Long Distance Life Part 4

"Even to read and to write," she said. And no more about it.

Of course he had seen Jean Jacques a hundred times: an old mulatto from Saint-Domingue with skin far darker than Cecile's and gray hair perfectly like wool around his ancient skull, he had often frightened the children, walking as he did with hands behind his back, a rusty wide-pocketed coat hanging well below his knees, the heavy folds of his brown skin lending him a brooding expression, so you feared he would stamp his foot at you if you came near: he never did. His thick lips moved silently as he turned the pages of his missal at Ma.s.s, and from a worn cloth purse he drew coins for each collection, and sometimes soiled dollar bills.

And there had always been his shop with its s.h.i.+ngle in the Rue Bourbon. He made all manner of furniture to order, including pieces that he covered with damask and velvet as well as those crafted entirely from wood.

But it was later that afternoon when the winter dusk was dreary, and Marcel had broken away to wander by himself in the streets, that he saw-really saw-Jean Jacques.

His doors lay open to the bustling street, and the potbellied stove showed a heap of red coals behind him, while in the warm light of his smoking lamps, his sleeves rolled above the elbow, he bent on one knee in the fragrant shavings, his arm moving the silver chisel so smoothly and regularly along the leg of the delicate chair before him that it seemed he didn't carve the piece at all, rather merely discovered under the wood the marvelous curve that had been hidden there all the time. Chairs for sale stood in a row by the door; and others hung in the shadows along the walls, while bolts of cloth gleamed on high shelves, and on a small desk as fine as anything that might carry a price, its French polish s.h.i.+ning dully in the light, lay an open ledger in which Marcel could see the long lines of slanting purple script. Here and there were thick catalogues and engravings taken from them of fine furniture which must have been his models, and on a st.u.r.dy simple bench lay all his tools which he would lift with reverence now and again in the manner of the priest gone to the side altar for the was.h.i.+ng of his hands.

"That man taught himself all that he knows..." came the low and enigmatic voice, all the more rich with meaning for its monotone, "even to read and to write." And the words were mingled with this vibrant and aromatic place that shone in the thin winter rain with the magic of a stage; and pa.s.sersby became blind men.

It was not long after that Jean Jacques, having seen Marcel so often stranded for a half hour or more in the open doorway, asked him to come inside.

He made strong coffee on the iron stove, and poured it with the hot milk in one stream into the china cups, giving one to the boy and taking the other, though he stood always with a knotted fist on his hip as he drank and went back to work when the cup was yet half full. Marcel, stiff in a straightback chair, asked politely the name of this tool, that style of chest, what kind of wood was this? He waited patiently for the slow replies, the pauses so long sometimes he'd thought the man had forgotten, only to hear the answer finally: this chisel is tempered for wood, you see, and this one for stone. Jean Jacques placed a square of marble into the neat frame of a table top, having made the four sides smooth to touch.

Rudolphe Lermontant, Richard's father, came in one afternoon carrying a batch of slats bound with cord. "Look at this," he said angrily, as the old man cut the bundle loose and lifted the lacquered pieces. "A fine little table, and they let it fall from the cart on the way from Charleston, sometimes I..." he smacked his fist into the palm of his hand. "And then they say it was already ruined, all the glue come undone, I don't believe it. That's my daughter for you." He threw a furious glance at Marcel who stood decorously and self-consciously on the edge of the room. "You know Giselle, aaaahhh!"

The old man had it done by the end of the week when Marcel came after school, a jewel of inlaid rosewood and glinting mahogany, the tiny drawer sliding back and forth, back and forth beneath the table top as if it were on magic wheels. Even the key turned again in the polished bra.s.s of the lock where it had once been rusted tight. "Ah, so many of them no longer have the key," said Jean Jacques with slow wonder as if this were the remarkable aspect of it all, this good luck. Rudolphe, stunned, said, "Monsieur, name your price. My grandmother bought this table when this place was a walled colonial town."

