by John Brunner
Imelda Moyne and her husband were dining alone tonight… alone, that is, but for the black servants who silently attended them as though the war had never happened. Between them stretched an immaculately polished mahogany table on which silver and lace and cut crystal betokened affluence that permitted their sons to be at college in Europe and status that befitted membership in the Mistick Krewe of Comus and had caused their daughter to be cited as a potential Queen of the Mardi Gras.
Silence reigned for most of the meal. Andrew Moyne was much preoccupied at present with what had come close to being a financial disaster for them. Seeking sound investments when most American currency was turning into paper as valuable as autumn leaves, he had poured money into a Scottish firm that planned to supply wood for the new “safety” matches invented in Sweden and now being mass-produced in Britain. Long-range inquiries indicated that the Mr. Donald Macrae who had launched the enterprise was regarded as a business wizard. Unfortunately he had expropriated all the liquid assets of the venture the day before it was announced that the trees which he intended to exploit did not belong to him, but to the Dukedom of Buccleuch. Keeping up until the last a fog of prevarication and excuses, he vanished thereafter from the ken of mankind.
Moyne was not the least eager among countless persons who looked forward to finding Macrae and flaying him alive.
However gloomy his reflections, though, he conquered them long enough to inquire how the day had gone for his wife.
She explained. And added thoughtfully, “I feel inclined to withdraw our custom from Marocain.”
“Why?” Her husband blinked in surprise.
“One has the impression he caters to a less select clientele than formerly. At all events a man stormed in this morning wearing such foul clothes that Louisette was positively shaken. Foul-mouthed, too, and for all I can tell flea-ridden! He insisted that they owed him twelve thousand dollars and wanted it in cash. Not that he got it. He’d brought a horrible greasy bag to put the money in, and when he left it was as light as before.”
At mention of so large a sum her husband’s full attention had come to bear. He said cautiously, “Did you find out who this person was?”
“They called him Captain.” She frowned. “Not an officer. I mean, not an army officer. One of those was present and courteously assured our safety. But the clerks addressed him as—I have it! Captain Drew!”
Moyne started. “Master of a steamboat, was he?”
“I imagine he might be.”
“Hah!” Draining his wineglass, he rose. “Thank you for warning me!”
“What about, dear?”—in a puzzled tone.
“I’d heard that Drew was back. And he’s an astute businessman. If he’s withdrawing his credit from Marocain’s, there’s bound to be an excellent reason!”
Fueled by such rumours, a run on the Marocain Bank began next day.
In an alcove secluded by screens from the Limousin’s main dining room, Langston Barber was preparing to attack a dish of pompano with sauce aux crevettes. Fridays detracted little from the luxury enjoyed by those among his customers who, like himself, insisted on the strict observances. And they were many. In New Orleans, perhaps more than any other city of North America, superstition held the worshipers of Lady Luck in bondage; they slid from rarefied Catholicism to the use of brutal slave-taught charms without noticing a hiatus in their thinking.
Knife poised, he was interrupted by a rasping voice.
“So this is what a stately pleasure dome looks like! If I’m addressing Kubla Khan, what happened to the ice?”
Into the chair facing him slumped Drew, manner and tone alike hostile. It was stuffily hot in this room despite its high ceiling and marble walls, not only because the night was warm and humid but because of the many gaslights. Barber summoned the nearest waiter.
“Bring my guest a drink! Captain, what would you like?”
“To be anywhere except here! Oh… Same as you, I guess. I don’t understand liquor. I went without for so many years, and it and I don’t get along.”
“In that case, sir, I won’t commend the champagne I’m drinking. Particularly because, if we are to discuss the matter I mean to broach, I would not wish to put you at any disadvantage.”
“Hah?” Drew’s head jerked up. “Discuss what? I thought you must have had me haled in here so you could gloat!”
“Captain!”—with an expression of distress—“I assure you the proposal I have in mind is perfectly valid!”
“Then break it on my bows,” sighed Drew. And, seizing a clean glass from the array in front of Barber, he waved it in the direction of the waiter. “Ah, fill it up with whatever’s going!”
Receiving a nod from his employer, the waiter lifted the champagne bottle and poured to the two-thirds mark. Drew drank that at a gulp and signaled for more.
“There’s no justice in this damned world,” he said suddenly. Barber flinched, afraid he was to be shouted at; however, Drew’s tone was rather of resignation than of fury.
“Why do you say so?” Barber parried. And, in passing: “May I offer you anything to eat?”
“Not hungry.”
“In that case…” Replacing his cutlery, Barber let the waiter remove his dish, saying, “Tell the cook to keep it warm, if he can without it spoiling. Otherwise send it to another table. It’s untouched.”
“All manners, aren’t you just?” Drew said with contempt. “Show and shine and finery! Like the cabin of my boat—like it was… And did you earn it the way they taught me, by slaving and sweating and struggling till I was like to die? The hell! You got it by gambling!”
He looked for a place to spit and located an engraved brass cuspidor. But when he pursed his lips to let go, he realized there was no chaw to generate juice. He felt in his pocket and found no sign of his plug tobacco. Under his breath he began to curse.
