Feast of All Saints (75 page)

“You have room for him there?” Rudolphe asked dully. But before Christophe could answer, he said decisively, “I think Marcel should come with me.”

Marie had risen and gone out.

A dark expression passed over Christophe.

“My God, man,” he whispered. “If you still don’t trust me with the tender youth of this community, why don’t you shut down my school!”

Rudolphe was stunned. He glanced pointedly at Marcel as if to say how can you speak this way before the boy. His mouth pressed shut. “I admire you, Monsieur,” he said coldly. “This was simply my advice.”

“Oncle Rudolphe,” Marcel said, climbing slowly to his feet and steadying himself by the bedside table. “I want to go with Christophe. Oncle Rudolphe, you must allow me
not
to be a burden to you just now.”

“Marcel, Marcel,” Rudolphe sighed, shaking his head. “You are never half the burden to anyone that you are to yourself. Will you stay
quietly at Christophe’s until we can reach your Tante Josette at
Sans Souci
, do I have your promise, will you behave for just a little while as if you were in your right mind?”

Marcel’s wretched confusion was aggravated by these sharp and loving words, and one perfect and distinct moment was yielded to him, that of Monsieur Philippe with that riding crop, and the boot, and those words,
you dare, you dare, you dare
. What in the name of God have I done? Christophe slid a firm arm around his shoulder and urged him forward; he moved without saying a word.

Cecile was in the door, and her face was streaming with tears. Marcel shut his eyes. If she says something angry, I will deserve it and I cannot bear it, he thought. But her hands stroked tenderly at the sides of his face, ignoring the rough beard there and she kissed him quickly and pressed him close.

“Stay at Christophe’s,” she whispered. “Promise me…”

Marie had come in with a valise, and he realized it contained his clothes. He wanted to say something to Marie, to Cecile, to all of them, but he could think of no words.

Rudolphe was giving orders as he left, the coachman Felix was not to be told where Marcel was, he was to tell his master, if asked, that Marcel was “no longer at home.” It had a dreadful finality to it, and Marcel thought vaguely, yes, that’s it, I have not brought the roof crashing in on them, no matter how outraged he is, he will never desert them, it’s merely that I can never live under this roof again.

Juliet dragged her long boat-shaped tub across the carpet and stoked the fire. She peeled off his clothes and told him to get into the water when it was hot enough and she soaped him all over, rubbing the suds well into his hair. He could see the soot on his hands and how it had become sticky when Marie had tried to clean it off. He lay back against the rim of the tub and shut his eyes.

“Do you know what I’ve done?” he asked wearily. The cuts on his feet burned in this hot water and he could not decide whether this was pleasure or pain.

“Hmmmm, we are a fine pair,
mon cher,”
she said, “both mad it seems.”

When she had dried him off and wrapped him in a thick white robe, she sat him against her many ruffled pillows, and brought the straight razor and the basin, and put a towel around his neck.

“Lie back,” she whispered, and deft as a barber began to lather his face. He put his hand up to feel the cuts. It seemed the swelling had died down some, and it felt again like the contours of his own face. “Close your eyes,” Juliet said. “Go to sleep.” And as if he had just discovered this was permissible, he fell into it, only vaguely aware that
she had finally finished and had put the covers up over him, and blown out the lamp.

Remorse. It was one of those words he’d heard but never actually made his own. Guilt he understood, but remorse? He felt it now, however, he was certain, and with it the most agitated dread. With the days of drinking sending tremors through his limbs, and all the house quiet, the streets beyond quiet, and Juliet sleeping deeply in the barest glint of the moon, he lay awake trying to reconstruct the why and the wherefore of what he had done.

It had seemed he had had to go to
Bontemps
, but why? No one knew the etiquette of this strangely stratified Creole world better than Marcel knew it, so why? What had he hoped to do to his white father, what had he expected that outraged and anxious white man to do to him? He shuddered, inflicting those blows again in his mind, his sickened and exhausted body unable to sleep anymore, the image of Philippe’s convulsed face confronting him again and again. He wanted to hate Philippe, but he could not. He could not see himself as he had been before he entered the gates of
Bontemps
, he could see himself only as Philippe had seen him. And his actions were senseless, utter folly, and had brought misery on himself, his mother, his sister, on them all.

