by Anne Rice
Marcel drew in his breath. His expression changed like that of a soldier being called to attention, and through the dreamy exhilaration induced by the beer, he felt quite clearheaded suddenly and miserable.
“Monsieur, I have only the most profound respect…” he began. He was vaguely conscious of putting his hand over his heart. He saw her again, beautiful, asleep against her pillows and he shut his eyes. He had the overwhelming physical sense of that soft flesh right where her arm pressed against her breast. The room moved.
“Yes, I remember that,” Christophe said. “But are you a gentleman?” the voice was harsh. Marcel looked up again to see Christophe’s face somewhat hard as it had been before. “Well?”
“Ma foi, I mean to be always!” Marcel said. “I’ll never darken your door again, I swear it.”
“That’s not my meaning. Shall I make it clear?”
“Yes?”
“If I ever hear one word spoken by you, or by anyone…about what passed beneath my roof this afternoon, I will know that you are no gentleman. And I’ll break your neck.”
“On my honor, Monsieur, I swear.”
“Good. Because I mean what I say. And if you mean what you say then we can both look forward to the school. Now come on, your mother’s likely to send for the police if she finds you’re gone. Get up, get up! You’re going home.”
Marcel nodded submissively. “You don’t despise me,” he whispered, as he all but fell off the stoop into the cooler air of the street. He found himself gazing up at the women on the overhanging porches, dark shapes against the dimly lit windows beyond. A thinning but still spirited crowd moved on the banquettes under a silent and faintly fragrant rain. Marcel extended the open palm of his hand to feel the droplets.
“Now do I need to walk with you?” Christophe asked. He drew on his delicate cigar. It was clear he did not wish to leave.
“Oh, no,” Marcel said, cocking his head, “I’m quite myself. When shall I come?”
“It will be a while, I have to fix the house, you know what state my house is in, it’s about to collapse, but in a few days I can give you some studying to do on your own. Tell your mother, if you wish, that I’ve accepted you, that is, if it will help with your disgrace. I’ll be advertising the school. Now go on, it’s raining on top of everything else, I want to see you off.”
Marcel moved swiftly away. There was a small tavern at the end of the next block, a tarnished light in the darkness. He moved toward that light, and then turned to see if Christophe was still there. Christophe stood on the brick banquette before the cabaret and with his arms folded appeared to be looking at the sky, or perhaps at the windows of the bordellos across the way. He dropped the butt of the cigar and ground it into the brick with his boot. And without looking after Marcel, he went back into Madame Lelaud’s. Marcel meantime pushed his way into the tavern, jostled on all sides by the massive shoulders of the workingmen and getting his elbows onto the bar and his boot onto the slippery rail, managed to down three mugs of beer in rapid succession. Now certain he could feel no pain he plowed through the dark muddy streets toward home.
Cecile sat in his room, clutching a blue satin wrapper about her, and cried bitterly as he fell headlong onto the bed. “I’m too tired, Maman,” he said, as his eyes closed. For a little while he knew she was still there, walking back and forth. He could hear her choked and angry sobs. But then he was gone.
PART THREE
I
AT TWELVE NOON a mild breeze from the river carried the ringing of the Angelus over the rooftops so that Marie on the settee in the parlor of the cottage put down her needle and thread, and shutting her eyes, began the prayers to herself without the movement of her lips. Her long straight black hair was parted simply in the middle, unbraided, undone; and casually, without thinking of it, she ran her hand beneath its silky weight and shook it loose over her shoulders. It descended like a veil on either side of her face.
She did not feel well, and invested the prayers with her full concentration, her mind for the moment cleared of all that tortured her, her face devoid of expression. She had slept miserably the night before, a prey to thin dreams of Marcel’s troubles, and she had heard her mother crying in the night. At dawn she had been awakened to be sent on a peculiar errand to Monsieur Jacquemine, her father’s notary, in the Rue Royale, an errand which violently confused her, and coming home had had the misfortune to meet Richard Lermontant in the street and cry in his presence, and even now, some hours later, she was still on the verge of tears.
