Feast of All Saints (34 page)

“Well I hope Antoine hears of today’s proceedings,” Marcel said to Richard with spirit. “I hope he hears that Christophe is the most brilliant teacher since Socrates, and the school is going to be a success.”

Richard shrugged. They had just reached the Ste. Marie gate. “The hell with Antoine,” he whispered.

“Come on, let’s go to my room.”

Richard was reluctant. He had refused Marcel’s invitations several times this week, and at first Marcel had not noticed this, but it was very clear that again Richard did not wish to accept.

“What’s the matter with you?” Marcel pressed. He was so elated, he wanted to share this with Richard. And not to worry about the Englishman or Juliet. They could talk about the class, mull it over, make it endure.

But Richard struck an unusual pose. He lowered the bundle of books in his arm, straightened up to his full height of six feet and six inches and with his right hand behind his back made Marcel a civil
bow. “I must speak with you, Marcel,” he said, “on an important matter, now, in your room.”

“Well, perfect!” Marcel said. “I just invited you, didn’t I?”

Richard hesitated. Then he nodded. “Yes, you did. However it would have been better…” he stopped. He was embarrassed. “It would have been better had I come to call. Nevertheless, may I speak to you? It’s a pressing matter. May I speak to you now?”

Marcel was beginning to laugh. Then his face became somber. “Just so long as it isn’t about Anna Bella,” he murmured. “About my going to see her.”

“No,” Richard shook his head. “Because I assume and justly so that you went to see her. You’re a gentleman. You wouldn’t ignore her request.”

A momentary anger flashed in Marcel’s eye. He opened the gate and led the way back the alley to the
garçonnière
.

Pulling off his newer, stiffer boots at once, he settled on the bed as he selected an older pair, and gestured for Richard to take the chair at the desk. He was quite surprised to see that Richard merely stood in the door. Richard had set his books down, but his hands were clasped behind his back and he was staring at Marcel.

“Richard,” Marcel said calmly “I will go to see her in my own good time.”

A faint shadow of pain passed over Richard’s face. “Make it soon, Marcel,” he said.

“Is this all you think about? Anna Bella? I know Anna Bella better than you do.” Marcel could feel his face reddening. He thrust the discarded boots aside and strode heavily to the back of the room, sitting on the windowsill against the close trees, his back to the frame, his knee crooked, one foot on the sill before him. “No one has to tell me when to see Anna Bella,” he said coldly.

Richard remained motionless, his demeanor utterly formal. “Have you seen her?” he asked, his voice so low that the question was almost inaudible.

Marcel turned his head. He looked down into the bracken, into the drifts of ivy hanging from the oaks. “Let’s talk about school, Richard, it’s going to be rough,” he said.

When Richard didn’t answer, he went on.

“Those boys, Dumanoir and the other one from the country, do you realize they’ve both studied in France for a year. Dumanoir was at the Lycée Louis le-Grand…”

“They told everyone that four times,” Richard murmured. “Let us settle this…about Anna Bella. Because it is not the subject of this call. I must talk to you about something else.”

“Good lord, what next!” Marcel sighed.

“All right, let me be rude,” Richard said. “If you don’t go to see her, she will think that I didn’t give you her message.”

“She’s given the same message to Marie. Believe me, she knows her messages have been relayed.”

“I don’t understand this!” Richard insisted. He was becoming heated and his voice was lower, softer than before. He stepped into the room. “When the rest of us were running from girls and making faces at them, you were fast friends with her, Marcel! You spent half the day at her house all summer long. Now that you’re old enough to…”

“Old enough to what!” Marcel turned on him suddenly. The edge on his voice startled Richard.

Richard looked down. “She wants to talk to you…” he murmured.

Marcel’s face was darkly flushed. He removed his foot from the frame of the window and stood. Richard studied him uneasily.

“Madame Elsie won’t let me near Anna Bella. I can’t see Anna Bella!” Marcel said. “And if I could…what would I say?”

“But there is a situation there, Marcel…”

“I know that, my fine gentlemanly friend,” Marcel answered. “I know all about it. I know more about it than you know about it. But what can I
do
about it!” He was astonished to realize that he was trembling, that a sweat had broken out all over him, and that he was glaring at Richard as if he meant to strike him. Richard was not the one to strike.

