Feast of All Saints Read online

  A shadow passed over Marcel’s face.

  “What is it?” asked the old man.

  Marcel shrugged quickly, “But tell me, Monsieur, with writing, how did you learn to write?”

  “You ask the strangest questions,” Jean Jacques said. Marcel was looking at the open diary. He himself had tried a diary and had written such empty foolish things as “Rose, breakfasted at seven, walked to school.”

  “How do you think I learned?” Jean Jacques laughed. “By copying the words I read on pages other people had written and in the pages of books.”

  A silence passed between them as often it did. It seemed Jean Jacques had the tissue of thin gold leaf poised on the tip of his dry brush again. A bit of the leaf clung to his fingertips. He looked at the oval mirror before him.

  “You have heavy thoughts, mon fils.”

  “Will you tell me…explain to me…about the battles in Saint-Domingue?”

  Jean Jacques paused. Then he shook his head. His hand, however, did not move. The gold leaf on the tips of the bristles did not move.

  “Can’t do that anymore, mon fils, maybe I should have never done it before…” His expression was brooding, unpleasant.

  “But why?” Marcel asked.

  “It’s not my decision, mon fils,” he said. “I can’t decide when you’re to learn those things. But remember, when I die, I leave all my books to you.”

  “Don’t talk about death, Monsieur…” Marcel couldn’t contain himself.

  “And why not?” Jean Jacques asked simply. “I’ve lived too long as it is. Seen too much. I guess I remember too much of those old times.” He went on with his work.

  “But it’s better now, isn’t it?” Marcel asked. “I mean those wars, those battles, they’re past. It’s peaceful now, and we can talk about it, can’t we?”

  “Peaceful now? You misunderstand me, mon fils. The memories don’t hurt my soul.” He had carefully replaced the little leaf of gold as though he despaired now with this conversation of getting anything done. And setting down the brush, he took a rag from the bench beside him and carefully wiped his hands. “In some way, those times were better than these. There were battles all right, there was bloodshed, and I don’t want to think of the number of men who died on all sides. But in a way those times were better than these.” He narrowed his eyes as if peering into his history, “because for all the roughness and cruelty of that land, men’s ideas weren’t so fixed. They tortured their slaves, they murdered them on that island in ways no planter would ever try to use here; and when those slaves rose they gave that cruelty back in kind. But men’s ideas were not so fixed. There was hope that the gens de couleur, that the whites…that even a hardworking slave getting his freedom might…” he stopped. He shook his head. “I’ve lived too long,” he said. “Just too damned long.”

  IV

  MARCEL WAS SOBBING on the steps of the garçonnière. Cecile at her wits’ end had sent Marie to the Lermontants.

  “They looked everywhere for you!” She was wringing her hands, “If you’d been in school, they might have found you! What is the matter with you that you carry on like this?” But as she reached for him, he jerked away and smashed his fist against the cistern.

  It was Rudolphe Lermontant himself in his black broadcloth coat who stepped into the courtyard. His face was somewhat hard and fixed until he saw Marcel.

  “But he can’t be dead, not just like that, no one can die just like that! He was there last night, I was talking to him, he was right there, everything was the same last night…”

  “Listen to me, Marcel,” Rudolphe began in a low voice. “Jean Jacques died in his sleep. He was probably dead long before midnight, if I’m any judge of such things, most likely he never even took his supper. And this is midsummer, you know perfectly well that I couldn’t keep him in this heat. But for you, Marcel, for you I would have kept him as long as I could. I sent to school for you, you were not there, I sent to the house for you, you were not there. Now come with me. Pull yourself together and come with me now. I’ll take you to the cemetery and show you the stone and you can pay your respects…”

  Marcel drew back from Rudolphe’s hand. A momentary indignation passed over Rudolphe’s heavy features and then he let out a little explosion of breath between his lips and pressed them tightly together.

  “The shop’s empty, empty,” Marcel gasped. “He can’t just disappear as if he was never there! I don’t want to see his grave, I won’t look at it, he can’t be shut up in it like that.”

