Feast of All Saints (52 page)

Flowers shivered on the empty dining tables, the smell of warm biscuits came from the pantry, and across that sea of round white linen tablecloths, he saw her, Anna Bella, that girl. She sat in a shaft of sunlight working with a needle a small band of lace, and looked up suddenly to him when he came into the double doors. She said something simple to fill the silence. She rose to get for him whatever he might want. It was so hot, she was saying, her voice liquid and sweet and flowing easily into some mellow rhythm of conversation that soothed him as though she had been touching him, stroking his fevered temples, telling his aching heart it was all right. He remembered afterward that he had made her sit down, that he had asked her some feeble, foolish question and that at last assured of the warmth of her voice, he had lapsed into himself again, near in his strangled silence to someone who would talk to him, someone who was warm to him, someone who would give him the tenderest, the most genuine smile.

He was there the following night and for all the rest of the week. Philippe had not exaggerated the special appeal of this American colored girl, he had to admit, as he lay with his coffee, thinking in his bed, this girl with a baby’s cheeks, who spoke French so slowly but so nicely, devoid of vanity, as batting her long thick lashes she seemed the natural model for this gesture so often cultivated by women Vincent had never liked. She was not cunning and exquisite as Dolly had been, she did not go to the veins like champagne. But an ineffable sweetness seemed to suffuse her speech and her subtlest gestures, so that he was almost painfully drawn to her in his grief, and felt a near-delicious calm when he merely glimpsed her moving about the rooms.

However, something else stirred deep inside him as he dozed, thinking of her, against his white pillows, something of which he had never before been aware.

He had grown up among black nurses, cooks, coachmen, soft African-voiced beings who surrounded him with gentleness and attentive care. He had felt warmed by their laughter and their hands. And though he would never truly have given in to the desire to force himself upon one of his slave women, he had known that desire in someplace a little less obscure to him than his dreams: that image of the yielding black girl as she sinks into the shadows of the cabin, firelight glinting on her long neck and soulful eyes, begging, “Please, Michie, please don’t…” It exploded in his brain as Anna Bella came forward, hips swaying under those scalloped skirts. Yes…this was precisely the brand of nymph that, flushed sighing from the wood, lurked beneath Anna Bella’s lace.

Only when he had to, did he return to
Bontemps
. Excuses couldn’t cover it any longer. Aglae knew he had arrived, he had picked up his messages at the St. Louis Hotel. So he boarded the crowded steamboat at five o’clock in the evening, intoxicated by the breadth of the mighty river, glad for the first time to be home. He had presents for everyone, sat down to the table laden with his favorite dishes, and clasped in both hands his little nieces and nephews who buried their kisses in his neck. How sweet it had been to mount the front steps, between those majestic columns, to hear the click of his heels on these marble floors. The wealth of Europe could not dim the perfection of all that lay about him, and the priceless devotion of his own kin. He told foolish stories, absurd details of trunks lost, packets behind time, little hotels where he had had to make signs for a razor and basin, and laughing, kissed Aglae again and again.

She was older, remarkably older, and never given to
enbonpoint
as one might expect at this age, seemed almost painfully drawn. He felt such a rush of relief at the sound of her steps ahead of him in the
corridor, the vision of her throwing back the doors to his room. The familiar tone of her voice brought him several times to the verge of tears.

But that night, slipping out of the netting that draped his bed, he wandered out onto the broad upstairs gallery facing the river and thought of his little girl. Over a year ago, he had taken her into his room at the Hotel St. Louis the night before he was to sail. He had fed her himself with a spoon from the supper table, and much to her nurse’s disapproval brought her to sleep in his own bed. So Dolly would be furious with him for keeping her overnight. He did not care. He nestled her against his chest in the dark, and when the heavy rap came on his door before dawn, he opened his eyes to see her smile. She had been waiting for him to awaken, she laughed with a shrill and perfect delight.

