Feast of All Saints (3 page)

But Marcel daydreamed in class, provoked the teacher with obscure questions, and the sight of his empty chair a dozen times in the last month filled everyone with a vague dread. He was too well liked for the other boys to enjoy it. And his best friend, Richard Lermontant, seemed rather miserable. But what made this fall from grace all the more confusing, especially to Richard, was that Marcel himself seemed not the least confused by it. He was hardly helpless in the face of youthful passion. He did not, for instance, court his sister’s pretty friends and then, giggling, yank their hair. Nor did he pound his fist on tree trunks declaring, “I don’t know what got into me!” And never once, in a welter of confusion, did he call on God to explain how he could make the races different colors, or demand an explanation for why the world was cruel.

Rather he seemed privy to some terrible secret that set him apart, and bound to calmly pursue his course.

Which this morning seemed hell-bent for disaster.

It was a warm summer day, and he had only caught his breath as he drew closer and closer to the volatile Juliet when she stopped at the fruit stands beneath the arcade. And putting his left hand up against the slender iron post in front of him, he pressed his lips against his hand and gazed at her with wide blue eyes. He did not realize it, but he seemed to want to hide behind the colonette, as if such a narrow thing could hide him, and he had covered all of his face except his eyes.

There was pain in his eyes, but the kind that reveals itself in a flicker, the puckering of the eyelid underneath, a flinching at one’s own thoughts. Looking at Juliet, he knew full well what he was expected to see, and understood full well what he, in fact, perceived. Not squalor and wickedness but some radiant and splendid spectacle of neglect that laid his heart waste. But this had been today a matter of glimpses.…

Running breathless to her gate from school, he’d pounded on it
for the first time in his life, only to be told by a shouting neighbor that she’d gone to market. But he’d caught the first sight of her only a block away. And she was tall and he could trace her easily.

Now, when the flock of bonneted women broke between them, and she stepped out again into the cobblestone street, he saw her clearly for the first time.

He started, all of a piece, like a man jumping to the clang of a bell, and moved as if he might go up to her. Then he lapsed back, lips pressed again to the back of his hand, as she made her way under the clear sun to the iron fence of the square. He seemed lost to her in every detail and silently shuddered.

She was slow if not languid as she walked, her market basket riding gently on her arm, and as he had seen her a thousand times, fantastical, her frayed shawl a blaze of peacocks and silver against her red silk dress, flounces torn and dragging the stones, her fine brunette hair falling in hopeless tangles from the grip of a pearl comb. Diamonds sparkled on the fingers of her right hand with which she gathered her skirts at the curb, and as she turned toward the long row of sketches for sale on the pickets, Marcel could see her profile for an instant and the flash of the gold loop in her ear.

Suddenly, a great lumbering hack rattled by, obliterating her, and maddened, he darted across the street behind it, coming to a slapping halt so that she turned around.

Someone called his name. He didn’t hear it, but then he did, and couldn’t remember it. She was looking at him, and he had lapsed again into the utter passivity of a staring child.

Only a yard stood between them. It seemed in years he had never been so close to her, her amber face as smooth as a girl’s, deepset black eyes fringed with lashes, the high smooth expanse of her forehead broken by a widow’s peak from which her hair grew back in lustrous waves. She was mildly curious as she looked at him. Then, her thin rouged lips drew back into the curve of her cheek and the supple flesh around her eyes was etched with fine lines as she smiled.

A tiny heart pounded in Marcel’s temple. Someone brushed his shoulder, yet he didn’t move. Someone said his name.

But suddenly as if something had distracted her Juliet bowed her head, tilting it strangely to one side and groped with her fingers in her hair. She was searching for the comb as though it had begun to hurt her. And as she jerked it out and looked at it, all of her black hair fell down over her shoulders in a cascade.

A soft excited sound escaped Marcel’s lips. Someone had a hold on his arm, but he merely flinched, stiffened, and let his eyes grow wide again, ignoring the young man at his side.

