by Anne Rice
Marcel by the shadows of the grate laid the poker by and took her in his arms.
He was the man again in her life as he had been before—never the lover, of course—but the man.
It was obvious to all that he had regained some old sense of proportion, the clouds were gone from his face, and added to that easy courtesy which had so beguiled them when he was a child was a new maturity, a quiet strength. He was not the wanderer and the truant any longer, and presiding at the head of the table each night he kept the conversation quick, sometimes delighting his aunts with teasing witticisms, giving them interesting bits of the daily news. Of course they themselves never read the papers, they did not consider it very nice for a lady to read the papers, so he had for them all that distinct aura of a man who knew the world.
It was surprising to Marcel, then, that when they began to talk of the opera season, of Marie’s presentation there, they did not expect him to go.
He had not forgotten that dazzling experience of the season before, and when they began to laugh at him, he felt a sudden sharp pain.
“You’re just a baby,” said Tante Louisa playfully, “what do you know about the opera? Why, young men go to sleep in the opera, women have to pinch their husbands to keep them awake.”
“But no, I want to go…” he insisted.
“This is foolishness, really,” Cecile interjected. They had finished supper, and she gestured for Lisette to take the plates. “Marcel loves music, what does Marie know about music?”
Tante Colette laughed lightly, “Cecile, she’s to be seen, chère,” she explained. “Mon Dieu, you know perfectly well she’s to be seen!”
“She’s too young for all that,” Cecile said flatly. “Marcel if you wish to go, I am sure that it can be arranged. Monsieur Rudolphe can arrange it…”
“Cecile,” Louisa said gently, “we were talking about Marie. She’ll have to have a dress made and…”
“Oh, talk, talk, talk about Marie. You’re turning her head with all your ribbons and taffetas and pearls. I never heard such foolishness in my life.” And then, bending forward, her eyes narrow, she demanded of Marie:
“Do you want to attend this opera! Is this what you want, all this nonsense? Well?”
Marie’s face tensed. Then the color rose in her cheeks as she looked at her mother. Marcel could see that she was unable to speak, yet she did not look away as she did so often. And as she at last moved her lips to form some words, Louisa spoke.
“Don’t leave it up to her, Cecile, why it’s all arranged.” And then lowering her voice to project an utter seriousness, she confided, “Cecile, the best families wouldn’t consider not presenting their girls. You should have seen Giselle Lermontant the year she was fourteen, and Gabriella Roget last year.”
“You don’t have to talk to me as if I were a fool,” Cecile said coldly. “We do not do everything that other people do. It’s time and money wasted, if you ask me.”
“Well, it seems to me that time and money are two commodities which you have,” Louisa answered.
Colette who had been watching all this as closely as Marcel was watching it, leaned over to Marie and asked her to look in the bedroom for a dress that had to be mended. “Go on,” she whispered, “I want to talk to your mother.”
“You make too much fuss over that girl,” Cecile was saying as Marie quietly left, “you turn her head.”
“Maman,” Marcel said gently. “I doubt that anyone could turn Marie’s head.”
“You keep an eye on your friends, Monsieur,” Cecile said sharply. “Imagine that Augustin Dumanoir coming here, asking if he might call! And Suzette Lermontant asking if Richard might walk with Marie to church…”
“They are all asking, and I told them at the birthday party that after the opera…” Louisa said.
“You had no right to tell them!” Cecile said. Her voice had become shrill. A silence fell over the little group. At some point this had passed from the usual suppertime argument to something unpleasant. Colette’s face was darkly angry as she studied Cecile. Louisa, however, in a patient manner, went on.
“I had to tell them something, chère, because you were not there!” she said. “She is the belle of this season, chère, don’t you realize that? And Richard and all those boys…”
“Of all the foolishness, that boy doesn’t come to this house to see her, he comes to see Marcel, he’s Marcel’s closest friend, why they’ve been friends for years, he doesn’t pay any mind to her, he’s seen her since she was that high.”
“Maman,” Marcel said, “perhaps Marie is old enough, perhaps she would like…”
“Marie, Marie, Marie!” Cecile wrung her hands. “I should think you’d be sick of hearing it, Monsieur, so much talk of your sister as if she were a queen! I detest all this talk at supper.”
