Crescent City (56 page)

Alone, Miriam went to take a last look at the land she had once so sorely resented. The cattle had been released from the barn and were moving through the gate with heads to grass. Already Pelagie’s sons had begun to set things in order, regulating the milking times and setting firm schedules for planting and plowing. For them this was the natural way of life, rather than a way to be learned with struggling effort. The land and its creatures had been asking to be cared for, Miriam told herself, and she was glad to be leaving them with people who loved them.

Sisyphus was on the verandah supervising the family’s meager luggage. And she recalled the flourish of their former arrivals and departures at Beau Jardín, the wagons piled with trunks, the coachmen in feathered hats and the glossy horses in brass-studded harness. Changes. Changes.

Downhill, out of the light, into the shadow of cypress and live oak, she went toward the bayou. The day was windless, so still that the tops of the túpelo trees caught not a breath of breeze, and the fluffy roseaux heads at the bayou’s rim stood without swaying. The water lay thick as black glass, dotted here and there with silver or bronze where a shaft of sunshine pierced the darkness. Yet, in its calm depths the drowsing alligator lurked and the dreadful Cotton-mouth slithered.

Like life, Miriam thought. Danger hides in beauty and beauty in danger. Then, mocking herself: How philosophical we are this morning, Miriam! She walked back to the house. It was time to go.

Someone touched her shoulder. It was Angelique, holding a clutch of coarse, ragged zinnias out of the abandoned garden.

“We must put this on our papa’s grave before we leave,” she said solemnly.

Miriam’s eyes lifted to the second-floor piazza, then lowered to the spot on the grass where Eugene had lain.

“Of course,” she said softly.

The son and the daughter laid the flowers on the father’s grave. With soundless steps and muted voices they went, as if the man who lay behind the hedge of Cherokee roses could know that they were there. He was resting now in the place he had cherished, his Beau Jardín.

Standing a little apart from them, Miriam regarded her daughter and her son. They waited now, without knowing that they waited, in that short period of uncertain possibilities at the entrance to adult life. One had little way of foreseeing yet what they might finally become, but whatever it was would be soon. It was time. The boy, without schooling during these past years, had grown restless and awkward, almost as shy and raw as a backwoodsman. Blunt as a backwoodsman, too, she thought; or else, one might say, blunt and honest as David. There was no mistaking the honesty in his answering gaze, so much like David’s.

Miriam’s own gaze paused then at Angelique’s bent head. Copper threaded her black, streaming hair; in one quick-moving curve she knelt to place the flowers, then straightened tall. Those odd tea-colored eyes, which in her father’s face had seemed to hold such mystery and menace, were in the girl’s face exotic and alluring. She had her father’s pride, but none of his arrogance. And without envy the mother recognized a beauty greater than her own had ever been.

The boy was saying the Kaddish, his voice faltering with emotion, while Angelique looked down at the mounded grave over which two bumblebees pursued each other. How they loved their father! Miriam thought. They don’t know we were unfaithful to each other. They don’t know how they were conceived, how I had to grit my teeth to keep from crying out my rage. And they will never know. He fathered them and he cared for them. That’s all that matters.

But how she had loathed him and been so sorry all the while! And she said suddenly to her children, “When you are twenty-one, you can decide whether you want this place. I do not.”

Dear city, dear home! The house was in better condition than they had hoped it might be, although the curtains were faded where the rain had beaten in, the parquet floors were ruined, the garden was overgrown, and the fountain was filled with trash.

A letter had been left in the mailbox. From Gabriel, Miriam thought at once with a surge of hope, but it was not. It was from Fanny.

She wrote from Washington, where she was working in a fine household, caring for children and in general “helping out.” No different from what she did here, thought Miriam, reading on.

“They are good people, this is a wonderful city, and I am happy, but I miss you all the same. I will never forget you, and always love you. Fanny.” The signature made a nice flourish on the page.

I was a child myself when I taught her to write. I taught her and she, in her own ways, taught me.

“To life,” Miriam said aloud. It was a kind of blessing, almost a prayer, if one wanted to think of it like that, an ancient Hebrew blessing.

