A Separate Country (7 page)

Anna Gertrude has a cold. I hear her breathing, a rasping and rattling. She coughs so quietly it’s a rough whisper. Her eyes are pale blue like her father’s, but her black hair is mine. (You have my eyes, Lydia, nearly black. They’re pretty on you.) Anna Gertrude is as beautiful and mysterious as every one of our babies. I am grateful. She sleeps in a wicker bassinet that has sprung most of its weave. Sharp, broken pieces poke out on every side. The paint has mostly flaked off, and in certain spots it’s still possible to see some of the seven other shades of color your father added to the contraption. Now it is falling apart. The bassinet will not last much longer, and most of my old friends would have burned it years ago. It wobbles on its legs, it sags in the center where ten other babies once lay. It is the vessel, though, that has borne each of my children along into the world, and I will not give up on it so easily.

I begin this way because I am nervous, Lydia. I imagine that you are reading this when you are old, and that you hate me and your father for the life we led. You are poor now, and perhaps you are still. Most of the children don’t remember the servants and the fine flatware and the bolts of paisleyed French cloth propped up in the corners, from which we had men sew us our dresses and curtains and bed coverings. You, at least, would remember the prestige of being the family of John Bell Hood, you would remember the men who paid court to him and laughed at his half-remembered jokes. You would remember when the stray dogs were afraid to sneak through our fence, and when the roses still produced flowers and didn’t just ramble across the yard. Because you would remember all that, I wonder if you hate us for abandoning it all.

There are many reasons for me to write to you now, and the bassinet is one of them: I should explain why the bassinet fell into such a state, and why I still keep it and love it.

There are many things like it in this house now. The floors are scratched and rutted, the stove is broken and will not fire anymore, John Junior has outgrown his short pants but has nothing else to wear. What furniture is left has been tied together at the joints, and the old trap is missing some of the red spokes from its right wheel. It sits in the sideyard gathering to it vines and some chipped pots in which I’ve planted lilies. We walk nearly everywhere now. The horse is long gone, and there is no oil for the lamps. We still have candles, though I’ve noticed that you children have no more interest in them. Or, rather, that you have no more interest in doing the things that require candlelight. You and your brothers and sisters sleep when the sun sets and rise when it warms the counterpane. I think this is healthy, though our neighbors must think us eccentric.

Only John still insists on mastering the night. I hear him thumping around the parlor now, I hear him cursing, and then I hear the snick of a match. He moves too fast, even with his wood leg. I try to tell him that the wind he makes walking so quickly will always snuff a candle, but he will not slow himself. He worries about me, and this makes him want to move, to grab up things and put them back down. I have heard him arranging and rearranging his books. I have heard him shaping the hollies outside into perfect round balls of green, using only his old bayonet which he keeps paper-thin sharp. God help us, he has even cooked our food, which as you know always comes out of a big pot. He cooks us camp food in the fireplace. It is garrison food, the food that soldiers make for themselves when all they have is the overripe turnips and sprouted potatoes and bacon ends they scrounge from trash heaps and on old harvested fields. He makes for us the food of desperate men grateful for small things, and I suppose that is what we are now, though I wouldn’t mind if he would discover salt, pepper, maybe some thyme. Perhaps you will help him with that. My little helper Lydia.

Surely you have noticed how empty this grand house has become. You’ve seen how we rattle around inside, hidden beneath its soaring roof and filigreed gables, loose inside its solidity like seeds inside an old, dry, and still perfect gourd. The life we live now is not the life this house was supposed to contain. It is a house of great ambition, built for entertaining and leisure amid beauty and grace. It is a house that was built by much younger people who had every reason to think that they would have everything they ever desired and that they would need a place to put it all before they ran out of room and found a larger house to fill. I have all I desire now in this rickety bassinet and the sound of you children crawling into your beds, but I’m afraid this is too little for such a house. There is grief in it, as if the house itself could see and feel and harbor wishes that could be dashed. It must know now that it will never again be so grand as the two who built it, just as we ourselves will never be so grand. I hope it does not resent me.

