Crescent City

by Belva Plain

  André remarked on the new cathedral. “A sumptuous building.”

  “Yes, thanks to the generosity of Judah Touro.”

  “We read about his will in Europe. Most extraordinary! All those charities, the Jewish Hospital here, and orphan homes and help for the poor of Jerusalem. Remarkable.”

  “Gabriel says if Touro had died ten years ago he would have left nothing at all to any Jewish cause. Gabriel had great influence on him, you know. He was one of the people who brought him back to his faith.”

  “How is Gabriel? Still not married?”

  “Still not married.”

  In some odd way she felt as though she were defending Gabriel, or as if, still more illogically, her very existence as the object of his love were her fault.

  And she went on, thinking aloud, “He has been a great help to me, a right hand since Eugene’s accident.”

  “Ah, but you’ve had too many burdens!” André exclaimed. “Far too many.”

  Pausing a moment before unlocking the door, he surveyed the square with obvious admiration. “Except for Andrew Jackson capering on his horse, one might think oneself on the Place des Vosges in Paris.”

  He led her upstairs into a tall salon with a Louis XV black marble fireplace. Automatically they walked to the windows; in these rooms one would always walk to the windows. Below, in the square, crepe myrtle spread pink autumn flowers. To the right, one saw the levee and the glistening river. They stood quite still; the silence ticked.

  What am I doing here? Miriam thought She began to speak in a high, unnatural voice.

  “That’s the wharf where Jenny Lind arrived. P. T. Barnum brought her from Cuba. There were ten thousand people waiting. Such a crush! She stayed here in the Baroness Pontalba’s house.”

  “Did she?” André was behind her, not touching; yet in the air around him there was an aureole of warmth which covered her back and shoulders.

  “Yes,” she said, “yes, she was here a month. They sold the tickets at auction for two hundred dollars and more.” The words rushed. “Perhaps Marie Claire will be like her someday.”

  Why speak of Marie Claire?

  André replied, “Marie Claire has a pure voice, but it’s a little voice. She will never be a Jenny Lind or an Adelina Patti, although she doesn’t realize it yet.”

  “I’m sorry,” Miriam said.

  The grave, plain child sang her heart out in Papa’s parlor. The drab young bride stood with André. Aunt Emma falsely chirped: Don’t they make a handsome couple?

  “Sorry?”

  “Yes. Sorry that she will not have what she wants so badly. It’s a terrible thing to want something you know you will never have.”

  “We didn’t come here to talk about these things,” he said.

  She put her hands over her face. “I am all confused. I don’t know.”

  He laid her head on his shoulder. His fingers moved in her hair, loosening the sturdy pins, undoing the chignon at the back of her neck so that the slippery hair fell to her shoulders.

  Her heart slowed; she could feel it pulsing steadily and strongly. Something rose in her that she had never felt before; a flower opened and spread; a river ran; a wave lifted to a crest. His hands released the fastenings of her dress and she stood quite still, with closed eyes, allowing him to do what he wished. Wire hoops and twenty yards of yellow cloth fell to the floor. When she opened her eyes, she saw in the mirror the pale mauve mounds of her breasts swelling above the shift before it, too, fell. Her face was opalescent; it swam in the mirror; the shadows under her eyes were like tear stains, while her lips turned upward slowly, slowly, into a wandering, gentle smile.

  Lightly he lifted her, easily carried her, and in a high, white lovely room, laid her down on the bed.

  Now his head rested on her shoulder. With her free hand she stroked his cheek, on which the thinnest ray of afternoon light, having slid through the drawn blinds, tipped the fine hair with gold. What a beautiful thing was his hand, with its fingers lying loose in sleep! Each nail, smooth as glass, bore its pale crescent. Such tenderness, such skill in that strong hand!

  In a wonderful languor she stretched her arm, smelling a lemon scent on her warm skin, feeling the bloom of her own health. A small quickening breeze swept in, waking André.

