Feast of All Saints

by Anne Rice

  It was getting dusk when Philippe reached the Rue Ste. Anne and he saw at once that the front rooms of the cottage were dark. His hand was all but frozen on the reins, and a frost clung to his hair and to the ruffled fur of his collar. He guided the mare back the shell-paved alley, Felix following him, and the dark wet banana fronds slapped at him lightly as wearily he put up his arm. Felix dismounted at once to fill the bucket at the cistern, and the kitchen door creaked open showing Lisette’s face. Philippe gave her a nod and a wink as he jumped down, and said, “Ah, there’s my girl.”

  A light swelled behind the lace curtains of Cecile’s bedroom, and in an instant, Philippe had Cecile in his arms. She was soft, hair down, in her silk dressing gown, and so hot that her fingers all but burnt his freezing face.

  “Precious, precious,” he breathed to her, lifting her off her feet, the warmth of the little room seeping about him like a delicious fluid. “Don’t cry now, my precious, there, there, don’t cry,” he breathed as he carried her toward the unmade bed and felt her shuddering as he covered her small mouth with his own. All of her rounded limbs yielded to him as her head slipped into the hollow of his neck. “Take off these wet clothes, precious,” he whispered, and watched through a haze, it seemed, as those tiny dark fingers worked a miracle with the buttons, the coal fire glowing, blinding his watery eyes.

  It was after midnight before he awoke against the pillow. She had a plate of oysters for him, hot bread with lots of butter, and a cup of thick soup which he drank, chewing the bits of meat with a slight moan. He stretched, his knuckles scraping the mahogany behind him, and snuggled back into the pillow, his eyes closing. “And Marcel?” he whispered drowsily, his head turned away from her, on the verge of sleep.

  “Gone to the country, Monsieur, for a long visit,” Cecile said. “Do you want your nightshirt, Monsieur?”

  “No, chère, just your arms,” he sighed. “A long visit, in the country, a nice long, long visit, that’s good.”

  After a week, he sent the miserable and anxious Felix back to Bontemps for his trunk. Marcel had already been in the Cane River country for two months, and it would be three months more before he was to come home.

  V

  NONE OF THE NIECES and nephews, the cousins, aunts, and uncles had left Sans Souci though it was four days after New Year’s. And the eleven rooms of the rambling mansion were fragrant with blazing fires, and the smell of roasting meat still wafted from the slave cabins on the cold air. The day was mild, however, for this time of year.

  Marcel rose early despite a long night of toasting and dancing, and after a brief bit of small talk in the parlors, went off for a walk along the Cane River, alone. He was worried about the family in New Orleans, and he found it soothing to wander the banks of this broad swiftly moving stream, at times approaching the very edge of the water, at others roaming some thick bracken for a silent visit to an oak or a tall stiff magnolia which had become a milestone on his private landscape for mornings such as this.

  He loved this river; far smaller than the Mississippi it was manageable for his heart. One could row across it, fish in it, wade in it, with none of that awe or reverence which the Mississippi inspired. The sky was streaked with clouds, and a pale blue, the sun slanting warm through the crisp air.

  It was midmorning when he came back, and he was tempted to send for his horse and ride out beyond the borders of the plantation through an uncleared and eternally mysterious land just to the south. But he was still tentative with the horse. He had learned to ride in spite of his fear, and he rode well. But a tension always preceded the decision to mount. He thought better of it as he came up the broad front steps, and pushing open the double doors on the immediate warmth of the parlor, saw a letter from Christophe lying on Tante Josette’s desk.

  Christophe had written faithfully since Marcel had left, letters coming as often as three times a week by the steamboats that plied the river, and the letters were always candid, leaving nothing to doubt. Chris said things Rudolphe would have never committed to paper. Richard’s notes contained no information whatsoever, and Marie did not write at all. And often Christophe wrote, “Burn this when you are finished,” and as Marcel tore open the soft blue paper and found the usual three pages crowded with a remarkably clear though ornate script, he saw these words again: “Burn this when you are finished.” He had not burned a single letter and he would not burn this one.

