Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (7 page)

“I have done what I can,” announced Agnes, her protuberant brown eyes flashing grimly. “Whore and bitch she might be, but she can fix hair. How such a woman could have been so . . .” She gave up with a gesture. “This is the big chance for Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose to be seen, to be admired at their best. If that conceited light-skirt doesn't turn up . . .”

“I'll move her tableau to last.” January shifted the Rossini aria he'd arranged as Angelique's music in behind the Mozart dances that would usher in the Harim.

“Don't you dare!” cried a masked woman in a red-and-gold hashish dream of a Sultana costume. Her fantasia of dyed ostrich plumes tossed like storm clouds as she shook her head and shed a faint snowfall of shreds, “We're on last. It serves her right if she misses her place.”

“Rachelle, of course if she shows up after you go on, we'll put her on last,” said Minou coaxingly. “Think how unfair it would be to punish Emilie and Clemence and the two Maries. And where is Clemence?”

“I think she left when Galen did,” put in Marie-Rose. “Iphegenie's aunt saw someone wearing that gray-green dress in the courtyard.”

“Tell you what,” said January, as the Sultana Rachelle's bronze mouth puckered dangerously. “We'll do that mazurka as an extra, to give everybody a little more time. Minou, you checked back on the parlor lately? She's got to go back there one time or another if she's going to fix those wings of hers. It's the only place where she'd have room to work.”

“Hussy,” whispered Agnes Pellicot, her face like a hurricane sky. “Bandeuse! Coming to the ball like this, two months or less after Arnaud Trepagier is in his tomb, to see what else she can catch! If she'd had any decency she would have left the tableau, turned her position in it over to someone else! She can't be needing money. After all he gave her, the jewels he lavished on her, slaves, a house fit for royalty, horses and a carriage, even! You saw those pearls and emeralds she had about her neck! He'd ride in from his plantation every night to be with her, even took her to the opera . . . fie!”

She stormed out into the lobby again in wrath.

“Dare one infer,” murmured Hannibal, turning over a page of the mazurka, “that Mama had some plans for Peralta Fils and the fair Marie-Rose?”

“Sounds like it,” agreed January philosophically. “Shall we?”

The brisk dance was entering its third variation when Minou reappeared in the hall, her face ashy in the dark frame of her hair. January, glancing up from the piano, saw the flutter of her sleeves with the shaky wave of her hands, the way the jeweled pomander chain at her waist vibrated with the trembling of her knees. With a quick gesture he signaled Hannibal to carry the figure as a solo —hoping his colleague wasn't going to engage in any adventures with the tempo, as he sometimes did at this stage of an evening—and leaned from the piano's seat.

“What is it?”

“I . . .” Minou swallowed hard. “You'd better come.”

“What happened?” He hadn't known his sister long, but he knew that under the empty-headed frivolity lay considerable strength of mind. It was the first time he'd ever seen her unnerved.

“In the parlor,” she said. “Ben, I think she's dead.”

From the time he was fourteen years old, January had wanted to study medicine.

St.Denis Janvier had sent him to one of the very fine schools available to the children of the colored bourgeoisie—where he had been looked upon askance, as he had in his music lessons, for his gangly size and African blackness far more than for his mother's plafage—which boasted a science master who had trained in Montpellier before returning to his native New Orleans to teach.

Monsieur Gomez had been a believer in empiricism rather than in theory and had trained him as a surgeon rather than a physician. For this direction January was infinitely and forever grateful, despite his mother's sneer and frown: “A surgeon, p'tit? A puller of teeth, when you could have an office and a practice of wealthy men?”

But his reading of the medical journals, the endless quibblings about bodily humors and the merits of heroic medicine—his experience with the men who prescribed bleeding for every ill and didn't consider a patient sufficiently treated until he'd been dosed with salts of mercury until his gums bled—convinced him early on that he could never have adopted a livelihood based so firmly on ignorance, half truths, and arrogant lies.

