Crescent City

by Belva Plain

  She retrieved the idea. “Yes, I was thinking, do you suppose we might offer Sanderson an interest in the business? He’d have more incentive than one can have with just a salary.”

  “And I was thinking of suggesting that myself. You’re a step ahead of me. Soon I shall have to run to keep up with you.”

  “Oh, no, there’s so much I don’t understand! All that business about bank stocks, Sanderson was trying to explain.”

  “Why they’re a sound investment? Because banks have to be exceptionally strong in this economy. Planters need big loans to keep themselves afloat between harvests.”

  “But why is it so hard to keep themselves afloat?”

  “They have to modernize. It costs money to run a plantation. A cane-grinding engine alone costs five thousand dollars. Then there’re all the slaves to be fed. And the owners live lavishly. They spend from crop to crop.”

  “Creoles are so extravagant!”

  “Not so much anymore. It’s not the Creoles, but the Americans, who have the real money now. Today’s Creoles are tightening their belts. Very few can recall the days of places like Valcour Aime’s Versailles.”

  “And a good thing, too. I was there once and it disgusted me. I remember how annoyed Eugene was because I wasn’t impressed.” Miriam paused, as if to make up her mind whether to speak or not. “I would like to sell Beau Jardín. I never liked it.”

  “Oh, no!” Rosa cried. She had been working quietly at an embroidery frame. “Not that beautiful place!”

  “Yes. I would like to free all the slaves and be rid of it. Every time I go there I despise it more. I drive past the fields where the people are working and I think, ‘That woman there with the infant on her back was bought for a thousand dollars; that man driving the mule wagon was bought for fifteen hundred dollars.’ And I cannot stand it.”

  There was a silence in the room. Rosa’s, Miriam knew, was disapproving. Gabriel’s might also be disapproving, yet there was something about him that gave her full freedom to speak her mind. And she continued. “It’s hard to reconcile that feeling with the people I know so well. Eugene, after all, is not a villain.”

  “No,” said Gabriel, “he is not.”

  “He’s only like everyone else. Living here, he does what everyone else does. I understand that.”

  From the street a voice cried through the tall open windows, “Artichokes! Figs! Cantaloupes!”

  “The Green Sass Man,” Rosa said. “Have you been buying figs from him, Miriam? They’ve been especially good this season.”

  “That old man,” Miriam said, ignoring the question, “has been buying his freedom as long as I’ve known him. His master must make a good two or three thousand a year out of his sales. Oh, how I hate it the more I see of it!”

  Gabriel asked, “What does Eugene say about selling Beau Jardín?”

  “Of course he doesn’t see things my way at all He won’t hear of it. No one sees it my way except David, and even he writes to me now that we might need the place as a refuge when war comes. He’s become more and more pessimistic in the two years since he left.”

  “When war comes!” Rosa cried.

  With pity Miriam thought, Her sons will have to go.

  “Yes,” she said, “David believes there is no stopping it. He says it’s only a question of when, not whether.”

  “Thanks to people like himself!” Rosa cried sharply. “How clever he was all the time he was here! Who could have had the slightest idea what he was doing?” Her words cut the air. “It’s a wonder he got safely away.”

  “Feelings are very high. It’s well to be cautious,” Gabriel advised. And. Miriam understood that this was a warning for her. “The other night at our meeting, our Jewish widows and orphans relief, some of the men almost came to blows.”

  “We Jews should stay out of politics,” Rosa pronounced. “We have enough of our own affairs to keep us busy. Look at that mess in the Albany Temple in New York, with the Orthodox fighting Rabbi Wise over women’s rights!” She was out of breath with indignation.

  Miriam said, “I’m sorry, I can’t agree.”

  “Agitators on both sides are whipping people up too high,” Gabriel said soberly. “I go along with Isaac Leeser in the American Jewish Advocate. He thinks Jews ought to stay in the middle as peacemakers.”

  “It’s very hard to remain in the middle when you have convictions,” Miriam argued. “Have you read Uncle Tom’s Cabin? David sent it to me from New York. It’s sold over a million copies in the North.”

