02 Fever Season bj-2 Page 3

  Whenever he'd stepped outside he had been astonished to see the jostling mansard roofs, the chestnut trees, and gray stone walls of Paris, instead of the low, pastel houses of the town where he had been raised.

  One day he'd walked back to the two rooms he and his wife shared in the tangle of streets between the old Cluny convent and the river, to find them stinking like a plague ward of the wastes Ayasha had been unable to contain when the weakness, the shivering, the fever had struck her. To find Ayasha herself on the bed in the midst of that humiliating horror, a rag doll wrung and twisted and left to dry, the black ocean of her hair trailing down over the edge of the bed to brush the floor.

  Death had spared her nothing. She had died alone. "No." Though January had never spoken of this memory to his sister-who he knew was a disciple of Mamzelle Marie-or to anyone else, he thought he saw her knowledge of the scene in this woman's serpent eyes. Maybe she really did read people's dreams. "No, it's not so bad as last year," agreed January again, softly.

  January didn't really expect to be allowed to speak to the houseman Gervase. His query met a bland, sleek smile and a murmured "Oh, Gervase is at his work right now. Madame doesn't hold with servants leaving their work."

  He'd never liked the Lalaurie coachman, Bastien. The round-faced, smooth-haired quadroon had a smug insolence to him, a self-satisfaction that boded ill for the other servants of the Lalaurie household, despite all that Madame herself might try to do.

  Born a slave and raised in slavery until the age of eight, January had always found it curious that colored masters so frequently worked their slaves hard and treated them cruelly, even if they had once been slaves themselves. Given a chance, he suspected that Bastien would have been such a master, exercising petty power where he could. He knew the coachman had been with Madame Lalaurie a long time, perhaps longer than Dr. Nicolas Lalaurie himself. Upon those occasions when he'd seen them together, it was clear to January that the face Bastien showed his mistress was not the face his fellow slaves saw.

  The two Blanque girls-daughters of Delphine -Lalaurie by her second husband, the late banker Jean Blanque-were older than one usually found still unmarried Creole belles of good family: Though they were soft-spoken and polite, as Creole girls must be, January liked neither of them. Even Louise Marie, the cripple, for whom he had expected to develop sympathy when first he had been introduced to the household last spring, made him uneasy. She was clinging and self-pitying, constantly referring to her twisted back and misaligned pelvis.

  "I do my best," she said with a sigh, blinking her large hazel eyes up at him from the piano stool. "But as you see, I'm no more a musician than I am a matrimonial catch." Her lace-mitted hand, thin to the point of boniness strayed for the thousandth time to the bunches of fashionable curls that hung over her ears, readjusting the ribbons and the multifarious lappets of point d'esprit. Louise Marie was dressed as always in the height of Paris fashion, the bell-shaped skirt of girlish yellow jaconet trimmed with blond lace, flounces, and far too many silk roses. The bodice was specially cut, and the skirt specially hemmed, to accommodate the twist of her spine and the uneven length of her legs.

  "As long as you do your best, Mademoiselle Blanque," replied January, with the patient friendliness he had long cultivated to deal with pupils he didn't much care for personally, "you'll make progress. This isn't a race," he added, with a smile. "It's not like you have to be ready to open in Le Mariage de Figaro at Christmas."

  "Well, that's a blessing," muttered Pauline, prowling from the shuttered windows of the second-floor front parlor where the piano stood. The younger sister slapped her fan on the piano's shining rosewood top, then a moment later caught it up and beat the air with it again, as if the necessity to do so were unjust penance imposed upon her alone. Though he had bathed before coming here, January felt the stickiness of sweat on his face and under his shirt and coat.

  In April or October, all the long windows onto the gallery would have been thrown wide at this time of day to catch the breezes of coming evening. But now that was a luxury that could not be risked. Fever rode the night air, invisible and deadly-that was all that anybody knew of it. The winter curtains of velvet and tapestry had been exchanged for light chintz and gauze, but those were drawn closely over the tall French doors; and the light they admitted was wan and sickly gray. The woven straw mats underfoot, and the muslin covers masking the opulent furniture, did little to lighten or cool the room. With its mirrors swathed in gauze, its ornaments veiled against flyspecks, the place had a shrouded atmosphere, tomblike and drained of color.

  "Oh, darling, please..." Louise Marie made a feeble gesture toward her sister's fan and produced another cataclysmic sigh. "If you would... The heat affects me so!"

  Any other family would have been in Mandeville, where January knew Madame Lalaurie owned a summer cottage and a good deal of property. Nicolas Lalaurie was a doctor-a partner at Jules Soublet's clinic on Rue Bourbon-but somehow January suspected the small, pale, silent Frenchman would have had no objection to leaving a town where only the poor remained to fall ill. But Madame Lalaurie, almost alone among the high Creole society, had chosen to remain in town and nurse the sick. January guessed that Dr. Lalaurie-not a native Creole himself-knew his reputation would never survive flight from a danger that his wife faced with such matter-of-fact calm.