Jean Jacques' heavy shoulders shook with silent laughter. "Don't say such a thing to a shopkeeper, Monsieur," he said. But then serious, he wrote some figures on a slip of yellow paper. Rudolphe paid it at once from his pocket.

Later, that Sunday afternoon, Marcel, entering the Lermontant house for dinner, saw that small table nestled between the heavily draped French windows. A bra.s.s lamp stood in the center of it casting a loving light on the curved drawer, its s.h.i.+ning key, the tapered legs. "And this was made," he whispered, approaching it. He touched the surface which felt like wax. "Made!"

"Marcel!" Rudolphe snapped his fingers behind him. All the room was filled with things that were made, made by someone with chisels, saws, the pot of glue and the bottles of oil, and the soft cloths and the tiny pegs, and hands that felt the object all over as if it were living, breathing, growing into its perfect shape.

"Sometimes, my boy," Rudolphe whispered to him as he reached for his shoulders, "you have the perfect vacant stare of the village idiot!"

It was easy between them, Marcel and Jean Jacques. There was never any explanation for Marcel's being there. Time and again he slipped in while the man worked, or talked with his customers, or seated at his desk, filled that ledger not with long columns of figures but neat sentences, paragraphs, which he wrote with quite rapid dips of his pen. Never was much said. There was no need. But Marcel burned with the one question he could not ask, how did you do it, how did you learn all of this yourself?

From a picture in a book, Jean Jacques made a rounded and gilded fern stand for the rich Celestina Roget who was so delighted she clapped her hands like a child, and visiting the parlor of an old white woman in the Rue Dumaine he came back to make three more chairs for her to match the one and only that had survived the crossing from France. With knotted fingers sometimes he threaded his own needle and bound the edges of the flowered damask before he stretched it to fit the rounded seat of a settee. But how did it all begin, was Tante Josette right? She had said it with such authority, and gone home again to Sans Souci Sans Souci, her plantation in the Cane River country, before Marcel could catch her alone.

No matter if he had teachers really. What had enabled him to learn? What had removed this man from the commonplace and given him the gift of spinning straw into gold?

Learning for Marcel was agony at times. It was only after a long tutelage with his friend Anna Bella and hard work in Monsieur De Latte's cla.s.s that the magnificent world of books had opened to him, and even now he struggled, against all his native inclinations, to make something coherent, if not beautiful from the Latin verses he did not really understand. Oh, how he envied Anna Bella that she could read English by the hour, as easily as French, and curling up in a chair by her bed, laugh aloud to herself over the pages of Robinson Crusoe Robinson Crusoe, or fall into the spell of a penny romance.

But there was no way this boy in starched Irish linen and velvet waistcoat could ask the working man such questions. And how tastelessly it would have betrayed an admiration that was fast growing into love. He longed to take the broom from the man's hands at the end of the day's work, or help him wipe the oil again and again from the chair leg as it slowly darkened. But Marcel had never touched a broom in his life; his hands lay still at his sides, there was no dark stain in the fine lines of his fingers, nor beneath his carefully trimmed nails.

No one understood what he was doing there. Richard would leave him at the corner on the way home from cla.s.s with a shrug. The streets were filled with the shops of such free colored craftsmen, good men all of course, but they worked with their hands, what was the fascination? Especially for Marcel who possessed for Richard always, the panache of a planter's son, born for drawing rooms and crystal gla.s.ses, as if he had been nurtured in the big house itself, and not in the demimonde.

Cecile, observing Marcel once at the back of the shop, turned beneath her parasol with a stiff back. Marcel was humiliated until he was sure that Jean Jacques had not seen.

"Well, they told me you made yourself at home in that shop," she said that night at dinner. "Would you please be so kind as to tell me why?"

Marcel played with the food on his plate.

"I don't want you hanging about a shop," she said, as she gestured to Lisette for more soup. "Marcel, are you listening to me? I don't want you with that old man."

"But why?" He looked up as if from a dream.

"That's what I asked you, Monsieur. To tell me why?"

