Crescent City (54 page)

“I’m sorry,” André said. “This conversation has gotten too deep. A lecture on the frightfulness of war is not the right way to end a beautiful evening.” His luminous smile asked them all to forgive him.

The words “end the evening” acted as the signal they were intended to be. Indeed, it had grown late, as
everyone was reminded by the hall clock’s rattle and bong.

“I thought they would never have sense enough to leave us alone,” André said when the others had gone upstairs. “Come here! Come here!”

He stretched out his arms, into which she came with automatic obedience, clasped her, kissed her, and clasped her again. Her eyes, not closed in any ecstasy of forgetfulness, were wide and alert, staring over his shoulder toward the hearth, where a dozen tiny red eyes winked back out of the gray ash.

Into her ear he murmured, “Sit down. I have things to show you. First this. Read this.”

From a clipping out of a Paris newspaper she read the following:

“Well, now, what do you think of that! She has divorced me! Don’t forget, this article is three months old. I should be receiving papers any moment. But wait, that’s not all. There’s this.” And drawing a small velvet box out of his pocket, André laid it on the table before Miriam.

“Open it.”

Her hands trembled, so that she was clumsy with the catch. In his eagerness André reached over and snapped up the lid.

“How do you like it?”

It was the traditional ruby engagement ring, but it was no ordinary ruby. It was a splendor of splendors.
Many-faceted, it drew to itself all the light in the room and threw a rosy radiance into the shadows. She stared at it as though it were alive. And her mind went back—all evening her mind had been taking such backward leaps—to the moment when Eugene had given her his ring. She even recalled the dress she had worn that night, the way the skirt had spread; cream-colored lawn it was, laced with lavender ribbons. Yes, and she could recall that the ring had presented itself to her with no joy of possession, neither because of its symbolism nor its intrinsic beauty. It had frightened her.

And so did this ring now.

“It’s very beautiful,” she said.

“You don’t like it?” André asked.

“How could I not admire it? But it’s too magnificent for me.” She stammered. “It doesn’t suit me—or the times.” And she made a half-conscious gesture toward her dress, which had been “turned,” so that what had been the lining was now the outside.

“Ah, you’re tired of it all, you’ve had nothing, that’s what’s the matter! You need new dresses, you need new pleasures. You’re out of practice!”

He pulled her to him to kiss her again, but her position was awkward, and his mouth barely grazed hers. He smelled of wine. He was rough. The wine had gone to his head. And the ring still lay on the table.

“Here, put it on. Try it on.”

She didn’t want to do it. A terrible confusion, a weakness, overcame her, and without knowing it was going to happen, she felt her eyes fill. This caused panic. How did it look to cry, now, at this moment of fruition, of what was to have been fulfillment for them both? She squeezed, pressing her lids against her eyeballs, forcing the tears back.

“I must be very tired. There’s been so much today.”
Her lips formed the words just as they slid through her mind, phrases with no order or purpose. “I’m afraid … I don’t understand …”

André was astonished. “What don’t you understand? What can you be afraid of?”

“I don’t know.”

In the fireplace the little red eyes were winking out, one by one. It had begun to rain. One always heard the first slow, heavy drops on the verandah roof. They accelerated now. It would be a warm, gray, rain, like tears.

“This place smells of defeat,” André said abruptly, with a kind of scorn.

He waved his arm toward what she knew he had seen when he rode up that afternoon: the weathered boards rotting away for lack of paint and the dry, broken stalks of cotton in the fields. His scorn seemed to be turning into anger.

“Listen to me. I’m going to get you out of here, away from all this ruination. It’s not worth building up again, anyway. What would you say to a small chateau along the Loire? Or a
mas
in Provence? It’s a paradise in spring. We’ll take the family, your father, too, of course.”

Take Papa? Ask Papa to leave America and return to Europe? He doesn’t know Papa, she thought.

