Feast of All Saints by Anne Rice Page B

books to you.” He looked at Marcel. “Would you read them if I did that, would they mean something to you?”
    When Marcel did not answer, he asked again,
    “Mon fils?”
    “I don’t want you to die,” Marcel said.
    Jean Jacques smiled. But he was already turning to get the shutters, and said again under his breath that it was time for Marcel to go home.
II
    M ARCEL HAD BEGUN to change. Cecile saw it, and sighed,
“Eh bien
, he’s thirteen.” He took unexplained walks, and went out of his own accord to the flat of his aunts over the dress shop. And at table on Sundays (they were always at the cottage for supper if Monsieur Philippe was not there) he asked them simple questions about Saint-Domingue, seemed bored by their accounts of all the practical wealth left behind, reminiscences of those lovely courtyards crowded with flowers where you could pick the ripe yellow bananas right from the trees.
    “But the revolution, what was it like?” he asked quite suddenly one afternoon.
    “I’m sure I have no idea,
mon petit
, since it was mostly in the north and we were all so thankful Josette escaped!” Tante Louisa said haughtily.
    And Cecile nervously turned the talk to the subject of Marie’s birthday. That white eyelet lace was too expensive, she said suddenly, she was thinking of something a little more practical, and Marie was growing so fast besides.
    Richard, a frequent guest, felt the tension in Cecile at such gatherings. The tall aunts fascinated him with their ripples of laughter, rustling and tinkling with pearls and gold, even the white streaks in their straight dark hair seemed decorative. While Cecile, cutting the cake for dessert, brought down the knife a little too hard making a strangely attractive “chink” against the plate. But never, never did any of them speak of anything that was more than the practical, more than the materially real. “Oh, we had such chandeliers in that house, and champagne each night, and that young French officer, what was his name, Louisa, you remember he brought up the little orchestra. Why, we had music every night, all night. Richard, here have some more cake. Cecile, give that boy another piece of cake, Richard, if you get an inch taller you won’t fit through the door.”
    And before he could even answer these quick flashing statements, their eyes were elsewhere, their hands eternally busy. Cecile in particular fussed with the flowers in the center of the table, or examined the immaculate linen napkin in her hands as if for some tiny and all-important flaw. And if the boys, alone after dinner, lapsed into some low-voiced talk of what they had read at school, she was at once uncomfortable, quick to clear the table, as if listening to some abrasive foreign tongue.
    Richard had not thought of it before. And it was Marcel’s taut face that made him think of it then, how empty at times all that chatter seemed, and how quickly it left the mind. Richard was only vaguely aware of his own ability to think about abstract things and to talk of them, but the whole tone of the Lermontants’ suppers was different. You could count on it, trivial or not, conversation with the Lermontants revolved around the invisible. And Marcel, who had once sipped his soup quietly waiting to be excused so that he and Richard might slip off alone, now stared fixedly at Rudolphe who waved a folded newspaper over the steaming plates, crying, “Read what they say, read it!” while Grandpère Lermontant tried to quiet him with a quick, “It won’t pass, Rudolphe, I tell you the legislature will never pass it.”
    “It’s the country parishes, every time it’s the country parishes: strip the
gens de couleur
of their right to own property!” Rudolphe all but rose straight into the air with rage. “To think that they…”
    “It won’t pass,” said the old man.
    “But why, what does it mean?” Marcel asked.
    “That the country whites are afraid of the free negro,” Grandpère explained