Merrick (3 page)

I had banished my unseemly curiosity and set to memorizing her appearance, as was my custom in those days, by looking very carefully at every aspect of her visage and form.

Her limbs had been beautifully molded; her breasts were already too fetching, and the features of her face were large, all of them—with no unique hint of the African—large her well-shaped mouth, and large her almond eyes and long nose; her neck had been long and uncommonly graceful, and there had been a harmony to her face, even when she had fallen into the deepest thought.

“Keep your secrets of those white Mayfairs,” she had said. “Maybe someday we can swap secrets, you and me. They don’t even know in these times that we are here. Great Nananne said that Oncle Julien died before she was born. In the dream, he didn’t say a word about those white Mayfairs. He said for me to come here.” She had gestured to the old glass photographs. “These are my people. If I’d been meant to go to those white Mayfairs, Great Nananne would have seen it long before now.” She’d paused, thoughtfully. “Let’s us just talk of those old times.”

She’d spaced the daguerreotypes lovingly on the mahogany table. She made a neat row, wiping away the crumbly fragments with her hand. And at some moment, I’d noted that all the little figures were upside down from her point of view, and right side up for Aaron and for me.

“There’ve been white people kin to me that have come down here and tried to destroy records,” she said, “You know, tear the page right out of the church register that says their great-grandmother was colored.
Femme de couleur libre,
that’s what some old records say in French.

“Imagine tearing up that much history, the page right out of the church register with all those births and deaths and marriages, and not wanting to know. Imagine going into my great-great oncle’s house and breaking up those pictures, pictures that ought to be someplace safe for lots of people to see.”

She had sighed, rather like a weary woman, gazing down into the worn shoe box and its trophies.

“Now I have these pictures. I have everything, and I’m with you, and they can’t find me, and they can’t throw all these things away.”

She had dipped her hand into the shoe box again and taken out the
cartes de visite
—old photographs on cardboard from the last decades of the old century. I could see the high slanted letters in faded purple on the backs of these latest pictures as she turned them this way and that.

“See, this here is Oncle Vervain,” she said. I had looked at the thin, handsome black-haired young man with the dark skin and light eyes like her own. It was rather a romantic portrait. In a finely tailored three-piece suit, he stood with his arm on a Greek column before a painted sky. The picture was in rich sepia. The African blood was plainly present in the man’s handsome nose and mouth.

“Now, this is dated 1920.” She turned it over once, then back again, and laid it down for us to see. “Oncle Vervain was a Voodoo Doctor,” she said, “and I knew him well before he died. I was little, but I’ll never forget him. He could dance and spit the rum from between his teeth at the altar, and he had everybody scared, I can tell you.”

She took her time, then found what she wanted. Next picture.

“And you see here, this one?” She had laid down another old photograph, this time of an elderly gray-haired man of color in a stately wooden chair. “The Old Man is what they always called him. I don’t even know him by any other name. He went back to Haiti to study the magic, and he taught Oncle Vervain all he knew. Sometimes I feel Oncle Vervain is talking to me. Sometimes I feel he’s outside our house watching over Great Nananne. I saw the Old Man once in a dream.”

I had wanted so badly to ask questions, but this had not been the time.

“See here, this is Pretty Justine,” she had said, laying down perhaps the most impressive portrait of all—a studio picture on thick cardboard inside a sepia cardboard frame. “Pretty Justine had everybody afraid of her.” The young woman was indeed pretty, her breasts flat in the style of the 1920s, her hair in a bob, her dark skin quite beautiful, her eyes and mouth slightly expressionless, or perhaps evincing a certain pain.

Now came the modern snapshots, thin and curling, the work of common enough hand-held cameras of the present time.

“They were the worst—his sons,” she had said as she pointed to the curling black-and-white picture. “They were Pretty Justine’s grandchildren, all white and living in New York. They wanted to get their hands on anything that said they were colored and tear it up. Great Nananne knew what they wanted. She didn’t fall for their soft manners and the way they took me downtown and bought me pretty clothes. I still have those clothes. Little dresses nobody ever wore and little shoes with clean soles. They didn’t leave us an address when they left. See, look at them in the picture. Look how anxious they are. But I did bad things to them.”

