Feast of All Saints (84 page)

“Oh, I know how you feel, Marcel, you’re a European in your heart and mind. That’s what you’ve been all your young life, a European. But you must understand that the only integrity that you can claim for that image of yourself is in the sanctuary of your own mind. I tell you, the worst hatred is racial hatred, the worst wars are racial wars, I see no end to it at hand.”

“I am a man,” Marcel said quietly, his voice thickened, the picture of her at the desk slightly blurred. “A
man!”

It seemed his tone pulled her back. Into some awareness of the room about her. She was looking at him. She was perplexed. “Well,” she said with raised eyebrows. “In all these years, with all my pronouncements I have never made anyone cry.” She laughed dryly. “Perhaps it’s a reason to go on living after all.”

He did not answer.

He was aware that ever since he could remember, one illusion after another had been shattered. The world was never what it seemed. And yet again, here on the Cane River, he had been drawn into another illusion, of peace and solidarity and something inviolate, only to learn from this wise woman that this too was but an illusion sustained day in and day out by a collective act of faith. Perhaps he had gone
about it in the wrong way over and over again. Nothing was anything until someone defined it. Nothing was inevitable. Nothing was inviolate. Everything existed, perhaps, by an act of faith, and we were always in the midst of creating our world, complete with the trappings of tradition that was nothing more than an invention like all the rest.

And for the first time it occurred to him that the world of the white Southerner with all its doors shut in the colored man’s face might also be fragile, also dependent on the same enormous act of collective faith. It didn’t seem so. It seemed the one aspect of this world not subject to change. He smiled.

“I admire your decision,” Tante Josette said, her eyes on the windows beyond him. “I was old when I came here. I found a refuge in this country, a place where I could lay my head down. But you’re too young for that. I admire you that you choose to go home.” She flexed her hands again, slowly, as if the pain in the joints was bad, and then she lifted the letter she had put aside earlier, and opened it.

“But you cannot go now,” she said. “I don’t know how long your mother wishes you to remain here, or why, but she is adamant that you must not come home until she sends for you, though what I am about to tell you will certainly prove a trial.”

He snapped out of his reverie. “What now?”

“Monsieur Philippe died two nights ago in your mother’s house.”

T
HIS HAD TAKEN
A
GLAE
by surprise, this apparent physical inability to set foot into the room. She had short patience for such temperamental nonsense in others and feared some excess of emotion for which she was completely unprepared. But it had happened this way. She had gone down the stairs, and approaching the parlor doors she had been unable to go in. Miss Betsy was crying. She had her arm curled under her face and leaning on a table cried, while her Tante Antoinette stroked her hair. And the room was filled with black-dressed men and women, Philippe’s brothers among them, who had turned to face Aglae at once as she stood there in the main hall. And beyond, along the far wall, stood the coffin with silver handles amid a veritable garden of fragrant flowers. She could see nothing of Philippe’s face.

And then it happened. She could not move. She could not, simply could not, enter the room. And she had turned much like a marionette, she imagined, and made her way up the stairs. People had spoken to her, her sisters, little Rowena from the kitchen who was proving to be such an attentive maid. But she had been unable to answer. Unable, imagine that. She had felt a tension in the muscles of her face. She could not open her mouth. So sitting in her room now, her elbows on her leather-top desk, fingers meshed, she stared straight forward, and was barely conscious that Vincent had come in behind her. It would be a fine thing if Vincent should speak to her and she would not be able to answer. With a gesture of impatience, she emphatically turned her head.

“Aglae,” he said softly. He stood at the back of her chair.

A series of items passed through her mind, items of information to which she returned again and again. And without emotion, without emotion! This physical inability to speak was insane. That he had died
in the bed of his colored mistress. That she had run out screaming into the street. That the body was so malnourished the face had darkened and collapsed. That it was the noteworthy skill of that colored undertaker, Lermontant, who had many rich white clients, which had restored the face so that the coffin might be open after all. That this mistress lived in the Rue St. Anne, and had two quadroon children! That she had been Philippe’s mistress for some eighteen years! That Felix, their coachman had resided there and here with the master for some eighteen years!

She shut her eyes and said quite plainly,

“Philippe Ferronaire! To die like that! Philippe Ferronaire!”

“Aglae, if you are to blame yourself for this I will not allow it,” Vincent said. “If you had not moved to take the reins of this plantation when you did, we might very well have lost it! Do you understand?”

Again she made that characteristic gesture of impatience with a slight scornful sound.

It seemed the motion was eternal. She could hear the clock ticking. And one carriage after another stopping below. Wind tugged at the French windows, and a frost obscured the sky beyond. Aglae had always liked the sound of a clock ticking.

“Did he die in this woman’s arms?”

They had not discussed it, she had not discussed it with any man, it was from women that she got the story, her sister, Agnes Marie, and her maids.

She heard his proper sigh. He didn’t want to speak of it, more properly, he did not want for her to speak of it.

“Did he die in this woman’s arms!”

“In his sleep,” Vincent said.

“And she awoke then to find him?”

“Yes.”

She sat back.

“Did you see her?”

He had gone to get the body. The Lermontants had had the body, surely they didn’t lay him out in that woman’s house!