  It is as bad as rumor would have it. I can confirm this now because I met Monsieur P. last week and was invited up for cards in the garçonnière. Let me add that your mother gave me the evil eye when she saw me, but I accepted this invitation out of concern for you as you will understand. The man is drinking suicidally. He has sent for much furniture from the country and carved out a regular parlor for gambling next to your old room, taking over that as well for his wardrobe and that valet, Felix, who appears the most miserable of men. Monsieur P. has company continually there, and there were two white men when I arrived, both of them spiffily dressed with no breeding, river gamblers I suspect, though your father despite the amounts of liquor he pours down his throat, is sharp.

  I lost fifty dollars before I had sense enough to become a spectator, and Monsieur P. lost two hundred, but it could have been much much more.

  And this between Christmas and New Years. He did not go to the country at all. Your mother is terrified, or so I’m told, now that she sees the man is seriously ill.

  Lisette finally came back, and there is no doubt now she was earning something for her favors wherever she was lodged. I’ve pleaded again with her to be patient, not to quarrel or run off, to wait until you can come home.

  Marie is gone completely to your aunts now. And meantime there can be no talk of the wedding while Monsieur P. is so ill. Rudolphe is furious, and Richard at school is a loss. Take this advice. Write to your mother and urge this marriage, now.

  Don’t be so much ashamed with me of enjoying the country life. There is nobility in every pleasure you describe to me, the riding, the hunting, the good company by the fire. Learn all that you can from this, and stop deriding your own weakness for loving it. You weren’t sent there to suffer, and even if you were, you are free to do with any experience what you like. That you have “given yourself over to it” is a credit to you.

  Au revoir, petit frère. Stop asking about Maman. Hers is a treacherous nature because it is so simple. And I have always relied upon you to be clever in this regard. But never mind, she misses you in her own way. She hit me with an iron pan the other day for teasing her. An iron pan.

  Chris.

  Marcel put the letter into his pocket, and felt, as he always did after Christophe’s letters, that he couldn’t bear to stay away a moment longer, he had to find some way to go home. That he could be of no help to his mother or to Marie stung him. However, he was loving the life of the Cane River country, and when he had written Christophe that he had given himself up to it completely he had been telling the truth. But there was so much more that he wanted to tell Christophe, so much he was aching to tell, and soon after his arrival, he had realized he could not commit the real content of his feelings to paper. He simply lacked any gift with the pen. Another failing in a series of personal failings, which in some way was the real drama of his life: that discovering music in earnest that first year at the opera, he himself could do nothing with it; and loving art always as he trudged here and there with his sketchbooks, he himself could do nothing with it; and now it was the same with literary expression, his passion for literature not lending him the slightest gift for writing of his own. And his mind teemed. Not only with thoughts of those he loved at home, but with a thousand realizations that had come to him in the country, and he wanted so much to talk with Christophe, to feel the easy exchange of ideas between them, that this desire approached physical pain.

  It was a Creole plantation, Sans Souci, not one of those massive Grecian temples, cold and indifferent, and come so late to Louisiana with the Americans. Rathe
r it was the old style of house, simple, harmonious, and built for the climate and the terrain. And Marcel had come upon it quite unawares in the hour just before dawn as his packet wound its way through the Rivière aux Cannes, not knowing that this distant lovely house, a vision emerging from the mist beyond a thinning line of forest, was in fact his aunt’s home.

