Crescent City Part 44

But that's the way I always see her! Miriam cried silently. Why do I always see her in a plaid shawl? I'm sure he never told me this before. Did anyone else ever tell me? She could not remember.

"She was lovely. She had an oval face, quiet and grave."

As he rocked, his chair creaked, blending with his even voice in a dreamy rhythm.

"Curious, the way a life unwinds. If it hadn't been for a stone thrown by a hate-crazed lout, we'd all perhaps still be in the German village. Angelique and Eugene wouldn't have been born. Yes, you remind me of her, but David has her eyes. Exactly her eyes. I wish I could see David again. He made me so angry, but he's a good man, I know he is. I'd like to see him,"

"Now that the war is over, he'll surely come to see you, Papa. I know he will."

She looked over at her father. He had started a beard, since it was the fashion again, but his beard made him look not fashionable, only like a patriarchal Jew, the Opa whom she could still see in her mind, rocking, rocking and creaking. The hair that had once been a crown of chestnut waves had turned quite gray. Oh, she thought, was it just today or was it last week that I saw he was old? Age comes like that; suddenly one day a person is old.

Ferdinand was staring out of the window.

"There goes Eulalie. She's got a bucket of water for the chicken yard. I can't get over the change in her."

"Maybe she feels important for the first time in her life."

"What? Tending chickens? From a family like hers?"

"That and all the rest she does. I never realized she knew so much. It's true she's sour, but we'd have managed here a lot less well without her. None of us knew how to preserve or sew or do anything properly until she showed us how." Something drove Miriam to talk, not so much in defense of Eulalie as out of a sense of fairness and personal indignation. "All her life she's been a failure because she wasn't good at the one thing you men expect us to be good at: being ornamental. I don't know how it is, but a man can be fat, bald, or buck-toothed, and it doesn't matter, but let a woman be even mildly plain and she goes into the discard. Heaven help her, if she's not married, she can only cringe in shame. I don't want my daughter to be like that!" she finished sharply.

"Don't worry about Angelique." Ferdinand chuckled. "She's a beauty already."

Miriam started to say: That's not what I meant at all but stopped. What was the use? He would never understand.

Gabriel would. It flashed across her mind that Gabriel had always understood, but she was kept from further thought by her father's next remark.

"I would like to see you married again, Miriam."

And I want it .... I have never been married, don't you know that? Married, with that comfort, that unity so warm, so trusting. How thrilling to belong, to have no secrets, to hold back nothing of body or heart! To know another so completely .... I try to see Andre, to hear his voice, and cannot anymore. Cannot.

"There's someone coming," Ferdinand said suddenly. He stood up to get a better view. "A man's riding up the lane."

She did not have to ask. She knew-she knew without asking or looking that it was Andre.

"This is a real celebration!" Ferdinand cried. "G.o.d help us, the war's over at last. And though our hearts ache for the sons who died"-glancing out of eyes gleaming wet with emotion at Rosa and Pelagie-"we give thanks that so many have survived and will come back. Now for the savior of my son"-Ferdinand raised his gla.s.s toward Andre-"for him a special thanks today, a toast drunk from the good wine he has brought us. Ahhh, excellent-nothing like a fine French wine, nothing!" he concluded, and sat down, quite overcome with sentiment and the heat of the wine. But he was not yet finished.

"Here's Sisyphus, good Sisyphus! We've not had a dinner like this in I don't know when, have we, Sisyphus? You mustn't think we've been living in such luxury, Andre. No, far from it," he declared, as Sisyphus brought the roast turkey on one of the rescued silver platters.

On the sideboard stood jellies which had been discovered in a forgotten cellar, and a floating custard, made under Eulalie's supervision, which had used up, Miriam thought with some concern, the last of the scarce eggs.

"Yes," Andre said, "the fall of Richmond was something to behold. Davis was in church, you know, when they came to tell him that the city was to be abandoned. People were absolutely shocked; they'd had no idea of the situation because the War Department had been keeping the truth out of the newspapers during the last few weeks. Instead, they'd been printing a lot of optimistic nonsense. So there was chaos in the streets. Church bells were still ringing for Sunday services while in government offices they were loading the archives into wagons to take them to the railroad. People were rushing to get on a train, but you couldn't get on without a pa.s.s from the secretary of war. And most people don't have access to the secretary of war, do they?"

