‘Your father and I have indulged you too much since—since we returned from Paris,’ Mama decided. ‘Hélène will make her first Confession soon. She must learn that we cannot always do what we want to do. We must ask ourselves: “Will it please Our Lord?”’
Hélène frowned. ‘Why does God care if I see Grandpapa’s clocks?’
‘God cares about everything we do.’
‘But…’ Hélène’s chin, her lips, even her nose began trembling, and she made a little whimpering sound as if her kitten had run away. She was very good at this, acting as though the world would end if she didn’t get what she wanted. Her pouting was particularly effective because she rarely asked for anything unreasonable. Often Hélène begged for something entirely selfless. If Papa were here, he would be pudding. Joseph himself felt his heart breaking. Behind him, he heard May snigger. Cathy just rolled her eyes.
Mama chewed her lip and squeezed one of their hands in each of hers as if she might never see them again. Finally, she gave in. Mama made them promise to go straight to Grandpapa’s shop and come straight back.
As he and Hélène passed beneath the palmettos and chinaberry trees, as they darted across the sandy streets ahead of approaching horses, Joseph saw two negroes for every white person. Men delivering messages, dressed in livery so everyone knew who owned them. Women in head kerchiefs carrying baskets of brightly-colored fruits or briny-smelling fish and crabs from the market. Even from here, you could see the flags atop the tallest ships in the harbor.
Apart from his sister stepping in manure as they crossed Broad Street, they arrived safely. Hélène left her soiled pattens in the alley, and they entered the shop. They were greeted by the familiar sound of the clocks tick-tick-ticking away all around them like a hundred mechanical hearts.
Many of the cases were wood or porcelain, but these were not Joseph and Hélène’s favorites. The truly memorable pieces were ormolu, gilded bronze, each design different from the last. The clock-face might be set in the rose window of a miniature cathedral; might be disguised as the wheel of Napoleon’s cannon or a maiden’s chariot; might overlook an entire scene from an opera or a myth.
Hélène spotted a new clock. She pointed to the gold bas-relief on the base, where a man carried a limp woman in his arms, followed by a monk. “Is this Romeo and Juliet?”
Joseph studied the figures on the top of the piece. A mostly naked man sat painfully beside the clock-face, his hands bound above his head to a palm tree. A golden woman stood over him, her hands on the ropes. The final clue was the dog in the bas-relief. “It must be Atala. It’s a story by Chateaubriand, set here in America.” Joseph pointed to the man, then the woman. “Chactas is an Indian. Atala is half-Spanish like Papa. She does kill herself like Juliet.”
“Because she can’t be with her beloved?” Hélène sighed, her elbow on the counter and her chin in her hand. She loved romantic stories.
Joseph nodded. He supposed this was not the time to remind his sister that suicide was a mortal sin. “Atala made a vow to her mother and the Blessed Virgin that she would stay chaste.”
“She wants her beloved to chase her?”
Joseph laughed. “C-h-a-s-t-e. It means…that you’re pure, that you don’t get married. Like Priests and nuns.” He saw Hélène still didn’t understand, but he didn’t understand it himself, what exactly husbands and wives did together to make themselves impure.
“That’s why she can’t be with her beloved? A silly vow?” His sister’s forehead was wrinkled in protest. “Why doesn’t she just say she’s sorry and then marry him?”
“Vows are sacred, El. You can’t break them.”
“It’s better than killing yourself,” Hélène muttered as she wandered to another clock.
Chactas was supposed to be a pure-blooded Indian, yet on this clock, his skin was as black as a negro’s. Often Joseph couldn’t tell which figures were Indians and which were Africans, since they all had headdresses and skirts made of feathers and the same black patina for skin. Grandpapa said the French artists had probably never seen Africans or Indians. But they made all the savages and animals a solid gleaming black on purpose, because of how strikingly it contrasted with the white of the clock-face and the gold of the rest of the piece. These black-and-gold clocks had been popular for decades. They sold better than the time-pieces with figures of Frenchmen, Greeks, or angels, because those were entirely golden.
