Feast of All Saints (64 page)

So did it matter when that robust smiling planter, reins in one hand, trotted his mare through these narrow streets as if they were his own fields?

Of course Monsieur Philippe approved when Marcel spoke of his determination to sit for the examinations of the Ecole Normale in Paris. A year ago, Marcel could not have hoped to pass. But it was more than possible now. Christophe had told him so. “You’ll be prepared by the time you go.”

“Then I could teach at a French
lycée
, perhaps go into the university
itself some day,” Marcel explained as Monsieur Philippe blew the foam from the mug. “I would have my profession!” the word had a gilded ring. Of course the salary for such positions was nothing, most likely, he murmured. Monsieur Philippe said, “No matter,” under his breath. “Very good, very good indeed. But does that teacher ever teach you anything practical?” Philippe shrugged. “Sums, accounting, whatever,” he snapped his fingers to summon some intangible from the air.

He was pleased then to hear that Christophe had them read the English papers twice a week aloud in class, discuss the reportage, the political and financial events. And that Christophe had taken them all to see the Daguerreotypist, Jules Lion, who lectured on this magnificent new process, did Monsieur Philippe know of this man, a man of color, who had introduced the Daguerre method here from France?

“Ah, he is mad for all this, Monsieur,” Cecile laughed, almost as if slightly ill at ease to see Marcel go on so.

“But here, Monsieur,” Marcel was undaunted. “I insisted we all have a portrait made, together, to commemorate the school.” And Marcel produced the large shining full plate of these twenty individuals staring stiffly at the camera, a dark spectrum from the near-black Gaston, son of the shoemaker, to the snow-white Fantin Roget. Monsieur Philippe laughed.

“Magic, magic,” he said to Marcel with the characteristic twinkle in his eye. “One no longer has to sit for the painter, I always loathed it, so boring,” and then squinting he found Marcel among the assemblage with a playful laugh. “Ah, those Dumanoirs,” he said recognizing the son of the planter, “I tell you they do better than I!”

Cecile laughed as though this were capital wit. And in spite of Marcel’s increasing height, he discovered his father could still reach to pat him on the head.

Marcel smiled.
Ti
Marcel indeed. On the balmy nights of summer when he heard their lovemaking across the little courtyard, the heavy breaths, the creak of the giant bed, he lay calm in the shadows of his upstairs room waiting for them to fall asleep. He was too much the gentleman to have said it even to himself, but the truth was, he had a mistress as beautiful as Monsieur Philippe’s.

No one knew it. If Lisette knew it, and if other slaves knew it, as Christophe had once indicated they might, they had never said a word. Not to anyone that mattered, that is, not to anyone who might care.

And all winter long he had gone to Juliet, slipping out of his room when it was quiet to admit himself to the Mercier house with his own key. Over and over he had climbed anxiously into the smoky warmth
of that second floor to find her barefoot by the glowing grate, an angel in white flannel with high neck and long sleeves contrived to drive him mad. He would lose himself in caressing her, feeling those small angular limbs through the soft cloth as if he’d never seen them naked before.

And sometimes miserable and restless he had come to her just before dawn, already dressed for the day’s demands, wandering in the dark trickling garden under her window, singing her name. “Come up,” she would whisper to him, a ghost above, and he would find her carelessly dressed in one of Christophe’s cast-off shirts, its flared hem stroking her pubic down. She made coffee for him on the hissing stove, laughed when he reached for her legs. They would breakfast on fruits and bits of cheese in bed, and coming up after school, he would find her sleeping still in the perfumed room.

And Christophe all the while came and went, finding Marcel at home with no more comment than if they were one family, and Marcel had always been there. They studied together, argued philosophy over supper, went through old trunks and old books, played chess and would end on the floor of Christophe’s room before the fire with their wine.

Juliet was always near, bringing supper to them, mending some cuff or collar for Christophe as they talked, or sewing a button to Marcel’s coat. She brought cake to them when they were glassy-eyed and frenzied in their arguments and had forgotten that they must eat. And fluffing the pillows of Christophe’s bed, lay there at times to listen to them, her eyes on the ceiling, her hands beneath her hair. She would crook her legs under her flared skirts exactly as if she were a boy. And at table she was ever the servant with Bubbles’ silent assistance, anticipating their slightest need.

