Wet Grave, page 6
The world smelled fresh here in Milneburgh. A mockingbird sang in the trees. The smells and heat of town, the clattering wagons and drunken Kaintucks and gritty filth of steamboat soot seemed part of another world.
As did last night's threat of violence, and the broken sleep and angry dreams that had run in its wake.
“I thought she was over it,” said January quietly. “Her fear of men.”
“Oh, p'tit.” Dominique put out her hand, cool and slim, on his.
He had taught his piano-lesson that morning to the daughters of a plaçée who was grooming them in “accomplishments” with an eye to attracting protectors of their own as soon as they were of an age for it. It was one of two weekly lessons that continued into the summertime, the woman's protector having left her in town while he himself went to stay with his wife and white children at one of the stylish residential hotels by the lake. Riding out to Milneburgh on the steam-cars—in the last car of the train, which the free colored were welcome to share with the servants of the whites who occupied the rest of the equipage—January had felt only a kind of exhausted anger as he watched the green monotony of cypresses and magnolias pass by.
Anger at himself that he had not sprung instantly to bludgeon the man in Rose's path before he so much as touched her (and that would have accomplished what?). Anger at the faceless shadow in the tavern door, reeking of forty-rod and spit tobacco, who'd assumed he had rights over any woman of color who came his way. Anger at Rose, who had repeatedly refused his offers to lend her the money to find other quarters than those she could afford. Who had closed the door behind her last night without even saying Thank you, Ben.
Anger that the world should be as it was.
I should never have come back from Paris.
Or, since he would have gone mad from grief in Paris, he told himself, he should have gone elsewhere: Venice, Naples, Vienna, Milan. Anywhere but back here—
—where Rose was teaching her school, and studying electricity and Homer and how to make mummies and bombs. Alone and aloof and as unconscious of his presence in the world as he was of hers.
He closed his eyes, letting the cat's-paw breezes trail over his face. Seeing her as first he'd seen her, a stranger—a tall, thin woman in the heat and stench of a cholera ward, who moved as if she was always about to trip and never did: I need a doctor, she'd said. Three of my girls are down sick. . . .
Her beloved students, all of whom had died. He tried to imagine what it would have been like to gather up the strength to start fresh in an unknown city in the wake of Ayasha's death rather than come back to this place, where there was a woman named Rose whom he'd never met.
I did what I had to. . . .
Tried to imagine not knowing Rose. Not seeing her every day.
He couldn't.
“Last year,” said Dominique, “when you were trying to rescue Rose's friend Cora from her masters, and were beaten, and hurt . . . suppose that instead of just beating you, they'd cut up your manhood with a knife? How long would it have taken you to stop having nightmares?” She leaned forward in her chair, one hand resting on her swollen belly. “Or suppose that instead of dying, your wife had . . . had run away with another man? Not only run away with him, but stolen all the music you'd written, and given it to that other man for him to publish as his own?”
January's eyes flared in surprise. Dominique had been only four when he'd left their mother's house to go to Paris. He didn't think she'd remembered that he used to write music.
“How long would it be, before you trusted a dark-haired woman again? Or any woman, ever?” Dominique looked up at him gravely, all the lightness, the frivolous patter that characterized her absent now as she willed him to understand. “And if you did fall in love with some dark-haired lady, and she wore the same perfume as Ayasha did, or liked the same colors . . . Wouldn't the pain come back and hit you sometimes, when you didn't expect it, and undo everything she was patiently trying to heal in you?”
January turned his face away. Two boys rolled hoops along the shell paths by the lake. Under a tree a little girl served imaginary tea to her friends and their dolls.
“Does it take so long?” he asked.
But he knew that it did. He knew there were women who never got over being raped.