  He had left the great palatial steamboat on the Mississippi the night before, transferring to this smaller boat which then chugged inland on its serpentine route at an abominable pace, time and again stopping at a darkened pier beyond which the swamp, not so dense perhaps or so forbidding as it was one hundred miles south, nevertheless threw up its mysterious wall against the impenetrable and starless sky. And unable to sleep, he had come out on deck in the dark to find the morning warm and alive with whispering creatures and the slapping of the smaller paddle wheel somewhat soothing to the anxiety which had increased as he drew closer and closer to this unknown world. And then the sleepy porter had come out with the trunk behind him and as a slave appeared on the pier beyond, his lantern high in the clearing mist, had said, “B’jour, Michie, c’est Sans Souci.”

  High on a foundation of whitewashed pillars it stood, its broad verandas enclosing the main floor on three sides and supporting its deeply pitched roof with slender graceful columnettes. Narrow gabled attic windows looked out over the river, and a broad stairway ran down from the front gallery with its double doors to the avenue of young oaks below.

  Marcel’s heart was pounding as he mounted the steps. It had been years since he had seen his Tante Josette, and there came a sweet moment then when she took him in her arms. She was the eldest of the three sisters, and seemed vastly older than either Louisa or Colette, her hair pure white now, waving tightly back from her high forehead to a pair of pearl-studded combs. Tall, stiffly slender, she could look Marcel straight in the eyes in spite of his height, and when she kissed him there was a simple sincerity of affection to it which put him at once at ease. Memories came back to him, myriad impressions of her which had lain dormant in his childhood soul. The special perfume she always wore, a mixture of verbena and violets, and the particular feel of her firm hand.

  She took him directly into the big parlor, its French doors open to the mild September air. There was strong coffee for him at once, and he sat back on a long couch and surveyed this high-ceilinged room with its immense old-fashioned fireplace (no mean coal grates here) and its many oil portraits hung over mantel, sideboard, between the windows, everywhere indeed that he might look. They were all dark faces, some bronze, amber, others the perfect cream of café au lait, and he recognized Tante Louisa and Tante Colette among them, and men and women he did not know. He had never seen such a vast collection of painted gens de couleur, and he was to remember the curious effect of it afterwards because it forecast the particular world to which he had just been admitted, the nature of which he could not have really guessed. In the coming months he was to study these pictures often, noting a style that ranged from a Parisian perfection to a cruder, ill-proportioned work, very expressive, however, which reminded him painfully of his own sketches. Tante Josette meantime settled at her high secrétaire against the wall, turning to face him in a Queen Anne chair. Her eyes had an intensity he remembered at once. They were youthful or timeless as was her voice which hadn’t the slightest timbre of old age. But the face was lined, the cheeks slightly sunken, and the dark blue broadcloth dress with its somewhat narrow sleeves and proper white lace collar completed the figure of advancing age. None of that frivolity that marked her sisters, the abundance of rings and frills. Only the two pearl-studded combs.

  “You’re in good health,” she said. “And you’ve got your father’s height which is always an advantage and your mother’s delicate bones. And I see an animation and intelligence in your face which seems the best of them both. So tell me why you did such a foolish thing as to go to your father’s plantation, why you let that man humiliate you, why you let him put his boot in your face.”

  All this was said so calmly that it took Marcel’s breath away.

  But Tante Josette went on in the same even voice.

  “Don’t you know who you are, and who your people are, Marcel?” she gave a short sigh. “When you let a white man humiliate you, we are all humiliated. When you give that man the opportunity to degrade you, we are all degraded. He knocked you down on the floor of a slave cabin, and so he knocked us all down. Do you understand?”

  Not even Rudolphe could have said it better, if Christophe had ever given him the chance. Marcel felt his cheeks grow hot but he didn’t take his eyes off his aunt.

  “Well,” he said, “at least we come right to the point.”

  She uttered a small dry laugh. He himself did not realize he had said these words somewhat casually and confidently in a voice that was no longer the child’s voice she remembered, and she respected him for it.

  “I was angry and bitter, Tante,” he continued. “I lived all my life with the idea I would go to Paris when I was of age, that I had a future. All that was changed, and I was angry, and bitter, and foolish.”