  “At three o’clock this afternoon that shop wasn’t empty,” Rudolphe said. “It was jammed with mourners. He was much loved.”

  Marcel struggled to stifle the sob in his throat. “And his books, Monsieur,” he pleaded. “They’re gone, and that old charwoman, she just told me to get out.” He clenched his teeth over a cry.

  He did not see Rudolphe’s sudden inquiring glance to Cecile, or the haughty lift of his mother’s chin and the imperious jerk of her head. Lisette at the kitchen door was looking from one to the other of them.

  Cecile clasped her hands at her waist, her eyebrows raised as she stared at Rudolphe, her hands making a lock.

  “What books?” Rudolphe murmured, his eyes fixed on Cecile.

  “His diaries, Monsieur, he promised them to me, he left them to me, he told me he wanted me to have them. I went to the presbytère, the priest knew nothing about them! They were gone…”

  “Get up, Marcel,” Cecile said quickly.

  Rudolphe’s eyes were still fixed on her. And under his breath he said, “The wishes of the dead are sacred, Madame.”

  “I don’t take orders from shopkeepers!” she said. “Books, what do I know of books!”

  Lisette had turned to the alleyway which led to the yard in back.

  Marcel looked up. He saw them, their eyes holding one another, and then Rudolphen’s face contorted with rage.

  “Shopkeeper or no, it was his will,” Rudolphe whispered.

  “I am not referring to the cabinetmaker, Monsieur, I am referring to you!”

  “Maman, what are you saying?” Marcel’s tone was impatient, desperate as if to say What now?

  Rudolphe was furious. He remained a moment longer, his hands curling at his sides, then forming into fists. He strode toward the alley-way and then turned.

  “What is it?” Marcel rose, his hand on the banister, wiping the tears from his face. “What are you saying?” His mother was angry, he could see it in the tremor of her lip, the narrowing of her eyes. “Maman!”

  “You had best go, Monsieur, and leave me to care for my son,” she said coldly.

  Rudolphe’s voice was equally cold and controlled. “You destroyed those books!” he glared at her.

  “Leave this house,” she answered.

  Late that night, drunk to incoherence, Marcel lay across the bed. All the long evening he had been with his friend, Anna Bella Monroe, in her little parlor behind the boardinghouse at the corner. And it was she who had taken the wine away finally and locked it up. “You haven’t lost him,” she had said, and when he protested through his tears that he did not believe “those things,” she had shaken her head patiently.

  She seemed a lady to him then through the glaze of his pain, not merely his Anna Bella, but then she had always been so, perhaps, deeper and better than childhood allowed, and at fifteen a lovely equanimity shone in her eyes that often drained the tumult out of him. “I mean you’ll always have what passed between you, no one can take that,” she said, “what you remember in here!” Her small curled hand tapped her breast, her face a perfect sweetheart amid the soft fullness of her black hair. It seemed he had kissed her then, just to let her know how much he loved her. She had always understood about Jean Jacques, even when Richard did not understand, when no one could understand, and as he felt the baby roundness of her chin, the plumpness of her cheeks, all the exquisite pain of loss dissolved for him. But a warning hand had pressed him gently away. And from a dim bedro
om beyond, her ancient guardian, Madame Elsie, pounded the floor with her cane. He could not have gotten to his own gate without Anna Bella’s supporting arm.

  Now he was only vaguely aware that she was, in fact, gone from him, not holding him, that he was in his room, and that Lisette had silently opened his door. She had a bundle folded in her soiled apron and approaching him she held it out. He squinted at her, feeling a vague fear of that reverent posture, the way that she held the folded apron as if it had some power. It put him in mind of fetishes, those foul-smelling objects she sewed into his pillows when he was sick, her magic powders.

  “The dead are the dead,” he whispered. “Get me a bottle of whiskey, Lisette, get it. I’ll give you a dollar.”

  “You’ve had enough whiskey, now sit up and look here.”

  And flipping back the apron she showed him the charred remains of a ledger, its corners blacked and burned off, the leather of the cover blistered. “I dug through those ashes with my own hands for this, Michie, I burned my hands for this, sit up.”