Dominique broke a tea-cake in two, crumbled half of it into bits that she dipped into her tea and then left untasted on the edge of her plate. “Honestly,” she said, and her voice regained its old bright chattiness, “the way people tiptoe around me, you'd think I was the first woman in the world whose protector took a wife! Iphigénie and Phlosine were here this morning”—she named her two best friends, plaçées whose protectors likewise had bought them cottages on the lakeshore—“and to watch them fetching tea for me and glancing at me sideways whenever they thought I wasn't looking, you'd have thought I was going to hang myself from the rafters the moment they turned their backs.”
She laughed, but her laughter was brittle, as it had been since she had first learned of Henri's engagement.
“Poor Henri! When he was last here he looked just wretched. And who wouldn't be, who has to visit every single member of that family before the wedding? I wonder if he even got in to see their crazy old uncle Joffrey? I understand the man hasn't been off his plantation in twenty years—literally twenty years, p'tit!—and is crazy as a banana. . . . His sons, too. No one in the family has seen any of them since I don't know when. And that dreadful grandmother of Henri's . . . the one who insists she's about to die and has to see her niece and her grandson married right this minute, before she goes, and never mind that everyone has to come into town again, because God forbid any grandchild of hers should be married by anyone but the Bishop—and I'm sure His Excellency would much rather stay out here at the lake as well. Do you know she has four footmen to carry her around in a palanquin like a Roman empress? It's the truth, p'tit, I've seen her. She has two or three of the things—palanquins, I mean—all of them draped in black, to match her dresses. . . . Not that she has a gown newer than the reign of Napoleon, honestly! I can't imagine what she's going to wear to the wedding. . . .”
January let her chatter, drank his tea, and listened, knowing that it was all that he could do. Her friend Iphigénie, he guessed, had been full of advice—as far as he knew she was still trying to get Dominique to abort the child that would certainly be a desperate liability should Henri in fact be forced by his new bride and her family to repudiate his mistress. And Phlosine, with her own second child on its way, was a wellspring of well-meant tricks to hold Henri and deceive his wife. And their mother, January knew, would be no help. Other people's problems bored her, except as a source of gossip with her own friends.
So he listened, hearing how many times Dominique spoke Henri's name, as if repetition would serve as proof—or conjuration—of his continued devotion. And he wondered where hope ended and folly began. His own love for Rose, maintained in the face of her fear that might prove too strong for him—or her—to conquer . . . What of that? Was it madness to love a woman who could not respond?
Would that love turn to hate when he finally came to understand that there truly was no water in that well?
But there is, he thought, recalling the passion of her kisses when times were gentle and good. I know there is.
“I was saying to Henri only . . . only last week”—her voice hesitated a little—“that there's no reason on earth for his poor sisters to be stranded all the way downriver at Bois d'Argent for the summer. Poor things, they're all starting to look exactly like his mother's sisters! The family has four plantations, after all, and Viellard itself is only across the lake. And Henri agreed with me that the older three are never going to be married if their mother persists in dressing them in that petunia-colored gauze. . . .”
Before he left Milneburgh, January walked along the lakeshore to the handsome boarding-house where his mother rented rooms every summer, so that the lakeside cottage St.-Denis Janvier had given her could be let out to a white sugar-broker and his wife. His mother had offered to let him stay in her house in town—at only the smallest of rents—and could not understand why he had refused, any more than he could understand, he supposed, why Rose would not be beholden to him, who loved her.
“Oh, it's Henri this and Henri that now,” sniffed Livia Levesque, after January had delivered an account—unsolicited—of how he'd found his sister. “Sneaking away from that mother of his, and the St. Chinian girl, to see her. They'll put a stop to that, and so I told her, though, of course, she wouldn't listen.”
She fanned herself with a round of stiffened and painted silk, as beautiful as she had been on that night twenty-three years ago when she'd dressed before her mirror for General Humbert's birthday dinner. There were more lines around her enormous pansy-brown eyes, and at the corners of her wide, secretive mouth, but a steady regime of crushed strawberries and wafer-thin slices of raw veal had so far held Time's more serious graving-tools at bay. She dressed as exquisitely as ever, in delicate shades of turquoise and buttercup—she'd worn mourning for the late Christophe Levesque for precisely the prescribed year and then had put it aside with the comment that black did not become her—and still kept the slender upright figure that was the envy and despair of her contemporaries. The only difference between that slim, elegant plaçée and this slim, elegant widow lay in her eyes, and the briskness of her voice and movements, at variance with the languid gait and murmur of a rich man's concubine.