He paid her no mind whatsoever. It never occurred to him to do so. Sundays were unspeakably dreary to him because Jean Jacques' shop was closed, and every other day now he was there at one time or another, and sometimes, swelling with pride, was left to watch for a moment or two while Jean Jacques in the backyard fed the fire with the day's debris.

At last one afternoon as he sat on a stool by the stove, staring at that open ledger, Jean Jacques, who had been writing in it since he had come in, turned to say, "It's my diary," as if he had heard the wordless question aloud.

Marcel was amazed. Writers kept diaries, and so did the planters, and so did Jean Jacques. He would get a diary himself at once, why hadn't he thought of it before now?

Jean Jacques laughed lightly, soundlessly at the expression on Marcel's face.

"Why, you stare at this book as if it were alive!" said the old man. He shook his head and closed the ledger carefully, running his hand along the cover. "Well, it's precious enough to me. Forty-nine years ago when I left Cap Francois, I didn't have anything with me but the clothes on my back and a diary just like this one in my hands. See there?" He pointed beyond the front room of the shop to the small rear bedroom. Marcel saw a shelf above the neatly made bed and on it was a row of such ledgers. "That's the very same book there, which I began in Cap Francois, and next to it are those I've filled for forty-nine years."

"But what do you write in it, Monsieur?" Marcel asked.

"Everything," Jean Jacques smiled. "How the day begins and how it ends. What I do that day and what happens to others. All those events that took place in Saint-Domingue, those I saw with my own eyes, and those that were told to me by others." All this he said slowly, thoughtfully, his eyes off to one side as though he were seeing the things of which he spoke. "I imagine you've heard plenty about those times," he went on glancing at Marcel. He rose from the chair, and pressing his hands to the small of his back, he stretched.

He looked like a young man when he did this. But then his shoulders came forward as they'd been before, his vest sagged open as he stooped, and he was the old man again, his steps slow as he approached the bench and looked at the tools before him.

He had said more in these few moments than the sum of all that had ever pa.s.sed between them, and Marcel had liked his manner of speech. His French was not formal but almost perfect. In short, he spoke like a gentleman. "Your aunts must have told you enough," he said. "I mean Madame Colette and Madame Louisa. I remember them when they came, and your Maman when she came, she was just a baby...like that." He made the gesture with his hand to indicate she had been so high.

Of course they spoke of Saint-Domingue, Tante Colette and Tante Louisa, but Cecile had been too young to remember anything and never said a word. They spoke of the rich plantations on the Plaine Du Nord and their house in Port-au-Prince where they had entertained the French officers in their regal uniforms, drinking champagne with the generals, and gossiping about the wild orgies of Napoleon's sister, Pauline, who had dined and danced through the entire war. All the names of Saint-Domingue thrilled Marcel along with these images of b.a.l.l.s until dawn, and s.h.i.+ps with billowing sails striking out across the blue Caribbean for the port of New Orleans. And then there had been the buccaneers. "Tell me about the buccaneers," he had said once when nestled among their immense skirts in the cottage parlor. They had laughed wildly, but Anna Bella had read him an English story about buccaneers.

"Oh, yes, Monsieur," Marcel said, speaking lightly and quickly of French officers, champagne, and how the black slaves had risen and burnt it all and finally the French officers had left with the army, and his aunts had left, too. He meant to sound knowledgeable, but even as he spoke he sensed that all he knew was flimsy, simple phrases often repeated and never explained. He was ashamed suddenly of how foolish he had sounded.

Jean Jacques' face had changed. He stood very still over the workbench looking at Marcel. "French officers," he said under his breath. "French officers, and parties till dawn." He shook his head. "These are some historians your good aunts, but please understand I mean no disrespect." He turned back to the chair he had been fixing, and going down on one knee as if in genuflection, he pressed the damask where he had been tacking it down. The box of bra.s.s tacks lay beside him, and in his hand he held a small hammer.