Aaron had shaken his head, studying the strange tense faces. As the pictures had disquieted me, I had kept my eyes on the womanish child.

“What did you do, Merrick?” I had asked without biting my tongue wisely.

“Oh, you know, read their secrets in their palms and told them bad things they’d always tried to cover up. It wasn’t kind to do that, but I did it, just to make them go away. I told them our house was full of spirits. I made the spirits come. No, I didn’t make them come. I called them and they came as I asked. Great Nananne thought it was funny. They said, ‘Make her stop,’ and Great Nananne said, ‘What makes you think I can do that?’ as if I was some wild creature that she couldn’t control.”

Again there had come that little sigh.

“Great Nananne’s really dying,” she said looking up at me, her green eyes never wavering. “She says there is no one now, and I have to keep these things—her books, her clippings. See, look here, at these clippings. The old newspaper is so brittle it’s falling apart. Mr. Lightner’s going to help me save these things.” She glanced at Aaron. “Why are you so afraid for me, Mr. Talbot? Aren’t you strong enough? You don’t think it’s so bad to be colored, do you? You’re not from here, you’re from away.”

Afraid. Was I really feeling it so strongly? She’d spoken with authority, and I’d searched for the truth in it, but come quick to my own defense and perhaps to hers as well.

“Read my heart, child,” I said. “I think nothing of the sort about being colored, though maybe there were times when I’ve thought that it might have been bad luck in a particular case.” She’d raised her eyebrows slightly, thoughtfully. I’d continued, anxious, perhaps, but not afraid. “I’m sad because you say you have no one, and I’m glad because I know that you have us.”

“That’s what Great Nananne says, more or less,” she answered. And for the first time, her long full mouth made a true smile.

My mind had drifted, remembering the incomparable dark-skinned women I’d seen in India, though she was a marvel of different tones, the rich mahogany hair and the pale eyes so visible and so meaningful. I’d thought again that to many she must have looked exotic, this barefoot girl in the flowered shift.

Then had come a moment of pure feeling, which had made its indelible and irrational impression. I’d perused the many faces laid out upon the table, and it had seemed they were all gazing at me. It was a marked impression. The little pictures had been alive all along.

It must be the firelight and the oil lamps, I’d thought dreamily, but I’d been unable to shake the feeling; the little people had been laid out to look at Aaron and to look at me. Even their placement seemed deliberate and sly, or wondrously meaningful, I’d conjectured, as I went smoothly from suspicion to a lulled and tranquil feeling that I was in an audience with a host of the dead.

“They do seem to be looking,” Aaron had murmured, I remember, though I’m sure I hadn’t spoken. The clock had stopped ticking and I’d turned to look at it, uncertain where it was. On the mantle, yes, and its hands had been frozen, and the window-panes had given that muffled rattle that they do when the wind nudges them, and the house had wrapped me securely in its own atmosphere of warmth and secrets, of safety and sanctity, of dreaminess and communal might.

It seemed a long interval had transpired in which none of us had spoken, and Merrick had stared at me, and then at Aaron, her hands idle, her face glistening in the light.

I’d awakened sharply to realize nothing had changed in the room. Had I fallen asleep? Unforgivable rudeness. Aaron had been beside me as before. And the pictures had become once more inert and sorrowful, ceremonial testimony to mortality as surely as if she’d laid out a skull for my perusal from a graveyard fallen to ruin. But the uneasiness I’d experienced then stayed with me long after we’d all gone up to our respective rooms.

Now—after twenty years and many other strange moments—she sat across from me at this café table in the Rue St. Anne, a beauty gazing at a vampire, and we talked over the flickering candle, and the light was too much like the light of that long ago evening at Oak Haven, though tonight the late spring evening was only moist, not wet with a coming storm.

She sipped the rum, rolling it around a bit before she swallowed it. But she didn’t fool me. She’d soon start drinking it fast again. She set the glass aside and let her fingers spread wide apart on the soiled marble. Rings. Those were Great Nananne’s many rings, beautiful gold filigree with various wondrous stones. She’d worn them even in the jungles, when I’d thought it so unwise. She’d never been prone to fear of any sort.

