Feast of All Saints (67 page)

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do with her! Why she hasn’t run away for good before this, I don’t know.”

“This is her town, Marcel, where would she go? Away from New Orleans and her own people? No. She wants to be free right here, Marcel, not living hand-to-mouth, but set up nicely somewhere right here. That’s not to say she couldn’t ruin herself, ruin any chance she’s got. But you don’t think Michie Philippe would send the police after her if she did run away…”

“Anna Bella,” he laughed. “What do I know? Had you asked me yesterday could he put his own daughter, black or colored, to licking her brother’s and sister’s boots, I would have said never. Ties of blood mean something to the man, he wouldn’t stoop so low. But that’s just what he’s done. She’s my sister! And my mother knows this, has always known.” He stopped. This was one salient aspect of the entire revelation that caused him private and particular grief. “Marie doesn’t guess,” he said in a calmer voice. “Anna Bella, I tell you I can’t go on under the same roof with Lisette now that I know this, and with Marie it would be the same way. Do you know she brushes Marie’s hair every night, she takes her dresses from the laundress, swears they’re not done well enough and heats up the iron again after the supper’s cleared away at night? I see her down there in the open kitchen ironing those dresses while Marie sleeps. What am I going to do with her? What am I going to do with myself?”

He could not see the reservation in Anna Bella’s face as he said these last words. He could not know that Anna Bella had overheard too much of Lisette’s sharp tongue to believe Lisette had ever loved Marie. Lisette played with those pretty dresses as poor children play with dolls.

“There’s only one thing you can do as I see it, and I think you know what that is,” she said. “You’ve got to get Michie Philippe to keep his promise to her. She’s got to get her freedom for your sake now as well as her own.”

He was quiet. In all the day’s interminable wanderings this single fact had never come clear in his mind.

“That girl’s ruining herself in ways you don’t even know,” Anna Bella murmured, “what with that Lola Dedé the voodooienne…”

“I know that,” Marcel said with a nod. “But how can I do this? No one demands anything of Monsieur Philippe! If you knew how things stood with me and…”

“I’m not talking about demands, Marcel, I’m talking about getting him to do it, they aren’t the same thing. You’ve got to put it to him in the right way, don’t you see, you’ve got to convince him it’d be best for all of you if Lisette wasn’t around. Now don’t tell me that man would put his own daughter on the block. Don’t you see, you’ve got to put it like an advantage to the peace of the house if Lisette goes. You’ve got to work up to it, you’ve got to begin by asking him gently if he means to do it sometime, you’ve got to play it smart.”

“I can’t do that! I swear if he were in town now, I don’t know that I could look him in the eye. I couldn’t stay in the house with him.”

“Stop that,” she said. “Don’t you ever say that. Don’t you ever stop looking him in the eye or staying in the same house, and don’t you ever let him know that you know! You just have to set your mind on one thing, the best way of getting that girl free without making the man mad. You’ve got to keep pride out of it, not just for her sake, but for your own.”

She stopped, alarmed at her own heat. “Don’t you let it come between you, Marcel, you and your father. You know what that could mean.”

He was musing. He was thinking of Zazu, tall, slender and ebony black as she’d been when he was a little boy, thinking of that mute subservience, the decorous manner in which Zazu had always waited upon Cecile, and Cecile’s quiet dismissal, while Zazu had once been…But he would become angry if he thought of it again, and blinded by that anger he would not be able to extricate Lisette from this, nor himself. Anna Bella was right the way Anna Bella was ‘most always right.

“And what will she do if she gets free?” he murmured thoughtfully. “There was a time when the better slaves used to call on her, the blacksmith Gaston, you remember, and those blacks that worked at the hotels…But lately, what’s happened to her with that Lola Dedé and those women in that house…”

“All that in time,” Anna Bella said. “When that girl’s free and on her own. She’s a smart girl, smart as you and me, the way I see it, and with a little money in her pocket she can hire out as a cook, as a lady’s maid. I’d hire her in a minute myself if you want to know it, and she’d have decent wages and…”

“You’re right.” I must think practically, I must be wily, I must accomplish this, he thought, with disgust.