Livia Levesque was her own woman now, well-off and beholden to none.
“If Henri Viellard thinks that marriage is going to give him one pennyworth more say in the ordering of the family plantations, all I can say is he doesn't know that mother of his particularly well. She ruled old Jean-Charles Viellard like the Empress of Russia, and you can see what she's made of her son: a bag-pudding good for nothing beyond reading books by heathens and deists and picking out waistcoats for himself. Minou will be well shut of him. Drink your tea, Benjamin. It's first-rate China green at a dollar and seventy-five cents a pound and it'll be completely useless if it gets cold.”
January drank his tea. The gallery of the Louisiana House overlooked a small garden that ran down to the lake; on the lawn two bluejays tormented a stout gray cat, one of them hopping about in front of it exactly a quarter-inch beyond the maximum strike of its forepaws, the other stationed behind, pulling tufts of fur from the end of the cat's thrashing tail. January could almost see steam coming from the exhausted and exasperated tom's ears.
The Widow Levesque dropped a chunk of white sugar into her tea with the silver sugar-tongs, and did not offer the plate to her son. “I went to the trouble of finding a woman in St. John Parish who'll take that baby and nurse it for a dollar a month—when every slut in town is charging two dollars and some of them more—and all I got from your sister was a lot of eyewash about Henri Viellard's child, as if he won't be getting a dozen like it onto the St. Chinian chit. Well, I wash my hands of her.”
She shook her hands illustratively. Well-kept hands, thought January. Smooth as a girl's and the color of walnut-hull dye, the nails kept like jeweler's work. Only a scar just below the little finger of the right one marked where a sugar-cane had gouged, in the days when she'd dragged bundles of cut cane to the mill like any other slave-gang girl. Once she'd become St.-Denis Janvier's plaçée she'd never spoken of those days. When January or Olympe mentioned them, she would turn away from them in cold silence, as if they had ceased to exist.
On the night of General Humbert's birthday dinner, the topaz set Hesione LeGros had worn could have bought Livia's cottage and everything in it—Livia and her children as well, had they still been on the open market. January had seen what became of freebooters' women when they ceased to be young and fiery and gay, when childbearing and drink began to mark their faces and their bodies. It was the clever women like his mother who spent their money not on Italian silks but on creams and paints and Olympian Dew to prolong their youth, investing not only in their own beauty, but in property, slaves, mules, shares of cotton-presses and steamship companies.
For those who loved, and who gambled on a man's love, the damage and the pain were perhaps the worst.
Livia had little enough to say about Hesione LeGros. “Of course I remember her! Who could forget those hideous old-fashioned topazes—which I'll go bail were paste—and feathers like she'd bought out a hatmaker's shop?” She selected a beignet from the plate Bella brought out to her and considered the question. Bella had been the slave who had, twenty-three years ago, helped her on with her delicate kid gloves. These days she looked ten years older than her mistress, though in fact they were both fifty-nine.
“I think she came to one or two of the Blue Ribbon Balls, got up in the most antiquated crimson taffeta polonaise and jeweled like a shop window, but I don't recall anyone giving her a regular place or so much as thinking of it. She looked haggard even then and she spoke the most awful French, blast this and blast that and blast your eyes out. . . . Men laugh at that sort of thing but they don't buy cottages for it. I think she whored for a little while on Tchoupitoulas Street.” She sounded pleased about that, and brushed powdered sugar from her fingers.
“Did she have family, or particular friends?”
“Good heavens, Ben, I don't know! This was years ago. And any man with silver in his pocket—or copper, later on—was Hesione's particular friend, I daresay.”
She shrugged impatiently, the curious features of Hesione's death meaning as little to her as they apparently meant to the City Guards.
