Crescent City (33 page)

“Well, Gabriel, then. He’s a cool sort, but he grows on you. Emma’s people, of course, Eulalie, Pelagie, and any of her children who want to come. Oh, yes, put Perrin down, André Perrin. I haven’t seen him since he’s been back in town. He never comes to call; you’d think he’d be more friendly.”

Miriam’s pencil rested; she controlled her trembling hand. “If he’s not that friendly, why invite him?”

“Oh, well, I’ve no grudge. I do know he travels a good deal, so maybe that’s why he hasn’t come round.
I always liked him, he’s clever, goes all over the world, which I wish Fd done when I was still able.”

“So he’s very likely away somewhere. I’ll find out for you.”

“Don’t bother. I can find out myself. Put his name down.”

André Perrin.
The letters shaped themselves into spaces on the paper. They looked up quizzically, startled and alarmed as the pounding of her frightened heart.

On the piazza after dinner the men smoked and talked. The drone of their voices coming through the long open windows was in competition with the harp, which Pelagie’s daughter, Felicité, was playing in the parlor.

Miriam’s thoughts moved like troubled wanderers looking for a place to rest. They moved from Angelique, who, pretending to be attentive to the music, was probably wishing she were as old as Felicité and could wear her hair up, back to André on the piazza. She strained to hear his voice among the others’, but it did not come.

After three days they had still not been alone together. Men and women bathed separately in tibe bayou. In groups they went driving through the countryside; in groups they dined and played cards. Occasionally her eyes had met his; then, remembering how Pelagie’s adoration of Sylvain had been so naked on her face, she had turned away.

She thought curiously: Gabriel’s face is covered up. Nothing is revealed in it. Could Rosa have been mistaken? No, of course not. Then it must be very hard for Gabriel tonight .… How strange that two men who loved her should be sitting there together!

How strange to be having these thoughts at all! She,
Miriam, the proper-seeming wife of a respected gentleman; the mistress of this family home, gleaming and orderly in its traditions; the mother of that manly boy, already old enough to take his place with the men after dinner; the mother to be an example for her daughter …

What would the world—the world in which she had to live—say of her if they knew? Her children … she would stand shattered before them. How they would suffer! And she passed her hand over her perspiring forehead.

“I’m thinking,” Pelagie remarked, “of how Marie Claire used to play for us. It’s so strange that she stays abroad. It must be very hard on a young husband.”

“I suppose it must be,” Miriam agreed.

“Yet he seems content! He looks very well, don’t you think so?”

“Very well.”

“And you do, too, Miriam. I don’t know when I’ve seen you so blooming, so healthy and pink.”

Miriam moved closer to the window, giving as excuse the heat, but needing really to remove herself from Pelagie’s remarks.

“I have enormous respect for Rabbi Wise,” Gabriel was saying. “He feels religion and politics ought to be separate and I agree.”

“Well, Wise,” Eugene replied, “Wise is against slavery, and of course I don’t agree with him there. But when he says he’d rather break up the Union than go to war, there I do agree.”

“There’s no question that if war comes, it will be the abolitionist Protestant preachers who brought it about.”

Miriam recalled a time when she had thought constantly about those questions; yet at this moment they
meant nothing; she was thinking of André. She had become a woman with a fixed idea.

“I’m told that at the State House they predict crisis,” Eugene was saying. “They say if a Republican is elected President we shall secede.”

Another voice was heard. “Then there will be war.”

Other voices joined.

“We are short of everything: wagon factories, ammunition, tents, everything.”

“Can you imagine abolition here? It’s enough to make your flesh crawl! Hordes of them taking to the roads with no place to go, nothing to eat, except what they can steal.”

She felt a touch on her shoulder.

“It’s a perfect night,” André said. “Too beautiful for such depressing conversation. Would you like a walk or a row in the skiff?”

She raised her eyebrows, as if to say, We can’t do this.

But André countered lightly. “Any lady who wants to come is welcome. The boat holds two. Shall we take turns? You first, Pelagie?”

