by Anne Rice
“Dolly, what is it!” he whispered. The scent of verbena came from her. Her hand was ice cold.
“Help me home, Richard, I cannot…” she whispered, stopping again, her lips pressed together. “Help me. Let me lean on your arm.”
He rose at once, ushering her out into the sun.
She didn’t speak. She had to stop twice. Once to catch her breath, and another time, she put her arm about her waist as if she were in pain. It was only three blocks to her house and finally he had tucked her against him, his right hand under her right elbow as he lifted her weight from her feet.
It did not surprise him to find no servant for the door. Or to see the house dark behind closed blinds and in some disarray. A lot of new furniture stood about the parlor and flies swarmed over a ruined dinner beyond the double doors.
He settled her in a chair by the window, telling her he would get water for her at once.
“You’re kind, Richard, you’re always kind,” she whispered, and lifted up her veil to take a deep breath.
He was just turning to go when he stopped with a start.
In the shadows he had not seen that a man lay sleeping on the couch. And the man was rising now on his elbow, squinting at the distant blinds. Seams of light lay across his face. It was Christophe.
“Dolly?” he asked, shielding his eyes from the thin glaring light.
“It’s gone,” Dolly said. “It’s gone.”
“She’s ill, Monsieur,” Richard whispered. He didn’t understand Dolly’s words.
“Did you see the doctor?” Christophe scrambled to his feet. He smoothed his jacket haphazardly.
“It’s no use,” she whispered. “It started last night.”
Richard was looking everywhere for a pitcher and a glass.
“You shouldn’t have gone out,” Christophe said almost angrily. He was beside her and she let her forehead rest against him.
“It doesn’t matter,” she was saying as Richard went down the passage. “It’s always the same. One month, two…and then it’s over. I don’t know why I let myself hope. I don’t know why I thought that it would be any different this time.”
There was a pitcher by the bed in her room. Richard filled the glass and brought it to her, and she took it, trembling, and put it to her lips.
“Should I call Madame Celestina?” he asked.
“No,” she shook her head. And Christophe, so that Dolly could not see, made a more emphatic negation to Richard with a jerk of his head.
“Come lie down,” Christophe said, helping her to her feet.
Richard waited silently at the door of the parlor until Christophe had returned.
“You’re a marvel with women in distress, has anyone ever told you that?” Christophe asked.
“Monsieur, she is in bad pain.”
“I know that,” Christophe said. “I’ll go for Celestina if it gets worse. She is not close with Celestina now.”
Richard said nothing. He too had heard the story of Dolly’s infamous return to the “quadroon balls” the week after little Lisa died.
“But she is very ill, Monsieur,” he said. He could feel nothing but compassion for the fragile woman who had clung to him all the way from the Cathedral. He could tell his mother about this. His mother would come. Celestina wouldn’t stop his mother. Nothing would if Dolly was really ill. Richard’s mother spent half her life visiting the sick, caring for the aged, her small Benevolent Society of women of color was her life outside the family, the only life she had. “Monsieur,” he asked now. “Do you know what is wrong?”
This caught Christophe slightly off guard. He studied Richard’s face. And Richard realized that Christophe did know what was wrong and that Christophe was a little surprised that Richard did not.
“It will pass,” he said.
That evening, when the supper was finished, Richard sat with his mother on the rear gallery over the garden and told her the story of his meeting with Dolly Rose. When he came to the mention of Christophe in the house, he told this as delicately as he could. He repeated Dolly’s conversation. His mother’s face had stiffened at this mention of a man alone with a woman in her flat, but now her face became remarkably sad.
“She is ill, Maman,” he said to try to explain why he had burdened her with this indelicate tale. “And there was only Christophe.”
His mother sighed. She rose and put her hands on the railing as she looked down into the yard. “Mon fils,” she said, “Dolly can have no more children. She cannot carry them. I’ve heard this from Celestina before. Now it’s happened again.”
For a moment Richard felt no compassion when he heard this. It confused him. It was dreadful to think that she had lost a little baby just so soon after little Lisa’s death, but it was dreadful to think that she had gone to the “quadroon balls,” too. It was dreadful to think of all the scandalous things that were said of her and the endless procession of men in her life. “Is it such a tragedy, Maman?” he asked gently.
“She was a good mother, Richard,” Madame Suzette said. “She would have been a good mother till the day she died. You see, for a woman like Dolly that is everything. Men mean little. They come and go. Nothing of honor or dignity endures there. But the child, that is la famille, that is all.”
She took her place in the rocker beside him, straightening her skirts. “I’ll call on her, of course, but there is nothing anyone can do.”
Richard knew so little of bearing children and losing children that he naturally accepted this without a word. But he was strangely unsatisfied. He felt uncomfortable that he had told his mother this tale, uncomfortable that he had spoken so plainly of Christophe sleeping in Dolly’s parlor, quite at home there when they had come in.
“You’ll forgive me, Maman?” he whispered slowly, “for burdening you with all of this…this matter of Christophe…” his voice had deepened, trailing off.
“I know why you mentioned it, Richard,” she said. She tilted her embroidery ring slightly toward the light from the window behind her.
