She was Aníse, I was Arthur.
XVI
What Came to Pass
Aníse had the further worldly sense, or maybe it was only intuitive fear, to avoid the question of marriage, knowing full well my awareness of the legal aspects underlying our impending event.
We had a TV, 12”, black and white, but soon tired of The Honeymooners, Sgt. Bilko, Ed Sullivan and the rest. I cooked supper and read what I considered to be classic novels. She read modern maternity magazines and made lists. She sometimes filled me in on what would happen, when and why. And, as if in context to who we be, she reviewed what had come to pass, enumerating our unusual courtship, our budding romance, our blossoming love. I did not back-quote these concepts but smiled, allowing these evenings to pass in pleasant contemplation of the past, just as our neighbors to the north might have done. Still I wondered: courtship?
She filled me in on the balance of her family’s rich history. Mose Cohen arrived in Guadeloupe in 1905 or ’06 and kept on sailing and fishing out of those islands, more or less returning to Guadeloupe between trips. Luzon died in ’05, but Mose didn’t learn of his father’s death for another twenty-three years and didn’t imagine it, as the tale goes, because nobody knew Luzon’s age, neither in exact years nor in approximate years. Time was measured for Luzon only from his departure from the Allston place in Rockville in ’64, when he was likely not younger than twenty or older than forty-five.
Mose was said to have turned an eye west in longing for kinship after his first few years of fishing the shallow seas, but then he gave in to the distraction in both eyes as they filled with Rochelle Goussard, who ran a café there at Basse-Terre, the strategic location of which could attract fishermen from both the Atlantic and Caribbean fleets, though they weren’t fleets at all but men fishing alone or in pairs from small, open boats. Still, they had to eat.
Mme Goussard held an attraction for Mose that was greater than the warmth and sustenance of her beans and baguettes. Her husband had died, though he, the husband, returned some years later to claim his share of the café and cause Mose no end of trouble. In the meantime Rochelle Goussard let Mose know that she needed help and a man. He must’ve been close to thirty-five and feeling the rigors and solitude of a life at sea. He settled in to café work for brief periods, heading out behind whatever schools were running, thereby keeping the café afloat with supplemental income while keeping himself buoyed on Rochelle’s charms.
Mose and Rochelle bore a daughter named Julia in ’11, so named for the mother he missed most of all.
Julia’s childhood was chiefly notable for her precocious conversational skills, practiced daily with tourists, mostly French, and with fishermen making up most of the local clientele. All too soon, at age sixteen, which was, after all, the age her father had left home, Julia fell for Antoine, whose last name was lost or more likely discarded. He was a Parisian far older, well into his thirties, which was nearly the age of Julia’s father. Antoine came for a week but stayed an entire month, professing a quick return to the island paradise, once he had time to arrange his affairs back in Paris. Antoine’s departure was chiefly characterized by passion and vows of eternal love, or maybe it was only the time they spent together that he would forever cherish.
Julia was left inconsolable to everyone’s dismay, especially Mose, who couldn’t trust a Frenchie of such egregious affectation, continuing demands and ill manners—and who stank worse than last week’s grouper. Rochelle, the mother, was neither disappointed nor surprised, having seen her share of tourists over the years promising one thing and another for ever and ever on their way home to arrange affairs, so eternal love could begin in an orderly fashion. Perhaps most dejected of all was Claude Coquelin, Julia’s amour and peer and apparent betrothed ever since childhood and even through the transition to adolescence, with its hormonal complexities. The story sounded like a parallel universe just like the one Anne and I bonded in, to a state I thought of as love. The big difference was that Claude’s and Julia’s infatuation solidified at age nine or ten, given the sultry air and sensual inclination of the place. That is, they had sex. We have sultry air here too, but the inclination is more social than sensual.
At any rate, Julia broke Claude’s heart just as her own was broken in her head-over-heels tumble for Antoine. Both hearts seemed crushed more thoroughly still, when Julia woke up retching soon after Antoine’s departure. The bilious noises emanating from the small house of the pretty young girl was evidence, for all to hear, of the ultimate love sickness. Though never to be seen or heard from again, Antoine’s lingering presence grew obsequiously in Julia’s swollen womb.