In addition, the Rue Ste. Anne was in an uncommon commotion. Juliet Mercier’s son, Christophe, the famous Paris writer, had returned the night before, and this morning he and his mother had been quarreling so fiercely that glass was broken, screams erupted from the town-house, and finally the famous man himself, his shirt open at the throat and tie streaming, had run into the street shouting with a clenched fist at his mother over the garden wall, while she with wild witch’s hair banged shut the blinds of a high window with such force that they broke, clattering down to the flags below.
A crowd had gathered, neighbors hovered at their gates, and Mercier at last stomped off, but only after demanding of one and all where a man might order a decent meal with something to drink without being thrown out of the establishment for being a nigger. Trunks lay helter-skelter on the corner for thieves to steal, and five different women had come to the cottage to relate to Cecile these amazing details.
Marie showed no interest in this matter, but merely continued to make small embroidery stitches in a scarf as though she liked this kind of work when in fact she loathed it. Far from distracting her from her fears for Marcel, this confusion in the street seemed rather some absurd amplification of what was in her mind. She stopped occasionally, taking deep silent breaths, and stretched her long fingers out against the muslin of her skirt.
Cecile, muttering disdain for such disturbances, and pacing as she had since morning, at last took up her parasol and on the pretext of an errand went out, obviously to see some of the spectacle for herself.
Of course Marie knew who Christophe Mercier was.
She had seen his Nuits de Charlotte on her brother’s desk, and one evening Marcel had come bounding down the steps of the garçonnière with a freshly done ink sketch of the man which he turned over and held up to the shade of her lamp, demanding to know if she could detect in it the slightest disproportion. Impressed with his skill, she confessed she saw none, and gave him quickly from her armoire an empty oval frame with glass intact that he accepted at once as if it were a jewel. Dazed for the moment by her brother’s passion she had thought little of the subject of the portrait at all.
Until on long slow nights this summer, she had overheard that name again and again as Richard and Marcel, lingering after supper, spoke of his wild Parisian life, often forgetting that she was near. Richard’s voice was a deep rumble at such times, and lounging with legs outstretched, his large heavy fingers gesturing against the lamp, he cast a man’s shadow, and now and then filled the small rooms of the cottage with a man’s laughter. Of all the young boys she knew, brothers and cousins of friends, or the few companions Marcel brought home, Richard alone had stirred in Marie some new and painful fascination.
She had always been fond of him, and had always known that Marcel loved him. And loving Marcel as she did, she could not help but see Richard bathed in a flattering light. But there was more to it than that, he had become a presence to her, something baffling in its intensity, and on dreary afternoons when she was dull and tense from the silence of the cottage and her mother’s unspoken irritations, she found herself more and more often wondering if Richard would not corne by. She listened for his voice at the door, for the sound of his foot on the path.
Quite recently, after the death of a mother of a friend, she had seen him presiding with his father at the wake when he had not known that she was there, a man among the mourners, attending to all manner of details with an adult’s ease and
something gentle and reverent that struck in her a resonating chord. Later on the steps of that house, his father had taken her hands, called her Mademoiselle, and expressed his affection for Marcel. She with downcast eyes had felt a sudden anguish, a desperation as if something utterly precious, something more than she had ever wanted in her life before, might be torn from her for reasons she could not know. In the night she would awake with a start to her empty room, the tiny porcelain light flickering on the tester, and find that she had been thinking of Richard, not dreaming of him, merely thinking of him, in her sleep.
So hanging on his words on balmy evenings, when the candles burned low, and the smell of strong coffee rose deliciously from the steaming pot, she had learned something of Monsieur Christophe Mercier without ever meaning to learn it—that he was a famous novelist and a writer of pamphlets about the arts, that the boys idolized him and lived for the day that he might come home.
Well, he was home and quarreling in the street. And it was no wonder. His mother, Juliet, was as terrifying as a voodooienne, and it seemed to Marie, something evil lurked in the long and ruined house at the corner. The silhouette of that reclusive woman moving from one dim window to another was repellent, like the slime that oozed from the crevices of her walls.
