“In Congress they are already ranting about ‘the sin of slavery,’” Sylvain continued. “John Slidell—a very good friend of mine—comes back from Washington with warnings of the sentiments in the Senate.”
“Do you not think it’s significant,” asked the elder Labouisse, “that some of our most brilliant defenders in the Senate are not southern born? Slidell is from New York; and, of course, Soulé is from France. Remarkable,” he mused, and the others inclined their heads respectfully as though the old man had himself said something remarkable. “Soulé is coming here tonight, I’ve been told. I’ve not seen him yet. In my opinion this talk of war is exaggerated. Our civilization will not be undermined by a handful of fanatics,” he concluded scornfully.
Startled, Miriam heard a whisper and turned to look into the face of André Perrin.
“Excuse me. Would I be depriving you of this discussion or might you like to dance?”
“I should like to dance,” she said, rising.
Suddenly the talk had become too heavy. It was important talk, but she had had enough of it; guiltily she understood this was because she was too absorbed with herself.
“Such heavy talk on a night like this,” said André Perrin as if she had spoken her thought aloud.
In the courtyard, where dancing couples were moving in concentric circles, he drew her into the outer one. At once they fell into step.
“I have just come back from the war in Mexico,” he told her. “I don’t want to hear any more threats of war. People think it’s all parades and flags. But you enjoyed old Rough-and-Ready’s victory parade, I hope? He was quite a sight, riding Old Whitey.”
“Oh, yes, it was splendid.”
“Your little boy was thrilled with it, anyway. You’re wondering how I knew he was there? I saw you. Your girl was with you, too. They’re twins, aren’t they?”
“Yes, but they say forty thousand people were in the Place d’Armes. How could you have seen me?”
Perrin enjoyed her surprise. “Because when we stood at attention opposite the cathedral, I recognized Pelagie in the front row. You were next to her. You wore a gray velvet bonnet with a white plume. Your boy wanted to pull away from your hand and run with the soldiers. You had to hold him back.”
“Incredible! What a memory you have.”
“As a matter of fact, my memory is not all that good. But I remembered you.”
He was not much taller than she, so that she could look almost directly into his face. His skin was ruddy brown from wind and sun. He was so close that she could see the blond roots of his eyelashes.
“You think I’m too bold, Mrs. Mendes? I don’t mean to be.”
“It’s all right,” she murmured. After a moment of awkward silence she could think of nothing better to add than “It was a stirring parade.”
“It was a stirring war. All the way from Matamoros, where we landed, to Monterrey.”
“But such terrible suffering! The heat and the flies—we kept reading the dispatches in the Picayune. Surely you must want to forget it all.”
“I should like to.” He laughed. “My mother won’t let me, though. She has renamed our plantation ‘Palo Alto,’ after the battle in which I was almost wounded. She wants to think I was a hero, which I wasn’t.”
Miriam liked the way he could laugh at himself, liked the easy grace of the dance, liked the way she was feeling. Swaying and swinging, they drew an arabesque around the courtyard. The light played on his face whenever they passed beneath a lantern. His mouth was beautifully molded, and even when he was not smiling, the curve of the lips gave an effect of good humor. Like sunshine, she thought.
“Shall you be living at Palo Alto?” she asked, and remembered at once what Pelagie had said about going abroad.
“No, we’re going to France for a while. But we’re having a house built here in town for when we come back. It’s in the Garden District with the Americans.”
“So you’re deserting us in the Vieux Carré!”
“Oh, we are all getting mixed up together these days. The old rivalry’s dying, it’s practically dead. Look at us here tonight Everyone of us speaks both languages. The Creoles themselves are moving, spreading all over the city. It’s a wonderful city. I shall love working here.”
“You’re an attorney?”
“A notary. Of course, we’re all mixed up here between the Code Napoléon and the English common law. But you probably know all that already. Or else you aren’t interested and don’t want to know, for which I wouldn’t blame you.”
“But I am very interested,” she said brightly, making her eyes larger and at the same time thinking, This is just common flirting.
The waltz crashed and whirled. Marie Claire flew past in the arms of the French consul.
“How happy she must be!” Miriam cried.
“Who must?”
“Why, your Marie Claire, of course.”
“Dancing with the Frenchman? Oh, she is in love with France, with anything French.”
“So you are to live in France.”
“Only for a year or two. We shall be here first for a while, though, at the St. Charles Hotel.”
The St. Charles Hotel. A suite with a balcony. Cream-colored roses, large as cabbages. A bed. White linens and a blue silk quilt. A bed. With this man.
His right hand lay between her shoulder blades, not pressing, but so firmly placed that its heat, even though the hand was encased in a kid glove, rippled down to the small of her back. She was not used to being touched that way, with such natural familiarity. It came to her mind that she had never been touched with any tenderness at all—not even as a small child. There had been no one to do it.
And now she was only aware of that hand as it moved an inch or two from side to side over her naked back. All the blood in her body seemed to be pouring into the place where that hand rested. She wanted him to move her nearer to himself, to obliterate the empty air between them. At the same time she was horrified by her desire. This total stranger! It was absolutely mad!