Richard was mystified. There was something here that he could not comprehend.

“But Marcel,” he said uncertainly, “if you could just be a brother to her…”

“A brother! A brother…” Marcel was staring at him in disbelief. “If I were her brother, do you think she’d be in that situation? Up late at night…how did you put it…to let the gentlemen in?”

At this, a peculiar light came into Richard’s eye. He was silent. Marcel seated himself on the windowsill again. He was looking out at the trees. “Madame Elsie can’t force Anna Bella,” he said in a low voice. “Anna Bella has a mind of her own.”

“But who will help her to stand up to Madame Elsie, who will be on her side?” Richard asked. “That old woman is mean. She needs a brother, Marcel, you…you are like a brother to her!”

“Damn!” Marcel burst out. “Will you stop using that word!”

Richard was astonished. His brows knit. He was probing Marcel’s agitated and darkened face. It seemed a latent emotion had overcome Marcel, something inimical to the round childlike face, the clear innocent blue eyes. Richard’s lips moved as if something were just dawning on him, and then he stopped.

“We aren’t brother and sister,” Marcel whispered, the voice thick and slow. “We never were. If we had been, it would be simple, and I would do as you say. But we are not brother and sister! Anna Bella’s a woman and I’m not yet…not yet a man.” He stopped, as if so volatile that he could not continue, and then the voice even lower than before resumed. “She’ll be spoken for while I’m still sitting in the schoolroom, she’ll be spoken for before I set foot on that boat for France, she’ll be spoken for and gone and we are not brother and sister, and there is nothing, nothing that I can do!” He turned his head and once again looked out into the trees.

Richard stared at him helplessly. Every muscle in Richard’s being reflected his distress, his heavy frame sagging though he stood erect, and a subtle light in his dark eyes flickered as if detached from the older, sadder face around it.

“I didn’t understand,” he whispered. “I…didn’t understand.” He reached for his books.

For a long moment Marcel was silent.

“Now what was it you wanted to speak to me about?” Marcel asked. “This other matter that was on your mind?”

“Not now,” Richard said.

“Why not now?” Marcel asked. The tone was bitter but he didn’t mean it to be so. He was conscious of Richard standing in the doorway and suddenly, he resented Richard very much. There were times when Richard’s life struck him as profoundly simple and this could irritate him almost beyond words. “What is it?” he asked again, and for vanity, or reasons he did not know, he attempted to regain his control.

“I’ll come tomorrow, after school,” Richard said.

But Marcel’s face was calm. He wiped his forehead almost casually with his folded handkerchief, and then he made some semblance of a polite smile.

Richard hesitated. He set the books down again and clasping his hands behind him in that deferential manner he said, “It’s about Marie.”

Marcel’s expression was utterly innocent. Uncomprehending. “Marie?”

“I want to call on her,” said the deep voice, barely louder than an ordinary breath. “Your mother…I’m afraid…” He stopped. “I’m afraid,” he went on, swallowing, “that she will think it unimportant, that we are too young…but if I could just call on her, with your blessing, when you were there! I mean, however you would want it…however you…” the large shoulders shrugged. And the face was mortified.

Marcel’s eyes were wide. He had assumed that blank and obsessed expression that so often frightened people.

“Marie?” he whispered.

“Good lord, Marcel!” Richard stammered. “Good lord!”

“I’m sorry. It’s my turn not to understand,” Marcel was almost laughing. But Richard’s face was so ominous that he didn’t dare. Richard looked menacing. As if he might grab Marcel and shake him as he’d done so often in the past. “Of course you can see her, if she wants!” he smiled. A calming sensation was surprising him. Marie and Richard…But then he drew himself up. He left the window and stood firmly in the middle of the floor.

“She’ll be fourteen soon. You should really wait until then,” he said seriously. “There’ll be a party for her naturally and of course you’ll come. After that…anytime. Before that, well, if you wish, I’ll see.”

“But your mother…”

“Don’t worry about my mother,” Marcel smiled. “Just leave that to me.”

