Dreams of Glory (22 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Dreams of Glory
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Flora began to teach him the subtleties, the thousand smaller pleasures of love. The touches, the kisses, the bites, the teasing refusal and the sudden, laughing acquiescence. She made him aware of his body as he had never known it. Her fingers, her lips explored flowing muscle and soft flesh, and invited him to do likewise. He found the other meaning of the verb to know.
Caleb was infinite miles, ages of years from Morristown,
where dirty bitter men bared their backs at whipping posts in the blowing snow, where every path and road was guarded by bayonets, and an army's stench pervaded the icy air. Benjamin Stallworth's lash of a pulpit voice, his iron mouth demanding treachery in the name of victory, preaching love as a form of betrayal—all became ghosts, demons out of some nightmare. This alone was real, this woman giving herself to him, opening her sinuous arms, her languorous mouth to him, taking him into her body, with sighs of welcome, murmurs of praise.
At last there was that yielding and giving moment, that blending of wish and fulfillment. “Caleb, Caleb,” Flora said after a few minutes, “now I must tell you everything. There can be no secrets between us. They're the murderers of love. I know that from experience. But now I have another fear.”
He cradled her in his arms, suspicion stirring again. Now if Stallworth was right, she would tell him the whole truth. His answer was bombast. “That word—fear—is banned from this room, from this house.”
“We'll see,” she said. “We will see what love can risk—”
“I want to know why you're often so melancholy,” he said. “I want to banish that word, that humor. Whatever its cause.”
“What do you think is its cause? Have you guessed?”
They were speaking with their arms around each other, their lips only inches apart.
“It has something to do with Caesar Muzzey,” Caleb said. “At the funeral I saw you weeping for him. Do you feel responsible for his death?”
“Yes. But it's more than that. Caesar was my lover.”
Involuntarily, before his mind could do more than record the astonishing fact, Caleb felt his body stiffen in revulsion. She felt it, too.
“I knew it,” she said, shoving herself away from him. “I knew it would disgust you.”
“It doesn't,” he lied.
“Don't deny it, in your stupid Protestant way,” she said. “It's better to confess and repent, to admit your evil feeling. I felt the disgust run through your body. It disgusts you to think that Caesar's lips, his hands, his black thing, have been where you've just been. In spite of all your fine words about Negroes, you don't really like them. They disgust you. Isn't that true? Their blackness disgusts you?”
“Yes,” Caleb said.
“Then let me tell you something even more disgusting. I'm one. White as I am, I have a grandmother, probably still alive in New Orleans, who's as black as Caesar. If we have a child by what we did together, your child could be black. Black as soot, black as mud. What do you say now?”
She was sitting up in the bed, the covers clutched around her against the cold. The firelight played on her face, which seemed to cast a light of its own, a blaze of pride and despair. Caleb lay on the pillow, gazing up at her, feeling more and more uneasy. He groped for something genuine. “Perhaps you're teaching me what loves means,” he said.
She began to weep, not tears of grief, Caleb saw, but of joy, hope. She fell back into his arms. “I wasn't sure of you,” she said. “I wanted to turn you away now, when I could still deny everything.”
Caleb's conscience leaped to savage life; a hell localized in his mind. How sound, how sure her loving instincts were. How many times would he have to stifle them with lies?
“There's no escaping it. You must tell me everything now.”
“Promise me, no matter what you hear, you won't despise me.”
Here it comes, Caleb thought. Stallworth's vindication. The true story of why Flora Kuyper wants Caleb Chandler to spy for King George. Did he want to hear it? “Stop talking nonsense,” he said. “I'm ready to hear your life's confession and give you eternal absolution. For penance I'll command you to love me forever.”
“Don't, she said, putting her hand over his mouth. “Don't mock my Catholic faith. Caesar did that too often.”
“Tell me,” he said.
She began.
“HOW DARE YOU APPEAR IN public with that woman and child?”
“I'll appear where and when I please and with whom I please,” my father replied.
Those words are my earliest memory. I heard them standing between my mother and father in the Place d'Armes, the dusty central square in New Orleans. I was about five and was wearing a blue silk dress with a red sash. My mother was wearing a much plainer white dress. My mother was not beautiful, but her height and bearing gave her great dignity. She glared at the black-mustached man who had just insulted us. He was Vincent Pierre Gaspard de Rochemore,
commissaire ordonnateur,
the second most powerful man in New Orleans.
Around us loomed the official buildings, the Church of St. Louis, the mansion of the governor, the barracks of the garrison that de Rochemore commanded. On our right flowed the brown Mississippi from the heartland of my native continent, North America. Already I thought of myself as an American, even though I spoke mostly French.
