Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (13 page)

“Bearin' up enough to collect every earbob and pin, and cut the silver buttons off every one of her daughter's dresses, is how she's bearin' up.”

“A woman can grieve her daughter and still fear for her own future, Agnes,” said Clisson gently. “You know she had nothing beyond what Angelique sent her every month.”

“God knows it was Angelique who paid her bills, more times than not,” added Gignac, crossing herself. The daughter of respectable free colored parents, she was one of the small minority of sang meles who accepted the plafees on their own terms as friends as well as customers, though it was understood they did not speak on the public streets. “And her gambling debts, from what I hear. It's that poor child Clemence that fainted dead away when she came here this morning and heard.”

Agnes only sniffed. January deduced the matter of young Peralta still rankled.

“Judith,” Clisson went on in her soft voice, “please be so good as to fetch Monsieur Janvier some coffee. Or should I say Ben?” she added, her dark eyes sparkling with a friendship she'd never shown him when they were young. “I've missed you twice by your mama's. It's good to catch up with you at last.”

January smiled, too. He'd been fourteen when she, far too proud of her own position to take the slightest notice of a gawky coal-black lout such as he had been, had become the mistress of a middle-aged Creole with a plantation on Lake Pontchartrain. January's adoration had lasted for years. On the nights when Monsieur Motet came into town he had been drawn to loiter on the opposite banquette of her cottage on Rue des Ramparts in an agony of jealous speculation, though they had not spoken since she had left Herr Kovald's class.

Funny, what time did.

The memory brought back all those other memories. He'd played with Odile and her brother as children, though her parents had looked askance at a placee's son, and had sent her to a Select
Academy for Colored Females at an early age. A queer sense of pain touched him, which he recognized as a kind of pins-and-needles of the heart: feeling coming back into memories long buried and numb.

This city had been his home. These people had been his home.

In turning his back on Froissart and Richelieu, and on the thick heat of the fever summers, he had turned his back on them as well.

“I'd forgotten how beautifully you played.” Clisson laid down her fan, French lace on sandalwood sticks, costly and new. “I didn't even think about it during the dancing, but afterward, when you were playing to keep everyone amused . . . The Rossini almost made me cry. I was sorry to hear about your wife.”

He smiled down at her from his height. “I didn't think you even noticed how I played when we had class together,” he said, with the rancorless amusement of shared old times. “You're still with Monsieur Motet?”

Her smile was no more than the tucking back of the corners of her lips, the velvet warming of her eyes. It told him everything even before she nodded, and he felt for her a rush of gladness. “Are you taking students, now you're back?” she asked. She spoke almost as if it had been a given, a foregone conclusion for all those years, that he would eventually return. He wanted to tell her he hadn't intended to return at all.

“I think your mama said you were. My daughter Isabel's eight. I've taught her a little, but it's time she had a good teacher.”

January was opening his mouth to reply when a woman's voice cried out in the rear of the house, a sharp gasp, rising to a shriek “There it is! There! I told you! Oh God—”

A break, a murmur, January and Clisson and Gignac all on their feet in the sliding doorway that separated the darkened parlor from the still-darker bedchamber. “Oh, my child! Oh, my poor little one! Murder! Oh God, murder—”

“What the—” began January.

“Of course it was murder,” said Clisson, puzzled. “Nobody ever said it wasn't.”

The door to the bedroom sliced open and Euphrasie Dreuze stumbled through, clutching something in her fat jeweled hand. “My God, my God, look!” she sobbed at the top of her lungs. “My poor little girl was hexed to death! Someone hid this in her mattress; she was sleeping next to this all along! It drew death down on her! It drew death!”

“Phrasie, don't be a goose.” Livia Levesque emerged from the bedroom on her friend's heels and made an unsuccessful grab at the filthy little wad of parchment and bone.

Euphrasie Dreuze wrenched herself free. Only five years older than January, she was plumper than she'd been when first he had seen her but retained the impression of kitten-soft cuddliness that had attracted a well-off young broker thirty years before. Her chin was pouchy and deep lines graven on either side of her painted mouth, but she was still a lovely woman, fair-skinned even among quadroons, with small, grasping hands. Even for day wear her tignon was orange silk, glittering with an aigrette of jewels.

With a shattering sob she brandished what she held. January took it, turned it over in his hands. A dried bat, little bigger than a magnolia leaf.

