Feast of All Saints (33 page)

Never had they been instructed so directly and never had they been spoken to as if they themselves might take some responsibility for what they were going to learn.

But it was only the beginning. They were soon told that during the hours spent here they would be regarded as serious scholars no matter where they were to go afterward, or what they were to do. Whether they went on to the university, or to work in some profession or trade did not matter. They were to devote themselves with equal fervor to all the subjects taught here so that when they eventually left this small academy they would be educated men.

Marcel, his eyes lowered shyly, had been swelling with pride. Christophe spoke with an easy perfection, his sentences as crisp and articulate as if all had been prepared in advance, and yet it flowed as if spontaneous, the voice so natural and eager in its inflections that it kept them riveted to his neat and commanding person as he paced slowly back and forth at the front of the room.

Again and again he paused at the perfect moment, his eyes engaging their eyes, and went on to elaborate in the same thoughtful manner on this or that point that might not be so clear.

His speech was slower than usual, an excitement for the task at hand emanated from him, along with the same muted power that Marcel had felt all along.

And only Marcel knew of the torment Christophe had endured that week, the endless frustrations, the long visits of the Englishman, Michael Larson-Roberts who would come upon them in the midst of their work in the sweltering heat and disparage the school without even speaking a single word. Marcel despised this man.

Yet there was something utterly compelling about him. That was the trouble. He would stride into the dusty townhouse, its long corridors echoing with the sound of hammers, his dove-gray clothing immaculate as though he had been miraculously conveyed above the muddy quagmire of the streets to this spot, and stepping with exaggerated care through dirt and broken boards, he would take up some lonesome position in the corner of the empty classroom, a Paris paper spread out before his bowed head, and there read in deafening silence as all around him paled, became confused, as if the angle of the world at large were the angle of his narrow green eyes. Christophe couldn’t work when he was there. His power over Christophe was monstrous. He caused Christophe’s power to go dim.

And in one long afternoon at Madame Lelaud’s Marcel had been curled over his sketchbook, drawing all manner of ugly things, as the
two men argued furiously in English, Michael Larson-Roberts hitting Christophe with one ripe sally after another, such as “You’re vain, that’s what you are, vain and frightened of the critics, frightened of your talents, frightened to go on risking that talent in the world. This isn’t the world, this place, this is self-immolation, don’t preach that rot to me about a school for your race, you don’t believe in your race, you don’t believe in anything but art, and even in that you don’t believe enough or you wouldn’t have turned your back on it…”

“You say that to me because you believe in nothing!” Christophe came back at him through clenched teeth, “you think you’ve stripped me of the faith in simple things, the faith that sustains every human being, because
you
have no such faith and never have had. Don’t talk to me about art, what do you really know about art, have you ever written anything, painted anything, understood anything! If you had, you’d know that everything I wrote was trash. It was written for effect, that’s why it was written, there was no passion to it, no soul. I tell you what I do here has a soul to it! Somewhere during one of those long binges I woke up to see the difference between us. I understand art and you don’t and I can’t abide bad art whereas you have never known what that was, yes, you, for all your sophistication, your education, your taste! You don’t know!”

Often the rifts of English were too fast for Marcel to comprehend or lapsed into phrases so informal and violent he didn’t catch them at all. But never had he seen a man attempt to exert such force over another, while that other resisted so bitterly though falling again and again into stammers and at last a sullen silence which seemed the only really successful resistance he could accomplish. Was it perhaps that they argued like a father and son???

No, more truly priest and sinner. For there was something violently religious about the Englishman, something desperately dogmatic about his pronouncements. Christophe was being lost as a soul is lost, Christophe was damning himself, and this cesspool of a city around him with its sullen slaves and wary
gens de couleur
was hell.

“It’s a dangerous thing to really love someone,” Christophe had said finally after a half hour’s silence at the dirty little table, his back to the wall, staring at Michael Larson-Roberts, “it’s a dangerous thing to be young and malleable and let that someone give you a consummate vision of the world.”

“I never meant to give you a consummate vision of the world,” the Englishman said, barely moving his lips. Marcel had never seen him so spent. “I meant to give you an education, that was all.”

