Feast of All Saints (68 page)

Anna Bella latched the front blinds and moved slowly toward the bedroom door. She prayed Zurlina had gone to bed—though Zurlina should not have gone—she did not wish to hear her predictable hostile words. She set the candle down on her dresser and as the flame steadied and the light spread out beyond her, she all but let out a scream. There was a man sitting on the bed, his legs crossed, the red glint of a cigar in his hand.

“Michie Vince!” she gasped.

She lifted the candle and saw his still, relatively calm face. He was in shirtsleeves, his coat laid neatly over the foot of the bed, “Michie Vince, if I had known…”

“I know that,
chère,”
he said. “It’s quite all right.”

“Why, I thought when you didn’t come by supper. Why, I didn’t have any idea…”

“Anna Bella, it’s all right.”

She sank down in the chair beside the dresser, and in spite of his words began to cry softly, inconsolably, covering her face. He slipped off the bed and lifted her by the arms.

“Anna Bella, come now,” he said. “I could have sent Zurlina in, I chose not to. Now don’t show me tears,” he held her tightly. “I’ve come too far.”

This seemed only to aggravate her misery. He led her to the bed, kissing her, smoothing her hair. She slipped her arm up around his neck. “I love you, Michie Vince,” she said. “I love you, I love you, I love you!”

“Then why the tears?” he whispered. “Hmmmm,
ma belle
Anna Bella?”

They came in a torrent and she was powerless to stop it, only clinging to him and making that same affirmation of love again.

It was dawn when Marcel at last reached home. He had fallen asleep, not in Juliet’s room, but in Christophe’s on the rug before the hearth. Late talk, some wine, and then the tossing and turning to discover that they had both of them dropped off in their clothes. The air of the room was smothering. He slipped out without waking Christophe and went down the street sleepily toward his own bed.

But the city was awake already, the
vendeuses
on the way to market from the outlying farms, and the lamps lit in his mother’s room. Well, if there was no time before class for sleep he might at least splash some water on his face, bathe his arms and chest. Study round the clock, indeed, this was a great beginning, and was Lisette still dead to the world in her room, he had to rouse her, reason with her, and a cold dread came over him as he thought to himself, what if she’s gone?

Hurrying up the
garçonnière
steps, he couldn’t wait to peel off his limp and rumpled clothes.

But just as he was removing his boots, he heard a rude rap at his door.

“Who is it?” he asked crossly. He was unbuttoning his shirt.

“Lisette, who do you think it is!” came the answer, and the door swung back.

She wore a bright fresh calico with a spotless apron, starched and ruffled, as she stomped into the room. His coffee was steaming on the tray, and there was a special breakfast, the sort she whipped up for him when he’d been good to her, slabs of bacon, eggs perfectly done, the grits melting with butter, and warm bread. He was flabbergasted as he watched her set the tray on the desk. She picked up his soiled boots.

“Do you look for every mud puddle between here and that teacher’s house!” she demanded.

He couldn’t answer. He was staring at her as stupidly as he had ever stared at anyone in his life.

“Well!” she demanded, reaching for his soiled shirt. “You going to eat that or let it turn to stone?”

“You didn’t…you didn’t have to…” he whispered.

She was shaking her head in disgust as she held out the boots. Then their eyes met.

Her face was as sullen and unreadable as it had always been, the eyes brown and overcast with weariness, but sharp in the smooth copper-colored face. A snow-white
tignon
mashed her springy hair, and she was studying him as if it were any day of the week, any week of the year.

He swallowed, glancing away from her and suddenly back to her, and struggling to form words, he said nothing but the driest whisper of her name.

“Now, do you want these cleaned now, Michie,” came the low matter-of-fact voice, hand on the hip. “With every china plate in this house stuck with food and the laundry stacked to the ceiling, or couldn’t you manage with your old boots?”

But she didn’t wait for his answer. She had seen the rumpled coat on the bed and was furious. “Look at that!” she swept it up as she went out the door. “What did you do, roll around in the street in that!” She was on her way downstairs.

