Dead and Buried (23 page)

Or had he only been desperate to put distance between himself and the blood that condemned him to a lifetime of powerlessness?

‘He was her baby boy,’ Quennell whispered, through a throat so tight the sound squeaked out, as if pulled through metal pincers. ‘Mama’s little white lamb, she called him. He was ten years old, and he wrote her that she should tell everyone he’d died. That he wasn’t coming back.’

‘And she did that?’

He nodded, took off his spectacles, rubbed his eyes. ‘She always did what he asked.’

Half-forgotten fragments of his mother’s gossip returned to him. Most of the white side of the Quennell family had left New Orleans years ago, with the death of Beauvais’s father, gone upriver to Ascension Parish. He recalled vaguely his mother saying there had been white sons of the household, of whom he – and everyone else – had assumed Martin was one.

But mostly he recalled the softness in his mother’s face, when she’d cuddle and sing to Dominique, the daughter of her own white protector, born when he – Benjamin – was sixteen years of age. He didn’t ask, or need to, how a mother could let her child go that way. Every
placée
in New Orleans knew what a gift from God it was, to any child born able to pass for white.

The undertaker extended his hands, turned them over beneath the single gas-jet left burning in the hall, as if studying their color as he must have studied it countless times as a child, wondering why it mattered. Why it mattered so much. ‘You’re a doctor, Ben. How can it be, with the same mama, same daddy, he looks like a white man? I ain’t that much darker.’

January looked from Quennell’s face into the room to Martin’s, and with the difference of the lighting between gas and flame there was no difference in color at all. The older brother’s hair was a half-shade more brown than golden; the younger’s eyes – shut now and bruised-looking in an ashy face – that peculiar grayish turquoise-green so common among the octoroons and musterfinos. He shook his head. ‘If anybody knew that—’ He hesitated. ‘If anybody knew the why of it, you can be sure somebody would turn that knowledge to evil somehow.’

Quennell’s eyes slid to him, caught by the thought.

Martin Quennell – only January couldn’t recall whether anyone had ever said what that almost-forgotten ‘dead’ brother’s name had been – had been sent to school in Nashville when he was very small. Most people at the back of town didn’t even remember that Corette Quennell had borne her protector two sons instead of one.

He looks like a white man
 . . . January’s mind snagged on the phrase.

LOOKS like a white man . . . He IS a white man
.

He is a man, and he’s white! What else do you want?

Only, of course, in Louisiana he was not. Even in Boston, were it known that one of his great-
great
grandmothers came from Africa, he would be barred from ‘the best’ white society . . .

And Quennell, and every other
libre
in town, thought the same.

So he only said, ‘And he came back to town when your father’s bank went under?’

‘Father had set me up in business already,’ the undertaker remembered. ‘Got me apprenticed; paid for my education, same as he’d paid to send Martin to school in Nashville. Father had a stroke when the bank failed; he died soon after. It was understood that I’d take care of Martin. Only, when Martin came back, he didn’t come to us. Wouldn’t write, wouldn’t visit. Not even on the Feast of All Saints would he come down to the cemetery and help clean up our grandpa’s grave.’

Silence had settled on the house, that deep abyss between midnight and the turn of the tide. Above their heads the gas jet hissed softly, and somewhere upstairs in the darkness a girl cried out softly in her sleep. In another two hours the Cathedral bells would ring for early Mass, and the long night would be done.

‘He found a family uptown – a white family, Americans – to board with; he told them he was white. He even turned Protestant.’ Quennell’s face twitched at the mention of that heretical faith. ‘They didn’t have to do with the downtown folks of course. Not many Americans do even now. He only came to us, finally, when he needed more money. I can take care of the books myself, but Maman begged me to give him something, and he wouldn’t just take help for free. Please believe that,’ added the undertaker. ‘Please believe that, Janvier. He never stole from me.’

That you know of
.

‘I’d never have let Maman talk me into putting him up to look after the Society’s books if I’d had the slightest doubt of him.’