Collecting Christophe’s bruised books she scolded him for slopping the pages when he drank, saying, “Look at what you’ve done to this,” as she set it near the stove to dry. She urged heavy coats on him when he went out, or sent Bubbles rushing after with his wool cravat. And had the slave not cleaned his master’s boots she would have done that with her own hands.

All this Christophe took, meantime, as if it came to him on the open air. He was the magician who merely wishes for a full glass to find it in his hand. And Marcel had long come to realize and accept that Christophe was her first love when he was there. “Anyone coming into this house right now would think they were the lovers,” he mused, “her eyes never leave him for an instant.” And he felt both jealous and content.

From time to time, he remembered that letter Christophe had written to her from Paris to tell her he was coming back. He wished
now that he could see it again, just by chance perhaps lying open on a table or a desk. For in all Christophe’s long diatribes about his return home, he had never mentioned his mother with all the warmth, the feeling that had been written there. And here he was slumped in study by the fire letting her massage the muscles of his neck, stir the sugar into his coffee, even touch the cheroot with the match.

Yes, it was enough to make a lover jealous, but after all, when they were alone together in that bedroom, Juliet belonged to Marcel.

She was his completely between the sheets, showing him all manner of secrets with her lips and her hands. He thought some of it perverse at first and lay awake afterward uneasy and afraid. But gradually he became accustomed to her wild variations and saw them as the piquant delicacies known only to mature lovers, even as was her passion. He had not known before that women could so relish the act of love, in fact, Richard had told him quite simply once that they did not. And there she was, this woman who had had her pick of men, her head thrown back, her lids fluttering, dying over and over in his arms. He glanced in the mirror proudly, put a slender cigar to his lips, drank his wine with lusty despairing swallows, and laughed.

The waning season had found them a regular trio at the opera, Juliet in red silk and laced to make her waist a mere handful which he could not gather for himself save in the dark.

He had never dreamed that life could be this way.

It astonished him the contentment he knew when he was in that now familiar house, its nooks and crannies comfortable as his own. And time after time he would leave her fragrant bed and wandering down the hall, find Christophe writing by the dingy light of his smoking lamp. They would talk. The clock would tick, the wind made a mournful sound in the chimneys, Christophe scratched at the verses in front of him, then might crumple the paper into a ball and toss it into the fire. Once on the frostiest night, Christophe had all but dragged Marcel up on the sloping roof to look at the stars. He was afraid of falling, but the wilderness of glistening roofs spread out before him magically; and he would have liked to run from one to another, peering down through alleys at yellow windows, listening for mingled voices rising unevenly up the airwells, to find the river from this height and watch the steamboats, a spectacle of vague and dazzling lights in winter mists. Christophe knew the constellations, discovering each easily, and told him how much he would love the absolute clarity of the heavens when he first saw them over the open sea.

“But let’s not talk of that now,” Marcel had whispered, “of going, parting.” And realizing later that never had he said such a thing to anyone, he pondered the wordless feeling he had for Christophe which was love as surely as his passion for Juliet, and in some ways just as
volatile, sweet, with the ebb and flow of each new encounter be it argument, laughter, hours alone together reading in a silent room. They had seen pain together after all, even death, the excesses of temper and drink, and had fallen into some simple and utterly explicit language as do the more trusting members of a family who cannot conceive of life without each other and think nothing of it as time goes on.

And yet daily there was the relentless and demanding teacher at the podium who with a sharp accusing finger would catch Marcel as he lapsed into his habitual dreams. And once begging off an assignment late at night, Marcel was lacerated by such a venomous glance that he went at once to beg Christophe’s forgiveness and home to do the appointed work.

Yet there were times when a darkness came over Marcel, and waking up in Juliet’s bed, he saw the world through her shuttered windows, slits of green leaf and sun seemingly beyond him, and feeling stifled suddenly he sought the open air.