“We shall see about your doing what you please, you and your fellow Hebrews,” de Rochemore snarled at my father.
“Sire,” my father said with a brief bow, “I am at your service any time you wish to discuss this matter with his excellency the governor.”
De Rochemore muttered an oath and strode away. I looked up at my father's face. It reminded me of an old house, battered and worn, but wide and charming. “Papa,” I asked, “what's a Hebrew?”
“A Jew,” he said, “what I am. Some people don't like us. They blame us for killing the Lord Jesus, long, long ago. But
that's not true. Don't worry your head about such things, my darling. Come on, now, let us go see the alligator Captain Dias Arias has brought from Pensacola. They say it's the biggest one ever caught.”
We continued across the Place d'Armes to the wharf, where Captain Daniel Dias Arias had docked his ship,
Texel.
On deck was a huge alligator, over thirty feet long, its legs and tail tied to keep it from attacking anyone. Black seamen poured water on its head and the beast opened its small, glaring eyes, then gaped its great jaws with their rows of gleaming teeth. I was terrified and began to cry.
“Ah,” my father said, “he can't hurt you. Watch this.” He seized a stick and thrust it into the monster's mouth, propping its jaws open. The alligator thrashed its head back and forth until it dislodged the stick. “I wouldn't do that again, Moses, if I were you,” Captain Dias Arias said.
Alas, my father did not listen. He liked to do daring things.
Captain Dias Arias, a small, sad-eyed man, died of fever in our house on Rampart Street a month later. Only when I was older did I grasp the whole story. Dias Arias was also Jewish. A war was raging between France and England. Under a flag of truce Dias Arias had sailed from British-owned Jamaica with French naval prisoners to be exchanged for captured British sailors. The captain also carried a cargo of merchandise he and my father hoped to sell in New Orleans. Monsieur De Rochemore claimed the cargo violated the flag of truce and seized the entire ship as an enemy vessel. When my father protested, the
commissaire
made an ugly attack on all the Jews in New Orleans, demanding their expulsion under Article I of the Black Code, which regulated slavery and religion in the colonies of France.
Most of the other Jews in the city—there were about a dozen—had been terrified and ready to abandon Dias Arias. But my father had dealt with petty bureaucrats in a dozen countries and colonies. He went to the governor, Chevalier Louis Billouart de Kerlerec, promised him a share of
Texel
's
profits, and poof went Monsieur de Rochemore's seizure. As for Article I of the Black Code—it was an anachronism ignored in all the French colonies. The French were not inclined to fanaticism in religion. They regarded Jews as useful, valuable citizens. They stimulated trade—the chief reason for founding a colony in the first place.
But the second most powerful man in New Orleans became my father's enemy. For the next five years de Rochemore and his friends never missed a chance to insult “the proud Jew” Lopez. One of their chief weapons was the relationship he dared to call a marriage, his open alliance with a free woman of color and his public acknowledgment of his quadroon child. Even more infuriating to these bigots was the way my father had gone to the Ursuline sisters and persuaded them to admit me and other quadroon and mulatto children to their convent school. The gossips fumed but the sisters accepted my father's argument that we had souls that were eager for religion and minds ripe for learning. He paid for all of us at first, when he could afford it. This generosity and tolerance only aroused more antagonism. Not even the dinner for fifty or sixty people he gave to celebrate my first communion changed his enemies' minds. They called him a hypocrite, a
poseur.
Over the next few years these slanders slowly diminished my father's business. He was a commission merchant, who sold goods shipped to New Orleans by Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen. Gradually the word went out that Moses Monsanto Lopez was unpopular in New Orleans, that the best people in the city would not trade with him. More and more of his clients sent their wares to other merchants. He was forced to take cheap cloth, spoiled beef, shoddy goods that desperate ship captains dumped in New Orleans when they couldn't sell them elsewhere. Gradually my father's store, which had once been the favorite of the city's wealthy ladies, became known as the place the poor and middling sort went in search of bargains.
At home on Rampart Street, I never heard a word about these troubles. Each day at sunset I would race the whole length of the block to fling myself into his arms. Father would sweep me above his head and tease me about my name. “What flower are you today?” he would ask. “Rose, violet?” I would choose the flower and he would call me by that name for the rest of the evening. He loved music and could not hear enough of my playing and singing. “Encore,” he would say, and join me for a reprise in his husky baritone.
Toward bedtime I would sit on his lap and he would tell me tales of the cities he had visited in his travels: London, Paris, Antwerp, and his birthplace, Lisbon. He had grown up speaking Portuguese, which was why he spoke French so badly. His family had lived in Lisbon as Marranos, converts to Christianity who ate pork and went to mass on Sunday but thought of themselves as Jews. They were forbidden to practice the Jewish religion under pain of expulsion.
