Feast of All Saints (51 page)

But she was more than level-headed and submissive, this dark-eyed girl who sat across from him at table, listening impassively to his rambling conversations, or boasts of overwork to his brothers, without so much as a nod of her head. There was something flinty and cold about her small mouth, her drawn cheeks, something calculating and mocking about those steady eyes. Twice she caught him in obvious exaggerations with a few frigid well-chosen words.

He would have liked her to laugh at his witticisms, think him splendid in his new riding coats, and cater to his exhaustion when at last he collapsed each night at her side. It was wise to be firm with her, he decided finally, find details where her domestic management was lacking as he had often seen his brothers do at home with their wives. He must make it clear to this remote girl he was not so easily pleased as she supposed.

But all this brought from her was an icy incredulity, and a near-venomous smile. Her mother had died when she was twelve. When she walked up the aisle in bridal white, she had been mistress of
Bontemps
for five years. And realizing the stupidity of much of what he’d said, Philippe was pink with frustration to the roots of his hair. He sat sullenly at the breakfast table in his vast bedroom wishing he were home again in his mother’s house.

Aglae’s voice was monotone and low as she retaliated soon enough, reporting that the slaves complained of his contradictions, she would not allow her kitchen staff to be beaten, the overseer, old Langlois, were he not placated at once, might leave when he was in fact indispensable, having been at
Bontemps
since before she was born.

This was spoilt behavior, unforgivably arrogant, Philippe declared. Was he not aching in every muscle? He would not tolerate such talk from his wife a moment longer. She merely laughed as she walked out the door.

But she left him in painful confusion. He was injured and awkward in her presence and despised her for it from then on. She seemed forever in the background when he greeted family and friends, measuring him in her silence so that she became cruel in his mind, a vindictive and ungrateful girl. Had he not taken on this monstrous feudal paradise for her sake, and now he lived in dread that she should catch him in some small humiliation or find some evidence of his untutored judgment to throw in his face.

Dinners were agony for him, her sisters buzzing softly of unimportant
things, he loathed the sound of her spoon hitting the dish. And he drank late until the recurrent need, flamed in these long hours, to subdue her would lead him time and again to the bedroom door. There was no warmth between the sheets.

As the year passed it grew plain that she did not respect him. Those little witticisms of his, which had so warmed others, sounded ridiculous when uttered in her presence. His charm seemed to wither, and even at Christmas, with the house crowded, he could not escape some stumbling, inept vision of himself reflected in her hard eye. While she all the time grew in power, devoted mother to little Vincent and then after uncomplaining labor exemplary with her own child. People admired her at all turns for her poise and domestic capabilities, the slaves adored her, and she became the darling even of Philippe’s mother and his aunts. And all the while he kept this secret to himself that she was mean and even vicious to him, trying from time to time to find some way to correct her in the presence of the others, only to bungle this so that apologies were required as he felt the censure of silence all around. If only they knew! A wife should bolster her husband, wipe his brow. She, on the other hand, showed him eternally a deceitful outward respect. And once, alone in his study, he put his fist right through the plaster wall.

Oh, the loneliness of it.

But in his heart of hearts he feared sometimes he knew why her contempt for him had bitten so deep. There was something in himself that he accepted readily enough but did not admire. He didn’t really
want
to run
Bontemps
. He had no passion to emulate the dead Magloire, or his own brothers. And ashamed, he also wondered why he had let himself give up that life which had been so dear. He lived in fear of others perceiving this lack of ambition, or of making mistakes through carelessness that he might not be able to correct. And little Vincent, it would be years before he could lend a hand.

But by the end of summer, he was in a state of perpetual fury toward his wife, and wondered at the extraordinary independence with which she could go on from day to day pretending he was not even there. He was sorry for himself and wanted to spite her. And the limp passivity that was offered him at night, that which had so appealed to him in the beginning, seemed now a worse insult than all else he had had to bear. Well, she would give him children, a son already, and another on the way. But this merely added to her glory. He took to sleeping on the study couch.