"They had a great plantation on the Plaine du Nord," Marcel went on. "Tante Josette lived there, but the others, Tante Louisa and Tante Colette, they lived in the city of Port-au-Prince. Of course, they lost everything. Everything was lost."

"Eh bien, everything was lost," Jean Jacques sighed. "I could tell you a lot about French officers, I could tell you a slightly different story, of the French officers who killed my master at Grand Riviere, and broke his commander on the wheel."

This was said simply and for a moment Marcel was not certain that he had heard. Then it was as if every sound from the street had died. He strained forward, and then a shock went through him and he felt himself shudder. He had heard it all right, Jean Jacques had said the words, "my master." Jean Jacques had been a slave! Never in all his life had Marcel heard anyone refer to a time when he or she had been a slave. Of course there were mulatto slaves and quadroon slaves and slaves as light as Marcel, as well as there were black slaves, but these were not gens de couleur, Creole gens de couleur gens de couleur, Creole gens de couleur who had been free for generations, free always, free so far back that no one could remember-or hadn't they??? who had been free for generations, free always, free so far back that no one could remember-or hadn't they???

"Do those good ladies ever talk about that, the battle at Grand Riviere?" Jean Jacques asked gently. There was no judgment in his voice, merely in the choice of his words. He lifted a tack from the box, fitted it between two fingers of his left hand which held the cloth in its place. "Do they ever speak of the mulatto, Oge, and how he led the men of color in battle at Grand Riviere and how the French captured him and broke him on the wheel?"

It seemed the shame Marcel was feeling was palpable and hot. It burned his cheeks. The palms of his hands were damp with it. What does it matter that Jean Jacques was a slave, what does it matter, he was struggling with it, hearing quite distinctly his mother's tone at table, so sans facon sans facon, "I don't want you with that old man." He loathed himself at this moment. He would die before he let Jean Jacques know what he was feeling. He cast back though the confusion of his mind for the words Jean Jacques had only just spoken and said quickly, nervously, "No, Monsieur, they never spoke of Oge." He was afraid of the tremor in his voice.

"No, I don't suppose they would," Jean Jacques said. "But it seems they might have. That a young man should know something of those times, of those men of color that died."

Only now was the meaning of the words penetrating to Marcel.

"What does it mean, Monsieur, broken on the wheel?" Men of color fighting a battle with white men, he could not envision this. He knew nothing of it.

Jean Jacques stopped. He held the hammer poised above the bra.s.s crown of the tack, and in a low voice said, "'...while alive to have his arms, legs, thighs, and spine broken; and afterward to be placed on a wheel, his face toward Heaven and there to stay as long as it would please G.o.d to preserve his life.'" He paused. Without looking up, he went on. "I was in Cap Francois then, but I didn't go to the Place d'Armes. There were too many white people in the Place d'Armes to see it happen. Planters drove in from the countryside to see it happen. I went later, after they'd hanged the other men of color they'd captured with him. But they didn't capture my master. My master died on the battlefield, and no one got to hang him, nor break him on a wheel."

Marcel was stunned. His eyes were riveted to Jean Jacques.

"But how did this happen?" Marcel whispered. "Colored men fighting white men?"

Jean Jacques glanced at him, and slowly a smile broke over his wrinkled features. "Some historians those good aunts of yours, mon fils," mon fils," he said gently as before. "It was colored men fighting white men who commenced the revolution in Saint-Domingue he said gently as before. "It was colored men fighting white men who commenced the revolution in Saint-Domingue before before the slaves rose. You see, it really began in France. It began with the slaves rose. You see, it really began in France. It began with Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, those magic words. And this man, Oge, quite an educated man, had been in Paris and wined and dined by those men who were the friends of the blacks in the colonies and believed in their protection and their rights." Jean Jacques suddenly put the tack and the little hammer down. He closed the top of the box of tacks, and then rising slowly as if his knees ached, he turned the chair toward him and rested back on it, his hands on his thighs. He sighed heavily with a movement of his shoulders.