  “You haven’t slept?” he murmured.

  “No, I was drowsy, but I didn’t sleep.”

  “You were thinking,” he reproached gently. “You think too much.”

  At this instant, at this reminder, anxiety shattered her peace.

  “I was remembering how often I wondered how it would be when you came back.”

  “Weil, now you know. You don’t have to wonder anymore.”

  “I feel as if these years hadn’t passed at all, as if you’d left only yesterday.”

  He kissed her eyelids. “I want you to be happy … happy.”

  “If only we never had to get up, if we could stay in this room like this.”

  “Dear Miriam, we’re here now, don’t spoil it.”

  “I don’t want to, but …”

  “But what?”

  “If only there were no Eugene or Marie Claire!”

  Two pairs of her stockings, the black net worn over the flesh-colored silk, lay over a chair. They reminded her of—of Eugene’s woman. Am I then no better than she?

  “You’re worried about them? We’re taking nothing away that anyone wants. Certainly not Eugene, after all you’ve told me.”

  “But Marie Claire?”

  “It doesn’t matter, I tell you. She cares about her voice and nothing else, certainly not about me! And if she doesn’t care, why should I?”

  “Do you know, you probably won’t believe me, but it’s true, I always saw my life touching hers one day?”

  “Do you often ‘see’ things?” André teased.

  “Not often,” she said soberly. “But sometimes. For us I see only a blank, a dark blank.”

  “You’ve listened too long to the servants. Superstitions. Listen to me.” He held her closely. “Always listen to me. Think of yourself going on a long, wonderful, dangerous journey. I’m the guide, I’ll keep you safe, I’ll keep danger away.”

  She sighed. “You do comfort me. Even your voice comforts me.”

  “That’s what I want to do.” He kissed her. “You’ll come again? I shall have to be away a great deal—my family’s place, and business in the North—but never for very long. You’ll come again?”

  “Oh, yes, oh, yes I will. I will.”

  So it began.

  18

  Now in the last year of peace there were some who saw what was coming and others who denied it, even though it was scrawled across the sky.

  John Brown had seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Hailed in the North as a defender of human liberty, he was daily condemned as a vicious agitator when merchants and planters met over lunch at Maspero’s Exchange. There they spoke, too, of men like David Raphael, wondering that he, for instance, could have come from so decent a family. And they were sorry for his relatives. They quoted politicians who were saying that secession was inevitable unless some “reasonable compromise” could be effected and soon. In lowered voices and somber tones they spoke of Englishmen murdered in the Indian Mutiny at Lucknow only a few years before.

  The Mistick Krew of Comus organized a Mardi Gras parade that year as splendid as any; the French Opera House opened with a spectacular season of Donizetti, Massenet and Bellini; Adelina Patti sang; the new gaslights were installed in the grandest houses; and women, parting their hair in the center, madonna-style, had themselves photographed.

  Yet perhaps it was not ignorance but the fear of war which engendered this gaiety and roused Eugene from his indifference.

  “It’s too long since we had guests at Beau Jardín,” he said one day. He frowned. “Why have we not done it before?”

  “We were conserving,” Miriam reminded him with some resentment. Not once had he given her any credit for what s
he had been doing.

  “We’ll invite people in time for the grinding season.”

  That meant a week of lavish entertainment, of escorting visitors through the sugar mill, drinking hot cane juice and rum, while the slaves toiled twenty-four hours a day until the cane had all been ground.

  “We’ll bring everyone upriver on the Edward J. Gay, do it in fine style while we’re about it,” Eugene said. He became enthusiastic. “I shall want a fine menu, chowders and turtle soup, pigeons, whatever you can think of. And very likely we’re low on Madeira. It’s so long since I’ve checked. Will you take care of that? And the guest list, too, since—since I can’t write?”

  She fetched pencil and paper.

  “We’ll begin with Gabriel and the sister.”

  “Rosa will be in Saratoga,” she reminded him.

