“Very well, I will pray for you, darling,” she said, coming to kiss my cheek. “And for your poor mother’s soul, which is in heaven.” Sarah came in carrying the breakfast tray. “In the dining room,” I said, waving her back. I followed my aunt to the door and watched her join a stream of pedestrians at the corner, all elegantly dressed, greeting one another lightheartedly. None, I thought, would name the true cause for his high spirits and say what each one felt: “Others have died, but I am alive.” I went back into the dining room and took a piece of bread from the plate. I called for Sarah, who appeared in the doorway, her eyes cast down.
She had kept out of my way since the night Mother died, hiding in the kitchen or staying in her hot room with the baby, appearing only when called for. I swallowed the bread, watching her. She seemed to stiffen before my eyes, to become stone, even her eyes didn’t blink; it is a trick she has. “You must know,” I said, “that servants are not allowed to receive visitors at the front door.”
“Yes, missus,” she said, moving only her lips.
I sat down at the table and tore off another bit of bread. “Pour me some coffee,” I said. She picked up the pot and leaned over me, directing the hot black stream into my cup. I was certain she knew I knew all about Mr. Roget. “Who was the man you were speaking to yesterday?” I asked.
“His name Mr. Roget,” she said. She had a cowed look about her, expecting the worst.
“What was his object in coming here?”
She set the pot carefully on the trivet, then stepped back so that I couldn’t see her. “My brother sent him to tell me he got work on the docks.”
“Who has work? Mr. Roget?”
“No, missus. My brother. He hired out from his master to work on the docks.”
“And what is your brother’s name?”
“Clarence.”
I sipped my coffee. A brother, I thought. What a clever invention. I wondered if she’d made it up on the spot or if she and Mr. Roget had worked it out together. “It’s unusual, isn’t it,” I said, “for a free man to carry messages between two slaves?”
Of course she made no response. After a sufficient silence, I tired of having her standing behind me. “Leave me,” I said. “Go and tell Peek to help you open the shutters.”
MOTHER’S ESTATE IS left entirely to me and is greater than I thought. She had set aside a small inheritance I knew nothing about, and it has grown impressively. So I am to have the house, the furnishings, sufficient income to live comfortably, and two slaves, Peek and a boy named Isaiah whom Mother has hired out to a baker in town. All this is mine, and yet it is not mine, because my husband can, and doubtless will, dispose of it just as soon as I can get it. “Is there no way to preserve this to myself?” I pleaded with the lawyer.
“Not unless you were to divorce your husband,” he said. “And that could take years. In the meantime he would have control of the estate.”
My aunt sat beside me, her lips pressed tightly together, trying to block out the word “divorce” by batting her eyes.
“Of course, when your husband passes away, the property will all come to you,” the lawyer reassured me.
“If there’s anything left of it,” I said.
As we left the lawyer’s office I observed to my aunt, “The laws in this state are designed to provoke the citizens to murder.”
She gave me a disapproving look. “It’s the same everywhere,” she said. “A woman’s property is her husband’s.”
“My husband won’t want Peek. What am I going to do with her?”
“Peek is a problem,” she agreed. “Come and have coffee with me, and we will discuss it.”
Mother’s will requested that Peek should not be sold at market, or hired to any establishment, and that she not be required to leave the city, as, Mother had written, “she has a terror of country life.”
“I have no wish to keep her,” I told my aunt when we were seated in her drawing room. “Would you want her for yourself?”
“No,” she said. “My Ines is an excellent cook. And the unhappy truth is that Peek is not an accomplished chef.”
“Delphine says she can spoil milk just by looking at it,” I said.
My aunt smiled. “Your poor mother used to borrow Ines for her dinner parties two or three times a month, whenever your uncle and I were dining out.”
“That was generous of you,” I said.
“It was an exchange,” she explained. “Peek spent the evening in my big kitchen making her medicines for all of us. No one can stand to be in the house when she’s at that.”
“Mother swore by her remedies,” I agreed.
“I continually derive benefit from her chest infusion.”
“She does nothing but cry,” I said. “She thinks I’m going to take her home with me and make her cook for the field hands.”
“That might occasion an insurrection,” my aunt chuckled.