I
T WAS THE SAME
dream again, vague and bordering on nightmare, and that excitement mounting until Marie awoke, pushing her hands against the mattress, her body rigid, the excitement culminating in a series of delicious and reverberating shocks. She was jarred by the sound of her own moan. And stung with shame, she turned over on her back and gazed numbly through the gauze of the mosquito
baires
at the familiar furnishings of this narrow bedroom in her aunts’ flat. So the dream had followed her here as well, and even through the immense and heavy cypress door, her aunts might have heard her soft sounds.

She sat up, leaned forward, and pressed her hand to her cheek. The excitement was only now subsiding and she felt a shudder as her heavy tresses fell over her shoulders and brushed the nipples of her breasts.

The dream had been happening for a year now, with its inevitable and shattering pleasure, and she knew without anyone telling her it
was wrong. But what brought this peculiar and terrifying cross to her, that she could not understand. Behind a door in her mind lay the simple fact, quite unexamined, that never in all the years of her childhood had she heard from her mother’s bed any sound other than Monsieur Philippe’s laboring breath. And a sordid suspicion had begun to form behind that same door, form somewhat like a cartwheel spiderweb, that women who felt this debilitating and exquisite pleasure were wretched women, women such as Dolly Rose and the girls who had come to live in Dolly Rose’s house. So abhorrent was this, and yet so obsessive, that in recent weeks it had terrified Marie even to see one of those women walking about, and that Dolly Rose herself was seldom seen in public anymore was quite a relief.

But Marie would begin to cry if she thought of this and as always her tears would be aggravated by a dull rage. And these tears would alleviate nothing, rather, they would produce a new chaos with which she would then have to contend.

She sat back against her pillow, the pleasure having drained away, the air of this narrow and darkly furnished room very still. And the dream in all its simplicity came back to her: she wandering in a strange house, Richard wandering in that same house, the two of them advancing across a vista of empty floors. That was all of it, really. Nothing brutal, nothing raw, and yet all was charged with that vanquishing pleasure that faded slowly afterwards as if of its own accord.

It was unpredictable. It might not visit her for a month and then it might come several nights in a row. She could interrupt the pleasure, however, were she to wake in time and sit up at once, slipping out of bed to stand on the floor. But often she didn’t do this. This morning she didn’t do it, and she felt a dreary anger against herself. No one had to tell her that, no matter whatever else was true of women, decent or indecent, this pleasure for an unmarried girl was a sin. And that it was merely a more brilliant and unhampered expression of the same pleasure she felt whenever she touched Richard, whenever she was near him, well that much was certain, too.

And Richard, had he begun to suspect? She ached for Richard now, positively ached for him, and she knew that had he been present at the moment she awakened, she would not have denied him anything for any reason in the world: not for guile, not for cunning, not for reputation, not for God. And she had the oppressive, near despairing fear that Richard in some wordless way had come to understand that she felt these blinding passions and that because of them, he and she must not be alone. She was not the proper lady protecting her virtue and had not been for some time. Richard was protecting it, meeting her only at the little soirees which her aunts still gave for her, accompanying her without fail to Sunday Mass. He would not risk a
moment of privacy with her, and she, often driven to distraction by the hum and chatter of senseless conversation in a room about them, could think of nothing else. But so be it, it was best.

Because the boy Richard whom she thought she loved a year ago was merely a gentle precursor of the man, Richard, whom she loved now. At one time, she had still been able to count their meetings, the little stolen tête-à-têtes at the soirees, the leisurely walks, Lisette following, from church. She had been able to summon to mind a dozen brilliant and subtle images of him which had marked the stages of her deepening love and savor them as one might Daguerreotypes and engravings memorizing every salient detail. But she had long lost count, for too much had passed between them, too many times together, hushed voices telling of their day-to-day world, hers so neat and lackluster, his own so full of relentless demands. Life and death beyond themselves had brought them together, too, in other parlors where people wept and Richard, never shy or effusive with her, managed the mourning, the burying of the dead with a man’s hand. It was after Zazu’s death at the beginning of summer, however, that he had made his most indelible impression upon her, coming into the death room to take her quite by surprise. She’d been frightened then. She didn’t know how to prepare the body for burial, and was praying that Zurlina would come to help her, that Marcel had not gone wandering away to leave this burden to her alone.

