Feast of All Saints (53 page)

She read poems to Madame Elsie, learned to walk back and forth across the boudoir with a book on her head for perfect posture, and the Boston tutor had a stroke in his bed.

One afternoon, having finished the lace for a Sunday collar, she wandered out the garden gate. There was that mean little Marcel sitting on the step, his arms wrapped around his knees. His blue eyes blazed under the scowl of golden brows as he watched the game of ball in the street. Someone had cheated, it had gone unnoticed, he murmured when she asked him, he would not “debase” himself with all this again. She understood though she’d never heard the word. She knew the meanness of children perfectly, nobody had to tell her. “Oh, don’t play with Anna Bella, oh, don’t let’s play with Anna Bella. Anna Bellllla! where’s your mamma and daddy! Well, she may belong to Madame Elsie, but she’s not Madame Elsie’s little girl!”

“Come inside,” she said to Marcel. “Come on inside and talk to me.”

His blue eyes shifted. He looked so mean. Not half as mean as that white sister of his, but awfully mean. Yet getting up from the steps he brushed his pants and said that he would come in. She served him tea like an English lady, she sat amazed with her hands in her lap when he talked of buried treasure, of pirates up and down the Spanish Main. “I know these things,” he said with raised eyebrows, “I have heard of these pirates, they used to come storming through this very city, that’s why there are gun holes in the walls.”

“Fancy that,” she said laughing, “it’s like I was just reading in this book. See this book?” she took it off the shelf. “I think sometimes I was brought here by pirates. And someday those pirates are going to come back.”

They would laugh about it afterward, he didn’t know anything about the buccaneers! He lay stupefied as she turned the pages of
Robinson Crusoe
. She made voices for the characters. Sometimes she cried. “Like that, and like that, and like that,” he shouted as he showed her how to wield the rapier. Madame Elsie said “Hmp!” in the door. But he had been mortally wounded in the heart (outnumbered) and fell dead.

There were years after that when she expected him daily, putting down her lace if he weren’t there by half past four to ask with mild astonishment, “Now, where’s Marcel?” He brought her engravings which they colored, showed her how to do very special things with
drawings, to make the folds of drapery real, to draw profiles, to draw ducks. He read the papers in French to her, they sneaked away together to view an execution in the Place d’Armes. And were both confined to their separate houses afterward, but he sent her a note by his sister Marie.

When it was that he had ceased to be that sexless golden childhood friend she could not have precisely said. Like so many girls in this steaming tropical climate, she could have borne children at the age of twelve. She loved him. He poked a trash fire in the street, the flames glinting on his rounded forehead and spoke of the end of the world. They stood in the dark yard together in summer looking at the stars. “Do you think it will be like that,” she asked hugging herself anxiously, “at the end of the world?”

“I think it will end in our lifetime!” he said triumphantly. “You and I shall not know death at all.”

On the day of his First Communion, he sat quite still among all the fuss and celebration and said to her later, “I had the living Lord in my soul.” She bowed her head, and said, “I know, I know.”

Something to laugh at? All of that? The boy who came last year and walked restlessly around the parlor. The boy who read her the newspapers and listened so attentively when she confessed those childhood memories, how the colored barber of that small town, her father, had carried her on his shoulders down the main street to his shop. “Each one of those rich men, they had a shaving mug with their own name. My Daddy wore a fresh white apron. It was the cleanest shop.” She lay with her head back against the wall. “You know sometimes I want to go back to that town, just walk down that dirt street.”

“I’ll take you there, Anna Bella,” he said.

“I just want to see my Daddy’s shop again. I just would like to walk out there, you know, where they buried him, you know…” she sighed, hugging her arms.

She loved him. He loved her. They even said so to each other, but there was something virginal in the way that he had spoken the words, something that sensed its own nobility in transcending whatever older people might mean by such utterances. Older people cheapened them with kisses and embraces. In short, she thought once in the night air under the stars, her hands on the gallery railing, “He really loves me for myself, Marcel. And that’s just not enough!”

