Crescent City (3 page)

The grandfather had been paying close attention. “Short time?”

“Yes, unfortunately my partner died of yellow fever a year ago. Most people leave the city in the summer, but for once he didn’t do it, and he caught the fever. Terrible thing.”

“So now you own the business?”

“Yes, he left it to me. His widow and daughter are otherwise provided for with a fine home in Shreveport. I did promise to look out for them if ever I should be needed. The girl, Marie Claire, is a little older than Miriam.”

“Marie Claire,” Dinah remarked. “A strange name for Jewish girl.”

“Well, customs are different in New Orleans.” Yes, different, he reflected, wishing himself back there now and suddenly aware of how far away it was. “My business soon will be one of the largest in the city, if it isn’t already. Last year I finished my house. All brick, built around a courtyard”—his arms swept the air in a large, enthusiastic gesture—“ten times the size of this whole house, with stables and quarters at the rear, built in the square. All the houses are built that way, it’s actually a Mediterranean style.”

“After the Roman atrium,” David said.

“You do keep surprising me, David!”

The old man’s thin voice quivered with scorn. “This
boy’s head is full of things that don’t concern a Jew. Roman atrium!”

“Opa.” David spoke patiently. “Opa, you never understand. People aren’t content anymore to live behind closed doors. We want to know what’s been happening in the world outside. That doesn’t mean we must lose our faith.”

Opa rose on his elbow. “Listen to him. Oh, they may not be content, but they’d be better off if they were. I’ve seen enough in my lifetime not to be tricked again. Napoleon came: we were all free. Napoleon left; back inside the wall with us!” The skeletal hands clapped together, making a wall. “Here’s where we are. There’s where they are. And I don’t need to know a thing about what’s happening on their side of the wall because I’m never going to live on their side of the wall. It will never be different. Let a war come or a financial panic, or God knows what, and it’ll be our fault again. It always has been.”

Ferdinand spoke quietly. “With my respect to you, Opa, David is right. If you could only see how we live in America! In my city nobody asks what religion you are, or even whether you have any religion. Anyone who can afford the cost is free to move in the highest social circles.”

“It seems to me,” Dinah remarked, “you were always telling us the same thing about your family in France when Napoleon was emperor.”

“And so I did. There were great days. If he had lasted, things would have been different all over Europe.”

“But he didn’t last,” the old man interrupted. “So it’s just what I’ve been saying. Must I tell you—you of all people—what happened when the Hep Hep boys swept through half the towns in Franconia? Massacre in Darmstadt, in Karlsruhe, in Bayreuth—Hep Hep,”
he said bitterly. “I keep forgetting the words it stood for, something about Jerusalem—”

“Hierosolyma perdita est.
Jerusalem has been destroyed. That’s Latin.”

“Latin or not, it was blood to us. Hannah’s blood.”

There was a somber silence. Ferdinand lowered his head. The eyes—his son’s, his daughter’s—were unbearable to see. They were Hannah’s eyes, her sweet eyes, which, during these years since he’d lost her, he had almost forgotten.

“Yes,” the old man resumed. The terrible subject had poured a few minutes’ worth of energy into his veins. “Yes, back where we were before! No equal rights of citizenship. No public office. Wear a badge so the German will know who you are when he passes you on the street. Your few pfennigs taxed away. And
matrikel
resumed—”

Ferdinand was stifled. The weight of all this affliction, which he had for so long been trying to discard, now fell back upon him. And he tried with feeble levity to remove it.

“So you’d have to pay to get married here, David. Think about that!”

“I don’t want to get married.”

“You’ll change your mind in time. A pretty face will change your mind.”

“Smile it away if you can,” the old man said, “but you can’t get away from the truth. All through the horror, did anyone do anything to help us? The clergy, for instance? No. Nobody did anything and nobody ever will.”

“You’re right,” Ferdinand said softly.

“Then what are we arguing about?”

“I don’t know, Opa. I’ve forgotten how this all began.”

“You were saying,” David reminded him, “that it’s different in America.”

“Yes,” said Opa, “and I was saying you will see it will be the same there, too.”