Richard felt his cheeks burn. He tried to make out her face, but the light behind her illuminated only the loose fine hairs of her coif.
“You mentioned it because you wanted me to tell your father. You wanted your father to know that your teacher is courting Dolly Rose, and all of Antoine’s vicious gossip about him is therefore a lie.”
Richard was speechless. He should have known this could not be kept from his mother, no matter how rank and shocking it was. And if she was right, that he had told her this tale tonight to counter Antoine’s gossip, he was amazed. He had not known it himself. But she knew it. She knew it all. She had witnessed Antoine’s horrified expression at the supper table, observed those whispered sessions with Rudolphe behind closed doors, and Antoine’s shock when this Paris Englishman whom he accused of the vilest, most appalling, and most mysterious proclivities had appeared in New Orleans at Christophe’s door. But that Richard and his mother should speak of these things was out of the question. Richard and his father couldn’t speak of them. And Rudolphe had only vaguely alluded to them to try to warn his son that Antoine was “losing his mind.” “It’s the dirt people talk in the Quartier Latin in Paris,” Rudolphe had waved it away, indignant. “Don’t you listen to it, and don’t you think of it. And above all, don’t you repeat it for it could ruin young Christophe.”
Richard, thunderstruck, had been all too willing to obey.
He sat stunned now, unable to look his mother in the eye.
“Don’t worry, mon fils,” Madame Suzette went on in a hushed voice. “Your teacher is apparently quite enamored with Dolly Rose. That Dolly has reciprocated his affections is the reason that her godmother, Celestina, is so put out. Celestina!” she sighed. “Celestina was not so shocked as you might think that Dolly returned so soon to the ‘quadroon balls,’ those women are so very practical!” She paused as though considering, and her voice was intimate, unusually candid as she went on. It was the voice reserved for other
women when sewing together they confessed the vulgar facts of this world to one another with a weary shake of the head. “But a man of color courting the lovely Dolly, how is Celestina to abide that? Why the good Celestina and the good Dolly have never put anything into their coffee but the purest white milk.”
Richard winced. His eyes were fixed on the shifting trees, and the sudden flicker of a star beyond which was as suddenly lost.
“It won’t come to anything,” Madame Suzette sighed. “Dolly is already being seen in the evenings by a white gentleman, and I trust your clever schoolteacher knows what to expect. They are all the same, those dear ladies, they and their mothers before them, and their grandmothers before they were born.” She reached out to touch the back of her son’s hand. Richard’s fingers clasped hers, but otherwise he didn’t move. “Celestina,” she whispered, “and Dolly…and old Madame Elsie,” and dropping her voice for emphasis, “and the proud Madame Cecile Ste. Marie.”
Long after her hand had withdrawn from his he remained perfectly still. He was staring out over the darkened yard. Love her as he did, he could not tell her what he was thinking, he could not confide. She reminded him softly that his Vacquerie cousins were coming to dinner soon, lovely girls. Theirs was a family as old as her own, as respectable, older than the Famille Lermontant. He didn’t speak. He was not there. He was standing in the grove behind Marie’s house. He was holding Marie in his arms.
III
IT WAS OVER FINALLY, the first day of class. Marcel was the last to rise, and a knot of students still lingered with Christophe at the lectern, waiting their turn for a few words as Marcel went out of the room. He stood in the hallway on the new Aubusson carpet gazing through the door of that long back study where two of the oldest boys, colored planters’ sons both, sat at the round table leafing through the papers and periodicals that Christophe had put there. This was the table where Christophe, Juliet, and Marcel had dined together every evening for a week. No one but Marcel knew that Christophe, his funds dangerously low, had stripped to the waist and gotten down on his knees to bring the polish up in the hardwood floor. Or that Marcel had cleaned and dusted the marble busts that gleamed in the shadowy shelves, or that the two of them together had put all those long rows of novels, classics, poetry in order. Now this room would be open for all of their benefit until supper each day, the class ending at four o’clock, and a copy of Nuits de Charlotte lay on the table, there were back issues of the Paris journals, stacks of the New York and the London Times.
Marcel was tingling. And with something more painful than a twinge of jealousy he finally let go of Christophe at the lectern, surrounded by his eager students, and went out into the sunlit street. A group of the youngest, those twelve-and thirteen-year-old boys, were just heading home down the Rue Dauphine their loud laughter and animated talk in wild contrast to their demeanor only moments before. Richard was waiting for Marcel and when their eyes met they knew at once that they were in perfect triumphant agreement about the events of the day. They walked in silence toward the Ste. Marie gate.
For four hours they had sat still among the class of twenty, gripped by Christophe’s opening address. Not a hand had stirred unnecessarily, there was no whispering in the back row, no flutter of pages, no idle and irritating sharpening of quills. No one shuffled his feet, or gazed out the window. In fact the air was so different from that of the schools they had known that they were at a loss to explain how they and all those around them might have been transformed into adults over night.
The fact was that in one day they had been graduated from the uneven discipline of an elementary schoolroom to the serious atmosphere of the university class. And it was Christophe’s tone and bearing which had brought about this transformation. They had known from the very first words spoken by him that he expected them to behave as young men.