Instead he had dissected rabbits and possums netted in the bayous and cattle from the slaughterhouses; had roved at will through Monsieur Gomez's meager library and had followed the man on his rounds at the Charity
Hospital, learning to set bones, birth babies, and repair fistulas regardless of which bodily humor was in ascendance at the time. He had been more than a student to Gomez, as Madeleine Dubonnet had been more than a student to him; rather, he had been, as she had been, a secret partner in a mystery, a junior co-devotee of the same intricate gnosis.

He had fought alongside Gomez in Jackson's army when the British invaded and afterward had tended the wounded with him. When yellow fever had swept the city for the first time in the summer before his departure for France, he'd worked at his mentor's side in the plague hospitals.

But from the start, Gomez had told him to be a musician.

“That Austrian drill sergeant is the best friend you have, p'tit.” Gomez's Spanish-dark eyes were sad. “You have talent. If you were a white man, or even as bright-skinned as I, you could be a truly fine doctor. But even in Europe, where they don't look at a black man and say, 'He's a slave,' they'll still look at you and say, 'He's an African.' ”

January had sat for a long time, looking down at the backs of his huge ebony hands. Very quietly, he said, “I'm not.”

“No,” agreed Gomez. “Were you an African—living in Africa, I mean, in the tribes—I daresay you'd have found your way to the healing trade. They're not all savages there, whatever the Americans may say. You have the healer's hands and the memory for herbs and substances; you have the lightness of touch that makes a good surgeon, and the speed and courage that are the only salvation of a man under the knife. And you have a surgeon's caring. You'd have been exceptional, either in the one world or the other. But you're not an African either.”

January was silent. He'd already encountered too many of his mother's friends—too many of his classmates' parents—who gave him that look. Who said—or didn't say—“He is ... very dark to be Monsieur Janvier's son, is he not?”

With one white grandparent—whoever that had been—he was only sang mett by courtesy in those days. He knew how, in colored society, one white grandparent was looked down upon by those who had two or more. Even in those days it had been so. Now it was worse, now that the colored artists and craftsmen of the city, the colored businessmen who owned their own shops, were being met by the newly arrived Americans flooding into the city and taking up plantations along the river and the bayous. They were being called “nigger” by illiterate Kentuckians and Hoosier riverboat men who wouldn't have been permitted through those artists' and craftsmen's and businessmen's front doors.

These days, the colored had stronger reasons than ever to proclaim themselves different—entirely different —from the black.

Maybe he could have practiced medicine in New Orleans, he thought, if he were as light as Monsieur Gomez, as light as the one or two other colored physicians in practice there—even as light as his own mother.

She was a mulatto. He, with three African grandparents, was black.

“I'll make them change their minds,” he said.

That was before the war.

Despite Napoleon's betrayal, St.Denis Janvier, like most Creoles, regarded himself as French. When January spoke to him about going to study in Europe, it was assumed by both that he would study in France. But by the time he was old enough to undertake the journey, fighting had broken out afresh between England and France, and between England and the United States. There was little enough fighting on land in Louisiana, except toward the end during Pakenham's disastrous attempt at invasion, but it wasn't a safe time to be on the sea. Thus January was twenty-four, and a veteran of battle, battlefield surgery, and a major epidemic, before he set sail for Paris, to study both medicine and music, subjects that in some fashion he could not explain seemed at times to be almost the same in his heart.

He had found Monsieur Gomez to be mosdy right. He studied and passed his examinations and was taken on as an assistant surgeon in one of the city's big charity hospitals, but no one even considered the possibility of his entering private practice. In any case it was out of the question, for St.Denis Janvier died of yellow fever in 1822, shortly after his adopted son was admitted to the Paris College of Surgeons. He left him a little, but not enough to purchase a practice or to start one on his own.

He had still been working at the Hotel Dieu two years later, when a black-haired, hook-nosed, eighteen-year-old Moroccan seamstress had brought in a fifteen-year-old prostitute who sometimes did piecework for her, the girl hemorrhaging from self-induced abortion.

The girl had died. Ayasha had left, but later, coming away from the hospital, January had found her crying in a doorway and had walked her home.

He was not making enough as a doctor to marry, and by then he knew that he never would.