Finally, unable to bear his thoughts a moment longer he rose, pulling on his pants and a soft full-sleeved linen shirt that was Christophe’s, and in his bare feet he padded silently to the door.

A meager relief touched him as soon as he saw the light at the end of the hail. There was the smell of the kerosene of Christophe’s lamp, there was the barely audible but steady scratch of Christophe’s pen. And savoring this relief Marcel let his eyes drift over the ceiling and the walls. The passage was barren and damp as always, but it was warmly familiar as was everything about him, even the moonlit face of the Old Haitian peering from the open dining room door. And only now did it come clear to Marcel that the day’s violence was over, and that somehow the sanctuary of this house had been yielded to him again. He was in his refuge. And just possibly, as it had happened in the past, the world outside would become blurred, unimportant, even a little unreal. He moved impulsively toward Christophe and felt his relief deepen as he saw the figure bent over the desk, shadow leaping on the wall as he dipped his pen.

A soft grace emanated from the figure. It wasn’t merely Christophe. Rather it was Christophe carrying on in spite of the day’s insanity, Christophe undeterred from the usual and very significant tasks. It suggested balance, well-being. And Marcel, standing silently in the doorway, felt an overpowering desire to fall into Christophe’s arms.

There had never been real touching between them. Not even the jostling which boys might occasionally enjoy. And in fact, Marcel had never embraced another man in his life. But he wished now that he could overcome the reticence that seemed inveterate to both of them, and that he could just hold Chris for a moment or rather be held by him in some natural way as brother might embrace brother, as a father might hold a son. Those old suspicions were remote to him, they were trivial and mildly irritating, and seemed something that was part of a confused and dimming world beyond these walls. But he sensed this reticence in him had never been part of those concealed fears; it had nothing to do with gossip or the specter of the Englishman; it was merely his nature, and more or less the nature of all the men he knew. But the desire for this embrace, the need for it was so acute now that he would have left Christophe’s door if Christophe hadn’t laid down the pen and turned around.

He turned the small brass key on the lamp so that he might see Marcel in the shadows, and he gestured for him to come in. “Drink a little of this,” he said turning to the wine on his desk. “But slowly, it will help.”

It was that same calm he had evinced in the cottage, miraculously at odds with Rudolphe’s disgust and Cecile’s tears. Marcel took the glass from him and drank deeply.

“Slowly,” Christophe insisted. He gestured for the chair.

“Rather stand,” Marcel whispered. He moved to the mantel, setting the glass before him, and stood over the empty hearth. It was quite possible that the pressure of the boards against the blisters of his feet felt good.

Christophe was watching him. “Rudolphe’s already written to your Tante Josette,” he said. “Have you ever been upriver to this plantation,
Sans Souci?”

At the mention of the place a bitter tremor passed over Marcel. It seemed quite impossible that he was going there.

“I don’t know those people,” he said in a low voice. “Or rather I know them and that’s all. They aren’t my family, they snatched my mother off the street in Port-au-Prince when the war was on, when Dessalines was massacring the French. That’s the connection. She was four years old. They brought her up.” He winced. He had never told this to anyone, not even to Marie who did not know it, and without realizing it he shut his eyes.

“They’re your family then,” Christophe said. The tone was unobtrusive, gentle. “It’s been that way all these years, hasn’t it?” The voice was perfect compassion, devoid of self-consciousness. It was intimate and easy and nothing more.

“They are not my family,” Marcel whispered, but he stopped,
unable to continue because that desire had welled in him again to reach out for Chris, and he wanted to say you are closer to me, more a part of me than they are, but he could not. He glanced at the figure who sat at the desk. It was that old posture, habitual with Christophe, so still and contained that it seemed he was posing for the Parisian Daguerreotype all over again.

“What are you really thinking?” Christophe asked.

Marcel shook his head. He rested his arm against the mantel. The room was thick with shadows and the gray night, misty perhaps, showed luminous against the black shutters over the street. But Christophe’s face in the small dim circle of the lamp was gently illuminated and the yellow-brown eyes were probing and patient and calm.

