Crescent City

  “I’ve something to say. It is very disagreeable to me. Your husband left it to me to tell you, and I have been putting it off too long.”

  In sudden weakness she sat down again. Surely it was something about André. He had gone back to Europe. He was dead. Yes, she thought, I have lost all. David. André. All.

  “He has doubts about the affairs he has entrusted to you.”

  “Doubts?” she cried. “Why? Have we not prospered, pulled the loose ends together? You said yourself over and over that I—” She stopped. It was surely because of André. It had to be.

  “Why?” Gabriel repeated. He spoke almost listlessly, as if the subject were one that did not concern him. “You must have some idea why, I should think.” And he looked at a spot on the wall behind Miriam’s head.

  The high, thin hum of silence rang in her ears. He was not going to make it easy for her. Always he had that habit of making a person pull words out of him, or else submit to waiting in that maddening silence until he was ready to speak.

  “Oh,” she said, “I really think that since you were given this commission, you are obliged to tell me all of it.”

  Now he met her eyes directly, fastening on them with his strange, severe, sad gaze. “Very well. It is because, he says, he is no longer sure he can trust your judgment. He is afraid that you might, quite unintentionally, sign papers or do some other foolish thing that might in some way involve the family.” Gabriel hesitated. “Because of various influences …”

  It was like being found out in a theft. She was shaking. “Is that all he told you? Nothing more?” And she forced herself to ask, “Did he name this—this influence?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  How could Eugene have done such a filthy thing? Still, it was his right to protect his property, their children’s property. At whatever cost she must not flinch under this man’s gaze.

  “And do you believe that?”

  “Believe that you would allow your family to be harmed? No. I assured him that you were a very capable woman and that you could be trusted completely.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “There’s no need to thank me. It is only the truth.”

  She could not bear the shame in the room, the humiliation. All Rosa’s marble statuettes threatened to spring from their pedestals with outspread wings and clutching arms. The swollen furniture threatened to line itself in battle array and barricade the door. She had to get out.

  “I’m sorry,” Gabriel said. “There was really no need to tell you all this, except that he wanted it. I’m his lawyer. I have to do what he wants.”

  “It’s all right. Forget it. I understand.” She tried to push past him, but he prevented her.

  “Wait! Wait, Miriam. Don’t leave without hearing me.”

  “I don’t feel well. Please. I have to go.”

  “Only a moment. I shouldn’t say what I’m going to say, but I’ve held it in so long, and now this—all this business—it’s too much to hold in anymore. Listen to me,” he said, putting his hand on her arm.

  He never touched me before, she thought, arid was afraid, although she could have given no reason for her fear.

  “You must know I love you. You must know. A woman as sensitive as you. How could you have sat in this room with me these many hours, not knowing what was in the room with us?”

  “I didn’t … you never said,” she whispered awkwardly.

  “No, I never did. And why? Because one is civilized and I had no right. Even now I would never have spoken … what I feel for you … can’t help feeling .… In all decency I had to keep still. While he, this man, this man who already has a wife, he dares to expose you a woman like you … to the scorn of the city. He risks your ruin and your children’s ruin! Oh, I would never—”

  Miriam was stripped bare. It was as if someone had entered that cool, quiet room above the river and the square, where she had been with André through long afternoons, had flung open the door and come upon the bed where they lay.

  “As intelligent as you are … but knowing nothing of the world …” Gabriel spoke in broken sentences, with fury, with passion, such as she had not dreamed he possessed. “Nothing of the world … It is like robbery, a desecration .… If I were eighteen, a hothead of eighteen … and if he were to walk into this room, I would be able to kill him. Yes, even now … perhaps I would be unable to stop myself from killing him. My God, how could he have done this thing to you?”

  And suddenly this purity of emotion obliterated Miriam’s shame. It made the fact of her shame a degrading thing in itself. He was not thinking of himself, but only of her! And without one single word of blame for her, only with a protective rage on her behalf, as though it had been André alone who had done what Gabriel called “this thing,” only André, and not Miriam, too! She was intensely moved.