“Do you know how old she is?”
“She wasn’t a girl when she came to your mother, and that was twenty years ago. She is fifty or fifty-five, I would guess.”
“She wouldn’t bring one hundred dollars at sale.”
“No,” my aunt agreed. “She has little value.”
We sipped our coffee. I felt at ease, lighthearted, as I seldom do, but as I once did. The furnishings, the paintings, the carpet in my aunt’s drawing room all reminded me of happier times. Even the leafy pattern on the saucer in my lap seemed designed especially to please me. “She should be with someone like Mother,” I concluded. “A widowed lady, living alone.”
“And one not particular about food,” my aunt added. “I can’t think of anyone in the family.”
“We’ll have to find someone to give her to, I suppose,” I said.
“That seems much the best course.”
“Is there someone in the neighborhood?”
After a few moments’ thought, my aunt replied, “I don’t know of anyone. But you might ask Peek. She may have some idea about what to do herself.”
AND TO MY surprise, my aunt was right. When I called Peek into the parlor, I was prepared for a scene of tears and lamentation, but as soon as I had related the stipulations of Mother’s will, she dried her eyes and showed a keen interest in her fate. “Miss Favrot will take me to nurse her mother,” she said. “Her house three blocks from here.”
“How can you be sure?”
“My cousin work in her house. He already spoke for me and his mistress say she take me, but she won’t pay no high price.”
“Are you acquainted with this lady?”
“I brought her a remedy for her son one time. He suffer from the croup. He got better when the doctors couldn’t do nothin’ for him.”
“Very well, Peek,” I said. “I shall write to this lady today, and you will deliver the letter.” She nodded her head a few times and went out, folding her handkerchief and smoothing her skirt, without so much as a word of thanks.
IN THE EVENING it was so cool I had a fire in the parlor. I sat at Mother’s desk with the intention of examining Father’s diary. For the first time I felt myself in possession of the house, an agreeable sensation, unlike any I have ever known. I took out the leather book and opened it to the page on which Father had written the date and his name, printed in large square letters, G. PERCY GRAY. A shiver of pleasure ran along my spine, as if Father were there in the room, though he has been gone these fifteen years.
I turned to the first entry and read an account of the weather, work done in the fields, bills paid; and a brief mention of a visit from a neighbor. This entry covered half the page. The next was similar in style and content. I looked ahead and saw that the entries were all much the same length and addressed the same topics—the weather, the crops, hunting or fishing, infirmities of animals and slaves, money spent, provisions bought—day after day. I was disappointed by the dullness of this record. Father was so full of energy it seemed impossible that he would make no more distinguished account of his life th
an this list of business and domestic preoccupations. And why had Mother preserved the book, if there was nothing of interest in it? I flipped through the pages, reading at random. News of a fire at a neighbor’s gin. Hands picking poorly, cotton trashy. Three days hard rain, spoiling the bolls. A visit from the doctor, another from the factor. No mention of Mother or me, as if we didn’t exist. A coal sputtered and shot a spark onto the tile. I looked up at the fire, letting the pages fall where they might, and when I looked back again I read this sentence: Have apologized to my dear wife for my failing, but she says she cannot forgive me now nor ever will.
For my failing. I read the entry carefully: May 23. weather fine, unusually chilly in the morning. Scraping cotton this side little creek. Replanting corn. Lice have ruined part of crop, all corn above much eaten. Stopped growing. Dr. White here to see my sick ones, seven in number. Old Burns will not recover I fear. Have apologized to my dear wife for my failing, but she says she cannot forgive me now nor ever will.
The next entry and the next were all concerned with the crops, the weather, a fishing expedition, a trip to the town for jury duty. Another mentioned a dog I scarcely remembered: my old dog Rattler so crippled, forced to put him down. Where is the God who will put us out of our misery. I looked ahead, skimming the pages, but found no further mention of this failing. Toward the end there was an entry that concluded, my dear wife, much vexed, will not forgive me. This was six months later. The diary filled only half the book. The last entry, made a few days before his death, read: Cold, damp, sowing oats, numberwild geese, burning logs, three with pleurisy, misery in the cabins and the house, rain at dark.
