by Anne Rice
He went back down the length of the porch. He pushed at the doors. They had been latched, but it was easy enough to break them in. And instantly, with the hard thrust of his shoulders, he sent them caving backward, the latch tearing loose from the wood.
She was standing there, stark still in front of the dresser, and in her hand was a raw piece of glass. He could see the broken hand mirror amid the powder and combs, and he could see that pure jagged piece of it in her hand. He took it quickly and threw it aside.
“You are coming with me,” he said. “Now.”
V
RICHARD DROPPED HIS CAPE on the hat rack without so much as stopping so that before the heavy front door had closed he had crossed the parlor, careless of the mud on his boots, and was standing before the ancient portrait of Jean Baptiste, and the guns that were affixed to the wall beneath it, the long shotguns, and the pistols with their pearl handles that Grandpère polished twice a year. He was reaching for the first of these pistols when Rudolphe’s voice crackled from the deep shadows.
“Have you given up the custom of dining with this family? We waited for you, one half hour at your mother’s request, and it is nine o’clock.”
The voice lacked its usual edge of exasperation. A gloom hung over the family just as if Marie had recently died and been buried, and no one would touch the piano for days, nor laugh too loudly, nor think of any light entertainments out of deference for Richard and for the girl herself whom they had in their own way loved.
“What is the matter with you?” Rudolphe leaned forward, from behind the heavy leather wing of his chair.
Richard had the pistol in his hands and was trying the triggers. It was not loaded. But he knew how to load it, and he knew where the bullets were kept. He moved to the sideboard and opened the first of three very tiny top drawers. There were the bullets. He proceeded to load the gun. “What has come over you!” Rudolphe demanded. And Richard could understand why. It was seldom that he didn’t crumple politely at the sound of his father’s voice, and his own movements felt marvelously light to him. All the world was clearly delineated and devoid of shadowy margins. It was just that simple when you had made up your mind. “What are you doing with that gun!”
“I am loading it, that’s what I’m doing with it. Where’s Maman, is she in bed?”
“Loading it, why? Yes, she’s in bed.”
“Grandpère?”
“In bed.” For days they had all gone up to their rooms early, having no desire to share the feeling of depression that lingered in the house.
“All right, then,” Richard said. He could see the shape of his father’s head clearly in the light from the grate but not the features of his face. Better that way, he calculated. “Now you see I am placing the gun to my head.”
“Stop that!” his father’s voice was a resentful growl. “Stop that this instant, put that gun down!”
“No, look at it, I have it against my temple,” Richard answered. “And if I pull the trigger…”
Rudolphe was afraid. Afraid even to move from the chair. He was bent forward, afraid even to rise and try to snatch the gun. He sighed audibly as Richard put the gun down and let it hang at his side.
“If I had pulled the trigger,” Richard said coldly, “I would be dead. I am your only son, and I would be dead.”
“Keep this up and I’ll shoot you!” Rudolphe said furiously.
“No, you won’t,” Richard said, but he couldn’t repress a smile. It was perfectly fine this little touch of humor because he had made his point. He came forward to the fire, but he did not sit down. Rudolphe glowered at him, the brown leather behind him gleaming faintly with the reflection of the flames. “But you might as well do it,” Richard said. “That is, one of us might as well pull the trigger if I do not marry Marie.”
Rudolphe was visibly startled. But his eyes never left Richard for a second. “Don’t torment yourself,” he said in a low voice.
“I mean it, mon Père, if you do not consent you might as well put the gun to my head. You know what it would do to me if I left this house and married without your consent. And frankly, you know what it would do to Maman, and you know what it would do to you.”
“Don’t threaten me, Richard,” Rudolphe’s voice was low. He was straining to perceive if Richard were serious.
“Mon Père, I want to marry her now, tonight, and bring her home.”
“O my God,” Rudolphe gasped. He placed his elbow on the arm of the chair and ran his fingers across his forehead. “Mon fils,” he said softly, “you cannot turn back the calendar or the clock.”
“Mon Père, you misunderstand me. My mind is made up. I love you and I love Maman, Grandpère, all of you. But I am going to marry Marie with or without your consent. If I cannot find a priest in the Quarter who doesn’t know you, I will go out of the Quarter. I will do what I can to obtain witnesses, and I will marry her just as soon as I can. It will kill me to go against you, kill me to leave this house, but I have no choice.”
The voice was cool, respectful, but utterly confident. Richard had no idea himself of how resolute his tone was. He was thinking only of what he had to do, and feeling again that clarity, that simplicity of one who has made up his mind. The impression of the future which he had seen from the top of the stairs only an hour before hadn’t left him, not for a moment, and he knew that once he went back into the bedroom for Marie the path was irrevocable.
And Rudolphe was just beginning to understand. He was regarding his son with a peculiar expression almost as if the two had just met.