Andre told the tale well. His rapid, resonant voice contained just enough dramatic emphasis. Miriam's avid, questioning eyes, which had not left him, attracted no notice, since every other eye in the room was on him, too.

His handsome features were unchanged. The war had left its mark on everyone else, laying its weight of gloom on some, agitating the brittle nerves of others, making voices shrill and tempers short; it had marked Miriam with dark stains of fatigue under her eyes. But Andre glowed. He might have been at a ball.

"The city council ordered all liquor to be destroyed. You could see whiskey running in the gutters. What a waste!" Andre exclaimed, making a comic face. "But a lot of folks drank it up instead, and drunkards went lurching through the streets among the broken bottles with no idea of what was happening. Then the military ordered the burning of the flour mills. Stupid! The fire spread-well, it spread like wildfire! What did they expect? Or what can one expect of politicians and soldiers but stupidity?"

Something came into Miriam's head, a chance recollection: Once in her father's house an old man, a world traveler returned from India, had entranced his audience with his descriptions of the burning vats, the moonlight streaming on the filthy Ganges, and the morning sunlight uncovering the bodies of the poor who had died on the street during the night. It had seemed to her, child that she was then, that the man had been telling of these awful things with a thrill of excitement; he had been a spectator of the exotic, without any feeling of human kinship.

She blinked and the memory slid away.

"Naturally, the fire spread to the a.r.s.enals, so the munitions exploded. It was pandemonium, I tell you! People threw furniture from their burning houses, they made bonfires out of Confederate money, they crammed themselves into wagons and fled.

"I got on my horse and followed the railroad tracks out of the city. The last I saw of Richmond was cinders and smoke."

The story ended. Andre lit a cigar. Shocked into a mournful silence, all watched him tear off the band, bite the end, apply the match, and finally lean back to savor the first aromatic draw.

Lambert Labouisse broke the silence.

"Well, I always said Jeff Davis was never wholeheartedly with us. He tipped toward the Union, always had. And this is the result. By G.o.d, this is the result." And he looked accusingly about the room, at faces and furniture, at ceiling and walls, as if one of these might have some other explanation for the disaster.

Andre observed cheerfully, "No use in recriminations. You have to look at it this way: All's well that ends well."

"Ends well?" Miriam repeated somberly. "Without even counting the wounded and dead, one has only to stand at the foot of our lane and watch the men go past; they've been coming by for weeks now, carrying their paroles and nothing more, not a penny, and no work in sight. They're wiped out. The poverty is beyond belief. That's how well it's ended."

"Oh, I understand." Andre's tone was sympathetic. "But that's not the case everywhere, you know that. Some, even in the South, have made fortunes they could never have dreamed of before. Why, up in Memphis and in Vicksburg-why, I a.s.sure you, as many bales of cotton went north on Union gunboats as went downriver to southern ports and overseas."

That was certainly true. Miriam was careful not to look at Lambert Labouisse except out of the corner of her eye, with which she could see him in his aging, but still correct, white summer suit, smoking one of Andre's enormous Havana cigars.

"I'm sorry," Andre said. "This conversation has gotten too deep. A lecture on the frightfulness of war is not the right way to end a beautiful evening." His luminous smile asked them all to forgive him.

The words "end the evening" acted as the signal they were intended to be. Indeed, it had grown late, as everyone was reminded by the hall clock's rattle and bong.

"I thought they would never have sense enough to leave us alone," Andre said when the others had gone upstairs. "Come here! Come here!"

He stretched out his arms, into which she came with automatic obedience, clasped her, kissed her, and clasped her again. Her eyes, not closed in any ecstasy of forgetfulness, were wide and alert, staring over his shoulder toward the hearth, where a dozen tiny red eyes winked back out of the gray ash.

Into her ear he murmured, "Sit down. I have things to show you. First this. Read this."

From a clipping out of a Paris newspaper she read the following: It is said on good authority that Madame Marie Claire Perrin, after her huge successes in the recital halls of Europe this past winter, will shortly obtain a final decree of divorce from her husband, who is said to be residing somewhere in the United States.

"Well, now, what do you think of that! She has divorced me! Don't forget, this article is three months old. I should be receiving papers any moment. But wait, that's not all. There's this." And drawing a small velvet box out of his pocket, Andre laid it on the table before Miriam.

"Open it."

Her hands trembled, so that she was clumsy with the catch. In his eagerness Andre reached over and snapped up the lid.

"How do you like it?"