“Or would you rather have an Elizabethan manor in the south of England? The choice is yours.” And when Miriam did not answer, he added somewhat grandly, “I’ve a Sir Edwin Landseer painting of King Charles spaniels that I bought in London just for you. It would be splendid over the mantel in an old English house, or anywhere else. They look just like Gretel.”

Gretel, hearing her name, raised her old head from the rug and after one weak thump of the tail, lay back.

Gabriel brought the puppy; the soft, wriggling, tiny thing was not much larger than the palm of his hand.

“Are you so rich as all that?” Miriam asked softly. “They were talking, your friends in Richmond, they were talking about a man who made fifty thousand dollars a month on imported goods. Was that you?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t the only one. People like to count other people’s money, anyway. And I certainly didn’t do that sort of thing every month. It’s an exaggeration, although not too far off the mark.”

When she offered no comment, he asked abruptly, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I was only thinking—”

But he interrupted, “Thinking again! It will take me a long time, I can see, to train you out of all this solemn thinking.”

“I was thinking,” she insisted, “of all the pain—and fifty thousand dollars a month.”

“That’s what war is, Miriam, what did you think it was? Pain and death! Don’t take it so tragically, will you? War is a damn-fool silly business, but people have always had wars, they come and they go. This one’s over, so just forget it, forget the whole damn-fool business.”

“Damn fool? You call it that?”

“Yes, and fools were the only ones who took it seriously. The smart ones took care of themselves. I was scarcely ever in any real danger! Oh, I made a couple of blockade runs during the early months, just for the boyish thrill of it! But when it got too dangerous, I quit. All the flags and slogans, what are they for? And the glory that is ho glory! Come back with a wooden leg and a dirty rag with some stars on it—for what? Stars and bars or stars and stripes—what difference does it make? Is it worth a leg or an arm? Only fools,
boys”—André laughed—“thirty- and forty-year-old boys, stir themselves up over that sort of thing.”

She begged silently: Don’t talk, don’t. Every word is a nail in the coffin.

He did not see that she was wretched. Pouring a drink of brandy, he swirled the tan liquid in the rotund glass and sniffed it sensuously. Miriam watched the elegant ritual with a sinking heart.

“Listen! You want to know the truth? I never gave a damn who won. I hedged my bets. If the South had won—I knew it wouldn’t, but if by some fluke, it had—I would still have owned my land as before, but with this difference. I’d have had the means to maintain it. The other way, as it’s turned out, I’m well supplied with everything I’ll need for six lifetimes. My cousins can have my land here and are welcome to do what they can with it, which won’t be much.”

Absorbed in this account of himself, he had forgotten that only a few minutes earlier he had been concerned over what might be wrong with
her,
and Miriam felt her body stiffening. She sat upright with her hands clasped in her lap, with her nails cutting into her palms.

“Wouldn’t it have been a good deal more simple,” she asked, “to have stayed in Europe where you were when the war began? What made you come back to all this trouble?”

And in the very instant of asking she was aware that only a few months before she would have taken for granted why he had come back: for love of her.

He answered, “How, after all I’ve just been telling you, can you still ask that? Because there was a fortune to be made! Let me show you something in my traveling bag.” Out of a small bag which he had set down in the corner of the room, he brought forth a packet of photographs. “Here, look. This was when I
was running the blockade in sixty-two. This is a café in Havana called the Louvre. Everybody met there, northerners and southerners, to do business. Here I am, sitting with two officers in the Federal navy. They used to make contacts with northern merchant ships, you see, to bring down a load of manufactured stuff; the blockade runner would bring in the cotton and the middlemen would buy and sell. It seems complicated, but basically it was a trade and very advantageous to all. A shipload of cotton could bring in half a million dollars’ worth in traded goods. That’s how it worked.”

Miriam examined the photograph. Yes, there he sat, squinting a little into what must have been a glaring tropical sun. But the smile was the old charming, vivid smile. He had been enjoying himself, while my brother—how he suffered! She saw David’s sunken face, with the teeth rotted out. And Gabriel, who might or might not still be alive …

She said slowly, “It was like a play for you, wasn’t it? A drama. Playacting. You didn’t care, you say, which side was right or wrong, or even how it was all to end. You were scorning us all, weren’t you? As long as you could have things like that”—and Miriam’s arm swept toward the brandy and the pile of gifts still heaped on the sideboard.

