Feast of All Saints (50 page)

M
ONSIEUR
P
HILIPPE
F
ERRONAIRE
had reached his full five feet eleven inches by eighteen years, a majestic height in those times for which he was very much admired, along with his golden hair and blue eyes, these traits being not at all common among the white Creole aristocracy, rife with French ancestors, who were his people and his friends along the prospering river coast.

His was the world of the Creole sugar plantation, come into its own at the turn of the century, with its rambling raised cottage of white columnettes and broad verandas over which the roses twined and the river breezes blew. Seated on these deep porches on summer evenings, one could watch the boats beyond the levee on the high water of the river, moving as if they floated against the sky. Being the youngest of four brothers he was the baby there, and evinced from childhood that mixture of sparkle and easy charm which endears itself at once to adults, so that he grew up on the laps of doting aunts who pushed cake on him at table and sent for a portrait painter from New Orleans to fix him forever in a gilt frame on the wall.

He rode his pony on rampages through the oaks, flushed the ducks from the marshes with the crack of his gun, and dancing at his brothers’ weddings, drew squeals from his little nieces with the golden coins he plucked magically from their curls.

Months passed in the languid rural summers of his twenties when disdaining to make the Grand Tour, he seldom rose before noon in the lonely luxury of the
garçonnière
, lingered at table with his white wine and tobacco, and at last rode off to race friends along the spine of the levee or call upon the local belles. He was good to his mother in her old age, liking to stroll with her through the orange trees, and evenings found him spruced to go to town.

Of course there was the Mardi Gras, plays at the Theatre St. Philippe, billiards at which he proved to be excellent to a degree, and finally his perennial luck at cards. He had missed the war of 1814, obliged as he was to take the women out of the battlefields, but he fought a duel when he was twenty-one and seeing his opponent die instantly in the damp morning mist beneath the Metairie Oaks was overcome with horror for this senseless act. It had not seemed real to him before. After that he still played with the rapier, loving to advance with perfect form and rapid steps across the polished floor, but this he confined to Saturdays in fashionable upstairs city salons.

At twilight, pleasantly exhausted so that the muscles of his long legs tingled, he would wander back to the flat of his city cousins, singing aloud the saccharine airs of the Italian opera, and grooming for an hour or two, sup late, and then appear at the “quadroon balls.”

He loved the
sang-melées
with whom he danced, certain that any one of them would have been his mistress, but being young yet, and free, and loath finally to tie himself in any alliance, he settled for listening with a smile to the gossip of his glamorously fettered friends. He liked his life, might visit for months on the plantations upriver, loving the luxury of long days on the steamboats, and at home was the pampered darling of his brothers’ wives.

After all, he had time to be courtly, made amusing stories, and sometimes in the dim light of some waning party found himself falling in love with a cousin who was about to be married so that he sighed sadly to the night air.

But what were his prospects, actually, asked the mothers of the girls with whom he danced the cotillions, though he had made such a handsome figure in the saddle riding to the front door. Of course he was graceful on the dance floor, played with the little ones, and always on hand to please the fathers, could while away the night with brandy, dominoes, cards. But Ferronaire was a struggling plantation, grown up with the industry, suffering with its experiments, and desperate at times still for capital, then swimming in the profits of a flush season which must sustain it through more mercurial times.

It was his brothers who had built the noisy mill with its belching chimneys and it was they who brooded over the bubbling vats. They led the blacks at dawn through the icy fields to slash the ripening cane before the coming of the frost. He did not care for these things, Philippe, grew bored around the plantation office, and only once in a while, lounging rather arrogantly in his saddle, with gleaming spurs, did he ride out with a friend or two through the fields.

Of course he had his share of these arpents, but what was that, and each of his brothers now with a wife, and children running through the garden and those airy immense rooms?

But Philippe’s name was as old as Louisiana, a commodity that was priceless to the ancient families, and he spent his life in the parlors, on the veranda, sipping
eau de sucre
as he bided his time. And kissed the ladies’ hands.

Then one evening in New Orleans, meeting his older and very distant cousin Magloire Dazincourt among the quadroons of the ball-room, he perceived in an instant the poverty of this bachelor existence. It had wearied him in the extreme. For here was his cousin at sixty, master of twenty thousand arpents, and though a widower, had the consolation of one small son and four marriageable girls.
La famille
was all, really.

And by summer, Philippe had married Aglae, the eldest and Magloire’s favorite, journeying upriver to the endless cane fields of his father-in-law’s plantation,
Bontemps
. Its wealth astonished him. Five hundred attended the wedding, dining on plate.

But before that happy event united two remote branches of the family, Magloire had become fast friends with his future son-in-law and entrusted to him (it was a simple matter for a bachelor who lived so much in town) a certain series of duties with regard to a beautiful little mulatto woman whom he kept in a flat in the Rue Rampart. He was building a house for her in the Rue Ste. Anne.

Kitchen and
garçonnière
having survived an old Spanish dwelling recently destroyed by fire, he had got the land cheap and was building a cottage in front, a comfortable but modest establishment to have four principal rooms. But all was to be done as
Ti
Cecile wanted it, his dark beauty, it was her future home. Could Philippe supervise these proceedings, that is, ride in at the first of each week to show these men the master was near at hand? He would appreciate it all the more, however, if on those days Philippe could bring himself to look in on the poor little woman herself, as she was all alone in the flat, and having lost two babies in the past, was again expecting a child.