And thereupon the ice jam broke that he had constructed within his head for two decades. Out came the secrets he had planned to reserve for Susannah and her children. Out came the resentment that festered in his mind because he saw his rivals enjoying the advantages of wealth for far less effort than he had to invest, while every cent he earned was already pledged: so much to pay off crazy Jacob’s debts; so much to support Susannah in a house with at least a couple of servants; so much to provide for Elphin, and Dorothy, and Eustace, and Jerome who woke every night screaming because he always dreamed he was about to suffocate; and last of all a residue that was again subdivided, chiefly to keep the steamer running, ultimately to keep her master’s body together with his soul.
As the minutes ticked by, the torrent of words eroded the mask of the strict steamer captain. Revealed like a mussel in a broken shell was the naked heart of the teen-age boy within, the boy who had so idolized his half-brother that he would hear of no other career but one where they could work together; who had quarreled with his mother and insulted his father and come close to losing his family completely; who had carried his admiration for Jacob to the point of falling in love with the same girl… and then, slowly and horribly, discovered that his parents had been right after all, for the man he thought godlike, wonderful, fell victim first to drink and then to disease, and bet away at the gaming tables what was not his to lose, at last making so conspicuous a spectacle of himself that his few remaining friends felt obliged to commit him to an asylum, where he wore away his final years in a delirium of fanciful projects that would make him millions and restore all he had pilfered from his relatives, from his wife, from what should have been the portion of his children. It was not the least of the matters on his conscience that he had infected Susannah with the syphilis that was killing him. Miraculously, it appeared that the children had escaped.
Though it was impossible not to wonder about poor Jerome.
Abruptly it dawned on Drew what he was saying… and also that tears were leaking down his cheeks. As ashamed as though he had wet his pants, he stared at the man opposite. What magic had been worked to m
ake him open his secret thoughts to someone he detested beyond measure?
And why was this fiend incarnate shaking his head with a sympathetic look and flourishing Marocain’s draft?
With infinite effort he composed his mind and readied himself for Barber’s reaction like a cub awaiting a senior pilot’s verdict on the way he had steered through the last bend.
But the words he heard were gentle and made sense.
“Mr. Drew, who better than a gambler should understand misfortune? Did I not tell you I was not expecting you to honor your brother’s debts? To take advantage of a sick man—why, I’m appalled that you thought I’d do such a thing!”
He leaned forward, displaying the draft much as a lady would wave a fan.
“What will you do now, Mr. Drew?”
Drew shrugged, remotely aware that his glass had been filled again, and also that Jones had turned up at his employer’s right. He tried and failed to recollect what had become of Fernand. His presence would have been welcome, like a second’s at a duel.
“They were magnanimous enough not to take away my license,” he said eventually. “I guess I’ll get a job that pays—sufficient.”
He drained his glass for the latest of too many times.
“But you stand no chance of repairing the Atchafalaya?” Barber pressed. “Or selling her for enough to commission a new steamer?”
“Hell, no. The inspectors are right, damn them! My fault, I guess, for specifying cheap wood, cheap piping, cheap everything, to save money. But if I’d had the chance…!”
“To do what?” Barber encouraged.
“I have such a boat in mind as would put the nose of any rival out of joint. Think I’m crazy? Maybe so. But I know I could design the finest steamer ever on the Mississippi if I had a fraction of her cost. If I had, let’s say, ten thousand dollars.”
“And you don’t, after all your effort?”
“Oh, hell! You know how much Jacob owed when he was locked away? A hundred thousand! And I’ve paid it back! All of it! Yours was the last!”
There was a pause. Eventually Barber said, “Mr. Drew, when impulse made me send my servants to seek you out, I hoped and expected I was to make the acquaintance—the proper acquaintance, not a brief encounter like this morning’s—of an honorable man, a gentleman. My expectations have been outrun by events. It would be contemptible were I to complete our negotiations under present circumstances. Allow me to put a room at your disposal. In the morning—”
“What’s all this?” Drew rasped, eyes sparking.
“Captain, I merely wish to emphasize that, while I’m of course delighted that you find my wine so palatable, its effect on you has been—”
“What negotiations?” The final s blurred into sh. “Talk straight, damn you!”
“I was going to say: enjoy a night’s repose here, and tomorrow—”
“Come to the point!”
Barber took a deep breath.
“Very well, if that’s how you want it. You say you would like to build the finest steamer ever on the Mississippi, and you could if you had ten thousand dollars. I believe you. I am prepared to endorse this draft in favor of any boatbuilder you care to name, on account of her construction. I am further prepared to offer, whenever you are in the city, a room at the Limousin—no, make that a suite—and as many meals as you care to take, at no extra charge. I would regard this as an investment to be set against a half-share in the profits of this boat you claim you can design.”
“Claim?”—belligerently. “I’ll goddamn’ well show you! You and everybody else. All the shit-kicking bastards who… It’s a deal! Drunk or sober, I know when I’m on to a good thing!”
“I hoped that would be your answer,” came the grave response. “I have derived the most favorable impression of your capability and integrity. Name the boatyard.”
“I’d go straight to Hupp & Tonks at Louisville!”
