Crescent City

by Belva Plain

  “And it didn’t matter to you?”

  “Of course I was shocked, but there was nothing I could do about it. Anyway, I’ve learned at last that people aren’t always what they seem.”

  “A child knows that, Miriam.”

  “Not always. Girls brought up as they are here don’t get to know much about the world, or what lies under smiles and courtesies.” She took a deep breath. “What did I know about you, André? I’m beginning to think I don’t know you at all.”

  “What the devil can you mean?”

  “Oh, it’s not your fault! No, it’s not. Because you don’t know me, either. We never opened ourselves to each other.”

  André’s eyebrows went up. “Oh? I should have said we did, very much so.”

  She flushed. There it was again, that humiliating wave of hot red rising into her scalp.

  “There are other ways beside just—”

  “Just the body, you mean? Why don’t you say it? Miriam, I don’t understand what’s wrong tonight, what’s happening. You’re different.”

  “Oh, yes, but you are, too. Or else I’m only seeing things I never saw before. You come down here to this ruination and talk the way you do! There’s cruelty in it! Pelagie’s home is burned and gone. She’s lost a son. Rosa’s lost one, and every cent she had in the world, besides. Gabriel had all their funds in Confederate bonds, and they’re worth nothing.”

  “The more fool Gabriel,” André said contemptuously. “If he’d had any sense, he’d have moved his money to a New York bank.”

  If you love him, Gabriel said, then that’s the way it is. I only wanted to be sure, in case … She had felt his cheek against her hair. A military band played a glum march down on the dismal street … I went with Lee at the start. I gave my word.

  She almost screamed, “Don’t you say that! Don’t you call Gabriel a fool! He believed in something, maybe enough to give his life for it.”

  “Your face! Look at your face! Why, it’s on fire! One might think you were in love with the man!”

  “If you had believed in something!” she cried, ignoring his words. “What is life worth if you don’t believe in something?”

  “But I do believe! I believe in pleasure! In love and pleasure. They go together. We’re here such a little time! I want to get as much as I can out of my time! It’s as simple as that. Doesn’t it make sense?”

  The old caressing smile appealed for response. She met it thoughtfully.

  “After all, Miriam, I’ve never hurt anyone, have I? Never in my life, not that I know of, anyway.”

  Not that he knew of. The hurt he was giving now, he would not understand, she saw that clearly; his comely blond face wore a look of puzzlement, with no comprehension of anything she had said all that evening.

  Yes, a man for pleasure, welcome in dark times and places whether in a marriage without love or in the upheaval of a war. But he had nothing else to give. Nor had she anything left to give to him. The need was past. That’s what it was. The need was past.

  And she could have wept for him, wept for them both.

  “Miriam … don’t stare like that. You’re frowning, as if I were some sort of villain.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, “I don’t mean to frown. Of course you’re not a villain, you never were. It’s just that, only that …”

  There was a long silence, in which eyes searched eyes.

  Then André said, very slowly, “Just that there’s another man, I think. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  In a lightning stroke everything is changed; one sees what one never saw before; desire is gone; the man who stands here is a stranger and always has been, although one didn’t know it until now.

  When she did not answer he demanded, seizing her hands, “Is there? Is there?”

  She wanted so much not to wound him, only to make him see that they two had never been matched and never would be.

  And she said, “There isn’t anyone else, André. It’s only that we’re not—not matched. That’s all it is.”

  He dropped her hands. “Not matched! I can’t believe what I’m hearing!”

  “I know. I can hardly believe it, either.”

  And again there was silence between them, while all around the sleeping home the rain fell, roaring.

  “You always were a Puritan,” André said at last. “A Bible Puritan, like your brother. Strange, because you don’t look like one. At least, you didn’t use to! Maybe that contradiction was the fascination. Who knows?” His voice roughened. “But there has to be more to this than you’re telling me! Then it is another man. It’s Carvalho. That’s why you defended him when I called him a fool.”

  “You’re wrong, André. Quite wrong.”

