Feast of All Saints (58 page)

When he went out finally, promising to be back for supper, she had wrapped her cape around her, ignoring Zurlina’s outraged protests, and walked the long windy streets to Madame Elsie’s where she wandered alone in the rain in the backyard. A nest of ferns still grew in the shelter of the cistern. She dug up the best of these herself. It was in the window in a porcelain pot, its spears spreading in the steamy warmth of the cottage, when Monsieur Vincent came home.

I
T WAS A MONTH
after Madame Elsie died that Anna Bella learned she was pregnant. This was early spring, and the winter having retreated slowly still gave them chill damp days. Not a fortnight had passed without a visit from Monsieur Vincent. He would come swinging through the gate with quick hard steps, carrying flowers, and sugar liqueurs in his arms. He had bought Zurlina after Madame Elsie’s passing, gotten Anna Bella’s modest settlement from her out of the tangle of the courts, and matters had settled into a routine. He ate heartily, rose early, studied late by the fire. Sometimes in bed naked from the waist he read the papers he had come to New Orleans expressly to buy or went through treatises on economics, and the cultivation of sugar in other lands.

He had papers from the land office which he examined, always locking them up afterward, and went off to lawyers in the St. Louis Hotel, bringing back candy for Anna Bella or some fine article from a
shop window he imagined that she might like. Sometimes she laughed at these gifts, they were so strange, so luxurious in their uselessness, little statues, a foreign coin in a minute rosewood stand, ancient bits of lace for her to copy that were themselves so fragile they required a frame.

As the weather warmed and the garden blossomed she felt as if she’d always known him, and she couldn’t even remember him as that earlier remote and frightening young man. He seemed very young to her at times, a boy of twenty-two; yet at others, he was a specter at her door with his gleaming black hair, those magnetic eyes, his dark cape wrapped around him as if he were the figment of doom.

But in their day-to-day domesticity, he had taken on a perfection in her eyes. She loved the sight of him at leisure, his linen shirt undone at the throat so she could see the thin curls of hair on his chest. He had this same soft growth on his wrists where she liked to play with it and move her fingers through it as if it were a wild land of tall grass and they were little creatures on the run. But it was his face that was the perfect part, she often thought, loving the high cheekbones and the graven eyelids, and eyes like beads of jet.

The mere sight of him, unexpected at the gate, could make her weak. A shock passed through her body often in her dreams, and opening her eyes in the empty bed she felt a craving all over when he was not there.

He would kiss her all the time as if he could not get enough of it, not in passion but some lovely pleasurable tenderness such as one lavishes on little girls. And she, loving to touch him in any way, would come round him in his busiest moments to work the tired muscles of his neck and shoulders, even once in a while to run her hairbrush gently through his thick hair. She liked to roll his curls on her finger until with a tightening of his lips, he looked at the ceiling and reached out for her hand. But even then he smiled, kissing her fingers, it was impossible to think of him in a temper, the mere idea of it could fill her with dread.

But on the night that she was to tell him of the coming baby, she was uneasy. She had realized some time ago that he was skilled at interrupting the act of love just at the crucial point to prevent conception, and he had not consulted her in this, nor had she wanted to question him. But now that she knew for certain she was pregnant she was filled with a dull misery, fearing his unhappiness, and her own unhappiness, and that he would not be pleased, nor would he love this child.

The night was warm when he came, and he asked at once for a bath. Zurlina had long ago set up his broad boatlike iron tub in the small unused back bedroom of the cottage, and he peeled off his
clothes as the water on the stove began to boil. Anna Bella got his soap and the towels and filled the tub. She lit the candle on the washstand, and turned her back demurely as he came from behind the screen and slipped into the steaming water. He let out a moan of pleasure. She picked up the soap and leaning over daintily rubbed it into the wash-cloth that she brought along his back.

“Do you love me?” he asked playfully.

“You know I love you, Michie Vince, why do you tease?” she said. She rubbed the soap well into his neck, lifting his dark curls and holding them up until she rinsed him. She touched them lovingly with the towel.

“And what do you do when I’m gone?”

“Think about you,” she said.

