by Anne Rice
But by the end of summer, he was in a state of perpetual fury toward his wife, and wondered at the extraordinary independence with which she could go on from day to day pretending he was not even there. He was sorry for himself and wanted to spite her. And the limp passivity that was offered him at night, that which had so appealed to him in the beginning, seemed now a worse insult than all else he had had to bear. Well, she would give him children, a son already, and another on the way. But this merely added to her glory. He took to sleeping on the study couch.
But when his mother died, he sent at once for a young black maid who had been his favorite at home, and by whom some years before he had fathered a child. Of course he would not soil himself with such sordidness in the future, who would think of it, he’d been a boy (and terrified, his brothers having threatened to send him away to school), but he needed some touch of warmth beneath his roof, and that dear sweet black girl had cried when he left. No one need know more about it, he wanted her there to arrange his clothes as she had done in years past.
However, Aglae upon seeing the woman’s copper-skinned little girl had given him such a withering smile that he convinced himself she was of low mind. He would not dream of humiliating himself with some household maid, but he did not shrink from giving everyone the impression through special favors to this woman that he had.
It was near winter again before he went to New Orleans, the second harvest over, the money in the bank. Two of the girls were married off, he was sick of the country. And riding through the narrow muddy streets of the “old city,” found himself at the gate of Magloire’s little mistress, that sweet Cecile who had lost both her protector and her expected child.
It had been too long since he had looked in on her, he told himself, this was a matter of concern. After all Magloire had been devoted to her, lawyers could not always be trusted to follow through in such matters. But he forgot all this when she opened the door.
“Michie Philippe!” she had cried out, and catching herself in the act of rushing toward him, stopped, her face in her hands.
“Now, now, ma chère,” he pressed her small head to his cashmere vest. Old Magloire could turn in his grave.
It did not always please him to think of the old man afterwards. There had been a bond between them, a trust. Aglae was his favorite daughter though little Vincent of course was the favorite child.
But Philippe had come to live for these days in New Orleans when entering that small cottage he felt himself grow so that reaching out, it seemed, he might touch the four walls. There were his slippers, his tobacco, the few liqueurs he preferred to brandy; and this soft scented woman who hung on his every word. He thought sometimes he had fallen in love with her eyes. So wide and mournful they seemed to him, never leaving him for an instant, and firing so magnificently when she smiled.
Even the birth of Marcel with all its inconveniences gave him some pleasure. Because he so loved the sight of the petite mother, and enjoyed the sound of the singing as he lay patiently across the bed.
And he was not out of sorts either when those shrewd aunts, Louisa and Colette, cornered him, making him promise to provide a European education for the boy. They were practical women, they had not been consulted in this little arrangement, but indeed they had had many a conversation with Monsieur Magloire, such a fine old gentleman, didn’t he agree? “You know, Monsieur, what can the boy do here in Louisiana?” said that clever Colette, cocking her head to one side. “For a girl it’s different. But for the boy? An education in Paris, Monsieur, a few years abroad, four I should think, and perhaps the boy might be settled there someday, who knows?”
All right, all right, he would deposit money in the bank for him, he shrugged, opening his coat with both hands. Did they wish to take it out of his pockets? Must he pledge his faith in blood? “Stop it, stop it,” whispered his pretty little ladylove Cecile. She came to his rescue, and warmly he beamed down at her from his lofty height. “Forgive them, Monsieur,” she said.
“You will provide for the boy, Monsieur, four years in Paris when he is eighteen?”
“Mais oui, but of course!”
II
THERE IS A SAYING in the Catholic Church; “Give me a child until he’s six years old and I’ll give you a Catholic forever.” Vincent Dazincourt was Magloire’s son till he was six years old and he remained Magloire’s son till the day he died.
No one had to turn him against the kindly blond-haired brother-in-law who told him the best bedtime stories he had ever heard; he was simply cut from a different cloth. He adored his sister Aglae with all the warmth and trust he might have shown his own mother, and she became for him as he matured at Bontemps the model of the woman he would one day take for his wife.
At fifteen he was riding the fields every day with the overseer, reading avidly the agricultural journals, and having spent years with Magloire’s diaries knew the failure and success of every refining experiment, every innovation in the planting, harvesting, grinding of the cane. Nights often found him accompanying Aglae to a slave’s sickbed, and as he rode the vast plantation from its river beaches to its back forest, he knew the names and the histories of every black man and woman whom he passed.
He’d been bookish as a young boy, read the contents of Magloire’s dusty library, went to school for a year in Baltimore and then on to Europe for fifteen months when he was twenty. In short, he traveled, was exposed to new ideas.
But he did not come home to consider the institution of slavery an evil, and being born to it, reasoned that he was a “Christian” planter in the act of civilizing the heathen, so that he carried out his “duty” with conscience and a firm hand. The waste and suffering of Europe’s industrial cities had appalled him, and in the midst of his own orderly world he remained convinced that “the peculiar institution” had been misunderstood. But cruelty disgusted him as did all excess, so that he supervised the whip himself whenever possible and observing with a silent thoughtful face all cause and effect in the running of Bontemps believed in moderation, consistency, and reasonable demand. This made him to his slaves a more admirable master; at least they knew with young Michie Vince how things stood.