A gris-gris. A talisman of death.

“Madame Dreuze, Madame Dreuze,” bleated Clem-ence Drouet, fluttering at her heels the way she had fluttered at Angelique's, her round face still gray with shock and tears. “Please don't. . . .”

“Throw that piece of trash out,” commanded Livia sharply and snatched it from her son's hands.

Even as she did so, Euphrasie turned with a hysterical cry upon the servant girl Judith, frozen in the act of pouring coffee from a pot at the sideboard.

“You did this!” Euphrasie shrieked, smashing cup and saucer from the girl's hands. “You black slut! You planted it there, you wanted my child to die!” Her hand lashed out, quick as a cottonmouth striking, and clapped the girl on the ear. Judith gasped and tried to run, but the room was choked with furniture, new and English and thick with carving. Odile and Pellicot clogged the door to the other half of the parlor, Clemence and Euphrasie herself that to the bedroom.

“You did it, you did it, you did it!” Euphrasie struck her again, knocking her white head scarf flying, her gesture almost an identical echo of Angelique's last night, when she had struck young Peralta. “You cheap, lazy whore! You dirty black tramp!” She caught Judith by the hair, dragging her forward and shaking her by the thick pecan-colored mass until the girl screamed. “You wanted her dead! You wanted to go back to that mealymouthed white bitch! You hated her! You got some voodoo and got her to make gris-gris!”

“Phrasie!” Clisson caught the hysterical woman's wrist. “How can you, with Angelique dead in her bed there?”

“Phrasie, don't be a fool.” Livia thrust herself into the fray, slapped Euphrasie loudly on her plump cheek.

Euphrasie fell back, opening her mouth to scream, and Livia picked up the water pitcher from the sideboard. “You scream and I dump this over you.”

Clisson, Odile, and Agnes Pellicot promptly retreated to the doorway, hands pressing their mountains of petticoats back for safety. January reflected that they'd all known his mother for thirty years.

Euphrasie, too, wisely forbore to scream. For a moment the only sound was the girl Judith sobbing in the corner, her hair a tobacco-colored explosion around her swollen face. The smell of coffee soaking into wool carpet hung thick in the air. Outside a woman sang “Callas! Hot callas hotl”

Then Euphrasie burst into fresh tears and flung herself onto the bosom of the only male present. “They murdered my little girl!” she howled. “My God, they witched her, put evil on her, so someone was drawn to kill her!”

Livia rolled her eyes. January's mother was small and delicate, like her younger daughter but not so tall, almost frail looking, with fine bronze skin and Dominique's catlike beauty. At fifty-seven she moved with a decisive quickness that January didn't recall from her languid heyday, as if her widowhood, first from Janvier and then from Christophe Levesque, had freed her of the obligation to be alluring to men.

“She hated her!” Euphrasie moaned into January's shirt. “She ran away, again and again, going back to that uppity peteuse. She hated my angel, she wanted her dead so she could go back. . . .”

Livia meanwhile set the pitcher down, picked up Judith's head scarf and the unbroken saucer and cup, and said to the sobbing servant, “Get a rag and vinegar and get this coffee sopped up before the stain sets.” She thrust the scarf into the girl's hands. “Put this back on before you come back. And wash your face. You look a sight. And you” — she pointed at Clemence, sagging gray faced against the side of the door, both lace-mitted fists stuffed into her mouth — “don't you go faint on me again. I haven't time for that.” She looked around for the gris-gris but January had retrieved it from the floor and slipped it into his coat pocket.

“It was that woman,” Euphrasie wailed, clutching January's lapels. “That stuck-up white vache! That nigger bitch, she'd run off, trying to go home, and that Trepagier, she'd tell that girl how if my Angelique were to die, she'd take her back. I know it. That Trepagier set her up to murder my child, my only little girl! Oh, what am I going to do? They drew down death on her and left me to starve!”

“Phrasie, you know as well as I do Etienne Crozat left you with five hundred a year,” said Livia tartly. “Benjamin, pull her loose or she'll hang on to you weeping till doomsday. You'd think it was her funeral tomorrow and not her daughter's.”

Odile Gignac meanwhile had helped Clemence Drouet to one of the overstuffed brocade chairs, where the girl burst into shuddering tears, handkerchief stuffed in her mouth, as if all her life she had been forbidden to make a sound of discontent or grief. “There, there, cherie,” murmured the dressmaker comfortingly. “You mustn't cry like that. You'll make yourself ill.”

