Feast of All Saints Read online

  Marcel let out his breath slowly, resting at last against the back of the chair. Across the gulf he caught the animated face of Tante Colette and the subtle persistent wave of her gloved hand. He smiled. It had been months since he had seen her, though she had asked for him again and again. He had not seen her since that day he’d spoken to her at the door of the shop. But some sweet exhilaration warmed her distant features. She was happy to see him here. All but imperceptibly he gestured with the fingers that clung to the rail.

  But at that vibrant moment when the lights went slowly dim, he found himself passing the inevitable glance across the parquet, and the white tier below, and realized with a start that he was staring down into his father’s upturned gaze.

  His heart stopped. All around Philippe were his white family, women with petal cheeks, young men with Philippe’s long French nose and the same golden thatch of hair. Marcel could remember nothing of them afterward, only his father’s eyes. He felt himself a yellow flame against the mellow backdrop of the Lermontants. And shut his eyes as the lights at last went out. Only the sudden glow of the distant tiny stage soothed the pounding of his heart.

  There was a world come alive above the footlamps, of painted windows, doors, bright candles, a brilliant and ornate room. A woman with outstretched arms unwound a plaintive lilting song that caught him at once with its power. He felt the chills rise. But it was when the orchestra swelled beneath her bright soprano that the tears suddenly blurred Marcel’s vision. Music rose violently and beautifully in the dreamy gloom. Diamonds winked like stars. It was too solid, too perfect ever to have been, this music. Its rich and startling rhythms were like pure gold, something mined from the earth, and burnt to send its vapor heavenward. He had only known it in flashes in the past, like glints of sun in winter windows, felt the mere promise of its spell at High Mass, or in those thin and distant ballroom violins. It was a discovery, this music, something inevitable, that might in fact devour him; he must know it forever, breathe it always, never let it get away.

  Dragging his feet on the way home, he sang softly all the melodies he could remember, dreaming of Paris when he would stand with other gentlemen, on the parquet, so near to those magnificent instruments he could feel their vibrant music like the beating of a heart. He would stroll the boulevards afterward, or chat amiably of this or that brilliant new talent in glittering crowded cafés.

  For days this music stayed with him, he sang it, whistled it, hummed it, until gradually one by one the phrases had slipped away.

  He remembered now with a bitter bite of his lip how little he had paid attention the evening that Philippe had offered to buy Marie a small spinet, she was studying music with the Carmelites, he might enjoy a little music himself. “Monsieur, you are too generous, no, indeed, you go too far,” Cecile had said so quickly, “These children, sometimes I think they have only to close their eyes and wish for things, not even to speak.” The sisters had said that at school Marie showed promise, played well.

  But one afternoon finding the parlor empty at the Lermontants, he approached the piano stealthily, and tried the keys. Dissonance echoed through the room, and strain as he might he could make nothing of melody, only discovering, after long effort, a few simple but priceless chords.

  It was almost summer when Philippe came again, and taking Marcel aside with a gravity that frightened him, told him only he should go to a notary in the Rue Royale every month from now on to get the money for the bills. It was foolish for Cecile to have such sums in the cottage, and Marcel was old enough to take this worry from her shoulders.

  They never gave him anything to sign.

  And there was something all but felonious about the envelope of cash that he slipped into his breast pocket, coming as it did from strangers. Stepping back out into the sun, Marcel was pricked again by a revelation of what he felt he had always known: not a scrap of paper kept the golden barge of day-to-day life afloat. He walked on water.

  V

  SO IT WAS this frame of mind that brought Marcel to misery in Monsieur De Latte’s class where the four walls of the classroom suffocated and the constant recitation of the younger boys scratched at him like insects on the blinds. With the crack of a ruler the old white man taught by rote, gave back without a spark of comprehension those basics dealt out to him some half century before, and disliking extremes, resenting questions, assigned again and again to his older pupils the same verses, theorems, platitudes and lies.

  Marcel saved his money from week to week for the secondhand booksellers, and finding old texts of Latin, philosophy, metaphysics, brought these home and set to serious work on his own.