“And when you’re not thinking about me?” Vincent laid his head back on the curled edge of the bathtub, sliding deeper into the water, and looked up into her eyes.

“And when is that, that I’m not thinking about you, Michie Vince?” she smiled.

She came round the tub, dropping down on her knees with the grace of a curtsy, and began to gently soap his chest.

“So, tell me why you’re not glad to see me,” he said in a low voice.

“Why, Michie Vince, what do you mean?” she asked. But it was no use trying to hide it. He took the washcloth out of her hand. “Leave that, I’m clean enough,” he said. “Talk to me, Anna Bella, what’s wrong?”

She rose slowly, her hand instinctively moving around her waist. “I do so want a little baby, Michie Vince, I guess, I guess I would never want anything that made you unhappy with me…”

“Is that it, then?” he asked softly. She didn’t dare to look at his face. She moved slowly to the coal stove and opened the door just a crack to let out some heat. He had stepped out of the tub behind her and drying quickly, slipped into his robe. She heard him padding across the bedroom, and took a deep breath. A strange thought passed over her, clear and wordless, that gave her exquisite pain. She had not planned to love this man really. She had not ever expected it. She loved Marcel too much. And she knew too little of Michie Vince to expect anything, besides. But she had been utterly won over in the past months by his genuine gentility and his brooding charm. She loved him. It was that simple. She loved him and respected him, respected all that was decent in him, honorable, a code of behavior that seemed to extend to all human beings who had not lost his trust. She had sensed before now that this man would treat her decently long after he had ceased to want her, as he treated everyone decently, and that respect had so warmed her affection for him that somewhere, mysteriously it had turned to love.

That he was ecstatically happy with her she understood, but did he love her? She was not so sure.

When she went into the dining room, she found him sitting in his armchair by the empty parlor grate.

“Come here,” he said wearily. And as she obeyed he put his arm around her waist. “It isn’t fair of me, is it? To ask you to wait?”

“Michie Vince,” she said. “It’s already done.”

“Aah,” he sat back. She could see his relief. He hesitated for a moment and then rising wound her in his arms. He kissed her fervently, and sweetly at the same time.

“You know, I’m a fool,” he said. “I can already see it, I can see the glow in your cheeks.”

She shook her head, this was all flattery.

“No,” he said. “It’s true. You’ve got to have everything, do you hear me, everything that will make you comfortable. Do you understand?”

They dined early. She had not told Zurlina this news, and he seemed to sense at once that she didn’t want to talk about it when Zurlina was near.

“And how long will it be, then?” he asked. “Before you must…well, stay in?”

“Oh, a few months,” she said. “I’m not worried about all that.”

“I am,” he answered. “But why?”

“Because I know that when I’m not here, you’re very alone.”

She laughed suddenly with delight. “Well, when that little baby comes, it won’t be that way anymore, then I’ll have part of you here with me all the time.” She stopped, not sure what she had read in his face. Perhaps she’d said too much.

“What about that girl?” he asked, leaning forward on his elbows, “the girl who gave you that little
secrétaire?”

“She only came that once,” Anna Bella shrugged. “We were never really good friends, it was Marcel who was my friend, Marcel, her brother, you remember me telling you all about Marcel.”

“And does he come…when I’m not here?” He had given his permission for this quite explicitly and there was nothing of suspicion now in his tone.

“No, he doesn’t come,” she said. She didn’t want to talk of this, even to think about it, she wanted to think of the baby, or think of nothing at all. Just be in this room, with the light of the candles and Michie Vince sitting comfortably across from her, and she was very surprised when he said,

“Would it help if I were to speak to him, to tell him that he might visit you if he likes?”

“Would you do that!” she whispered, amazed.

“I’m going to be gone for long periods this summer, there’ll be too much work at
Bontemps
. There’ll be months when I can’t come to see you at all. You told me once he was a brother to you, that you were the closest of friends…”

She studied his innocent, trusting face. His quick black eyes moved expressively as he spoke. He had met this boy once, Marcel, he was saying, it would be a small matter putting him at ease.

