Feast of All Saints

by Anne Rice

  Richard laughed softly before he could stop himself, and it took him a moment to regain his composure under the man’s playful eye. He felt strangely at ease with Christophe, the man’s manner was compelling, even spouting this blasphemy outside Dolly’s door.

  “I want to thank you, Monsieur,” Richard said, “for helping me as you did.”

  “De rien,” Christophe shrugged.

  “If it weren’t so soon after Madame Rose’s death, perhaps Dolly could manage better, but they were so close, closer I think than mother and daughter usually are.”

  There came that mystery again to Christophe’s expression. “She was a witch!” he said.

  Richard was stunned.

  “And I’ll tell you something else,” Christophe said simply. “Dolly hated her.” He turned, cigar and match in hand, and walked quietly toward the back door.

  As Richard returned to the parlor, more and more callers were coming up the stairs. A short line formed behind the little prie-dieu before the child, and it seemed order had returned to the universe, the rosary soon commenced, and a decorous wake proceeded as smoothly as before. Christophe, coming in from the gallery, brought a chair up beside the white man, so they were soon tête-à-tête and as the hours passed, a faint picture emerged from the murmuring pair: they had known one another in Paris, had acquaintances in common, and had returned home together on the same boat. But this was subdued, slow conversation, and Vincent Dazincourt, obviously comforted by Christophe’s presence, soon lapsed into his own heavy thoughts.

  And burning to tell Marcel of Christophe, and burning to know more of Christophe himself, Richard would have forgotten the white man altogether after this night had it not been for another occurrence which left its imprint on Richard’s mind.

  At a very late hour, when the crowd had thinned somewhat and the rosary had already been said, another white man came up the stairs from the back courtyard, walking with a heavy tread down the high-ceilinged hall, his dark cape flaring to touch the walls on either side. This was Marcel’s father, Philippe Ferronaire.

  Richard had seen this man many times in the Rue Ste. Anne, and he recognized him at once. His yellow hair was unmistakable as was his large somewhat affable face with its pale blue eyes. Philippe Ferronaire appeared to know him also, and gave him a nod as he hesitated at the door. Richard could not know it, but Philippe had marked him often in the past, not only for his height but for the exotic slant of his eyes, the fine bones of his face and an overall beauty that struck Philippe as regal, reminding him of those African “princes” among his slaves who kept the women in thrall. Now he surveyed the small company, and turned to Vincent Dazincourt.

  He drew up a chair beside the listless figure, and Dazincourt turned with a start. His face evinced a faint and evanescent pleasure at being so surprised.

  Christophe, however, distracted him by choosing this moment to go. With a nod, he was headed for the stairs. Dazincourt rose for the first time during all these long hours and followed him. “Thank you for coming,” he whispered as he took Christophe’s hand. And after a moment’s hesitation he said gravely, “I wish you well.” For an instant Christophe merely stared at him. The words were ceremonious and final. And Richard felt himself stiffen as he looked away. But Christophe merely murmured his thanks and was gone.

  “Ah yes…the novelist, ‘sweet Charlotte’…” Philippe Ferronaire whispered afterwards when the two white men were again alone. They spoke in hushed voices until Philippe rose, his heavy cape unfolding thickly around him, and moving to the hallway, beckoned for Richard to follow him as he proceeded to the rear gallery over the yard.

  Richard’s limbs were stiff and his back ached. He wanted to stretch when he stepped out under the black sky but he did not, only breathing deeply as he looked up at the faint stars.

  Philippe Ferronaire lit a cigar and moving from the light of the hallway, leaned his elbows on the iron rail. A gas lamp flickered at the bottom of the curving stair, and beneath it in the rippling waters of a fountain Richard could see the sudden flash of goldfish beneath the pads of the lilies. The lilies were as white as the moon. The small stone figure of a child, dark with moss, poured water over all from the mouth of a pitcher and that low trickling seemed somehow by its sound to cool the air. Yet there were weeds everywhere, sticks of weatherworn furniture, and the buckling broken flags that signaled ruin all around.