  Trimming his lamp, and cutting himself a set of new pens, he turned to his Greek early on these warmer evenings, only to realize when the clock chimed ten that he had daydreamed for an hour after struggling with a few thick meaningless words, or had even drifted into sleep, obsessed in thin dreams with some simple phrase that Jean Jacques had spoken or that disturbing image of the African head, its slits for eyes, gleaming by the firelight in some slave cabin in the land that was drenched with blood.

  And turning to Thomas Aquinas, he would soon nod over the pages. The Divine Comedy confused him, the jests of Shakespeare’s clowns were unfathomable, and the couplets of Longinus stiff and without life.

  But day after day he struggled in this manner. And week after week. While the afternoons found him drawing pictures idly in the Place d’Armes, the quick scratching of his charcoal pencil somehow soothing to the driving misery inside of him, or wandering along the levee bewitched as it were by the vision of black children and white children in the lapping brown water, dancing with thin legs atop a dipping, turning log.

  But at last he came upon an inescapable truth about the shape and limits of his own mind, and he was seized with an awful despair. He could learn the rudiments of anything if he chose, but he could not progress. He needed teaching, guidance, the blazing flash of another intellect to stir the chilled waters of his own thoughts. He was incapable of learning on his own.

  And if ever there was a time when he longed for Anna Bella, when he needed her, it was now. But this, in his private cataclysmic world was fast becoming an old pain. He was burying it deep within the recesses of his soul. While she, with her head bowed and a cautious hand on her lovely summer bonnet, never passed his gate without the old woman, Madame Elsie, clinging to her arm. He pretended he had not seen, and pretending, soon did not see her at all.

  Late on still nights, when the cottages of the Rue Ste. Anne lay dark under the cloudy sky, he would emerge on the gallery outside his room and gaze beyond the rooftops at the distant rosy glow that hovered over the gaslit streets, listening for the subtle faraway sounds so often lost at midevening, the rumble of carriages, the fleeting melody of violins. It was Paris that he saw beyond the dark whispering trees, Paris of the Quartier Latin, the Sorbonne, the endless corridors of the Louvre. It was the Paris of Christophe Mercier. The years that lay between him and his dreams seemed endless and dreary, and his heart ached as he clung to the wooden railings feeling the comfortless river breeze. Oh, the wasted hours, the wasted days. He did not know what his life was supposed to be! And thinking of the white planters’ sons who at this moment sent the billiard balls rolling in the casinos of the Rue Bourbon or rushed up the stairs of the ballroom in the Rue Orleans, he wondered what vast stores of knowledge lined the walls of their palatial homes from which their tutors must have plucked books like flowers, rolling the Latin phrases on their tongues, explaining at breakfast this marvelous philosophical point, that stunning historical conclusion.

  Oh, if he had only known the truth! Of all Philippe’s children he was the only one who had even the pretense of an education, but comparisons were not the point.

  He burned to be a part of the Great World, where empires fell, and poetry rang from the great stages; to argue in cafés the way to paint the human form, and stand breathless in the presence of the monuments of the masters. But it was n
ot the surface that fascinated him. He had seen to the heart of things; a door had cracked on an endless vista, a door that now threatened to swing shut on him forever.

  He could not, would not presume, to ask Philippe if he might make the voyage early. These things had been agreed to the year before he was born. A gentleman’s tour when he was eighteen, the Sorbonne if he should so desire, an income naturally, letters of introduction might even be arranged…Tante Colette had seen to that, she would say with Cecile’s approving nod. But God, if it could only be now!

  VI

  SO A YEAR had passed since Jean Jacques’ death, a year since life had been unalterably changed for Marcel.

  And now in one day, all the bleak and terrifying confusion of that year had come to its mystifying climax. Marcel had been expelled once and for all from Monsieur De Latte’s class, he had ravaged the exquisite and helpless Juliet Mercier, and he had lost her famous son, Christophe, forever. He had lost Christophe just as he had lost Jean Jacques. And as he stood in the shadowy bedroom of the garçonnière, peering down through the blinds at the courtyard below, it was grief that Marcel felt, and it was harrowing.