Pelagie declined. Miriam’s chair scraped abruptly as she stood up, reminding her how he had drawn her away from the talk on that very first night.

“We started out so cheerfully,” André said. “But they always turn to politics. Let’s look at the stars. They’ve been here long before there was a North or a South and will be here long after.”

The moon, faintly red, bled pink into the white sky. In the middle of the lawn where the decorous sound of the harp almost faded out of hearing, it was met by the poignant thrum and twang of a guitar. Over in the cabins a man was singing of ancient longings and transient delights; one needed no words to recognize both longing and delights.

On and on André and Miriam moved with identical steps. She felt the motion of his legs in unison with her own. The path to the bayou was thick with a hundred years’ worth of fallen pine needles, on which feet made no more noise than a breeze in the treetops. Live oaks spilled streamers of gray moss like old women’s hair.

“The moss is sorrowful,” Miriam said.

André was not to be drawn into her mood. “To begin with, it isn’t moss at all. It’s related to the pineapple family, and that’s the symbol of welcome.”

He helped her into the boat. So still was the surface that the trees along the shore made a motionless reflection, scalloping a deeper black against the opaque bayou water. André dropped the oars to let the boat drift and took her hand. For a long time they sat without speaking, joined by the tightening contact of their hands.

“I wish there were someplace for us to go tonight,” André said.

She dared then to say what she had been holding back. A woman should never take the initiative; a woman should wait to receive.

“I wish for more than tonight. To see ahead.” And when he did not answer, she cried, “What’s to happen? Where are we going?”

“Ah, don’t! I can’t bear it when you’re unhappy! Listen to me. Remember that every day brings something new. When we first saw each other you were choked with tears. You couldn’t have foreseen, that night, what’s happened between us since then, could you?”

“That’s true,” she admitted.

“I’m not a superstitious man, but I’ve seen so many curious and wonderful turns and twists that I never give up hoping.”

He stroked her hair. More than his words, his fingers
calmed her. His compassion made her want to believe that in some miraculous turn of affairs all impediments between them might be swept away.

Presently he took the oars and turned the boat back to the landing, soothing all the while in his bright vigorous voice with talk of New York and Washington, of theater and amusing personalities.

They walked back up the path toward the house. In deepest shadow, just before the path emerged onto open lawn, they stopped and he pulled her to him. She trembled and, leaning against him, gave him all her weight, so that, half lifted, her feet barely grazed the ground and she was held to him by arms and lips.

At last he said, “I haven’t told you, I have to go north again next week.”

“Again? Must you?” she cried, thinking, I sound like a wife. I cling like a wife.

“I have to. I have business that has to be taken care of quickly. The war is coming, you know. I couldn’t stand any more talk of it inside there tonight, but they’re right, it’s coming.”

“And who will win?”

“Who can say? The North has more men and more money. The South will have help from Europe because of cotton. But who can say?”

All thought of issues and principles, all private secret allegiances, washed away. What would war do to André and Miriam?

She controlled her voice. “How long will you be gone this time?”

“It depends how things work out. A couple of months maybe, but I’ll be back, you may be sure of that. Meanwhile, when you pass the Pontalba, think of me, remember that the place is waiting for us. Do you promise?”

She understood that he was aware of her fear and
that he would admire her for covering it up with gallantry.

“I promise,” she said.

“Good! Then, let’s go inside.”

The brush raked her hair, snapping sparks. Through the mirror she saw the bed waiting and thought with relief that she would be asleep when Eugene came in after a late night at cards, so that she would not even be aware of his entry. How many thousands of hours they had lain together in the dark intimacy of that bed without touching! And she thought that, but for the constraint of law and custom, it would be—ought to be—so natural and simple for André instead of Eugene to walk through that door and lie down in that bed.

Someone knocked.

“Come in,” she called, expecting Fanny.

It was Eulalie. Her skirts flounced through the door with such speed that the taffeta crackled. At once she began to speak, like a child who had run to deliver a message and dared not forget it.

“I want you to know that I saw you! I saw you and him tonight. I heard every word you both said.”