  He snatched it from her, cracking it open to see Jean Jacques’ script.

  “Richard Lermontant brought it for you, Michie, never you mind what she says!” she spoke now of his mother. “There was a note on every one of them with your name, I can read that much, Michie. That old man left them for you and I saw her light that fire with her own hands. I got this one for you, Michie, digging in those ashes myself, all the rest is gone.”

  What was there? Fragments.

  All through the hot summer he pored over it, finding not a single sentence complete for all that had been burnt away around it. Observations of the weather, bits of a transaction, some purchases of imported woods further on, the note of a public hanging. And here and there the dates that fixed the year as 1829 with all the rest gone forever.

  This the only document left of a life, this the only relic of fine slanting script replete with curlicues, and some fine relationship between the exquisite purple ink and the cleanliness that had been the page, as though the man who had taught himself all he knew had liked to lift the pen, to form the words as well as he had done everything.

  October came. Marcel was fourteen.

  V

  MARCEL READ night and day, dreamed at school, listened with bright attention to the chatter of fishmongers, and wandering at random found the world alien with wonders.

  Before a clock shop at noon, he strained to see and hear all the clocks strike at once behind the plate glass windows. And reading the newspapers in French and English, ate his breakfast with one hand, speaking to no one. In bitter October rains, he trudged through the high grass in the cemetery and gazed with head turned from the corner of his eye down the aisle at the stone of Jean Jacques’s high crypt, one of a hundred fixed into the crumbling whitewashed walls.

  Only for Marie’s First Communion did he affect a human face and kiss her afterwards on both cheeks, refusing for a moment to let her go, then drinking sherry with the party, sharing cakes, and smiling stiffly at his aunts and their pleasantries, words he instantly and effortlessly forgot.

  Writing his name, Marcel Ste. Marie, in his diary, he found his hand stopped. Where had Cecile got the surname, anyway? From her prayers? Bare feet, dirty face, tangled hair. After supper he watched her at the head of the table as she pinned up her taffeta sleeves. The slaves set a basin of warm water before her as always, and carefully she washed each painted china plate herself, only entrusting them to Marie’s waiting hands. Drying her long fingers afterwards, she fanned them on her palms to inspect the perfect ovals of her nails.

  How many times in the long summer nights of his childhood when the damp heat made his sheets limp and the air close, had he heard her suddenly moan in her sleep, and through the open doorway saw her rise from the pillow like a doll thrown forward, her hands in her hair. She would pad silently across the boards, her chemise luminous in the dim flicker of the night-lamp, and taking the pitcher in both hands drink it down. “And oh, to hear that child scream! It made no difference to that baby that that man was dead, oh, to hear that child scream…” And even setting the pitcher by, seemed still heavy with her dreams, turning, and turning again as if she could not find her bed.

  People still called Marcel an angel, dutiful son, sometimes even yet a perfect child, were they out of their minds? He glared as if they uttered abominations. In this new blaze of clarity that threatened to consume the most mundane objects, he turned his relentless gaze upon himself and realized that he had always known the truth about his world, breathed it like the very air.

  Who had told him a pedigree lay behind the endless washing of hands, suffering of starched collars, the lowering of voices in this tiny parlor, leaving the last of the soup when you are hungry, never daring to tip the edge of the plate? The world was glass like angels on the mantel, bound to shatter at the thrust of a crude word. “Why did you burn those books, how could you burn those books!”

  “Don’t you raise your voice to me, Monsieur! May I remind you that I am your mother!”

  She shivered in his arms. He felt the stays of her corset, the prickling layers of lace. Her hands clung to his thick hair, her lips quivering against his neck. “You did a bad thing, Maman.” She cried bitterly, “I didn’t know, I didn’t know.”

  And I am a part of this, he hissed to himself in the oval of a mirror, affecting the stiffness of an ancestral portrait until the image fired before his eyes with a separate life and turned him away, his fingers digging into the back of his neck, his breath halting.