One jet-black man toted a clock on his back, while another pushed his in a wheelbarrow. Four wooly-headed boys carried a clock on poles. Their lips nearly touching, a black-skinned couple draped over another time-piece in an embrace that always made Joseph avert his eyes. One of the man’s hands cupped the woman’s bare breast.
Hélène pulled Grandpapa over to a new sculpture. Standing on a golden pedestal and flanked by two cherubs, it was the bust of a black girl with a feathered turban on her head. Below her broad nose, her lips were slightly open in an eternal smile. “They sent you the wrong thing, Grandpapa!” Joseph’s sister scowled. “There isn’t a clock in this one.”
“But there is, ma petite,” he smiled. “Queen Marie Antoinette herself had a clock like this. Watch closely now.” Grandpapa pulled on the left earring of the negress, and her eyes rotated in her head.
Hélène shrieked in delight. She stood on her toes to see better. The right eye of the negress now contained an X, her left eye a 13. Her turban must be full of clockwork.
Some of the other clocks were simple automatons: as the gears kept time, hidden mechanisms would cause parts to move. The arms of little musicians pulled bows across their instruments. A ship bobbed on the waves.
Beside Joseph, a fat negro nodded his head over and over, his wide red lips dipping toward his long-stemmed pipe. The clock-face sat inside his round belly, surrounded by his golden robes. Joseph half expected his huge eyes to blink, but the negro just kept nodding.
“That’s supposed to be Toussaint Louverture,” Grandpapa said behind him. “Do you know who he was?”
“The leader of the slave revolt on Saint-Domingue.” Joseph imagined the finely dressed, grinning negro drenched in blood and shuddered.
“I put that model away, after…Vesey,” Grandpapa told him. “But then someone asked for it. I sold another one last week.” He shrugged. “Maybe people find it comforting.”
The wide-eyed negro with the clock in his belly did look harmless, his head nodding and nodding as if he would agree to any command. “They do that to fool you,” Joseph’s Great-Grandmother Marguerite had said.
But she’d been wrong about so much. She’d been wrong to take them to the hanging. Mama, Papa, and the Grands all said so. Hélène had slept in Joseph’s bed that night, because Cathy refused to share hers. Joseph couldn’t say no when Hélène started sobbing. He’d prayed with her, and she’d fallen asleep clinging to him.
In the morning, Hélène had beamed at him as if he’d performed a miracle. “I didn’t dream about them at all, Joseph! God listens to you! You’re as good as a Priest!”
But Joseph himself had dreamed about the hanging men, that night and many nights after. More than the sight of their kicking bodies, it was their sounds that came back to him, their last desperate struggles for breath. Sometimes, Joseph would feel the terror burning his own throat, and only an ejaculatory prayer would allow him to breathe again.
When Joseph and his sister returned from Grandpapa’s shop, they found Mama in her bedchamber, kneeling on her prie-Dieu. Before she could rise, Hélène threw her plump arms around Mama’s neck. Mama disentangled her gently but immediately.
‘Joseph kept me safe!’ his sister signed.
‘I am so glad.’ Mama rose. ‘But you know what I’ve told you about embraces, sweetheart.’
Hélène frowned. ‘But I love you, Mama!’
‘And I love you.’ Again and again, Mama pressed her hands to her heart: ‘I love you and your brother’—she smiled at Joseph—‘and your sister and your father… But we must not
forget that someone else deserves our love first.’ Mama cast her eyes to the portrait on the wall, where Christ held His own shining heart. ‘He is the one who truly kept you safe today.’
‘I do love Our Lord, Mama—but I can’t hug Him!’ Hélène pouted. ‘Why can’t I hug you? Don’t you like it?’
Mama grimaced as if she were in pain. She reached toward Hélène, then withdrew her hand and closed her eyes for a moment. ‘I like it too much. I think you are old enough to understand now. It is very hard, so we must help each other to be good.’ Mama looked at Joseph to make sure he was watching her hands too. She made the signs slowly and deliberately, first striking her chest with her fist: ‘It is a sin to take pleasure in anything except Our Lord.’
Hélène kept frowning. She did not look like she understood at all.
