Feast of All Saints Read Free Page B

expensive, the classes select. They must be educated when they stepped off that boat, they had to be men.
    And that Marcel would make the journey to Paris, that he wouldhave his chance—all that was certain. A promise made by Monsieur Philippe at his birth was the guarantee. And sooner or later, at least once a year, that promise was reiterated. Cecile saw to that. She had no concern for her daughter Marie, she said, Marie would “do well.” Lips pressed tight, she dismissed that subject abruptly. But in the warmest and best moments would broach the matter of her son. Marcel, lying awake on smothering summer nights when the mosquito netting, gleaming gold in the faint spluttering nightlight, became the only walls dividing them, would hear Monsieur Philippe murmur on the pillow, “I’ll send the boy in style…” It was a vintage promise, a part of life. So why not work toward it?
    But Marcel daydreamed in class, provoked the teacher with obscure questions, and the sight of his empty chair a dozen times in the last month filled everyone with a vague dread. He was too well liked for the other boys to enjoy it. And his best friend, Richard Lermontant, seemed rather miserable. But what made this fall from grace all the more confusing, especially to Richard, was that Marcel himself seemed not the least confused by it. He was hardly helpless in the face of youthful passion. He did not, for instance, court his sister’s pretty friends and then, giggling, yank their hair. Nor did he pound his fist on tree trunks declaring, “I don’t know what got into me!” And never once, in a welter of confusion, did he call on God to explain how he could make the races different colors, or demand an explanation for why the world was cruel.
    Rather he seemed privy to some terrible secret that set him apart, and bound to calmly pursue his course.
    Which this morning seemed hell-bent for disaster.
    It was a warm summer day, and he had only caught his breath as he drew closer and closer to the volatile Juliet when she stopped at the fruit stands beneath the arcade. And putting his left hand up against the slender iron post in front of him, he pressed his lips against his hand and gazed at her with wide blue eyes. He did not realize it, but he seemed to want to hide behind the colonette, as if such a narrow thing could hide him, and he had covered all of his face except his eyes.
    There was pain in his eyes, but the kind that reveals itself in a flicker, the puckering of the eyelid underneath, a flinching at one’s own thoughts. Looking at Juliet, he knew full well what he was expected to see, and understood full well what he, in fact, perceived. Not squalor and wickedness but some radiant and splendid spectacle of neglect that laid his heart waste. But this had been today a matter of glimpses.…
    Running breathless to her gate from school, he’d pounded on itfor the first time in his life, only to be told by a shouting neighbor that she’d gone to market. But he’d caught the first sight of her only a block away. And she was tall and he could trace her easily.
    Now, when the flock of bonneted women broke between them, and she stepped out again into the cobblestone street, he saw her clearly for the first time.
    He started, all of a piece, like a man jumping to the clang of a bell, and moved as if he might go up to her. Then he lapsed back, lips pressed again to the back of his hand, as she made her way under the clear sun to the iron fence of the square. He seemed lost to her in every detail and silently shuddered.
    She was slow if not languid as she walked, her market basket riding gently on her arm, and as he had seen her a thousand times, fantastical, her frayed shawl a blaze of peacocks and silver against her red silk dress, flounces torn and dragging the stones, her fine brunette hair falling in hopeless tangles from the grip of a pearl comb. Diamonds sparkled on the fingers of her right hand with which she gathered her skirts at