“…because all your life after that, the vision haunts you,” Christophe went on. “You’ll hear that deprecating and defining voice in your ears saying, ‘this isn’t what I taught you to value, this isn’t what I taught you to respect’…”

“And what are you going to teach those precious little coffee-colored bourgeoisie of yours in that classroom?” the Englishman had asked with a sudden flush of anger.

“To think for themselves!” Christophe said. “I’m twenty-three years old and I’d never once thought for myself until I got on that boat for New Orleans!”

The Englishman’s bright eyes held his steadily as he brought up a clutch of bills from his pocket and dropping them on the table, he said, “You do this to wound me, Chris. And you’ve succeeded, but you could have been a great writer, you could have done anything you wanted with your talent. Wounding me is a pathetic accomplishment in comparison!” And rising he left.

Christophe was furious and impotent in his fury as he watched the Englishman disappear through the crowd at the door.

But after a long while of sipping his beer slowly and moving his lips now and then as though communing with himself he said to Marcel wearily in French, “Forgive me for all this arguing in a language you don’t understand.”

“But Christophe,” Marcel said in English, “You are a great writer, isn’t that true?”

“Marcel, I just know this, that if I hadn’t gotten out of Paris and the
Quartier Latin
when I did, I would have died. If I am destined to be a great writer, all I need is pen and paper and the solitude occasionally of my own room. Now come on, let’s get out of here.”

His stride had been swift then. His hand was firm and casual on Marcel’s shoulder as he led Marcel, quite to his surprise, down the Rue Dumaine to meet Madame Dolly Rose.

They drank coffee with her in the shade of her patio. She was shamelessly dressed in a yellow sprigged muslin though it was only three weeks since the death of her little daughter, and an equally shameless piano music carried out of the windows of her flat. But she was pale, had dark shadows under her eyes, and her hands shook. She laughed sometimes with a forced gaiety and teased Marcel about his blond hair. She called him “Blue Eyes” while Christophe smiled serenely, and she spiked their coffee with brandy which she drank herself, desperately and lustily as a man, without effect.

A lovely woman, delicate of feature and voice, she could speak the patois one minute and her usual Parisian French the next, laughing in sudden frantic but alluring spurts as she reminded him of the characters of the streets in their childhood, the old chimney sweeper who had threatened them with his broom when he had caught Dolly and Christophe marching behind him, mimicking his gestures and his sing-song voice. “Well, Blue Eyes!” she had said once when she caught Marcel watching her. She had kissed him on the cheek. “Women,” he thought with an uncomfortable shift in his chair. But he beamed at
her. And did not like to see her lapse suddenly into silence. Christophe was content here. He clasped his hands behind his neck, and when the music within had stopped, looked up with interest to see that strange tattered black slave coming down the steps, that painfully thin boy who had brought his key chain from Dolly’s house weeks before. Dolly called him Bubbles, gave him small coins now for his dinner and sent him off. “Well, I finally bought him outright,” she said. “But he just runs away.” He had been cheap, and tuned pianos perfectly, but never brought the money back to her; it had been a failure, buying him, she ought to sell him to the fields.

“You don’t mean that,” Christophe scoffed. “Sell him to the fields.”

“But he was not the one playing the piano, was he?” Marcel asked.

“He can play anything,” Dolly said. “That is, when he’s here.”

“Buy him a decent coat, some shoes…” Christophe said.

“And then I’d never see him!” Dolly snapped. “You buy him a decent coat!” She was suddenly crestfallen and distant. But Christophe had leaned across the table and given her a slow gentle kiss as Marcel took a bit of a walk about the yard.

And after that Christophe had hired the slave, Bubbles, to help him with his work at the house, and given him an old serviceable suit of clothes. That got him into decent houses again with his tuning wrenches, and the day before the school had opened he had tuned the spinet in the Lermontant parlor and played an eerie song for Marcel and Richard, his fingers like spiders on the keys as he rocked back and forth on the stool, his eyes closed, humming along with the obscure melodies through clenched teeth. And he had not run away.