  “Well, Gabriel, then. He’s a cool sort, but he grows on you. Emma’s people, of course, Eulalie, Pelagie, and any of her children who want to come. Oh, yes, put Perrin down, André Perrin. I haven’t seen him since he’s been back in town. He never comes to call; you’d think he’d be more friendly.”

  Miriam’s pencil rested; she controlled her trembling hand. “If he’s not that friendly, why invite him?”

  “Oh, well, I’ve no grudge. I do know he travels a good deal, so maybe that’s why he hasn’t come round. I always liked him, he’s clever, goes all over the world, which I wish Fd done when I was still able.”

  “So he’s very likely away somewhere. I’ll find out for you.”

  “Don’t bother. I can find out myself. Put his name down.”

  André Perrin. The letters shaped themselves into spaces on the paper. They looked up quizzically, startled and alarmed as the pounding of her frightened heart.

  On the piazza after dinner the men smoked and talked. The drone of their voices coming through the long open windows was in competition with the harp, which Pelagie’s daughter, Felicité, was playing in the parlor.

  Miriam’s thoughts moved like troubled wanderers looking for a place to rest. They moved from Angelique, who, pretending to be attentive to the music, was probably wishing she were as old as Felicité and could wear her hair up, back to André on the piazza. She strained to hear his voice among the others’, but it did not come.

  After three days they had still not been alone together. Men and women bathed separately in tibe bayou. In groups they went driving through the countryside; in groups they dined and played cards. Occasionally her eyes had met his; then, remembering how Pelagie’s adoration of Sylvain had been so naked on her face, she had turned away.

  She thought curiously: Gabriel’s face is covered up. Nothing is revealed in it. Could Rosa have been mistaken? No, of course not. Then it must be very hard for Gabriel tonight .… How strange that two men who loved her should be sitting there together!

  How strange to be having these thoughts at all! She, Miriam, the proper-seeming wife of a respected gentleman; the mistress of this family home, gleaming and orderly in its traditions; the mother of that manly boy, already old enough to take his place with the men after dinner; the mother to be an example for her daughter …

  What would the world—the world in which she had to live—say of her if they knew? Her children … she would stand shattered before them. How they would suffer! And she passed her hand over her perspiring forehead.

  “I’m thinking,” Pelagie remarked, “of how Marie Claire used to play for us. It’s so strange that she stays abroad. It must be very hard on a young husband.”

  “I suppose it must be,” Miriam agreed.

  “Yet he seems content! He looks very well, don’t you think so?”

  “Very well.”

  “And you do, too, Miriam. I don’t know when I’ve seen you so blooming, so healthy and pink.”

  Miriam moved closer to the window, giving as excuse the heat, but needing really to remove herself from Pelagie’s remarks.

  “I have enormous respect for Rabbi Wise,” Gabriel was saying. “He feels religion and politics ought to be separate and I agree.”

  “Well, Wise,” Eugene replied, “Wise is against slavery, and of course I don’t agree with him there. But when he says he’d rather break up the Union than go to war, there I do agree.”

  “There’s no question that if war comes, it will be the abolitionist Protestant preachers who brought it about.”

  Miriam recalled a time when she had thought constantly about those questions; yet at this moment they meant nothing; she was thinking of André. She had become a woman with a fixed idea.

  “I’m told that at the State House they predict crisis,” Eugene was saying. “They say if a Republican is elected President we shall secede.”

  Another voice was heard. “Then there will be war.”

  Other voices joined.

  “We are short of everything: wagon factories, ammunition, tents, everything.”

  “Can you imagine abolition here? It’s enough to make your flesh crawl! Hordes of them taking to the roads with no place to go, nothing to eat, except what they can steal.”

  She felt a touch on her shoulder.

  “It’s a perfect night,” André said. “Too beautiful for such depressing conversation. Would you like a walk or a row in the skiff?”

  She raised her eyebrows, as if to say, We can’t do this.

