Feast of All Saints (93 page)

But even after she had gotten off his wet boots and put the coffee to heat and made the fire, still he hadn’t spoken. He could see that she was crying; he could tell from her warm hands that took his head and pressed it against her the depth of her pain and relief.

Even when Martin awakened again, he did not speak. He followed her into the bedroom and watched her put the baby to her breast. Finally, it was she who broke the silence.

“Is that Henri DeLande, is he…?”

Vincent nodded. He was looking at the child. He did not tell her that Henri DeLande had been shot stupidly, miserably in the stomach, and that it had taken him twenty minutes to die. They didn’t attempt to move him, and he couldn’t have endured the pain. Nineteen years old and blinded by the rain, the boy’s own shot had gone wild.

It seemed he wanted to take the baby from her. She herself was looking down at the puckered rounded little lids, the long lashes, moist-matted, and the tiny mouth. She was trying to see what Vincent saw, a skin as fair as her own, the hair softly curled, the dimpled hand opening and closing as if in thought. Now, as if perceiving that a stranger was near, Martin jerked loose from the breast and stared at Vincent. And when he saw no smile on Vincent’s face, when Vincent stared at him with the same seriousness with which the baby stared at him, little Martin began to scream.

“Hush, now, don’t you do that.” Anna Bella pushed him back to the breast. “He doesn’t mean anything by that,” she said. “He just doesn’t know who you are!”

But Vincent’s face was stricken. And he stood up turning away from her and his shoulders commenced to heave with an awful silent crying that seemed to shake him completely and to shake the room. Anna Bella watched, helpless. It was as if some great strong dam had been broken and Vincent’s entire body was shattered by the release while vainly he struggled against it, unable and unwilling to give it voice.

Finally Anna Bella put the baby down, finding the sugar tit hastily among the covers, and turned her attention to the man.

But turning his back to her as he sank down on the side of the bed, he would not face her until he was still.

“Anna Bella,” he said, “Anna Bella, I came here to tell you I was sorry, sorry that it ended the way it did. To tell you myself that I would always provide for you, and for the baby, but that you would never see me again. It was wretched having my lawyers tell you these things. It
was wretched of me to put it, as I did, in legal hands.” It seemed he was going to lose his restraint again, but he took his linen handkerchief and wiped impatiently at his lips. That simple gesture sustained him.

“All of this…these Ste. Marie children, the boy coming to
Bontemps
as he did, and now the girl…it should never have happened!” he insisted. “I mean these children, they should never have been! My brother-in-law was an evil man, selfish and lacking in fiber because he did not care for anyone but himself. It was carelessness and carnality that produced that family, and left it, penniless, to fend for itself. Anna Bella, you and I…that baby…it should never have happened either. It’s wrong! I tell you it should never have happened no matter how great the loneliness, and how great finally…the love!” He stopped. She had her arm about his shoulder, had been holding him all this time, but at his slightest gesture she would have let him go. Her face was mellow and thoughtful, but why, he could never guess. She was thinking of her own reservations, of the day she had gone to the
garçonnière
and made Marcel take the decision in his hands. Only the slight turning of his head, the pressure of his hand against the small of her back brought her back to this moment. “I understand, Michie Vince,” she said.

He appeared softly handsome to her as he sat there, the morning sun at last warming the windows beyond him, his face slightly gaunt from sleep, eyes touched with sadness like those of a much older man. And a strange thought came to her as she watched him, that he had killed three men in two days, and the last not more than two hours ago. And yet it was not this that tormented him. He did not even think of it now. She looked at the slender white hand, nails trimmed so neatly, that lay upon his knee and thought of this hand holding the pistol, pulling the trigger back. “I understand, Michie Vince,” she murmured, feeling some dull sorrow for her own awakened desire. She was straining to understand the allure of his power, the infinite power and freedom that infused that elegant hand, that white brow. “I understand.”

“But you see, if I had come back to you to tell you myself, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to walk out that door. Anna Bella, I’ve needed you so much. I have loved you so much. God, why did I ever do this to you, why did I do it to myself?”