Chapter 8
What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears. The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.
— Victor Hugo, 1845 letter
Joseph had been sitting on the piazza with his book for only a few minutes when he heard Henry’s voice from the garden:
“What you reading today, Master Joseph?”
Henry was always interested in his books. Joseph knew negroes weren’t allowed to read for a reason. Denmark Vesey had been able to read, and he’d twisted verses from Scripture to suit him. But the thought of opening a book and seeing meaningless black marks… “It’s part of a set Mama bought about the lives of the saints. It’s by feast day.”
Henry was using a garden syringe to spray tobacco-water on Mama’s roses and kill the insects. “Whose day is today?”
“Saint Calixtus. He was a Pope.” Joseph scanned for more details, and his eyes widened. “But he was born a slave!”
Joseph tried to imagine Henry being elected the next Holy Father. He would have to become a proper Christian first—like most of the negroes Joseph knew, Henry was a Methodist. He was also married to May, at least as married as slaves and Methodists could be. But as far as Joseph could tell, Henry was a kind man, even a wise one.
“I don’t suppose Calixtus was an African, though,” Henry commented.
Joseph shook his head. “He was a Roman. But there are African saints.” Maybe he could save Henry yet. Why hadn’t he thought of this before?
Beneath the brim of his straw hat, Henry wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “That right?”
Joseph nodded. “I know there’s Saint Moses the Black, and Saint Benedict the Moor. Saint Augustine and his mother, Saint Monica, were both from Africa, too.” Joseph didn’t know what color they had been. Negro blood would explain how wicked and lazy Saint Augustine had been in his youth. But Saint Monica was so virtuous.
There must be other African saints. Joseph would find them. He would ask Bishop England. Maybe Joseph could talk to His Lordship tonight—surely he would be at the party.
Joseph had intended to skim the rest of October for African saints, but he stopped at Saint Teresa of Ávila, who had been Spanish like his grandmother. When she was seven years old, Teresa and her little brother ran away, because they had “resolved to go into the country of the Moors, in hopes of dying for their faith.” Their martyrdom was thwarted by their uncle, who brought them home almost immediately.
Papa’s voice interrupted Joseph’s reading: “Henry, your mother says she needs about ten more okra pods.” Papa must have been in the kitchen talking to Agathe again. Because Henry’s mother was from Saint-Domingue, she spoke a Creole dialect, and Papa seemed determined to learn it. He spent an odd amount of time talking to their slaves, and not about anything important like their souls.
Papa stepped onto the piazza. “Are you ready, son?”
“Yes, sir.” Reluctantly Joseph set aside his book.
“Have your mother and sisters come down yet?”
“No.”
“Shall we see how close they are to perfection?”
Upstairs, he and Papa found all the females clustered around Mama’s dressing table. Mama was attending to Cathy’s hair, while May dressed Hélène’s. This might take a while yet. Joseph perched on the trunk at the end of his parents’ bed to watch.
There was more hair to arrange than ever before. That morning, his sisters had squealed with delight at the arrival of their strange package: the severed, glossy tresses of peasant women that had come all the way from Italy.
For as long as Joseph could remember, Cathy had been whining about her hair. She couldn’t grow it long or shape it properly because it was too frizzly: it only stood out from her head. Looking like a hedgehog might have been the fashion in Great-Grandmother Marguerite’s day, but not now! Lots of women added false curls, so why couldn’t she? “Maybe when you’re older,” Papa answered again and again, till at last he surrendered. And Hélène wanted whatever Cathy wanted.
Hélène spotted Papa in the mirror and darted away from May to tug on his sleeve. “Am I pretty now, Papa?”
His smile seemed sad. “You have always been pretty, ma poulette.”
Cathy actually stuck her nose in the air while she admired her reflection. From long habit, she signed and spoke at once. “Hers don’t match as well as mine.” It was true: the added hair was slightly darker than Hélène’s own.
Mama scowled at Cathy, in the way only Mama could. ‘Vanity is a mortal sin, Catherine. Remember your patron saint. When she wasn’t much older than you, her brothers wanted her to marry. But Saint Catherine knew she was a bride of Christ, so what did she do?’