“To you, Fanny,” she said softly, and folded the letter away.

Summer slid into fall. Red haw and chinquapin ruddied the mornings, while a lively wind blew a thin filament of clouds across a sky as hard and blue as porcelain. Soon wild ducks would be hawked on the street and the shortening days would turn dark with rain.

Along the cemetery’s wall the last of the hydrangea hung dry and brown, crisped by the final heat of the summer. Miriam and Ferdinand stood in front of the elaborate tomb which, in the days of his prosperity, he had bought at Emma’s behest. For fully five minutes Ferdinand stood staring at the inscription.

Miriam’s eyes wandered down the long avenues of crypts set high and safe above flood water, to the tombs with their hovering angels, the glass cases of artificial flowers, and finally to the grave of Sylvain Labouisse, a few yards away. Old enmities! The terrible night of David’s flight. Pelagie veiled in heavy black, and David, softest of men, in whose imagination the apparition of her stricken face would live as long as he did.

All the old enmities.

A man and woman bearing the unmistakable aspect of tourists came by. The woman spoke with a Yankee twang.

“Quaint, isn’t it? I’ve never seen a cemetery like this. And everything in French—the whole city—it hardly seems American at all.” They moved on.

“No,” Ferdinand demurred, “it was the most American of cities. It was the American paradise. Oh, I remember coming downriver lugging my trunk off the boat .… Here there were no distinctions of any kind. Here if you worked hard, you could make something of yourself,” he mused in his familiar way. “And, ah, the life, the sweet life!” He kissed his fingers.

“Well, yes, to be sure,” Miriam replied patiently.

Ferdinand’s hand smoothed the bas relief on which an angel with puffy cheeks and folded wings was blowing a trumpet.

Presently he sighed. “She was a good woman.”

“She was kind, she was dear, and I loved her.” Then hesitantly Miriam asked, “Will you he here, too, Papa, when your time comes?”

“No. Have I never told you? I bought my grave in Shanarai Chasset Cemetery long ago.” And at the unmistakable shadow of surprise in his daughter’s expression, he added with a curious combination of shyness and pride, “Tomorrow I go to say Kaddish for Eugene. And for so many more. So many.”

As they walked back toward the waiting carriage, he continued, “You know, there’s something else about America that I don’t think I ever really saw before.”

“And what is that?”

“It’s that you don’t have to lose yourself in it or forget who you are. You can merge in the whole and keep yourself. Anyway,” he reflected slowly, “you can’t ever escape yourself, even if you want to, can you? This war and all the false—”

She interrupted. “But you don’t want to escape anymore?”

“No. No …” And he turned on his daughter a bright, grieving look, almost youthful in its fervor. “I
suppose you might say I’m growing old and want to make my peace. I think more and more of your mother every day and of the things that meant so much to her. But then, you’ve known that quite awhile .… Then I think, strangely enough, of Judah Touro, a man I scarcely knew, and how he came back to his beginnings. Something happened to him. What? Maybe it happens to us all in the end. Who can know why? Maybe it’s in the bones.”

Once, Miriam remembered vaguely, Gabriel had said something about people wanting to forget the old fears and humiliations of Europe, and in the process, discarding all else of value. Yes, Gabriel had said that.

And she thought, He is a long time coming home.

“I would like to see your brother, Miriam,” Ferdinand said again, as so often lately. “I wonder whether I ever will.”

“I think you will, Papa, although I don’t know when.”

“I would like to tell him that I understand more than I once did. Oh, it took this terrible war for me to understand my son! He was right, of course, although the path he followed wasn’t, God knows, the most prudent! Still, he was true to himself, as you always reminded me.”

True to himself, she thought. As Gabriel was. And reflections of Gabriel now crowded in upon her, vivid scraps jumbled out of their times and places: the top hat stuffed with papers, the flight from David’s house through the eerie streets, the room above the dreary Richmond alley, and his arms around her.