  He guessed, too, that one or the other of the Lalauries had-decreed that the two girls should remain as well: the doctor out of wariness about how things looked, or Ma dame simply because the possibility of falling ill had never entered her mind.

  Her face like bitter stone, Pauline slapped open the sandalwood sticks and began to fan her sister, while Louise Marie, a long-suffering smile of martyred gratitude and a gleam of satisfaction in her eye, jerked and hobbled through a Mozart contredanse in a fashion that amply demonstrated that she had done none of her appointed practice during the previous four days.

  But January was used to pupils not practicing, and there were things he could say to praise without condemnation, which he knew would do him no good. All girls of good family studied the piano from childhood, though few kept up lessons into their twenties. Madame Delphine Lalaurie, however, was as renowned for her piano playing as she was for her hospitality, for her business acumen, for her beauty and social connections, and it was unthinkable that her daughters should fall below the standard she set. Watching Louise Marie's exaggerated winces at her mistakes-as if they were catastrophes imposed upon her by a spiteful Muse instead of the result of her own negligence about practice January felt a pang of pity for them.

  Madame's very perfection was probably not easy to live up to.

  "That was good, Mademoiselle Blanque. May I hear Mademoiselle Pauline on the Haydn now?" Their mother had been the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in New Orleans; Marie Delphine de McCarry's first husband a city intendant, a Spanish hidalgo of great wealth, and her second, Jean Blanque, a banker whose signature underwrote nearly every property deed in the city. Their two older sisters were the wives of two of the most influential men in the parish. With the early death of their little brother these girls became heiresses to a sizable fortune in city rents and land; to an unshakable position in Creole society; and to this huge and almost oppressively opulent house, with its gilded ceilings and French furniture, its marble stairs and crystal lighting fixtures.

  But as he watched the older girl-a young woman, in truth, in her early twenties make an elaborate business of limping across the parlor to the most comfortable chair; clutching heavily on her sister's arm; sending Pauline to fetch a fan, a cushion, a kerchief, to call for Babette to fetch some lemonade from the kitchen-summoning Pauline back when she had gotten started on the Haydn march, because she suddenly felt faint and needed her vinaigrette-he knew Louise Marie would never marry. And Pauline? She was still what they would consider marriageable in any society, eighteen or nineteen, and would have been pretty had she not been so thin. Some wasting sickness there, thought January,
studying her rigid profile with a physician's eye. Not consumption. Her color looked good, and she seemed to have no trouble drawing breath. An inability to digest certain foods, perhaps? Her hands were stick thin, wrist bones like hazelnuts standing out under the gold of her bracelets; her whole body seemed brittle, stiff as wood as she played, mechanically and badly. Resentment rose off Pauline like steam from the mosquito-wriggling gutters.

  At her sister? January had seen other households rendered twisted and tense by the manipulation of a chronic invalid, and Louise Marie certainly seemed to take delight in interrupting her sister's practice. "Oh, here's Babette; darling, will you bring the lemonade here?" Pauline must have had a lifetime of being admonished to obey her sister: she stopped playing immediately, stalked to the parlor door where an emaciated servant woman stood with a single German crystal goblet of lemonade on a tray. This Pauline snatched without so much as a word of thanks and brought it across to the invalid. January, who had hoped to have a quick word with the servant, watched the woman depart, a dark-clothed ghost whose plain white muslin tignon brought back a memory of petite Cora, who dressed like a freedwoman's daughter but arranged her headscarf like a slave.

  For the remainder of the lesson January watched for his chance to have a moment alone, to slip away and find another servant, to ask discreetly that word be got to the houseman Gervase to meet him. But only in so watching did he become aware of how bounded he was by the regulations of society. A guest in the house never spoke to the servants, be that guest white or free colored. Neither was expected to have the smallest inclination to speak to a black, a slave. And well-trained servants, for their part, never came into the presence of guests unless specifically sent for. Listening, he was aware of how quiet the entire floor was. Now and then he heard a soft tread in one of the rooms above, but no one entered the big front parlor in which the piano stood or the smaller sewing parlor, which opened from it through an arch of cypress wood painted to resemble marble. The shadowy hall that divided the house, American fashion, from front to back, was still. If any servants moved about, laying the table in the long dining room or cleaning the lamps in Dr. Lalaurie's library behind it, they did so without sound.

  And January was very conscious that he was being paid to teach Mademoiselle Blanque and Mademoiselle Pauline to play the piano, however little they might wish to learn. They were his priority, taking precedence over a favor promised to an untruthful young woman he barely knew. So, though he watched for his chance, he kept the greater part of his concentration on them.