But Paris was a city of music, and music was not something that whites appeared to believe required a white father's blood.

Angelique Crozat had been bundled together in the bottom of the armoire in the retiring parlor, beneath a loose tangle of cloaks and opera capes.

“I looked to see if she might have stowed her wings in here.” Minou was still a little pale, her voice struggling against breathlessness as she glanced from her tall brother back to the silvery form stretched on its scattered bed of velvet and satin, the face a deformed and discolored pearl in the particolored delta of hair. One extravagant sleeve was torn away from the shoulder, and a drift of white swansdown leaked out onto the dark satin of the domino beneath her. Beside her, the wings lay like the brittle, shorn-off wings of the flying ants that showed up on every windowsill and back step after swarming season.

January knelt to touch the needle dangling loose from the torn netting at the end of its trailing clew of silk.

“She was under the cloaks. I saw just a corner of her dress sticking out and remembered there was no one else in the ballroom wearing white.”

“Did you pull off her mask?”

Minou nodded. “She had it on when I—when I found her. I thought she might have been still alive. . . . I swear I don't know what I thought.”

This room, like Froissart's office, had not been included when the building was converted to gaslight. Instead, branches of expensive wax candles burned against glass reflectors all around the walls. It was a haunted light, after the brilliance of the gas, as if the whole chamber had been preserved in amber long ago, and the woman who lay on the cloaks were no more than some beautiful, exotic relic of an antediluvian world. But under the eerie, tabby-cat face shoved up onto her forehead, there was no mistaking the bluish cast of the skin, the swollen tongue, and bulging, bruised-looking eyes. There was certainly no mistaking the marks around her neck. Behind them, Leon Froissart whispered, “My God, my God, what am I to do? All the gentlemen in the ballroom . . .”

“Send someone for the police,” said January. “God have mercy on her.” He crossed himself and offered an inward prayer, then turned the lace-mitted hand over in his. There was blood under all her nails; two of them had been pulled almost clear of their beds in the struggle, and dabs of red stood on her skirt and sleeves like the fallen petals of a wilting rose.

He was thinking fast: about the passageway from the ballroom to the Theatre, about the courtyard with its teeming, masked fantasies. About the Coleridge dreams ascending and descending the double stair to the lobby, and the double doors opening from lobby to gaming rooms, and from gaming rooms to the street.

“Now, immediately, as soon as possible. Keep anyone from entering or leaving the building and send someone over to the Theatre and tell them to do the same. If anyone tries to leave tell them we've found a large sum of money and we have to identify the owner. But mostly just tell Hannibal and the others to play that Beethoven contradanse. It should keep everybody happy,” he added, turning to see the look of horror that swept Froissart's face.

Belatedly, he remembered he was no longer in Paris, shifted his eyes quickly from the white man's eyes and modified the tone of command from his voice. “You know the police are going to want to talk to everyone.”

“Police?” Froissart stared at him in horror. “We can't send for the police!”

January looked up, startled into meeting his eyes. Froissart was a Frenchman of France, without the American's automatic contempt for persons of color, but he'd been in the country for years. Still, an American wouldn't have flushed or have turned his glance away in shame.

“Some ... some of the most prominent men in the city are here tonight!” There was pleading in his voice.

The most prominent men in the city and their colored mistresses, thought January. Any one of whom can be headed out the side door this minute, masked and disguised as who-knows-what.

And French or not, Froissart was white. January looked down again and made his tone still more conciliating, like the wise old uncle common to so many of the plantations. “Believe me, Monsieur Froissart, if I had a choice between what your guests'11 say about your calling the police, and what the police'll say if you don't call—if it was me, I'd call.”

Froissart said nothing, staring in fascinated horror down at the dead woman's face. The beautiful light skin of which she had been so vain was suffused with dark blood, the delicate features—indistinguishable from a white woman's—contorted almost beyond recognition.

“I could be dismissed,” he whispered in a wan little voice. “M'sieu Davis wants no trouble in this house, not in the gaming rooms, not in the Theatre. . . .” He swallowed hard. “And bien sur, she is only a placee . . .”