But when January mentioned, in frustration and in passing, that Bertrand Avocet was supposed to have murdered his brother Guifford, and this case was taking up the whole attention of the City Guards, his mother was avid with attention.
“Absolutely common tradesmen,” she sniffed, which was a little high in the instep, January thought, from a former field-hand. “The father came from France with a shipful of shoes and married old Tileul's daughter—the bossy one—and got her father to give them the place down in Plaquemines for their own rather than any share of the family holdings. . . .”
Olympe was right, thought January again, even more annoyed than he had been in the Cabildo the previous day. His mother wouldn't have gotten her skirts dirty to cross the road to look at Hesione's corpse, but produce the smallest shred of gossip concerning the lives of the white and wealthy and she would let herself be trampled by wild horses in her rush to demonstrate how much she knew about them.
“. . . barely a hogshead of sugar per acre, and the swamp so far off across the open marshes that the wood-gangs spend half their day dragging fuel. What with the one brother spending every cent that came in on this and that newfangled scheme to get rich, and marrying Claud Houx's widow earlier this month into the bargain—a flighty piece of work if ever I saw one—and the other brother undercutting him and trying to force him to hold household and carrying on an affair with his brother's new wife. . . .”
“I ought to introduce you to Lieutenant Shaw,” remarked January bitterly, after his mother displayed—as he had predicted—an exact knowledge of every clue surrounding Guifford Avocet's death in the marshy clearing behind the Avocet sugar-mill: the bloody shirt, the broken watch in his pocket whose hands marked half-past nine, the parlor clock likewise inexplicably stopped, the discrepancy in Bertrand's tale of a runaway slave when no slave had been missing from the quarters. “He'd appreciate your information.”
“Don't be silly, Benjamin.” She didn't even speak sharply, and the indulgent chuckle in her voice told him just how much she regarded the thought of her conversing with Shaw as simply a jest in doubtful taste. It was as if he'd suggested that she go into real estate partnership with one of Dominique's pet finches: something unthinkably foolish, not even considered.
As if he'd suggested that the City Guards actually investigate the death of a drunken black woman who owned nothing.
“Mind you,” she added, as January prepared to depart, “I expect you to let me know more about the Avocet murder, as soon as you hear anything from that flea-bitten American animal you consort with . . . Not that he'll speak a word of the truth.”
Exasperated, January returned to town by the steam-train, to find “that flea-bitten American animal”—his mother's favorite term for Lieutenant Shaw—still absent from the Cabildo.
The rainy afternoon streets were quiet as he walked back to Rue des Ursulines—too light for a real storm, and afterward the steaming dampness would render the heat ten times worse. Shuttered shops and shuttered houses, except for the gambling-halls on Rue Royale, which Death on a Pale Horse itself couldn't have closed. As he climbed the garçonnière steps he could hear Madame Bontemps talking with her protector as she swept the back gallery, in the flat, queer accents of the almost-deaf. The fact that M'sieu Bontemps had been dead for a number of years did not seem to bother the stooped little woman any more than did the rain that spattered in under the gallery's wide roof. When he'd come to board here, after one too many of his mother's acts of emotional blackmail, January had negotiated the use of Madame Bontemps' parlor in which to teach his piano students, and even in their summer absence he kept up his payments to her, so that he could have an hour or two a day uninterrupted of playing his piano for the sheer joy of it.
In many ways he felt most himself—most real—at such times. His enormous hands floated lightly over the keys, his mind and heart engaged, both producing the music and listening. Playing the cotillions and mazurkas, the quadrilles and waltzes, that were his livelihood: arias from Rossini and Meyerbeer, overtures and ballet interludes. Playing, too, the old-fashioned pieces that were no longer in demand, but whose clockwork precision rejoiced his heart: Mozart marches, concertos of Bach and Vivaldi. Playing, too, the songs he'd heard the stevedores sing on the levee, with strange strong rhythms like the surge of the moon-called sea, and African words that no one any longer understood.
