Feast of All Saints Read Free Page A

for those sold off or dead, patch the walls, bring the drapers and painters up the steps? No one doubted she could do it. She was so-o-o-o lovely still, Marcel at twelve was mad to get a glimpse of her. He didn’t really understand about Christophe then. He was “in love” with something or someone else. It did not come to him as having meaning yet that a famous man had lived there, walked there, breathed there.
    And she did nothing. Her windows crusted with dirt, her garden wall became a menace. The vines that pushed it out miraculously held it up. She did not answer notes or knocks, and soon the hatred commenced. It was unfair! Christophe’s
Nuits de Charlotte
stood open in the windows of the booksellers. Stupid, silly…but most of all unfair.
    How wonderful it would have been, after all, to “receive” her and hear about the young man firsthand, be her friend. But she became a witch in time, her lone-ness not only absurd but unfathomable. How, after all, could she endure it? The last of her slaves was put to rest in the Old St. Louis. The house was empty save for the cats.
    Pity went fast, however, for she was too vicious if you spoke to her on the street, turning away at once, her head bowed, her cat in the basket on her arm. And with her son’s fame, increased the hatred.
    But the boys Marcel’s age were now on fire for Christophe. Theyworshiped him, and sternly forbidden to go near his mother they nevertheless lingered at her gate, hoping to put but one question, and always in vain. If she came out at all, they scattered. She looked too dreadful with her diamond rings in the noonday sun, an inch of petticoat beneath her hem. The mailman brought her letters from France, they got that out of him, but did she even pick them up from the gravel path? Straining to see through a chink in the wood, they had the worst fears.
    But she was Christophe’s mother after all. They couldn’t despise her out of loyalty, and they had other things on their minds. Like writing stories in his “style,” making scrapbooks of clippings sent home by older brothers, uncles, cousins. And lounging about in each others’ parlors on afternoons when adults were out, they dreamed aloud with pilfered brandy of the day they would make the fabled pilgrimage to Paris, might knock on his black lacquered door on the Ile Saint-Louis and reverently, politely, gently, unimposingly, hand him their sheaf of manuscript pages.
    Occasionally there was an uncle or a brother home who had, in fact, drunk with him in some crowded café, and then the rumors went wild.
    He smoked hashish, talked in riddles, could be seen quarreling in the street, and staying drunk for twenty-four hours at a stretch, he talked to himself, and sometimes fell into a stupor at a café table. And there would appear that Englishman, “white of course,” who would pick him up, slap his face gently with a few drops of water, and slinging Christophe’s arm over his shoulder, carry him home.
    But he was kind to his countrymen always. He never read stories shoved at him across tables, but gave gentle general advice, and when a tactful introduction here or there could be effected, did that with grace. He showed no shame of race, clasped dark hands, asked about New Orleans, and certainly seemed to listen. But he was quick to be bored, to grow silent and then be gone. You clanged his bell in vain after that. He knew when he had done all he could and you had nothing to offer.
    Ah, admire him if you will, but imitate him never, said the parents to the enamored children. Marcel worshiped him, and those who watched his recent wanderings wondered if it were some mad emulating of the famous man that sent Marcel off the track.
    For Christophe set the other boys on the straight and narrow when they thought of him. They wanted the tools to be like him, and in the scattered private schools around the town, here under a white teacher, there under a colored, they strove tensely, the lessons