  The clock in the cottage chimed eleven times, and the lamps went out. A small hand pushed the shutters back from Cecile’s window and the breeze stirred the lace curtains of her darkened room.

  Marcel waited for the faint flicker of her night lamp, and then silently he opened his door.

  A splendid and terrible vision was taking hold of him, and for the moment his agony was finding a direction in a perverse and beautiful plan. In all this time, he had never approached Jean Jacques’ narrow raised crypt in the St. Louis, never ventured down that weed-choked walkway to actually touch the engraved letters he knew to be there.

  And in all this time he had never crept out at night from this room. Well, he was to do both now. He would slip out down the steps through the alleyway and along the deserted Rue Ste. Anne across the Rue Rampart all the way to the St. Louis Cemetery, and there scale the short thick wall, find Jean Jacques’ tomb and pour out his soul. Alone in the dark he would tell Jean Jacques what had happened to him today, how he had lost Christophe, and how he had loved Christophe as he had loved Jean Jacques, and that he had lost them both. His pain was already soothed by the boldness of this vision, the obvious tortures ahead of him, the dark near-moonless night, and his own natural fears.

  And who knows what he would do afterwards, ruined as he was with his mother and his friends, and slated for an hour of reckoning with the famous man? Perhaps he would find one of his favorite filthy little cabarets. So delicious on his truant afternoons, what would they be at night, those haunts full of Irish cutthroats and runaway slaves? He had two dollars in his pocket. He would get drunk. He would smoke cigars.

  Quickly, he padded down the wooden steps, bracing himself for the inevitable creaking, and moved gracefully, his shoulders bent forward, into the courtyard. A twig crackled beneath his boot and he froze, eyes fixed on his mother’s windows. But all was still. However, just as he darted toward the mouth of the alley, the great ancient fig that hung above the side fence stirred, its leaves rustling all at once so that he spun round.

  For an instant it seemed a shape loomed from the dark, some concealed figure that moved among the immense limbs only a pace from where he stood. But by the dim quarter moon, Marcel could see merely a thousand menacing configurations, and drawing up, he clenched his teeth. If you are so damned frightened in your own backyard, how in the name of God will you ever scale that cemetery wall! And turning, he ran.

  He was sprinting when he hit the street and seeing ahead a broken and broadly spaced path of dimly lit windows, followed the old brick banquette that he knew so well by day that it would not fail him now in the dark.

  Only when he had crossed the Rue Rampart, did he slow his pace. His throat was burning, but for the first time since he had left Juliet, he was not utterly miserable. And the fear subsided. Then he saw ahead the faint chalk white of the cemetery walls.

  He stopped. A score of subtle sounds replaced the dull tromping of his own feet. The sidewalks were gunwales now, rotting here and there from the constant rain, and creaked even as he stood still, but he heard steps somewhere, and beyond, far off, the clanking of a bell. He turned around. But there was nothing in the dark behind him except the faintest gleam of the slanting roofs, the dim outline of a massive oak. All right, coward! He spun round again and ran full speed, feet splashing through the open gutter until he could lay his hands right on the rough whitewashed wall.

  He was panting and for the moment could only rest there. A cloud was over the moon and must surely move as all clouds do on the wind from the river, but he couldn’t wait for this, he had to go on, to remember how he had done such things as this when he was ten years old, or better yet, forget. Just do it, don’t try to think how. He backed up, utterly terrified suddenly of the dark and the graves and the night and the dead and of everything that had ever terrified him, and running at the wall, leapt up to catch an inside edge, his arms across the top of the soft moidering bricks. He shut his eyes, breathed heavily, and hung tight. Then with all his strength he brought himself up on his arms, swinging his legs up behind him so that he was lying out straight. And letting out an awful moan for what he was about to do, he crawled over the broad width of the vaults lining the wall and let himself drop into the cemetery below.