“Thinking,” Marcel sighed. “That I behaved like a fool,” he said. “I hated him for what he did, and for letting me know it like that through the notary, Jacquemine. He never meant to send me to Paris. He lied. And now I’ve done something unpardonable, and he has the right to despise me for it, the right to disown me. I’ve earned my disinheritance as if I deserved it all along.”

The world outside was coming back, in spite of the house, in spite of this room.

“But you didn’t deserve it,” Christophe said. “And I think you are punishing yourself much too much for what you did today, you need to rest in this place,
Sans Souci
, you need to think. But not about the exchange between you and this white man. It’s finished. You frightened him, outraged him; he feared some humiliation before his white family which from all I’ve heard simply did not come about. They didn’t see you, and more than likely if they had, they would not have guessed who you were. So don’t go on with this, Marcel, turn your eyes ahead.”

“Ahead, Chris!” Marcel demanded. “Ahead to what!”

The smooth flesh of Christophe’s forehead contracted into a sharp frown. But he was as still as before. “I didn’t educate you for the Ecole Normale in Paris,” he said. “I educated you for yourself. And you will kill me—you will kill me!—if this has proved a waste. If I haven’t given you something with which to fortify your soul now, well then truly, I’ve failed.”

“You’ve never failed!” Marcel whispered. He looked away. It was excruciating to him that their talk had taken this turn. Unwillingly he thought of that night in Madame Lelaud’s when Christophe first came home, he thought of all he had expected of his new teacher and of how the flesh-and-blood Christophe had put to shame the poverty of his dreams. He let his eyes return to the disarray of poems, books that made up Christophe’s wall and then again to Christophe’s face. It wasn’t a severe look he found there, not even with a touch of the
reprimand which had just barely sharpened Christophe’s voice. “Why is it you’re not angry with me?” Marcel demanded. “Why is it you’re not disgusted with me for what I’ve done? Why do you go on believing in me when everyone else has probably given up?”

But Marcel didn’t wait for an answer. If they could not embrace, he could still find some voice for his heart. “It could have been so different,” he said. “You could have been the same teacher, and the school, it could have molded me in the same way. But why have you given me so much more than that, why have you demanded of me over and over just what I really wanted to demand of myself? You trusted me when you came home, trusted me when I’d disappointed and frightened everyone; and you trusted me later with Juliet, trusted me to love her and not bring harm to any one of us, and you’re trusting me now, aren’t you, not to fail us both?”

“Is that so remarkable!” Christophe’s face had changed. The calm had melted to an agitation, and the voice was deepened as it always was at moments of emotion. “Why shouldn’t I trust you!” he insisted. “Why shouldn’t I believe in you as I always have? Marcel, is it that you fail to see what’s really happened here? What is cutting you even now? I’ll tell you then if you don’t see it. It’s that this man, Philippe Ferronaire, has dismissed you, that he doesn’t give a damn about you, your accomplishments, your dreams. And you stumbled out to that plantation to make him see you, to force him to recognize you for the young man that you are! But Marcel, he’ll never do that, and you must let him be a fool in his own world without destroying yours!”

He stopped. He had never once broken the still posture, never once even raised his voice. But his face was contorted and his eyes were moist. “He’s a bastard for what he’s done!” he whispered. “And you never deserved it, and it is no measure of what you are!”

Marcel was shaken. He knew that Christophe was watching him, waiting for some sign that he had been heard. And that desire in Marcel to embrace Christophe was almost more than he could surmount.

“It’s not going to cripple you!” Christophe said. “It’s not going to ruin you. Do you understand?”

Marcel nodded.

Their eyes met.

And the clearest perception occurred in Marcel then. So clear that it was never subject to doubt. He knew suddenly that Christophe wanted to rise, to come to him just as surely as Marcel wanted it, he knew that Christophe wanted desperately to underscore this moment with some vibrant and man-to-man warmth. He wanted to slip his arm around Marcel’s shoulder, he wanted to say with a forthright gesture, yes, I trust you, and there is love, too. It was all there in Christophe’s eyes. It passed between them unspoken. And just as surely as Marcel
sensed this, he knew Christophe would never embrace him at such a moment. Christophe would never, never take the risk. Because all of the old suspicions about Christophe were true. And that rigid poise which over and over again simulated the Daguerreotype was simply the violent and obdurate check on physical desire.