  But how could he have imbibed this desperate need to build a respectable world as if it were Cecile’s passion for chocolates, her wild aversion to the color red? So he breathed this. It was the very air. But some flaw in him must have made him the all-too-perfect player of parts, what was it? He saw himself poised on that stool in the back of Jean Jacques’ shop, hands immaculate, gloss and gleam like the polished tables, Queen Anne chairs on tiptoe, armoire doors inlaid with mirrors. Some flaw in him, what was it? He dipped his own pen to write, to make his own diary.

  That he had loathed childhood from the beginning? That he had absolutely hated being a “little boy?” And bruised and confounded by those stifling limits, put himself by will upon another path? Games bored him eternally. The dull-witted repetitions of his teacher, Monsieur De Latte, made him grit his teeth. But with a monster’s mind he had perceived the workings, what was wanted, and settled on a subtle subterfuge that had no use for innocence. He would be perfect out of rage, bow of his own accord to kiss the ladies’ hands, scorn chatter in the back pews, and look upon humiliations from aloft, seeking eternally for reason. That’s such a good boy, that is the best boy, why that’s Madame Cecile’s little man, that boy.

  My little man, your little man, her little man.

  He belonged to the adults, he was their darling, with uncanny calm, and a perfect liar.

  But he hadn’t known it then. It had seemed so natural. As natural as it had been to seek those long afternoons with Anna Bella, away with the din of the boys of the street, listening to her read from the English novels, his foot against her coal stove, his eyes on the woven plaster wreaths of her ceiling. She was a woman at twelve. They had played at lady and gentleman, and with a grown woman’s impeccable grace she had understood his new passion for the cabinetmaker and had not begrudged him the new world away from her in the cabinet-maker’s shop. She made him English tea, when he came to call, from a china pot.

  And then there was Richard who was, in fact, the gentleman and had treated Marcel like a man from the moment they met, coming forward out of the cold-eyed pale-skinned gathering in the new classroom at Monsieur De Latte’s to show Marcel to an empty seat, welcome him to the new school, remark that they might walk home afterward the same way. And Marcel, frightened to the marrow of his bones in that new world, would never all his life forget this kindness, the clasp of this hand which said, “We are young men, we are brothers.” Theirs was a bond that would last a
lifetime.

  And so the strife between them was all the more painful now. “Je suis un criminel!” Marcel would stop suddenly with a shudder as they walked in the street, gripping the backs of his arms as though he were cold, and Richard astonished would murmur steadily of the time of day. And with some frantic movement like that of a bird, Marcel might bolt through the crowded streets, crossing the Rue Canal, finding the depot of the Carrollton Railroad and riding for hours up the shell road through a world he had never seen, tall oaks, the white columns of the homes of the Americans. Nothing had been real in childhood. And things were so real now that he could have spoken aloud to the very trees.

  On the street one day, he met Anna Bella in a splendid dress of plum taffeta, hair swept up beneath a lady’s broad brimmed bonnet. She carried a parasol that threw lace shadows on the bricks behind her. And startled to see her the grown woman with her fine small velvet gloves, he was speechless as she reached to take his hand. Madame Elsie, her guardian, always a mean woman, urged her forward.

  “Now wait, please, Madame Elsie,” Anna Bella had said in her soft always slurred American voice, “Marcel, why don’t you walk a ways with us?” But he had seen the look in the old woman’s eyes, her gnarled hand pressing Anna Bella on.

  Had she seen that kiss in the parlor, had she overheard those drunken tears for Jean Jacques? He had stood stock-still among the jostling passersby, to watch that small-waisted figure make its way into a crowded shop.

  And calling for Anna Bella soon for evening church, he was told simply she could no longer go. He stood silent before the old woman as she adjusted the quilt over her lap, until finally, brushing her gray hair back from her temple, she said under her breath with a shrug, “Mais non, you are no longer children, hmmmm?”

  Something was over.

  But why? With some silent, almost obdurate instinct he would not question it, he would not dare to bring it to the surface of his mind, and leaving his gate each day turned sharply not to see the shuttered boarding house, not to risk a glimpse of Anna Bella at her door.