How queer it would be if a person were ever able to look through the flesh and the forehead’s white bone to know what another was thinking! It would be like walking naked down the street, as sometimes one does in those frantic dreams where one seeks a place to hide and something with which to cover oneself.
All this time her feet were moving to the music.
He was saying something to her. He had pulled a little away, to see her more clearly. She thought she had heard his question, but was not sure, and he had to repeat it.
“Why are you so unhappy?”
The most burning tears came at once. Her lips quivered. He had seen through her skull.
“Don’t look at me,” she said. “Please don’t, or I shall cry here in front of everyone. Please.”
He was shocked. “Forgive me. Oh, my God, I don’t know why I said that! Forgive me.”
Like wheels revolving to a stop, the music slowed and Perrin danced them into the house. In a tall mirror she saw that he had indeed turned his head away. He understood, then, that when you stare at a woman’s tears, you make them flow harder. He brought her to where Eugene was standing, thanked her, and moved quickly away.
I have made a fool of myself, she thought.
“So you were dancing with Perrin. Good. I want you to cultivate them,” Eugene said. “Invite them often; they’ll be living at a hotel for the next few months and they’ll be glad to come. Marie Claire’s a friend of yours anyway.”
She said faintly, “We’ve never been close, I hardly know her.”
“What difference does that make? It’s a contact that I want to encourage. He has connections all over the country and in Europe. Everywhere.”
Without knowing why, she was terribly afraid. Her control was ebbing. She had no hold on things, and she did not want to see André Perrin again.
By midnight the party was ending. Coachmen and footmen who had been playing marbles under the streetlamps now mounted the b
oxes and the carriages departed, leaving the quiet street under a murky sky.
“Let’s walk,” David said.
Gabriel fell in beside him. Sycamore leaves crackled dryly under their feet. There was a silence between them, carried over from the bickering of the early evening. When they passed the cathedral, soon to be rebuilt, Gabriel broke the silence.
“These distinctions between us mean very little in the end, David. It’s the principles of the faith that matter.” Saying so, Gabriel remembered that Miriam had used those very words only a few hours before.
“Principles! You talk of making changes in our form of worship, but you don’t change the very society in which we live. All this piety, and still the leaders of our Jewish community, the honored and respected, own slaves!”
“I do not own slaves,” Gabriel retorted.
“You live with your sister who does. And you are silent about it.”
Gabriel said coldly, “I would advise more silence on your part. Right now, in fact.”
As if to emphasize his meaning, a cat’s poignant cry startled the midnight stillness.
“Excuse me. You’re right,” David said suddenly. “I don’t know why it is, but I always manage to turn the conversation around to the one thing that stands between us.” He glanced at his friend, whose profile under the streetlamps stood out with the aquiline gravity of a face on an ancient coin. “The truth is, Gabriel, I’m irritable, I’m worried, I’m not feeling good about anything. My sister worries me terribly. She’s miserable. You saw that tonight.”
“I know.”
David sighed. “A child, married off before she knows what living is all about, if one ever does know. Listen,” he said, grasping Gabriel’s elbow. “I shouldn’t ask and I’m not asking for anything about your client that I’ve no right to know. But is there anything you can tell me about my brother-in-law that I should know?”
Gabriel considered. All he could say about Eugene Mendes was that he was hardworking and shrewd in business, that he paid his bills and was truthful in his dealings.
He said only, “Mendes will never do anything that doesn’t befit his position in the community. He will follow the rules. He will maintain his house and family. He will be generous, but never extravagant.” Gabriel gave up. “The truth is, I don’t know anything more than you do.”
And again he saw Miriam’s Mideastern eyes, so passionate and mournful, eyes of Rebecca and Rachel, out of the biblical age.
“Have you ever thought,” David asked suddenly, “that there is a kind of slavery for women, too? It seems to me it must be very hard to be a woman.”
“Yes, I’ve thought so,” Gabriel said.
They walked together as far as David’s house, where they parted and Gabriel went on alone.
The fog, lifting, revealed a vast, mysterious oyster-colored sky. Over the flat, silent city loomed the dark cupola of Charity Hospital. He walked slowly, in no hurry to reach home. When he put the key in the front door, he sensed that his sister was not yet home. Always the last to leave, she would have lingered at the party. She had a need for close companionship, a need which was lacking in himself. He wondered whether among her intimacies she had learned very much about Miriam Mendes. Probably not. And again he saw before him those passionate, suffering, lambent eyes.
Enough of this, he said sternly to himself. For a moment he stood in the hall, staring at nothing, then shook himself as if he were trying to shake off a burden, and climbed the stairs.
10
She lies awake in the sultry night. She lies, as she always does, at the very edge of the huge bed. The vacant hollow between her husband and herself is symbolic, she thinks; they are now totally apart. Thus it is that he has not noticed what has been happening to her during these many months and, satisfied that her appearance and behavior are “correct,” has looked no deeper. It comes to her mind that possibly something is really wrong with her, some poisoning of spirit, some seeping disease.