  “Is it only his fault?” she asked softly. “It is just as much mine if one can talk of fault at all. Why, is it a fault to love? Can anyone help it? You said yourself that you—”

  “I said I loved you, but I spoke also of risk and humiliation.”

  “Does loving count risk or humiliation?” she countered.

  “If it is really love, then yes, I think it must.”

  “Perhaps it ought, but we don’t always do what we ought.” She bowed her head, which felt hot and dizzy. There would be red blotches on her forehead and cheeks, they came always when she was anxious, making her ugly; she did not know why at this moment she should care about looking ugly before Gabriel. Then she thought of something else.

  “You speak of risks. Have you forgotten the risk you took for my brother?”

  He bowed. “You are right and I stand corrected. I risked my sister and her family. I had forgotten.”

  The little bow, the formal words, put a wall between them. She did not let it stand.

  “What I meant was, you did what you did for David because you loved him, you didn’t think of yourself.” And she added, “I’ll be in your debt forever, Gabriel.”

  “I don’t want that. I don’t want thanks. I didn’t then and I don’t now.”

  She was dismayed at having hurt him by her choice of words, speaking of debt, when what she meant was something so different.

  “Gabriel,” she began again, “we go back so far … I was a child, you and David weren’t long past childhood either, and love came to the three of us even then. David and I … we would do anything for you, you must know that. We were talking about risks just now. Love knows none; that’s all I meant to say. That’s all I hoped you would understand.”

  “All right. I understand.”

  She saw that he was very tired and that he had already begun to regret what he had said, because it would come to nothing. He would lie awake tonight, as one does after pouring one’s heart out to no avail. She wanted to say that everything was senseless and cruel: the way Eugene and she had come together, the way André and Marie Claire had come together, even the way that beautiful dark woman loved Eugene—how queer and strange to love Eugene!

  But she said only, “I’m sorry, Gabriel. I truly am.” And if it had been permissible, would have added, “my dear.”

  Except for that hand, trembling on her arm, he had not touched her. Raising the hand now, as if to curve it somewhere, to caress her cheek or her hair, perhaps to take her face between both hands and kiss her lips, he let it fall back, turning the motion into a gesture of despair. Then, standing aside, he allowed her to pass through the door.

  A breeze had come up over the river, blowing the flimsy, summer skirt about her ankles. Under the thin cotton cloth her body burned.

  20

  “Let us wait at least until after the Inauguration to see what Lincoln will do,” Ferdinand ventured timidly, in response to Eugene’s positive indignation. “Give him a chance. Jefferson Davis wants to. Sam Houston wants to.”

  “Nonsense!” Eugene said. “The Union is a compact between sovereign states, and it can be broken as easily as it w
as put together. Governor Moore said exactly that only last week. Do you really expect Louisiana to live under a Black Republican government? Do you?”

  Whether Ferdinand did so or not, Miriam did not discover. She suspected that what Ferdinand feared most was war. His memories of violence were too sharp to have been forgotten. Anyway, there was no arguing with Eugene. Flaunting the blue cockade in his lapel, he liked to tell them—had told them a dozen times already—that both the words and the music to “Cockades of Blue” had been written by none other than Penina Moise of Charleston, the same Penina Moise who wrote hymns for Temple Beth Elohim in that city.

  After dinner Eugene liked to call for a whiskey punch and make a toast.

  “With Stephen Decatur we repeat, ‘My country, may she be right, but my country, right or wrong.’ This,” he proclaimed, “is the same as the struggle against England in seventy-six. It is a fight for freedom.”

  In the face of such sentiments Miriam, too, kept silent. She was living on sufferance and was quite aware of it. Of course Eugene knew where her secret sympathies lay; he had simply decided that this was one more subject better left unmentioned between them. It was just as well. She could not have borne his touch upon her wounds.