Miriam’s heart slowed. A heart was supposed to beat faster from shock; nevertheless, she felt hers beat slowly, felt its hard pulse pounding. She laid the brush down and waited.

“I was sitting on the lawn when I heard your voices quite clearly on the path. I certainly didn’t stoop to eavesdropping, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I’m not thinking anything.”

Cool. Icy cool. Say as little as possible. Above all, don’t let her see that you’re terrified.

“I think,” Eulalie said, clipping the words, “that you are a disgrace. A disgrace.” A spray of her saliva
struck Miriam’s cheek. “Perhaps there isn’t enough decency in you to know that you are.”

Miriam collected her thoughts. “If you choose to misunderstand—completely misunderstand—what you say you heard, then there’s nothing I can do about it, is there?”

Eulalie’s laugh was the victor’s laugh, scornful and careless. “There’s nothing to misunderstand. The Pontalba! So that’s where you go on your afternoon walks, the fine lady with—with gold bracelets!”

She will cry this through the house and over the city. My children will hear of it and hate me.

“No wonder they moved the state capital away from New Orleans! A modern Sodom, they said. Not fit for legislators, they said, and it’s true when women like you from respectable homes …” For the moment Eulalie had no more words.

There is a streak of madness in her, Miriam thought, as the red flush, like a burn or a disease, stained the woman’s neck. Perhaps it was that, before all else, that had kept the young men away: a streak of madness.

“What do you think your father will say, your father who thinks the sun rises on you! And my mother, who has treated you like one of her own daughters! And this is how you repay them!”

Now I have gone as far as I can go in this life of mine, they will do what they want with me.

Still she held on. “Is that all, Eulalie? Really, there’s no point in continuing this, since you have made up your mind.”

“Do you know what people will think of you? That you’re a—a whore! Yes, a whore!”

Surely this is the first time such a word has left her tight mouth, Miriam thought. She stood up and slapped Eulalie with a light, humiliating sting.

“Don’t use that word to me! What do you know of whores? Or of love? Or anything else? You hate the world! You’re a poisoned woman, you hate yourself. You’ve been my enemy from the day I came to your house. I was a child, but I knew it even then. So now you’ve got a weapon! Well, do what you want with it, I can’t stop you—”

“I could hear you at the end of the hall,” Eugene said furiously. “What the devil is going on?”

Suddenly the walls revolved and the floor tilted upward.

“I need air,” Miriam said. She stumbled to the verandah; she could hardly speak. “Eulalie will be glad to tell you what’s going on.”

From below came the sound of music and the voices of men still at cards. Among them André, unsuspecting, had no idea what the last few minutes had done. She thought again of her children. They were Eugene’s children; he could take their mother out of their lives; the law said so.

Life has its way of surprising us, André had told her tonight. Float with its current, it’s easy, he had told her. But this current could dash her to pieces on the rocks.

And that hard beat of her heart resumed. How long could a heart beat like that without failing?

Later—how much later? Ten minutes, half an hour?—she became aware that Eugene was alone in the room.

“You can come back in now,” he called. “Sit down.”

She was thankful that he could not see, for she knew that terror was written on her face.

“Well,” he began, “that was quite a story! Quite! The woman’s a poor, sneaky creature, but still I suppose
she could hardly have invented it all. So it must be true.”

She could not bear to look at him; instead, she looked down at her nails, the pink shells of her innocent nails. She sighed.

“It’s true.” And she waited for his fury.

Instead, the door to the hall, which had been ajar, was flung wide open and the children came in.

My God, she thought, he has told them already! Or he will tell them. He will condemn me in front of them, and they will despise me. They will be disgraced. No man of family will want to marry Angelique. In the temple on the Sabbath people will turn to stare—Her mind raced, aching like a winded runner.

“Mama!” cried Angelique. “Why haven’t you been downstairs? They’re playing the piano, and we’ve been dancing!” The child’s vigor illuminated her skin so that it glowed like ivory. “Mr. Perrin has been teaching me to waltz, he says I’m as light on my feet as any of the ladies in Paris!”