Crescent City (32 page)

Presently, she got up and left. The carriage was waiting at the door.

“Maxim,” she said, “there’s some property I want to see before we go home.” And she directed him to the garden district.

Past Urania, Thalia, and Euterpe streets they drove, past towers, stained-glass windows, and serene lawns. It was a different world from that of the Vieux Carré—an American world.

“Here, Maxim, stop here for a minute.”

It had been a long time since she had seen the house. With a queer sense of satisfaction she noted
how it differed from the others on the street White and classical, it stood apart in an airy grove of mimosa trees. For a few minutes she sat in the carriage just looking at it, at a child who ran around from the back of the house, and at the second-story windows at which lace curtains hung in what must be a lovely room, where a man and woman slept together.

The horse flicked its tail and stamped, recalling her to herself.

“Home now, Maxim,” she said.

“Very pretty here, Miss Miriam,” Maxim observed, feeling chatty. “I had to go past Adele Street this morning for Miss Emma. She had an errand. You wouldn’t believe it’s the same city as this, with the slaughterhouse and all the smells. Those Irish sure is dirty people.”

Everyone wanted to look down on someone else. Maxim in his fine suit, driving his owner’s fine carriage, could feel himself superior to any poor Irishman who had no fine suit, no fine carriage, and no master to provide him with either. Curious indeed.

Ferdinand and Emma were having coffee on the verandah.

“You stayed a long time,” Ferdinand said.

“Yes. Rosa and I talked after the business was over.”

“What did you talk about?” So long “out of things,” he was eager for every crumb of news, however unimportant it might be.

“Oh, religion, home furnishings, war—”

“War!” Ferdinand was indignant. “There’ll be no war. We left all that behind in Europe.”

“Gabriel thinks there will be. So does David. But,” she ventured boldly, “I do think if women were to run
the world, there would not be. We’d find other ways to solve things.”

“Women, my dear?” Ferdinand gave his daughter the same smile he gave to little Eugene and Angelique. “Women? Surely, if man with his strength and intellect can’t manage affairs any better, what makes you think women can? Why not entrust affairs to children while you’re about it?”

And who has been keeping this house together since Eugene lost his sight and you lost your money, she thought angrily. Vain, ignorant man!

But he looked so old, throwing his shoulders back with such pathetic bravado. Let him talk, she thought, and did not reply.

Now in autumn a cooler breeze swept in from the Gulf, and the sun, ceasing to scorch, poured out a benevolent warmth. In the side garden where Miriam sat with an unread book, the first yellowing leaves lay on Aphrodite’s shoulder; on the dry grass an overripe persimmon fell, splashing its sweet thick juice, to which at once a bee came buzzing in a perfect frenzy.

The gate clicked. Mildly vexed by the intrusion, she turned to see who the intruder might be.

“Miriam. I’ve just arrived. I came as soon as I could,” said André.

So often in imagination she had contrived this meeting, fancying a chance encounter on the street or at some formal, drawing-room occasion, or even, foolishly, a tryst in a forest as in a German opera—always toying with such fancies and discarding them, embarrassed at their futility. Now, as he stood there, she did not know what she felt other than dull wonder that he was there at all.

“So much has happened to you since I went away .… Your brother. Oh, Miriam, in my heart I cried for you.”

“And you knew about Eugene?”

“Yes, long ago. Emma wrote to Marie Claire.”

“Marie Claire” hung in the air between them. “And
how is she—your wife?” Whether in the saying of the name there was any sharp intent to hurt either him or herself, she could not have said.

“She hasn’t come with me. She has had some recitals. Her teacher is enthusiastic. Well, at any rate, she wants to stay there a while longer.”

So they are drawing apart, she thought maliciously, and was ashamed of the thought.

“But I had to come back. I’d been away long enough. We’ve taken a house in the Pontalba Building.”

“They are very handsome houses,” Miriam said.

These perfunctory remarks—what did they mean? He looked the same, with the same brightness about him. Did he remember their parting here in this place, how they had clung to one another? Perhaps not. Time flows, changing, changing as each moment passes.

“Would you like to see the house?” André asked now.

She had a need to walk, to move, to do something with the churning that was inside her.

