Forever

by Pete Hamill

  “She never stopped being angry,” the countess said. “And when Napoleon sold Louisiana to the Americans, she was angrier than ever. Anger kept her alive. It was her food.”

  They had a small house with a garden on Royal Street and a piano in the front parlor. They had two slaves, both women: a cook and a woman who cleaned. When the Americans arrived after 1804, all wild and bearded and wearing the skins of animals, drunk and mean-eyed men, as they said, from the back of beyond, whooping and raising rifles in the air, her mother had added a male slave to guard the doors, armed with an ax. His name was Jacques. The piano teacher stayed on, and the countess played every day, escaping from the anger of her mother, and the growing disorder of the town. And finally, when she was sixteen, after pleading and sobbing and many tantrums, she convinced her mother that they must go to Paris.

  “She sold the women slaves,” she said, “and freed Jacques, closed the house, and we sailed away.”

  She met M. Breton at the Conservatory, where he was teaching harmonics and violin. She tried to explain to Cormac how handsome M. Breton was then, in spite of the way he limped (from a wound at the Battle of Wagram), how reckless he was, how charged with passion. He talked without pause, about Goethe and Schiller and Madame de Staël, names she’d never heard in New Orleans, about the endless possibilities of music, about painters, about the way Napoleon was changing all of Europe and all of history. He became the first man she ever slept with.

  “It was like a summer storm,” she said, “without warning, without time for escape, and I have never regretted it. Everyone should fall in love in such a way, at least once.”

  M. Breton was eleven years older than she was, twenty-eight to her seventeen, a brilliant violinist, his music brooding with regret or exploding into exaltation. He had been too young to savor the enormous excitements of the Revolution, but he remained, in that year before Moscow, a passionate follower of Bonaparte, who had repaired all the errors and excesses of the Jacobins and restored the nation to glory. Or so he said. The loss of three toes on his right foot and part of his right femur at Wagram kept him out of the Grand Armée. But as he limped along the marble halls of the Conservatory, and through the streets of Paris, he kept telling her that all French honor, all European honor, was now derived from Bonaparte. M. Breton played his violin for soldiers in hospitals and at the funerals of the fallen. He cheered at parades.

  “That was the only thing he did without sarcasm: cheer,” the countess said. “And I cheered too.”

  Then came Moscow, and the end of the myth of invincibility, and the long, slow, violent fall that followed. When M. Breton looked up with clear eyes, the streets were filling with cripples and widows, and Napoleon Bonaparte was on Elba.

  “By then, my mother and I were gone,” the countess said. “We were back in New Orleans. We arrived three weeks after Andrew Jackson defeated the British, and my mother found her two women, and Jacques too, paid them for their services this time, and we tried to make the house a home. Now I gave lessons too, for there was not enough money, and my mother was still angry.”

  Nine months later, M. Breton arrived like a corsair. He courted her again, courted her mother too, charmed their friends, who were enchanted by his music. And so they married. A year later, a child died stillborn. One rainy summer night, M. Breton sat down and wrote a letter to his wife, explaining that he could not look at her without thinking of death, and then he vanished. There were a few letters over the next few years, from Mexico, from Havana, from Italy. A few lines here, a few lines there. She did not see him again. Until now.

  “All true stories are unhappy ones,” she said, once more protected by irony. “That’s the essence of the romantic.”

  When she was gone, he fell into bed in the dark, thinking of the Countess de Chardon, and remembered where he was living when she was in Paris: that small sweaty room on Reade Street, and a woman whose face was now dim in memory and whose name was gone. Those were the years when he began thinking about women in categories that he knew were unfair: episodes, chapters, events, stories. As if each woman were a mere book taken down from a shelf, to be examined, pondered, and closed. He had no more women than other unmarried men, just more time. Year after year after year. All the time in the world. Everything could wait, including the possibilities of love. He learned in those years to avoid learning too much about a woman, because knowledge would make parting more wrenching, for her and for him. It was unfair, and in some cases cruel, but that came with the strangeness of his life.

  Now he knew much more about the countess than he had learned in all the months that came before, but the knowledge gave him no comfort. His stomach churned. He wanted to go down the hall and lie with her. He wanted to confront M. Breton. He lay there until night melted into dawn.

  77.

  He paid for the burial of Beatriz Machado and her son and the girls. The adult coffins cost two dollars each and the children’s seventy-five cents. A preacher from the African Methodist Church spoke over the coffins, and they were placed in the earth of a small cemetery near the Bowery. Some of the neighbors were there, and when it was over they hugged, whispered words of regret, and went their separate ways. Cormac thought: I have gone to too many funerals.

  For four days he worked harder than ever at the newspaper. On one of the days, he talked to three politicians about the way New Yorkers were at last able to elect a mayor, and what that would mean to the future. He covered the suicide of a stockbroker, caught embezzling, and wrote a story that was not printed. “I know the poor lad’s family,” said Bryant, waving the story away. “They’ve suffered enough.” On the following day, he visited a house overrun by rats, where women were beating at them with shovels while policemen laughed and small boys took target practice with rocks. He wrote a story about the American settlers in Texas and their revolt against Mexico, which refused to let them own slaves. He interviewed Samuel Colt, visiting from Hartford, who was showing off his new invention, the six-shooter. He did an article about the men who were paving lower Broadway, all of them Irish. He wrote for the Evening Post. He read the New York Herald.