Claude pined, but Julia vowed to wait her man’s return from Paris.
Yet even a child of sixteen knew the score after six months with no word. Wiser still after eight, she crossed the line to everyone’s relief with a blue-black baby girl showing mottled gums to match. So the baby was Claude’s after all; Antoine was pale as a baguette and just as soft. And so old. Never mind; the child was Claudia, who soon charmed the tourists. It was 1927, and the world seemed bright and sunny, surrounded by gentle seas of crystal clarity.
Mose sailed west to Wadmalaw the following spring, arriving at the Edisto after ten days reach under steady trades. He hung out on a slack ebb for six hours before easing in like driftwood. Julya expired soon after hearing of her granddaughter, Julia. She heard as well of another generation promised by the baby Claudia, who would become Aníse, whose eyes welled in the telling, grateful that her great-grandmother heard her name. Julya passed as Mose spoke of warm, clear water and little fish of amazing color.
Aníse cried, either for her great grandmother trying to see the little fish or for herself seeing them again, or for something amiss.
Was Julia banging Claude at the same time as Antoine? Or after Antoine left? These questions seemed indelicate in the face of such emotion, and who cared anyway? I was sixteen in ’27 and saw those teeming schools of garish color and profound innocence as she described them, because I’d visited those reefs in my dreams. That was long ago, but there I was, dreaming again, and at my age.
Claudia married Jules Monfret in ’44, when she was sixteen. A dear man, he couldn’t keep up and died in ’51. She wiped her eyes, as if his passing was not grounds for mourning.
“Couldn’t keep up?”
“Yes. He want to and try so hard. But he could not do well at all without his sleep. Now he get all he need.”
“That sounds dispassionate.”
“Yes. I did not love him. I was too young. You can’t tell a girl anything, you know.”
“Seems uncanny, all the girls and boys got married or left home at sixteen?”
“Yes, we have our pattern, but everyone do, you know. I think I marry Jules because his name is Jules, you know, like my mother and my great grandmother. I think it is meant to be, but it is not. Yes, it come to be but I force it, not the same as meant to be.”
So she worked the café a few years after Mose died in ’56 and still when Rochelle passed in ’59.
Julia and Claude separated then; love and life had run its cycle, and both had many good years remaining. In their mid-forties, life seemed long on such an early start, without twelve years taken by school, with education flowing from the wide world in many voices.
Claude farmed and fished. Julia worked the café with Claudia, who stayed on till Etienne Gaulois showed up for variations on a theme. Etienne brought records and a record player and a vision of himself as the disk jockey. His rhythm rolled steady as waves on a beach. He could not stand still but moved incessantly as a downbeat with a scat or loose lyric trickling from his lips. So too nobody stood still in his presence. His step was contagious as a head cold; Etienne sneezed, soon the crowd was juking. Or so the story went, his mystique deriving from his rhythm. He’d played trombone in a ska band, could play trumpet too for a lighter touch and sometimes went to tuba that could sink a tune into your bones. What was a girl to do?
I hated the imagery, trombone, trumpet and tuba. “Girl?”
“Yes. Would you not call me a girl?”
“You were what? Thirty-one? Thirty-three?”
“I’m still a girl. What you think sometime. I don’t know.”
“How old was he?”
“How old? I don’t know that too. Why you ask, how old? What difference, how old? Old enough to be a man. Not so old as you.”
“Thank you. So he was younger than you?”
“Yes. Not by much. A few years. Not more than ten or twelve.”
“I’m getting the picture. He’s thirty years younger than me. So you feel safe with me.”
“Yes, I do, Arthur. You do make me feel safe.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What do you mean?”
“So he was the great love of your life?
She looked away. She gave it time. She looked back. “J’ ne sais pas.” She didn’t know. “Not yet.”