They sat for a long while in silence. He lifted the glass of white wine she’d given him and tasted it for the first time. “You’re right,” he said again softly with resignation. “I will manage to get her free.”

A mellow breeze moved through the open door, and the dull glow of the lights beyond the gate made a soft halo of the edges of her hair. She moved her palmetto fan drowsily.

“I want to know…” Marcel said finally. “How is it with you?”

He felt an anxious tremor as he asked this question, as if venturing into waters where he might be afraid. It had been easy to talk of Lisette, to let Lisette bring them together, but now—

“Well, you can see that for yourself, can’t you?” she smiled. But she wasn’t so big yet with the baby, and draped with the white shawl as she was, no one could have told. What was changed about her—he couldn’t really put it into words. The voice was a woman’s voice? But hadn’t it been always? And there was that easy confidence about the way she moved, the way she spoke. And they were as close it seemed suddenly as they had ever been.

“No, you know what I mean, Anna Bella,” he strained to make out her expression in the dark.

“He’s more than a fine man, Marcel,” she said, her voice low with feeling. “I am not fortunate, I am blessed!”

He did not answer. And she could not guess that he had been surprised to discover that this was not the response from her that he had wanted to hear. What did he want, he thought in disgust, for her to be miserable? “I’m glad,” he said softly, but the words stuck in his throat. “Of course, it’s what I’ve heard all along. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d heard different.” And why couldn’t he mean that, after all this, the longest, most eventful year of his life? He wondered if those perceptive eyes could, in fact, see the lie in the dark.

“What sort of a man is he?” he asked dryly.

“I can’t describe him, not in a few words, I don’t know where to begin. He’s a man that lives for his work, Marcel, that plantation, it’s his life. I never knew there was so much to study in the cultivating of sugar cane, I never saw so many books and letters as he reads on that one subject, of how to grow it, cut it, refine it, ship it out. I wonder sometimes if all hardworking men don’t have something in common, really, whether they’re gentlemen or laborers or craftsmen like old Jean Jacques. I mean, that is, men who love what they do. It’s an excitement, it’s something almost magical in their lives. You remember, watching Jean Jacques in the shop with his chisels, his tools.”

He nodded. Time would never diminish that.

“I remember my Daddy,” she went on, “when he used to be working
on his books, figuring how he could pay off the barber shop and that little farm we had outside of town. My Daddy had two pieces of property when he died and he was a young man. He loved his work, you know what I’m saying? I suppose it’s like that with you when you’re studying for school, and when you’re in Michie Christophe’s class. Everybody says you’re the star pupil these days and that Augustin Dumanoir from St. Landry Parish is fit to be tied. Is that true? That he’s always trying to do better than you and he never can?”

“It’s Richard he’d like to best at the moment,” Marcel smiled. “It’s Richard who’s gaining on the prize he really wants.”

“I heard that too.”

“But what were you saying about this man and your father?” he asked.

“Only that he puts me in mind of my father, when I’m watching him work. ’Course I wouldn’t say that to Michie Vince,” she laughed with just a touch of slyness. “What I mean is, he’s a hardworking planter, he’s got his hopes and dreams wrapped up in
Bontemps, Bontemps
means everything to him, and he’s earning what that land puts out, he’s putting in his share. Every time he comes to town, seems he has to visit with his lawyers, he spreads maps out all over that table, he writes in his journal, he makes his plans. Right now, the whole plantation’s working to lay enough wood by for the sugar mills in the fall. They have to get it early out of the back swamps, because it has to have time to dry. He’s in the saddle these days, more than he’s out. I never knew there was so much to it, I guess, I never thought much about those big plantations, it’s an industry, he says, he says it will take as much as a man may give.”

She regarded him quietly. “Come on now, you don’t want to hear all this, you probably heard enough about
Bontemps
over the years to put you to sleep.”

“Maps?” he asked. “Lawyers?”

“I don’t understand any of it, he never goes into the complicated questions with me. I’ll tell you one thing. He likes to hear me read in English just the way you did, which is nice, and I’ve been just reading myself blind. I have a pair of eyeglasses now, Zurlina says they’re ugly, but he likes them, and I like them. Michie Vince says they look pretty, eyeglasses on women, he can’t get used to the sight. Can you figure that?”

