Feast of All Saints (98 page)

A cluster of men pushed suddenly against the head of the table, and the usual din was underscored by the hard heavy sounds of a scuffle, shouts. And passing then was the spectacle of a man hoisted in the air, brogans dangling above a score of rising, shoving hands. Into the street, the fog curling just for an instant as those who blocked the door gave way, and then closed again against the cold.

There was thirty dollars in gold gleaming on the rail, Christophe took his time, knowing now that he was at that perfect stage of drunkenness when this would be easy, this would go well. An hour from now, maybe less, get out of the game. “You have another one of those, cold and foaming?” he whispered to Madame Lelaud. Her apron was filthy, her thin rippling hair reminded him of his mother who said of Marcel so indifferently last night, “But he’s no longer a boy, he’s a man now,” as if that made all the difference in the world to her passion.

“But Dumanoir is no boy, what is that to you!”

“Ah, yes!” she’d answered with remarkable candor. “But he is a
very old man!” Nothing like you, Maman, since ancient Rome, he had thought.

“Watch out for these boys, darling!” Madame Lelaud said to him in English. “You know what I mean?”

“Seven ball, far right pocket,” he said and with a quick and somewhat reckless thrust sent it in.

“Hmmmm,” he took the beer from her, drank a mouthful and giving it back, wiped his hand on his pants.

“They let you win a little at first, hmmmm? Watch out.”

“Five ball, side pocket,” he tapped the leather edge with the tip of the cue, then banked the ball at the perfect angle so that the black man smiled. He wore pomade on his tightly waving hair. It gleamed like his face under the low-hanging lamp, the little camellias in his lapel browning at the edges, but otherwise he was perfect, the coat tapering at his narrow waist, his nails shining as if they’d been buffed. A rough-bearded Dutchman appraised him slowly as he passed, thudding up the wooden stairs to the rooms above. Men in the corner suddenly roared with laughter, heads bowing, rising, at some perfect exchange.

“Three ball, far left pocket,” Christophe said, but he had been thinking this was the time to try to get both of them in, the three and the two, the two chasing the three perfectly, very tricky. And as they sank, he heard the murmur around him like applause, the riverboat gambler in his green coat shifting his weight from one foot to the other with that moist smile and only shadows for eyes. “Very good, Monsieur le Schoolteacher,” said the black man.

“Now this is your Waterloo!” Madame Lelaud’s hair brushed his ear. “This is where you always go crazy, with the eight ball.”

“Madam, for the love of heaven,” he rubbed the chalk on the cue, “have a little faith.”

He was sizing it up, why not make it a beauty? And calling the farthest pocket, he heard them gasp.

“But on second thought,” he said suddenly with a slight mocking lilt to his voice, and a touch of the fop to his gestures, “I think that ball looks just fine right where it is.”

The black man was laughing, the riverboat gambler let out a low rumble as he smiled. Adjusting the brim of his hat he showed for one instant the gleam of a clear hazel eye.

“You are a witty man, Monsieur le Schoolteacher,” said the black man. Christophe tapped the pocket again. Marcel had just left the church as though that smile were enough.

“Did you think he was going to be a boy forever?” his mother had turned the questioning around the night before, pulling the hair from her brush. “And you, Christophe, are you going to be a boy forever?”

“Stop, Maman, enjoy your old man.”

“And suppose I go to the country with him…”

“But you won’t!”

“I don’t know,” she had shrugged, flicking the long hair over her shoulder again, “I was born in the country, maybe I want to go back to the country, and you, Christophe, you?”

He drew in his breath and shot, hard, fast, the ball crashing against the right bank, left bank, right bank again and straight into the wrong pocket!

The black man had thrown back his head to laugh, his long concave fingers sliding the thirty dollars off the rail. “You should teach the art of billiards, Monsieur le Schoolteacher.”

“The
art
of billiards, the
art?”
Christophe surrendered the cue to an anonymous hand. It seemed the black man’s pocket jingled with coins. “Billiards is not an art, Monsieur,” Christophe smiled as he turned to push his way toward the bar. “You wouldn’t think of marrying,” he had said to Juliet, and she with that wan smile, “Ah, but what you mean to say is I wouldn’t think of leaving you!”