All he could feel was the pounding of his own heart and he had
the distinct impression that the rush of horses and wheels in the street had become deafening. There was shouting somewhere, and from the riverfront before him came those echoing booms from the unloading ships. But he saw none of this. He was seeing only Juliet, though not right now. Rather it was another time, long long ago, before he was the villain he had become of late, the outcast. But it was a time so palpable that whenever it came back to him, it engulfed him and was memory no longer, but pure sensation. His tongue pressed against his teeth and he felt flushed and stunned. He might even be sick. And just for a moment he didn’t know for certain where he was, which might lead to terror. But groping for a hold, he found the memory which was a spell.

Running home years ago, he’d stubbed his boot on a fallen lump of coal in the street and been thrown right into her arms. In fact he’d pushed her backwards as he gripped the taffeta of her soft waist and then seeing it was she, Juliet, let go in such panic he would have fallen if she hadn’t clasped his shoulder. Looking up into her eyes like beads of jet, he saw the buttons all undone from her throat, and the mound of her naked breast pushed against the placket of shimmering cloth. There was a darkness there beneath the undercurve where he could see the soft meeting of chest and bosom. And an alien surge had made him shudder. He had felt her thumb against his cheek like sealskin, and then the open palm of her hand rubbing gently back and forth, back and forth against his tight curly hair. Her eyes seemed blind then. Her fine small waist was flesh beneath the cloth only, an astonishing nakedness. And the scent of spice and flowers lingered afterwards on his hands. He almost died.

He was almost dying now. And then and now, he watched baffled, weak, as she moved away from him like a tall ship, upstream.

“But this has nothing to do with it!” he whispered, the shame burning in his cheeks, unable to keep his lips from moving (he was a great one for talking right out loud to himself, and was forever relieved when others, coming upon him unawares assumed he had been singing). “It’s Christophe,” he went on. “I have to talk to her about Christophe!”

But the mere vision of her swaying skirts was stunning him again and he murmured in French out loud with a melodramatic air, “I
am
a criminal,” and felt some mild relief at being the abject object of his own condemnation. Too many nights had he indulged himself thinking of that chance childhood collision—the naked breast, uncorseted waist, wild perfume—so that now he had to draw himself up like a gentleman who, having glimpsed an unclad lady at her bath, shuts the door and quickly walks away.

This was the Place d’Armes, someone was trying to break his arm.

He stared astonished at the breast buttons of Richard Lermontant, his best friend.

“No, go on Richard,” he said quickly as if they’d been arguing all the while, “go on back to school,” and craning his neck to see Juliet disappear in the throng at the market, tried to wrench himself free.

“You are telling
me
to go back to school?” demanded Richard, holding him fast. His voice was low and deep, all but a whisper on the word of emphasis. “Marcel, look at me!” It was always Richard’s habit to lower his voice precisely at that point where others raise theirs, and it was invariably effective, perhaps because he was so tall. He towered over Marcel, though he was only sixteen. In fact, he towered over everyone in the street. “Monsieur De Latte’s furious!” he confided, drawing close. “You’ve got to come back with me now.”

“No!” Marcel said shortly, and lurched forward freeing himself and stifling the urge to rub the upper part of his arm. Seldom in his life had he been touched except in anger, and he had a healthy distrust of being held, loathing it in fact, though it was impossible for him to loathe Richard. They were more than friends, and he simply couldn’t bear to be angry with Richard or to have Richard angry with him. “Be a good friend to me,” he turned pleading, “and go. I don’t care what you tell Monsieur De Latte. Tell him anything.” And he started off fast for the corner.

Richard overtook him quickly.

“But why are you doing this? What’s the point of it?” he pleaded, his shoulders slightly bent so he could be near Marcel’s ear. “You ran out in the middle of class, do you realize what you’ve done?”

“Yes, I realize it. I did it, I did it,” Marcel said, blundering into the traffic of riverfront street, so that he was at once forced back on the curb. “But let me go please.” He could just make out the top of Juliet’s head at the fish market.
“Give up on me, please!”