  “I know that,” she said. “But had you no pride in yourself in the here and now, where you are? Paris may be the City of Light, Marcel, however, it is not the world. This is the world. Where was your pride?”

  “I should have had it,” he said. But he could divine from her expression that she knew he did not entirely mean what he said. This, the world? How could he live in this world? He wondered if his mouth showed the bitterness, the positive anguish he felt at being on her charity here, on her hands. After all, she was not really his aunt, these were not really his people, he found himself looking off and shaking his head. “I have no fortune now, Tante, and no future, but I have money enough that I won’t be a burden to you while I’m here. I regret that…”

  “Nonsense, you insult me. You are my nephew and this is my house.”

  “Tante, I know about my mother. Years ago I got it out of Tante Colette. I know you picked her up off a street in Port-au-Prince in the time of Dessalines. It’s quite an accident my being here…”

  “It’s an accident any of us being here or anywhere,” she said at once, with the same calm but quick manner. “It’s all an accident and we don’t care to realize that because it confuses us, overwhelms us, we couldn’t live our lives day to day if we did not tell ourselves lies about cause and effect.”

  This he hadn’t expected. He turned slowly to her again and saw her meditative face in profile, the white hair rippling back through those combs to the chignon on the nape of her neck. An uncomfortable realization confronted him which was at once exciting. Why had he thought this woman so peculiar in years past, so eccentric? Because she was intelligent?

  “Tante, I wouldn’t insult you for the world,” he said. “I’m painfully aware, however, that I’m a burden to you whether you say so or not. I occupy space and I require food and drink. I’m on your hands. Please understand my anger in this helplessness and allow me my apologies. You’ve always treated me as if I were your own flesh and blood, my unhappiness now is no recrimination.”

  “Hush, Marcel,” she said, but again she had been secretly impressed. “You’re being a bit of a fool. I love you and your sister just as I love your mother, don’t you understand the true nature of love?”

  Of course he understood it. It was unselfish and unquestioning in the final analysis and it was loyal. He was humiliated by this love.

  “You misunderstand it all,” she said. She had made her narrow fingers into the steeple of a church which she touched lightly to her lips, her eyes on the wall above her. “I know what my sisters told you, of how I snatched your mother from the shadow of that dead Frenchman in Port-au-Prince. But that’s the mere bones of the matter, not the real flesh and blood. Love can be quite selfish, Marcel, love can serve itself.”

  She shifted in her chair so that she might see him. Her slight eyebrows were black still against her brown skin and arched lightly ov
er the deep-set black eyes. Her thin Caucasian mouth was only a line now in old age. But her expression leapt from the eyes. “I had no right to take your mother from that street. She was a dark child for all her French features, those soldiers of Dessalines would not have harmed her. Oh, starved and lost for a while she might have been, you cannot imagine the sheer clumsiness and confusion of war. But she was not orphaned. Yet I took her, took her as if she were the spoils of a battle in which I myself was not even engaged.”

  He looked away. This seemed absurd. But Tante Josette went on.

  “I took her on the spur of the moment, Marcel, and plunged her into my world of my own will because I wanted to do it. She became my property at that moment, and my responsibility thereafter. More keenly perhaps than any child which God has sent to me since.”

  There was no doubt she meant these rather extraordinary sentiments. She was not speaking this way merely to put him at ease. And seen in this light, the sordid battle, the moaning frightened child, and the brave woman going down the stairs to rescue her from the torn street—these images changed in Marcel’s mind slowly but richly; however, nothing distinct emerged. He attempted, just for a moment, to see it her way.

  “Some would not have bothered, Tante,” he said. “Some would have trampled her underfoot in the escape.”

  “I wanted her,” she said, arching those fine eyebrows. “Wanted her.” She studied him. “It was that desire for her, and certainly an impulsive desire, that lay at the root of the magnanimous act. I was widowed then, and barren. I wonder if she had not been such a beautiful child whether I would have noticed her at all.”