"What do you know about Genevi?ve Jumon, Mama?" He brushed with the backs of his fingers the smooth green-and-pink cheek of her coffee cup where it sat on a table at her side. "May I warm this for you? Or yours, Minou?"
"Trashy cow," said his mother, and bit off the end of her thread.
His sister Dominique gave him a brilliant smile. "If you would, thank you, p'tit."
The coffee stood warming over a spirit lamp on the sideboard in the dining room. The French doors were open onto the yard, and he saw Bella, his mother's ser vant, just coming out of the garqonniere above the kitchen, where January had slept since his return from Paris. On plantations, the gar?onni?re that traditionally housed the masters' sons were separate buildingsthe custom of a country, January remembered from his childhood at Bellefleur, that preferred to pretend that those young men weren't making their first sexual experiments with the kitchen maids. Among the plac?es in the city the motivation was reversed: few white men wished to sleep under the same roof as a growing young man of color, even if that young man was that protector's own flesh and blood. Since January's return a year and a half ago, Bella had resumed her habit of sweeping the gar?onni?re and making his bed, in spite of the fact that January conscientiously kept his own floor swept and daily made his own bed.
His efforts in that direction, he understood, could never meet Bella's standards. Presumably, should St. Martha, holy patroness of floor sweepers and bed makers, descend from Heaven and perform these tasks, Bella would still detect dust kittens and wrinkled corners.
"I hope you're not going to mix yourself up in that scandal of your sister's," said his mother, when he returned with three cups of coffee balanced lightly in his enormous hand.
It was the first time in eighteen months that he'd heard his mother refer to the existence of any sister other than Dominique. The first time, in fact, since before Lou isiana had been a state. She raised plum-dark eyes to meet his, bleakly daring him to say, She's your daughter, too. Child, as I am a child, by that husband who was a slave on Bellefleur Plantation-the man whose name you've never spoken.
It was astonishing, the pain his mother could still inflict on him, if he let her.
Instead he said, casually, "Olympe has asked my help, Mama, yes. And I knew you'd never forgive me if I didn't at least go down to the Cabildo this morning to try to find out why Genevi?ve Jumon's daughter-in-law would hate her enough to put a gris-gris on her."
His mother's eyes flared with avid curiosity, but she caught herself up stiffly and said, "Really, Benjamin, I'm surprised at you. Of all the vulgar trash. And Dominique, that isn't yarn you're sewing with, I can see that buttonhole across the room."
Livia Levesque was a widow nearing sixty and still beautiful, slim and straight as a corset-stay in her gown of white-and-rose foulard. She had worn mourning for exactly the prescribed year for the sake of St.-Denis Janvier, who had died while January was a student at the Hotel Dieu in Paris; later had worn it not a day longer for her husband Christophe Levesque, a cabinetmaker of color whom January recalled only as one of her many male acquaintances during her days of placage. Black, she had declared on several occasions, did not suit her complexion. Her father had been white, though she had to January's recollection never even speculated as to who he might have been. Her daughter by St.-Denis Janvier had added to her mother's exotic beauty the lightness of skin and silky hair so admired by white men and by many of the free colored as well. Dominique glanced worriedly sidelong at her mother, apprehensive of a scene, and then said "Poor Paul! And the children-are they all right? Shall I send over Th?r?se to help?" "You'll do nothing of the kind," snapped her mother. "That girl of yours doesn't do her own work for you, let alone looking after some laborer's children, not that she'd have the faintest idea how to go about it. As for Genevi?ve Jumon, I'm not surprised her daughter-in-law wanted to do her ill-I'm astonished the girl didn't poison her instead of her son. A more grasping, mealy-mouthed harpy you'd never have the misfortune to meet. She's been above herself for years, for all that she started out as one of Antoine Allard's cane hands."
She shrugged, exactly as if she herself hadn't worked in the fields before St.-Denis Janvier bought her. "She's had nothing but ill to say about Fortune G?rard since he rented the shop floor of Jeanne-Fran?oise Langostine's house for his business-he sells coffee and tea, and charges two pennies the pound more than Belasco over on Rue Chartres-that she wanted, not that she's ever made a hat that didn't look as if a squadron of dragoons had been sacking a florist's." She opened the top of a heavy-pleated sleeve and produced a white paper sack of what turned out to be goose down, which she carefully shook into the space between the outer sleeve and its thin gauze lining, so that the sleeve rapidly assumed the appearance of a gigantic pillow. After ten years of marriage to a dressmaker, January was familiar with the style, and he still marveled at the sheer ugliness of it.