“You enjoyed what I brought. That time I brought the yellow silk, and the shoes and hats, you enjoyed them, didn’t you?”

“Yes. To my shame, I did.”

He laughed. For the first time she realized that he laughed too much, too often. Now in this laugh there was faint incredulity.

“You’re a silly thing. A silly, pious little girl, but a darling, all the same. Come here”—and he reached for her breast.

She moved out of reach. “André, I am neither silly nor little. And I am not a girl. I am a woman.”

“Then, be one, and don’t try to be like a man. Miriam, be yourself. Be what you were.”

Was this André? What had happened to her? His words passed over her like wind. She trembled.

“André … We never talked about the war. The biggest event of our time, the biggest in our lives, and we never talked about it, do you know that? I’m just realizing that we never talked very much about anything.”

“We talked about the only things that are important: you and me.”

His voice coaxed. Still, she could feel her mouth setting itself into that downward curve of disapproval, that expression which, through observation in a mirror, she had trained herself to control; yet now this downward curve was on her face. She knew by his response.

“Most talk is blather anyway,” he said. “What people really want to talk about, if they would only admit it, is survival. Ways to get on in the world and stay there.”

She was still not able to believe that he could mean all these things.

“That’s not so,” she protested. “How can you talk like that? You who were so kind to my brother. That wasn’t to ‘get on in the world.’ That was pure goodness.”

“It was to please you! I hardly know your brother. And how do you think I was able to do it? Only because I had those contacts and dealings that seem to shock you so. Why are you so shocked, anyway? You were always a sympathizer with the North. You think I didn’t know that?”

“Yes, I was. I am. But I had to live here with my
family, and I was loyal to these people, here where I live. At least I was loyal!”

“Your loyalty is rather ironic! Right in this house, a member of one of the so-called best families was playing both ends against the middle. I suppose you’re not aware of that, though.”

“Oh, I’m aware! It was old Labouisse. I knew about that long ago.”

“And it didn’t matter to you?”

“Of course I was shocked, but there was nothing I could do about it. Anyway, I’ve learned at last that people aren’t always what they seem.”

“A child knows that, Miriam.”

“Not always. Girls brought up as they are here don’t get to know much about the world, or what lies under smiles and courtesies.” She took a deep breath. “What did I know about you, André? I’m beginning to think I don’t know you at all.”

“What the devil can you mean?”

“Oh, it’s not your fault! No, it’s not. Because you don’t know me, either. We never opened ourselves to each other.”

André’s eyebrows went up. “Oh? I should have said we did, very much so.”

She flushed. There it was again, that humiliating wave of hot red rising into her scalp.

“There are other ways beside just—”

“Just the body, you mean? Why don’t you say it? Miriam, I don’t understand what’s wrong tonight, what’s happening. You’re different.”

“Oh, yes, but you are, too. Or else I’m only seeing things I never saw before. You come down here to this ruination and talk the way you do! There’s cruelty in it! Pelagie’s home is burned and gone. She’s lost a son. Rosa’s lost one, and every cent she had in the world,
besides. Gabriel had all their funds in Confederate bonds, and they’re worth nothing.”

“The more fool Gabriel,” André said contemptuously. “If he’d had any sense, he’d have moved his money to a New York bank.”

If you love him, Gabriel said, then that’s the way it is. I only wanted to be sure, in case … She had felt his cheek against her hair. A military band played a glum march down on the dismal street … I went with Lee at the start. I gave my word.

She almost screamed, “Don’t you say that! Don’t you call Gabriel a fool! He believed in something, maybe enough to give his life for it.”

“Your face! Look at your face! Why, it’s on fire! One might think you were in love with the man!”

“If you had
believed
in something!” she cried, ignoring his words. “What is life worth if you don’t believe in something?”