  Richard glanced at Philippe who was also looking down. The man fascinated him because he was Marcel’s father, yet he had been thinking since Philippe arrived that it was rotten luck, pure and simple, for Marcel that the man was in town at this time.

  “Listen to me,” said Philippe in a low drawling voice. “There’s a boardinghouse in the Rue Ste. Anne…for gentlemen, a respectable place…oh, you know the place, right near the Rue Burgundy…that’s that young girl there, very pretty girl.”

  “Oh, Anna Bella,” Richard said emerging from his thoughts. The man had avoided saying this is just near the Ste. Marie cottage, or that the girl was Marcel’s friend. “It’s Madame Elsie’s, Monsieur, at the corner.”

  “Ah, that’s the one, you know it then.”

  “In passing, Monsieur.”

  “But you could get him a room there tonight, in spite of the hour?” He referred to Dazincourt obviously. He drew his pocket watch out, and facing the door again, checked the time. “He has to sleep, he can’t stay here till morning. And he won’t go back to the hotel, doesn’t want to be with his friends.”

  “I can try, Monsieur, and of course there are other respectable boardinghouses.”

  The man sighed heavily and leaning on the banister appeared to be looking at the dark sky. Lights glimmered behind slatted blinds across the courtyard; there was, as always, noise from the nearby cabarets that were sprinkled throughout the Quarter among shops and quite lavish townhouses. He moved his jaw a little as though chewing his thoughts. There was something heavy about him beyond his build, though in fact he was rather firm. It was more in his slow casual manner and the deep voice that drawled as he spoke. It seemed his most natural gesture would be the shrug, a gesture that would consume him easily, even to the loose twist of the mouth and a droop to the heavy eyelids and a rise to the mossy brows. Richard did not find him compelling in any way, could see nothing certainly of the Ste. Marie children in him, but he was not insensible to the fact that the man had the aura of immense wealth. There was something powerful about him, too. Perhaps it was merely that he was a planter, that he wore high riding boots even now, and this heavy black serge cape that no doubt protected him even in this sweltering heat from the cold winds on the River Road. He smelt of leather and tobacco, and seemed made for the saddle and some seemingly romantic ride through the fields of cane. There was gold on his fingers, and a bright green silk cravat, which he had apparently taken off in deference to the funeral, bulged from his jacket pocket. “Anna Bella, is it?” he whispered now. “What does she do there?”

  “She’s an orphan, Monsieur, but well provided for. Madame Elsie is her guardian. I do not think that she works in the house.”

  “Hmmmm…” he drew on his cigar, and the fragrance was sweet but strong, hovering about them in a cloud.

  “Pretty thing…” he muttered. “Well, you take him there when you leave, you can do that now, can’t you?”

  It wasn’t until near midnight that Richard’s cousin, Pierre, at last came to relieve Richard, and he set out for Madame Elsie’s with Monsieur Dazincourt. The man said nothing as they walked, seemed to be brooding and deadly tired, and though he was shorter than Richard—as was almost everybody—he was by no means of small stature. He had a near military stiffness to his back.

  As they passed the Ste. Marie cottage it was completely dark, as Richard had expected, but he realized now that Philippe Ferronaire was not stopping there, and it was for this reason no doubt that he had not taken Dazincourt to the boardinghouse himself. He had not wished to be seen passing, naturally. At least Marcel might hav
e some time.

  V

  IT HAD BEEN A LONG while since Richard had seen Anna Bella, except at Sunday Mass, and he was rather surprised when it was she who answered the front door. He was glad. He wanted a chance to talk with her alone.

  In the normal course of his life, Anna Bella was a person Richard would never have known and never have noticed. But Richard did not fully realize this. It was Marcel who had made them close, they were his best friends, and Richard had grown fond of her in the last few years, trusted her certainly, and was eager in his concern for Marcel to speak with her now.