Like Gertrude, I am also sick, though I fear I am much worse. This is the last reason for writing to you. I might not live to tell you these things in their own good time. I was old to be having any more children. I was old the
last
time, with Oswald, who was born precisely nine months ago when the city itself was sick. Thousands dying around him of all manner of contagion, and yet Oswald remained considerate. He waited until we were safely removed from the city and out of the reach of the miasma bearing yellow fever and cholera and scarlet fever and measles, until we were safely settled on the other side of the lake, until it had become clear that we would never return to a city exactly as it was, until it was clear that we, the Hoods, had been changed, and only then did Oswald choose to come into the world. Such an awful time, and yet such a perfect birth. I was forty years old, I had no business having a baby. Even so, I was walking around the little fish camp the next day and, a week later, I admitted the General back into my bed.

Now, when we are poor but happy, after the best year of my life, I give birth to a little girl who takes most of me with her. I will not be coy about the blood. It ran from me as if I were a fount, a headwater. Everything was red and hot and humid in that room. It smelled like metal, I could taste it in the air. If not for the negress sent by my old friend Rintrah, I would have died I’m sure. But she made poultices and mumbled words in a broken tongue I could not understand, I suppose it was Houdou language though it might have been Latin. Or both. When the bleeding stopped they burned the sheets in the back courtyard. I remember hearing myself beg them not to burn so many sheets, that we had none to spare. I sounded tired, I think.

It’s been three weeks and I am still very cold. I am shivering, though it is April and the sweet olives are sending off their scent, which drifts in on the river breeze. I have a fever, the negress says, but I will not die from it. How does she know? She stands at the foot of my bed, freckles dashed across her cheeks and hair up in a green tignon, eyes constantly blinking and round like a doll’s. She rocks from side to side, saying her blasphemous Mass, and I am comforted. She says I will not die yet.
Good
. But I will take no chances.

There are things I must explain to you. You should know how we have become who we are. You should be
proud
to be a Hood, to be one of these Hoods. There wasn’t always a good reason to be proud, but now there is. You will understand. Let me begin.

I remember taking the coupé out and over to Esplanade, through the faubourgs and between the saplings, the day before you were born, Lydia. It was John’s idea. His first child, and I suppose all he could remember were the cows of his Kentucky boyhood, and so he went out to exercise his woman and encourage you along. Perhaps he thought I would drop you in a nice, soft pile of hay miraculously deposited on the wayside? I asked him this, and he blushed. (Have you seen him blush? He can, you know.) I laughed and he laughed and it was grand. Scandalous. The delicate and properly appointed Creole ladies gawked at me, bouncing along swollen and sweating. John smiled as if he’d won a great prize. The ladies yapped like terriers and shied away from us in a spray of skirts, as if they could catch whatever had so obviously addled our brains. I was a Creole gone mad. I was a white Creole, a new distinction that hadn’t been nearly so important before the war. A
white
Creole expecting her child would lie on lounges in dark corners berating the service, the consommé, the pharmacist, and her husband. Birth, that consuming pain measured in brief moments of sweetness, was an evil visited upon the white Creole lady. Such ladies did not ride about, and certainly not alone with their husbands. The
colored
Creole women either didn’t complain, or we just never heard about it. Our city, Lydia, is full of silliness.

John was scared. Hard to tell behind the tattered curtain of beard, but it was true. Of death? It is strange that while a life gathers we think of death, but it was inescapable. I’m sure it crossed his mind. I thought of it very little.

I believe he thought that you and any other child would appear into the world broken, ashamed of him, and implacable. That you would bear his mark and never forgive him for it. The truth of John Bell Hood, and what made it possible to love him, was that he cared what you thought of him. You, little you, Lydia. He would fight others over what they thought of him, but he did not love them. And Lord, do not think he
spoke
of love! To name it would turn it against him, or cause it to fall apart.
Better not to say
is the twin of
Better not to know.