"Well, it must have made a lot of sense in Paris, that Oge should dome home to Saint-Domingue and demand the rights of his people, the gens de couleur gens de couleur. Mind you, n.o.body had said too much yet about freedom for the slaves. But I don't have to tell you, mon fils mon fils, young as you are, that there was no way the white planters of Saint-Domingue were going to give the gens de couleur gens de couleur the same rights as they had themselves. So Oge gathered a fighting force at Grand Riviere, and my master was there. Oh, I'd begged him not to go. I'd begged him not to be so foolis.h.!.+ And he wasn't my master then anymore, I was free, and he respected me, he really did." He looked at Marcel, his eyes moved slowly over Marcel's face. "But he went on, and with that small force met the French and the French defeated them like that. the same rights as they had themselves. So Oge gathered a fighting force at Grand Riviere, and my master was there. Oh, I'd begged him not to go. I'd begged him not to be so foolis.h.!.+ And he wasn't my master then anymore, I was free, and he respected me, he really did." He looked at Marcel, his eyes moved slowly over Marcel's face. "But he went on, and with that small force met the French and the French defeated them like that.

"But by the time it was all over, by the time your good aunts had left with your mamma and come here...why, thirteen years had pa.s.sed, and white had fought colored, and colored had fought black, and black had fought white. And black and colored had finally joined together to drive out the French...those French officers your aunts have told you about...and that famous Madame Pauline, Napoleon's sister...they drove them out.

"I wonder if there was an acre of farmland left...of coffee or sugar or anything a man can grow...I wonder if there was an acre of it on that island that hadn't been burned ten times over before it was finished. I don't know. It was in the very beginning that I left, set sail from Cap Francois during the first days of the black revolt."

He sat still. His eyes left Marcel and he stared forward as if seeing those times.

Marcel was speechless. And when Jean Jacques looked at him again, his dark eyes appeared to search Marcel's face for some glimmer of response, some little indication that he had understood. But Marcel had never heard a word of this before, he had believed his people to have been one with the whites, to have been driven out along with the whites, and he had that overwhelming sense which had come over him of late of all that he did not know or comprehend.

Jean Jacques glanced at the open door. "Do you feel that breeze?" he asked. "Winter's over, and none too soon." He rose and stretched as he had done before. "That's the Angelus, mon fils mon fils," he said.

Marcel had heard it, the dull clanking of the Cathedral bell. "But Monsieur," he began, "it went on for thirteen years, this war, this revolution?"

"You've got to get on home, mon fils," mon fils," Jean Jacques said. "You're usually gone by this time." Marcel did not move. Jean Jacques said. "You're usually gone by this time." Marcel did not move.

All the while he had imagined it so simply. One night the slaves had risen, and burned it all. "White, colored, it didn't make any difference," Tante Colette so often said with a weary wave of her fan. "They burned everything that we had."

He was excited. And yet he was frightened at the same time. It seemed he hovered on the edge of an awful, dismal feeling as he sat there, conjured by this vision of men of color in arms, and black men fighting with them. He barely heard Jean Jacques' voice: "Go on, mon fils mon fils, your mother will be one angry woman if you don't go on."

"But will you tell me tomorrow?" Marcel asked. He got to his feet but stood there looking intently at Jean Jacques.

Jean Jacques was thinking. And that dismal feeling in Marcel deepened, something akin to the dusk in the street and the fading light around them within the shop. He watched Jean Jacques' dark face and regretted that he had asked with such feeling. Marcel had made it seem too important by asking, and as so often happened when you wanted something desperately, then you couldn't have it.

"I don't know, mon fils," mon fils," Jean Jacques said. "Maybe that's enough history for a while. Maybe I've said too much as it is." He was looking at Marcel. He appeared to wait and then Marcel said, "But Monsieur..." Jean Jacques said. "Maybe that's enough history for a while. Maybe I've said too much as it is." He was looking at Marcel. He appeared to wait and then Marcel said, "But Monsieur..."

