Feast of All Saints (40 page)

Rudolphe was grim. He pounded along the sun-drenched street in silence, occasionally coughing from the dust that swirled in the air, his
chest heaving with his pace, as Marcel struggled to keep up with his long legs.

“Damn that woman,” he whispered finally. “I don’t have to tell you what a mess this is, do I?” Marcel knew that Rudolphe was speaking to him man to man. Rudolphe would have never taken that tone with his own son. “That harlot,” he went on. “White men quarreling over her year in and year out, and now she plays this lovely act with Christophe and this Captain Hamilton, I hope that woman burns in hell.”

“She said he was drunk, Monsieur,” Marcel said, out of breath. “She said he’d been drunk for days.”

“I heard what she said,” Rudolphe stammered. He darted across a crowded street forcing a carter to slow before him, pulling Marcel by the arm. “I heard every word. She’s left him in that flat for that white man to find.”

The few short blocks to the Rue Dumaine took forever. But at last they were rushing back Dolly’s open carriageway and up the rear stairs. The door to the flat lay open, lending it a neglected look, but it was far from neglected inside. Evidence of young Captain Hamilton’s affections were everywhere, new tables, mirrors, the smell of fresh enamel, and bright new wallpaper on the walls. Rudolphe tapped at one door after another, cautiously examining each room to find it empty until he paused at Dolly’s bedroom door. He knocked once. And then turned the knob.

It was a sumptuous room, with a wilderness of perfumes on the immense dresser and the gleam of new velvet over the blinds. Bottles crowded the bedside table, their dark liquid catching the bits of afternoon light that filtered through the shutters, and beyond them in the high poster with its red silk trappings lay Christophe, asleep, his face in the pillow, his slender brown body naked and uncovered on the white sheet.

“Get up,” Rudolphe said to him at once, and commenced to shake his shoulder violently and then to tug on his arm. “Christophe!” he said, “Christophe, wake up.”

“Go to hell,” Christophe answered, and slipped heavily and shapelessly from Rudolphe’s hands.

“Listen to me, Christophe, and listen now. Captain Hamilton’s coming here, do you know who that is…”

“…he’s in Charleston,” came the slurred voice from the pillow.

“…not according to your sweet friend. He’s expected here today. Now. Get up!” And jerking Christophe’s arm, he brought him to a sitting position where he fell forward and stared now not at Rudolphe but at Marcel. His brown eyes widened and then appeared very calm. He was looking at Marcel just as if he had seen him for the first time, as if there were no urgency, as if he were merely watching him
in some timeless and safe place. Then very slowly he smiled. When Rudolphe slapped him now he was not prepared for it and awoke as if from a dream.

“Don’t do that to me!” Christophe whispered. He looked about, his eyes reddened, squinting as if he did not know where he was. The flesh of his lips was so badly cracked that it was bleeding. It hurt Marcel to see it. It hurt him to see Rudolphe slap Christophe’s face.

“Listen to me, you fool,” Rudolphe was furious now. “You’ve got to get out of here. That Captain Hamilton is keeping Dolly! Do you understand. He is keeping Dolly!”

“And he wouldn’t like to find a nigger in her bed,” Christophe sneered. He was about to lie down again.

“If he finds one,” Rudolphe said, leaning over him now with a grim, sardonic smile, “that nigger is just very likely going to be dead.”

“Come on, Chris,” Marcel said suddenly. He thrust Christophe’s limp arm through the sleeve of his shirt. “Get up, Chris,” he said. “If you don’t, that man will find us all here, don’t do this to us, Chris, come on.”

The mere thought of some ugly confrontation with a white man sickened Marcel. It was not the violence he feared, that was theoretical to him, it was the humiliation that his mind found quite real. Christophe rose, shakily, letting Marcel button his shirt. He commenced to dress himself now, shoving them belligerently away.

They gathered his watch, his tie, and his keys and put them into his pockets; and starting unsteadily for the door, their arms around him, they stopped at the shrill crying of a bell.

“Damn,” Rudolphe murmured. Christophe attempted to straighten himself but his legs would not support him and he crashed heavily into the wall. Again there came the shrill sound of the bell.

Then with some preternatural effort, Rudolphe lifted him out of the bedroom and toward the rear door of the flat. They could hear the grinding of a key in the lock, a distinct metallic sound that echoed through the empty passage from the front of the house. But they had reached the back gallery then, and within seconds were halfway down the stairs.