Could it be that the famous Christophe, having been gone so long, had failed upon coming home to realize what everyone knew full well, that the woman was mad? It was tragic if he did not know.
But it was remote. Marie thought of Marcel who by noon had still not come down from the garçonnière, and when the closeness of the parlor became too much for her, or the sewing had put her teeth intolerably on edge, she put it aside and wandered to the back of the cottage to look up at the shuttered window of her brother’s room.
It was all the same.
Sun glared in puddles from a morning rain that had cooled nothing, and the fronds of the banana trees hung listlessly against the plastered walls. Behind drawn blinds, Lisette and Zazu dozed while the pots simmered in the open hearth, and above Marcel’s room on the great thatch of blue Morning Glory that dipped its tendrils to his door, a swarm of insects gave off the only sound, a murmur that seemed the murmur of the heat itself.
Still as a statue, her hands loosely clasped before her skirt, Marie looked at these things, wanting to wake Marcel but never dreaming of actually doing it, afraid as she was of the scene that might inevitably follow, when he learned how things stood.
Early that morning, Cecile had dictated a note to Marie for the notary, Monsieur Jacquemine, demanding that he attempt to reach Monsieur Philippe at once on urgent business. Cecile’s face was drawn, and though primly dressed, her hair was yet undone and disheveled and there was a slight puffiness beneath her eyes. She had paced, summoning up her words with effort, and at last concluded, “It is a matter concerning Marcel Ste. Marie who has been expelled from school and behaves badly.” Marie was appalled. For an instant she had stopped, bent over the secrétaire so that her mother could not see this, and when she went on the writing was uneven, a word misspelled. Of course she had known Marcel was expelled, she had learned it the night before, but what shocked her and to some extent even for the moment revolted her was that her mother would report this to Monsieur Philippe.
“Take that to his office, go!” Cecile had said, and her back to Marie, she moved into the dark bedroom where the blinds had been drawn against the heat. Marie had turned slowly and looked at her mother, at the hunched shoulders, at the flared and flounced muslin skirts.
It was then that Cecile had spun round and flashing a similar virulence to that she had shown the evening before in Richard’s presence, hissed at her daughter, “Go, do you hear me, go!” Her teeth were clenched and she had made of her hands two small trembling fists.
A peculiar sensation passed through Marie then. She felt chills. They moved over her arms, up her back, and up the back of her neck. And looking up, she met her mother’s eyes for the first time since Richard had blundered out of the cottage the night before. There was a subtle alteration in Cecile’s expression, no more than a flicker, and hastily she turned her back again.
Marie watched her calmly, watched her lift the soft mass of her skirts and blend with the shadows, leaving behind her in the air only the sound of her hasty halting breath, the sudden gurgle of water being poured from a pitcher into a glass. It seemed then Cecile made some sound, something that was almost a cry. But Marie merely folded the note and left.
Walking steadily toward the Rue Royale, her parasol too far back on her shoulder to shelter her from the clear sun, the heat of the bricks rising through the thin leather of her slippers, she felt herself blinded by an uncommon emotion, uncommon in kind and uncommon in intensity: this was anger, an anger bordering on rage.
Marie did not think in words as Marcel did. She did not talk to the mirror, nor write out “thoughts” on paper, and even in the Cathedral where she often went alone on Saturday afternoons to kneel for an hour in a pew nearest the altar of the Virgin Mary, there was no outpouring of her soul that was articulate, she did not pray in words.
And those rote prayers she uttered at such times—as she did each morning and each night and with the ringing of the Angelus, or when the beads of her rosary passed through her hands—those rote prayers had precisely that effect they were intended to have when invented centuries and centuries before: they ceased to be language and merely became sound, a rhythmic repetitious sound that lulled the mind and slowly allowed it to empty itself. So that divorced from what others call thought it was free to know itself in terms of the infinite, in terms of that which language has only begun to approximate if not destroy. Marie saw images at such times like blazing icons. Eyes fixed inwardly on the sufferings of Christ, she pierced all the mundane visions of the dusty Jerusalem streets through which He dragged His Cross and felt with a violent chill what was beyond the words of the missal in her hands: the pure nature of suffering for others, the meaning of the Incarnation: and the Word was made Flesh. The concept of goodness was real to her, as was the concept of the good life.