“So that’s it, is it?” Rudolphe sighed. “If I do not bend to the will of my eldest son, my eldest son leaves this house.”
“Mon Père, I am devoted to you. I have always been devoted to you. But in this matter I must do what my conscience tells me and my heart tells me.”
“And that is to destroy what this family has labored to build over four generations?” Rudolphe asked. “That’s what you will do, you know. You will destroy it if you attempt to bring that girl into this house as your wife.”
Richard felt a surprising calm as he stood there. He had not been aware of any tension in himself, that up until this very second, he had been poised as a soldier in battle. Rudolphe had never spoken to him with this seriousness before. Rudolphe had never spoken to him as if he were a man. And the relaxation which Richard experienced was almost delicious. Half the battle had been won.
“Because even if I accept her,” Rudolphe said gravely, “and I’m not so sure I can! Even if I accept her and your mother accepts her, and somehow Grandpère could be won over, which strikes me as a sheer impossibility…the community would never accept her! The people who tip their hats to us today would turn their backs tomorrow. My clients would vanish overnight. We wouldn’t be the ones whom they would call into the sanctuary of their homes to attend their dead. Everything I’ve worked for would be destroyed. But why must I say this to you? Don’t you know it?”
“There has to be a way!” Richard said. “There has to be a way. To stand up to them all! They need us, mon Père, they can’t turn their backs on us after years and years of our faithful service, not just like that. There has to be a way.”
Rudolphe shook his head. “Richard, my heart aches for that girl. She made a foolish mistake! She was led into it, obviously, by that miserable Lisette and never dreamed what was going to happen to her. And she compounded that mistake, in her hurt and her confusion, when she sought refuge with Dolly. But it’s done, mon fils, it’s done.”
“No, mon Père. Now you must listen to me. I know how you’ve worked, I know how Jean Baptiste worked, I was that high when Grandpère told me the story of how he bought his freedom and his wife’s freedom, I’ve heard all of my life of how Grandpère worked in the tavern in the Tchoupitoulas Road saving every dime that he made, and teaching himself to read and to write at night by the fire. I cherish this heritage, mon Père, I have always cherished it. But I tell you, if you do not help me find a wa
y to make Marie my wife, then you have made me the victim of this heritage, the victim of all you’ve worked for, not its heir. Don’t do that, mon Père, don’t doom me to a life of lowered voices in the parlor and balancing coffee cups on my knees. If it hasn’t been for me that you’ve done all this, me as much as Giselle, then who was it for?”
Rudolphe sat back, his sigh almost a groan.
Richard was looking at the gun, the barrel of it cradled in his left hand. “The Lermontants have always been workers, mon Père, fighters! They’ve always had the strength to beat impossible odds.”
There was a soft creak beyond them then, from the darkness of the stairwell. But both men were wrapped in their thoughts, Richard staring at the gun, and his father’s eyes on the flames.
“There has to be a way for that strength to prevail in this affair, now!” Richard whispered.
Rudolphe shook his head.
But from the darkness of the hallway there came another voice which said calmly,
“There is a way. It might be done.”
Richard started. Rudolphe sat forward peering at the open doors.
It was Grandpère. He came slowly into the room, his slippers scraping with every step. His long wool scarf was wound twice around his neck and his small spectacles became brilliant and opaque with the reflected fire. “There just might be a way…” he said. He waved Richard out of his path as he approached the chair. Richard took his arm as he seated himself slowly and with obvious pain.
Rudolphe was staring at his father, amazed.
“I always swore…” Grandpère commenced now that he was settled, “that I would never consent to this boy going to France, not after what happened with his brothers. That I would never give my blessing to such a voyage until he was married, settled, with children in this house. Well, I am ready for a change of mind. He and the Ste. Marie girl should go together, just as soon as the ceremony can be performed, and they should stay abroad until all the tongues of the Quarter cease their wagging. A year, I should think, and then they will come home. Marie Ste. Marie will be the wife of a Lermontant, and I should like to hear anyone dare to insult her then!” He stopped and held up his hand. “Come here, Richard, so that I can see you,” he said.
Richard clasped the hand tightly. His heart was pounding. “Yes, Grandpère.”
“After that year…” Grandpère said, “you come home!”
“Grandpère. I will live all my life in this house, my children will be born in this house, I will live here until I die.”
But Grandpère held tight to his hand as if he did not quite believe this. And then he said. “Mon fils…” then he stopped.
Rudolphe motioned for Richard to be silent. Richard thought Grandpère was thinking of those brothers of his that he’d never seen, those grandsons sent off with such high hopes for the education abroad.
“Grandpère,” he whispered, “you’ve done the Lord’s work.”
“And the girl?” the old man asked. “How do you propose…”
“I took her out of Dolly Rose’s house two hours ago,” Richard said. “She’s at home now with Marcel.”