I thought of her in those hot tropical nights. I thought of her during those steamy hours under the high canopy of green. I thought of the trek through the darkness of the ancient temple. I thought of her climbing ahead of me, in the steam and roar of the waterfall up the gentle slope.

I’d been far too old for it, our great and secret adventure. I thought of precious objects made of jade as green as her eyes.

Her voice brought me out of my selfish reverie:

“Why are you asking me to do this magic?” She put the question to me again. “I sit here and I look at you, David, and with every passing second, I become more aware of what you are and what’s happened to you. I put all kinds of pieces together from your open mind—and your mind’s as open as it ever was, David, you know that, don’t you?”

How resolute was her voice. Yes, the French was utterly gone. Ten years ago it had been gone. But now there was a clipped quality to her words, no matter how soft and low they came.

Her large eyes widened easily with her expressive verbal rhythms.

“You couldn’t even be quiet of mind on the porch the other night,” she scolded. “You woke me. I heard you, just as if you’d been tapping on the panes. You said, ‘Merrick, can you do it? Can you bring up the dead for Louis de Pointe du Lac?’ And do you know what I heard underneath it? I heard ‘Merrick, I need you. I need to talk to you. Merrick, my destiny is shattered. Merrick, I reach for understanding. Don’t turn me aside.’ ”

I felt an acute pain in my heart.

“It’s true what you’re saying,” I confessed.

She drank another big swallow of the rum, and the heat danced in her cheeks.

“But you want this thing for Louis,” she said. “You want it enough to overcome your own scruples and come to my window. Why? You, I understand. Of him, I know other people’s stories and just the little I’ve seen with my own eyes. He’s a dashing young man, that one, isn’t he?”

I was too confused to answer, too confused to will courtesy to build a temporary bridge of polite lies.

“David, give me your hand, please,” she asked suddenly. “I have to touch you. I have to feel this strange skin.”

“Oh, darling, if only you could forego that,” I murmured.

Her large golden earrings moved against the nest of her black hair and the long line of her beautiful neck. All the promise of the child had been fulfilled in her. Men admired her enormously. I had known that a long time ago.

She reached out to me gracefully. Boldly, hopelessly, I gave her my hand.

I wanted the contact. I wanted the intimacy. I was powerfully stimulated. And treasuring the sensation, I let her fingers linger as she looked into my palm.

“Why read this palm, Merrick?” I asked. “What can it tell you? This body belonged to another man. Do you want to read the map of his broken fate? Can you see there that he was murdered and the body stolen? Can you see there my own selfish invasion of a body that ought to have died?”

“I know the story, David,” she answered. “I found it all in Aaron’s papers. Body switching. Highly theoretical as regards the official position of the Order. But you were a grand success.”

Her fingers sent the thrills up my spine and through the roots of my hair.

“After Aaron’s death, I read the whole thing,” she said, as she moved her fingertips across the pattern of deeply etched lines. She recited it:

“ ‘David Talbot is no longer in his body. During an ill-fated experiment with astral projection he was ousted from his own form by a practiced Body Thief and forced to claim the youthful trophy of his opponent, a body stolen from a shattered soul which has, as far as we can know, moved on.’ ”

I winced at the old familiar Talamasca style.

“I wasn’t meant to find those papers,” she continued, her eyes still fixed on my palm. “But Aaron died here, in New Orleans, and I had them in my hands before anyone else. They’re still in my possession, David; they have never been filed with the Elders and maybe they never will be filed. I don’t know.”

I was amazed at her audacity, to have held back such secrets from the Order to which she still devoted her life. When had I ever had such independence, except perhaps at the very end?

Her eyes moved quickly back and forth as she examined my palm. She pressed her thumb softly against my flesh. The chills were unbearably enticing. I wanted to take her in my arms, not feed from her, no, not harm her, only kiss her, only sink my fangs a very little, only taste her blood and her secrets, but this was dreadful and I wouldn’t let it go on.

I withdrew my outstretched hand.

“What did you see, Merrick?” I asked quickly, swallowing the hunger of body and mind.