It was the traditional ruby engagement ring, but it was no ordinary ruby. It was a splendor of splendors. Many-faceted, it drew to itself all the light in the room and threw a rosy radiance into the shadows. She stared at it as though it were alive. And her mind went back-all evening her mind had been taking such backward leaps-to the moment when Eugene had given her his ring. She even recalled the dress she had worn that night, the way the skirt had spread; cream-colored lawn it was, laced with lavender ribbons. Yes, and she could recall that the ring had presented itself to her with no joy of possession, neither because of its symbolism nor its intrinsic beauty. It had frightened her.

And so did this ring now.

"It's very beautiful," she said.

"You don't like it?" Andre asked.

"How could I not admire it? But it's too magnificent for me." She stammered. "It doesn't suit me-or the times." And she made a half-conscious gesture toward her dress, which had been "turned," so that what had been the lining was now the outside.

"Ah, you're tired of it all, you've had nothing, that's what's the matter! You need new dresses, you need new pleasures. You're out of practice!"

He pulled her to him to kiss her again, but her position was awkward, and his mouth barely grazed hers. He smelled of wine. He was rough. The wine had gone to his head. And the ring still lay on the table.

"Here, put it on. Try it on."

She didn't want to do it. A terrible confusion, a weakness, overcame her, and without knowing it was going to happen, she felt her eyes fill. This caused panic. How did it look to cry, now, at this moment of fruition, of what was to have been fulfillment for them both? She squeezed, pressing her lids against her eyeb.a.l.l.s, forcing the tears back.

"I must be very tired. There's been so much today." Her lips formed the words just as they slid through her mind, phrases with no order or purpose. "I'm afraid ... I don't understand ..."

Andre was astonished. "What don't you understand? What can you be afraid of?"

"I don't know."

In the fireplace the little red eyes were winking out, one by one. It had begun to rain. One always heard the first slow, heavy drops on the verandah roof. They accelerated now. It would be a warm, gray, rain, like tears.

"This place smells of defeat," Andre said abruptly, with a kind of scorn.

He waved his arm toward what she knew he had seen when he rode up that afternoon: the weathered boards rotting away for lack of paint and the dry, broken stalks of cotton in the fields. His scorn seemed to be turning into anger.

"Listen to me. I'm going to get you out of here, away from all this ruination. It's not worth building up again, anyway. What would you say to a small chateau along the Loire? Or a mas in Provence? It's a paradise in spring. We'll take the family, your father, too, of course."

Take Papa? Ask Papa to leave America and return to Europe? He doesn't know Papa, she thought.

"Or would you rather have an Elizabethan manor in the south of England? The choice is yours." And when Miriam did not answer, he added somewhat grandly, "I've a Sir Edwin Landseer painting of King Charles spaniels that I bought in London just for you. It would be splendid over the mantel in an old English house, or anywhere else. They look just like Gretel."

Gretel, hearing her name, raised her old head from the rug and after one weak thump of the tail, lay back.

Gabriel brought the puppy; the soft, wriggling, tiny thing was not much larger than the palm of his hand.

"Are you so rich as all that?" Miriam asked softly. "They were talking, your friends in Richmond, they were talking about a man who made fifty thousand dollars a month on imported goods. Was that you?"

"I don't know. I wasn't the only one. People like to count other people's money, anyway. And I certainly didn't do that sort of thing every month. It's an exaggeration, although not too far off the mark."

When she offered no comment, he asked abruptly, "What is it? What's wrong?"

"I was only thinking-"

But he interrupted, "Thinking again! It will take me a long time, I can see, to train you out of all this solemn thinking."

"I was thinking," she insisted, "of all the pain-and fifty thousand dollars a month."

"That's what war is, Miriam, what did you think it was? Pain and death! Don't take it so tragically, will you? War is a d.a.m.n-fool silly business, but people have always had wars, they come and they go. This one's over, so just forget it, forget the whole d.a.m.n-fool business."

"d.a.m.n fool? You call it that?"

"Yes, and fools were the only ones who took it seriously. The smart ones took care of themselves. I was scarcely ever in any real danger! Oh, I made a couple of blockade runs during the early months, just for the boyish thrill of it! But when it got too dangerous, I quit. All the flags and slogans, what are they for? And the glory that is ho glory! Come back with a wooden leg and a dirty rag with some stars on it-for what? Stars and bars or stars and stripes-what difference does it make? Is it worth a leg or an arm? Only fools, boys"-Andre laughed-"thirty- and forty-year-old boys, stir themselves up over that sort of thing."