“You will be responsible for all that I say in this room,” he had explained, his eyes moving with complete command from one eager face to another, “you will each keep a notebook for each subject of study, writing in it as you wish to record for yourselves the lectures of each day. At any time I may ask to see these notebooks, and when I do I expect to find evidence there that you have profited by the time spent here.
“The texts for general history and the physical sciences are on your desk, as well as your Latin Grammar and your Greek. And as you can see on the blackboard behind me, there is the schedule of your assignments for the summer which you will copy at the end of this day’s class.”
Never had they been instructed so directly and never had they been spoken to as if they themselves might take some responsibility for what they were going to learn.
But it was only the beginning. They were soon told that during the hours spent here they would be regarded as serious scholars no matter where they were to go afterward, or what they were to do. Whether they went on to the university, or to work in some profession or trade did not matter. They were to devote themselves with equal fervor to all the subjects taught here so that when they eventually left this small academy they would be educated men.
Marcel, his eyes lowered shyly, had been swelling with pride. Christophe spoke with an easy perfection, his sentences as crisp and articulate as if all had been prepared in advance, and yet it flowed as if spontaneous, the voice so natural and eager in its inflections that it kept them riveted to his neat and commanding person as he paced slowly back and forth at the front of the room.
Again and again he paused at the perfect moment, his eyes engaging their eyes, and went on to elaborate in the same thoughtful manner on this or that point that might not be so clear.
His speech was slower than usual, an excitement for the task at hand emanated from him, along with the same muted power that Marcel had felt all along.
And only Marcel knew of the torment Christophe had endured that week, the endless frustrations, the long visits of the Englishman, Michael Larson-Roberts who would come upon them in the midst of their work in the sweltering heat and disparage the school without even speaking a single word. Marcel despised this man.
Yet there was something utterly compelling about him. That was the trouble. He would stride into the dusty townhouse, its long corridors echoing with the sound of hammers, his dove-gray clothing immaculate as though he had been miraculously conveyed above the muddy quagmire of the streets to this spot, and stepping with exaggerated care through dirt and broken boards, he would take up some lonesome position in the corner of the empty classroom, a Paris paper spread out before his bowed head, and there read in deafening silence as all around him paled, became confused, as if the angle of the world at large were the angle of his narrow green eyes. Christophe couldn’t work when he was there. His power over Christophe was monstrous. He caused Christophe’s power to go dim.
And in one long afternoon at Madame Lelaud’s Marcel had been curled over his sketchbook, drawing all manner of ugly things, as the two men argued furiously in English, Michael Larson-Roberts hitting Christophe with one ripe sally after another, such as “You’re vain, that’s what you are, vain and frightened of the critics, frightened of your talents, frightened to go on risking that talent in the world. This isn’t the world, this place, this is self-immolation, don’t preach that rot to me about a school for your race, you don’t believe in your race, you don’t believe in anything but art, and even in that you don’t believe enough or you wouldn’t have turned your back on it…”
“You say that to me because you believe in nothing!” Christophe came back at him through clenched teeth, “you think you’ve stripped me of the faith in simple things, the faith that sustains every human being, because you have no such faith and never have had. Don’t talk to me about art, what do you really know about art, have you ever written anything, painted anything, understood anything! If you had, you’d know that everything I wrote was trash. It was written for effect, that’s why it was written, there was no passion to it, no soul. I tell you what I do here has a soul to it! Somew
here during one of those long binges I woke up to see the difference between us. I understand art and you don’t and I can’t abide bad art whereas you have never known what that was, yes, you, for all your sophistication, your education, your taste! You don’t know!”
Often the rifts of English were too fast for Marcel to comprehend or lapsed into phrases so informal and violent he didn’t catch them at all. But never had he seen a man attempt to exert such force over another, while that other resisted so bitterly though falling again and again into stammers and at last a sullen silence which seemed the only really successful resistance he could accomplish. Was it perhaps that they argued like a father and son???
No, more truly priest and sinner. For there was something violently religious about the Englishman, something desperately dogmatic about his pronouncements. Christophe was being lost as a soul is lost, Christophe was damning himself, and this cesspool of a city around him with its sullen slaves and wary gens de couleur was hell.
“It’s a dangerous thing to really love someone,” Christophe had said finally after a half hour’s silence at the dirty little table, his back to the wall, staring at Michael Larson-Roberts, “it’s a dangerous thing to be young and malleable and let that someone give you a consummate vision of the world.”
“I never meant to give you a consummate vision of the world,” the Englishman said, barely moving his lips. Marcel had never seen him so spent. “I meant to give you an education, that was all.”
“…because all your life after that, the vision haunts you,” Christophe went on. “You’ll hear that deprecating and defining voice in your ears saying, ‘this isn’t what I taught you to value, this isn’t what I taught you to respect’…”
“And what are you going to teach those precious little coffee-colored bourgeoisie of yours in that classroom?” the Englishman had asked with a sudden flush of anger.
“To think for themselves!” Christophe said. “I’m twenty-three years old and I’d never once thought for myself until I got on that boat for New Orleans!”