  But André countered lightly. “Any lady who wants to come is welcome. The boat holds two. Shall we take turns? You first, Pelagie?”

  Pelagie declined. Miriam’s chair scraped abruptly as she stood up, reminding her how he had drawn her away from the talk on that very first night.

  “We started out so cheerfully,” André said. “But they always turn to politics. Let’s look at the stars. They’ve been here long before there was a North or a South and will be here long after.”

  The moon, faintly red, bled pink into the white sky. In the middle of the lawn where the decorous sound of the harp almost faded out of hearing, it was met by the poignant thrum and twang of a guitar. Over in the cabins a man was singing of ancient longings and transient delights; one needed no words to recognize both longing and delights.

  On and on André and Miriam moved with identical steps. She felt the motion of his legs in unison with her own. The path to the bayou was thick with a hundred years’ worth of fallen pine needles, on which feet made no more noise than a breeze in the treetops. Live oaks spilled streamers of gray moss like old women’s hair.

  “The moss is sorrowful,” Miriam said.

  André was not to be drawn into her mood. “To begin with, it isn’t moss at all. It’s related to the pineapple family, and that’s the symbol of welcome.”

  He helped her into the boat. So still was the surface that the trees along the shore made a motionless reflection, scalloping a deeper black against the opaque bayou water. André dropped the oars to let the boat drift and took her hand. For a long time they sat without speaking, joined by the tightening contact of their hands.

  “I wish there were someplace for us to go tonight,” André said.

  She dared then to say what she had been holding back. A woman should never take the initiative; a woman should wait to receive.

  “I wish for more than tonight. To see ahead.” And when he did not answer, she cried, “What’s to happen? Where are we going?”

  “Ah, don’t! I can’t bear it when you’re unhappy! Listen to me. Remember that every day brings something new. When we first saw each other you were choked with tears. You couldn’t have foreseen, that night, what’s happened between us since then, could you?”

  “That’s true,” she admitted.

  “I’m not a superstitious man, but I’ve seen so many curious and wonderful turns and twists that I never give up hoping.”

  He stroked her hair. More than his words, his fingers calmed her. His compassion made her want to believe that in some miraculous turn of affairs all impediments between them might be swept away.

  Presently he took the oars and tu
rned the boat back to the landing, soothing all the while in his bright vigorous voice with talk of New York and Washington, of theater and amusing personalities.

  They walked back up the path toward the house. In deepest shadow, just before the path emerged onto open lawn, they stopped and he pulled her to him. She trembled and, leaning against him, gave him all her weight, so that, half lifted, her feet barely grazed the ground and she was held to him by arms and lips.

  At last he said, “I haven’t told you, I have to go north again next week.”

  “Again? Must you?” she cried, thinking, I sound like a wife. I cling like a wife.

  “I have to. I have business that has to be taken care of quickly. The war is coming, you know. I couldn’t stand any more talk of it inside there tonight, but they’re right, it’s coming.”

  “And who will win?”

  “Who can say? The North has more men and more money. The South will have help from Europe because of cotton. But who can say?”

  All thought of issues and principles, all private secret allegiances, washed away. What would war do to André and Miriam?

  She controlled her voice. “How long will you be gone this time?”

  “It depends how things work out. A couple of months maybe, but I’ll be back, you may be sure of that. Meanwhile, when you pass the Pontalba, think of me, remember that the place is waiting for us. Do you promise?”

  She understood that he was aware of her fear and that he would admire her for covering it up with gallantry.

  “I promise,” she said.

  “Good! Then, let’s go inside.”

  The brush raked her hair, snapping sparks. Through the mirror she saw the bed waiting and thought with relief that she would be asleep when Eugene came in after a late night at cards, so that she would not even be aware of his entry. How many thousands of hours they had lain together in the dark intimacy of that bed without touching! And she thought that, but for the constraint of law and custom, it would be—ought to be—so natural and simple for André instead of Eugene to walk through that door and lie down in that bed.