Maxim started the horses, a pair of tired nags sold cheaply by the occupying forces to save the trouble of transporting them. The carriage rattled. Stuffing bulged from the upholstery.

“They gave it hard wear,” Ferdinand lamented. “I
remember the day I bought it and the day Eugene saved it for me from my wreckage. So good of him! It was a handsome piece of equipment in its time. I always liked bright things, red wheels, good leather. Expensive things.” He laughed shortly and ruefully.

The shambling clip-clop of the horses was too loud in the too quiet streets.

“Oh, it will take a long time for this city to revive,” Ferdinand said.

“But it will, Papa. And in the meantime things could be worse for us. At least we have a house, which is more than a lot of others have.”

“True. A house. And your fine boy and girl. You know, I often imagine Angelique being married in the garden. Maybe to Rosa’s Henry, what do you think? So the ancient stock will continue, the fine old Sephardic line go on?”

Strange comment from one who himself had not a trace of that fine bid Sephardic stock in his own ancestry! But that was Papa, in spite of all reverses and defeats, still seeking grandeur, or his version of it! She suppressed her amusement.

“Heavens, I don’t know,” she said, and suddenly frowned, thinking, Marriage again, for Angelique barely sixteen! Oh, not that soon, not another mistake in the old style, not if I can help it!

“And I think of you, too, Miriam. You’re a very young woman, too young to live alone. I suppose you’re tired of hearing me say it. You know, for a while I thought there might be something between you and Perrin, if ever his wife should divorce him—there were some rumors of divorce, Emma always said. I’m rather relieved that there isn’t.”

“I thought you liked him. You seemed to enjoy him.”

“Oh, enjoy, indeed! He has a way with him, good
humor that’s catching. But there was something about him that didn’t suit you.”

Strange that he didn’t see it when I married Eugene, she thought. She did not answer and her father, glancing sidelong, aware that some nerve had been touched, said no more.

Later that day Sisyphus, in the proper butler’s garb that, old and frayed as it was, he insisted on wearing, was serving tea when a horse came trotting up the street and stopped at the curb. A man swung down, tied the reins to the hitching post, and came up the walk. Sisyphus almost dropped the cream pitcher.

“Why, that’s got to be Mister Gabriel!” he cried. “Why, surely it is!”

All rushed, overturning a chair, clattering down the steps and the walk. But Miriam was first, first to call his name, first to fling her arms around him.

“Gabriel—”

His left sleeve dangled. The arm was gone.

She was horrified. She stammered, “Your arm …”

“In the last battle. At Five Forks, before Richmond fell.”

“Your arm—” Her voice rose out of control.

“Don’t, don’t,” he admonished her gently. “I’m alive and grateful.”

They crowded back into the house, Angelique and Eugene, Miriam and Ferdinand and Gabriel, with Sisyphus, as overcome by his emotion as all the others, in the rear.

“Come inside, here, sit down, let’s have a look at you,” Ferdinand urged.

“Your arm …” repeated Miriam.

Ferdinand attempted heartiness, entering a masculine
conspiracy to slide over the subject and spare the delicate woman.

“Where have you been? We have been waiting for months.”

“I went north. About my arm—and other things.”

Miriam composed herself, forcing her eyes away from the terrible empty sleeve to Gabriel’s face. Attentive and courteous, he listened to Ferdinand’s excited babble. The reticence was still there; his had never been a mobile or expressive face; what was within him was held in and carefully released, not spilled away .… She thought she had never seen so beautiful and masculine a face. She thought she had never really
seen
it before now.

“Will you have some brandy or wine? We’ve a bottle or two. They didn’t leave us much.” As always, Ferdinand was the anxious host.

“No, no, tea is fine, thank you.”

“When I think of the old hospitality …” Ferdinand began, and asked then, “You’re home to stay, of course?”

“Yes. I took the oath and I have my pardon.”

For a moment nobody knew what more to say; Eugene and Angelique were obviously overawed by this hero of the war. Regardless of his altered judgment of the war Eugene would still revere a hero. His admiration shone.

Now his curiosity broke through. “What does the pardon say?”