Astray (16 page)

So I said out very loud in front of the whole court that I had perjured myself and that I withdrew the charges and that I was damned for all time. And when I walked to the door, the people moved out of my way so as not to touch me.

I went across the fields for fear of meeting any human creature on the road. And it seemed to me the snow was like a face, for its crust is an image of perfection, but underneath is all darkness and slime. And I wept, a thing I have not done since I was a child, and the water turned to ice on my cheeks.

The Lost Seed

The story of Richard Berry comes from a cluster of terse legal records in
Records of the Colony of New Plymouth,
edited by N. B. Shurtleff (1855). A resident of Yarmouth (founded 1639, one of the twenty-one towns of Plymouth Plantation on Cape Cod), in 1649 Berry started accusing neighbors—Sarah White Norman, Mary Vincent Hammon, Teague Joanes—of various sex crimes. The following year, in a volte-face, Berry confessed to having borne false witness against Joanes and was publicly whipped. Three years on, Berry, Joanes, and others were ordered to “part their uncivil living together.”

Kenneth Borris’s
Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance
(2004) digs up a few more facts about Berry’s targets. Sarah’s husband never took her and the children back, but went off to England with an inheritance, which he promptly wasted. Mary and Vincent Hammon, however, had a number of children before he died in 1703.

In 1659 one “Richard Beare” was found guilty of “filthy obscene practices” and banished from the colony; this seems likely to be a variant spelling for the same old troublemaker.

VACHERIE, LOUISIANA

1839

VANITAS

T
his afternoon I was so stone bored, I wrote something on a scrap of paper and put it in a medicine bottle, sealed it up with the stub of a candle. I was sitting on the levee; I tossed the bottle as far as I could (since I throw better than girls should) and the Mississippi took it, lazily. If you got in a boat here by the Duparc-Locoul Plantation, and didn’t even row or raise a sail, the current would take you down fifty miles of slow curves to New Orleans in the end. That’s if you didn’t get tangled up in weed.

What I wrote on the scrap was
Au secours!
Then I put the date,
3 juillet 1839.
The Americans if drowning or in other trouble call out,
Help!,
which doesn’t capture the attention near as much, it’s more like a little sound a puppy would make. The bottle was green glass with
Poison
down one side. I wonder who’ll fish it out of the brown water, and what will that man or woman or child make of my message? Or will the medicine bottle float right through the city, out into the Gulf of Mexico, and my scribble go unread till the end of time?

It was a foolish message, and a childish thing to do. I know that; I’m fifteen, which is old enough that I know when I’m
being a child. But I ask you, how’s a girl to pass an afternoon as long and scalding as this one? I stare at the river in hopes of seeing a boat go by, or a black gum tree with muddy roots. A week ago I saw a blue heron swallow down a wriggling snake. Once in a while a boat will have a letter for us, a boy attaches it to the line of a very long fishing rod and flicks it over to our pier. I’m supposed to call a nègre to untie the letter and bring it in; Maman hates when I do it myself. She says I’m a gateur de nègres, like Papa, we spoil them with soft handling. She always beats them when they steal things, which they call only
taking.

I go up the pecan alley toward the Maison, and through the gate in the high fence that’s meant to keep the animals out. Passers-by always know a Creole house by the yellow and red, not like the glaring white American ones. Everything on our Plantation is yellow and red—not just the houses but the stables, the hospital, and the seventy slave cabins that stretch back like a village for three miles, with their vegetable gardens and chicken pens.

I go in the Maison now, not because I want to, just to get away from the bam-bam-bam of the sun on the back of my neck. I step quietly past Tante Fanny’s room, because if she hears me she might call me in for some more lessons. My parents are away in New Orleans doing business; they never take me. I’ve never been anywhere, truth to tell. My brother, Emile, has been in the Lycée Militaire in Bordeaux for five years already, and when he graduates, Maman says perhaps we will all go on a voyage to France. By all, I don’t mean Tante Fanny, because she never leaves her room, nor
her husband, Oncle Louis, who lives in New Orleans and does business for us, nor Oncle Flagy and Tante Marcelite, quiet sorts who prefer to stay here always and see to the nègres, the field ones and the house ones. It will be just Maman and Papa and I who go to meet Emile in France. Maman is the head of the Famille ever since Grandmère Nannette Prud’Homme retired; we Creoles hand the reins to the smartest child, male or female (unlike the Americans, whose women are too feeble to run things). But Maman never really wanted to oversee the family enterprise, she says if her brothers Louis and Flagy were more useful she and Papa could have gone back to la belle France and stayed there. And then I would have been born a French mademoiselle. “Creole” means born of French stock, here in Louisiana, but Maman prefers to call us French. She says France is like nowhere else in the world, it’s all things gracious and fine and civilized, and no sacrés nègres about the place.