He was staring at himself in the filthy mirror beyond the row of bottles. All the shades on the oil lamps that hung from the ceiling were completely black. “And I would think of it,” she had touched him lightly with the handle of the brush. There loomed suddenly behind his own reflected image the broad-brimmed hat of the river gambler, the light skittering again on his gray silk vest.

“Kentucky sipping whiskey!” the barkeep stared into the river gambler’s face, the glinting shadows that were the man’s eyes.
“Sipping
whiskey,
sipping
whiskey!”

“I know you have it,” came the velvet whisper, a shoulder nudging Christophe.

What had he expected, that Marcel would come to him then after the wedding, alone, and vulnerable, what are you going to do now with your life, which direction, and they would sit again in his room as always talking, sharing all of it, the wine, the relief, the despair? Marcel didn’t need him anymore, Marcel had not needed him for some time, the young man who returned from the Cane River was without that certain yearning, it was simply absent, replaced by that confident and remote smile. A hand was squeezing his arm.

He felt a pain in his temples as if the skin were tightening and the veins were protruding, veins that were always there, a small expressionless and completely unremarkable brown face confronting him in the splotched mirror, and the panic rising again which he had left, somehow or other, by magic at the door. This isn’t the component of a great emotion, Christophe, this is petty, the thinking of a child. How to live without it, that’s the question, without the cool Englishman
sitting in the door of the hut at Sounion waiting, waiting, knowing precisely what was going to happen through all the confusion, the exposure, the pain. And the boy with the blue eyes, “But I don’t know how to be your lover, you have to show me, be my teacher!” “No, the answer is now and forever no.” Yes, love and pain, that’s exquisite, but how to make life worthwhile even when they aren’t there, how to be sustained by what you do, what you want, what you are yourself! “But you can’t marry Dumanoir!” he had said to her, and she, “Ten long years I kept my vigil for you, Chris, I tell you I will marry him, I will leave this house.” He shuddered. And in the dim mirror saw again the ruddy square face of the riverboat gambler, light glinting on the fine bones of his cheeks, his jaw. The lips spread in that moist, easy smile. The editor from Paris had written just months ago, “This novel has your old brilliance, but not your narrative strength. Send more, we want to see more, can’t you recapture your old narrative strength?” One had somehow to feel one’s own powers, one’s own skill coursing through one’s veins!

“I know you have good sipping whiskey, I’ve seen it!” said the river gambler.

“Ah, darling, you lost your money, I told you to be careful.” Madame Lelaud leaned on Christophe’s shoulder like a child going to sleep. I feel empty, empty! And over all is laid a layer of ash so that nothing has its former brilliance, all is indistinct. “Give them the good Kentucky bourbon,” she winked her eye. “You don’t play any more billiards tonight.” She brushed Christophe’s hair back from his temples which was perfectly absurd because his hair was so wiry and closecut it never actually moved. “You watch out for these boys!” she smiled at the gambler.

“I always watch out for the boys, Madam,” Christophe beamed down at her. And he heard the river gambler’s soft American laugh. The man had placed his elbow on the bar beside Christophe, one foot on the brass rail so the buckskin pants pulled over the bulge between his legs.

“And this house is going to be empty, empty,” she had warned him with another long swipe at her dark hair. “You grow up, hmmmmm?”

“You want to find a little amusement?” the gambler whispered in French.

Of course it will all come back to you! Christophe drank the mellow expensive bourbon, soothing the rawness of his tongue. In the classroom tomorrow it will come back to you when you see their faces, when you see young Gaston with those poems he won’t dare to show to anyone but you, and Frederick, that brilliant Jean Louis, Paul. This deadening cloud will lift when you hear their voices, there will be a
flavor to things, color, you were living with some foolish notion while Marcel was gone, or were you merely living with the notion that he would come back? “He’s not a boy anymore,” flick of the hairbrush, “and that’s why I didn’t wait for him. And you,
mon cher
, when I’m gone, what will you do?” Go to hell, Maman, go to hell for all I care, go to the country, go to hell.

“Amusement?” he whispered to the mirror. The buckskin leg nudged his gently. “Women?”

“Is
that
what amuses you?” asked the unobtrusive American voice.