She is obsessed by André Perrin. He inhabits a permanent corner of her memory. His voice with its peculiar, slightly nasal timbre, repeats in her ear his most trivial phrases. Her eye recalls the blond hairs on his wrists, revealed by a too loose cuff. She remembers the kid-gloved hand on her back.
She reads a story to Angelique. Two plump, sleek curls dangle on either side of the child’s face; the mother twists the curls, drawing the child closer to her side, thinking How sweet she is. In the same moment she is thinking of André Perrin. In the marketplace she feels the melons, gray cantaloupes, netted and veined in darker green; when the ends give under the fingers, the flesh will be juicy and rosy. In the same moment she is thinking of André Perrin.
She counts the times she has seen him since their first meeting: Five times he has come home with Eugene for two o’clock dinner; there have been eighteen parties here and at other people’s houses; eight times they have met at the theater. Four times they have met on the street when he was walking with Marie Claire.
Isn’t it disgraceful that he should fill her mind? She has no right to these thoughts! He belongs to Marie Claire! They lie together at night, he with the remote and dreary Marie Claire. They lie together; his hands move wherever they want to move upon her body. Their arms and their mouths move wherever they want to move.
In the same way Eugene must lie with his woman. He lies now breathing heavily into the darkness; his heavy shoulders twitch in a dream.
What if Eugene were dead? What if Marie Claire were dead? What might happen then? Miriam throws the sheet back; she is suffocating with the heat and with these terrible guilty thoughts.
Why are you so unhappy? he asked me. I might have answered: Because my husband is not like you.
What can you know of me? he might have asked me then.
And I should have answered: How can three bars of music tear the heart with sorrow? How can a slow gray rain infuse the heart with delight? You see, there is no reason for any of these things.
She does not want to be alone with him ever again. Suppose some thought forms on her lips and sounds itself against her will? And now a horror seizes her. Someday, surely, that will happen. She will put out her hand and touch his arm in a way that will tell everything, or else her voice in making some ordinary remark will betray her.
In her dining room she places him far from herself at the end of the table. Yet perversely, whenever she knows they are to meet, she takes particular pains with her dress. For years she has forgotten to be vain; probably the last time she had delighted in herself was at her first appearance at the opera, when Emma had taught her how to flutter a fan. Yet last week, buying a white straw bonnet heavy with lilacs, she wished that he might see her wearing it.
Occasionally she has met his glance. She knows he must remember her tears. Perhaps he wonders why she cried, or perhaps he thinks only that she is a weak and foolish woman, a spoiled and silly woman who ought to know better.
After all, your husband does not beat you, he—or anyone—might say.
Your children sleep safely under the solid roof.
How many women would not gladly change places with you?
First light breaks through the blinds and lies in stripes across the floor, striking the basket in the corner where Gabriel Carvalho’s dog lies still asleep, creeping across the marble tabletop where last night’s pearls lie coiled, to strike her at last full in the face, with the glare of another day.
11
On the riverboat going upstream, David stood at the rail, sorting out his thoughts. More than ever it was his sister who troubled those thoughts.
The perversity of human affairs! That after all this time he had come back to the South, and now it was she who wanted to go north!
Only a few months before, she had told him about her fantasy—and fantasy it was—he thought now, ruefully. She had told him, on that mild winter night, so much that he had felt the burden of it ever since.
On the way home from a late call, he had passed the Mendes’s
darkened house and seen her sitting at a single light by the library window. He had stopped and mounted the steps.
“What are you doing up so late? And alone?” he’d asked.
“I couldn’t sleep. So I came downstairs again, that’s all.”
Her face was turned away, deliberately; not wanting him to see it, she allowed her hair to swing across her cheek. But her hands were clenched in her lap.
“What is it? What’s troubling you so that you can’t sleep?” he asked.
“Nothing. Nothing. I’m all right.”
“There’s always a reason why a person can’t sleep, you know.”
“You’re being a doctor,” she murmured, still turned away.
“Yes, but also your brother.” Her shoulders shook; she was making an effort not to weep.
He hesitated. They might have had a simple quarrel, just a bad day; women were often oversensitive; what was a tragedy tonight could easily be forgotten in morning light and morning smiles; he might do better minding his own business.
Yet something made him persist.
“I wish you’d tell me, Miriam. How will I be able to go home and sleep while all sorts of thoughts about you go pounding in my head?”
For a minute or two she did not answer. A shutter swung and creaked in the night wind. Gretel, asleep on the carpet, whimpered in her dream, and was still. The silence was stifling. And suddenly Miriam broke it. She whirled up from the chair and flung out her arms.
“I want … I want …” She gasped. “I want to get out of here! I despise it! There is no freedom, not only for the Negroes, but for anyone! There is a line, drawn so”—she drew a line with her foot—“and so, and over it one dares not walk. You have a position, you are Mrs. Whoever-it-may-be, and there are rules. Rule number one: Put on a good face, never let anybody know the truth about the way you live .…” Miriam’s lips trembled.
She frightened David. He stood up and grasped her hands.
“What are you saying? Is it as bad as that?”