Oh, yes, Aníse’s conversational skills were impressive for impact on few words; she turned the screws on two syllables. I think she needed a great love of her life and wasn’t particular how old he was, if he measured up to devotion, duty, loyalty, security, performance and so on, which likely holds true for most women.
“So he was a white man, Etiénne Galois,” I deduced.
“No. He was black, not black like me but black as any Frenchman. Nobody knew his real name. Abdul or Aziz. Something like that. He was Algerian, much worse than native French.”
“How’s that?”
“Arabs. They are different.”
“You mean from you and me?”
“Yes. Jules Monfret, my husband; he was white.”
“Oh, boy.” I hadn’t had a drink in weeks but needed one to melt the shadows cast late in the day over my woman’s past.
“Why you say, ‘Oh boy?’”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the same for … It’s that …”
“If you must know, he was quite beautiful. I would do anything for him. Anything.”
“You mean Jules, your husband?”
“No. Jules was different. I mean anything for my boyfriend. So? Whatever you imagine, now I would do it for you. That make you the winner. N’est pas? Come. Let me show you something.”
“Oh, please!”
“Non! You want to torture yourself? Okay. I will help.”
So she showed me what I’d won, a jackpot of sorts, beyond my wildest fantasy at seventeen or fifty-seven. Or was it fifty-eight already? Never mind, because the mind won’t work under certain stress. Besides, I was too dull to imagine at seventeen and too afraid to admit it at fifty-seven. Yet I would have paid dearly for the sight then before me at any age or price.
Well, there I was in the front row and paying dearly for it. But, I suppose, happy to be rid of the resource. Drink? Not necessary, not yet. Maybe in a minute or two.
Meanwhile I recalled on a trip to town recently, my hat pulled low on a surreptitious route to the tasks at hand. I took the back streets and alleys less trafficked than the gadabout byways.
I’d stepped out of Maiden Lane onto the wide sidewalk but stopped short at the invisible wall, bouncing back around the corner into cover. Closing my eyes and calming my breathing, I waited for the unpleasantness to resolve and go away. For there, standing by her black Mercedes, demonstrating her propriety interest and quacking disconsolately at Elspeth Pinckney over Helen Lachicotte’s God-awful she-crab soup, was my own ex-Eudora. That soup was based in heavy cream! It near stopped her heart and liked to run her something fierce—it laktuh roo-un me sumpth’n fee-iss, Ah sweah’t did.
But the fat was naught next to the sherry on top; I mean, if you want to have a drink then you ought to have a drink. You don’t sit down for dinner and pour it in your soup for heaven’s sake!—Ah muyeen, ifya wonna hayuv a drank, yota hayuv a drank …
Eudora most often wanted a drink. Besides, what could she do, not eat it? Which she couldn’t, I mean, my God; and the horrendous difficulty of finding a parking place these days; it’s enough to make you wonder.
I didn’t mean to eavesdrop but only to make life easier for all parties concerned. What could we do, make small talk? Assess soups or air out some issues?
“Yes,” Elspeth said, looking down her nose in her officious way at the teeming refuse yearning to be free who lurked just below radar. She officially affirmed the fatty soup, then digressed poignantly: “Well, it’s like you say on Arthur’s little escapade. Birds of a feather flock together. He is reaping exactly as he’s sown. To each his own, because you can never forget that a man is judged by the company he keeps.” Buhds of a feathuh flock togethuh … It wasn’t easy, holding my peace, that a stitch in time saves nine. And a penny saved is a penny earned.
Yet as I mused on life passing in a dream cliché, Eudora asked, “What was he thinking? I know a man his age wants to be a young buck again. I can assure you he isn’t. But I can’t get over his carelessness, out there humping that Jemima. What’d he think? He wouldn’t get a … disease? God knows where she’s been. Did he think she was immune from preggers, just because she’s convenient, and he’s white?”