  He left the house on Duane Street early each day and returned late. He dined one night with Jennings, who was still sickened by the slaughter of Beatriz and her grandchildren, and did his best to console the man. He found an inn where the steak was tender. On the third night, he bathed alone in the room where the women of the house washed away the aromas of their work. He saw little of the countess. Then, on a rainy Saturday night, he was at his pad of paper again, working up finished drawings from tiny sketches made on the street. His fingers ached for the piano, wanting to bring music out of his head and into the air. The door burst open and M. Breton stood in the frame. His hair was unruly. His shirt was open to his chest. His mustache needed trimming.

  “You, Irishman,” he said in English. He had been drinking.

  “Come in,” Cormac said.

  “I am in.”

  “Then close the fucking door.”

  M. Breton closed the door and gazed around the small studio. He glanced at the books and studied the drawings.

  “Laurence Sterne?” he said. “Jonathan Swift. Théophile Gautier? Goethe… You’re a reader.”

  “When there’s time.”

  “I’m a musician,” he said with a shrug. “Musicians don’t read. They feel. They play.”

  “I’ve heard you play,” Cormac said.

  M. Breton waited as if expecting a blow.

  “You’re very good,” Cormac said.

  M. Breton sighed. “Not as good as I once dreamed of being.”

  “But very good, nevertheless.”

  “Merci. Do you have anything—”

  “I don’t drink. But I can pull that cord near the door and—”

  “Cognac,” he said, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Cormac ordered cognac from the black servant who answered the pull of the cord.

  “I came to apologize,” M. Breton said, and asked if Co
rmac understood French, and switched with Cormac’s affirmative nod. “I’ve come here, Irishman, to apologize.” There was a scatter of rain on the windowpanes. “I have disrupted your life. My wife has told me the story, and of your… arrangement, and of how you have comforted her.”

  The hall porter arrived with a bottle of cognac and two glasses. M. Breton poured a glass for himself, offered the bottle to Cormac, who declined, then inhaled the aroma of the drink. His features seemed to loosen.

  “I loved her from the day I met her,” he said, staring into the glass. “She was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen.”

  “She’s beautiful now.”

  “Of course. But then she was still innocent. Then she was still flowering in music. I would see her, and sing. I would think of her, and play.”

  Cormac thought: Please don’t say “We were meant for each other.”

  “We were certain to destroy each other,” M. Breton said. “Music made her innocent. It made me corrupt. And corruption is always stronger than innocence.”

  He drained the cognac and poured another. The rain spattered the windowpanes now, and from away off to the west, Cormac heard thunder.

  “So, Monsieur Breton, why did you come here?”

  He looked at Cormac for a long beat.

  “To die.”

  He didn’t know where he had picked up syphilis. He was sure it was after he abandoned his wife in New Orleans. It could have been in Mexico City, where he played violin in a bordello on the Calle de la Esperanza; or in Vera Cruz, among the Africans and Indians and mestizos of the waterfront; or in Havana, where he lived for three years in a house on the Malecón facing the sea. He wanted the sun, not the cold drizzle of Paris. He wanted bodies warmed with the sun. He wanted to coarsen his talent with drink and women and the smothering stupor of heat. He found his way to Martinique, so that he could speak in French, and cursed Bonaparte for a fool, with his dreams of conquering arctic Russia while he had Louisiana and New Orleans and the islands of the southern sea.

  “He could have ended his days glazed by the sun, a free man,” he said. “But his vanity was too strong. He ruined himself. He ruined France. He ruined Europe.”

  He was happiest in Italy, where he landed in 1829, playing in Frenchified Milano, wandering on foot south to Tuscany, to Florence, listening to madrigals in cathedrals, on to Rome, then back again, instructing the children of the Italian rich. He was already sick, although the first stage had faded, and cognac was the only consolation. Until suddenly some guttering ember of his youth burst into flame. Charles X in France decided to bring back the hard old authority of the hard old regime, smashing freedom of the press and dissolving parliament, and M. Breton knew what would happen next. He took a coach to Paris in time for the July Revolution.

  “I wanted to die on the barricades,” he said. “A properly romantic death. One that would absolve all my sins.”

  He was wounded in the taking of the Hôtel de Ville, with a bullet through his side that just missed his kidneys, and did not see the celebrations after the August abdication. A woman nursed him back to health, a woman who loved him, who took him to the countryside near Lyons, who fed him, who dressed him and bathed him. When he could walk again, he fled.

  “I could not give such a woman what I had,” he said. “Could not kill her with my prick.”

  He shrugged again, shook his head. He was quiet for a long time. The storm rumbled around the New York streets. The windows trembled.

  “I don’t sleep with her,” he said, motioning at the door and the apartment of the Countess de Chardon. “You should not worry.”

  He stood up heavily.

  “I wish you’d play something,” Cormac said. “There’s some melody of yours that I’ve never heard before….”