  She was drained. She suffered beneath his gaze, which kept studying her from the soiled hem of her old dress to her tired, bent head. A spark of light fell on the splendid ring which still lay on the table before her. It looked pathetic to her, a symbol of abandonment flung there on the bare wood. It had arrived so proudly in its velvet box.

  André struck his fist impatiently into his palm. She knew the gesture. It meant that he wanted a solution, a quick answer.

  “Is there anything I can do? You know me, Miriam. I can’t stand all this vagueness, you with that mournful face. Just tell me whether there’s anything you want me to do.”

  “There isn’t anything,” she answered miserably.

  “Well, then, I suppose there’s no point in my waiting here like this, is there? I might as well go the way I came. Fast.” He swept the ring up and tucked it into his pocket.

  Miriam touched his sleeve. “Don’t hate me, André.”

  “I don’t hate you. I couldn’t, ever. I’m only sorry for you, Miriam, not even angry as I ought to be for this waste of my time, making this journey for nothing.”

  “I didn’t know before. I really didn’t know until today. Believe me.”

  “I believe you. It seems as though I didn’t know you either, doesn’t it?” He gave her a wry smile. “I just hope you’re not making a terrible mistake that you’ll regret when it’s too late.”

  “If I am, so be it. I can’t help it.”

  The rain stopped abruptly, and a humid wind out of the lonely night blew through the windows. André peered into the darkness.

  “I’ll take the night boat back to New Orleans.”

  She would have liked to bring order into this severance, to round it out diminuendo, as in music, to end with a quiet chord.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t go this way.”

  “How do you want me to go? I think I’m taking it rather well—my first rejection.”

  “Don’t think of it like that. I haven’t rejected you. We’re rejecting each other, or we would have, eventually. It would have come to that, André. We’re too different.”

  He swallowed. She saw the hard contraction and release of his throat; both pain and pride were stuck there, then swallowed. Yet after a moment he was able to summon up the old gaiety.

  “No sense bemoaning, is there? We’ve some good things to remember, after all, haven’t we? If you want to remember them, that is. And I do, Miriam. It was lovely—while it lasted.” His lips brushed her forehead. “So we go on to the next phase .…” He looked at his watch. “I’d better rush. I’ve half an hour to catch the boat.”

  She heard him close the door, heard his firm steps crush the gravel. He was hastening away, putting this night behind him as fast as he could. And why should he not?

  So the curtain comes down on the play. Sometimes, though, the audience, deeply moved by what it has just seen, pauses for a moment or two before gathering wraps and departing. And Miriam sat quite still. Her eyes filled up with stinging tears which did not fall but swam there, blurring the dim room.

  Presently she heard someone moving about. Eulalie had come in to lock the brandy away from the servants. Curiosity was written large upon her, but she did not speak.

  “Yes, he’s gone, Eulalie
. It’s over. And I was wrong, you may be glad to know, or perhaps you don’t care, but I’ll tell you, anyway. I misjudged. I was wrong, only not for the reasons or in the way you’re probably thinking.” Then she remembered something. “I’ve never thanked you for having kept so discreetly quiet. So I thank you now.”

  “You’ve given me shelter,” Eulalie said stiffly. “And I respect your husband’s memory. I admired him. He was a southern gentleman.”

  “Yes, I know you did.” Miriam put out her hand. “This seems to be a day of reckoning for me. So, truce, Eulalie. We’ll never love each other, probably not even like each other very much, but truce anyway?”

  They shook hands. Halfway out of the room with the bottle in her hand, Eulalie remarked, “I suppose he’ll go back to his wife?”

  “I suppose so.”

  There was no need to explain.

  For a long time Miriam stood looking into the fire. Fire, like water, held one’s thoughts. One saw a whole life in the flames. At the back of the hearth a piece of kindling wood had caught, renewing for a while the blaze that had been dying. She stood entranced before it. Years reflected themselves from the golden shimmer. The astonishing day just past reflected itself. Yes, she thought, he might have been a statue labeled: Grecian Youth. That’s what he was, André, with all that glow to enchant a woman, but not to endure. There was not enough underneath, and he would burn away, as in a few more minutes this fire would burn away, too. There was not enough underneath to feed it.

