Crescent City Part 47

He filled the room with his presence. All else fell away, along with the words they were speaking; the furniture, the very walls fell away, leaving only the vibrant afternoon light and Gabriel in the center of it. And she had the happiest, most foolish thought: I'm glad I changed my dress. I want to look perfect. He will see how glad I am.

"The war has changed us all. Do you know it would have cost less to have bought all the slaves and set them free? Yes, it would have cost far less. The differences between us weren't worth the war. It was the politicians who made it."

"Then why didn't they do it, then?" young Eugene inquired.

"Do what?"

"Buy the slaves and set them free."

"Why, that would have been too simple! No, seriously, there were many reasons. Money is one. It always is."

As though it were her own shame-and was it not in some part hers?-Miriam thought of the hideous profits out of blood. The more fool he, Andre had said, and laughed.

"Honor and glory," she murmured. The words came unbidden from her mouth. "They mean nothing, after all."

Andre had said that, too.

"Well," replied Gabriel, "there's no glory, that's true enough. But honor there is, and that's probably all we have left." His shoulders straightened. "We went in with honor and we've come out with it, as David says."

"David? You've talked to David?" cried Ferdinand.

"Yes, I met him in New York."

"Tell us. Tell us!" Ferdinand urged.

"I thought he looked pretty well. He's got his health back. The only things he won't get back are his teeth. Incidentally, I hear that that devil Wirz, who ran the infamous camp at Andersonville, is being court-martialed for his crimes."

"What else? Is he coming home, did he say?"

Gabriel said gently, "I'm sure he'll come to visit, but home for David is in the North. You must know that."

"So he'll be opening an office in New York? Or where?"

"I don't think he's quite sure. He's the same old David, you see ...." Gabriel smiled. "Off to new wars again."

"Off to new wars!"

"Yes, wage slavery, he tells me, is only a little better than Negro slavery. It is selling oneself by the day and nothing more. So he's prepared to fight that, too, now."

"Fight it? How?" Ferdinand was aghast.

"Well, it's not fighting, exactly. He wants to raise wages, which really are disgracefully low in some places. Then the sanitary conditions in the tenements, the lack of safety in the factories, child labor, and a long list of abuses-he wants to tackle them all."

"Good G.o.d," Ferdinand muttered.

"Poor Papa!" Miriam said almost mischievously. There was something a little comical about her father's consternation. "It really is time we got used to our David, don't you think so?"

"He's our angry prophet," Gabriel remarked. And he said soberly, "The world needs people like him, miles ahead of the rest of us. And thank G.o.d America's always had people like him."

Ferdinand sighed. "And the Jews have. People like him are at the heart of our faith."

Miriam looked at her father with surprise.

"Oh, I'm getting old, Miriam, but I haven't forgotten everything yet."

Gabriel said quietly, "It's a democratic faith. Very American, when you think about it."

He stopped, looking toward the window, where some scorched leaves on a dead branch tapped the upper pane. He looked so long that the others turned their eyes there, too, but there was only the dead branch to be seen, and sensing his abstraction, they did not interrupt it.

"So," he said, turning back to them, "we build again. There'll be a new generation. In time it will be better for us all than it ever was before."

"That's what Rabbi Gutheim said last week," Eugene reported.

"And he was right," declared Gabriel.

Angelique, who had been studying Gabriel with her chin in her hands, blurted suddenly, "You know something, it's just occurred to me, you look like Lincoln!"

A flurry of laughter relieved the gravity. Gabriel made a comical formal bow.

"In many quarters that would not be taken as a compliment, Miss Angelique. But I take it as one."

Ferdinand stood up.

"I have things to do. Will you excuse me? Come, Eugene, come Angelique, you've things to do, too."

They had nothing to do, Miriam knew, but her father, with some thought in mind, had wanted to leave them alone.

She said the first thing that came to mind. "Your arm-does it hurt? I've heard that there's pain even after-"

"Only a little. But David tells me it will pa.s.s." He said ruefully, "The U.S. gives artificial limbs to its soldiers, but our side can't afford to. Well, I'll have to get my own and be thankful it wasn't a leg."

He leaned down to stroke the dog, who lay near him, keeping at it too long. And she knew he needed a reason not to speak, to cover the emotion that revealed itself by the twitching of his cheeks.

Questions, shreds of long-ago conversations, proud convictions, dark anxieties and doubts, lived on, humming in this silence. And remembering, Miriam knew that Gabriel, too, must be recalling these ghosts of the dead years, so that it seemed they were a presence in the room, like the genie in the box, awaiting the cutting of the string, the unpeeling of the paper, the lifting of the lid. She was afraid to cut the string.

After a while, forcing herself to speak, she made a soft reproach. "You never wrote. You could have got someone to do it for you."

"I can write," he answered quickly, evading the main issue. "I still have my right arm."

"Are you different-changed?" she asked, and at once would have withdrawn the absurd question if she could have done so. The words were unclear as she had spoken them, for what she had meant was: Do you feel the same about me?

He took a different meaning from the question. "Of course I've changed. One couldn't have gone through these last years without changing. I've seen men giving their last morphine to a wounded enemy, and-forgive me for this truth-I've seen men in savage rages cut out a wounded man's tongue. You ask me whether I've changed?"

She twisted Emma's sapphire round and round her finger, which had grown even thinner since the ring, too large to start with, had been given her.

"I'm sorry. It was a stupid thing to ask you."

"Yes ... but I gave the wrong answer," he said quickly. "I'm sometimes too irritable. It will take effort. I'm trying ..." His voice faded.