"No, mon fils mon fils, one day you can read all of that in books on your own. It seems you ought to know something about it. Those were your people." He shook his head. "But you read it in books on your own."

"But Monsieur, I have no such books, I've never even seen them," Marcel said. "I could go into the bookstores and ask them..."

"Oh no, no, mon fils mon fils. Don't do that, you mustn't do that, don't you ever go into bookstores and ask," Jean Jacques said. His face had settled into that brooding frown of his that Marcel had known so often in years before. "Some day I'll give you those to read." He gestured to the diaries on the shelf. "When I die, I'll leave those books to you." He looked at Marcel. "Would you read them if I did that, would they mean something to you?"

When Marcel did not answer, he asked again, "Mon fils?"

"I don't want you to die," Marcel said.

Jean Jacques smiled. But he was already turning to get the shutters, and said again under his breath that it was time for Marcel to go home.

II.

MARCEL HAD BEGUN to change. Cecile saw it, and sighed, to change. Cecile saw it, and sighed, "Eh bien "Eh bien, he's thirteen." He took unexplained walks, and went out of his own accord to the flat of his aunts over the dress shop. And at table on Sundays (they were always at the cottage for supper if Monsieur Philippe was not there) he asked them simple questions about Saint-Domingue, seemed bored by their accounts of all the practical wealth left behind, reminiscences of those lovely courtyards crowded with flowers where you could pick the ripe yellow bananas right from the trees.

"But the revolution, what was it like?" he asked quite suddenly one afternoon.

"I'm sure I have no idea, mon pet.i.t mon pet.i.t, since it was mostly in the north and we were all so thankful Josette escaped!" Tante Louisa said haughtily.

And Cecile nervously turned the talk to the subject of Marie's birthday. That white eyelet lace was too expensive, she said suddenly, she was thinking of something a little more practical, and Marie was growing so fast besides.

Richard, a frequent guest, felt the tension in Cecile at such gatherings. The tall aunts fascinated him with their ripples of laughter, rustling and tinkling with pearls and gold, even the white streaks in their straight dark hair seemed decorative. While Cecile, cutting the cake for dessert, brought down the knife a little too hard making a strangely attractive "c.h.i.n.k" against the plate. But never, never did any of them speak of anything that was more than the practical, more than the materially real. "Oh, we had such chandeliers in that house, and champagne each night, and that young French officer, what was his name, Louisa, you remember he brought up the little orchestra. Why, we had music every night, all night. Richard, here have some more cake. Cecile, give that boy another piece of cake, Richard, if you get an inch taller you won't fit through the door."

And before he could even answer these quick flas.h.i.+ng statements, their eyes were elsewhere, their hands eternally busy. Cecile in particular fussed with the flowers in the center of the table, or examined the immaculate linen napkin in her hands as if for some tiny and all-important flaw. And if the boys, alone after dinner, lapsed into some low-voiced talk of what they had read at school, she was at once uncomfortable, quick to clear the table, as if listening to some abrasive foreign tongue.

Richard had not thought of it before. And it was Marcel's taut face that made him think of it then, how empty at times all that chatter seemed, and how quickly it left the mind. Richard was only vaguely aware of his own ability to think about abstract things and to talk of them, but the whole tone of the Lermontants' suppers was different. You could count on it, trivial or not, conversation with the Lermontants revolved around the invisible. And Marcel, who had once sipped his soup quietly waiting to be excused so that he and Richard might slip off alone, now stared fixedly at Rudolphe who waved a folded newspaper over the steaming plates, crying, "Read what they say, read it!" while Grandpere Lermontant tried to quiet him with a quick, "It won't pa.s.s, Rudolphe, I tell you the legislature will never pa.s.s it."

"It's the country parishes, every time it's the country parishes: strip the gens de couleur gens de couleur of their right to own property!" Rudolphe all but rose straight into the air with rage. "To think that they..." of their right to own property!" Rudolphe all but rose straight into the air with rage. "To think that they..."