January searched his face for a moment, meeting in his eyes the question:
was it the Burial Society Board of Directors that asked you to take a job here? To watch him, learn where he was getting the money he was spending?
January was afraid Quennell would ask him this out loud – and that he’d be obliged to reply – but, in the end, the undertaker did not, and the silence returned. From the tiny bedroom Corette’s voice could be heard, whispering the broken thread of a lullaby:

‘
By an’ by, by an’ by, gonna lay down easy by an’ by
 . . .’

Candlelight and sorrow erased the hue of her skin, and that of the young man on the bed, leaving only the terrible pietà of every woman who finds herself called suddenly to bury her son.

‘How long?’ asked Quennell at last, and January shook his head.

‘Could be hours. Might be days.’ He glanced along the hall to the parlor, where the Countess could be heard moving about, her skirts a silver taffeta rustle against Hughie’s snores. ‘She’ll want him moved.’

‘Of course.’ Everyone had their living to make. In Quennell’s voice was the echo of a thousand other madames, saloon-keepers, boarding-house owners, hotel managers:
I don’t want to sound heartless, but you’ll need to get him
– or her –
out of here
 . . .

The first school Rose had run had not survived the death of four of her students in the yellow fever epidemic of ’34.

Still neither man made a move.
My business partner
, Schurtz had called Martin, and had treated him like a dog.

Yet he had offered what Martin had always wanted.
To get as far away from New Orleans, and his family, as it is possible to get.
To outrun the slightest whisper of rumor, about what and who he was.

Wonderingly, he said, ‘I can see why I never knew – I was gone for nearly sixteen years – but your brother’s scheme was good, if it fooled my mother.’

Quennell laughed, a single bitter sniff. ‘Not so hard. Nobody uptown knew the Quennells, so there was no chance anyone would learn Father’s sons by his true wife weren’t the right ages to be Martin. The white Madame wasn’t about to mention it to anyone: had Noah been an American, she would have been proud to drown. The only thing anyone knew of us uptown was that Father had been a banker . . . and white. The Americans didn’t find it hard to believe Martin when he said, “I want to be American and not French,” instead of, “I want to be white and not black.” It’s done all the time.’

A sound in the parlor – a shadow against the light – drew January’s eyes in that direction again, where the Countess sat beside the lamp in the parlor, her black curls taken down, a newspaper in her hands but her eyes lost in distance.

Softly, January said, ‘That’s true.’

At four, January returned to the tiny bedroom and found Martin Quennell’s heartbeat a little stronger, his breathing the deeper rhythm of normal sleep. As he listened with a stethoscope, felt those slender wrists, he heard the Countess enter behind him and help Madame Quennell to stand. ‘I think he can be moved, Madame,’ he said, rising. ‘Gently and carefully. As soon as it grows light—’

‘No,’ said Madame Quennell urgently. ‘No, now. Before anyone can see.’

‘Corette,’ murmured the Countess. ‘It’s Sunday. There is time.’

The mother shook her head, impatient with this stupidity, and in her beautiful hazel eyes January saw the unreasoning single-mindedness that the grieving sometimes adopt to defend against the unthinkable. ‘Not you, Didi,’ she said. ‘But the people at his lodging house! McPhearson’s is a respectable place, a residential hotel! What are they going to think, if they see me, and Beau here, take him in—’

‘Maman,’ protested Quennell, ‘we’re taking him to the house—’

‘Never!’ She swung around on her son. ‘What will M’sieu Schurtz say when it gets around that
we
took Martin in? They’ll guess—’

‘Maman, they won’t guess—’

‘They
will
!’ she insisted. ‘Beau, Beau, we cannot spoil Martin’s chances! Not after all he has worked, all he has tried . . .’ She gripped her elder son’s lapels, almost shook him, as if the physical jolt would illuminate his mind to see things as she did. ‘We have the money; we must send him a nurse, an American. Beau,
please
!’

He opened his mouth to snap at her –
Maman, he’s DYING! –
and could not. With the look on his face that the Good Son must have worn during the feast for the Prodigal’s return, he turned on his heel and strode down the hall and out through the kitchen to re-harness his horse.