But he was a child yet, despite the waistcoats and his pocket watch and the long dreams he unfolded of Paris, the Sorbonne, flats above the waters of the Seine. Time was all around them she told herself, until the day that Jean Jacques, the cabinetmaker, died in his sleep.

It was a young man who came to her that night to pour out his sorrow, it was a young man’s terror that she witnessed, a young man’s first understanding of death. And as the hours ticked to midnight, it
was a young man, bleary and raw with pain, who had told her in a soft and musing voice, “You know, Anna Bella, if I hadn’t been born rich, I could have learned the cabinetmaker’s trade from him…learned to make things as well as he made them…and I might have been happy with that all my life.”

But his future was to be that of a man of means, how could she tell him that it made her heart ache to think of his leaving her, to know that someday he would go away? And then had come that moment when their lips touched, when drowsy, his sorrow softened by wine, his eyes had burnt with a low fire as if he were seeing her for the first time. He loved her, loved her in the new and disturbing way that she had loved him for so long. And Madame Elsie saw it all through the crack of the door.

In the months that followed, Madame Elsie insulted him, rebuffed him, but Anna Bella was sure that it would be rectified. It never was.

She would see him in the streets, his face painfully knotted, a bundle of leatherbound books under his arm. Or in the Place d’Armes once where he stood with legs apart, drawing in the dry dust with a long stick. He turned a tense face toward her during Mass, seemed on the verge of speaking even there, of slipping out of the pew and moving toward her, but he never did. His legs grew long, his face lost its early roundness, and he cut a sharp figure, almost dramatic, so that people marked him when he passed.

But week followed week without his calling, and soon the long months had made a year. And realizing desperately that she had lost him, somehow long before the appointed time, she gave way again and again to tears. She would have run away with him then, done anything with him, but the pure fact of it was that these were wild imaginings. Why after all should he leave the snug world in which he had such a lustrous future, and when had they last been alone together, even exchanged words? No, she had lost him, not just the young man who had kissed her in the parlor, but the boy who had been her closest, truest friend. She was at a loss to understand it, but understood at the same time that her own life was changing in a manner she could not prevent.

Madame Elsie whispered to her of the “quadroon balls” and the old ways, scoffing at any talk of a colored husband, that was disgusting to her, “for the common,” she said as she sent Anna Bella out at night to let “the gentlemen” in. “My rents are thirty dollars a month,” she said with lowered lids and an ugly baring of her yellowed teeth. “My gentlemen are the best!” And letters came from Old Captain’s parish priest that said he would not get up from his broken hip, and might not see his little Anna Bella again.

Sometimes she thought of the sons of the old families of the
gens
de couleur
, families she had known for a little while when she was still studying with the Carmelites in school. But theirs seemed a remote and exclusive world, and she was the daughter of freed slaves. She was not invited to those homes, not even as a little girl to play. Yet she was frightened of the hardworking free Negroes around her, men like her father who’d bought their freedom and learned a trade. These were the men who came to repair the plaster, spread the new wallpaper in the parlor, or in the little shops that lined the Rue Royale, fitted her new boots for her, or took her order for a new four poster for the best upstairs rooms. Good men with money in their pockets, they tipped their hats to her after Mass and called her Mamselle. So why did they frighten her? Because she dressed so well, spoke so well, carried herself like a lady, had the hairdresser in each Saturday afternoon, and had grown accustomed to directing a household of slaves?

One night late when she was alone in the parlor of the big house—fearing at any moment the bell at the door and the long walk down the polished corridors with some strange white man who might whisper an irritating familiarity which she would be bound to ignore—tears came to her eyes. What was it that she herself wanted, she asked. What would she have, were there the choice? But the answer eluded her. Pushed and pulled she had no clear vision; she could think only of the traps that awaited her. And helplessly, she felt the need of time.

That Marcel could have left her so completely made her angry, suddenly, and a little bitter. Perhaps it was a lesson; perhaps life was full of such lessons. People left you one at a time and forever all along the way, mother, father, Old Captain, and your only real friend.