While my father was on a trading voyage to London, one of his brothers had been caught visiting a secret synagogue. From a fellow merchant, who warned him not to return, my father learned that everyone in his family had been arrested by the Inquisition and tortured until they confessed to being Jews. Some, including a favorite sister, were killed, the rest expelled from Portugal. Father settled in England, a country he soon admired. The government's power was limited; citizens had the right to vote and speak freely. Jews could practice their religion.
“Why did you leave England?” I asked him.
“I fell in love with a beautiful English woman who refused to marry me. It may have been because I was Jewish. Or only because I was ugly and not very rich. I didn't think I would ever love another woman until I met your mother here in New Orleans. I came with a ship. I was only going to stay for a month, until I sold my cargo. Now I shall die here. The fever will get me one day, or your mother will poison my gumbo when she sees a chance for a younger wealthier man.”
The mere thought of his dying terrified me. I began to weep. My mother scolded him for frightening me. “She's only a child,” she said. “You talk to her as if she's a grown woman.”
He smiled at me and caressed my cheek. “I think of her that way,” he said. “I have a feeling that I'll never see her as a grown woman.”
Father gave me a squeeze and laughed at his own fears. “I'm in a gloomy mood,” he said. “Just remember this,
chérie,
the important thing is to die in a place where you have been loved, where you leave some love behind you. I'm afraid that's all I'll be able to leave you.”
One evening a year later, when I was about eleven, I came home from my music lesson and heard my mother and father talking in the sitting room. I stood in the shadows of the hall, unable to resist listening.
“What will become of Flora?” my father said. “That worries me more than the pain in my belly.”
“She'll be very beautiful. She'll have no trouble,” my mother said.
“I don't want her to be the plaything of some fat
commissaire
or wheezing judge.”
“You must leave that to me. She won't have to choose low. I'll make sure she has every protection the law affords.”
My father sighed. “If I could get her to England, she could marry wealth. Even a nobleman might not ask questions. The English aristocracy often marry outside their class.”
“But you can't get her to England,” my mother said. “Your creditors will never let you leave New Orleans. We must bear what we can't change.”
“Sometimes it's like a stone on my chest,” my father said. “I can hardly breathe thinking about it. She's white, Madeleine. She could pass for white anywhere, especially in England.”
“But not here. it's written on her birth certificate: F.D.C. You know that.”
The next day, when I came home from school, I asked my mother what F.D.C. meant.
“Femme de couleur,”
she said calmly. “It is what you are, what I am.”
My mother's skin was the color of coffee with milk in it. I looked at my hands and arms and said, “But we're not the same.”
“Come with me.”
She seized my hand and walked swiftly from Rampart Street to Chartres Street, in the heart of the city. There, in the hot sunshine, not far from the Ursuline convent, sat a fat old Negro woman as black as the mud of the Mississippi bank. In front of her were piles of fresh fruit. I passed her stand every day on the way to and from school. Often she called to me and gave me a pear or peach. I thought of her as a friend.
“
Bonjour
,
Mama,
” my mother said. “How are you?”
“I'm fine, daughter,” the woman replied. “How is your good husband?”
“He's not well. He spits blood,” my mother said. “Pray for him, will you?”
“Of course. But the prayers of this angel will do far more than my sinful croaks.”
As she said this the old woman reached out to me. Her leathery black hand caressed my cheek. I recoiled. I could not believe this blackness was part of me. My mother soon convinced me that it was.
“My mother was a slave,” she explained as we walked home. “She was very beautiful when she was young. Her master made her his second wife. When he died, he freed her and her children in his will. My brothers live in the country on a farm and are as black as she is. Because I was not black, she sent me to live with her cousin on Rampart Street. By law, women of color can only live there if they choose to stay in New Orleans. It's written in the Black Code that they can't marry white men. That's why your father angers people by calling me his wife. He hates the Black Code and often talks against it.”
Our route back to Rampart Street took us through the quarter where the free Negroes lived. I stared at the glistening black skin of a tailor, sitting in front of his shop sewing a coat. “Who shall I marry?” I asked. “A black man?”
“No,” my mother said, looking around her contemptuously. “Never. You are better than these people. You'll marry no one. You'll find love with a white man, one of the rich. I'll choose him for you. You'll have a house of your own and a servant and more jewelry and dresses than you can count. If you're clever, you may even get a plantation on one of the bayous, where you can live like a queen with dozens of black slaves at your call.”
My mother didn't know that I had overheard my father's loathing for this future. Hour after hour in the following weeks I would lie awake, trying to imagine what this rich white man would be like. Would he be a fat
commissaire
or a wheezing judge? Would my mother condemn me to such a fate?

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