Property (Vintage Contemporaries) (25 page)

He chuckled, turning to me. “Alice has already begun her instruction with Père François.”

Alice, I thought. Alice Borden. It sounded like a steam-boat. “So you are determined to stay in town,” I said.

“Oh, yes.” He gave me a meaningful look. “There is much to keep me here.”

What, I asked myself, was the meaning of the meaningful look? Neither of us was under the illusion that my opinions had the slightest influence upon him. It would certainly never occur to Joel to include me in the circle who knew about his adventures at the Blue Ribbon Balls, or the likelihood that he would acquire a little house on the Ramparts where he could retire of an evening to be pampered by some poor, trussed-up yellow girl who was ignorant enough to think she was free. No, the meaningful look was simply for show, a courtesy to a poor, crippled widow who must find some way to live on such looks. I am sick to death of this charade, I thought, but I said, “I’m glad. I should miss your visits.”

“Then you do forgive me,” he said earnestly.

“There is nothing to forgive,” I said.

This reply suited him so well he rushed out ahead of it like a horse scenting the barn. “I plan to buy a large house, the biggest I can find, and give a series of dinners and dances. As I’ve explained to Alice, I owe everyone in town. We will have to bring in the wine on flatboats.”

“That will be very gay,” I said.

“It will be,” he agreed. He grasped my hand as if to guide me into a happy future we would share together. “It will be such a relief to have money,” he said. “I am mortally sick of being in debt.”

I was uncomfortably conscious of my hand pressed between Joel’s. As he spoke, he rubbed the back of my wrist with one finger. It was my bad arm. I could lift my fingers, but I couldn’t withdraw it without bringing my other hand in to help. I had not the slightest interest in entering Joel’s fantasy about his delightful future. Already the name “Alice” was tedious to me. I pasted an imbecilic smile on my face while Joel rambled on, but I was thinking gloomily that my aunt was right, my heart was cold.

Yet she was wrong as well, for it wasn’t childlessness that had chilled it. It was the lie at the center of everything, the great lie we all supported, tended, and worshiped as if our lives depended upon it, as if, should one person ever speak honestly, the world would crack open and send us all tumbling into a flaming pit. My future was as dark and small as Joel’s was bright and wide, yet it was my duty to pretend I did not know it. Was there a man of fortune so disagreeable to other young women that he could be forced to settle for me? And if such a miracle did occur, as my poor aunt deluded herself it might, wouldn’t it be understood that I must remain silent, as Alice McKenzie certainly would, while my husband sought solace for my inadequacies in the bed of some light-skinned quadroon? The only woman I knew who had not had to tolerate her husband’s fascination with these creatures, which they bred for their own pleasure, was my mother, and now it had been revealed to me that this was because my father was somehow deficient in the urge to procreate. He had refused to bring more children, black, white, or yellow, into this hell where they must suck in lies with their mother’s milk.

But it wasn’t their mother’s milk, I corrected myself. Perhaps that was how the poison entered us all, for even the quadroons were too vain to suckle their own children and passed their babies on to a servant. I recalled watching Celeste nursing my brother at one breast, her own dark child at the other, while my mother looked on approvingly.

Never, I thought. Not me. Let Alice McKenzie have a houseful of Joel’s screaming babies; better her than me. I would hold fast to my independence as a man clings to a life raft in a hurricane. It was all that saved me from drowning in a sea of lies.

At length Joel came to the end of his rhapsody and began to fear that he was tiring me. He released my hand and rose to leave. “You must take care of yourself, Manon,” he said, looking about the room disconsolately. “Don’t shut yourself up here in the dark.”

“I won’t,” I said. I got up to escort him to the door.

“I want you to be well again. I want to see you dancing at my wedding.”

The thought of whirling about in the embrace of some elderly gentleman while my arm hung like a dead animal at my side actually did make me laugh. “No, no,” I said. “I’m afraid my dancing days are finished.”

When at last he was gone, I collapsed on the settee, thoroughly exhausted. Mother would never have sent a young man off with so little fuss, I thought, but I didn’t care. My eyes rested on the portrait of Father, which is always such a comfort to me, but oddly it had no more effect than the likeness of some stranger in a shopwindow. Father was right; the artist had romanticized him. His jaw was not that strong, his eyes that clear.

I thought of his journal, those banal entries about cotton and weather and disease, and no mention of me, as if I didn’t exist, or he wished I didn’t, the obligatory mention of Mother as “my dear wife,” only in connection to his “failing,” for which he nobly accepted blame.

No, I thought. His failing wasn’t his refusal to perform his marital duties and engender more children for the general slaughter, though that was doubtless a symptom. It was something else, something Mother knew but never told, something he had always with him, and took with him, something behind his smile and his false cheer, and the charade of feelings he clearly didn’t have. He pretended to be a loving father, a devoted husband, but he wasn’t really with us, our love was not what he required, he did not long for us as we longed for him.

He was an impostor.

He kissed me good-night the night he died just as he had a thousand times before; nothing set it apart from any other night when I might find him in the morning, nodding at Mother over the coffee urn. He knew I would never see him again, yet he didn’t bother to leave me with so much as an extra word of encouragement, a lingering in the kiss, an extended moment of tenderness, anything that I might have clung to as evidence that he regretted abandoning me, that I figured in his life more importantly than his hoe or a sick field hand, which, after all, received a mention in his journal.