“Seems to me you detest it anytime,” Colette said in a low voice. “Seems to me you never want to talk about that girl, whether it’s her birthday or the opera, or First Communion…seems to me…”
Cecile’s face was changing. “You think you can arrange these matters without my consent, do you?” she said, her voice savage, and low.
“Somebody has to arrange them,” said Colette.
“You think you can coif and drape that girl as if she were a princess, parading her back and forth for your own vanity, that’s what it is, your own vanity, you think you can treat her like royalty with her brother in the shadow! Well, I tell you I won’t have it, I won’t listen to this anymore, I won’t see her preened and strutting like a peacock, her brother goes with her to that opera, he has a seat in the front row of that box, or by God your little marionette doesn’t go.”
Both the aunts were silent.
Colette was the first to rise, gathering her shawl up quickly, and putting on her gloves. Louisa murmured some brief words about the time, and the likelihood of rain, they ought to be going.
“Maman, I didn’t mean for there to be a quarrel,” Marcel whispered. “I can go to the opera with Richard, perhaps…I’ll see.”
“You can go with us, baby,” Louisa said, “Of course, you can, why we’ve arranged for an entire box, you can sit with us.” She slipped her cape over her shoulders adjusting the hood. Colette had paused at the door. She was looking back at Cecile with that same dark expression that had marked her face throughout the conversation when she had been quiet.
“You’re jealous of your daughter,” she said suddenly. All heads turned to her. Marcel was stunned.
“You’re jealous of her,” Colette said again, “you’ve been jealous of her since the day she was born.”
Cecile rose, upsetting the coffee cups. “You dare say this to me, in my own house!”
“You’re unnatural,” Colette said, and turning went out the door.
Cecile, in a paroxysm of rage turned her back as Louisa followed, and Marcel took his mother gently in his arms.
“Maman,” he said, “sit down, this is just an argument, sit down.”
She was trembling, and struggling to get out her handkerchief pressed it to her nose. As she settled again in the chair, she reached out for his lapels and pulled him down opposite her.
“I’m going to make things right with Monsieur Philippe,” she said in a low, choking voice, “I’ll explain to him I was distraught when I wrote the note, that I missed him. He’ll understand. There’s so much that passes between that man and myself, you don’t know,” she forced a strange glittering smile, her hand stroking his lapel. “No one knows, only the woman knows who is alone with the man. It will be all right.” Her voice became rapid, a little feverish, and with both hands now she held the lapels of his coat. “You know, once Monsieur Philippe told me that he’d write letters for you, letters to gentlemen in Paris that he knew, why letters of introduction so you could be received. You know when I saw you in the crib, when they first brought you to me, I made a vow, I told Monsieur Philippe that vow, he promised me, I swear to you, no one is going to break that promise…”
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“Maman,” he took her hands and clasping them tightly laid them on the table. “You mustn’t worry,” he said. “I’m not in Marie’s shadow.”
She let out a sharp sigh, and running her hand up through the tight hair over her temple seemed to be scratching at a deep pain.
“Maman, I never even think of her, I’m ashamed to say it,” he went on. “Why, I neglect her. We all neglect her. Why, I’ve never even thought of boys wanting to call on Marie, until Richard…Why, it’s only Tante Louisa and Tante Colette who make a fuss over her, and even then it’s not so much, not really. Why, when I think of Ma’ame Celestina with that lovely idiot, Gabriella,” he uttered a low laugh. “And Dolly Rose, the way her mother used to parade her, never the same dress twice…”
Cecile drew him close, her hand clasped to the back of his neck. She smoothed his cheek, his hair. “It’s vanity, all of it,” she said. “They’ve never had children, either of them, and now they want to pretend she’s their daughter, that gives them pleasure to show her off in that box…” She kissed him.
“Well, why not, Maman, is it such a bad thing? I feel sorry for Marie, sometimes. I have the strangest feeling that none of this makes Marie happy, I have an awful feeling at times, that Marie has never been happy at all.”