After a few minutes, January followed, skirting the parlor and pausing there only long enough to collect ink and paper from the little secretaire in the corner, then going on to the kitchen. The smell of coffee barely masked the fug of stale smoke, incense, blood, and spilled liquor. Auntie Saba and her children wouldn’t arrive until after church. He lit two or three kitchen candles and sat down to write out instructions, in English, for the American nurse, listening as he did so to the voices of the two women behind him in the hall outside the downstairs bedroom door, the soft blur of Creole French.

In time, Quennell came back in. January held up a finger, staying him on his way through; beckoned him over. ‘Will you do something for me?’

The undertaker stood for a moment, looking down at him, guessing what it was going to be. But there was nothing to be said. If the other members of the board had gone so far as to place a spy in the Countess’s house because Martin had been spending money he should not have had, it was clear where he had to be getting it. Quennell was an honest man. He might have looked aside from his brother’s doings, rather than upset their mother, when he merely suspected that Martin dipped from time to time into the bank account of his own business.

The funds of the FTFCMBS were another matter.

‘Tomorrow I’m going to bring a friend to your house,’ said January. ‘A white man, a lawyer.’ Or a white man who happened to have a lawyer’s business card in his pocket, anyway. ‘I want you to write out an authorization for him to go through your brother’s papers and effects. I’m pretty certain your mother won’t allow me to care for Martin – she may not even permit you to visit him, or visit him herself, for fear of having someone “suspect”. And we need the contents of his desk.’

‘All right.’

‘Get Martin to sign the authorization if you can, but I doubt he’ll be able to.’

‘No,’ said Quennell. ‘I know the look, and I see it in his face. And you’re right.’ He pushed up his spectacles again to rub his eyes. ‘Even she won’t go to him once he’s back at McPhearson’s.’ January recognized the name of the small residential hotel on Dryades Street, almost to the city limits – as far uptown as one could get and still be able to walk to work at the Mississippi and Balize. Expensive, but of course a man who was presenting himself as an up-and-coming speculator in city lots couldn’t be seen, by the wealthy, to be living in a boarding house. ‘Nothing must “spoil his chances”. Even now.’

‘Let her have her comfort,’ said January. ‘In a week it will be as much a part of the past as George Washington.’

Quennell nodded. He had comforted half the bereaved of the
libres
in the French Town: husbands who had lost wives untimely, women left suddenly without the spouses of forty years. Children who had closed their parents’ eyes, parents who had closed their children’s. Not all of those partings had been free of bitterness. It was now his turn.

Madame Quennell was saying softly, ‘Thank you, Didi. Beyond what I can say—’

‘It’s nothing, Corette. Truly.’ The two women embraced in the cloying dark. ‘I may be in the business of sin, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a Christian woman. I’ll send Auntie Saba to McPhearson’s, as soon as it’s light, to look after Martin until a regular nurse can be found. You may not find one until Monday. She’s dark enough,’ the Countess added, when the other woman drew in breath to protest. ‘Nobody’s going to think she’s family. Not like if they saw you, or Beau, there. And I’ll send Hughie for Pere Eugenius—’

‘No!’ Corette Quennell caught her hand. ‘No, you can’t. Martin was always . . . He says that the Protestants uptown, they know that we here are Catholics. That even that may cause someone to suspect.’

‘Corette, you’d let him risk dying in sin, rather than—’

‘He’s not going to die!’ insisted Madame Quennell. ‘Don’t say that! And he – Didi, you know how people are. You know how the
blankittes
are in this town. They all know – they all watch – for who might be
passe blanc
 . . . You’ve seen how they study each other’s hair and fingernails and the shapes of their noses. You’ve heard how they whisper, “Well, maybe
this
one is,” and, “Maybe
that
one’s been lying all along.” Didi, think. My son has a chance to escape, this one chance. Even a whisper, and of course M’sieu Schurtz would shout it all over town rather than have the other blankittes saying that he knew all along and didn’t speak . . . I can’t let anything spoil all he has worked for.’