Feast of All Saints (97 page)

But this time Grandpère motioned for quiet. “Go bring her here,” he said. “We won’t assemble the family, it will be too hard on her. I’ll tell your mother, go on.”

But as soon as Richard had left, he sat back in his chair morosely and seemed almost to have fallen asleep. Rudolphe was studying him, aware that it was time to wake Suzette, to prepare a room, but some vague anxiety kept him there near his father, something greater it seemed than the sum total of all the difficulties they now faced.

“Mon Père
,” he said finally, leaning forward and touching Grandpère lightly on the knee, “if you believe it can be done, I know it can be done.”

The old man did not stir. His eyelids fluttered for an instant behind his spectacles.

“And Richard will be in this house at the end of that year,
mon Père
, nothing will prevent that.” Rudolphe said.

“I know,” Grandpère sighed, his voice barely audible, “I never doubted that. It’s I who might not be here.” But abruptly he rose, shaking his head, and started slowly toward the door.

Rudolphe wanted to speak to him, he wanted to tell him not to talk of such things, but he felt a fear like a spasm of pain. He was still sitting in the chair when Richard and Marie came through the front door. In fact, he was somewhat confused as it seemed only an instant had passed, and taken by surprise he found himself staring up at the girl, who clung to Richard, her eyes like those of a wounded animal, her hair free and tousled by the wind. In an instant he was on his feet without thinking, and much to his own surprise he’d taken this girl in his arms. A wild flowery fragrance rose from her hair as he kissed her, and he realized that some powerful protective instinct had infected him. He drew back holding her at arm’s length, as was perhaps a father-in-law’s prerogative and realized that she had already become
one of them in his mind. She was shy, miserable, but when she looked up at his son, her eyes were filled with dazzling love.

C
HRISTOPHE DID NOT GO
to Dolly directly after the wedding as he had promised. He knew that he ought to do this, however, because Dolly was not in a good frame of mind. She declared herself quite happy for Marie and Richard, but some well of buried emotion had been stirred in her by Marie’s coming and going and she had in the last few days exhibited those very characteristics of debilitating grief that she had shown after the death of her own child. She did not dress or comb her hair, and keeping to her room, left her girls on their own. When no orders came from her for cook, maid, or valet, the house ceased to run itself, quarrels broke out, and all realized soon enough that she was quite willing to tell everyone and anyone to leave if they chose, and go their own way. The door in the Rue Dumaine was now locked.

But Marie’s sojourn had brought Christophe and Dolly together again, just as the grief for little Lisa Rose had once brought them together, and Christophe knew as he left the Cathedral that indeed he would go to see her, confirm for her that the wedding had in fact taken place (she had her doubts,
eh bien
, the proper Lermontants) but he could not go just now.

And why he was not sure. Except that the quiet afternoon ceremony in the sacristy of the church had affected him profoundly in ways that he did not anticipate. And as he wandered off along the waterfront, engulfed by the eternal crowds, he felt something of the desperation he had known during his last days in Paris, and recognizing this for what it was, he felt fear. Before five o’clock, he had stopped in half a dozen dram shops, and as the early winter dusk came on fast, with a heavy shrouding fog, he had the sense that he might be in any one of the vast cities he had once visited—the winding dirty alleyways of Cairo, the majestic and wildly beautiful squalor of Rome. All was alien to him, and the feeling of being home and where he belonged left him, so that he was disconnected and he did not understand why.

The school went well, better than ever, he was writing steadily, though nothing of real consequence, and a Paris journal had just written to him asking for more of his recent poems. Yet this harrowing feeling had mounted ever since he left the Cathedral and his mind would grant him no reprieve from some ruthless self-examination as he wandered about, feet often slipping on the wet cobblestones, terrified that were he to encounter anyone he knew at this moment, even
his own mother, he would be visited by a sensation he had once experienced in Paris with Michael of simply not knowing who the person was, why he was with that person, why they were on that very spot.

Of course he was happy for Richard and Marie, supremely happy.