A man pulled his carriage out of a porte cochere just as John gave the horses their head, urging them on so that I would laugh at the way his whiskers blew over his shoulder. The horses stumbled in the dirt and nipped each other. I fell forward against the console before John could yank me back.

The man in the carriage looked at us, stared briefly at me, and told John he was a drooling fool with no business on his street.
En français,
of course.

“What did he say, Anna?”

“He apologized.”

“Did not sound like an apology.”

The other man stepped down, erect, gray, girded in black like a smokestack.
Unblemished
. I am sorry to write that word, but it is what I remember. It is what I always thought when I saw John next to another man. John stepped down from our coupé. Heavily. He leaned toward his left leg, away from the wooden one, and in that position his left arm, half useless, hung down, straight and unmoving. While John composed himself, he could sometimes look as if he might fall apart, especially when he was angry and his face glowed red as if from the effort to hold his pieces together. But he moved very quickly. The tall man stepped back and soiled his heel in a puddle.

“Did you wish to speak to me, sir?” John’s blue eyes disappeared into a squint.

“No, no.
Non
.”

“I believe you do.”

“It is over. Please go back to your wife.”

“I do not take…”

John was near to telling the old man that he would not be ordered, that
he
would give orders and that the man had angered him and would not be allowed to retreat unscathed. Then, at that very moment, the creases in his face sloughed off and he stood placid and silent before the Creole. I watched. I knew what he was thinking, what he was willing himself to think:
Perhaps he is right. Return to Anna Marie. I foreswear the fight. I refuse
. It was a litany, words he forced upon himself as others might force the
Bona Mors
upon themselves at their own deathbeds.

Something in him had died, and something better had grown in its place, right there where John now stood. He bowed his head and limped back to the coupé without speaking. He looked at me. I saw blue, pure blue. He sat up on the driver’s box and quietly waved the old Creole on. The other, puzzled, took the reins and drove off. John put his good hand lightly on my leg and in a whisper asked if I had been hurt. I said no. We drove off slowly, this time quietly admiring the sweet, drifting scent of orange trees in bloom.

That was the General, not as I’d met him, but as he came to be. He could do nothing but fight. It was his character. But he had learned to find different sorts of fights. He fought for love, for instance. Believe me when I say he didn’t understand the first thing about love when we met. But with love, the struggle replenishes, the combatant rarely fails to rise. You were born the next day, our first child.

I hope that you never leave this city. I hope you will love it as I have, imperfectly, inconstantly, but passionately. I am captured by this town of my ancestors, by the heat and milky bright light, by the smell of sweet olives. There has been little for me but this city. I wonder if I could breathe the air outside New Orleans, whether I would drown. Has any person ever been so perfectly formed by such a small place? It can’t be left behind: the streets I walked on, the doors I entered, the steeples I navigated by, the bright and ringing crystal I raised to my lips, the river, the carriages, the gliding crowds of nuns. I could see myself laid out in every direction, street for blood and building for bone. I am glad of this place only because I could not survive anywhere else.

I remember days in my peignoir, reclining below the window, the breeze lying on me and gliding over me, the men on the banquette stealing glances and hurrying off, eyes cast down. This was New Orleans, too, the city I had made. A funny city arrayed between the flesh and the cross. Paris had been that way, though older and weighed down by centuries.
Its
flesh sagged,
its
crosses gathered dust, but my home was young and avid for both cross and flesh. None of those men passing by my window and stealing glimpses of the girl draped in lace would have guessed I had a volume of Livy open in my lap, and a slender copy of
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
under my pillow. I was a young woman and all around me things ripened when I passed, or they were made new again.

This was the woman who married your father, who met him at another senseless ball, another night of light across dark gardens, sweet dough frying, the hollow thump of my shoes on thick carpet, violins glistening on the shoulders of black-suited young men. The geometry of the parquet stretched out in every direction, uninterrupted by the twirl and slide of bodies orbiting each other like planets, their gravities stronger every minute. The servants laughed and made jokes at the top of the stairs, performing their own dance and coming together by their own physical laws. They spoke French.