Marcel was trembling when they reached the carriageway, but he was not trembling with fear, he was trembling with some other awful and degrading emotion that he’d never known in his life. He had never really run from anything before, and in all his follies had never been accused of cowardice in the face of any challenge, discipline, or trial. Leaning against the wall, waiting as Rudolphe said to wait, with Christophe slumped against his shoulder, he felt a curious loathing, not for Dolly, not for Christophe, and not for this Captain Hamilton, but strangely, for himself.

“Let’s go now,” Rudolphe said. And together, arms locked around
Christophe, they went out to the right, away from the house, walking fast until Rudolphe could signal a hack.

T
HAT EVENING
was the longest of Marcel’s life. He did not dare take Christophe into his own room where the Englishman had died, but Rudolphe insisted that he do this, and laid Christophe right down on the same bed. Of course it had been thoroughly cleaned, and the room was immaculately straight. It resembled more a room in the Lermontant house than Christophe’s cluttered study now, but Christophe did not seem to notice any of this, or to care. When he tried to get hold of his bottle of whiskey, Rudolphe stopped him and sent Marcel for a keg of beer.

When he returned, Christophe was propped against the head-board of his narrow bed beside the desk and he was staring glaze-eyed and still at Rudolphe who strode back and forth, back and forth, across the room. “Give him the beer,” Rudolphe said. Juliet, terrified of her son, hovered with a tear-streaked face just outside the door. She had all the look of madness and neglect of the years before Christophe came home.

“Now you listen to me,” Rudolphe boomed, “and you,” he said, pointing to Marcel, “I want you to hear this too. Now,” he turned to Christophe, “you know it’s not going to do you any good getting drunk like this. Sooner or later you’ve got to sober up and face it, your English friend is dead.”

Marcel drew in his breath. But Christophe remained motionless, his eyes like pieces of glass.

“Now your mother needs you,” Rudolphe went on. “She’s out of her mind. So if you blunder out that front door again, if you wander back to Madame Dolly Rose and her hotheaded young ‘protector’ and get yourself killed, well, then, you’ve killed your mother too. Not to mention this boy here who thinks you hang the moon, and two dozen other boys like him whom you’ve abandoned for this little escapade as if there weren’t a school downstairs and as if you weren’t the schoolmaster whom they all adore! Now, just keep this up! Just see how many people you can drag down with you, we’ll keep count.”

“Please, Monsieur,” Marcel said. He couldn’t bear this, and the gradual alteration of Christophe’s expression, as Rudolphe went on.

“Did you bury Michael?” Christophe whispered. He raised his eyebrows ever so slightly, but otherwise he did not move.

“Of course we buried him, but with no help from you. And I’ll tell
you something else, Monsieur, you get yourself in another fix with Dolly Rose and you’re on your own.” He stopped. His temper was getting the best of him, and again he strode back and forth across the room. Rudolphe was a massive man, not as tall as Richard, but strong of build and larger than anyone else there. He was ominous in this temper; his voice, though deep, had absolutely no African timbre to it, but a clear almost sharp Caucasian tone. Now he drew himself up, as if he found it difficult to say what he must.

“I have never been in such a position,” he declared, “as I was in…with you…this afternoon! I have never never…cowered before any white man in my life! And never have I had to! And never, never will I endure that again!” He turned, unable to go on. Marcel could not look at him. He could not look at Christophe. Much as his heart was rent and much as he was afraid, he knew these sentiments were his own. But he was a boy, Rudolphe was a man. Rudolphe was a man of substance and one of the strongest men that Marcel knew.

Christophe’s lips, whitened and cracked, barely parted and softly, very softly, he chanted. “DOLLY Dolly, DOLLY Dolly, DOLLY DOLLY ROOOOSE.” His voice trailed off. Rudolphe staring through the open door, his back to Christophe, had not moved. Then he sighed.

“Come lock the doors after me, Marcel, and don’t let anyone in.”

Christophe was sick. For hours he lay in fitful sleep awakening only to give up the bile in his stomach and to drink the heavy draughts of beer. But he did not ask for whiskey, he did not move to try to find it, and Marcel, sitting patiently beside the grate, watched the windows darken around them as night came on. The twilight terrified him, it seemed an immense resonance with the darkness in his soul. He put his face in his hands.