But when his mother died, he sent at once for a young black maid who had been his favorite at home, and by whom some years before he had fathered a child. Of course he would not soil himself with such sordidness in the future, who would think of it, he’d been a boy (and
terrified, his brothers having threatened to send him away to school), but he needed some touch of warmth beneath his roof, and that dear sweet black girl had cried when he left. No one need know more about it, he wanted her there to arrange his clothes as she had done in years past.

However, Aglae upon seeing the woman’s copper-skinned little girl had given him such a withering smile that he convinced himself she was of low mind. He would not dream of humiliating himself with some household maid, but he did not shrink from giving everyone the impression through special favors to this woman that he had.

It was near winter again before he went to New Orleans, the second harvest over, the money in the bank. Two of the girls were married off, he was sick of the country. And riding through the narrow muddy streets of the “old city,” found himself at the gate of Magloire’s little mistress, that sweet Cecile who had lost both her protector and her expected child.

It had been too long since he had looked in on her, he told himself, this was a matter of concern. After all Magloire had been devoted to her, lawyers could not always be trusted to follow through in such matters. But he forgot all this when she opened the door.

“Michie Philippe!” she had cried out, and catching herself in the act of rushing toward him, stopped, her face in her hands.

“Now, now,
ma chère,”
he pressed her small head to his cashmere vest. Old Magloire could turn in his grave.

It did not always please him to think of the old man afterwards. There had been a bond between them, a trust. Aglae was his favorite daughter though little Vincent of course was the favorite child.

But Philippe had come to live for these days in New Orleans when entering that small cottage he felt himself grow so that reaching out, it seemed, he might touch the four walls. There were his slippers, his tobacco, the few liqueurs he preferred to brandy; and this soft scented woman who hung on his every word. He thought sometimes he had fallen in love with her eyes. So wide and mournful they seemed to him, never leaving him for an instant, and firing so magnificently when she smiled.

Even the birth of Marcel with all its inconveniences gave him some pleasure. Because he so loved the sight of the petite mother, and enjoyed the sound of the singing as he lay patiently across the bed.

And he was not out of sorts either when those shrewd aunts, Louisa and Colette, cornered him, making him promise to provide a European education for the boy. They were practical women, they had not been consulted in this little arrangement, but indeed they had had many a conversation with Monsieur Magloire, such a fine old
gentleman, didn’t he agree? “You know, Monsieur, what can the boy do here in Louisiana?” said that clever Colette, cocking her head to one side. “For a girl it’s different. But for the boy? An education in Paris, Monsieur, a few years abroad, four I should think, and perhaps the boy might be settled there someday, who knows?”

All right, all right, he would deposit money in the bank for him, he shrugged, opening his coat with both hands. Did they wish to take it out of his pockets? Must he pledge his faith in blood? “Stop it, stop it,” whispered his pretty little ladylove Cecile. She came to his rescue, and warmly he beamed down at her from his lofty height. “Forgive them, Monsieur,” she said.

“You will provide for the boy, Monsieur, four years in Paris when he is eighteen?”

“
Mais oui
, but of course!”

T
HERE IS A SAYING
in the Catholic Church; “Give me a child until he’s six years old and I’ll give you a Catholic forever.” Vincent Dazincourt was Magloire’s son till he was six years old and he remained Magloire’s son till the day he died.

No one had to turn him against the kindly blond-haired brother-in-law who told him the best bedtime stories he had ever heard; he was simply cut from a different cloth. He adored his sister Aglae with all the warmth and trust he might have shown his own mother, and she became for him as he matured at
Bontemps
the model of the woman he would one day take for his wife.

At fifteen he was riding the fields every day with the overseer, reading avidly the agricultural journals, and having spent years with Magloire’s diaries knew the failure and success of every refining experiment, every innovation in the planting, harvesting, grinding of the cane. Nights often found him accompanying Aglae to a slave’s sickbed, and as he rode the vast plantation from its river beaches to its back forest, he knew the names and the histories of every black man and woman whom he passed.

He’d been bookish as a young boy, read the contents of Magloire’s dusty library, went to school for a year in Baltimore and then on to Europe for fifteen months when he was twenty. In short, he traveled, was exposed to new ideas.