  Every so often the dull ache of André’s absence was pierced by a pain so swift, so shocking, that it bent her over in the middle as if she had been stabbed. He had vanished. The earth, or perhaps the ocean, had swallowed him.

  And yet it was unthinkable that he should not return.

  In this terrible time there was no one to talk to, not even about the war. Her children were still too young, and besides, they were southerners, like everyone they knew. It would be wrong—cruel and dangerous—to confuse them with their mother’s doubts.

  Young Eugene came home from school in a mood halfway between anger and tears. He flung his books on the parlor floor between his parents’ feet.

  “The boys were talking about Uncle David in school!” he blurted. “And I was so ashamed. I hate him for what he did to us!”

  Miriam felt her heart lurch once before it resumed its beat. She asked calmly, “What did he do to us?”

  “You know! He killed Uncle Sylvain.”

  “Now, wait a minute. He’s not a murderer, Eugene. It was a political difference, a terrible, ugly thing, but a dispute all the same, not a murder!”

  “A political difference! But he was on the wrong side, a dirty abolitionist! I don’t like being blamed for having him in my family!”

  The boy looked toward his father as if asking for support. The father said only, “None of us is responsible for his relatives. That’s all you have to tell them, and keep telling.”

  “They say somebody in the family must have helped him get away. They say he escaped with only a couple of minutes to spare.”

  “That’s nonsense!” After another breathtaking lurch of the heart, Miriam spoke sharply. “Nobody in this family had anything to do with anything David did. He was always his own master and took care of himself.”

  “Indeed.” The senior Eugene’s tone was grim. “Indeed. Let us hope he can take care of himself in the war that he and his kind are going to bring upon us.”

  “I’ll fight if it comes!” The boy made fists, adding, in his ignorance, his innocence. “Maxim and Chanute, they’ll fight, too! You’ll see, we all will.”

  Poor baby, Miriam thought. Poor country. Thirty million people rushing into war.

  She said that one evening to Fanny, who had come running out of breath because of the nine o’clock curfew, which had now been imposed on all the city’s Negroes—an indignity which, on the first night of its imposition, had caused Miriam to lower her eyes in embarrassment before the girl.

  “Dark blood on the moon,” Fanny had said, which was as good a way as any to express an ominous fear.

  Dark blood on the moon.

  From the Senate gallery the applause poured like gold rain on Judah Benjamin.

  “The fortunes of war,” he said, “may be adverse to our arms; you may carry desolation into our peaceful land, and with torch and firebrand set our cities in flames … but you never can subjugate us.”

  South Carolina was the first to secede. When Louisiana’s turn came, the Picayune and the Crescent wrote in elegiac phrases of honor and the Union’s death.

  Fort Sumter fell and Lincoln called for volunteers.

  Robert E. Lee, who had emancipated the slaves he had inherited from his family, refused the command of the Union armies and, in anguish of mind, went home to Virginia to stand with his kin.

  The war had come.

  Southwinds brought fine April rain and moist air from the Gulf, to curl Angelique’s black hair and uncurl the new leaves on the jasmine bush. Sweet-olive scent drifted over the piazza. Redbirds were twittering and rustling in the gum trees when Miriam, always the earliest to rise, stood at the window waiting for the city to wake up.

  The awakening came abruptly, as soldiers poured in from the country and streamed out from the houses, filling the narrow streets with the vigor of drumbeats. There was a shine on everything, on swords, gold lace cuffs, and handsome horseflesh. On every woman’s shoulder fluttered the bright scrap of a Confederate flag.

  Eulalie was first to remark that Miriam was not wearing one. She had grown bolder, as if it were understood that a bargain had been struck: her silence about André in return for Miriam’s acquiescence in all else. The very next afternoon, visiting with Pelagie, Eulalie brought a flag and pinned it on Miriam’s shoulder. A few minutes later Rosa came, and she, too, was wearing one, Miriam looked down at the alien scrap of cloth on her own shoulder. So it was that one was drawn in. It would have been impossible not to wear this emblem in this company.