She begged silently: Don't talk, don't. Every word is a nail in the coffin.

He did not see that she was wretched. Pouring a drink of brandy, he swirled the tan liquid in the rotund gla.s.s and sniffed it sensuously. Miriam watched the elegant ritual with a sinking heart.

"Listen! You want to know the truth? I never gave a d.a.m.n who won. I hedged my bets. If the South had won-I knew it wouldn't, but if by some fluke, it had-I would still have owned my land as before, but with this difference. I'd have had the means to maintain it. The other way, as it's turned out, I'm well supplied with everything I'll need for six lifetimes. My cousins can have my land here and are welcome to do what they can with it, which won't be much."

Absorbed in this account of himself, he had forgotten that only a few minutes earlier he had been concerned over what might be wrong with her, and Miriam felt her body stiffening. She sat upright with her hands clasped in her lap, with her nails cutting into her palms.

"Wouldn't it have been a good deal more simple," she asked, "to have stayed in Europe where you were when the war began? What made you come back to all this trouble?"

And in the very instant of asking she was aware that only a few months before she would have taken for granted why he had come back: for love of her.

He answered, "How, after all I've just been telling you, can you still ask that? Because there was a fortune to be made! Let me show you something in my traveling bag." Out of a small bag which he had set down in the corner of the room, he brought forth a packet of photographs. "Here, look. This was when I was running the blockade in sixty-two. This is a cafe in Havana called the Louvre. Everybody met there, northerners and southerners, to do business. Here I am, sitting with two officers in the Federal navy. They used to make contacts with northern merchant ships, you see, to bring down a load of manufactured stuff; the blockade runner would bring in the cotton and the middlemen would buy and sell. It seems complicated, but basically it was a trade and very advantageous to all. A shipload of cotton could bring in half a million dollars' worth in traded goods. That's how it worked."

Miriam examined the photograph. Yes, there he sat, squinting a little into what must have been a glaring tropical sun. But the smile was the old charming, vivid smile. He had been enjoying himself, while my brother-how he suffered! She saw David's sunken face, with the teeth rotted out. And Gabriel, who might or might not still be alive ...

She said slowly, "It was like a play for you, wasn't it? A drama. Playacting. You didn't care, you say, which side was right or wrong, or even how it was all to end. You were scorning us all, weren't you? As long as you could have things like that"-and Miriam's arm swept toward the brandy and the pile of gifts still heaped on the sideboard.

"You enjoyed what I brought. That time I brought the yellow silk, and the shoes and hats, you enjoyed them, didn't you?"

"Yes. To my shame, I did."

He laughed. For the first time she realized that he laughed too much, too often. Now in this laugh there was faint incredulity.

"You're a silly thing. A silly, pious little girl, but a darling, all the same. Come here"-and he reached for her breast.

She moved out of reach. "Andre, I am neither silly nor little. And I am not a girl. I am a woman."

"Then, be one, and don't try to be like a man. Miriam, be yourself. Be what you were."

Was this Andre? What had happened to her? His words pa.s.sed over her like wind. She trembled.

"Andre ... We never talked about the war. The biggest event of our time, the biggest in our lives, and we never talked about it, do you know that? I'm just realizing that we never talked very much about anything."

"We talked about the only things that are important: you and me."

His voice coaxed. Still, she could feel her mouth setting itself into that downward curve of disapproval, that expression which, through observation in a mirror, she had trained herself to control; yet now this downward curve was on her face. She knew by his response.

"Most talk is blather anyway," he said. "What people really want to talk about, if they would only admit it, is survival. Ways to get on in the world and stay there."

She was still not able to believe that he could mean all these things.

"That's not so," she protested. "How can you talk like that? You who were so kind to my brother. That wasn't to 'get on in the world.' That was pure goodness."

"It was to please you! I hardly know your brother. And how do you think I was able to do it? Only because I had those contacts and dealings that seem to shock you so. Why are you so shocked, anyway? You were always a sympathizer with the North. You think I didn't know that?"

"Yes, I was. I am. But I had to live here with my family, and I was loyal to these people, here where I live. At least I was loyal!"

"Your loyalty is rather ironic! Right in this house, a member of one of the so-called best families was playing both ends against the middle. I suppose you're not aware of that, though."