  “Berlioz,” he said. “It’s from the Symphonie Fantastique.…”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  M. Breton sighed. “Yes.” He gazed around the room. “But not tonight.”

  Three nights later, M. Breton insisted on a dinner for three in the suite of the countess. The service was handsomely laid out, with golden light from gas lamps and candles and the silver gleaming. There were oysters, and cheeses, and chilled wines, and veal and asparagus and small roasted potatoes. He had bathed and was crisply dressed, his shoes polished, his cravat precise, his fingernails scrubbed. The countess looked at him in a cautious way, laughing at his jokes, accepting his pouring of the wine, nodding at his ruminations on the fevers of politics.

  “I must play,” he said, and then took his violin and limped a few feet to the side, and gave them the aching, then soaring melodies of the Symphonie Fantastique.

  Cormac saw tears welling in the eyes of the countess and held her hand. She placed her other hand on top of his. When M. Breton finished, he took a mock bow, and they applauded him.

  Around three-thirty that morning, M. Breton hanged himself.

  She buried him in St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. Cormac did not attend. She returned with her face dry, and he sensed her anger struggling with her pity, as it must have struggled within her mother after Haiti. But she said nothing and he asked no questions. She had his own old custom of closing a book and leaving it closed. With his door open, he heard her tell the maids to air out the rooms and cast out the clothing of M. Breton, and place his violin in its case on a high shelf of a closet. That night, they resumed the habits of their lives together. In the morning, he sat down again to run his fingers on the keys of the piano.

  And yet it was not the same. A shadow had fallen upon them, as indefinite as any shadow. On a primitive level, it was simple: He knew too much about her now and she knew nothing of consequence about him. The old symmetry of unknowability had been upset. But he’d learned something about himself too. After so many years, he could be jealous. He could tremble with anger and weakness and need. As old as he was, that tangle of nerves still lived within him. And he knew a larger truth: He loved this woman.

  Just after dark on December 16, the countess came to his room.

  “They’ve done it,” she said. “Pearl Street is burning.”

  Cormac dressed quickly in warm clothes, with beaver hat and lined gloves, for it was a frigid night, pocketed a sketchbook and pencils, and went out. High up on Duane Street, he could smell smoke, carried by the north-blowing wind, and peering down Broadway he saw a glow in the skies above the First Ward. He heard the dong-donging of warning bells and shouts of alarm and the strangled din of human voices. He turned his back to the wind, which blew more fiercely as he came closer to the harbor, clogging his eyes with cold tears. Thinking: Fire again. Like the fire that took my father’s body to the Otherworld. Like the fire that destroyed the earl’s mansion in Ireland. Like the fire that leveled the fort in 1741. Or the fires from the start of the Revolution, those great blazing, wind-driven fires that even toppled Trinity Church. Earth, air, fire, and water: the elements of the world.

  When he arrived at Pearl Street, the firemen were already wild with panic. The icy wind whipped the flames, shifting, turning, creating immense orange flames and whirlpools of fire, as if playing some evil game with the puny structures made by men. The pumps didn’t deliver the water that was needed. The water itself was frozen beneath the ground, in the shallow wells, in the rotting wooden pipes of the Manhattan Company. The water that did flow quickly froze in the canvas hoses. In the orange light of the flames, Cormac saw cobblers and coopers backing away from their burning homes, blankets draped across their shoulders, their children wailing, their wives mad with loss. A woman in a shawl raced toward the flames, screaming, “Our silver, our wedding silver!” A fireman tried to stop her, but she plunged through the great orange wall and didn’t come back.

  “Fucked,” a fireman said. “Too much wind and too little water. We’re absolutely fucked.”

  And so they were.

  For hours, with his fingers freezing in their gloves, Cormac moved through the crowds, swollen now by other New Yorkers who had c
ome to witness the calamity (or to bring blankets and soup to the dispossessed). There was no control, nobody in charge. Sparks and embers rose into the purple sky, and to Cormac looked oddly beautiful, like very slow fireworks. Those sparks and embers fell upon the shingled rooftops of other buildings. Beams crackled, bottles exploded and popped, and then there was a great whooshing sound as a roof came down upon an upper floor. Followed by the sound of an immense coal chute as the roof brought down everything with it: beds and books and nightgowns, silverware and tools, crockery and etchings, boots and crinolines and andirons. Some people wailed as the artifacts of their lives vanished. Some looked too stunned for human feeling. The smoke made all of them choke and cough, and Cormac tied a handkerchief across his mouth and nose. Men were leading horses to safety up Broadway, but he could smell burned horseflesh from the midst of burning buildings. Dogs howled. Men cursed. Carts arrived to help evacuate houses in the path of the flames, the cartmen tripling their prices for the night. Cormac the painter made sketches. Cormac the newspaperman made notes. One fireman told him that the fire had started at 88 Pearl Street, near the corner of Exchange, and was discovered by a watchman named Hayes. Another said that fifty buildings had been burned in the first fifteen minutes. Some citizens blamed the volunteer firemen for the chaos, saying they were nothing but amateurs, if not criminal gangs. And what was more, some were looting the burning homes, stuffing their pockets with silver and tools and pistols.