  Anna Bella was to him, however, an American Negro having been born and brought up in the north of Louisiana in a small country town. Her father, the only free colored barber there and a very prosperous one, had been shot down one day in the street by a man who owed him money; and her mother having died some time before, Anna Bella fell into the hands of a kindly white man whom she always called Old Captain who brought her down to New Orleans to board with an elderly quadroon, Madame Elsie Clavière.

  In times gone by, Madame Elsie had been more than a landlady to Old Captain, but that was all past. He had white whiskers and a bald head, could speak eloquently of the days when Indians still attacked the walls of Nouvelle Orléans, and Madame Elsie, crippled in the damp mornings with arthritis, walked with a cane. But she had been a wise woman when young, saved her money, and turned her townhouse into a fine boarding establishment for white gentlemen, from which she herself retired to a parlor and several bedrooms beyond the courtyard in back.

  It was there that Anna Bella grew up, played with the neighborhood children, and had lessons in French and in the making of Alençon lace. She made her First Communion with the Carmelites, studied for a while with a Bostonian Protestant who couldn’t pay his rent, and drew from her father’s estate at a downtown bank all that she required.

  She was ladylike in dress and manner, wearing her raven hair in a thick chignon, and though she spoke French now fluently, English was still her native tongue, and to Richard she was most definitely as foreign as the Americans who settled the faubourg uptown.

  Of course, technically, he was as American as she was, but though born in the United States, Richard was a Creole homme de couleur, spoke French almost exclusively, and had lived all his life in the “old city” bounded on the one side by the Boulevard Esplanade and on the other by the Rue Canal.

  But there were more profound reasons why Anna Bella would never have gotten more than a glance from him had it not been for Marcel.

  For though she had skin the color of wax candles, a perpetual bloom in her cheeks that was a rose, and large liquid brown eyes heavily fringed with a sweep of soft lashes, she had an African nose, broad and somewhat flat, and a full African mouth. In addition there was about her stance, her long neck and the easy sway of her hips, something that reminded him all too much of the black vendeuses who carried their wares to market in baskets atop their heads. All things African frightened him and put him off.

  But this was not really known to him. If anyone had accused him of looking down on Anna Bella he would have been mortified, steadfastly denying it, and perhaps have gone so far as to insist that no such superficial judgment on the basis of appearance could cause him to dismiss a feeling, thinking human being, or even run the risk of hurting feelings as tender as hers. Was he not a man of color, he might have asked, did he not understand prejudice all too well, feeling its sting day after day?

  But the truth is he did not understand it. He did not understand that its nature is that it is insidious, a vast collection of vague feelings that can wind their way into notions that are seemingly practical in nature, all too human, and have sometimes the deceptive aura of being common sense.

  And in his heart of hearts, without ever voicing it to himself, Richard was repelled by Anna Bella’s Africanness because of what it represented to him, the degraded state of slavery that was all round, and he would never have considered for an instant infusing by marriage into his own line those strong indications of Negro blood which had proved so obvious and profound a disadvantage for three generations and had now all but passed from the Lermontants.

  These feelings, unknown, unexamined, led all too easily to a sense on his part that they were different, could have little in common, must move in different worlds. But the sum of it was that he did not consider Anna Bella his equal and the measure of it was the courtly manner in which he invariably treated her, the near fussy politeness that governed his actions in her regard.

  Of course had he fallen in love with her, he might well have thrown all this to the winds. But he couldn’t have fallen in love with her. And in fact pitied her slightly.

  But again, of all these things, he was unaware. And when Marcel once remarked in one of those dreamy and disturbing conversations that Anna Bella came nearest in his estimation to being “the perfect person,” Richard had been baffled in the extreme.

  “What do you mean, ‘perfect person’?” Richard had asked. Thereby opening the door to one of Marcel’s longest, most abstract and rambling speeches which seemed to culminate in this: she was honest in a selfless way, and would tell Marcel the truth when he needed it, even if it made him mad.

  “Well, it’s sometimes very hard to tell you the truth, I’ll admit that,” Richard had murmured with a smile. But the rest he didn’t understand. Anna Bella was a sweet girl, he’d break the neck of anybody that hurt her; she’d make some hardworking man a good wife.