  “Mon Dieu, Mon Dieu!” he shivered, his hands trembling over his eyes, the sweat pouring down the sides of his face. His chest heaved, and his legs felt weak and light as if they might give way. But then a splendid exhilaration came over him. He was inside, he had done it, he was alone in this place, alone with Jean Jacques, and with himself. And turning slowly he opened his eyes. The shapes around him appeared gradually. But all of a sudden he heard sounds in the dark, a chorus of rustling, scuffling noises at once above him and beside him that caused his heart to rise in his throat. The dim white crypts gleamed dully before his eyes, and then he drew back, his breath a gasp. Some amorphous shape loomed above him, something rose and moved against the distant sky.

  No conscious will need tell him to turn, no intelligence that he must escape. He pivoted, his boots sinking into the marsh of high weeds, and he ran. But with a thick crashing, the thing behind him hit the sloshing path; and with a cry, Marcel felt hands clutch his arm. “O God!” he whispered, his teeth biting down into his lower lip to draw blood.

  “What in hell,” said the voice low behind him, all but a whisper, “what in hell are you doing?”

  Marcel went weak, his breath a series of gasps. It was a wonderful sound, that sound, of some human adult voice at wits’ ends with him as usual, nothing else! And the voice, didn’t he know the voice? “Oooo God!” he whispered again as the tremor passed through his arms and his legs. His arms ached under the tight hands that held him, and slowly, lifting his boot out of the mire he turned round.

  “Why did you run from me? And why in hell did you jump over this wall?” It was Christophe, of course.

  “Run from you??” Marcel’s voice was a pant, a whisper. “Run?”

  “You saw me in the tree!” The voice was exasperated. Marcel could see nothing of the face, except a tiny spark of light in the eyes.

  “O Mon Dieu…” Marcel sighed. The pain in his chest was excruciating and every breath seemed to aggravate it, not alleviate it. “But you were in the tree?”

  “I was waiting for your mother to retire. I wanted to talk to you! There was a light in your room,” he said.

  “In the tree?” Marcel repeated weakly.

  “Well, where else? Did you expect me to sit on the wet ground? I was sitting in the tree. You mean you didn’t see me? You looked right at me!”

  “No,” Marcel shook his head. “Then why the hell did you run?”

  Marcel put his hand up as if to ask for mercy. He groped in his pocket for his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his face.

  “My mother told me you were quite the bu
rning cauldron of youthful passion but this is beyond belief. What are you planning to do here, for God sakes?” Christophe had let go of him, and was looking about. He looked up at the wall of crypts, and then around at the faint whiteness of the high peristyled tombs clustered about them like so many small houses. He reached out suddenly to the dull gleam of a stone door. Marcel, breathing heavily, watched the hand moving down the stone, touching the shadowy indentations of the carved script. He looked into Christophe’s eyes, but he could see nothing there, he could see only the outlines of the partially turned face, and oddly enough the sparkle of his eyelashes against the remote backdrop of gray clouds.

  “Ah, Monsieur,” he sighed, his voice weakened still and very low, “I have nothing but the utmost respect for your mother, she is a great lady, I have only profound respect for her, for your house, this is the bitterest of misunderstandings, you mustn’t consider me a base intruder in your house, I swear on my honor, I have known your mother all of my life, grown up in her shadow and have always considered her a great lady, I would throw myself at your feet if that would cause you to believe me…”

  “Oh, do!” Christophe said flatly. “Throw yourself at my feet.” He laughed shortly. And lifting his boot he brought it down with an ugly splash.

  Marcel said quickly, “You have no compassion, Monsieur,” before he could stop himself. It was precisely the sort of thing he would have said to Richard if Richard had been making fun of him. “I am at your mercy, but I am not a buffoon.”

  Christophe dissolved into soft laughter, but then he said in a cold inflectionless voice, “Don’t be so damned quick to come to the point. Now, is there an easier way of getting out of this city of the dead? A gate somewhere without a guard at it? I’ve ripped my pants as it is.”

  “There’s a guard, to be sure, and he might summon the police,” Marcel said.