I closed the book. When Father died, Mother had not forgiven him for something, for some failing, and now I would never know what it was.
After his death, Mother was inconsolable. It was a month before she would speak to anyone but her sister or me. She insisted that the fire was no accident, that Father had been murdered. I slept in her room and heard her every night, calling his name in her sleep. Once I woke to find her standing over my bed, struggling to loosen the high neck of her gown and whispering harshly, “Percy, Percy,” as if she thought he was strangling her.
I returned the book to the drawer and moved to a chair nearer the fire. There was Father’s portrait on the table next to me, a handsome young American, his thick golden hair curling over his smooth brow, a tentative smile on his lips. He had just married a beautiful Creole, much against the wishes of her family, and removed with her to the small farm he had purchased in West Feliciana Parish. He had little money, but he had ambition; he was fearless, godless, principled, and kind. He made a success of his enterprise, not a fortune, but a solid concern, free of debt. What precious little failing was he guilty of that my mother could not find it in her heart to forgive? Did he fail to consult her wishes in every matter that concerned her comfort? Did he fail to tolerate her dependence on a religion that struck him as cruel superstition? Did he fail, perhaps, to bring her some present when he went to the town? How often had I seen him get up from the table to cut her a slice of bread or bring her a cup of coffee, dismissing the servant because, he said, it gave him pleasure to serve her? Did any day go by when he did not compliment her, defer to her, inquire as to her preference or opinion? How was it possible that she should have let him live one hour with the certainty that she held some grievance against him?
Next to Father’s portrait lay the latest letter from my husband, a thinly veiled command to return at once to his house and bring my father’s money with me. I recalled Mother’s last words to me, her complaint that I had failed as a wife because I neglected my duties to my husband. How could she chide me, when she had found fault with a husband who never gave her a moment’s anxiety, who was faithful, steadfast, industrious, loving, everything my husband was not? No. I acknowledged no duty to the man who has forced me to live these ten years in the madhouse of his cupidity, perversion, and lust. The fire in the grate burned low, but I took no notice. Another smoldered in my heart. I sat late in the cold room tending it, feeding it, until sparks ignited the dry tinder of my resentment, and it was as if I were sitting in a furnace.
THERE IS NO escape, yet how can I resign myself, when the world that is denied me tantalizes me at every turn. In the afternoon, as I stood with my sleeves rolled up, supervising the housecleaning, I received a note from my aunt inviting me to supper. Joel Borden called this afternoon, she wrote on the back of the card. He will join us after supper to offer you his condolences.
“Go to my aunt’s at once,” I bade Peek. “Tell her I will come at seven. And ask her for the loan of her black cashmere shawl.” Then I had Sarah leave off beating the carpets and spend the rest of the day washing and drying my hair.
Stupidly I enjoyed an inappropriate euphoria, as if I were going to attend some festive occasion, but as soon as I was seated next to my uncle in my aunt’s dining room, I came to my senses. He had just returned from visiting a planter for whom he is factor and was still much burdened by the shock of Mother’s sudden death. He took my hand in one of his, dabbing his handkerchief to his eyes with the other, and avowed the well-known scientific fact that Creoles are rarely taken by the yellow fever. This was the reason my mother had given for declining his invitation to their house on the lake. My aunt, teary-eyed, pointed out that she had lost a cousin in the epidemic of 1822. How fortunate, my uncle observed, that I had arrived in time to bid my mother farewell.
Every mention of Mother causes me to relive the last minutes of her life, which leaves me speechless, gripped by panic, but it would not do for me to beg for a new subject. Joel would doubtless speak of nothing but the pain of my loss, of his sincere attachment to and affection for my mother. What would he think if I said I’d rather hear the gossip from the latest fête he had attended? I was quiet through supper, eating little, which my aunt and uncle did not remark upon, attributing low spirits and lack of appetite to my bereavement. At last we took our coffee into the drawing room, the bell rang, and a servant showed Joel into the room.