In general, respectable people had never interested him very much; and seldom had he invested any emotion in what seemed the inevitable course of their lives. Among his students, he had loved most the wild, the unpredictable, and often the poor rather than those stalwart sons of the good families who in truth tended to grate on his nerves. He had never for a moment entertained the notion, even in childhood, that Juliet was respectable, and she herself had repeatedly throughout her life chosen the more rash and flamboyant of men. It seemed, in fact, that she invariably demanded some monstrous breach of decorum as the price of her favors. She had demanded this of Marcel, surely. And she was demanding it now of Augustin Dumanoir
père
who came to see her much too often for the good of his plantation and was even murmuring to Christophe something about marriage as if it were entirely possible to make Juliet the mistress of his house. Juliet managing a plantation household, kitchen, scores of slave women and children, the eternal round of sewing, entertaining—someone was losing his or her mind.

But the great exception to this quiet disdain for the respectable had always been the
Famille Lermontant
who struck Christophe not so much as desperately conforming bourgeoisie but rather the genuine article of middle-class gentility possessed of whatever nobility that hard-won position might allow. And Rudolphe’s conviction that the family could absorb the tragedy and scandal which had all but destroyed Marie Ste. Marie, as well as Richard’s courage in marrying her, had gone to Christophe’s heart. Of course his love and relief for Marie and for Marcel knew no bounds.

So why then had an excess of emotion at the wedding caught him so off guard?

Had he not expected the current of shared feeling in that crowded sacristy, the bride’s uncommon radiance, the raw and innocent love in the eyes of the tall groom? When Marie had spoken her vows in a halting and vibrant voice, Christophe’s eyes had misted over, and it seemed to him, though he had scorned all things romantic since his exile from Paris, that the immense structure of the Cathedral itself veritably trembled when the bride and the groom embraced.

Reasonably enough, he could tell himself now that it had been a rare moment when the very concept of marriage had been exalted, and that the collective act of faith in that room had transcended the sum of all the individual hopes. Marry they had, in spite of everything. And even Richard’s wan little cousins come so valiantly from far and
wide to peer fearfully at the resplendent bride had been affected by it as well as the more worldly Anna Bella, Marcel, and Juliet.

So why this unhappiness, why as darkness fell completely over the struggling gas lamps, and the burnished light of the open taverns spilled into the fog, was Christophe on the verge of panic, trudging through these streets? Was it a sense of exclusion, no, that could not be, he told himself. And muscling to a crowded bar, he drank down another shot of cheap rum.

And yet summoned back and back to the sacristy door in his imagination, he was confronted by a bewildering sight, that of Marcel turning from the young couple, and smiling almost sadly at Christophe as he went off down the alley beside the Cathedral alone. Christophe’s eyes followed that retreating figure unwilling now as they had been then to let the figure go. And he realized with a stultifying amazement that all this long dreary afternoon he’d been thinking of that moment, weaving it in and out of his more lofty considerations of the wedding, his more conscientious considerations of Dolly Rose. Marcel. And what was so remarkable about his leaving that sacristy, about his evanescent and melancholy smile? What was so remarkable about that figure moving on through Pirate’s Alley, tall, blond-haired, indifferent, moving steadily away from the Cathedral and steadily away from him!

Images came back to him, images alien to these waterfront streets, images so old that their freshness startled him, shook him in their clarity, images of a mountainside at Sounion, the tip of Greece, below the Temple of Neptune where Lord Byron had carved his name. And Christophe was thinking of the low peasant’s hut where he had first made love to Michael, after a year’s wandering from Paris during which Michael had never once touched him, leaving it to Christophe to make the first move. No, Christophe wasn’t thinking of it now, he was there!

And stumbling suddenly on the gunwale sidewalk, the crowd jostling him, he looked up with an exquisite relief to realize that he had found the familiar door to Madame Lelaud’s.