This had stopped her. She was looking into his eyes as if straining to find something there, and then with a little shake of her head, she drew back. But then she took his hands in hers and held them together. That strange glittering smile came back to her, her mouth twisting down at the ends and when she spoke, her voice was low and acidic and very unlike her.
“Don’t you understand that your sister is beautiful!” she whispered. Her lips went back into a grimace, and her face appeared malignant, losing all semblance to that of the woman he knew. “Your sister turns every head when she passes, can’t you see that?” she hissed. “Your sister is the kind of woman who drives men mad.” She was frightening him. There was venom in her eyes and in her voice. “Your sister has always…and everywhere…and at all times…passed for white!”
He was conscious of lowering his eyes, and of a peculiar blurring of his vision, her words reverberating in his ears, as if he had been daydreaming and had only heard her when the words at last penetrated his dreams. Yet he had not been daydreaming at all. “Well,” he murmured softly. He was looking at his hand. Her nails were cutting into his hand but she didn’t know it, and he was feeling a slight sharp pain. “That’s the way it turned out, Maman,” he said. He meant to shrug his shoulders. “It just turned out that way.”
“Feel sorry for her, do you?” she whispered, lips drawn back from her teeth, her eyes monstrously large. “Your sister will have anything in this world that she wants!”
Lisette stood in the kitchen, one hand on the flat iron which she had just lifted from the fire. She ran it along the rumpled width of a white sheet. The warm air engulfed him as he pushed the door wide. “Don’t let the cold in!” Lisette scowled at him, “now fix that back, Michie, the way it was.”
“Is Marie here?” he asked.
Lisette studied him for a moment so that he almost became impatient, and then he saw Marie, in the small cell off the kitchen where Zazu and Lisette slept. Marie was sitting on Lisette’s narrow bed. Candles spluttered beyond her, throwing ghastly light over the wall where Lisette pinned her holy pictures, and a small cheaply painted statue of the Virgin stood on a stand of two worn books.
Marie wore a winter dress of blue wool, the neck high and adorned only by a small cameo. There were no rings or bracelets on her long white hands. She had taken down her hair and it flowed over her shoulders, becoming part of the shadows around her, so that the face with its slight blush to the cheeks appeared almost luminous like that of a marble virgin in the church. Or rather the downcast face of the Mater Dolorosa beneath her dim veil, among lilies, weeping for the dead Christ. She turned slowly, shyly, and looked up to see her brother standing in the door. Her lips never touched by paint were the color of a deep pink rose. And as he stood there, not speaking, his brows knit, his blue eyes wide as if with wonder, she became frightened of him, and said, “What is it?” so that he shook his head.
“I won’t go if you don’t go!” she whispered. “I won’t go.”
“I’m going,” he said, sitting down beside her. “We’ll go together, with Tante Louisa and Tante Colette.” He spoke slowly, seriously. “I’ll tell you about the singers, the story of it all, so that you’ll enjoy it, it’s going to be something special that night, you’re going to enjoy it, you’re going to have a splendid time.”
II
IT WAS NOT VERY LONG until the opening of the opera, and the aunts soon soothed Cecile’s ruffled feelings by a series of ritual gestures, so that the cottage buzzed with talk of dresses, the perfect fabric and the perfect color, the choice of jewels. And Marie, raw and wary since the recent quarrel, found herself again and again turning to discover her brother’s attentive blue eyes.
It surprised her mildly that he came often to kiss her, to sit by her in the evenings by the fire. And more than once in the weeks that followed he coaxed her up the stairs to the garçonnière to do her sewing in that smaller, warmer room. It was more than his old protectiveness, something quite unknown or not fully understood by her had brought them closer, and during one of these long evenings, when she sat with the rise and the fall of her needle, and he with the turning of the pages of his book, she almost, almost confided to him her love for Richard Lermontant. But it was the unspoken bond that she treasured. Words had never satisfied her, and something deeper, finer, satisfied her now. And that Marcel would be with her on that frightening opera night when she was to be displayed like a doll in a shop window gave her a new peace of mind.