"I daresay she was good-looking enough that Laurence Jumon bought her of Allard, back during the war, for four hundred and seventy-five dollars," his mother went on, "but that's nothing to give herself airs about. Allard's asking price was six hundred and fifty and Jumon bargained him down. Jumon always did drive a warm bargain." No thought seemed to enter her head that St.-Denis Janvier must have bargained with her former master in just such a manner. All January could do was shake his head over the detail and comprehensiveness of her knowledge of everybody's business in town. He wondered if Marie Laveau bought information from her. If not, she should.
"Wasn't it Laurence Jumon who bought those matched white horses last fall?" Dominique fit a gold thimble onto the end of her middle finger. "With the black-and-yellow carriage?" "They looked like fried eggs on a plate," replied her mother. "And they'd been bishopped. In any case grays are a stupid thing to get in a town that's hip deep in mud ten months of the year. That's all the good they did him; forty days after he laid out the money they were pulling his hearse." She began to set the sleeve into place with neat, tiny stitches, and January marveled again at the linguistic convention that termed white horses "grays." Typical, too, that his mother had adopted it: most slaves just called them white.
"So why did C?lie Jumon buy a gris-gris from Olympe?" asked Dominique, eager as a child. "And why do they think the gris-gris ended up poisoning Isaak instead of Genevi?ve?" "Olympe says the gris-gris had nothing to do with Isaak's death, that it wasn't poison at all," said January. "What I'm trying to learn now is, where was Isaak Jumon between Thursday, when Genevi?ve swore out a warrant distraining him as her slave-" "Oh, shame!" cried Dominique.
"Sounds like her," remarked Livia Levesque.
"-and his death on Monday night. Not to mention such things as why Jumon didn't leave a sou to Genevi?ve, which he didn't."
"She'd have poisoned the boy herself, I wager, out of spite." "Mama, surely not!"
"Could she have? Isaak would be staying as far away from Genevi?ve as he could. He didn't take refuge with C?lie's parents..."
"He wouldn't have anyway," said Minou, gathering a length of mist-fine point d'esprit over the head of the other sleeve. "Monsieur G?rard never liked Madame Jumon, even before the shop rental incident, because of her 'former way of life.' He was mortified nearly to death when his precious daughter C?lie married her son. Although after thirteen years you'd think Monsieur G?rard would forget about Genevi?ve being a plac?e. I mean, everyone else has, and he's always polite to Iph?g?nie and Phlosine and me when we come into his shop. Although just the other day he said to Phlosine-"
"Thirteen years?" January set down his cup. "Thirteen years? I thought... I mean, I know Jumon never married, so there was no reason for him to put his plac?e aside..."
"No reason? That hypocritical moneybox, no reason? And it wasn't he that left her," Livia added, returning her attention to the sleeve. "She left him, or rather bade him leave, for she kept the house and the furniture and all he'd given her. And Jumon did marry, two years after that, to get control of his mother's plantation I daresay, which she wasn't
going to turn loose to any man who hadn't done his duty by the family and given her a grandson. Not that it did him the slightest bit of good, or her, either. She went to Paris. The wife, I mean."
"Wait a minute-What?" It was unheard of for a plac?e to leave her protector. "Genevi?ve left Jumon? Why?"
"Jealous," snapped his mother. "She heard there was marriage in the wind." "Oh, don't be silly, Mama, you don't know that! " protested Minou. "And no one-I mean, we all know..." She hesitated, looking suddenly down at her sewing, and a dark flush rose under the matte fawn of her skin.