"It won't pa.s.s," said the old man.

"But why, what does it mean?" Marcel asked.

"That the country whites are afraid of the free negro," Grandpere explained patiently. "It's been the same since 1803, since we became Americans," he went on with a slight twist to his smile, never missing a bite, reaching now and then for his gla.s.s: "They bring one bill after another before the legislature in Baton Rouge to try to take away our rights, limit our rights, what have you. It's all because some colored barber in their town has a finer horse than they have, or a prettier daughter."

Madame Suzette, Richard's mother, shook her head, deplored ignorance under her breath, and motioned to the cook for more rice. Marcel read the column in the paper when he could get his hands on it. And Richard mused silently that he had never even heard the word "color" at Cecile's table. He felt a momentary discomfort to think that he would not mention it in her presence.

"It's not the old families," Rudolphe was saying. "I can tell you that. It's men come here to make money off slaves, that's the long and short of it. It's not a system they inherited! They've no respect for a way of life, for traditions that go with it. And every free man of color's a threat to them. Well, I'll tell you one thing, that this family was the Famille Lermontant Famille Lermontant when half that cracker rabble were packed in the convict s.h.i.+ps landing off the coast of Georgia." when half that cracker rabble were packed in the convict s.h.i.+ps landing off the coast of Georgia."

Marcel's head jerked round toward Rudolphe, and he let the folded newspaper all but slip from his hand.

Rudolphe lifted his gla.s.s ever so slightly toward the framed portrait of his Arriere-Grandpere Jean Baptiste, beyond the double doors. "We had our tavern in the Tchoupitoulas Road, and money in the banks when they were splitting kindling for a living and clearing the fields."

"Let's go upstairs," Richard bent to whisper in Marcel's ear. But Marcel stared off, his face as still as if it were made of wax.

It was days later when wandering into the parlor of the cottage as young men do, absorbed in his thoughts and annoyed by the very sight and sounds of the house, he glanced at the pictures of Tante Josette and Tante Louisa above the buffet and said, "But they are not our real aunts, are they?"

Cecile, positively afraid of him of late, dropped the embroidery she held in her hand.

"They brought me up from a child that high!" she burst out, "gave me my trousseau, how dare you speak of them in that manner!" It was a rare moment. She had never spoken of being indebted to anyone. And once in a while she would remark when having her measurements taken how she hated, herself, to sew. She had done it for twenty-one years in their shop, Marcel knew.

Tante Louisa, two days later, as she pa.s.sed him a gla.s.s of sherry, said, "Of course I'm your aunt, who's to say I'm not? Who's been putting such ideas in your head?"

Her black hair was curled fastidiously at the temples, her pale brown face old but still lovely with the faintest blush of rouge. She had sent her last lover off three years ago. An old white widower from Charleston who loved to play with one side of his waxed mustache, had fighting c.o.c.ks, race horses, and taught Marcel to play faro.

"But there is no blood connection," Marcel said to her. They were in her rear sitting room, its high windows open to the court so that there rose over the distant noises of the street the constant trickling of the fountain.

"There's a connection," she said to him calmly. And rising, she stood behind his chair and slowly ma.s.saged his shoulders, his neck, "You're my little boy," she said in his ear. "That's the connection."

But Tante Colette, always the more practical and the more outspoken said without looking up from her book of accounts, "Now don't you worry your maman with all that, Marcel. All the questions you've been asking about Saint-Domingue, what do you know about Saint-Domingue? Your maman was just a child when she left, but children remember." Then she removed her gold-rimmed eyegla.s.s and let it fall on its long blue ribbon, looking at him gravely. "Why we hardly had the time to take the clothes on our backs...and the pewter and the silver we left behind...Oh, it makes me ill to this day!"

His lips were moving with her words, he had heard them so many times, but she did not see, and there was nothing of mockery in his eyes.

"But how did you happen, then, to bring my mother?" he asked.

They were stunned.

"Marcel," Colette began, "do you honestly think we would have left that baby there!"