“Done, sir! Shake hands on it! Jones, pen and ink!”
A NEW DREAM THAT YET WAS OLD
30TH JUNE 1870
“He had been standing on the shadowy deck
Of a black formless boat that moved away
From a dim bank, into wide, gushing waters—
River or sea, but huge—and as he stood,
The boat rushed into darkness like an arrow,
Gathering speed—and as it rushed, he woke.”
—Stephen Vincent Benét,
John Brown’s Body
Miles Parbury woke to utter darkness and the sound of a woman praying, and for a moment thought—knew—they were burying him alive. The air was hot and heavy, oppressive enough to be a shroud, and though it was drier than of late and smelled of dust, that only added to the horrible illusion. Here in New Orleans corpses were not consigned to the clay from whence they came, but were ensepulchered in tombs above the ground: dry places, dusty places.
Moreover an instant earlier he had assisted at the sinking of the Nonpareil.
The spasm of fearful certainty receded as he realized that the steamboat he had just seen blown up was not the vessel he had brought for sacrifice to the altar of war. As time went by it was growing harder for him to visualize places and objects, even those he had been familiar with since childhood—Dr. Malone said this was common among blinded people—but the new, the most magnificent, Nonpareil was based on a model he had carved from oddments because words did not suffice him and he could not see to make a drawing of her. He was acquainted with every inch of her lean lovely lines. And the proportions of the boat in his nightmare were those of his new triumphant masterpiece.
A dream, then. Only a dream. Followed by startled rediscovery of the daytime world. That voice he could hear belonged to his wife Adèle. Every morning she begged the Virgin to grant repose to the soul of their only child. He did not understand how she could go on deceiving herself. For his part, it had been the loss of the boy which decided him once for all that the instruction the priests had drilled him through prior to their marriage was no more than mumbo-jumbo emptier than the charms and hexes black folk believed in.
He and Adèle slept apart now, their rooms separated by a sliding screen, for that and other reasons. She was half-crippled by rheumatism. So she had had to abandon her self-imposed duty of guiding him around the city, dense with traffic of all kinds from streetcars on their unforgiving tracks down to scorching velocipedists treading away the miles as though the public roads were private raceways. Other people thought of this as one more undeserved calamity heaped on his head; Parbury, though, could have wished the distance between them greater, particularly when she prayed, because of late she had given the constant impression that she was reproaching him, as though in the private world she shared with the Mother of God the death of her son also had been a deliberate act, and his father’s blindness a self-inflicted protection against knowledge of his own cruelty…
However, this house he had been reduced to when the war wrecked his fortunes was a poky camelback shotgun, flimsily built and intolerably cramped. On the increasingly rare occasions when his wife’s relatives deigned to pay a visit, they could be heard sniffing their contempt of the place. And why should they not? Compared with what he had formerly been accustomed to it was a hovel. Compared to the luxury Drew wallowed in, earned by deceit and cowardice, crowned now by the illicit acquisition of gilded horns rightfully belonging to a steamer that worked regularly in the St. Louis trade—!
The rage crested in his head like a breaking wave. Over the past seven years he had been forced to accept that rage was his normal state of mind.
Abruptly, though, it gave way to a surge of excitement, an emotion so rare in his drab existence that sometimes he feared he might have forgotten what it felt like.
But today was the day. The day of the showdown. The day when Hosea Drew would learn to laugh with the other side of his face!
Rising on his pillows, chuckling, he groped for his repeater watch on its bedside stand.
And checked be
fore he touched it.
That dream… Could it have been an omen? Oh, no! He mustn’t believe that, mustn’t even think it!
Yet the possibility was so appalling, he remained awhile immobilized, scarcely aware that the praying in the next room had reached its conclusion.
He had talked much recently about matters of life and death, but not (as though to spite Adèle) with a priest or minister—instead, with someone he regarded as his peer, a practical man using his hands as much as his tongue to get ahead in the world. He had made something of a confidant of Dr. Malone, who had taken care of his and Adèle’s routine treatment since the death of old Dr. Halley.
Adèle did not care for him. On hearing his name for the first time she had assumed that anyone called Malone would of course be Catholic. If he was, he must be less than devout; certainly he was undogmatic as few of his profession were, regardless of religion. Now she fretted because he would not imitate Halley and promise that her back would soon be restored to youthful suppleness. She kept whining for her husband to call in the new, the celebrated, the fast-rising Dr. Cherouen, who used electricity and ozone and must be marvelous.
But Parbury liked Malone. Halley had reminded him of one of the pilots who had trained him as a cub: not deaf to reason, but gruff and quick to anger when his judgment was even mildly questioned. In this new physician he detected a concern for process akin to what had eventually made him a better pilot than any he had learned under. There was something the tides and shifts of a living body had in common with the seasons and the currents, and he had the same whatever-it-was in common with the doctor.
That was a revelation and a consolation. And not the only one. He heard the partition separating the rooms opening; here in a rustle of starched linen came another blessing he owed to Malone.
“Good morning, Dorcas my dear,” he said briskly.
“Good morning, Captain,” she returned, her voice sweetly inflected. “Shall I send in your coffee and beignets?”