Richard let him go, and clasping his hands behind his back he gained at once what seemed a characteristic composure so that nothing of the sixteen-year-old boy was left in him. In fact he had an ageless look most of the time so that strangers might think him twenty, perhaps older. He had never asked for his height, in fact, had prayed against it, but a manly spirit had some time ago invaded his long limbs; and as he stood very still with one foot forward, and his shoulders only a little bent, his lean face with its prominent cheekbones and slanting black eyes made him appear at once majestic and exotic. He was darker than Marcel, all of an olive complexion, his hair wavy and black. But this suggested the Turk, the Spaniard perhaps, or even the Italian, and almost nothing of the French and the Senegalese from whom he was descended.

Gesturing with a languid hand, fingers sloping gracefully from the
wrist, he whispered. “You have to come back, Marcel, you have to!” But Marcel was looking toward the market again where a great flock of birds rose suddenly from the tiled roof, looping and descending on the masts above the dock. His eyes narrowed. Juliet had emerged from the crowd feeding fish on her fingers to her cat.

Startled, Richard said, “You aren’t following her!”

An involuntary look of distaste passed over his face, which he quickly banished, but not before Marcel had seen it. “But why?”

“What do you mean, why? You know why,” Marcel said. “I have to ask her if it’s true…I have to know now.”

“This is all my fault,” Richard murmured.

“Go back.” Marcel started off again. And again Richard clutched his arm.

“She won’t know, Marcel…and if she does what makes you think she’ll tell you! She’s not in her right mind!” he whispered, and glancing at her, dropped his eyes politely as if she were a cripple.

Her hair was in streams now like that of an immigrant, and she wandered through the crowd letting her feet find her path so that people all but stumbled over her as she crooned to the cat. Richard’s thin, large-boned frame stiffened as he shifted his weight. The boy in him wanted to cry.

“You won’t turn to stone, looking at her!” Marcel whispered. And astonished, Richard saw a vicious spark in Marcel’s eyes, and heard a driving impatience in his voice.

“This is craziness,” Richard muttered, and almost turned to go. Then he said. “If you don’t come back with me now…you’ll be sent home from school for good.”

“For good?” Marcel reeled half off the curb. “Well then, good!” And he started across the street to her.

Richard was speechless. He stared beyond the row of crawling carts that worked against the crowds from the market, and as Marcel approached Christophe’s mother, Richard went after him.

“Well, then give me back the clipping!” he said, his voice thick. “You know perfectly well it’s Antoine’s, I want it.”

At once Marcel rummaged in his pockets and drew out a crumpled bit of newspaper with neatly trimmed edges. He tried desperately to smooth it in the palm of his hand. “I didn’t mean to steal it,” he said. “I was excited…I meant to put it back on your desk…”

Richard’s face was dark with anger. He glanced from second to second at the figure of Juliet, and then at the ground.

“I would have brought it to you before supper,” Marcel insisted. “You have to believe that.”

“It’s not even mine, it’s Antoine’s, and you stuffed it in your pocket and ran out.”

“If you don’t believe me,” Marcel insisted, “you wound me in my heart.”

“I know perfectly well where your heart is,” Richard murmured, with a glance at the
mea culpa
fist Marcel touched to his breast. “And you’re in for a lot more than pangs there, I’ll tell you. You’re going to be expelled!”

Marcel didn’t even seem to understand.

“And suppose it’s true,” Richard went on, “suppose Christophe is coming back here…What kind of a recommendation is it—to be bounced out of Monsieur De Latte’s school on your ear?”

Richard folded the clipping, but not without reading it quickly again. It seemed a flimsy piece of evidence to push Marcel to ruin. But, how splendid it had seemed that morning, when Antoine, Richard’s cousin, cutting open the letter from Paris, had given it to Richard at the table. Christophe coming back at last. They had always dreamed of it, hoped for it, told themselves the day would come when he would learn of his mother’s madness and if nothing else had done the trick, his love for her would bring him home. But there was so much more to it than that. One was left no room for fantasy, for speculation. It was spelled out plainly that Christophe Mercier planned no simple visit, but a real return. He was coming home to “found a school for the members of his race.”

By evening all the community of the
gens de couleur
would be aflame with it, this news which had sent Richard flying toward Monsieur De Latte’s classroom to share it with Marcel. And now this turn had been taken, this bolting by Marcel through the open doorway with Monsieur De Latte shouting for order and cracking his stick on the lectern.