Richard, miserably uncomfortable and relieved at the same time, now moved to go. He made a quick bow much like the bow he’d given Marcel at the gate and turned to the porch.

“Well,” Marcel said.

Richard looked back.

“You see what a good brother I can be?”

For a long time after Richard had gone, Marcel sat at the window looking out on those moving drifts of ivy and the winding, knotted branches of the old figs. Then wiping his face again with his handkerchief, he buttoned his jacket and went out.

In the dappled shade of the overhanging magnolias two white men sat at the painted wrought-iron tables of Madame Elsie’s courtyard, their tall glasses of bourbon a pale amber in the afternoon light. A row of airy crepe myrtle trees separated this small court from the path to the back outbuilding where Anna Bella lived. And its long porches were screened by these same light green branches though Marcel could see that the windows were open, the lace curtains drawn back. But when he noticed the white gentlemen with their drinks, and heard their low voices, he paused, quite invisible beyond the edge of the flagstones, and stood still looking up at that distant porch. He was barely conscious of their drawling French, the playful compulsive tapping of a key against the rim of a glass.

Then he went up the gravel path to the stair.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a dark figure in the kitchen door far across the yard, but he took no notice of it as he mounted the steps. The figure rushed forward with lifted skirts. But he was already on the porch before he heard her hiss for his attention, the snapping of her fingers, the whispered and urgent: “Marcel!”

He was staring through the low windows of Madame Elsie’s sitting
room as he moved toward the door. And he saw Anna Bella on the settee, her lap covered with a long thick ribbon of white lace. It had been months since he had laid eyes on her. He no longer went to Mass at all with his mother and sister and their paths did not cross. But at this moment when he saw her, the love he felt for her was so exquisite that it left him weak. And he felt the ugly sting of shame. How could she know what he was feeling? How could she know why he had never come? How could she know when Richard didn’t know and Marie didn’t know and he himself could only dimly understand? He did not plan what he would say now. He didn’t rehearse his words. He knew only that he must be with her, he must sit beside her in this room, close to her, and somehow make her understand.
Mais, non, we are not children
. And no longer children, what have we become? Oh, there were so many other moments, so many other times when they had opened their souls to one another, when in those long and mysterious tête-à-têtes they had come on truths together that neither, perhaps, would have ever known alone. So surely now they could take this step together. If any two people on earth could lay bare the adult travesties that had befallen them, entangling their lives, separating them, he and Anna Bella could. Just take her hand.

He moved forward, his fist already tight to knock, when suddenly inside the window just beside the door, a dark head distinguished itself from the familiar shapes of the room. A young white man, his black whiskers sleek and shining, his thick hair parted in the middle and curling fastidiously above his collar gazed up with severe hawk eyes. Marcel drew back and, his legs weakening under him, quickly left the porch.

He was still trembling when he reached his own room. He sat at his desk, the notebook for the day’s class where he had left it, the Greek text, the case for his new pens. He moved to take a pen, to dip it in the ink. But then his arm tightened around his waist and putting his head down, he shut his eyes and dissolved into private tears.

I
T WAS THE WITCHING HOUR
, or so it seemed. Lights out, and only the far-off sounds: a woman laughing hysterically, the crack of a gun. It seemed for a while there had been the faint thudding of drums, those persistent voodoo drums, from a meeting lost within the maze of the neighborhood fences and walls. Marcel awoke. Lisette was standing over him, he was hot, covered with sweat, he stretched uneasily in his clothes.

He had fallen asleep, his books spread at the foot of the bed. He
had been poring over his Greek, as he had done every night for three weeks since the school opened, striving to maintain his precarious lead at the top of the class, and now with some measure of relief he realized this was Friday night again, he could rest though the work was unfinished, he wouldn’t be on the rack again until Monday morn.

“All right,” he said grumpily to Lisette, ready for her lecture. He struggled up, stiffened, and wanted to fall back again asleep.

“That teacher wants you,” she said.

“What?” He had his face in the pillow again, a warm rumpled pillow. The heat was unbearable in the little room. “What?” he rose up.

“He sent that no ‘count Bubbles down here, said for you to come on up to his place if you were awake, and if your Maman said it was all right. Well, your Maman’s asleep. It’s nine o’clock. You going or not?”