“Yes, well,” Elspeth said, “It has been my experience, that the male of the species …”
And so on, back to Eudora, who cheerfully speculated on a yard child named Covingdale, which, of course, “… he’d nevah, evah allow, even if it meant taking up lawyering again, which he wadn’t much good at in the first place, but my Gawd, you’d hear some Covingdale bones roll over on that one if he didn’t.” Firmly agreed that I would assuredly avoid the legacy issue, they proceeded to further amusing visions of a pickaninny in the living room, rhetorically asking if social standing would be better with a high yellow rather than a blue gum, which, by the way, Eudora understood the wench to be. She further wondered if Junior would become a partner in the firm. Ha!
I backed up Maiden Lane as Luzon had backed into the forest a century or so ago, gaining distance from the shrill titter on every step. That I was more reflective than him is conjectural, though I perceived monumental difference between Eudora and Aníse, in their manner and approach to society and life. Aníse would no sooner call Eudora a white bitch or make casual reference to Elsie Borden than she would cross a road to pick a fight at random, or to call out bad tidings that couldn’t help anyone but might hurt someone. Aníse was superior in the moment, more evolved and more compassionate; not that I needed superiority, but she was. Both in charm, appearance and intuition, which are mostly what’s left to any person of seasoning, Aníse was superior.
Eudora, on the other hand, seethed with vindication for the social wrong heaped upon her, bad marriage to bad soup. What could ever be the purpose of telling Eudora of the difference between Aníse and the black stereotype? Even seeing those characteristics in person, Eudora would remain blind to them, or more likely hostile. Eudora would see nothing but black, as if variation on that theme was inconceivable.
I didn’t mind walking the three blocks long way around to Johnston’s Feed for some chicken scratch so we could feed the biddies near the boxes I’d built, so they’d lay us some eggs. I also needed some new dungarees and my own pair of gloves. Then it was another four blocks, long way around back to the small market I used for frozen lima beans and Brussels sprouts. It troubled me to stop for olive oil and lemons on the way back out at the James Island Piggly Wiggly, known to the landed as the Jim Island Pig, but cold-pressed, extra virgin was more than a luxury; it separated me from angina on a daily basis. And don’t forget your vitamin C, which I got a few bags of as well.
Those menial tasks were hardly notable, but something accompanied those errands besides the difference between Eudora’s rancor and my contentment. Blissfully humble, I felt the joyous potential of fresh eggs out in the country. And residual uncertainty lingered on that trip home, not social standing; Aníse would bear a blue gum in keeping with genetic patterns. What niggled then was the direct chal
lenge to common sense.
What was I thinking? Frankly, nothing.
I wasn’t thinking at all, not a few days ago on the way home or now. I simply gazed upon the new little woman in her unconditional, animalistic ministration of love. If I’d had a telephone I might have called Eudora then and there, to tell her the answer to her question, because it had preoccupied me too till the answer practically erupted: nothing at all was what I’d thought.
We simply be, Aníse and I, with terrific relief. Those miles south from Jim Island were simply logical, a pleasant transition from one life to another. I won’t wax rhapsodically on sugar plum fairies dancing in my head, though I did anticipate some lima beans, Brussels sprouts, and some leftover fried fish with lemon and salt as soon as we finished this romp, me and my musty woman. And to think, I was worried about who she was and where she’d been and who with and so on. I showed her my appreciation and sensitivity in love. Soon we’d have dinner, and she would expound further on her longstanding interest in nutrition and feeling good to the maximum.
XVII
A Long Row to Hoe
Nine months is a long pregnancy in the best of conditions. Given the inside-out adaptation to the tenuous new world of our making, the seconds ticked off one at a time. But then nine months would soon enough prove incidental to the years remaining. Nothing would change for the better after the birth; our days and nights would thicken with sleep deprivation, baby shit, bawling and the end of romance, as it were. Surely to follow would be the end of all else between us.
That’s how it was, peaches and cream one sunny day to cold porridge that night. I knew the score, that Aníse was practically a generation my junior, and though she could rouse a head of steam I’d thought long gone, I knew what her skills would come to. Wadmalaw women were fat, some of them waddling fat, and they bore none of the salacious charm I’d been drawn to. What could a woman her age do to get her shape back after a pregnancy?
In a Sweet Magnolia Time Page 24