January had to reflect that his sister was right about the Drouet girl's dresses: Like her costume last night, this one—also designed by Angelique, if Dominique spoke true—though costly and beautiful, made her look like nothing so much as a green-gold pear.

“That Trepagier put her up to it! She put her up!” It was astonishing how Madame Dreuze could keep her face buried in his sleeve without either muffling her voice or disarraying her tignon. “She hated her like poison! They poisoned my child, the two of them together!”

“Angelique was strangled,” Livia reminded her dryly. She went to the sideboard and handed January a clean napkin from a drawer as he fished vainly in his pockets for a handkerchief. “And you can't very well say Madeleine Trepagier turned up at the Orleans ballroom and did it. Get that child out of here, Odile. She's been nothing but underfoot since . . .”

“Why not? She could have come in through the Theatre . . .”

“With all the Trepagier family in the Theatre to recognize her? And that hag of an aunt of hers?”

“That black slut Judith did, then! Why not? She hated my child. . . .”

At Livia's impatient signal, Catherine Clisson came forward and eased the weeping woman from her leaning post. Clisson relieved Ben of his napkin and proceeded to dry Euphrasie's eyes as she guided her toward the settee. Livia Levesque took her tall son's arm and steered him briskly toward the door, and January went willingly, unnerved by the accuracy of Madame Dreuze's chance shot. “I swear,” declared Livia, as they descended the two high brick steps to the banquette, “it's like a summer rainstorm in there, between those two watering pots.” She pulled her delicate knit-lace gloves on and flexed her hands. “Give me rny parasol, Ben.”

“Why does she say the girl Judith hated Angelique?” January handed his mother the fragile, lacy sunshade she had thrust into his hands on the way through the door. “I take it Judith belonged to Madeleine Trepagier?”

Like the jewels and the dresses,
he thought. When there's only a man and a woman alone in a house miles from town . . .

The thought conjured up was an ugly one.

Livia opened the sunshade with a brisk crackle of bamboo and starch, despite the fact that the day was milkily overcast. Even so far back from the river, the air smelled of steamboat soot.

“She's carrying on as if she were wronged, not her daughter murdered,” the elderly lady sniffed. “And not her only child, as she's been saying. She has two sons still living, one of them a journeyman joiner with Roig and the other a clerk at the Presbytere, but they're not the ones who've been giving her gambling money and buying her silk dresses. Etienne Crozat left her a house and five hundred a year when he married Andre Milaudon's daughter in '28, so she hasn't any room to talk.” She moved with small, quick steps along the brick banquette, the river breeze stirring the pale green chintz of her bell-shaped skirts. Like Catherine Clisson, she was dressed very plainly and very expensively, her tignon striped pale green and white and fitting her fine-boned face like the petals of a half-closed rose. A gold crucifix sparkled at her throat, and Christophe Levesque's wedding ring gleamed through the fragile net of the mitt.

“And Madame Trepagier?”

She cocked her head up at him. “Arnaud Trepagier was free to do with his own Negroes as he pleased,” she said, in that deep voice like smoky honey that both her daughters had inherited. “I think the girl used to be his wife's maid, but as far as I'm concerned that's of a piece with giving her his wife's dresses and his wife's jewelry. That cook of Angelique's was Trepagier's, too, and a good one, for a Congo.”

He remembered the way Angelique had looked at him, the slight, impersonal regret in her eyes as she'd said, You 're new. He knew his anger at her was wrong, for he was alive and she was dead, but he felt it all the same. His mother spoke as if she'd never sweated in a cane field at sugaring time, had never been bought and sold like a riding mare. January remembered huddling in terror in the gluey, humming blackness of a dirt-floored cabin, holding his litde sister and fighting not to cry, wondering if the Frenchman who was buying his mother would buy him, too, and whom he'd have to live with if he was left behind.

Olympe had told him once that buying them hadn't been their mother's idea. He had no clue where she'd gotten this information, or if it was true.

“The whole time she was hunting through that room for a gris-gris—and she turned the place upside down, with Angelique lying there in her bed in that white dress looking like the Devil's bride—>she was picking up every brooch, earring, and bracelet she could find and putting them in her reticule.” Livia paused at the corner of Rue Burgundy to let her son cross the plank that spanned the cypress-lined gutter and hold out his hand to help her over.