I pass Millie on the stairs, she’s my maid and sleeps on the floor of my room but she has to help with everything else as well. She’s one of Pa Philippe’s children, he’s very old (for a nègre), and has VPD branded on both cheeks from when he used to run away, that stands for Veuve Prud’Homme Duparc. It makes me shudder a little to look at the marks. Pa Philippe can whittle anything out of cypress with his little knife: spoons, needles, pipes. Since Maman started our breeding program, we have more small nègres than we know what to do with, but Millie’s the only one as old as me. “Allo, Millie,” I say, and she says, “Mam’zelle Aimée,” and grins back but forgets to curtsy.

“Aimée” means beloved. I’ve never liked it as a name. It seems it should belong to a different kind of girl.

Where I am bound today is the attic. Though it’s hotter than the cellars, it’s the one place nobody else goes. I can lie on the floor and chew my nails and fall into a sort of dream. But today the dust keeps making me sneeze. I’m restless, I can’t settle. I try a trick my brother, Emile, once taught me, to make yourself faint. You breathe in and out very fast while you count to a hundred, then stand against the wall and press as hard as you can between your ribs. Today I do it twice, and I feel odd, but that’s all; I’ve never managed to faint as girls do in novels.

I poke through some wooden boxes but they hold nothing except old letters, tedious details of imports and taxes and engagements and deaths of people I never heard of. At the back there’s an old-fashioned sheepskin trunk, I’ve tried to open it before. Today I give it a real wrench and the top comes up. Ah, now here’s something worth looking at. Real silk, I’d say, as yellow as butter, with layers of tulle underneath, and an embroidered girdle. The sleeves are huge and puffy, like sacks of rice. I slip off my dull blue frock and try it on over my shift. The skirt hovers, the sleeves bear me up so I seem to float over the splinters and dust of the floorboards. If only I had a looking glass up here. I know I’m short and homely, with a fat throat, and my hands and feet are too big, but in this sun-colored dress I feel halfway to beautiful. Grandmère Nannette, who lives in her Maison de Reprise across the yard and is descended from Louis XV’s own physician, once said that like her I was pas jolie but at least we
had our skin, un teint de roses. Maman turns furious if I go out without my sunhat or a parasol, she says if I get freckled like some Cajun farm girl, how is she supposed to find me a good match? My stomach gets tight at the thought of a husband, but it won’t happen before I’m sixteen, at least. I haven’t even become a woman yet, Maman says, though I’m not sure what she means.

I dig in the trunk. A handful of books; the collected poetry of Lord Byron, and a novel by Victor Hugo called
Notre-Dame de Paris.
More dresses—a light violet, a pale peach—and light shawls like spiders’ webs, and, in a heavy traveling case, some strings of pearls, with rings rolled up in a piece of black velvet. The bottom of the case lifts up, and there I find the strangest thing. It must be from France. It’s a sort of bracelet—a thin gold chain—with trinkets dangling from it. I’ve never seen such perfect little oddities. There’s a tiny silver locket that refuses to open; a gold cross, a monkey (grimacing), a minute kneeling angel, a pair of ballet slippers. A tiny tower of some sort, a snake, a crouching tiger (I recognize his toothy roar from the encyclopedia), and a machine with miniature wheels that go round and round; I think this must be a locomotive, like we use to haul cane to our sugar mill. But the one I like best, I don’t know why, is a gold key. It’s so tiny, I can’t imagine what door or drawer or box in the world it might open.