But she spoke primly. “That; would be very nice.”

With morning church over, the streets came to life ais people streamed toward their Sunday amusements, the cock fights, the horse races, the minstrel shows, and the taverns.

“This much hasn’t changed, I see,” André remarked. “I suppose the Protestants still fume over these merry Catholic Sundays?”

“I suppose they do.”

“Well, I see no harm in amusing oneself, regardless of the day. Gloom never made the world any better.”

In the little square behind the cathedral children clustered about the ice cream stand.

“That hasn’t changed either.”

“No,” Miriam agreed.

They were making conversation. She felt the strain of stepping so gingerly around the only question of importance: Are we the same, or have time and separation left their mark?

André remarked on the new cathedral. “A sumptuous building.”

“Yes, thanks to the generosity of Judah Touro.”

“We read about his will in Europe. Most extraordinary! All those charities, the Jewish Hospital here, and orphan homes and help for the poor of Jerusalem. Remarkable.”

“Gabriel says if Touro had died ten years ago he would have left nothing at all to any Jewish cause. Gabriel had great influence on him, you know. He was one of the people who brought him back to his faith.”

“How is Gabriel? Still not married?”

“Still not married.”

In some odd way she felt as though she were defending Gabriel, or as if, still more illogically, her very existence as the object of his love were her fault.

And she went on, thinking aloud, “He has been a great help to me, a right hand since Eugene’s accident.”

“Ah, but you’ve had too many burdens!” André exclaimed. “Far too many.”

Pausing a moment before unlocking the door, he surveyed the square with obvious admiration. “Except for Andrew Jackson capering on his horse, one might think oneself on the Place des Vosges in Paris.”

He led her upstairs into a tall salon with a Louis XV black marble fireplace. Automatically they walked to the windows; in these rooms one would always walk to the windows. Below, in the square, crepe myrtle spread pink autumn flowers. To the right, one saw the
levee and the glistening river. They stood quite still; the silence ticked.

What am I doing here? Miriam thought She began to speak in a high, unnatural voice.

“That’s the wharf where Jenny Lind arrived. P. T. Barnum brought her from Cuba. There were ten thousand people waiting. Such a crush! She stayed here in the Baroness Pontalba’s house.”

“Did she?” André was behind her, not touching; yet in the air around him there was an aureole of warmth which covered her back and shoulders.

“Yes,” she said, “yes, she was here a month. They sold the tickets at auction for two hundred dollars and more.” The words rushed. “Perhaps Marie Claire will be like her someday.”

Why speak of Marie Claire?

André replied, “Marie Claire has a pure voice, but it’s a little voice. She will never be a Jenny Lind or an Adelina Patti, although she doesn’t realize it yet.”

“I’m sorry,” Miriam said.

The grave, plain child sang her heart out in Papa’s parlor. The drab young bride stood with André. Aunt Emma falsely chirped: Don’t they make a handsome couple?

“Sorry?”

“Yes. Sorry that she will not have what she wants so badly. It’s a terrible thing to want something you know you will never have.”

“We didn’t come here to talk about these things,” he said.

She put her hands over her face. “I am all confused. I don’t know.”

He laid her head on his shoulder. His fingers moved in her hair, loosening the sturdy pins, undoing the chignon at the back of her neck so that the slippery hair fell to her shoulders.

Her heart slowed; she could feel it pulsing steadily and strongly. Something rose in her that she had never felt before; a flower opened and spread; a river ran; a wave lifted to a crest. His hands released the fastenings of her dress and she stood quite still, with closed eyes, allowing him to do what he wished. Wire hoops and twenty yards of yellow cloth fell to the floor. When she opened her eyes, she saw in the mirror the pale mauve mounds of her breasts swelling above the shift before it, too, fell. Her face was opalescent; it swam in the mirror; the shadows under her eyes were like tear stains, while her lips turned upward slowly, slowly, into a wandering, gentle smile.

Lightly he lifted her, easily carried her, and in a high, white lovely room, laid her down on the bed.