  Gabriel had said: How could he have done this … an unworldly woman like you … a romantic, ignorant girl … to risk your ruin … if he were to walk in here, I would kill him.

  She passed her hand over her eyes, as if to wipe away the recollection of Gabriel’s wrath. She asked herself why she was crying and answered herself in André’s words: Because it was so lovely while it lasted.

  Yes, it was. But there was so little to it, and I took too long to find that out.

  I don’t cry for André; there will be someone else for him whenever he wants someone else. Wherever he goes, in London, in Paris, anywhere, they will be drawn to him. No tears for André.

  After a while she was cried out. The ashes were gray, the house was silent, and she went upstairs feeling a subdued relief for having wept, as is the way with tears.

  32

  Day after day brought the homecomers in uniform and parts of uniform; walking or riding, limping or hale, they came straggling down the dusty roads from the north and west with the winding of the river, and over the hills from the east.

  “It reminds me of Napoleon’s troops returning when I was a boy,” Ferdinand reflected. “Torn boots and no boots, some of them glad to get home, some of them scared of what they’ll find. Same thing.”

  Surely Gabriel would take the train and would be coming to them from New Orleans, if he were coming at all.

  Pelagie’s boys arrived and submitted sheepishly to a tearful, unrestrained welcome, for they were ashamed, in their hard-won manhood, with their new-sprouted beards, to reveal how glad they were.

  “How lucky I am!” their mother cried, when past the first tears and laughter. “Poor Mama lost eight of her eleven, but I’ve only lost two of my seven. And I have my boys back—with no roof to call their own, it’s true, but at least they’re alive.”

  Rosa’s Henry came, incredibly untouched by the war, although he had fought his way through Georgia and surely seen the worst of it. Looking far younger than his thirty years, hardened and browned, he quite obviously drew the shy attention of Angelique, who came to dinner wearing Pelagie’s only silk shawl and a garnet necklace borrowed out of Miriam’s jewelry box.

  The girl had hardly ever seen an “eligible” man. When I was her age, Miriam reflected, they were already maneuvering me into marriage, and I thought I was ready for it, as no doubt she thinks she is, too. As I did, she dreams of the bridegroom’s body and the marriage bed. I must tell her not to stare at Henry like that, or Rosa will notice. No, I must tell her nothing. Leave her alone. Let her make what she will of the world. It’s her world.

  A dozen times Rosa asked Henry whether he had seen or heard anything at all of Gabriel. Not satisfied with his negative reply, she kept insisting that there must be someone who knew and some way they might find out what had happened after the confusion of the final battle and the surrender.

  Miriam, who asked no questions, now began to have a series of strange dreams. They began with a suffusion of longings different from any she had ever felt before, even when she had longed for André. In this there was a depth of tenderness close to sadness, something elusive, so lightly grasped that the fear of losing it was as marked as the thing itself. Halfway between sleep and waking, yet aware that she was dreaming, she held a man’s head to her heart; she felt the weight of his leaning. Oh, take care of him, never let anything hurt him, never!

  And then one day at last came the news, brought by another of the footsore band that passed on the river road, a farmer’s boy from the hollow back of Beau Jardín. Somehow in the welter of war he had come into contact with Colonel Carvalho, and he had a message: Gabriel had “gone north for treatment of a wound.” He spoke in laconic monosyllables and had no answers to any of their natural questions about the wound, and why Gabriel had not written, or when he would be home.

  But Gabriel was at least alive. One could but wait.

  Summer moved toward the zenith, bringing with it a restlessness and impatience to try other ways. The war was past; it seemed time to return to “real” life, which for Ferdinand’s family, unlike the Labouisse connection, was urban life.