She understood this, just as throughout her life she knew her own feelings, was not given to self-doubt, spoke with quiet confidence, and seemed to possess no need to confide. In crowded rooms she could often through her own veil of silence perceive keenly the feelings of others—this one’s hurt, and that one’s anxiety—and the meaning of rapid verbal exchanges here and there, their injustice, their superficiality, their basic lie.
But when she was confused, when some emotion swept her violently for which she was utterly unprepared, Marie became lost in it, groping for a language that might help her discuss it in her own mind, and finding none, was shaken as if some force inside of her might rend her limb from limb.
It had been this way for her that morning, as she pushed steadily with the note through the muddy streets, toward the office of Monsieur Jacquemine, stopping mechanically at curbs for carts she did not see, oblivious to the shouts from a gallery doorway, her eyebrows raised, her lids lowered, in what seemed between the long shadows of her shimmering hair the very countenance of calm.
Envisioning over and over her mother’s face, hearing again and again that hiss of her words, she felt once more that extraordinary chill that had come over her at the secrétaire, the very chill she felt at keen moments in her prayers, a tiny rising of the delicate down on her flesh, a shock that seemed to paralyze, though somehow the body moved, step by step with unerring instinct, on its way.
She could not abide what she felt; yet she could not stop it. All she could do was continue her violent pace, and that movement alone soothed her, seemed constructive, though the nature of the errand filled her with loathing and with fear.
There had never been closeness between them, Marie and Cecile. They had never talked to each other, did not seek each other’s company, and moving swiftly through what had to be done in life—sewing, dressing, straightening, the preparations of a fine feast day table—they fitted hand in
glove in the cottage, knew nothing of argument, and held for each other not the slightest surprise.
Childhood had seemed timeless in this regard. It was the way it was. But of late, a shadow was between them, growing in depth, a shadow thick and cumulative like a cloud. It was perhaps that Marie had begun to think about their life, and roaming sometimes after school through rooms of other families, mothers and daughters at cluttered dressing tables with pins and cologne, had begun to see beyond the seemingly inevitable fortress of family to other worlds.
It was little things. Gabriella Roget with her fingers clasped tight to her mother’s eyes, steering her with waltzing flounces to the mirror, saying, “Not yet, not yet, very well now, look!” Peals of laughter at a birthday table, brothers and sisters quarreling for the last bit of cake with pinches and mischievous looks; or young Fantin on Gabriella’s bed, teasing, “I know what Maman wants to do, Maman wants to get ahold of that hair,” so that “Maman” turning from the dresser said, “Oh, do let me brush it, Marie, just let me take it down once, your mother won’t know, oh, just look at that thick straight hair.”
Things that ran to nonsense, kisses, defied memory or made up afternoons unmarked, so that a vague feeling collected in Marie, something that felt subversive, must stop, but did not.
At home with a rigid face Cecile watched the ticking clock over the covered dishes and when at last Marcel’s step hit the door, motioned again for the reheated soup to be served. He was animated, cross, picked at things; yet all the worse was his absence, when silence lapsed back like dreary waves on a winter beach. He must have his bath water hot, not so much milk in his coffee, you know how he dislikes it, call him again, did you forget to darn his shirt? So that at odd moments, when mother and daughter wandered alone from room to room with no sound but the soft closing of the armoire doors or the rattle of a rosary drawn from a small chest, a sense of dread overcame Marie. It was awful this dread, it was like fear of the dark when she was a child, that amorphous something that lurked in shadow beyond the dull glow of the Virgin’s face above a vigil flame, or guardian angels in a brass oval on the wall paper, clustered with giant feather wings about the tiny figure of a golden-haired white child.