“No,” Ferdinand insisted. “You never will. What do you know about America? Oh, I agree that Europe is finished. Away with it, then, as far as I’m concerned, away with its rotten bigotry and its rotten wars! There’s no future here for the young. Not for our young, at any rate.”

The room closed in. As the night deepened, the space grew smaller, and this very smallness made the world beyond the walls grow larger. They were isolated on an island in a menacing ocean. Suddenly Ferdinand was exhausted. Sorrow and fear exhausted him as he had not thought they could: all the years of his children’s lives that had been wasted! Patiently they sat, the little girl now drooping with sleep, while the boy was poised on the verge of new thoughts.

Suddenly the boy spoke. “I’ve often wished”—he hesitated, glancing at his grandfather, then back at Ferdinand—“I’ve often wished—I should like to be a doctor. It would be impossible for me here.” His outspread palms with their simple gesture described the life of the house.

“Quite possible in America,” Ferdinand said.

The boy—his son!—was pathetic in his outgrown jacket. People always looked pathetic in clothes that didn’t fit.

“The Medical College of Louisiana was founded just last year. You could go there or anywhere. And I’m not forgetting you, Miriam. We have fine schools for young ladies.”

“I’ll come with you,” the child said. “But only if Gretel can come, too.”

“Gretel?” Then Ferdinand understood that she
meant the dog. “Of course. She’s a beauty, an aristocrat, isn’t she? A King Charles spaniel. Wherever did you get such a dog?”

“I found her on the road when she was a puppy only a few weeks old, Aunt Dinah said. We think she must have fallen out of someone’s carriage.” The child’s arms tightened around the dog.

“There is an anecdote about them,” Ferdinand remarked. He was fond of anecdotes. “They say that Marie Antoinette had a King Charles spaniel hidden under the folds of her skirt when she went to the guillotine. It may or may not be true, of course.”

The old man was not to be diverted. “So you will take the children away,” he repeated. “Now at the end, you will all leave me.”

This appalling selfishness offended Ferdinand. Opa would actually keep these children here if he could! He would deprive them of their future. In one swift flash Ferdinand saw their future: David a respected doctor, an authority. Miriam married well in a fine house, perhaps even married to a planter owning wide acres. But then, he thought, who knows what I’ll be like when I’m old and sick? So he answered kindly.

“Consider, Opa. Here is a boy, a young man with a long life ahead, and a girl who in a few years will be a woman. What is here for them? New Orleans, even with yellow fever, is better than this.”

“What sort of religious life will they have in that place where you’re taking them?” the old man interrupted.

Ferdinand hesitated. “The truth is, not as much as here.”

“Well, that never bothered you, as I remember. But I hate to think that Hannah’s children will forget what they are.”

“There’s no reason why they should forget, Opa.”

“They have been brought up in this house to observe the laws. Like their mother, they are faithful Jews.”

Ferdinand looked at his children. Much good it had done their mother! He stood up, drawing a gold watch from his pocket.

“I’ve kept you all too late. It’s almost midnight, but I delayed so as not to arrive here before Sabbath sundown.”

“You traveled on the Sabbath all the same,” Dinah said.

“Ah, yes. I’m sorry! I’ve grown careless about things like that. My New Orleans ways again. I shall have to mend them,” he said soothingly.

Long before dawn the two who were to depart from the house rose from bed in their attic rooms, wakeful with excitement, a little fear, and some sadness. From their separate windows they watched the roiling black sky fade to gray, to melancholy lavender, then blaze into a sudden silver over the arc of the emerging sun.

David, leaning on the windowsill, closed his eyes against the spreading light. Papa boasts, he thought. He wants to show how important he is. Did I seem sullen to him? I didn’t know at first what to say. I suppose I’ll admit I’m angry that he went away and left me—left us. Still, that’s not fair: What could he have done with a little boy and a baby? And he was young. When he married my mother he wasn’t many years older than I am now. The queer thing is that he still seems very young, while I feel maybe older than he is—though that’s ridiculous. But I’ve always felt old. It has something to do with a picture that I’ve got in my head. It’s been painted there. Nothing wipes it away, no matter how I force myself to cover it with cheer. I can’t wash it away. Chalk-scrawls on a door:
Jude verreck; Jew, die like a beast
. Laughter and marching boots. Hep Hep. A woman with a swollen belly arches her back and screams and screams. Yes, yes, that’s how it was: a flurry of skirts, women’s long flying skirts and a door that banged and slammed; behind the door something terrible was happening. Then weeping and the long skirts in a surrounding circle, the women’s faces bending down: poor little boy with no mother, poor little boy.