  “I glanced at it,” Rosa said. “A sensational book, that’s all. It’s disgracefully exaggerated, and you must know that, Miriam.”

  “Probably so. Still, one often has to exaggerate to make a point.”

  Rosa’s voice became shrill. “I should think you’d want to stay away from the miserable subject, Miriam. I understand you have convictions, but it seems to me you’ve had enough trouble and shouldn’t want any more. If you don’t mind my giving you some advice, I hope you don’t talk this way in front of your stepmother’s family. Frankly, I think it’s wonderful that they’ve never humiliated you—not that it was your fault—but still, he is your brother, and just seeing you must be a constant reminder.”

  “Of course you must know I don’t talk about these things except here,” Miriam answered with some heat.

  “Well, good,” Rosa grunted. “We get all the blame for slavery, while the North raises tariffs and enjoys all the financial benefits from it.”

  “Benefits?” repeated Miriam.

  “Benefits. Money.”

  Gabriel intervened. “All the talk in the world won’t change the fact that the system is bound to end no matter who wins. I say that over and over.”

  “Then you take war for granted?” his sister cried.

  “The handwriting’s on the wall. The Republican party is being organized to oppose the extension of slavery into the territories. The next step is to eliminate it in the southern states.”

  Rosa was aghast. “And you think they have a right to do that?”

  “No, I don’t think the national government has a right in law to do it. It’s meddling in business that belongs to the states.”

  “Then how,” asked Miriam, “would you eliminate slavery?”

  “The states must do it themselves. And intime they will do just that, if they’re not interfered with.”

  “In time,” Miriam repeated.

  “Meanwhile,” Gabriel said, “the law of the land is the law.”

  “Spoken, as David always used to say, like a lawyer.” She smiled, wanting to quiet the charged atmosphere.

  Gabriel did not return the smile. Instead he got up to stand with his hand on the back of a chair. He spoke softly, musing, as if to himself.

  “Sometimes I wish I weren’t a lawyer at all. I wish I were a musician or a mathematician, dealing in abstractions. Everything quite clear and clean. I’d erase”—he made a broad, harsh gesture—“I’d erase everything emotional. Just facts, just facts.” He looked out of the window where a bee buzzed in the dangling wisteria. “And sometimes I think I’d like to strike out to California—not for gold, I’m not interested in that, just for something new. I’d take the Sea Witch around Cape Horn.” A faraway smile fled across his face. He might have been feeling himself at the prow of the Sea Witch in high seas and gusting wind. “It set a record, you know: ninety-seven days from New York to San Francisco.” He broke off to rest a hand on Rosa’s shoulder; she had been looking anxious. “Don’t worry, I shan’t abandon you yet, not till I see your boys grown and on their way.”

  “Then let’s talk of more cheerful things,” Rosa responded.

  “All right, my dear. You begin,” said Gabriel.

  “Well,” she said brightly, “is either one of you planning to hear Le Roi David? I heard it once. Such lovely music! Imagine that boy, only fifteen years old! Louis Moreau Gottschalk. His grandfather was some sort of cousin to Henry’s mother, I think.”

&n
bsp; Every prominent or prosperous Jew, no matter where from, turns out to be “some sort of cousin,” Miriam thought with amusement.

  “That’s a cheerful subject. And I do plan to hear it. Now I shall leave you ladies to go on talking of cheerful things,” Gabriel said as he left them.

  “I like your hat,” Rosa said by way of reconciliation. “I’ve given all my bonnets away. Only old ladies wear them anymore. Yes, the hat’s becoming. But you look tired. Not bad, mind you, but I’ve seen you look better. If you ask me, you’re working too hard.”

  It is the work that saves me, Miriam thought, not answering. If it were not for the work, I should be completely without use or purpose.

  Rosa filled the teacups. “How do you like my new decorations? You haven’t said.”