But as the very day of the opera drew near, events had conspired to separate them, the opera was far from Marcel’s thoughts, and all of this had to do with the slave, Bubbles, whom Christophe Mercier had hired outright in September from the disreputable Dolly Rose.
It was not clear in Marcel’s mind whether Christophe had really wanted Bubbles, or any slave, in his service, as even his chance remarks on the subject smacked of abolition or disgust. But Dolly had given Bubbles such a beating one Sunday that he had come to Christophe with weals on his face and blood showing through his ragged shirt. She had locked up his tuning wrenches on the argument that he held back his earnings. And in a rage, Christophe had written her a caustic letter with some dollars enclosed for the slave’s hire. No one, of course, had ever seen Christophe and Dolly exchange a civil word since the affair after the Englishman’s death, and Bubbles just came to be Christophe’s devoted servant after that, and devoted to Christophe he was, beyond doubt. If anyone ever heard the slave moan for anything, it was for the tuning wrenches which Dolly kept locked in her flat.
And soon such a transformation was worked in Bubbles that people who had taken no notice of the slave before came to stare at him in the streets. He had always been a striking figure, wiry and so black that his skin had glints of blue, and his small somewhat yellowish eyes under brooding ridges gave him a wise somber look unbroken by the slightest expression in his thin wide mouth. He resembled, in truth, a monkey.
But this requires some explaining.
As there was nothing comical or grotesque about him at all. He looked as monkeys really look when they are not clowning for organ grinders or doing tricks in ink cartoons.
They have wise faces, seem unusually meditative when they examine things carefully with their long-fingered black hands, and often frown under heavy brows as if in profound thought.
Bubbles had this manner, and as is the case in human beings often, this did in fact signify a depth of mind whereas in monkeys obviously, it may not.
But he was exactly that kind of young black man whose extraordinary grace and beauty was so alien to the Caucasian mode that brutal slave traders would have called him “a black ape” and uncorrupted children, not having been told yet what to think
, would see him as exquisitely feline and dignified. He had skin like fine old kid gloves, a tight cap of woolly hair on his perfectly round head, and he glided like a dancer through streets and rooms with hands so limp that they appeared too heavy for his narrow wrists.
But under Christophe’s wing, he had acquired a further distinction, that of Parisian coats and waistcoats, and linen shirts and new boots. And no one knew except Marcel that most of these came from the Englishman’s old trunk. Those personal effects of Michael Larson-Roberts had never been claimed by his family in England. And so Bubbles, small of frame as the Englishman had been, and also tall, was seen following Juliet to market in black broadcloth and Irish linen with the élan of a valet par excellence.
Everyone admired Christophe for this, just as they abhorred Dolly for her cruelty and for not giving up the tuning wrenches. That is, everyone admired Christophe until the Monday before the opera when Bubbles appeared seated in the back row of Christophe’s classroom with notebook and pencil in his spider hands.
Then no one admired Christophe at all!
Fantin Roget was the first to drop, not even finishing the day’s class, but leaving abruptly at noon. And when his mother’s letter came the next day to give some vague excuse for her son’s change of plans, three other letters of withdrawal accompanied it in the same mail. By Wednesday, all of the poorer students were gone, and Augustin Dumanoir, seeing Bubbles again seated and ready with pencil in hand, asked to talk privately with Christophe in the hall. “This is all nonsense,” Christophe’s voice was barely audible in the classroom. “What harm can he do anyone sitting in the back of the room?”
“It’s going to be all right,” Marcel had at once whispered to Richard. “People will get used to it, it will be all right!” But the alien expression on Richard’s face gave him a shock. Dumanoir left the class at midday, and that night, Rudolphe learning of all this from other parents lit into Richard in a rage, insisting that he remain at home.
At last on Friday the day before the opera, Christophe was stunned to discover himself at eight o’clock standing before an empty room. Marcel, after a night of exhausting argument with his mother and his aunts sat grimly beside the fire in the reading room not even bothering to go to his desk. Bubbles was at the round table, face narrow and heavily carved with sorrow like that of a medieval saint. He was the first to rise, to walk silently into the classroom and take his place in the last row.