Blood sickened him. Yet if one wanted to be a doctor, one must be able to look at blood. But that was different. It was the
violent
blood that sickened him. For a period, only a year or two ago, he had discovered he could not swallow meat. It stuck in his throat. A slice of chicken on the plate took life again: flapping, fluttering, feathers, spread wings, squawking, running on skinny fragile legs from the slaughterer. That period had passed. He had willed it to pass, as he had willed himself into the longing to be a doctor.

Downstairs now someone stirred and a chair scraped. Poor Opa, cranky, good old man! Surely he must know he was dying. Terrible to be old, to have no strength, to pass each day knowing that one was dying. Papa, now—he had strength, you couldn’t help but see that and admire it. To have done what he did, to have marched out into the world alone and made a place there for himself! Yes, you had to admire such vigor and will, even if he did boast about it.

A piece of cracked mirror hung on the wall: He had found it in someone’s household discard. And David examined himself. No, there was no resemblance between his own habitual half-scowling face and his father’s pleasant twinkle. Only the dark curly hair was the same. Papa’s determination, though: That I have. I know I have it.

How wonderful for Miriam to get away from bitter,
mournful Dinah! He would send her to school, Papa said. She was a bright little thing. David had taught her to read and sometimes she even tried his books, borrowed from the rabbi, the “modern” rabbi, against whom Opa railed. Naturally, she wasn’t able to understand them, but she tried and, surprisingly, here and there caught on to a sentence. Curious, she was. Quick to laugh also, as well as quick to cry. Sometimes he felt almost fatherly toward her. Well, now her real father could take over and care for her in the proper way.

He shut his eyes, swaying a little as one did in prayer. Then he opened them, wanting to keep in ear and eye this place that he was leaving, wanting to remember the risen light and a distant voice, and the hollow rumble of a farmer’s cart.

In the other attic room the little girl was stroking the skirt of her new dress. It was her way to describe things to herself in terms of the natural world; so the material was soft as new grass, it was butterfly-blue, it was warm and light as goose down. She had no mirror, and it was only by craning over her shoulder that she could see a whirl at her back where the plump corded niching of the skirt swayed above her ankles. Holding her hand up, she let the fluted cuff fall back over her little wrist. What a wonderful dress! Better by far than Aunt Dinah’s synagogue dress. Better by far than any she had ever seen. And there were to be more like it, for Papa had said so. It was a pity they were going away so early this morning, for it would have been a fine thing to walk up and down the street in this dress and let everyone see it.

She ran to the window. Nobody was out yet; there was no sign of life except for the caged bird hung outside the shuttered window of the shop across the way. The sight of this bird bothered the child; it always
had. The cage was too small. The poor thing could not even spread its wings. Was it to hang there drooping, silent, every day and every night of its life?

Opa had said once, “Your mother never could bear the sight of a caged bird, either.”

Your mother. Miriam knew the story of her mother, had known it long before she was supposed to know it, having overheard the voices.
She is so like Hannah. Think of it. A life going and another coming at the same time. Horrible. Horrible.
And having heard this so many times, she had begun to feel a certain distinction, a certain importance about herself that other people, those born in the ordinary manner, could not have. On the other hand, the knowledge had also given her nightmares.

Some said she ought never to have been told. But it was too late for that. Like her brother, she had made mental pictures, engravings not to be eradicated. In these pictures her mother was always wearing a plaid shawl: Why? No one had ever mentioned a shawl. And her hair would have been worn high, piled on her head. No one had ever told her that, either, and she had never asked.

Now, taking her own two braids, she twisted them into a black silk coil on the top of her head, elongating her face by sucking in her cheeks, which produced a serious, adult expression—and immediately broke into laughter, flouncing the skirt and scooping up the little dog, which had been looking at her with a dog’s equivalent of amazement.