Crescent City (42 page)

The carriage rolled nearer, the black wheels, bright as jet, coming to a smart stop at the foot of the verandah. The coachman jumped down and helped the woman to alight.

The woman was Queen.

In her manner, this time, there was neither deference nor avoidance. Her eyes, no longer lowering and flickering away as they once had, swept frankly over Miriam’s country bonnet and cotton dress, faded from many washings.

“You remember me,” she said. It was not a question, but a declaration.

“I do.”

“I came as soon as I heard what happened .… He was a good man.” The curve of the chin, lifted above three strands of marvelous pearls, was vaguely defiant.

It was hardly worth coming all this way to tell me that, Miriam thought, feeling a hot rise of anger. And do you think I am going to argue with you about it? But she merely nodded to indicate that she had heard.

“I brought you some things. I thought—I knew you would be needing things.”

The trampled corn, the broken railing of the piazza from which Eugene had fallen, and the fences on which repairs had barely begun, stood in mute evidence of that need.

“His—your—children will be needing things, I thought.”

To be the recipient of this woman’s largesse! I should like to tell her to take her charity elsewhere, Miriam told herself. But Angelique’s bright dresses had caught the fancy of the marauders, who had stripped her room of everything she owned.

“The boxes are in the carriage. Shall I have my man take them into the house?”

The floor and half of the back seat were covered with parcels, nicely tied. So long since the last time one had known that voluptuous anticipation in the presence of a well-wrapped gift! Greed widened Miriam’s eyes. She felt them stretching open.

“He may put them in the front hall,” she said. “It’s most kind of you .…”

The woman watched her servant and Miriam watched the woman. Her eardrops were diamonds. Gold bracelets, heavy and sinuous, twined around her wrists, and her fingers were covered with rings. The Queen of Sheba must have glittered so.

This obvious increase in wealth, this new manner of assurance and reversal of their relative positions, cut Miriam sharply, while at the same time she understood quite clearly that the cutting edges were her own resentment, injured pride, and envy.

When the last of the packages had been stacked in the hall, Queen started back to the carriage. An impulse toward ordinary decency shot through Miriam’s foggy distraction. The humid air was stifling, and the woman had made a long journey for the benefit of Eugene’s children.

“Come in and rest for a moment. I have nothing to offer you except rest in a cool place.”

Fortunately, she thought wryly, this was the time of the afternoon nap, so there would be no one about—especially not Emma—to be amazed at the sight of the lady of the house entertaining a free woman of color in the parlor.

Queen’s quick eyes were taking in the damage, the empty spaces where obviously furniture had stood, the shattered mirror, and the portrait with the ruinous diagonal rip.

“I don’t understand why they had to do all this,” she said. “They have left you nothing.”

“Yes, between them and Beast Butler, we have almost nothing,” Miriam said angrily.

“Yet he did do some good.”

“Butler did good?” Miriam was scornful.

“Oh, yes, he brought in food when the city was starving, and fixed prices. And he set men to cleaning the dirty streets. You know we’ve had no yellow fever this past summer.”

“That’s little enough to have given back to the city when he has got so rich from the city.”

Queen smiled. “Yes, many have got rich by it. His brother has made a fortune. I know people quite close to him, and I know it’s true.”

I am quite sure you do, Miriam said to herself.

In the distant west thunder muttered briefly, signaling, to her relief, its own passing away, for she could scarcely have allowed the woman to start home in the
thick of a storm. Then a silence filled the room. It ticked in the ears and grew more disconcerting with each moment, until at last Queen began to speak.

“I wanted to tell him that I was sorry I—left him when the city was taken.” Into the depths of her round, hooded eyes, so newly, confidently, bold, there now came a sorrowing remorse. “It’s too late .… People do things they’re not proud of afterward. But circumstances …” The soft, rushing voice, suggestive of love-words and laughter, stopped and the hands were flung out, palms upward, as if to say: Surely you will understand how it was.

Luxury, gaiety, and going over to the winners, that’s how it was. Still there was a certain dignity in the plain confession.

“I’m sorry he didn’t live to hear you tell him that,” Miriam said, remembering that flicker of a smile as Eugene lay dying on the ground.

“There’s something else .… It’s about my son. He’s a sculptor, did you know? He has won a prize in Rome. I would have liked to tell him about that, too. He would have been proud.”

No. He would not have cared that much. And she remembered the lion on Eugene’s chest of drawers. Yes, he would be—he had been—touched with understandable compassion, but his heart and his pride had been the son who carried his name in the city. My son, she thought; that’s the reason he married me.

But that was a thing one did not speak, and so the pair of them fell back into silence. There was, after all, no reason why they should have any more to say to one another. And yet, in a curious way they were bound to an unwanted, unspoken intimacy by their linkage to the dead Eugene.

What if I had loved him, too? Miriam asked herself, finding no answer.

We are all tied in a chain whose overlapping links are meshed into a tangled convoluted net without an end or a beginning: she to me and I to Eugene; I to André and he to Marie Claire and she—

The satin skirt whispered on the floor as Queen stood up to leave. With a sudden gesture of pity and shame—who am I, what am I, to judge?—Miriam put out her hand, only to feel in return a quick pressure and to see a small spill of tears, as quickly wiped away.