It was possible, in fact, to pass a year in his service without punishment, indeed a lifetime, and anyone might knock anytime at his office door. He saw the black babies baptized, rewarded wit and skill with promotion, but never, never did he set a slave free.
Philippe meanwhile regarded Vincent’s ambition with humor, was pleased with his quiet outward respect, and liking to encourage him in worthwhile ways shifted the burdens to his shoulders without argument whenever he showed the slightest interest in assuming them, the slightest good will.
But Vincent went to town as a young man, of course, and not dreaming of any complex alliances, fell hopelessly in love with the volatile Dolly Rose. Never had he known such a woman, dazzling in her high-pitched melancholy, and passionate beyond his wildest dreams. She danced with him at midnight around the spacious rooms of her elegant flat, singing between clenched teeth to the music of hired fiddlers, to fall exhausted finally against his chest. Morning was the time she liked for love, with the sun falling on her shameless nakedness. He buried his face in her perfumed hair.
But after the birth of their daughter she had been unfaithful to him, made him something of the laughing stock, was hostile and arrogant when questioned, only to throw herself into his arms declaring a love that consumed her to the bone. It brought him unbearable pain. He was not destined to understand her desperation and her cruelty. It was doubtful to him that she would ever understand it herself. Once on a Sunday morning, she had risen naked and slipped into his frock coat, walking straightbacked and jaunty about the room, her smooth naked legs like stems beneath the flaring serge, her hair tousled above the broad shoulders. And seating herself at last on a chair near him, she had drunk champagne from a china cup and said, “Nothing matters really except the ties of blood. All the rest is vanity, all the rest is lies.” He w
as to remember it afterward as his ship plowed the gray Atlantic, those pale stem legs crossed like a man’s, the bulge of her breast against the heavy black wool of that coat, and the Sunday sun spilling from the half-opened window onto her loose hair. He had kissed his little daughter before he left, squeezed her arms through puffed sleeves and cried. And then wandering the drawing rooms of Paris and Rome, sought to forget the one while cherishing the other, and coming home found his daughter had just died. It was a judgment on both of them from God.
The night he followed the tall undertaker, Richard Lermontant, to Madame Elsie’s boardinghouse, he had been softly coaxed in the direction of Anna Bella by Philippe who had seen her often in the Rue Ste. Anne. But Vincent could hardly think of this because he was bitter and contrite and more miserable than he had ever been. He was done with wild affairs, he had murmured to his brother-in-law whom he had been somewhat glad to see at last among those distant colored faces at his daughter’s wake, nevertheless he felt the need more keenly than ever for loving hands.
Those days were agony for him, the days of coming home to little Lisa’s funeral. He would remember them always with a vague sense of horror and dread. He had wanted desperately to be with Aglae in some fantastical world where he might somehow speak to her of what he had “done.” Yet he shuddered at the thought of going home to Bontemps. After all these months in Europe, he would have to endure the most passionate welcome, nieces about his neck, sisters caressing him, when he could think of nothing but that little girl, his Lisa, dead. On the morning after the funeral he awoke in Madame Elsie’s boardinghouse to the sound of the child’s laughter as if she had been in the room. He could hear it so perfectly that for a moment he wanted nothing but to surrender to sleep, to hold her again in his dreams. He would have given her the world. She had her mother’s beauty, and the perfect heart of a pearl. He rose to wander numb about the boardinghouse corridors, the parlors, the open rooms.
Flowers shivered on the empty dining tables, the smell of warm biscuits came from the pantry, and across that sea of round white linen tablecloths, he saw her, Anna Bella, that girl. She sat in a shaft of sunlight working with a needle a small band of lace, and looked up suddenly to him when he came into the double doors. She said something simple to fill the silence. She rose to get for him whatever he might want. It was so hot, she was saying, her voice liquid and sweet and flowing easily into some mellow rhythm of conversation that soothed him as though she had been touching him, stroking his fevered temples, telling his aching heart it was all right. He remembered afterward that he had made her sit down, that he had asked her some feeble, foolish question and that at last assured of the warmth of her voice, he had lapsed into himself again, near in his strangled silence to someone who would talk to him, someone who was warm to him, someone who would give him the tenderest, the most genuine smile.
He was there the following night and for all the rest of the week. Philippe had not exaggerated the special appeal of this American colored girl, he had to admit, as he lay with his coffee, thinking in his bed, this girl with a baby’s cheeks, who spoke French so slowly but so nicely, devoid of vanity, as batting her long thick lashes she seemed the natural model for this gesture so often cultivated by women Vincent had never liked. She was not cunning and exquisite as Dolly had been, she did not go to the veins like champagne. But an ineffable sweetness seemed to suffuse her speech and her subtlest gestures, so that he was almost painfully drawn to her in his grief, and felt a near-delicious calm when he merely glimpsed her moving about the rooms.
However, something else stirred deep inside him as he dozed, thinking of her, against his white pillows, something of which he had never before been aware.