  But he’d been a little surprised to hear Monsieur Philippe call her a pretty girl. And even now, watching her climb the steps ahead of Monsieur Dazincourt, throwing the light of her oil lamp before her, he found in the elastic movement of her hips, and the long low slope of her shoulders, something animalian and disconcerting. It was as if despite her carefully clustered curls and the pressed folds of her blue cotton skirt flaring so neatly from her whalebone waist, she was the black woman in the fields, the black woman swaying to the Sunday African Drums in the Place Congo. Very pretty? Well, actually…yes. He was not aware that Dazincourt who was plodding upward and down the long hallway after her had on the same matter decidedly more robust thoughts.

  “Richard,” she hissed at him from the top of the stairs when she was alone. He turned in the dim light from the fan window and saw her coming down in a hurry, like a little girl, her boots making not the slightest sound, the lamp held miraculously still at arm’s length.

  “You’ll spill that!” he said, taking it and setting it down.

  “Oh, I’m so glad to see you. I wanted to talk to you Sunday but I just couldn’t get the chance. Come in here Richard, Madame Elsie’s gone to bed; she’s all crippled with this damp weather, she can barely walk.”

  She drew him into the parlor which was for the boarders and told him to sit down. He disliked being here. He had never visited her in these rooms.

  “You’ve got to take a message for me to Marcel.” she said.

  “Then you haven’t seen him…I mean today.” There had always been the chance. In times past, when hurt, Marcel always went to Anna Bella. But that was before he had started to deliberately lose his mind.

  “Oh, I haven’t seen him in months!” she said, her head inclining to one side, her hands clasped in her lap.

  He murmured awkwardly that it was one of Marcel’s moods. It was a shame to treat her shabbily when before Marcel had visited her almost every afternoon.

  “It’s got nothing to do with moods,” she shook her head. “It’s Madame Elsie, she drove him off.”

  “But why?” he whispered.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said disgustedly. “She says we’re too old now just to be friends, me and Marcel. Imagine that, me and Marcel, you know how it is with me and Marcel. Oh, I don’t pay her any mind, not really, not when it comes to something like this. But I can’t get to see him long enough to tell him that. I can’t just go down there to his house anymore, she doesn’t need to tell me that, we’re not children.
”

  He nodded at once. He was embarrassed. He was not at all sure that Madame Elsie might not appear at the slightest moment and here they sat in this shadowy parlor with the light behind Anna Bella’s rounded shoulder, and he was wildly distracted by her breasts. It seemed that she sat with them deliberately thrust forward and her head back so that a sloping line ran from the tip of her chin to the tip of what was almost brushing his arm. He did not like it, did not approve of it. And if anyone had pointed out to him that his own sister Giselle carried herself in much the same manner he would have been amazed. All he saw when he looked at Giselle was Giselle.

  “Of course I’ll take a message to him for you,” he said at once, feeling guilty for these thoughts. She seemed trusting, simple, and her eyes were like those of a doe.

  “Just tell him that I have to see him, Richard…” she began.

  The door handle turned in the hallway. Several white men entered with the heavy tread of boots. Richard was on his feet at once and Anna Bella, taking the lamp showed the men up the stairs, leaving Richard in darkness. As soon as she returned, he headed for the door.

  “I’ll tell him as soon as I see him, but that might be a little while.”

  “Oh, but you’ll tell him for sure?” she asked. And again she dropped her head to one side. A long loose lock made a perfect curl against her pale neck. “Seems like I can’t go to market or to church anymore without Madame Elsie has to go with me, I can’t even get out the door. And then when he comes, she’s right there with him in the parlor and wants to know why he’s there. You never saw such nonsense…” she dropped her voice. “And then she leaves me here late to let the gentlemen in!”

  He did not answer her. He was staring at her, and then stammering, “I’ll tell him,” as he glanced at the floor. Above he heard the creak of the floorboards, the click of a lock. The house seemed vast, dark, and treacherous to him then as he slowly raised his eyes, and he felt an anger rising in him slowly and somewhat coldly so that he could not quite understand her words.