Now his head rested on her shoulder. With her free hand she stroked his cheek, on which the thinnest ray of afternoon light, having slid through the drawn blinds, tipped the fine hair with gold. What a beautiful thing was his hand, with its fingers lying loose in sleep! Each nail, smooth as glass, bore its pale crescent. Such tenderness, such skill in that strong hand!

In a wonderful languor she stretched her arm, smelling a lemon scent on her warm skin, feeling the bloom of her own health. A small quickening breeze swept in, waking André.

“You haven’t slept?” he murmured.

“No, I was drowsy, but I didn’t sleep.”

“You were thinking,” he reproached gently. “You think too much.”

At this instant, at this reminder, anxiety shattered her peace.

“I was remembering how often I wondered how it would be when you came back.”

“Weil, now you know. You don’t have to wonder anymore.”

“I feel as if these years hadn’t passed at all, as if you’d left only yesterday.”

He kissed her eyelids. “I want you to be happy … happy.”

“If only we never had to get up, if we could stay in this room like this.”

“Dear Miriam, we’re here now, don’t spoil it.”

“I don’t want to, but …”

“But what?”

“If only there were no Eugene or Marie Claire!”

Two pairs of her stockings, the black net worn over the flesh-colored silk, lay over a chair. They reminded her of—of Eugene’s woman. Am I then no better than she?

“You’re worried about them? We’re taking nothing away that anyone wants. Certainly not Eugene, after all you’ve told me.”

“But Marie Claire?”

“It doesn’t matter, I tell you. She cares about her voice and nothing else, certainly not about me! And if she doesn’t care, why should I?”

“Do you know, you probably won’t believe me, but it’s true, I always saw my life touching hers one day?”

“Do you often ‘see’ things?” André teased.

“Not often,” she said soberly. “But sometimes. For us I see only a blank, a dark blank.”

“You’ve listened too long to the servants. Superstitions. Listen to me.” He held her closely. “Always listen to me. Think of yourself going on a long, wonderful, dangerous journey. I’m the guide, I’ll keep you safe, I’ll keep danger away.”

She sighed. “You do comfort me. Even your voice comforts me.”

“That’s what I want to do.” He kissed her. “You’ll
come again? I shall have to be away a great deal—my family’s place, and business in the North—but never for very long. You’ll come again?”

“Oh, yes, oh, yes I will. I will.”

So it began.

Now in the last year of peace there were some who saw what was coming and others who denied it, even though it was scrawled across the sky.

John Brown had seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Hailed in the North as a defender of human liberty, he was daily condemned as a vicious agitator when merchants and planters met over lunch at Maspero’s Exchange. There they spoke, too, of men like David Raphael, wondering that he, for instance, could have come from so decent a family. And they were sorry for his relatives. They quoted politicians who were saying that secession was inevitable unless some “reasonable compromise” could be effected and soon. In lowered voices and somber tones they spoke of Englishmen murdered in the Indian Mutiny at Lucknow only a few years before.

The Mistick Krew of Comus organized a Mardi Gras parade that year as splendid as any; the French Opera House opened with a spectacular season of Donizetti, Massenet and Bellini; Adelina Patti sang; the new gaslights were installed in the grandest houses; and women, parting their hair in the center, madonna-style, had themselves photographed.

Yet perhaps it was not ignorance but the fear of war
which engendered this gaiety and roused Eugene from his indifference.

“It’s too long since we had guests at Beau Jardín,” he said one day. He frowned. “Why have we not done it before?”

“We were conserving,” Miriam reminded him with some resentment. Not once had he given her any credit for what she had been doing.

“We’ll invite people in time for the grinding season.”

That meant a week of lavish entertainment, of escorting visitors through the sugar mill, drinking hot cane juice and rum, while the slaves toiled twenty-four hours a day until the cane had all been ground.

“We’ll bring everyone upriver on the
Edward J. Gay,
do it in fine style while we’re about it,” Eugene said. He became enthusiastic. “I shall want a fine menu, chowders and turtle soup, pigeons, whatever you can think of. And very likely we’re low on Madeira. It’s so long since I’ve checked. Will you take care of that? And the guest list, too, since—since I can’t write?”

She fetched pencil and paper.

“We’ll begin with Gabriel and the sister.”

“Rosa will be in Saratoga,” she reminded him.