Cathy rolled her eyes but signed: ‘Cut off all her hair to make herself ugly. But I don’t want to marry Christ, Mama! I want to marry a man!’
Hélène had run back to the mirror and was tilting her head sideways so she could see the curls better. Her lower lip trembled, and her ragged breaths threatened to become sobs.
“No one will notice, sugar,” May soothed. “All we do is add a little decoration.” The black woman plucked two ideas from the dressing table. “Feathers, or flowers?”
Hélène weighed a choice in each hand as if her entire future lay in the balance. “Oh, May, I can’t decide! Which do you like?”
Cathy laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous, El. Everybody knows negroes don’t have opinions; they just do what they’re told.” Cathy motioned to the blue kerchief wrapped around the black woman’s head. “Does May look like she knows anything about hair? Negroes only have wool! Don’t they, May?”
“Yes, miss,” she replied quietly, her eyes lowered.
Meanwhile, Papa was noticing that Mama still wore her frilly white wrapper. ‘You haven’t chosen a gown yet?’ he asked with his hands and a smile.
Mama avoided Papa’s gaze. ‘You go with the children.’
He frowned. ‘You said you wanted to meet the new Priest.’
‘I’ll meet him later.’ What she meant was: When there aren’t so many other people about. This was an old argument. Mama had never liked parties, and Papa was always trying to get her to go places besides church. There, she would hide behind her mantilla. Mama had even asked their family not to sign to her in public. They didn’t always obey.
Joseph hopped off the trunk and caught Mama’s attention. ‘The Grands will be at the party. You can talk to them.’
‘Only with my hands.’
Papa lifted one to his lips and kissed Mama’s knuckles. ‘Then use your hands.’
‘I’ll embarrass you.’
‘No you won’t, Mama,’ Hélène assured her.
“May?” Papa asked aloud, turning to her. “Would you find Anne something to wear that doesn’t have too many hooks?”
May looked puzzled. “Sir?”
Papa grinned. “Something you can get her into quickly.”
The black woman chuckled. “I’ll try, sir.”
Apparently there were still a great many hooks. By the time they arrived at the house party, it was already dark, and all that remained on the table were nuts and prunes. Hélène pouted.
Father L
aroche’s health was poor, so he was leaving them. The new Priest was named Father McEncroe. He said he had been ordained three years ago and had known Bishop England in Ireland.
At first, Father McEncroe made the mistake of talking too loudly at Mama, as if this would make a difference. But then the Priest saw their expressions, stopped at once, and apologized. He seemed sincere, and he waited patiently while Papa translated.
The Grands soon found them, and Mama looked relieved. She positioned them carefully in a corner so they could talk without anyone else seeing their hands. Her signs were so contained, so different from Papa’s bold ones. When he had something to say, he didn’t care if the whole room took notice. The Grands’ gestures were somewhere in-between, though their eyes were nearly as cautious as Mama’s, always alert about who might be watching and what they would think.
Eventually, Joseph began wandering. He found Mr. Künstler, and they discussed Plato. Mr. Künstler was one of the lay teachers at the Philosophical and Classical Seminary. At first, Joseph had been wary of him, because he walked with a cane like Great-Grandmother Marguerite. Mr. Künstler leaned on his even more heavily, and he could not stand for very long at one time, because he had a club-foot. But Mr. Künstler could not have been more different from Joseph’s great-grandmother. He actually listened when Joseph spoke.
Mr. Künstler said he’d seen Bishop England in the garden. On his way there, Joseph passed the drawing room. A haze of cigar smoke drifted through the barely-open doorway. Inside, men’s voices rolled and boomed. When he heard the word “deaf-mute,” Joseph paused.
“Can you imagine a more perfect wife?” a man practically shouted, his words slurring. “You’d never have to listen to her! I mean: You’d never have to listen to her!”
“That Lazare is one lucky man,” someone else agreed, as if there could be any doubt about who this “perfect wife” was. Joseph felt as if claws had gripped his heart. He wanted to run away, but his legs wouldn’t move.
Necessary Sins Page 8