Then came that moment in the Mercier hallway, outside the room where the Englishman lay dead. There was no doubt then that Marcel loved her, and it was his love for her as much as anything else which had kept him away. Even as he cursed her, she’d known it and known that he would never come back. It was inconceivable to her afterward that she had slapped him, and that night alone in her room, she had known the deepest anguish of her life. No matter that Madame Elsie had shaken her when she returned home, called her “cheap,” declared that Monsieur Vincent Dazincourt had been asking for her, and had gone back to the country disappointed, Anna Bella was a little fool!

And there were the flowers from Monsieur Vincent on the table, and a bottle of French perfume. Monsieur Vincent had family, fortune, fine manners, had courted and abandoned the beautiful Dolly Rose. “He wanted to see you!” Madame Elsie snarled as she slammed the door.

The days after had been agony. But Anna Bella had to see Marcel.
Foolishly she had gone to the little birthday fête for Marie Ste. Marie only to witness the bitter controversy between Dolly Rose and her godmother, Celestina, to learn what treachery she had worked on the distraught Michie Christophe. On the verge of tears, she had returned only to come face to face with Monsieur Vincent in the front hall. She could not talk to him now, she could not talk to anyone, and rudely, almost rudely, she turned her head.

But in a low voice, all propriety at the expense of feeling he was complimenting her, telling her that he had only just learned of her nursing the unfortunate Englishman who had died at the school-teacher’s house. She was admirable, generous, he was saying, to have taken this into her own hands. Indeed, he had known the Englishman in Paris, and had seen him once or twice here at home before his death. Indeed, he had heard much praise of Christophe, the school-teacher who was now quite in Anna Bella’s debt.

But at those words, she turned to face him quite unable any longer to restrain herself or her tears. “Michie, he’s in bad trouble, the school-teacher!” she had cried. “He’s out of his mind since that Englishman died because he thinks it’s his fault. Michie, it’s Dolly Rose he’s gotten mixed up with, with that mean Dolly Rose! And she’s got a gentleman, a Captain Hamilton, coming back from Charleston to find it out this very afternoon.”

There was no caution at this moment. That no decent well-bred girl of either color should speak so to a man, Anna Bella knew, but it did not enter her mind. Cheapen herself in his eyes? She didn’t care. Monsieur Vincent knew Dolly, had quarreled with her, enough people had told Anna Bella this, and she was imploring now as she said, “She’s
nothing but
trouble for a colored man, Michie! She’s the meanest woman I ever knew.”

But never would she forget the seriousness of his expression as he took her outstretched hands, the immediate comprehension in his eyes. “Don’t you upset yourself a moment longer,” his voice had been hushed as he went to the door. “I shall see to this, rest assured.”

It was the next afternoon before she saw him again. She had just come up the stairs to find him watching her from the door of his room. “You must not worry anymore about your schoolteacher,” he had said to her softly, gravely. “He has only his grief to trouble him now.”

“Oh, Michie,” she had smiled, breathless, and utterly trusting. And silently he had stood before her, his hands at his sides. Behind him the snow-white bed with its great drifts of netting seemed a cloud in the late afternoon sun. He cut a black figure against it, except for his pale face, his pale hands. But something flickered in his black eyes as he watched her so that she stopped, at a loss. Slowly he turned and shut the door.

That night he asked Madame Elsie if he might speak to her, and she was quite surprised to see them both enter her little upstairs parlor, to see Madame Elsie nod and withdraw.

Vague speech followed, so proper, so veiled that finally, very frustrated, he stopped. “A flat was what I had in mind,” he murmured, looking out the window. He turned his back to her. His meaning was just dawning on her. She stared at him with wide eyes. Then he said a strange thing. “I would like very much to have one of those flats along the Rue Royale, with the high windows, to have a fern in the window on a marble-topped stand. I’ve always admired those windows with the lace curtains drawn back, and the ferns on the marble-top stands. Do you like such things?” He turned toward her, his face open, seemingly innocent. He looked like a boy.

“It would be lovely, Monsieur,” she said.

“But Madame Elsie insists that I purchase a small house. Of course I have no objection, the house would be in your name. She knows of a likely cottage…If you were to have a look…” He stopped.