What a strange effect the sight of him had upon me. He looked strong, masculine, with that combination of languor and gaiety that is so appealing, yet his features were composed in an expression of sympathy that was unmistakably sincere. As his eyes met mine I found no trace of his habitual irony; only sadness and a tender care for my feelings. He came to me at once, holding out his hands. As I rose to meet him, I was weakened by an unexpected surge of grief, so that I clutched his hands for support. A thousand regrets crowded my brain, a hard sob broke from my throat, and tears streamed from my eyes. The impossibility of collapsing in Joel’s embrace drove me back into my chair. There, bent over my knees and still clinging to his hands, I gave myself over to a storm of weeping. Joel released one hand to stroke my cheek, my hair, murmuring softly, “My poor Manon, my poor, dear girl.” Through my sobs I heard my aunt say, “She has been marvelously brave,” and then my uncle, after blowing his nose into his handkerchief, reminded Joel that it was unusual for a Creole to contract the yellow fever, and very odd of my mother to have succumbed to it. I regained control of myself and sat up, concentrating on extracting my handkerchief from my sleeve. “Please forgive me,” I said.
“Always,” Joel said.
“There is nothing to forgive in natural feeling,” my aunt said. My uncle got up and went to the sideboard, taking out glasses. He poured a brandy with water for me, which he pronounced “strengthening,” and two more without water for himself and Joel. “Just a thimbleful of my berry cordial,” my aunt requested. Joel brought my glass to me and took a chair next to my aunt. Our conversation lingered upon the sadness of the occasion, then gradually moved to my plans for the future. “What will you do with the house?” Joel inquired. “It is such a sweet little place. I have spent many happy hours visiting there.”
“It would be a shame to part with it,” my uncle said.
“I’ll close it up for now,” I said.
“It will make an e
xcellent pied-à-terre,” my aunt suggested.
“It would indeed,” Joel said. “With such a charming situation, perhaps your husband can be tempted to leave his sugarcane more often and join us here for the season.”
I took a good swallow of brandy, looking at Joel over the rim of the glass. Was it possible that he hadn’t guessed how I felt about my husband? Or was his remark just politesse, intended to distract my aunt and uncle? His eyes met mine, thoughtful, interested, there was a trace of a smile on his lips.
“My husband dislikes New Orleans,” I said.
JOEL’ SCASUAL REMARK was much in my thoughts as I went through Mother’s clothes, sorting some for charity and some for alteration. I had only a day to pack and close the house before my return to a place I hated for a duration I couldn’t anticipate. I felt like a prisoner who has been led from his dark cell into the daylight, shown a gay, lively, sunny world, and told, all this is yours, and whenever you can persuade your jailer to accompany you, you may see it again. As I worked, nostalgia and remorse visited me by turns, making each decision a kind of torture, as if a kerchief’s or an earring’s fate had momentous implications for my own. Peek and Sarah were in and out, taking up carpets, putting covers on the furniture, polishing silver and storing it in felt bags. What will become of me? I thought, turning a garnet brooch over and over in my hand. I could remember the exact shape and size of the box it came in, the deep wine color of the velvet bow, and my father’s amused glance in my direction as Mother pulled the ribbon apart eagerly. How had I moved so relentlessly from that bright moment to this one?
In the evening I dined with my aunt and we discussed my arrangements for the morrow. As I was leaving, she insisted on sending a servant with a lantern to accompany me back to the cottage, which was hardly necessary as the streets were well lit and the distance but a few blocks, heavily patrolled. It was a clear, chilly night, and as I passed beneath my neighbors’ balconies I could hear the muted sounds of talking and laughing, the occasional shout of pleasure as someone won at cards or delighted the company with a bit of scandalous gossip. How plain and quiet my own little house seemed in comparison, yet I felt again a pleasurable twinge of ownership as I put the key in the lock and opened the door into the darkened parlor. I lit the lamp and closed the shutter behind me. The room had a ghostly, abandoned look to it already. The furniture was covered in loose cream-colored cases, the grate was swept and dry. Peek had gone to her new mistress, and Sarah, I presumed, was asleep. I passed into my bedroom, which is never entirely dark, as the light from the street filters through the shutters. My nightdress was laid out upon the chair, the pitcher filled with water, the bed linens turned back invitingly. I undressed quickly, and slipped beneath the quilt. Tomorrow, I thought, I will not find so welcome a resting place.
Property (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 8