  On a trip to the Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York, she had fallen in love with the Belter style. She had refurbished the old parlor with plaster garlands on the ceiling and a flowered carpet. Sofas and chairs, covered in a pattern of golden bees on blue satin, stood around a large table topped with white marble. Carved flowers, grapes, and unicorns covered every inch of woodwork, and from the four sides of the room, tall mirrors reflected all this glory.

  “You don’t like it?” Rosa inquired, continuing before Miriam could reply, “You can be frank with me. No, you don’t care for it, I see that. It’s not your taste. Perhaps it is a bit show-offy, but I had to have it. I’m happy in this room.”

  “That’s all that matters, then,” Miriam said gently.

  “After all, one has to have something. I live alone, don’t I? My brother and my sons are wonderful to me, goodness knows, but still, I’m alone.”

  “Forgive me for asking, but I believe we’ve known each other long enough and well enough for me to ask you: How is it that a woman as lively as you doesn’t marry again?”

  Rosa set the teacup down with a click. She looked significantly at Miriam.

  “For the same reason my brother doesn’t.”

  “Why doesn’t he?”

  “We’re all the same in our family. If we can’t have what we want, we don’t take second best. You remember, I told you once.”

  “Ah, yes. He wasn’t Jewish.”

  “Wasn’t. Isn’t.”

  “He’s still living, then?”

  “Yes, and he would still have me. He’s wonderful, but I can’t do it. Of course, if I should find another man of my own faith, as good a man as Henry—but I haven’t, and as I said, we don’t take second best.”

  “And you say it’s the same with Gabriel?”

  “Not exactly the same. You mean you don’t know? You can’t see?”

  “See what?”

  “That he has never loved anyone but you.” Rosa regarded her with a curiosity that was almost prurient. “He could never obligate himself to another woman while he felt like that about you.”

  Unlike that old fingering taunt of Eugene’s, this apparently was fact, and it was stunning.

  “Gabriel has told you this?” Miriam whispered.

  “Let’s say I wormed it out of him.”

  Immediately, then, Miriam thought of André. That some other man should be entranced by her as she was—no, as she used to be—by André!

  Suddenly Rosa was alarmed. She clapped her hand to her mouth. “You won’t dare let him know I’ve told you? I don’t know why I do these things. It just slipped out I swore I’d say nothing. He was sorry after he’d said it and I promised him I’d never tell.”

  “Trust me, Rosa. I give you my word. Do you really think I would bring up such a subject with Gabriel?”

  “Oh, dear heaven, what an awful conversation this has been! Let’s talk about something else quickly so we can forget it. Tell me some gossip instead.”

  “I don’t know any. I don’t hear much since I’ve been spending afternoons at the office.”

  “Well, I know a bit. André Perrin is finally coming home. What do you think of that? I was beginning to think they had settled permanently in Paris. But I hear he didn’t get his money out of that beautiful house in the garden district. Such an extravagance, to build it and never use it!”

  So Rosa chattered on about the new neighbor across the street and the rabbi’s wife and the dressmaker’s charges. But Miriam, nodding or shaking her head in the right places, was only half with Rosa, the rest being divided, torn between forces of home and children, of Gabriel, whom she would now dread to face, and of André, who was coming home, having perhaps forgotten her entirely. And if he had not forgotten her, what then?

  Presently, she got up and left. The carriage was waiting at the door.

  “Maxim,” she said, “there’s some property I want to see before we go home.” And she directed him to the garden district.

  Past Urania, Thalia, and Euterpe streets they drove, past towers, stained-glass windows, and serene lawns. It was a different world from that of the Vieux Carré—an American world.

  “Here, Maxim, stop here for a minute.”

  It had been a long time since she had seen the house. With a queer sense of satisfaction she noted how it differed from the others on the street White and classical, it stood apart in an airy grove of mimosa trees. For a few minutes she sat in the carriage just looking at it, at a child who ran around from the back of the house, and at the second-story windows at which lace curtains hung in what must be a lovely room, where a man and woman slept together.

  The horse flicked its tail and stamped, recalling her to herself.

  “Home now, Maxim,” she said.