"We all know men marry?" finished her mother. Dominique drew a steadying breath, and when she raised her head again, wore a cheerful smile. As if, thought January, it mattered little to her that the fat bespectacled young planter who had bought her house for her, and fathered the child who had died last year, would not one day marry, too. "Well, if she's as grasping as you say, she wouldn't have let him go for a little thing like that." She made her voice languid and light. "Hmph," said Livia, unable to have it both ways. "At any rate, that whining nigaude No?mie-his wife-went back to Paris, and Laurence's maman sold up the plantations, and the brother's never had a regular mistress at all, so far as anyone knows." She shrugged. "Laurence Jumon never breathed a peep. When he was sick back in twenty-four he gave Genevi?ve money to buy both their sons from him, in case he died, and they'd still be part of his estate. That mother of his would have sold off her white grandchildren, if she'd ever had any, never mind her colored ones. Jumon and Genevi?ve had parted company by that time, but he paid every penny to educate those boys, not that anything ever came of that. For all the airs Antoine and his mother give themselves Antoine's just a clerk at the Bank of Louisiana. And Isaak..."
Her gesture amply demonstrated what she thought of a boy of education becoming a marble sculptor. "He's as bad as you, Ben, wasting the gifts M'sieu Janvier gave you..." "Not wasting them at all, Mama." January smiled at her. He'd long ago realized that being annoyed at his mother would be the occupation of a lifetime. "M'sieu Janvier paid for my piano lessons as well as for Dr. Gomez to teach me medicine. I think as long as I'm making money at one or the other.. "
"Not much money."
But January refused to fight, though the wound hurt. "So Genevi?ve turned M'sieu Laurence out, because of this engagement-it would have given him control of more property, surely? A plantation?"
Livia looked as if she'd have liked to enlarge on her son's folly and ingratitude, but in the end she could no more resist slandering a rival than a child could resist a sweet. Besides, reasoned January, the conversation could always be brought back around to his shortcomings. "Trianon," said Livia, with spiteful satisfaction. "And another one across the lake. Genevi?ve must have hoped to make free with some of the proceeds. But Madame Cordelia sold them up, and put the money in town lots. If she'd held on-"
"But you see," said Dominique, "Genevi?ve and Isaak have been estranged for just years. Isaak was the only one of the boys who was still friends with their father-and I always thought poor M'sieu Laurence seemed terribly lonely. He'd come to the Blue Ribbon Balls and chat with us girls, and be so gallant and sweet, not like a lot of the gentlemen who look at you so when they don't think you can see, even if the whole town knows you already have a friend. All he wanted to do was dance..."
Livia's sniff was more expressive than many books January had read.
"No, truly, Mama, we can tell." Dominique gently discouraged Madame la Comtesse de Marzipan, the less obese of Livia's two butter-colored cats, from playing with the ribbons she was sewing on the sleeve. "At any rate, when he was taken sick last fall, both Isaak and C?lie visited him every day. At least that's what Th?r?se tells me, and her cousin was one of M'sieu Laurence's maids. When M'sieu Laurence died he left Isaak-oh, I don't know how much money, and some property as well, I think."
"He left him a warehouse at the foot of Rue Bienville, half-interest in his cotton press, a lot on Rue Marais and Rue des Ursulines, which if you ask me isn't worth seven hundred dollars, fifteen hundred dollars' worth of railway shares in the Atlantic and Northeastern, and three thousand dollars cash."
January didn't even bother to inquire where his mother had obtained these figures. He merely whistled appreciatively. "Not bad for a marble carver living in the back of his employer's house. I presume they've only been waiting for the probate."
"Which would have gone through a lot more quickly had not four-fifths of the judges in this city turned tail and fled at the first rumor of fever."
"Well, yes," said Dominique: "But also, M'sieu Laurence's mother contested the will. You are going to do something about it, aren't you, Ben? Not about the will, I mean, but about Olympe being arrested? You can't let them-I mean, they won't really..." She let the words hang her trail off unsaid.
January was silent. Madame la Duchesse de Gateaubeurre prowled idly into the room, levitated effortlessly up onto his knee, and settled her bulk, making bread with her broad soft paws.
"Olympe wouldn't have done such an awful thing!" insisted Dominique. "And as for C?lie G?rard having had anything to do with it-stuff! Why would she have wanted to kill her husband?"
January remembered that sweet-faced child turning away from Shaw, her hand pressed to her mouth with the shock of having confirmed the doubts that had tormented her through the horror of the night. Mamzelle Marie's words rose to his mind: a thousand reasons men will think a woman poisoned a man.