“Don’t make me cry again, Michie Vince,” she whispered. He drew her close, his left hand pressing her, urging her as if he wanted her to pass out of herself and into his very flesh. His right hand felt the roundness of her cheek as if he could not get over it, the texture, as the skin, firm and silken, resisted the press of his thumb.

“I don’t know if I can leave you, Anna Bella,” he spoke into her ear. “But by God, I cannot bring another child into this, I cannot!”

She sighed. She was looking past him at the sun on the window,
the windy shifts of the golden rain. She was thinking of all those times before when he had fallen silent, brooding and haunted, and had held her tight like this in a wordless anxiety when it was time for them to part, and she knew that if she continued to think of that, more that than all he was saying to her now, she could not keep herself from yearning toward him with her whole soul.

But it was past, it was over! Over before the death knell had been dealt it in this very bed last night.

“Michie Vince,” she said looking into his eyes. “You don’t want me and you don’t want this!”

“Lord God, if only they weren’t one and the same!”

“But they are, and you don’t want it, and you don’t want that little baby there in that crib. You can’t even look at it or touch it, you can’t claim it as your own.”

He could not deny this, he could only draw up into himself now, turning away from her, his clasped hands thrust between his knees.

“What are you asking of me,” she said softly, “that I try to change your mind? That I make this bed soft for you again, so there will be nothing but misery for you now and in some part of your life till the end of your days?”

She could see his eyes warming with a curious light that she had often seen in them in the past.

“You’ve never done anything but right by me, have you, Anna Bella?”

“Michie,” she sighed. “I want to do right by us all.”

“But you never thought for a moment that I would let that child want…that I would let you want?” he asked.

She made a quick negation with her head. It had been a rhetorical question. He was making the only gesture with regard to little Martin that he could.

His voice was measured, calm now as he commenced to speak, there was an air of relief about him as though his struggle were past. He took Anna Bella’s hand and looked at it.

“I want him to be educated. And I want him to leave this place when he’s old enough, perhaps when he’s twelve, thirteen, before he’s a man. I want him to live somewhere on this earth where the races can achieve some amalgamation, or at least some peace…The legal precautions I have taken for you and him cannot be overturned by a probate court, and they are known to others in my family who will protect them, if or when I die, on your behalf.”

Her large slow brown eyes lingered on his face, and he did not perceive that as they left it, they moved over him remotely, dispassionately, as if seeing the entire man that he was.

“No, Michie Vince,” she said quietly.

Startled, his expression sharpened, his brows knit.

“Michie Vince,” she said, “I know you’re one of the finest men I’ve met, and I may live my whole life through without knowing your kind again. But I’m not rearing my baby boy to go to France because you want him to, I’m not filling his childhood with dreams of some rosy world where he can be a man. I’m teaching him to be a man right here, Michie Vince, where his mamma grew up and where he was born. I’m teaching him how to live among his people right here in the world they’ve made for themselves. And someday, someday if that boy wants to seek his fortune in another country, well, I’ll be the first to give him a helping hand. But nobody’s taking him away from me before that time, and nobody’s teaching him to despise what he is.”

He was quietly stunned. He looked down at her, the level brown eyes, the large silken mouth that was quite still.

“But don’t you worry, Michie Vince,” she said. “He’ll know his father was a fine white gentleman who provided for him always, but he won’t know your name.”

It stung him those words. He was incredulous. He studied her as if he could not believe that she had meant to hurt him and then he perceived that, indeed, she had not. And a peculiar thought struck him for which he was not prepared. He didn’t turn his head to the sleeping child in the bassinet but he thought of him, saw him, and it penetrated to him for the very first time that this was, indeed, his own child! And it penetrated for one simple reason. She had just told him, reasonably enough, that she would do with that child what she, and she alone, thought best.

He rose slowly, letting her hand go with deliberate gentleness and found himself stranded in the center of the room. All around was the dull roar of the sunny rain, and she was sitting quite collected there before him, her pretty silk peignoir tied modestly at the throat, her ivory-white hands clasped over her knee.

“That’s what you want,” he said softly.

And as she spoke now she reminded him of another raw and painful moment which had occurred for him not so very long ago. In fact the feel of that moment, its undefined confusion descended upon him as she said, “Michie, I don’t expect you to understand this, but this place, right here and now, is that baby’s home.”