  Eugene had lost too many years of education. Angelique had been hidden away in deep country silence; it was evident by her response to Henry de Rivera’s presence that she was ready for the next phase. And now that the crisis, with its need for cheer, was past, even Ferdinand’s eternal cheer had begun to falter.

  Not so much asking Ferdinand’s opinion as thinking aloud, Miriam remarked one day, “Sanderson writes that he’s back in the city and has taken the liberty, as he puts it, of going down to the office and the warehouse. They’re abandoned, but undamaged, he reports. I must say, in spite of Butler’s horrors, they didn’t destroy the city, which they could have done. Sanderson says there was an order in the mail from an old customer in England with a check in advance. He thinks we could start up again, very gradually and carefully, of course.”

  Her fingers folded and refolded the letter, playing with the crisp paper, recalling that first pleasure in mastering the mysteries of the ledger, in pitting her judgment against others’, in building a little kingdom, if you could call it that, for her family.

  “Commerce will thrive again,” she said. “Someday, goodness knows when, but it will.”

  “I wish I could give you advice.” Ferdinand sighed. The sigh was humble and wistful. “But I’m afraid to,” he added abruptly, and laughed with embarrassment.

  “Sit back now, Papa, you did your share in your time,” she reminded him, knowing that he was only too relieved to “sit back.”

  Pelagie went with her sons to see what was left of Plaisance. Old Lambert, at his own behest, had been left behind. It would have been too hard for him to confront the ruination of the grandeur which had been at the core of his life.

  “It will never be what it was, that we all know,” they reported soberly on their return. “But just to get some sort of house up, a small place to live in while we try to clean up the devastation, maybe get a few hands to plant a few acres—that in itself will take a couple of years.”

  The prospect was desolate. It was then that Miriam got her idea.

  “Why don’t you all stay here until you can get a start at Plaisance? You could run this place while we go back to the city. Make a crop here, sell it, keep what you make and use it to help rehabilitate Plaisance.”

  Pelagie’s tears, always so ready to rise, now rose in gratitude.

  “You’ve been so good to us! You to
ok us in, you fed us, and now this. I don’t know how you managed it all.”

  “My daughter can manage anything. She has a man’s head,” Ferdinand said pridefully.

  A man’s head, Miriam thought with wry amusement. And she said to Pelagie and Eulalie, who stood waiting to be included, “You’ll manage, too. You’ve a good heritage, both of you. Don’t you remember how your mother used to tell of her great-grandmother on the German Coast? I think it was my very first time at table in her house when I heard her. Five hundred arpents of land, she said; the house was hewn logs and the hogs ran loose in the woods, hunting acorns. Yes, I remember. She was so proud of that hard life! Well, yours won’t be that hard here .… So, it’s settled, then.”

  Alone, Miriam went to take a last look at the land she had once so sorely resented. The cattle had been released from the barn and were moving through the gate with heads to grass. Already Pelagie’s sons had begun to set things in order, regulating the milking times and setting firm schedules for planting and plowing. For them this was the natural way of life, rather than a way to be learned with struggling effort. The land and its creatures had been asking to be cared for, Miriam told herself, and she was glad to be leaving them with people who loved them.

  Sisyphus was on the verandah supervising the family’s meager luggage. And she recalled the flourish of their former arrivals and departures at Beau Jardín, the wagons piled with trunks, the coachmen in feathered hats and the glossy horses in brass-studded harness. Changes. Changes.

  Downhill, out of the light, into the shadow of cypress and live oak, she went toward the bayou. The day was windless, so still that the tops of the túpelo trees caught not a breath of breeze, and the fluffy roseaux heads at the bayou’s rim stood without swaying. The water lay thick as black glass, dotted here and there with silver or bronze where a shaft of sunshine pierced the darkness. Yet, in its calm depths the drowsing alligator lurked and the dreadful Cotton-mouth slithered.

  Like life, Miriam thought. Danger hides in beauty and beauty in danger. Then, mocking herself: How philosophical we are this morning, Miriam! She walked back to the house. It was time to go.