She experienced a jarring sensation then because she was suddenly flooded with memories that seemed to come from another world. And as these memories inundated her, she had the odd experience of thinking about two incidents at the same time. On the one hand, she was exquisitely aware of Marcel’s presence as if he were in this room, not the Marcel who had kissed her, but the raw and deeply trusting friend who had parted from her that last time they’d been together alone in the
garçonniere
. And on the other hand, she had an immediate and unexamined recollection of Lisette laughing in the back kitchen as she reported to Zurlina that Marcel was indeed spending his nights with Juliet Mercier. A sadness came over her. She was still looking at Michie Vince, and her love for him was so strong and so undoubted that she felt a bitter-sweet longing for Marcel as one might for a loved one who was actually dead. But was it possible that some ugly carnality had only arisen for a short time to mar that friendship which had been finer, more vigorous than any she’d ever known? Was it possible to somehow regain that innocence, that trust? Here she was with child, and there he was with a mistress, and in her mind she went back, way back to some evening in the parlor behind the boardinghouse when the two of them as children had been alone. The subject of the conversation had long escaped her leaving behind only the impression of closeness, of pure and certain love.

“Would you do that, Michie Vince?” she asked. “Would you really do it? I think if you were to tell him it was all right, he might come.”

“You know,
ma chère,”
he said with a peculiar look of wonder, “for you I’d do almost anything, anything that is within my power to do.”

He wanted to make love. He had given the series of indefinable little signals, rising without a word, wandering into the darkened bedroom without the candle. She heard the faint soft sounds of the quilts being folded back. As soon as she was in his arms, he alarmed her with his passion, stunned her with rapid kisses, his hands exploring her body with a new boldness that neither of them had known. She did not realize that her condition had excited him and relieved him. He didn’t have to be careful anymore, the blood was teeming in his brain.

Later she found him again in the parlor, alone. He turned to embrace her at once with such a frightening urgency that she brought up the candle and looked into his face.

“What is it, Michie Vince?” she asked. “Is it the baby?”

“No, no,” he shook his head shutting his eyes. She believed him. Often she had seen this struggle in his face. And now, as always, he said it was “nothing, nothing.”

“Just hold me,” he whispered. It seemed that passion did nothing to quiet this. But strangely enough she felt closer to him in these moments, when he needed her, clung to her. And all that was between them passed through their bodies to one another, it had been the same many times when they’d parted at the gate and a forlorn being she did not know had peered at her from his black eyes.

It was that strange being, gentle, relentless in his silent and consuming need, who lived with her for the next few days.

And when it came time for him to leave again, she watched him go in the grip of his dark feeling, and felt a gnawing pain. She knew him better than she had ever known anyone, and yet something divided them, hopelessly, something she knew instinctively had little to do with any fault in herself.

But what she failed to understand about Vincent was this. All her life it had been easy for her to tell her troubles to others, to lay her head on Old Captain’s chest, or let the tears flow from her eyes on the first night of love, whispering, “Monsieur, I’m afraid.” She knew at once what troubled her, or broke her heart, just as she knew what was dishonest and wore on her nerves.

But for a man of Vincent’s makeup such confidences were a luxury he would never enjoy. And even if he had somehow managed to overcome his profound disinclination, there were reasons why he could not confess to her the particular troubles on his mind. She knew the Ste. Marie family, his brother-in-law, Philippe. It was unthinkable that he could burden her with the turmoil at
Bontemps
.

For in the months after his return from Europe he had found that the new overseer, far less scrupulous or experienced than the deceased Langlois, had been given a free hand. Money was missing from the coffers obviously, or wasted in inefficiencies, Vincent could not at first tell. And during his months abroad a pregnant slave woman had been beaten to death. A hole had been dug in the ground over which her body had been stretched for the whipping so as to protect the child. But she’d aborted during the night and been found in the morning dead. Older slaves took this to Michie Vince just as soon as they could find the chance with him alone. Nonc Pierre and Nonc Gaston, the elders in the cabins, laying it all out for him in low reverent whispers, didn’t have to tell him that he was the only court of appeals. She’d been a lost soul, that poor slave woman, no man could claim or would claim to have been the father of that child, else the slaves might have been in a worse state than they were.