in the corner watching him at his desk, listening to the scraping of his pen. He put it down at last bending toward her, “What is it, Marie?” And when she could not answer, with both hands he stroked her hair and kissed her eyelids quickly as he clasped her hands.

She loved him. It was nothing to defer to him, wait supper for him, take the buttons off his worn shirts, saving them carefully in a wicker box. She went to church when he wished, tied his four-in-hands, waited on warm evenings until he had had his bath, gave him in winter the chair by the fire. He was the only person in truth whom she did love now, she was sure of it; and she would find herself thinking, more often than she was aware, of afternoon naps long years before when climbing onto his bed she had curled up by his side, his
knees tucked beneath her own, and felt the gentle pressure of his arm around her waist. He had smelt of pressed linen, rosewater, and something warm that was all his own. Rain fell outside the open windows with the soft rumble of thunder, and jasmine, pounded softly on the sills, filled the room with yet another sultry perfume. He had held her tightly in his sleep, and often kissed her hair. She liked the smooth golden flesh of his face, the lips ashen and rose, and all this so taut and satin in repose that she could not imagine it fired with waking laughter. Then stirring, he might rise and stare before him with such utterly blue eyes.

No, jealousy of him, it was impossible, it was not this constant favoritism she begrudged her mother, it had always seemed so natural that he should be first, and now if anything this only brought her to the brink of a new sharp pain:

After all, what was the matter with him now, why did he roam the streets at all hours, why had he finally been expelled from school?

She felt she knew the answer only too well. It had come with the abrupt end of childhood. One day childhood was gone and that was all. And in the new world of harsh adult distinctions, everyone she did not know believed Marie to be white, while no one who laid eyes on Marcel believed for a moment that he was.

It sent a shock through her to think of it; it was impossible that he did not know. Though she herself could never pinpoint that exact moment when she had found it out. And it was hurting him now, she was certain, causing him to shun her, to say always at the cottage door when she came in that he was going out. He passed her in the streets without a glimmer of recognition, and she had even glimpsed him on a Sunday afternoon, wandering in the Place Congo. Drums beat, incessant, urged on it seemed by the constant tink of the tambourines, the rattle of bones, and somewhere in the midst of that thick and common crowd, of Yanquis, tourists, slaves, vendors, the blacks danced just as they must have done in African villages, something wild and terrible that she herself had never seen. And there he was on the periphery, her brother, his hands clasped behind his back, his brow furrowed, he had seemed at once a child and an old man. He turned one way, then the next, eyes wild or in the midst of some blinding concentration, she could not tell. It seemed the crowd opened to envelop him and toward that pulsing terrifying center he had moved. She could hardly stand it. All she knew of love, its pleasure and its sublime pain, were wound up with Marcel alone.

That anyone could see him as any less desirable than her was inconceivable to her, the attraction was so strong, so rooted in detail when she studied him, hung on his words, relaxed easily into his casual embrace. He was beautiful to her, and must be to all the world, precious
in fact, his hands when he spoke enchanted her, so that to some extent prejudices of color had become for her at this early age something highly suspect, something all too caught up with ideas.

But she knew well how her world worked, heard more of it from sharp tongues of pale friends than ever did the world’s victims. Indeed it seemed sometimes that angels protected the victims, as they did children and fools. Or so it seemed with Anna Bella, who with her broad African features and American drawl seemed for all the world unaware of how Marie’s schoolmates snubbed her, and ever-pleasant with smiles, took not the slightest offense when others for sheer meanness, some idiot righteousness, had intended for her to do so. Girls on the way home from school turned their heads as Anna Bella waved from her courtyard gate.