He did not leave abruptly. He was aware that that would have been entirely wrong. It would have left an edge on things that he himself could not have borne. She followed him into the parlor, she smoothed his cape for him as he slung it over his shoulders, she put his boots before him and waited, her arms folded, and then accompanied him to the door.

He had thought this would be a painful moment. Wrenching, terrible, the inevitable price of seeing her again. And he wondered if she had thought so, too. But he could not reach the great swell of love he felt for her, or rather it could not reach him. But then looking to her bravely, expecting nothing more than that dispassionate face, he saw instead those tears welling again in her eyes. He saw her bite her lip, and he saw her head incline helplessly to the side.

“I love you, Michie Vince,” she whispered.

And he felt that tidal wave rising in him, and he knew it was really, really the end.
“Ma belle
Anna Bella,” he whispered, holding her, and then kissing her once more and forever he moved blindly and doggedly out the door.

A sleepy little Idabel came in from the kitchen, her flat and lanky twelve-year-old body done up prettily in a maid’s blue serge with white apron. She was sable in color, her tightly kinked hair drawn back to a little bun with two pins. She set the coffee down on the table, looking at her mistress’s bowed head, face hidden by her arms.

“Shush that baby, will you, honey, hold him for a little while?” Anna Bella said in English.

“Why you crying, Missie?” the child asked.

“Never mind, honey, but if you were to hush that baby, I’d feel a lot better, would you do that now?”

Idabel picked him up easily, “What are
you
crying about?” she said with a scowl, bouncing him as she made a small circle in the room. “Missie, that colored man was here,” she said. “I mean that colored gentleman, you know the one.”

Anna Bella lifted her head, eyes squinting at the wet and glaring light from the windows. “What are you talking about, Idabel?”

“That colored gentleman, Missie, with the blue eyes. He come riding in while Michie Vince was here, he was soaked to the bone. He come to the back door and he ask, was that white man here? I told him I didn’t know anything about any white man, and he says, ‘Well, you tiptoe to the door and see.’ Then he just went away, Missie, got on his horse, soaked through and rode off.”

The little girl stopped, the baby shushed and playing with the buttons of her dress.

“Now, don’t cry Missie, don’t cry!” she said with a fearful rise in her voice. But then she just stood there, her lips pressed together, watching her mistress’s shoulders shake as Anna Bella buried her sobs in her arms.

I
T WAS ALMOST DARK
. And the steamboats blazed along the levee, passengers scurrying toward these lights in a thin gray rain. Marcel stood on the high deck outside the stateroom, the rain cutting his face, his eyelids, cutting his hand on the rail. He was about to turn toward the open door when Tante Louisa emerged, turning her back to the icy wind off the water so that she might catch her cape around her with both hands. She drew near to him, head inclining toward him, and to avoid this moment, he attempted to break away. But she caught his hand.

“You’re not going to leave your Maman like this. Not after all the things you said to her, Marcel, when will you see her again?”

His face was tense. It had been an awful battle, and in some dreadful way it had been the worst of his life. He could remember little of what really passed between them now, only that Tante Louisa and Tante Colette had tried to prevent him from seeing her and that he had threatened to break down the door of her room. She had run from him, hidden her face from him, denied his accusations, refused to answer his questions, and at last she’d begun to scream. “I did it for you, I did it for you,” she had roared over and over, and at last, forced to the far corner of the room and cowering, she had weakened so that he had taken her arms and looked into her eyes. He would never forget that moment, never forget the moment of turning from her and seeing the two of them, his aunts, with that same terrified expression. And he had known then that all his words were wasted words, all his anger lost. They simply could not understand what had happened, they simply could not understand what they had done. They were staring at him as if he were a madman, and with the same maddening practicality with which Colette had first told him “the whole story,” she had commenced again to talk to him plainly, idiotically, then. He ought to leave his mother alone now if he had any decency in him, and he ought never, never to mention his sister’s name to her again. All the outrage had drained out of him at that moment. He had turned to the shivering little woman who seeing him towering over her raised her arms to shelter her head. He had thought clearly, calmly, this is my mother, this is the woman who bore me. And silently he had walked out of the room.