“Mon Dieu,”
Christophe smiled.

“I have a room just down the street, nothing fancy, just clean,” the gambler pushed the gold coin at the barkeep, the sleeve of his green coat resting against Christophe’s arm. “I want the bottle,” he said. His lean smooth face wrinkled softly again in a smile.

“Kiss that boy for me,” Madame Lelaud sang out as they moved toward the door.

“Most definitely, Madame,” Christophe made her a quick bow as, laughing softly, the gambler stepped into the dirt street.

Christophe stood on the gunwale banquette, staring up at the sky. Wisps of dark cloud obliterated the stars and there was a ring around the moon now that the rain had stopped. The panic was gone again as if it had never come, and the street was a riot of lighted windows, racket, the scream of the whistle of the gendarmes. In this very spot he had stood with Marcel that first night, and from this very spot he had watched Marcel walk away, and then gazed up at this sky.

The gambler was walking up and down slowly, that feline form flowing beautifully under the gray vest, the taut pants, that smile a permanent fixture beneath the shadow of the hat.

“I just had the most reassuring sensation,” Christophe murmured. And here we stood in this very spot that first night and you were that tall. “The most revealing sensation,” he whispered,
“that this is all there will ever be.”

“Come on, Mister Schoolteacher,” said the low American voice, as for the first time the gambler removed the wide-brimmed hat revealing his golden hair and the full invitation in his brilliant deepset hazel eyes.

I
T WAS BARELY LIGHT
, and the market was awakening with a clatter. The Lermontants had urged Marcel to come back with them for breakfast, but he had refused. Madame Suzette was crying bitterly, once the
ship had moved far enough downstream so that she could no longer see the bride and the groom, and the bride and the groom could no longer see her. And Rudolphe, very quiet now that there was no more opportunity for giving Richard advice,
stood
still on the levee for a long moment, seemingly unaware that the ship was no longer in sight. Christophe was the first to leave. He had to be in the classroom in an hour. And Marcel excused himself quickly saying that he wanted to be alone. He had tried then to catch up with Christophe, but Christophe was already gone.

It had been a grueling week, filled with a scintillating excitement and recurrent pain. There had been the inevitable offer from Rudolphe to lend Marcel the money to join Richard and Marie on the trip. But Rudolphe had taken out a note on the stables and sold two lots in the Faubourg Marigny just to meet the immediate expenses of the couple’s journey, and it was quite out of the question that Marcel would go traipsing about Europe, while at home Rudolphe worked night and day with Antoine and his nephew Pierre, as was usual, the family shorthanded now besides. The conversation had been humiliating for Marcel.

In fact, as the day of departure grew closer and closer, he found himself experiencing very intense pain, sometimes so intense that he could not hide it from others. He would shun the Lermontant house at such moments, and go on those long walks which had so often soothed him in the past, seeking any distraction from the desperation that was crippling his heart.

And over and over, he ached for Christophe, ached simply to sit with Chris by the fire, or more truly, to seek Chris’s quiet guidance as he wandered through the broken glass of his old world. But he could not turn to Chris now. Marie was safe with Richard, the entire course of her life altered, and Marcel could not, would not, let Chris see the smallness, the weakness of his soul. He would rather die than disappoint Chris. He would struggle through this alone.

As for Anna Bella, he could neither think of her, nor put her out of his mind. He felt rage against Dazincourt, and this was a man who had faced death for him on the field of honor, it was insupportable, and yet it seemed a devastating cruelty that Marcel had ever possessed Anna Bella, ever tasted what life might have been with her day-to-day love. And in the days that followed their lone night together, he saw again and again that image of Dazincourt’s barouche beside her cottage, and praying for some note from her, some sign as to how things stood with her, he was answered with silence which told him all.

Of course the wedding had lifted his spirits. Until the priest said the final words he did not, in fact, believe that it would happen. Some calamity must prevent it. But at last came that moment when his sister, a stranger to him now in light of all that had bruised and almost
destroyed her, was lifted on tiptoe into her husband’s arms. The world was shut out then, and it seemed the very air of the sacristy was suffused with love as they all left it afterwards, and he had hoped that he would not have to see Richard alone again.