She lifted them out of her bodice on a little silver chain, a tiny pair of eyeglasses, round as coins with a light and flexible frame. She fitted them to her nose, and they flashed instantly like mirrors.

He smiled.

“Of course I only wear them when I’m reading,” she said. “I’ve been reading Mr. Edgar Allan Poe to him, and some of those stories like to scare me to death.”

“Were they maps of the plantation?” he asked thoughtfully.

“I think so, they must have been, big maps showing the whole outlay, the sugarhouse, the fields, I’m sure they were maps of
Bontemps
, why?”

“I don’t know. I never saw a map of
Bontemps,”
he said. “Strange…”

“Strange?”

“You and I…and
Bontemps,”
he murmured.

Anna Bella sighed. She put the tiny pair of eyeglasses into her bodice. “And you’re dreaming of the day you can get on that boat for France.”

“More than ever,” he said. “More than ever.”

It was late when he rose to go. Anna Bella had lit the candle and been startled by the clock. The house had grown quiet around them as had the neighborhood, and she figured that for spite, Zurlina had gone off to bed.

“Anna Bella,” Marcel was not looking at her. He was looking out beyond the door. “I would like to come back…”

“Strange your saying that,” she said. But she didn’t say anything else. He bowed his head and was about to leave when she touched his arm. “Michie Vince comes on Fridays, late generally, but if he’s not here by Fridays, then usually he doesn’t come at all.”

“It will be in the afternoons.”

He was watching her, the candle behind her making a wreath of faint light about her head. Her eyes were downcast. There was so much he wanted to say to her but above all, this: that the frustrating passion he’d felt for her a year ago was now within his rein. Had it not been for his Juliet and her Michie Vince they could not have sat together, talked together, in this room. But whatever they had captured tonight it was fragile; he realized this, and he did not want to blemish it now.

“Do you want me to come back?” he asked.

“I want it to be as it was before,” she said, eyes averted, her head to one side. She had her hand to her temple as though hearkening to her own thoughts. “When we were children,” she looked up. “The way it was with us here tonight.”

“I know that,” he turned slightly angry. “You needn’t have said it.”

“But I thought if I didn’t say it, if I didn’t let you know, then you wouldn’t come back,” she said.

He was softened at once. “I’ll come back,” he said. He wondered if he might kiss her then, just gently, as he might kiss Marie. But realizing the light was behind them and they stood in the open cottage door, he found himself placing a kiss on the tips of his fingers exactly as he had done that night at the opera and touching those fingers to her shoulder as he went out.

But a strong feeling mounted in him as he walked away, his pace becoming quicker as he neared the Rue Ste. Anne. If he could rouse Christophe at all, he had urgent news for him. He would study round the clock from now on, take any private instruction Christophe could give. And as soon as Christophe told him he might pass the examinations for the Ecole Normale he would press to leave for Paris at once. And slowly, as he grew closer and closer to the Mercier house, the sweetness of this long evening with Anna Bella, its desperate solace, became laced with something bitter that seemed part and parcel of all the tasks that lay ahead of him, the burdens he could not thrust off. Some somber reasonable voice said, “What of Marie? Will you leave before she’s married, before Rudolphe even lets Richard ask?” And what of Cecile, then, would she be completely alone?

But this had always been just a matter of time, and never had he felt such an urgency to have that time concluded. What would it matter to Monsieur Philippe if he went a year early and wouldn’t Marie say yes now to Richard, if Rudolphe would only allow the proposal to be made? A sweet peace came over him when he thought of Marie. She was the single person in this world who seemed untouched by the sordidness around him, unsullied by complexities that made his head ache. And it was not until he was started up the stairs of the Mercier house toward the light in Christophe’s room that he thought vaguely of all that talk of lawyers, and maps. So Dazincourt, “the young pup,” was giving Monsieur Philippe a hard time, was he? And might there even be some feud in the making, over inheritances and lines? The disgust Marcel felt for his father was too profound to admit of the slightest sympathy. And he could not care about it all once he was across the sea. Yes, get Lisette’s freedom for her, and then go, he thought. Then go!