My aunt was right, he was obsessed by the negroes, he wanted them to admire him, to adore him, and my mother was right as well; they had killed him.

I could see myself, so passionate, so terrified, weeping like a fool and calling out to him in the cold wind on the dock. And then I turned to find those boys—did I really see them?—who appeared from nowhere to tell me what no one in my world ever would, the plain unvarnished truth. “Your pappy started that fire hisself. He shot hisself.”

It was the truth. They had no reason to make up such a story. They were just children, repeating what they had heard. Mother knew it, and it destroyed what was left of her life.

I reached out and laid the portrait facedown on the table. “Hypocrite,” I said. My head was bursting. It felt as if an iron collar, such as I have seen used to discipline field women, were fastened about my skull. I remembered watching my husband through the spyglass as he stalked across the lawn with one of these devices dangling from his hand. He was in a fury because he’d caught a new girl in bed with the overseer. He passed Sarah, who was feeding chickens in the yard, and spoke to her. I couldn’t hear what he said, but judging by the scowl she gave him, it was something insulting. What was it?

“
You’re next
.” I heard his voice clearly as I sat there in the darkened room clutching my head. He’s dead, I told myself. He’s not coming back. But it was as if he were there, leaning over me, turning the screw of the hot iron collar tighter and tighter until my skull must crack from the pressure.

IT TURNED COLD that night. I was so tired I slept well in spite of it. In the morning, while I huddled over my coffee, Rose and Delphine went about closing the windows and piling coal into the grates. My headache was gone. I felt better than I had in weeks. Let me just live quietly, without illusions, I thought.

When the fire was lit, I took my cup into the parlor and sat at the desk. I could hear the women struggling with the window in Mother’s bedroom. It has stuck for as long as I can remember. My thoughts wandered and my eyes traveled over the familiar furnishings until they settled upon a sight I will never become accustomed to: Walter was leaning in the doorway, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. “What are you doing here?” I said, as if he had it in him to give me an answer. He dropped his hands, ran across the floor, and threw himself down on the fireplace tiles, letting out a groan of pleasure at the warmth. Before I could call Rose, he turned upon his side and fell asleep.

He’s like a cat, I thought, always seeking comfort or making trouble, immune to all commands. Someone had washed him recently and cut his hair in short ringlets. In the firelight it glowed like hot copper wire. His lips were moist and red. I seldom looked at him, but I was in such an idle frame of mind that I noticed his face had grown longer in the last months. Though he had his father’s light eyes, he had begun to favor his mother.

Where was she? Philadelphia? New York? Great cold cities full of foreigners. How much longer would it take for Mr. Leggett to find her? And at what cost?

Rose came in, looking from Walter to me and back again. “I thought he was in the kitchen,” she said. “He snuck out while we was closing up. He always want to be where you are.”

This was true, I thought. He was fascinated by me. “Leave him,” I said. “Tell Delphine to fix me a big breakfast. All I ate yesterday was a morsel of bread and a plum.”

WINTER SETTLED UPON us. The cold seeped around the windows, rose up through the floorboards, even the carpets were cold beneath my thin slippers. I spent the mornings in the parlor, wrapped in shawls, the afternoons at my aunt’s, where the fireplace was large enough to accommodate small logs, and the nights shivering beneath a pile of blankets. Walter turned the morning nap by the fire into a ritual. To the amazement of Rose and Delphine, I allowed it. He was there, sound asleep, when my aunt arrived with the news that Sarah had been apprehended at last.

“A gentleman named Foster came to us last night,” she said, breathlessly pulling off her gloves. “He said he had promised Mr. Leggett to relay certain information to us, as he would arrive before the mails. Good heavens, is that Walter?”

“I let him sleep there once,” I said, “and now he wants to do it every day. Rose says he always wants to be where I am.”

My aunt contemplated the boy, who lay curled on his side, his head resting on his arm. “What harm can it do?” she said. “He has certainly grown.”

“He looks like his mother,” I said. “Where is she?”

“She is in jail in Savannah.”

“But I thought she was in New York?”

“She was. But Mr. Leggett has brought her to Savannah. That is where he met Mr. Foster and gave him a full account of his travels over dinner at the inn where they both passed the night. It is an amazing story.” My aunt threw off her cloak and composed herself on the settee. “Come and sit with me and I will tell you all I know. Really, I think Mr. Leggett has done himself proud.”

Mr. Foster told my aunt that Sarah had boarded the sailing vessel the
United States
barely a week after my husband’s murder, disguised as a white gentleman, Mr. Maître, and accompanied by a servant girl named Midge who pretended Sarah’s baby was her own. Mr. Maître wore dark glasses and hardly spoke, claiming the illness for which he sought treatment in the North made conversation too taxing. He stayed in his cabin, but Midge was all over the vessel, talking to anyone who would listen. Her subject was her poor master and the nature of his illness, which changed from day to day. The captain thought the girl excitable and ignorant. He told Mr. Leggett he wondered that a gentleman as frail and distinguished as Mr. Maître would tolerate such a giddy piece of baggage, with a screaming baby in tow.