He had grown up among black nurses, cooks, coachmen, soft African-voiced beings who surrounded him with gentleness and attentive care. He had felt warmed by their laughter and their hands. And though he would never truly have given in to the desire to force himself upon one of his slave women, he had known that desire in someplace a little less obscure to him than his dreams: that image of the yielding black girl as she sinks into the shadows of the cabin, firelight glinting on her long neck and soulful eyes, begging, “Please, Michie, please don’t…” It exploded in his brain as Anna Bella came forward, hips swaying under those scalloped skirts. Yes…this was precisely the brand of nymph that, flushed sighing from the wood, lurked beneath Anna Bella’s lace.
Only when he had to, did he return to Bontemps. Excuses couldn’t cover it any longer. Aglae knew he had arrived, he had picked up his messages at the St. Louis Hotel. So he boarded the crowded steamboat at five o’clock in the evening, intoxicated by the breadth of the mighty river, glad for the first time to be home. He had presents for everyone, sat down to the table laden with his favorite dishes, and clasped in both hands his little nieces and nephews who buried their kisses in his neck. How sweet it had been to mount the front steps, between those majestic columns, to hear the click of his heels on these marble floors. The wealth of Europe could not dim the perfection of all that lay about him, and the priceless devotion of his own kin. He told foolish stories, absurd details of trunks lost, packets behind time, little hotels where he had had to make signs for a razor and basin, and laughing, kissed Aglae again and again.
She was older, remarkably older, and never given to enbonpoint as one might expect at this age, seemed almost painfully drawn. He felt such a rush of relief at the sound of her steps ahead of him in the corridor, the vision of her throwing back the doors to his room. The familiar tone of her voice brought him several times to the verge of tears.
But that night, slipping out of the netting that draped his bed, he wandered out onto the broad upstairs gallery facing the river and thought of his little girl. Over a year ago, he had taken her into his room at the Hotel St. Louis the night before he was to sail. He had fed her himself with a spoon from the supper table, and much to her nurse’s disapproval brought her to sleep in his own bed. So Dolly would be furious with him for keeping her overnight. He did not care. He nestled her against his chest in the dark, and when the heavy rap came on his door before dawn, he opened his eyes to see her smile. She had been waiting for him to awaken, she laughed with a shrill and perfect delight.
Now on the cool breeze-swept gallery, gazing out at the distant river which he could no longer subtract from the darkness, the image of Anna Bella wound its way into his grief. He saw those lovely rounded cheeks, the delicate waist, those deft little fingers reaching for the needle and pulling it through the cloth. Mon Dieu, he didn’t understand life. Patterns did not soothe him because he suspected them. He rubbed his eyes. He would go back to Madame Elsie’s before the week was ended, he would think of some excuse. It was as if that colored girl’s sweetness mingled with the heavy atmosphere of death that lay over him, like the flowers beside the coffin; only he could not make that distinction, he merely saw those chrysanthemums again, and Anna Bella, in that shaft of sunlight, sewing, alone in that empty room.
Then Aglae came onto the gallery. He felt strangely shaken to see her coming along the rail. She wore a high-necked dressing gown that ruffled out from her ankles in the breeze. She stood quietly for a while as though she knew that he would rather be alone. And then turning, she looked into his eyes.
Only a little light seeped from the bedroom, enough to see all, but not clearly; however, she was in that light as she turned. “Any death is hard, Vincent,” she said. “And one of the worst is the death of an innocent child.”
He turned away from her, catching his breath.
“Mon frère,” she said, “learn by your mistakes.” And then kissing him, she left him alone.
He was never to know by what intricate grapevine this news had reached her, or what precisely she had heard. It was unthinkable that Philippe could have told her, no use even considering that. And Vincent and Aglae never spoke of it again. But sometimes in the weeks that followed, when she asked whether he took proper care of himself in New Orleans, might not b
e coming home too tired for his health and his rigorous schedule, he felt she was pleading with him. And he heard again that admonition, “learn by your mistakes.”
Without coyness, he gave her assurances at once. He needed the lights of the city now and then, he wasn’t ready after months abroad to settle into the country routine. And forfeiting an occasional plan to visit Anna Bella, he read stories to his nieces and nephews by the home fires instead. He would sit up late in the library, leave his brother-in-law alone to the pleasures of the bottle, and riding out early down along the gray mud beach of the river he looked at the cold sky like a man saying his prayers.
Bontemps had never been so beautiful, so rich. The death of Langlois, the old overseer who had succumbed in his absence, was a sadness. But there was the new man and the new harvest and when had the cane looked so high, so hardy, so green? He would break in this new overseer to his ways, he was home again, went out at night with his lantern to see the foal delivered of his favorite mare, and roaming through the rose garden in the early mist, drank thick soup for breakfast while Cook in her snow-white bandanna pouring the milk for him, said, “Michie, don’t you ever leave us again.”
Months later, Philippe from the carriage window pointed out the Ste. Marie cottage in the Rue Ste. Anne. The carriage had creaked to a stop. Vincent’s soul shriveled as he turned his head. At first he did not believe that he had understood, that here his brother-in-law kept a colored family! And would tell him this casually as they passed the gate!