Part 44 (1/2)

But that's the way I always see her! Miriam cried silently. Why do I always see her in a plaid shawl? I'm sure he never told me this before. Did anyone else ever tell me? She could not remember.

”She was lovely. She had an oval face, quiet and grave.”

As he rocked, his chair creaked, blending with his even voice in a dreamy rhythm.

”Curious, the way a life unwinds. If it hadn't been for a stone thrown by a hate-crazed lout, we'd all perhaps still be in the German village. Angelique and Eugene wouldn't have been born. Yes, you remind me of her, but David has her eyes. Exactly her eyes. I wish I could see David again. He made me so angry, but he's a good man, I know he is. I'd like to see him,”

”Now that the war is over, he'll surely come to see you, Papa. I know he will.”

She looked over at her father. He had started a beard, since it was the fas.h.i.+on again, but his beard made him look not fas.h.i.+onable, only like a patriarchal Jew, the Opa whom she could still see in her mind, rocking, rocking and creaking. The hair that had once been a crown of chestnut waves had turned quite gray. Oh, she thought, was it just today or was it last week that I saw he was old? Age comes like that; suddenly one day a person is old.

Ferdinand was staring out of the window.

”There goes Eulalie. She's got a bucket of water for the chicken yard. I can't get over the change in her.”

”Maybe she feels important for the first time in her life.”

”What? Tending chickens? From a family like hers?”

”That and all the rest she does. I never realized she knew so much. It's true she's sour, but we'd have managed here a lot less well without her. None of us knew how to preserve or sew or do anything properly until she showed us how.” Something drove Miriam to talk, not so much in defense of Eulalie as out of a sense of fairness and personal indignation. ”All her life she's been a failure because she wasn't good at the one thing you men expect us to be good at: being ornamental. I don't know how it is, but a man can be fat, bald, or buck-toothed, and it doesn't matter, but let a woman be even mildly plain and she goes into the discard. Heaven help her, if she's not married, she can only cringe in shame. I don't want my daughter to be like that!” she finished sharply.

”Don't worry about Angelique.” Ferdinand chuckled. ”She's a beauty already.”

Miriam started to say: That's not what I meant at all but stopped. What was the use? He would never understand.

Gabriel would. It flashed across her mind that Gabriel had always understood, but she was kept from further thought by her father's next remark.

”I would like to see you married again, Miriam.”

And I want it .... I have never been married, don't you know that? Married, with that comfort, that unity so warm, so trusting. How thrilling to belong, to have no secrets, to hold back nothing of body or heart! To know another so completely .... I try to see Andre, to hear his voice, and cannot anymore. Cannot.

”There's someone coming,” Ferdinand said suddenly. He stood up to get a better view. ”A man's riding up the lane.”

She did not have to ask. She knew-she knew without asking or looking that it was Andre.

”This is a real celebration!” Ferdinand cried. ”G.o.d help us, the war's over at last. And though our hearts ache for the sons who died”-glancing out of eyes gleaming wet with emotion at Rosa and Pelagie-”we give thanks that so many have survived and will come back. Now for the savior of my son”-Ferdinand raised his gla.s.s toward Andre-”for him a special thanks today, a toast drunk from the good wine he has brought us. Ahhh, excellent-nothing like a fine French wine, nothing!” he concluded, and sat down, quite overcome with sentiment and the heat of the wine. But he was not yet finished.

”Here's Sisyphus, good Sisyphus! We've not had a dinner like this in I don't know when, have we, Sisyphus? You mustn't think we've been living in such luxury, Andre. No, far from it,” he declared, as Sisyphus brought the roast turkey on one of the rescued silver platters.

On the sideboard stood jellies which had been discovered in a forgotten cellar, and a floating custard, made under Eulalie's supervision, which had used up, Miriam thought with some concern, the last of the scarce eggs.

”Yes,” Andre said, ”the fall of Richmond was something to behold. Davis was in church, you know, when they came to tell him that the city was to be abandoned. People were absolutely shocked; they'd had no idea of the situation because the War Department had been keeping the truth out of the newspapers during the last few weeks. Instead, they'd been printing a lot of optimistic nonsense. So there was chaos in the streets. Church bells were still ringing for Sunday services while in government offices they were loading the archives into wagons to take them to the railroad. People were rus.h.i.+ng to get on a train, but you couldn't get on without a pa.s.s from the secretary of war. And most people don't have access to the secretary of war, do they?”

Andre told the tale well. His rapid, resonant voice contained just enough dramatic emphasis. Miriam's avid, questioning eyes, which had not left him, attracted no notice, since every other eye in the room was on him, too.

His handsome features were unchanged. The war had left its mark on everyone else, laying its weight of gloom on some, agitating the brittle nerves of others, making voices shrill and tempers short; it had marked Miriam with dark stains of fatigue under her eyes. But Andre glowed. He might have been at a ball.