Now on the cool breeze-swept gallery, gazing out at the distant river which he could no longer subtract from the darkness, the image of Anna Bella wound its way into his grief. He saw those lovely rounded cheeks, the delicate waist, those deft little fingers reaching for the needle and pulling it through the cloth.
Mon Dieu
, he didn’t understand life. Patterns did not soothe him because he suspected them. He rubbed his eyes. He would go back to Madame Elsie’s before the week was ended, he would think of some excuse. It was as if that colored girl’s sweetness mingled with the heavy atmosphere of death that lay over him, like the flowers beside the coffin; only he could not make that distinction, he merely saw those chrysanthemums again, and Anna Bella, in that shaft of sunlight, sewing, alone in that empty room.

Then Aglae came onto the gallery. He felt strangely shaken to see her coming along the rail. She wore a high-necked dressing gown that ruffled out from her ankles in the breeze. She stood quietly for a while as though she knew that he would rather be alone. And then turning, she looked into his eyes.

Only a little light seeped from the bedroom, enough to see all, but not clearly; however, she was in that light as she turned. “Any death is hard, Vincent,” she said. “And one of the worst is the death of an innocent child.”

He turned away from her, catching his breath.

“Mon frère,”
she said, “learn by your mistakes.” And then kissing him, she left him alone.

He was never to know by what intricate grapevine this news had reached her, or what precisely she had heard. It was unthinkable that Philippe could have told her, no use even considering that. And Vincent and Aglae never spoke of it again. But sometimes in the weeks
that followed, when she asked whether he took proper care of himself in New Orleans, might not be coming home too tired for his health and his rigorous schedule, he felt she was pleading with him. And he heard again that admonition, “learn by your mistakes.”

Without coyness, he gave her assurances at once. He needed the lights of the city now and then, he wasn’t ready after months abroad to settle into the country routine. And forfeiting an occasional plan to visit Anna Bella, he read stories to his nieces and nephews by the home fires instead. He would sit up late in the library, leave his brother-in-law alone to the pleasures of the bottle, and riding out early down along the gray mud beach of the river he looked at the cold sky like a man saying his prayers.

Bontemps
had never been so beautiful, so rich. The death of Langlois, the old overseer who had succumbed in his absence, was a sadness. But there was the new man and the new harvest and when had the cane looked so high, so hardy, so green? He would break in this new overseer to his ways, he was home again, went out at night with his lantern to see the foal delivered of his favorite mare, and roaming through the rose garden in the early mist, drank thick soup for breakfast while Cook in her snow-white bandanna pouring the milk for him, said, “Michie, don’t you ever leave us again.”

Months later, Philippe from the carriage window pointed out the Ste. Marie cottage in the Rue Ste. Anne. The carriage had creaked to a stop. Vincent’s soul shriveled as he turned his head. At first he did not believe that he had understood, that here his brother-in-law kept a colored family! And would tell him this casually as they passed the gate!

But the morning after, stopping for Philippe again, he had seen the fruits of this alliance plain enough. There stood the blond-haired boy with the honey-colored skin staring at him with those shameless blue eyes. Kinky hair like that of a fieldhand, only it was the color of his father’s. Vincent’s cheeks burned.

He adored Aglae! Philippe knew this. But even if they had despised each other, brother and sister, this should never have been revealed to him, this little slope-roofed cottage under the magnolia tree and that oddly handsome blue-eyed quadroon in Sunday best at the gate.

It was more than Vincent could bear. He had ridden back to
Bontemps
in unyielding silence. And in the plantation library at night, he brooded on the promises he had made that very day. Anna Bella Monroe was his now. But by God, that alliance would end with honor and dignity at the very moment he contracted for a proper marriage, and striking the poker on the grate, he made that vow to a wife he had not yet laid eyes upon, a woman he did not yet even know. Anna Bella’s house would not be in that street, he would tell Madame Elsie
this was his one requirement, he must not have to pass through the Rue Ste. Anne.

W
HEN
A
NNA
B
ELLA
told Marcel that she didn’t care anything for “that man,” she had not been telling a lie. She had not let herself care for Vincent Dazincourt because she was convinced that the life he offered her was wrong.

This was not a heartfelt religious conviction, though Anna Bella was devoted to the Virgin and made special novenas to her on her own. She could have lived without the sacraments and was preparing to live without them now. On the Sunday morning that she saw Marcel, she did not receive Communion but she felt some personal and unshakable confidence that God still heard her prayers. She would go to Mass all her life no matter what she did, and light candles before the saints for all the causes that she knew.