But these bits and pieces of Christophe’s life which Marcel witnessed before the school began were but the tip of the iceberg. Much had gone on behind closed doors. Rumors had rippled through Marcel’s small world that Christophe took to spending late nights with the Englishman after that quarrel at Madame Lelaud’s, that he was wined and dined in the Englishman’s suite at the St. Charles Hotel with the slaves dismissed before he took his place at a table set for two in the privacy of the Englishman’s room. And Dolly Rose had had Christophe often as a guest in the afternoons, even walking out with him around the Place d’Armes, while everyone knew that she was receiving a white military officer in the hours after dark.

And just when all had expected that man to take up informal residence with Dolly (he was refurbishing the flat), she had broken off this connection violently, and gone dancing again at the “quadroon balls.” All this frightened Marcel, he would have preferred for Christophe not to be seen so much there. Dolly caused trouble for men,
men were dead on account of Dolly—of course up until now, they had all been white—yet it fascinated Marcel that Christophe was obviously quite pleasing to the demanding Dolly, and Dolly was pleasing enough to Christophe.

Meantime Juliet had been in a rage. Only Christophe’s threat to “throw everything up” if she did not show some courtesy to Michael Larson-Roberts had succeeded in calming her. If she remembered her little boudoir encounter with Marcel she did not show it; her son was now the man in her life. And the very night before the school opened, there had been another fight in the townhouse, complete once more with the breaking of glass. Lisette had told Marcel at dawn, when he was dressed and ready hours before, that Juliet had disappeared around midnight and had still not come home.

“Oh, you don’t know that, that’s foolishness,” he had answered sharply. “You were sound asleep at midnight yourself.”

“I might have been but there’s lots of others who were awake!” she said knowingly. “I tell you if that fancy schoolteacher doesn’t get that woman in hand…”

“I won’t listen to this!” Marcel had stormed, playing the master, “Take that tray out of here and go!” It was foolish to argue with her. She knew everything, it was true, and lying down for a while, as neatly dressed and still as a corpse on his bed, he thought to himself, maybe some day she’ll know something that I want to know. Lisette was warm to him even if downright disrespectful, but her face could be as sullen and unreadable as that of any other slave when she chose.

But as soon as he had entered the new classroom, first to arrive, one glance at Christophe’s drawn face had told him this must be true. The teacher was spiffily dressed for the first day, sporting a new silk tie, and a rich beige vest beneath his chocolate brown coat. But he looked debonair and half-dead.

“Have you seen my mother?” he had asked in a whisper. And then before the others had begun to arrive, he vanished to the rooms upstairs.

The Englishman had passed the front windows at seven-forty-five
A.M.
, a bent figure, hands clasped behind his back as usual, clearly recognizable even through the half-open shutters, but he had not stopped.

Then when the room was filled and waiting, Christophe had made his swift entrance right on the hour, face radiant, and there began this exciting day for all of them which went without a mishap or a dull moment until the stroke of twelve. One half hour before they were to be dismissed, early on this first day, he had begun their Greek instruction with a short and moving recitation of a verse in translation and then in the original tongue. Marcel had never heard classical Greek
recited; he could not read a syllable of it. But listening to this beautiful and impassioned speech, he had felt the heart of the poem as one feels it with music. Above the blackboard between the two front windows there hung an engraving of a Greek theater carved into the deep side of a hill. The audience sat in flowing robes; a lone figure stood in the center of the field below. Listening he had been transported to that place, and he was full to the brim at last when the noon Angelus had rung. He had bowed his head. A sudden burst of applause rang from the back of the room. It was those older boys, the colored planters’ sons, who had thought to do it. Christophe smiled gratefully, demurring, and let them go.

Only one aspect of all this had disappointed Marcel. And that was his jealousy of all these students who were encountering his teacher for the first time. There had been no sign to him that he was special, that he was Christophe’s friend. Of course he hadn’t expected it. He knew that he was to be treated as anyone else. Yet it hurt him and he was angry with himself for it and did not want this to show on his face. He thought he might hang about, offering perhaps to look for Juliet. But what if he were brushed off, Christophe after all was so very busy. He wasn’t really worried about Juliet besides. He felt an anger with her that grew out of this week’s long intimacy of working together in the schoolrooms, dining together at the little round table, easy with one another in their pride and their exhaustion, as she called him
“cher”
always, and sometimes rubbed the top of his head. It was too mean to have run off on this all-important night. He was certain she was all right.