"What will you do now?" she asked quietly.

He did not answer at once. He had scarcely heard the question. She was sitting so near him that he could see every grain of her amber skin. Here she was, his Biblical Rebecca, just as he had remembered. Here were the fine, flashing eyes, the dominant, haughty nose, and the contradiction of a mouth as soft as a child's.

She opens her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness.

In Richmond she had come into his arms and laid her head on his shoulder. Oh, what a brotherly, mild embrace-not at all what he wanted, neither then nor now! Under the layers of bodice cloth, the foaming skirt, the silly hoops and wires, there waited ... Not for him, though, but for that other, who wasn't worth her finger.

He collected himself. She had asked him what he was going to do. Bitterness, the most intense he had felt since the wounding, went through him. What choices did he have? He tried to flex the fingers that were not there, and a fiery, jagged pain went through the arm that was not there.

At least it is the left, he thought. But had it been the right, could he have learned to form the letters with his left? And this puzzled him, so that he frowned, feeling the pressure of the frown on his contracted forehead, and imagined the fingers of his left hand trying to form the letters of his name: the initial flourish of the capital G, then the downward stroke again, a short upward curve, and now the slanted stroke of the small a. The paper would be lying to the right of his hand as he worked the letters across it, trembling and awkward as a small child in his first attempt at printing.

He came back to the present moment. She was still waiting for an answer.

"Why, practice law," he said. "Try to pick up the pieces. And you?" He did not look at her, but at the floor on which the speckled light moved like confetti dots, as the sunshine quivered through the leaf.a.ge at the open window. "David told me that he-that he will soon be free."

"Andre, do you mean?"

"Andre," Gabriel said, forcing the name.

"He is free already." She thought her throat would burst. "He's gone away. Gone back to Europe, I think."

For a moment Gabriel did not speak. Then he said very low, "I'm sorry, Miriam."

"Sorry? Why?"

"That you're hurt."

"But I'm not hurt, Gabriel! It's I who sent him away."

He looked disbelieving.

"Yes, yes, it was I! Because I knew, you see, oh, it took me too long to find out, but I knew it was all wrong, it was a delusion; such things can happen, can't they?"

"And so it is all finished," Gabriel said.

"Yes, finished! And I've so much I should tell you, that I need to say."

It seemed to her now that she must beg forgiveness of this man for her stupid blindness, for not having seen him as he was, for not having understood anything.

"Forgive me," she said, and wept.

She brought a footstool and sat before him; she took his hand, pressing its palm against her cheek, murmuring, whispering, letting the words rise to her lips without hesitation or shame, speaking to him in French for no reason other than that the words of love flowed softly in the lilting vowels of that language.

"Je t'aime ... I love you. Oh, I've been so strange, not myself, I sometimes think; yet how can that be? But I love you."

He stroked her hair. She felt the warm cup of his hand smoothing, smoothing, and, in the sudden silence, could hear his breathing, yet he did not answer. She raised her head.

"I want to marry you, Gabriel. I want a long, quiet, wonderful life with you. I want to be with you for every day that's left to us. We're young, we can still-"

He turned his face away and covered it with his hand. She thought she heard him say, "Now! Dear G.o.d, now!"

Then, in a stronger voice, he said, "Oh, my dearest, I can't. How can I, the way I am?"

She sprang up. "What does that matter? Do you think I care about that? Or care about anything at all except ..." She could not go on.

"I know you don't. But I care. A one-armed lover, starting all over again at the bottom with nothing. That's not the way I used to dream I might come to you."

"You're wrong, you're stubborn, you're wrong! Tell me-is there some other reason? Because of him-of Andre-perhaps you don't trust me, don't believe in me anymore and don't want to say so?"

"I believe in you. I would trust you with my life."

"Well, then, trust me with it!"

Gabriel stood up. She came close to him, asking not in words alone, but with her eyes and her encircling arms, "Do you love me?"

"More than the world."

"Then take me. You can't just walk away and leave me."

The pressure of his arm was strong on her back. Yet, "See, I can't even hold you properly. I can't do anything for you. I couldn't even give you a ring."

"What do I care about a ring!"

"Don't torture me, Miriam. Oh, don't." He stroked her blazing cheek. "I want ... I wanted ..." His voice shook. "But the way things are ... Let me go." And very gently, he pulled away.

She could not speak. All, all was unreal. Weak, almost faint, she held the back of a chair while Gabriel rushed into the hall. When the outer door thumped shut, she went to the window. Out of tearless eyes she watched him go down the walk and swing himself onto the horse. She could hear the clatter of the trot and see him to the end of the street. Then she let the curtain fall back.

From another window I watched another man depart, and it was sorrowful in its way, but this is different, this is my heart.

"What?" said Ferdinand, in his jolly voice. He must have been waiting in the parlor across the hall. "Gabriel gone so soon? Is anything wrong?"

She answered flatly, "Only that I asked him to marry me."

"You-wait a minute-you asked him, you said?"

"That's true."

Ferdinand's face wrinkled with astonishment. He threw back his head and laughed in pure glee.

"You asked him? You must be the only woman in the world with nerve enough to do that! You and your brother! The two of you will never cease to surprise me with the outlandish things you do. And David will be so glad, so absolutely glad! Can't you imagine? Tell me, when is it to be? Very soon, I hope."

"He refused me, Papa."

Ferdinand stared. "Refused! G.o.d Almighty! Rosa told me, she swore me to secrecy, she told me-" Rosa and her secrets!

"-that he's been in love with you ever since-"

"Ever since before he lost an arm."