And then Richard had come through the door. “You go out now, Marie,” he had said firmly as she floundered, “You leave this to me.” All that night and the next day he had been there, directing the neighborhood cooks and maids up those steps, bending a patient ear to hear their soft eulogies, gathering the flowers they brought to be placed in water along the walls of that little room. There was no hint of intimacy even when he glanced at her, and yet no boy’s awkwardness prevented him from telling her now and then she must sleep, take a glass of water, get in out of the heat. That wasn’t Richard the boy of those first few dazzling encounters. No, it was the man for whom her admiration was as thorough as her love. She could not live without him.

And she would not live without him.

Be it an hour they might have together this week in her aunts’ parlor, or five minutes snatched from their random errands to meet at the gates of the Place d’Armes. Richard had become her life just as this tormenting passion for him had become her life, and she would suffer it in silence, bury it, as she moved relentlessly toward a future which was Richard in which this pain would be dissolved. It was unthinkable that once they were united this pleasure could be wrong. And now a pure sense of his presence revisited her, nothing dreamlike, but the real Richard who would press her quite suddenly against him in the
shadows near her front gate, his own body echoing that passion, yearning for it even as he stepped back and away. No, if he sensed it, it could not divide them; it was not shame that prompted his care, but rather the goodness that had always been in him, he would wait as she would wait.

She had gotten up from bed. Without even realizing it, she had risen, had taken the washcloth from the stand, submerged it in the tepid water of the basin and brought it up to bathe her face. No refreshment there. August was too damp, too warm. And she had to go out into the street now before the midday heat became too wearying, she had to make her way home.

For a week she had been living in this room. Of course Tante Josette never came down from the country anymore, never needed it, and her aunts were only too glad to have her stay. More and more often her mother suggested it, never in words to Marie, only obliquely to Monsieur Philippe, the cottage is so warm, Monsieur, why, Marie might stay with her aunts. And off she would go for a night there, two days there, now this time a week. And Monsieur Philippe having been at the cottage for over a month showed no signs of going back to
Bontemps
.

Of course she was grateful for the privacy. This narrow shadowy bedroom with only rare shafts of sun piercing the alleyway beside it, its darkly stained furniture, Tante Josette’s desk, Tante Josette’s books. It was remote from the little thoroughfare that was her boudoir at home. Yet there were times when she resented it as if it were exile. Her mother did not want her at home! What obdurate pride, she wondered, kept Cecile from sending her here with her aunts for good? It was not Monsieur Philippe who was forever asking for her, nor Marcel who would sense a rift at once. It was some ironclad, yet elusive
persona
of respectability that hovered at her mother’s shoulder, keeping that dull contempt for her daughter in check.

Again she put the washcloth into the water. Wringing it out tight she pressed it to her eyes. She needed clothes from the cottage, if Monsieur Philippe had been out at all, he would have some little gift for her and be sending for her, and she missed, positively missed Lisette. Since Zazu’s death it seemed Lisette had been the perfect servant, sometimes even a little tender not only with her but with Marcel. And he as always took special pains to keep her content. It was Marcel naturally who had defended her earlier this summer from Monsieur Philippe’s rage. He might have whipped her, he said, for leaving her mother’s deathbed. Marie had been aghast. But Marcel had been as clever with him, it seemed, as ever Cecile had been, calming him with soft words, Lisette was being so good now, why she had a special dinner prepared for him and had worked all day to make
it, would he, Monsieur, I beg you, give her just one more chance? And it was Marcel now that pleaded against Monsieur’s latest and most ambitious domestic plan.

Yes, the household needed another servant, but he could not see bringing a strange slave woman in under this small roof, no, Lisette should train a nice healthy little girl. About twelve would be a good age, he stated one evening at supper, and Cecile could mold her as she chose. It seemed only Marie and Marcel saw the shadow pass over Lisette’s face. “In a few years,” Monsieur Philippe had been saying, “you’d have the finest lady’s maid you could want, with all that Lisette could teach her, and in the meantime, well, Lisette would have another pair of hands. God knows it would be cheaper,” but then he shuddered with distaste at his own word.