”The city council ordered all liquor to be destroyed. You could see whiskey running in the gutters. What a waste!” Andre exclaimed, making a comic face. ”But a lot of folks drank it up instead, and drunkards went lurching through the streets among the broken bottles with no idea of what was happening. Then the military ordered the burning of the flour mills. Stupid! The fire spread-well, it spread like wildfire! What did they expect? Or what can one expect of politicians and soldiers but stupidity?”

Something came into Miriam's head, a chance recollection: Once in her father's house an old man, a world traveler returned from India, had entranced his audience with his descriptions of the burning vats, the moonlight streaming on the filthy Ganges, and the morning sunlight uncovering the bodies of the poor who had died on the street during the night. It had seemed to her, child that she was then, that the man had been telling of these awful things with a thrill of excitement; he had been a spectator of the exotic, without any feeling of human kins.h.i.+p.

She blinked and the memory slid away.

”Naturally, the fire spread to the a.r.s.enals, so the munitions exploded. It was pandemonium, I tell you! People threw furniture from their burning houses, they made bonfires out of Confederate money, they crammed themselves into wagons and fled.

”I got on my horse and followed the railroad tracks out of the city. The last I saw of Richmond was cinders and smoke.”

The story ended. Andre lit a cigar. Shocked into a mournful silence, all watched him tear off the band, bite the end, apply the match, and finally lean back to savor the first aromatic draw.

Lambert Labouisse broke the silence.

”Well, I always said Jeff Davis was never wholeheartedly with us. He tipped toward the Union, always had. And this is the result. By G.o.d, this is the result.” And he looked accusingly about the room, at faces and furniture, at ceiling and walls, as if one of these might have some other explanation for the disaster.

Andre observed cheerfully, ”No use in recriminations. You have to look at it this way: All's well that ends well.”

”Ends well?” Miriam repeated somberly. ”Without even counting the wounded and dead, one has only to stand at the foot of our lane and watch the men go past; they've been coming by for weeks now, carrying their paroles and nothing more, not a penny, and no work in sight. They're wiped out. The poverty is beyond belief. That's how well it's ended.”

”Oh, I understand.” Andre's tone was sympathetic. ”But that's not the case everywhere, you know that. Some, even in the South, have made fortunes they could never have dreamed of before. Why, up in Memphis and in Vicksburg-why, I a.s.sure you, as many bales of cotton went north on Union gunboats as went downriver to southern ports and overseas.”

That was certainly true. Miriam was careful not to look at Lambert Labouisse except out of the corner of her eye, with which she could see him in his aging, but still correct, white summer suit, smoking one of Andre's enormous Havana cigars.

”I'm sorry,” Andre said. ”This conversation has gotten too deep. A lecture on the frightfulness of war is not the right way to end a beautiful evening.” His luminous smile asked them all to forgive him.

The words ”end the evening” acted as the signal they were intended to be. Indeed, it had grown late, as everyone was reminded by the hall clock's rattle and bong.

”I thought they would never have sense enough to leave us alone,” Andre said when the others had gone upstairs. ”Come here! Come here!”

He stretched out his arms, into which she came with automatic obedience, clasped her, kissed her, and clasped her again. Her eyes, not closed in any ecstasy of forgetfulness, were wide and alert, staring over his shoulder toward the hearth, where a dozen tiny red eyes winked back out of the gray ash.

Into her ear he murmured, ”Sit down. I have things to show you. First this. Read this.”

From a clipping out of a Paris newspaper she read the following: It is said on good authority that Madame Marie Claire Perrin, after her huge successes in the recital halls of Europe this past winter, will shortly obtain a final decree of divorce from her husband, who is said to be residing somewhere in the United States.

”Well, now, what do you think of that! She has divorced me! Don't forget, this article is three months old. I should be receiving papers any moment. But wait, that's not all. There's this.” And drawing a small velvet box out of his pocket, Andre laid it on the table before Miriam.

”Open it.”

Her hands trembled, so that she was clumsy with the catch. In his eagerness Andre reached over and snapped up the lid.

”How do you like it?”

It was the traditional ruby engagement ring, but it was no ordinary ruby. It was a splendor of splendors. Many-faceted, it drew to itself all the light in the room and threw a rosy radiance into the shadows. She stared at it as though it were alive. And her mind went back-all evening her mind had been taking such backward leaps-to the moment when Eugene had given her his ring. She even recalled the dress she had worn that night, the way the skirt had spread; cream-colored lawn it was, laced with lavender ribbons. Yes, and she could recall that the ring had presented itself to her with no joy of possession, neither because of its symbolism nor its intrinsic beauty. It had frightened her.

And so did this ring now.

”It's very beautiful,” she said.

”You don't like it?” Andre asked.

”How could I not admire it? But it's too magnificent for me.” She stammered. ”It doesn't suit me-or the times.” And she made a half-conscious gesture toward her dress, which had been ”turned,” so that what had been the lining was now the outside.