Both grandfather and father stared at Richard in amazement. “Well,” Rudolphe began angrily.
But this time Grandpère motioned for quiet. “Go bring her here,” he said. “We won’t assemble the family, it will be too hard on her. I’ll tell your mother, go on.”
But as soon as Richard had left, he sat back in his chair morosely and seemed almost to have fallen asleep. Rudolphe was studying him, aware that it was time to wake Suzette, to prepare a room, but some vague anxiety kept him there near his father, something greater it seemed than the sum total of all the difficulties they now faced.
“Mon Père,” he said finally, leaning forward and touching Grandpère lightly on the knee, “if you believe it can be done, I know it can be done.”
The old man did not stir. His eyelids fluttered for an instant behind his spectacles.
“And Richard will be in this house at the end of that year, mon Père, nothing will prevent that.” Rudolphe said.
“I know,” Grandpère sighed, his voice barely audible, “I never doubted that. It’s I who might not be here.” But abruptly he rose, shaking his head, and started slowly toward the door.
Rudolphe wanted to speak to him, he wanted to tell him not to talk of such things, but he felt a fear like a spasm of pain. He was still sitting in the chair when Richard and Marie came through the front door. In fact, he was somewhat confused as it seemed only an instant had passed, and taken by surprise he found himself staring up at the girl, who clung to Richard, her eyes like those of a wounded animal, her hair free and tousled by the wind. In an instant he was on his feet without thinking, and much to his own surprise he’d taken this girl in his arms. A wild flowery fragrance rose from her hair as he kissed her, and he realized that some powerful protective instinct had infected him. He drew back holding her at arm’s length, as was perhaps a father-in-law’s prerogative and realized that she had already become one of them in his mind. She was shy, miserable, but when she looked up at his son, her eyes were filled with dazzling love.
VI
CHRISTOPHE DID NOT GO to Dolly directly after the wedding as he had promised. He knew that he ought to do this, however, because Dolly was not in a good frame of mind. She declared herself quite happy for Marie and Richard, but some well of buried emotion had been stirred in her by Marie’s coming and going and she had in the last few days exhibited those very characteristics of debilitating grief that she had shown after the death of her own child. She did not dress or comb her hair, and keeping to her room, left her girls on their own. When no orders came from her for cook, maid, or valet, the house ceased to run itself, quarrels broke out, and all realized soon enough that she was quite willing to tell everyone and anyone to leave if they chose, and go their own way. The door in the Rue Dumaine was now locked.
But Marie’s sojourn had brought Christophe and Dolly together again, just as the grief for little Lisa Rose had once brought them together, and Christophe knew as he left the Cathedral that indeed he would go to see her, confirm for her that the wedding had in fact taken place (she had her doubts, eh bien, the proper Lermontants) but he could not go just now.
And why he was not sure. Except that the quiet afternoon ceremony in the sacristy of the church had affected him profoundly in ways that he did not anticipate. And as he wandered off along the waterfront, engulfed by the eternal crowds, he felt something of the desperation he had known during his last days in Paris, and recognizing this for what it was, he felt fear. Before five o’clock, he had stopped in half a dozen dram shops, and as the early winter dusk came on fast, with a heavy shrouding fog, he had the sense that he might be in any one of the vast cities he had once visited—the winding dirty alleyways of Cairo, the majestic and wildly beautiful squalor of Rome. All was alien to him, and the feeling of being home and where he belonged left him, so that he was disconnected and he did not understand why.
The school went well, better than ever, he was writing steadily, though nothing of real consequence, and a Paris journal had just written to him asking for more of his recent poems. Yet this harrowing feeling had mounted ever since he left the Cathedral and his mind would grant him no reprieve from some ruthless self-examination as he wandered about, feet often slipping on the wet cobblestones, terrified that were he to encounter anyone he knew at this moment, even his own mother, he would be visited by a sensation he had once experienced in Paris with Michael of simply not knowing who the person was, why he was with that person, why they were on that very spot.
Of course he was happy for Richard and Marie, supremely happy.
In general, respectable people had never interested him very much; and seldom had he invested any emotion in what seemed the inevitable course of their lives. Among his students, he had loved most the wild, the unpredictable, and often the poor rather than those stalwart sons of the good families who in truth tended to grat
e on his nerves. He had never for a moment entertained the notion, even in childhood, that Juliet was respectable, and she herself had repeatedly throughout her life chosen the more rash and flamboyant of men. It seemed, in fact, that she invariably demanded some monstrous breach of decorum as the price of her favors. She had demanded this of Marcel, surely. And she was demanding it now of Augustin Dumanoir père who came to see her much too often for the good of his plantation and was even murmuring to Christophe something about marriage as if it were entirely possible to make Juliet the mistress of his house. Juliet managing a plantation household, kitchen, scores of slave women and children, the eternal round of sewing, entertaining—someone was losing his or her mind.