  “Very pretty here, Miss Miriam,” Maxim observed, feeling chatty. “I had to go past Adele Street this morning for Miss Emma. She had an errand. You wouldn’t believe it’s the same city as this, with the slaughterhouse and all the smells. Those Irish sure is dirty people.”

  Everyone wanted to look down on someone else. Maxim in his fine suit, driving his owner’s fine carriage, could feel himself superior to any poor Irishman who had no fine suit, no fine carriage, and no master to provide him with either. Curious indeed.

  Ferdinand and Emma were having coffee on the verandah.

  “You stayed a long time,” Ferdinand said.

  “Yes. Rosa and I talked after the business was over.”

  “What did you talk about?” So long “out of things,” he was eager for every crumb of news, however unimportant it might be.

  “Oh, religion, home furnishings, war—”

  “War!” Ferdinand was indignant. “There’ll be no war. We left all that behind in Europe.”

  “Gabriel thinks there will be. So does David. But,” she ventured boldly, “I do think if women were to run the world, there would not be. We’d find other ways to solve things.”

  “Women, my dear?” Ferdinand gave his daughter the same smile he gave to little Eugene and Angelique. “Women? Surely, if man with his strength and intellect can’t manage affairs any better, what makes you think women can? Why not entrust affairs to children while you’re about it?”

  And who has been keeping this house together since Eugene lost his sight and you lost your money, she thought angrily. Vain, ignorant man!

  But he looked so old, throwing his shoulders back with such pathetic bravado. Let him talk, she thought, and did not reply.

  17

  Now in autumn a cooler breeze swept in from the Gulf, and the sun, ceasing to scorch, poured out a benevolent warmth. In the side garden where Miriam sat with an unread book, the first yellowing leaves lay on Aphrodite’s shoulder; on the dry grass an overripe persimmon fell, splashing its sweet thick juice, to which at once a bee came buzzing in a perfect frenzy.

  The gate clicked. Mildly vexed by the intrusion, she turned to see who the intruder might be.

  “Miriam. I’ve just arrived. I came as soon as I could,” said André.

  So often in imagination she had contrived this meeting, fancying a chance encounter on the street or at some formal, drawing-room occasion, or even, foolishly, a tryst in a forest as in a German
opera—always toying with such fancies and discarding them, embarrassed at their futility. Now, as he stood there, she did not know what she felt other than dull wonder that he was there at all.

  “So much has happened to you since I went away .… Your brother. Oh, Miriam, in my heart I cried for you.”

  “And you knew about Eugene?”

  “Yes, long ago. Emma wrote to Marie Claire.”

  “Marie Claire” hung in the air between them. “And how is she—your wife?” Whether in the saying of the name there was any sharp intent to hurt either him or herself, she could not have said.

  “She hasn’t come with me. She has had some recitals. Her teacher is enthusiastic. Well, at any rate, she wants to stay there a while longer.”

  So they are drawing apart, she thought maliciously, and was ashamed of the thought.

  “But I had to come back. I’d been away long enough. We’ve taken a house in the Pontalba Building.”

  “They are very handsome houses,” Miriam said.

  These perfunctory remarks—what did they mean? He looked the same, with the same brightness about him. Did he remember their parting here in this place, how they had clung to one another? Perhaps not. Time flows, changing, changing as each moment passes.

  “Would you like to see the house?” André asked now.

  She had a need to walk, to move, to do something with the churning that was inside her.

  But she spoke primly. “That; would be very nice.”

  With morning church over, the streets came to life ais people streamed toward their Sunday amusements, the cock fights, the horse races, the minstrel shows, and the taverns.

  “This much hasn’t changed, I see,” André remarked. “I suppose the Protestants still fume over these merry Catholic Sundays?”

  “I suppose they do.”

  “Well, I see no harm in amusing oneself, regardless of the day. Gloom never made the world any better.”

  In the little square behind the cathedral children clustered about the ice cream stand.

  “That hasn’t changed either.”

  “No,” Miriam agreed.

  They were making conversation. She felt the strain of stepping so gingerly around the only question of importance: Are we the same, or have time and separation left their mark?