From time to time Juliet appeared at the door, and he would gesture to her that all was well. But all was far from well, and he was afraid. He lit the lamp by the bed finally, and drew himself a glass of the beer. It was still cool, and tasted good to him, and he felt he was going to cry. He had just settled in the chair again beyond the circle of the lamp’s light when he realized that Christophe was sitting up, against the carved headboard of the bed, and that he was staring at him with those same unnatural glazed eyes.

Marcel began to talk. He could never have remembered how he began. He simply tried to tell Christophe how much he needed him, how much all the boys needed him, and how Juliet was again going out of her mind. She had roamed the city night and day while he was gone. She’d boarded the ships convinced that he had booked passage to leave her forever, she had worn out the leather of her shoes, and
her feet bled. “She loves you, she loves…” Marcel said, his voice breaking and he realized that he wanted to say “I love you” but felt he could not.

“My life here is over if you don’t come back, I mean come back to us, to the boys. I tell you I’ll run away. I won’t wait for my chance to go to Paris, I’ll run away. Remember what you planned when you were in Paris when you were a boy, that’s what I’ll do now.” He ran on through long descriptions of how he would become a cabin boy or a common seaman just to escape “this place,” how he would be abused on the ships that took him, beaten probably, maybe he would starve. No doubt he would fall from the mast, and there would be rats in the hold, and they would all get scurvy, but he didn’t care. Sometime during all of this, he drew another glass of beer for Christophe, but Christophe sitting propped against his pillow did not move. His beard was thick and rough, darkening his face, and the eyes glittered in the gloomy light of the lamp.

It seemed the Cathedral bell clanged the hour over and over again, and still Christophe sat there, and after long pauses, Marcel would resume again, running through the old refrains to a slightly different tune.

Finally in a very soft voice, Christophe asked:

“Where did they bury him?”

And Marcel explained. It was the Protestant Cemetery uptown because from all his papers they had discerned he was Episcopalian and he had left some money for Christophe, too, in a packet marked “Property of Christophe Mercier, return to him in the event of my death.” It was a clever ruse, the lawyer had remarked, as the man had a good income but no capital which he might will on his own. Marcel could read no response to this in Christophe’s face. And only when the eyes closed again, did Marcel allow himself to drift into sleep.

When he woke the first impression he received was that of the sun flowing in through the open windows. “He’s escaped!” he thought, and jumped to his feet. But then he saw Christophe, freshly dressed, smooth-shaven, sitting with his legs crossed on the length of the bed. A pot of fresh coffee steamed on the desk beside him. And he drank from a heavy mug, a cheroot in his other hand which he lifted now and then to his lips. He appeared perfectly calm.

“Go on home now,
mon ami,”
he said.

“No!” Marcel protested. Christophe’s eyes were bloodshot, the lip was still bleeding slightly where it had cracked.

“I’m all right,” his voice was, as before, very soft. “And by the way,
mon ami
, you’d be quite the sensation on the Paris stage, you could move the most jaded audience to tears with those speeches of yours, all that about the roaches crawling over you in the hold of the ship.”

He turned then to fix a cup of the coffee for Marcel. But his hands were shaking so badly that he couldn’t quite manage to pour the warm milk, and Marcel took it over at once. Christophe’s eyes had an unusual fire in them. He seemed elated as he watched Marcel, and then he reached out and clasped Marcel’s arm tight. Marcel was looking down at him, and Christophe still holding him, bowed his head. And then Marcel yielded to an overwhelming impulse and put his arm around Christophe’s shoulder in a quick but firm embrace.

When he drew back, Christophe began to speak. He was exhilarated and his words came too rapidly, with too much feeling as Marcel settled into his chair.

“A long time ago in Greece,” Christophe said, “I saw a funeral for a peasant in the hills. This was near Sounion, the very tip of Greece. It was where we’d come to see the temple of Neptune where the poet Byron had carved his name. We were living almost in the shadow of the temple in a peasant hut. And I saw this funeral. With the women dressed all in black and crying wildly, wildly, as they tore their hair.

“It had a ritual sound, that crying. But something of blind anguish in it too. They wanted their cries to reach heaven, they wailed in outrage, they gave full vent to their grief. Well…” he stopped as though considering, and carefully lifted his coffee to his lips. A bit of it spilt but he did not seem to notice this. His hand shook even more violently as he set it down.