It was spring, the damp winter was dying in warmer though brisk winds. He found himself wandering back of town, out beyond the Place Congo to the Bayou Cemetery and sometimes back again through the Rue St. Louis past the cottage he knew to be Anna Bella’s home. His steps would quicken then, his eyes averted, and he would embroil himself in other thoughts, wondering after, why he had chosen that path. Everyone said she was happy. Some said now she was expecting a child. He would roam the markets and wharves as he used to do before, thinking vaguely, ah, well she will be indoors after this and I won’t see her, but there came some recurrent sensation of being with her in some sunny place, of white china, and some wholesome rippling talk. And dropping in at the Lermontants for dinner—he was always welcome and he knew it—he would immerse himself in their interminable and interesting conversations, occasionally looking around the orderly table—Richard’s mother beckoning with whispers to Placide, Rudolphe in the midst of some adamant point on the economy, and Richard musing with his glass—and thinking of Juliet, he would wonder: what would they do if they knew? What would they think? Rudolphe came so often to the back reading room of Christophe’s house, Giselle’s oldest boy, Frederick, had been allowed to sit in on class when in town. What would they think? It almost brought a smile to his lips, but then again it did not. Who could understand this madness, a woman past forty, a boy of fifteen? And then he felt disloyal to his love, and later would take Juliet flowers which he dropped one by one along the length of her bed.

Once wakening by himself near the very stroke of midnight he had been possessed by a disembodied thought: Anna Bella was no
longer innocent; Anna Bella was a woman; Anna Bella was carrying a child.

But his mistress in the half-light stretched her long brown limbs and shifted like a feline against his chest. She didn’t question the urgency with which he awakened her, nor the exhaustion with which he finally fell to sleep.

“If only I could speak of it to one living soul,” he thought once dismally seeing Juliet in the street. Alphonse LeMond the tailor had come with her to the door of his shop, entrusting a parcel to Bubbles’ hands. It was sweet to watch her unnoticed, her sprightly figure in shimmering taffeta and the lean graceful black servant at her side. “If only I could speak of it to a living soul.

“But I can’t. If I could I would speak of it to Chris, but I can’t, and I never will.”

Because in all those months Christophe had never acknowledged the affair with a single word. There were three subjects one did not speak of in this house which had become Marcel’s home: the first was the Englishman, the second was Juliet’s father, the black Haitian, the third was this day-to-day affair.

And remembering that awful fight between mother and son when Juliet had taunted Christophe, “Tell him the real reason you don’t want us together!” Marcel would not dare to break this silence on any of the three scores. That she had been taunting Christophe with a son’s natural jealousy of his mother, Marcel had no doubt.

But sometime in the early summer, Marcel could not precisely recall, he had wandered up the stairs in the small hours and found Christophe in her bed. Dressed, of course, and rumpled, with the wine bottle beside him on the floor. He’d fallen asleep there obviously, and she, seeing no earthly reason to move him, lay curled against him under his arm. A shocking impropriety anywhere else, but why not under this roof? It seemed similar to so much that happened here, a matter the world would misunderstand. Juliet had risen, gestured for silence, and covering her son’s shoulders, led Marcel down the hall. In Christophe’s bed they’d made love and this being new and different it excited Marcel wildly. He couldn’t hold her tight enough, wanted to make her cry out. It happened again. And again.

And even once he had awakened to find the three of them nestled in the same bed, Christophe in shirtsleeves beside his mother who between them had slipped into the modesty of her gown. It was Christophe who rose before anyone and, as if shocked to find himself there, left at once.

But what pleasure had Christophe in his life right now other than this simple affection? What would his rigid discipline allow? Aside from the occasional excess of the bottle, his was a monk’s life, and his room
with its books, narrow bed, and crowded desk had become a cell. Rarely if ever did the evenings find him gone, he was writing, studying, shuffling his students’ pages on the dining table or roaming about the house as if it had become a cloister, his lips moving silently with his thoughts. And then some physical task would obsess him, he must change every picture on the wall of the classroom, or wrestle trunks about the damp and leaking attic rooms. Bubbles must not be allowed to scrub the grates without help, it was too much for him; and Christophe, much to Bubbles’ misery, took the rake from him time after time to pull the weeds from the flags. A shocking thing this, a gentleman with callouses on his hands. And Bubbles said so whenever he could.