But he did not come home to consider the institution of slavery an evil, and being born to it, reasoned that he was a “Christian” planter in the act of civilizing the heathen, so that he carried out his “duty”
with conscience and a firm hand. The waste and suffering of Europe’s industrial cities had appalled him, and in the midst of his own orderly world he remained convinced that “the peculiar institution” had been misunderstood. But cruelty disgusted him as did all excess, so that he supervised the whip himself whenever possible and observing with a silent thoughtful face all cause and effect in the running of
Bontemps
believed in moderation, consistency, and reasonable demand. This made him to his slaves a more admirable master; at least they knew with young Michie Vince how things stood.

It was possible, in fact, to pass a year in his service without punishment, indeed a lifetime, and anyone might knock anytime at his office door. He saw the black babies baptized, rewarded wit and skill with promotion, but never, never did he set a slave free.

Philippe meanwhile regarded Vincent’s ambition with humor, was pleased with his quiet outward respect, and liking to encourage him in worthwhile ways shifted the burdens to his shoulders without argument whenever he showed the slightest interest in assuming them, the slightest good will.

But Vincent went to town as a young man, of course, and not dreaming of any complex alliances, fell hopelessly in love with the volatile Dolly Rose. Never had he known such a woman, dazzling in her high-pitched melancholy, and passionate beyond his wildest dreams. She danced with him at midnight around the spacious rooms of her elegant flat, singing between clenched teeth to the music of hired fiddlers, to fall exhausted finally against his chest. Morning was the time she liked for love, with the sun falling on her shameless nakedness. He buried his face in her perfumed hair.

But after the birth of their daughter she had been unfaithful to him, made him something of the laughing stock, was hostile and arrogant when questioned, only to throw herself into his arms declaring a love that consumed her to the bone. It brought him unbearable pain. He was not destined to understand her desperation and her cruelty. It was doubtful to him that she would ever understand it herself. Once on a Sunday morning, she had risen naked and slipped into his frock coat, walking straightbacked and jaunty about the room, her smooth naked legs like stems beneath the flaring serge, her hair tousled above the broad shoulders. And seating herself at last on a chair near him, she had drunk champagne from a china cup and said, “Nothing matters really except the ties of blood. All the rest is vanity, all the rest is lies.” He was to remember it afterward as his ship plowed the gray Atlantic, those pale stem legs crossed like a man’s, the bulge of her breast against the heavy black wool of that coat, and the Sunday sun spilling from the half-opened window onto her loose hair. He had kissed his little daughter before he left, squeezed her arms through
puffed sleeves and cried. And then wandering the drawing rooms of Paris and Rome, sought to forget the one while cherishing the other, and coming home found his daughter had just died. It was a judgment on both of them from God.

The night he followed the tall undertaker, Richard Lermontant, to Madame Elsie’s boardinghouse, he had been softly coaxed in the direction of Anna Bella by Philippe who had seen her often in the Rue Ste. Anne. But Vincent could hardly think of this because he was bitter and contrite and more miserable than he had ever been. He was done with wild affairs, he had murmured to his brother-in-law whom he had been somewhat glad to see at last among those distant colored faces at his daughter’s wake, nevertheless he felt the need more keenly than ever for loving hands.

Those days were agony for him, the days of coming home to little Lisa’s funeral. He would remember them always with a vague sense of horror and dread. He had wanted desperately to be with Aglae in some fantastical world where he might somehow speak to her of what he had “done.” Yet he shuddered at the thought of going home to
Bontemps
. After all these months in Europe, he would have to endure the most passionate welcome, nieces about his neck, sisters caressing him, when he could think of nothing but that little girl, his Lisa, dead. On the morning after the funeral he awoke in Madame Elsie’s boardinghouse to the sound of the child’s laughter as if she had been in the room. He could hear it so perfectly that for a moment he wanted nothing but to surrender to sleep, to hold her again in his dreams. He would have given her the world. She had her mother’s beauty, and the perfect heart of a pearl. He rose to wander numb about the boardinghouse corridors, the parlors, the open rooms.