When the carriage was out of sight, she went back into the house and called Fanny to unpack the boxes.

The next unusual visitor, some weeks later, was a fashionable gentleman with fashionable whiskers and a faintly British accent.

“My name is Isachar Zacharie, Dr. Isachar Zacharie.”

He carried a basket of oranges and, as they immediately learned, a letter from David. His manner had a courtly formality combined with friendliness.

“Then, you know my son professionally?” inquired Ferdinand.

“No, I only met him once, in New York. He, naturally, is in the Medical Corps, while I am a chiropodist. Also, if I may say so, a friend of President Lincoln’s.”

Emma’s lips pressed shut in distaste, and Rosa’s corsets creaked as she straightened her back in total rejection of this information.

“As a matter of fact, I am in New Orleans on a mission from the President.”

Suspicious glances flitted about the circle of faces. Was this some sort of charlatan, a fraud?

“Your son, when he asked me to deliver this letter, thought that perhaps you were still in New Orleans, but I inquired and learned you were not.”

“Beast Butler forced us to leave.” Ferdinand said coldly.

Dr. Zacharie smiled. “I understand your feelings.”

“Tell what you can about my brother, please,” Miriam asked with polite impatience.

“Oh, he has been in the thick of battles, he told me, but he seems to have survived pretty well. We really hadn’t much time to talk. Both of us happened to be in the city for a couple of events, when the facilities of the Jews’ Hospital were offered to the government for wounded soldiers. And then again at the Sanitary Fair, a day later. Raised over a million dollars for war relief. When he heard that I was bound for New Orleans-well,” Zacharie said delicately, “I have brought some things. I happened to mention to Rabbi Illowy in New Orleans that I was coming here, and he suggested that possibly—the devastation … There are a few things in the carriage.”

Directing Sisyphus to carry in an armful of blankets and quilts, Miriam thought, Gifts come from strange sources these days—first from Queen, and now from this peculiar man. But God knows they are welcome.

When she came back into the parlor, the man was saying, “Yes, my family is in Savannah, and it’s a terrible hardship to be away from them. But if there is anything I can do to bring peace about, I will go to any lengths to do it.”

Emma grasped the arms of her chair. Her pink flesh drooped; she had lost many pounds and her eyes were heavy with anxiety. Pelagie’s third son had now gone away to fight. As yet there had been no casualties in her flock, but each day increased the likelihood of one.

“Just how will you do that?” she asked skeptically.

Dr. Zacharie waved a hand, dismissing the question.

“With all respect, madam, these are official matters, highly confidential, of which I can’t speak. Oh, I can
tell you that I have something to do with readjusting exchange rates between the Union currency and the local, but that’s a small matter, and common knowledge anyway.” He lowered his voice. “Unofficially, though, I can tell you that I’ve made myself very helpful to many Jews—I am one myself, you see—both northern Jews caught in New Orleans and southern Jews who have left the city for the Confederacy. In dire straits, they are, because they refuse to take the oath.”

“My God, how long will this go on!” cried Miriam.

“Too long. But the longer it lasts, the more certain the Union is to win. Well, you asked me,” Zacharie apologized.

“Yes, go on, please.”

“We all know the Confederacy hopes to gain the support of France and England, but their missions, supposed to be secret, have all failed.”

André … Then, where is he now?

“For one thing, England found new sources of cotton in Egypt and India, and for another, the laboring classes, both of France and England, are so against the institution of slavery that their governments wouldn’t dare at this point to do otherwise. It has become a moral issue, especially in England.”

“A moral issue!” Rosa exclaimed. Her shattered nerves, now gradually piecing themselves together, had given her voice a grating tone. “Yes, for the Confederacy it is indeed a moral issue to protect ourselves against a foreign invader! You have attacked our homes .… You have only to look! My brother, sir, a lawyer, a student of affairs, a just-minded man as all who know him will attest to, even he always said it is not a question of morality in the North; it is money! Consider the wealth they get from our cotton, far more than we get, who raise it! Their banks thrive on
the slavery they prate about!” she finished passionately.

Miriam was embarrassed. “Dr. Zacharie has come on an errand of kindness. Let’s leave these subjects.”

“I’ve come and I must go,” the doctor said with unruffled good nature. “I have a thousand errands back in the city.”

“What did you think of him?” asked Ferdinand when he had seen Zacharie out of the house.

Miriam considered. “He is either a clever imposter, or a high-minded benefactor. Take your choice.”

Emma said disconsolately, “He seems sure we are beaten.”

“Never believe it,” Ferdinand argued. “Our forces will be back. You will see the men in gray ride up this lane again before very long. Mark my words.”

A spurt of rain struck the windowpane, followed by a flight of wind that rattled them in their frames. The autumn storms had come. Rain and mud will hold up the fighting, Miriam thought with gratitude.

But Ferdinand had just said that the men in gray would be back. And that meant more fighting, more deaths of young men.

Also quite possibly, could it mean that André might be back, too? If he were still alive … and it seemed to her that to be told she would not see him for ten years, or even never again, would be the hardest thing to bear; but to be told that he was dead would be unbearable.

Miriam put the letter down. Her heart raced.
The women were weeping.
So went the story, heard a hundred times over, of her mother’s death. And she read on.