“Briefly, I saw her.” He sighed. “Aglae, I went to the house so that you might never have to think of the house, so that you might never have to mention it. I went to the house to make certain that everything was as I had heard it. Do you understand? So that none of it would reach your ears? So that there would be no unfinished…”

“I should like to know your impression of her, Vincent, you may leave off the rest.”

“Aglae, don’t…”

“Vincent, when I am in my dotage you may expect my obedience. Until then, you will please answer the questions I put to you…what was your impression of this woman?”

“She was…ill. Philippe had…uncashed bank drafts, some clothes…she gave these to me. There was a sum of money which I told her she must keep. She did not answer me, so I left it there.” Of course he had looked into the matter further, ascertained that she had family to provide for her, she would not be destitute. And he would clear Philippe’s debts.

“The woman, her appearance, her age.”

He drew himself up, emitting a small sigh again more or less without wishing it to be eloquent, and moved across the room. She was an attractive woman, more than likely, how at such a time could he tell? Petite, curvaceous, a marvelously delicate face rendered all the more remarkable by the texture of her very dark skin. A white woman with a black skin. How was he to put this into words, and for what?

“Don’t torment yourself, Aglae, you owe these people nothing, you do not owe them the slightest thought.”

“If you persist in playing the master of this house with me, Vincent, I shall go to the notary in New Orleans and find…”

He shook his head. “A good-looking woman, very well-bred,” he shrugged. How else to put it, that she had been anxious, trembling, like any white lady at such a time in that pristine little parlor among whatnots and petit-point as delicate as herself. She had hardly managed a word. She had wrung her hands, her gold and pearl rings flashing, suffocating in her tight laces, and the daughter, standing there, that beautiful young woman who looked completely white. It was the daughter who had confirmed the story for him, and so properly had she rescued it from the sordid and the ghastly. “Monsieur had gone to bed early, Monsieur did not feel well. When it was time for Monsieur’s breakfast, we went to awaken him, Monsieur would not wake up. Monsieur did not suffer…at all.” The girl had her rosary beads in her hand, and the woman, crying, tore her handkerchief in shreds.

“Aglae, it was not a squalid place. It was
un plaçage
…Aglae, this is not a reflection upon anyone but Philippe himself.”

Again she made that impatient shake of her head. She was staring out the windows at the flutter of a branch against the frost.

“It was I who urged you to get the power of attorney,” he said. “It was I who examined the books. Even then he had every chance…I don’t believe he could have helped himself, even if he had wanted to. Aglae, the bottle had gotten him, all of his weaknesses had gotten him. His behavior was no longer acceptable anywhere else.”

“Aaah,” she said.

He drew close to her and put his hands lightly on her narrow shoulders. “Do you want to come down now?”

“Not just yet, but you must go down,” she said. “You must look out for Henri. And Miss Betsy.”

“They are in good hands,” he said. “It’s you I want to look out for.”

She looked at him as if she did not know him, and then she looked down. She reached for his right hand and removed it from her shoulder so that he removed the hand on the left. “Go down, Vincent,” she said.

He hesitated at the door. “There is something more I want to tell you. If you feel at all to blame for what we did last year, perhaps this will work some alchemy on your thoughts.”

However, she wasn’t listening. She was looking at the window. And murmured, “Last year?” as if she had hardly heard.

“When I visited that house, I saw in it a number of items which belong to you. The candles on the mantel were in the silver holders that were given to Grandmère by the Marquis. There were books which had been the property of our father. And on her neck the woman wore a small jet brooch, quite appropriate for mourning, which has been in the Dazincourt family for two hundred years. You remember that you could not find that brooch when Oncle Alcee died? There were other items, china, painted plates. He stole your treasures, Aglae, small, priceless heirlooms, he was the one all along who was taking those things…the little lap
secrétaire
, the carved wooden rosary, it was on a table beside the woman even as I talked to her, the wooden rosary that had been Grandmère’s, you remember that? Think on that if you are inclined to the slightest self-recrimination, think on the pettiness of it, the deceit…”

“You may go, Vincent!”

He went out closing the door.

She shut her eyes. Blame herself for what happened last year, the thought had never entered her mind. Blame herself for getting the power of attorney, the thought had never entered her mind. She had considered that action from every standpoint before she had taken it, and she was not a person given to regret. But something else loomed on the edges of her bleak considerations, something else hovered very near her that was alien to her and caused her to stare wide-eyed at nothing now as she looked up again, caused the muscles of her face to tense again as if she could not find the proper expression for herself, could not move, could not speak.

It was something immense, and so terrible that it could not, simply could not, be true. And her mind took her mercilessly back, as if she were a child with her heels dug in refusing to be dragged, and yet she was being dragged by some righteous stiff-backed woman who was also herself, back to the time when Philippe had first come into this house, when she had first seen him strolling along the gallery with her father, the figures reappearing in one window after another, those two
men, the silver-haired man so cheered by the company of the younger, the hand on the shoulder, and that handsome blue-eyed smiling face. How the blue eyes had gleamed as Philippe bent to kiss her hand. The eyes said we have some secret you and I, as he called her
“Ma chère.”
But oh, how at the same time those eyes had implored. That was it, they implored, always they implored,
love me, love me
, find me the man of your dreams,
love me
…and behind those quick witticisms and all that passed for charm among the others, there had always been that weakness, that dependence, those eyes saying
love me, love me
, oh, it gave her the wildest shudder of revulsion even now.