Through the window, I see the shadows are getting longer; I must go down and show myself, or there’ll be a fuss. I pack the dresses back into the trunk, but I can’t bear to give up the bracelet. I manage to open its narrow catch, and fasten the
chain around my left arm above the elbow, where no one will see it under my sleeve. I mustn’t show it off, but I’ll know it’s there; I can feel the little charms moving against my skin, pricking me.

“Vanitas,”
says Tante Fanny. “The Latin word for—?”

“Vanity,” I guess.

“A word with two meanings. Can you supply them?”

“A, a desire to be pretty, or finely dressed,” I begin.

She nods, but corrects me: “Self-conceit. The holding of too high an opinion of one’s beauty, charms or talents. But it also means futility,” she says, very crisp. “Worthlessness. What is done
in vain.
Vanitas paintings illustrate the vanity of all human wishes. Are you familiar with Ecclesiastes, chapter one, verse two?”

I hesitate. I scratch my arm through my sleeve, to feel the little gold charms.

My aunt purses her wide mouth. Though she is past fifty now, with the sallow look of someone who never sees the sun, and always wears black, you can tell that she was once a beauty.
“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities,”
she quotes;
“all is vanity.”

That’s Cousine Eliza on the wall behind her mother’s chair, in dark oils. In the picture she looks much older than sixteen to me. She is sitting in a chair with something in her left hand, I think perhaps a handkerchief; has she been crying? Her white dress has enormous sleeves, like clouds; above them, her shoulders slope prettily. Her face is creamy and perfectly oval, her eyes are dark, her hair is coiled on top of her head like a strange plum cake. Her lips are together, it’s
a perfect mouth, but it looks so sad. Why does she look so sad?

“In this print here,” says Tante Fanny, tapping the portfolio in her lap with one long nail (I don’t believe she ever cuts them), “what does the hourglass represent?”

I bend to look at it again. A grim man in seventeenth-century robes, his desk piled with objects. “Time?” I hazard.

“And the skull?”

“Death.”

“Très bien, Aimée.”

I was only eight when my uncle and aunt came back from France, with—among their copious baggage—Cousine Eliza in a lead coffin. She’d died of a fever. Papa came back from Paris right away, with the bad news, but the girl’s parents stayed on till the end of the year, which I thought strange. I was not allowed to go to the funeral, though the cemetery of St. James is only ten miles upriver. After the funeral was the last time I saw my Oncle Louis. He’s never come back to the Plantation since, and for seven years Tante Fanny hasn’t left her room. She’s shut up like a saint; she spends hours kneeling at her little prie-dieu, clutching her beads, thumping her chest. Millie brings all her meals on trays, covered to keep off the rain or the flies. Tante Fanny also sews and writes to her old friends and relations in France and Germany. And, of course, she teaches me. Art and music, French literature and handwriting, religion and etiquette (or, as she calls it, les convenances and comme il faut). She can’t supervise my piano practice, as the instrument is in the salon at the other end of the house, but she
leaves her door open, when I’m playing, and strains her ears to catch my mistakes.

This morning instead of practicing I was up in the attic again, and I saw a ghost, or at least I thought I did. I’d taken all the dresses out of the old sheepskin trunk, to admire and hold against myself; I’d remembered to bring my hand mirror up from my bedroom, and if I held it at arm’s length, I could see myself from the waist up, at least. I danced like a gypsy, like the girl in
Notre-Dame de Paris,
whose beauty wins the heart of the hideous hunchback.

When I pulled out the last dress—a vast white one that crinkled like paper—what was revealed was a face. I think I cried out; I know I jumped away from the trunk. When I made myself go nearer, the face turned out to be made of something hard and white, like chalk. It was not a bust, like the one downstairs of poor Marie Antoinette. This had no neck, no head; it was only the smooth, pitiless mask of a girl, lying among a jumble of silks.

I didn’t recognize her at first; I can be slow. My heart was beating loudly in a sort of horror. Only when I’d sat for some time, staring at those pristine, lidded eyes, did I realize that the face was the same as the one in the portrait of Cousine Eliza, and the white dress I was holding was the dress she wore in the painting. These were all her clothes that I was playing with, it came to me, and the little gold bracelet around my arm had to be hers too. I tried to take it off and return it to the trunk, but my fingers were so slippery I couldn’t undo the catch. I wrenched at it, and there was a red line around my arm; the little charms spun.