  “My sons have got their orders,” Rosa announced. “Henry goes to Fort St. Philip and Herbert to the Navy. They are commissioned,” she added, trying to sound casual about it.

  Pelagie explained, “Alexandre and Lambert are too young for commissions, but naturally they’ve enlisted. Alexandre is in the Mounted Wildcats and Lambert is in the De Soto Rifles.”

  “I should be ashamed of my nephews if they had not enlisted,” Eulalie said. “A woman who lives near us—I won’t mention any names—her son received a package in the mail with a petticoat in it.”

  “In some towns,” Pelagie related with a shudder, “I’ve heard they have been tarring and feathering young men who won’t volunteer.”

  “Well, I should hope they would!” Eulalie cried.

  “I have heard,” Rosa said softly, “that there is talk of jailing people who speak in favor of the North.” From under the pure white shells of her eyelids her quick eyes slid up toward Miriam, conveying an anxious warning.

  “Óh, I am proud of my sons,” Pelagie said. Her round cheeks were flushed with pleasure. “Lambert told me, ‘It’s for the defense of southern womanhood, Mama.’ But all the Labouisse cousins will distinguish themselves. They have been organizing their own companies. Mama’s cousins upriver have organized a company, too. Sons of the best families. Yes, we can all be proud. Even my cook, Belinda, has been baking boxes and boxes of cookies for Lambert and Alexandre. They are her boys.”

  Cookies and guns. Guns and cookies, Miriam thought. And suddenly a picture of one of Pelagie’s children flashed to mind—which one she could not remember, for there bad been so many—but a blond boy whom she had been pushing on a swing long before she had had children of her own. He had dropped his cookie on the grass and cried. Now he was to carry a gun.

  Without deliberate intent her gaze came to rest upon her own Angelique, who was sitting in the corner, sewing a pile of bandages. Even the schoolgirls, who last year had been learning to embroider trousseaus, were now enlisted in the war.

  Then through the open window came the voice of young Eugene reciting Latin declensions to his father. The voice deepened, throaty and husky, then cracked and squeaked. How long before he, too, would take up a gun?

  Not to be outdone, Rosa was say
ing, “Do you know that David de Leon has just been made surgeon general of the Confederate Army? He’s a cousin of Henry’s. Such an enormous network of cousins!”

  “My little Louie,” Pelagie related with satisfaction, “is so upset because he’s not old enough to go!”

  “Perhaps,” Miriam told her, “the war will last long enough for him to have his wish.”

  The irony went unnoticed. “Oh, they say it will be over in thirty days. On Good Friday I walked to nine different churches to pray for victory. I felt sure of it by the time I got home.”

  A letter from David crackled in Miriam’s pocket.

  “I have joined a medical unit .… England will recognize the Confederacy as a belligerent power .… They need cotton for the Lancashire mills .… Their aristocrats side with the South, anyway .… It will be a bitter, hard war .… Perhaps years.”

  As always, she had treasured his letter, reading it over and over so that every word was clear in her memory.

  “For the first time lam thankful you are so far away. I am no military man, God knows, but I really don’t believe the war will reach where you are. So you will be spared that, at least. I wish you could be spared all suffering! You have such burdens … the things we’ve talked about still there, I suppose, and added to, confused by your pity for him since he lost his sight .… But you are very strong. I don’t think you even realize how strong you are. Gabriel and I have always known it … you will keep things going for your beautiful children. I think of them always .… Someday, in a better time, I shall remind them that it was I who held them in their first minutes on this earth .…”

  Pelagie’s voice interrupted, saying now, “Eulalie has sewn the most glorious silk banner for the parade at the encampment next week.” Pelagie had not looked so youthful or enthusiastic since before Sylvain’s death. “It will be such a grand affair! I had to get a new dress for it. Have you noticed how much wider skirts have got this season? One really looks passé if one’s dress is more than a year old.”