In a moment he had pushed through the knot of white men blocking the entrance, and that relief still coursing through him, relaxing him, quieting him, he rested his back for a moment against a heavy rough-hewn wooden beam. Not ten yards from him was his regular table, the table where he and Marcel had talked when he had first come home. And the feeling of Sounion descended on him again, wouldn’t leave him, and he was seeing in disconnected blasts those rocky cliffs, the sea itself stretching out forever and those few columns piercing the sky. Not this crowded bar, not the sweetly shabby figure of Madame Lelaud with skin the color of a walnut shell, who very obligingly left the bar to put the usual mug of beer in his hand. He was
feeling, smelling that Greek countryside, and he could hear the tinkle of the bell about the neck of the Judas goat, see the shepherd climbing the steep cliff. He had to rest his back against the rough post to drink the beer. Where was Marcel now, at this moment? The smoke of this crowded place burned his eyes.

“And where’s my blue-eyed
bébé?”
Madame Lelaud smiled at him, flecking the smallest bit of dust from his lapel. He laughed. She wore a dark rouge on her lips that was dried and powdery, “Hmmm, I haven’t seen my blue-eyed
bébé
in ever so long, he stayed here for three days, right at that table, and then he was gone.” Gone, gone, gone, gone. “Hmm, you give him a kiss for me, hmmmmmm?”

“Certainly!” Christophe winked as he blew the foam off the beer. And then on tiptoe Madame Lelaud kissed him, a worn working mouth but gentle, and resisting the urge to wipe the bit of moisture left on his lip, he smiled at her, beamed at her in fact. He and Marcel together at that table which he could no longer see for the crowd, “Monsieur, you don’t know how I admire you, if you would only give me a chance…”

“I’ll kiss you again if you don’t watch out,” she winked, but the man behind the bar was shouting at her, taunting her, they teased her about Christophe as they always did when he came in.

“Billiards, Madam, billiards,” he said to her in English, quite unaware of the crisp British sound of it, a white man in a broad-brimmed hat looking up suddenly from the billiard table, his mouth a moist smile beneath the shadow of the brim. “It’s time to play some serious billiards,” and pushing toward the brightly illuminated felt as the white man was chalking his cue Christophe surveyed the scattered ivory balls. There was the black man who was always there, the one with the two camellias in his lapel, the silk vest and the frock coat with its velvet collar, his skin so black it reflected the light all over it, the lips almost purple.

“Aaaah, Monsieur le Schoolteacher,” he said, he spoke English also, elegant British English with just the hint of Jamaica, and saluted Christophe with his cue. He was running the balls, had shot the last three in while Christophe was downing the beer. And now he moved around the table for his fourth. Christophe slapped a five-dollar gold piece on the rail of the table, and the black man smiled, nodding, “Yes sir, Monsieur le Schoolteacher.” He bent over the table, made a high bridge with his very long fingers, and banked the red ball before it went in.

Sounion in this place, it was enough to drive a man mad! Some sudden irrelevant flash of sitting in his room drunk after Michael’s death, on the very same bed in which Michael died, explaining something to Marcel about Sounion and telling him only some vaguely metaphorical image for the real truth, the raw and passionate truth in
the hut. “Not very high stakes,” said the black man driving in the eight ball.

The white man with the broad-brimmed hat threw up his hands. The cue was standing against the table for Christophe to take it. The man wore fancy river gambler clothes, and rested his back with a feline movement on the rough-hewn support, crossing his ankles in pale immaculate buckskin pants that were tight over the bulge between his legs, the shimmer of his gray vest making Christophe grit his teeth suddenly at the thought of a fingernail running across the silk. The chest beneath it was solid, broad.

“Ten dollars, Monsieur,” said the black man chalking the cue, “and you break.”

“Generous, generous, let’s lag for break,” Christophe fished in his pocket, put the ten-dollar piece on the rail. “That’s fifteen, sir.” He liked the feel of this cue because it was heavy and short. “Eight ball,” he said. The Jamaican nodded. Marcel had listened so patiently, the blue eyes so intense, the face exactly the color of honey poured from a glass pitcher in the sunlight. The same Marcel who did not seek my company today after the wedding, who turned and gave me that affectionate, almost intimate smile, easy, touched my arm and then walked out of the church precisely when I had expected, expected what, that we would go on together???

“You break, Monsieur,” a smile on the sculpted black face, the high sloping forehead, prominent nose, white teeth.

“So I do.” There were several ways to approach it, take a risk, he felt the thrust perfect and then the balls went everywhere. Or so it seemed. He had sunk three.