C?lie, Isaak Jumon had said. And died.
"I don't know," he said thoughtfully. "Maybe I ought to find that out."
"I knew about the will, yes." Basile Nogent rested his forehead for a moment on his knuckles, against the shoulder of an infant angel carved to look like a white boy. The sculptor was small and middle-aged and had the sad thinness to him that sometimes befalls men when their wives die. The empty silence of the other side of the little cottage, the stillness of the yard where the kitchen doors gaped dark and deserted, told its own story. January knew that thinness, that shadow in the eyes. It was what had driven him from Paris, what had driven him back to the strange land of his tangled birth roots and the only family he had.
It was clear to him, as if he had read it in a book, that Isaak and Celie had been this man's family. And now Isaak was gone.
"Isaak never spoke much about his family to me," Basile Nogent said, in the hoarse rough voice of a consumptive. "He told me once that he wanted to put them behind him and, another time, that he forgave them, both father and mother, for what they were, for what neither could help being."
He shook his head. "An old quarrel, he said. And I understood that it was a pain that he-that Isaak-knew he had to overcome. He saw his father many times, and his uncle Mathurin. He'd meet them near the coffee stands at the market, or in a cafe on the Place d'Armes; sometimes he'd go by the big house on Rue St. Louis and sit in the courtyard and talk. It is not good when families divide like that, for whatever reason. There." He pointed to the marble block of a half-carved tombstone, like a classical trophy-of-arms: sword, shield, wreath, and cloak. A graven ribbon looped the sword hilt, bearing the legend JUMON. "Mathurin Jumon commissioned that last September, at his brother's death."
A quirk of irony broke the grief of that wrinkled face, and he ran one thumb-a knob of muscle like a rockover the curls of the cherub's temple. "There is a species of insanity that strikes when a will is read. I have wrought marble for forty years..." His gesture expanded to touch the two rooms of his little shop, to the doors that opened into a yard filled with yet more images still: a dog, sleeping on a panoply of arms; two putti struggling, laughing, over a bunch of grapes; Athene with her owl reading a book. "As three-quarters of what I do is to decorate graves, I see people every week who have just heard wills read." His breath whispered what might at another time in his life have been a laugh, and he coughed again. "I always told Isaak that when I die I'm going to be like the savage Indians and have everything piled up in a big pyre and burned with me."
&
nbsp; The sculptor again briefly closed his eyes. Did he think he could hide the thought that went across them? wondered January. The grief that asked, Who do I have to leave it to anyway? And the same, he thought, could be said of himself. And for an instant the memory came back to him, suddenly and agonizingly, as if he had found Ayasha's body yesterday; as if he had never seen that picture in his mind before this moment. As if he had not awakened every morning for twenty-two months in bed alone. Ayasha dead.
He still couldn't imagine how that could be possible. Couldn't imagine what he would do with the remainder of his life.
"He was-a good boy." Nogent's voice broke into January's grief, like a physical touch on his arm. "A good young man." The rain that had been falling since early afternoon, while January had been on the streetcar to the American faubourg of St. Mary to teach his three little piano students there, finally lightened and ceased; a splash of westering sunlight spangled the puddles in the yard.
"Tell me about Thursday," said January. "About the day they came for him."
Nogent sighed again, as if calling all his strength from the core of his bones to do work that had to be done. "Thursday," he said. "Yes." He led January to the back of the shop, where the light struck a simple block of marble. At first glance the headstone seemed unadorned save for the name, LIVAUDAIS. But sculpted over the block was what appeared to be a veil of lace, the work so exquisitely fine that the very pattern of the lace was reproduced, draped half over the name, the name readable through it-a truly astonishing piece. "We were working on this for old Madame Livaudais. Two-two City Guards came with the warrant. Isaak put aside his chisel and looked at it, and said, 'This is ridiculous.' Very calmly, just like that. To the men he said, 'I see my mother has decided to waste everyone's time. Please excuse me for just a moment while I get my coat and let my wife know where I'll be.' Cool-cold as the marble itself. But the way he touched the block"-Nogent mimicked the gesture, resting his palm for a moment on the flowered delicacy of the counterfeit lace's edge, holding it there, bidding it farewell-"I knew."
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