But the Catholic Church was not the church to which she’d been born, and it seemed ornate and alien at times of real trouble, it was a luxury like the lace she’d learned to make, the French language she had acquired. And when she received the offer from Vincent Dazincourt, she had a strong instinct that
plaçage
, that age-old alliance of a white man and a dark woman, was an evil and unwholesome life.

She had seen it all around her, this alliance, with its promises, its luxuries, its ties. And she had known the haughty dashing ladies of the demi-monde, Dolly Rose and her indomitable mother; and such proud and enduring women as Cecile Ste. Marie. But she had seen the insecurity also, and the ultimate unhappiness that such knots spawn. She had never thought of this for herself.

For Anna Bella, there shone across the vista of childhood the warm light of an earlier time when her father and mother had been with her, and there had been simple hearty meals at the deal table, and soft family conversation by a dying kitchen fire. She could remember snatches of things that still conveyed extraordinary pleasure…white starched curtains, rag dolls in gingham dresses with shining button eyes. Her mother could swing her up on the hip with one arm, and throw the clothes over the line with the other hand. She didn’t remember her mother’s death clearly, it seems they sent her out to play. And coming back into the house, she had seen the mattress stripped of its sheet and had known that her mother was gone forever. She could not remember a funeral or a grave.

But all the rough edges had been worn from these remembrances,
and so was the sense of time. She had been innocent in a perfect world, and had those parents lived, Emma and Martin Monroe, Anna Bella was convinced she would not be drawn out of innocence now.

But she had been at the barbershop window when the bullet hit her father, and she had seen him, the blood splattering from his skull, as he fell in the street. He had stepped out with his white barber’s jacket on, saying to the customer in the chair, “Just you wait.” Just you wait. She never forgot those words. It seemed to her, though it must have been wrong, that Old Captain brought her down to New Orleans that very night, stopping at a roadside tavern where she’d been sick and feverish and cried. She had one dress in which she slept, and she’d forgotten her precious doll. She could never remember anyone telling her Old Captain was her father’s father, but she knew it, and that he had an old white family in those parts so that he couldn’t take her in.

Madame Elsie gave her new clothes, a silver-backed mirror, and put her out alone on the gallery in the dark when she cried. And that mean Zurlina, Madame Elsie’s maid, said, “Eat that cake!” as if it were something bad when it tasted sweet. Zurlina tied her sash too tight, yanked with the brush at her hair. “Look at those lips, those thick lips,” she would say under her breath, “and that nose of yours, like to cover your face.” She herself was a thin-faced mulatto slave. She dragged Anna Bella along the porch saying, “Now don’t you get that pinafore dirty, don’t you touch anything, be still.”

But in bed at night, Anna Bella turned the pages of old books, and hummed the Latin hymns she had heard in church. Madame Elsie gave her a doll dressed as a princess. She held it as she slept deeply in her feather bed. The world was scented soap, starched dresses. Madame Elsie appeared in the dark over her pillow holding a candle. “Come, read to me, child, read to me,” she said, her cane scraping on the boards. She sat slumped on the side of her great bed, lace-trimmed flannel gown sagging over her gaunt bosom, too tired it seemed to move the covers over her lap. “See that girl?” she held an oval porcelain of a white woman, “That’s my daughter, my girl,” she would sigh, her nostrils quivering, and toss the gray braid that hung down her back. “Come on, child.” She put Anna Bella on the pillow. They went to sleep.

The gentlemen boarders picked her up, put coins in her hand, remembered in town to buy her a little sweet. And Old Captain coming up the stairs with a thump said, “How is my little one?” Zurlina whispered, brushing her long black hair, “Look at that nigger mouth!”

She was busy all the time, learning French from the neighborhood children, even that mean little stuck-up Marcel Ste. Marie. Always dressed for Sunday Mass, he passed with a solemn face, engaged in the burial of a dead bird he’d found in the yard. She studied for a
while with Mr. Parkington, that drunk man from Boston who couldn’t otherwise pay his bills. ’Course he was never drunk in the mornings, and she liked to make lace, loved it when the Mesdames Louisa and Colette came to call, showing her the patterns engraved on paper, in their bulging valises they had the needles and the thread.