Philippe smiled. And his respect for his father-in-law mounted. After all, the man was past sixty and worn out, and now in the midstream of such a romance. He had long suspected his own father had known such pleasures when he was young, and his brothers as well. But these were early escapades, and were supposedly stopped at the inevitable marriage, youth being the time for these luxurious alliances of the demi-monde. But whatever the man wanted, he was a widower after all. So one day in 1824, Philippe rode up the Rue Rampart and lifted the brass knocker of this woman’s door.

That afternoon in the parlor left him with a lasting and somewhat seductive impression. Of course he had known the lovely quadroons, women so white no real trace of the African remained, and others darker but as charming with their heavily lashed eyes and mellow
caramel skin reminding him of the pictures he had seen of Hindu women in books. There was about them an aura of the exotic and wild; and whirling with them over the polished floorboards, his hand lightly caressing this small waist or that rounded arm, he had dreamed of some savage pleasure he had never known. Pity they were so closely guarded, one had to “set them up” to have them, it was the custom,
plaçage
. Promises, rituals, and long-term means. Yet others, pale and stunning in their lofty refinement, struck him as white to the soul; they were all too much like the good women who surrounded him at home, he reasoned. Who would want such a mistress? One could see them shuddering on the pillow as they reached to make the Sign of the Cross.

But here in this long somewhat sumptuous flat maintained by his future father-in-law and cousin, Philippe encountered a piquant combination unexamined before. It was to enter his dreams. For though this woman was fragile and diminutive as a porcelain doll, and done up in the primmest fashion, she was dark, very dark, with skin the color of stained walnut such as one sees in the full-blooded Africans in the fields. It intrigued him, the fineness of her features, her small mouth with its lower lip trembling slightly as she approached him with all the shyness of a child. She was a petite white woman carved in dark stone. And he found himself drawn by this darkness, this glinting brown skin, and stifled the near-maddening desire to feel the backs of her hands for their texture, that silkiness perhaps that he had loved in all the black nurses of his youth.

Her eyes were wild with fear like those of some small animal captured in the wood; yet she was older, past twenty to be certain, and did not possess that irritating and dangerous flirtatiousness of ignorant young girls.

She spoke good French, would not sit in his presence until he insisted on it, and smiled now and again with an alluring spontaneity as he endeavored to put her at ease. Her tiny fingers played sometimes with a brooch at her throat; he had never seen such small hands. It would be a pleasure looking after her, and touched by what seemed her near reverence for him, he took his leave reluctantly for the long ride home. Winding his way in the slanting sun, he smiled, thinking his future father-in-law even more the man than he had known him to be before. Cecile, it was a lovely name, Cecile.

But Magloire was ailing by the time of the nuptials and knew it; and eager to acquaint his son-in-law with every detail of his vast plantation, he rode too long, stayed up too late, and at last went to bed with the first winter chill. His little boy Vincent he entrusted to Philippe and Aglae to rear as if he were their own son, and before New Year’s, he was carried to the parish cemetery after a well-attended Requiem Mass. Philippe sitting alone that evening on the broad veranda
saw in all directions nothing but land which belonged now to him.

He worked hard in these first few months. It was not only the newness of it, the power of ordering so many people about, but he was afraid. Nothing had prepared him for the immensities of responsibility all around. His brothers came when they could, he set his mind on nothing but management and riding the fields all day, ended with ledgers at midnight, almost blind.

And it was time to cut the cane lest the frost come early and destroy it, the vast team of slaves galvanized and ready for the heaviest labor, cords of wood gathered from the mud beaches of the river and the back swampland to stock the roaring furnaces of the grinding house, the wind already sweeping the galleries with icy draughts.

His back ached, it seemed he lived in the saddle, his feet tingling when they at last touched the ground.

But he was resentful of all that fell on his shoulders. It seemed to him time and again that someone else ought to be doing all this, why should he? But under close examination, this made no sense finally. He was wealthy, master of twenty thousand arpents, the scepter was in his hand. But when was there time to enjoy the pleasures of this palatial home he had acquired, dwarfing as it did the old Creole style house in which he’d been born? Here were Grecian columns so wide he couldn’t span them with his arms, the grace of spiral stairways, and all about, the sun striking prisms in the baubles of crystal chandeliers. He would have liked to take his ease as in the old days, becoming familiar at leisure with these fine things.

But his brothers drove him worse than he might ever have driven himself, the overseer was at his shoulder constantly, and he was visibly irritated at last with those around him and under him, becoming something of a gruff bully with his slaves. It was fear that lay behind this, naturally. He would rather be loved by them all. But doling out whippings which he himself would not watch, becoming imperious with his cook and his footman, he nevertheless at times lapsed into familiarity with everyone still hoping to be served and liked at the same time.

Yet by the end of the harvest he had learned the plantation. Her yield was enviable, fantastic. Consulting old diaries on the minutest problems, and the changing of the weather in past years, he buried the cane for the coming season, built up the levees, repaired the irrigation canals. A great ball was given just before Advent, with carriages crowding the broad drive beneath the oaks. And Aglae was expecting a child.

Aglae.

Had he been a man of reflection he might have wondered afterward, could he not have seen her character in those first meetings, could he not have been wiser, could he not have opened his eyes?

What marvelous luck it had seemed that she was so pretty, this
wealthy cousin, and that she ran her father’s house with a firm hand. He liked the dishes she ordered in those early days especially for his pleasure, and at night sinking down into the massive mattresses of her immense and ornate bed, he found her pliant like a child.