  Were they obliged to play, he wondered, at the dinners and danceables that made their mother so famous in the upper levels of Creole society?

  At the end of the allotted hour, Bastien materialized like a round-faced smiling genie in the parlor door, holding the carved cypress panels open for Louise Marie and Pauline to exit. Louise Marie gasped with restrained agony as she rose from her chair, her hand going now to her twisted back, now to her narrow chest. Once the demoiselles had gone, the coachman handed January his Mexican silver dollar.

  "This way, M'sieu Janvier."

  The servant woman Babette slipped across the hall and through the door of the rear parlor as January and Bastien passed through that of the front; from the corner of his eye January saw her nip up the lemonade goblet from the marble-topped occasional table beside Louise Marie's daybed as if she feared to let it remain out of her custody one moment longer than necessary. He tried to formulate an excuse to turn back, but was very conscious of the watchfulness in the coachman's eye, and in the end did not.

  The brick-paved courtyard's size was itself an ostentation in the crowded French town, and though the house was less than three years old, it was already lush with foliage, paint-bright bougainvillea and the banana plants with their pendulous fleshy blooms that seemed to spring up overnight. Piles of hooves, horn, and hair from the slaughterhouses smoldered fitfully in terra-cotta tubs, and the doors of the kitchen, the laundry, and the slave quarters above were shut against the smoke. That kitchen must be an inferno! thought January, looking back at its closed doors with a shudder of pity for any cook condemned to work there. The rooms above it would be worse: three servants' rooms looking onto a narrow gallery and three more garrets and another gallery on top of those. Below the slates of the roof, the heat would collect like a bake oven. Even the stables, where Madame's famous team of matched coal black English carriage-horses was housed, seemed almost hermetically fast.

  From a little ways up Rue de L'Hopital, it seemed to him that the tall house, with its tiers of galleries and watchful doors, had the look of a fortress, wreathed in smoke and towering above all buildings around it.

  A fortress against Bronze John, he thought. Against the cholera. Locked and shuttered, like every other house on the street, in the hopes of thwarting nightborne, drifting enemies no one could see.

  January shook his head, and proceeded up Rue de l'Hopital through gathering dusk.

  When Benjamin January left New Orleans in the spring of 1817, twenty-four years old, to study medicine in Paris, he had vowed in his heart as Louisiana's long flat malarial coastline settled into sullen mist behind the boat's wake that he would never return. Even in those easygoing days the dense African darkness of his skin guaranteed that he would be regarded as little better than a savage by white and colored alike, no matter how skilled he became. Not for him, he had always known, the affluent practices of the free colored physicians and surgeons in the town.

  He had made Paris his home. Even when he became a musician, trading on the other great love of his life to earn sufficient money to marry the woman he found there, the woman he loved, he had regarded Louisiana as a country of the past. Its memories of smothering heat, of going to bed too exhausted to eat were things he wished to put aside forever: of taking care never to meet a white man's eyes and always to appear slightly stupid, slightly lazy. Of avoiding anything that might possibly be construed as a threat. And hand in hand with all that had gone the knowledge that anything in his life could be taken away from him without warning, explanation, or recompense.

  In France it would not be so, he had told himself. In France he would be truly free.

  Then Ayasha had died. As if the wall between past and present had shattered like a pane of glass, pestilence flowed through the streets of Paris. The city took on for him the aspect of nightmare, a nightmare in which she was always about to come around the corner, she was always just a stall ahead of him in the market buying apples... she was always lying on the reeking bed amid the filth in which she had died, reaching for the empty water pitcher, praying for the strength to hang on until he returned home.

  Like a termite-riddled post under a hammer blow, his life had crumbled with her death. He had returned to New Orleans, to the world that, if it had not cherished him, at least was one he knew. He was forty.

  Some day, he thought, springing over the offal of the gutter and seeing ahead of him the pink stucco walls of his mother's house, some day he might collect the strength to leave Louisiana again. To return to France-though probably never Paris -or Vienna, or London, or Rome.

  But right now he was like a man with fever who can crawl no farther than his bed, where he lies waiting to heal. Someday, maybe, he would heal.

  He didn't know.

  His mother still owned the house on the Rue Burgundy given her by St. Denis Janvier, when that gentleman had died in 1822. Livia January had married a respectable upholsterer named Levesque, and a few years ago he had died, too. Though January had the impression she was less than pleased about admitting she'd ever borne a son in slavery-to hear his mother talk she had never cut cane in her life-she had extended a temperate welcome and agreed that he could reoccupy his old room above the kitchen, the room next to the cook's quarters. These rooms-gar?onni?res-were the custom in a country where the presence of growing sons under the same roof was regarded with less than enthusiasm by their mothers' protectors. Being his mother, she charged him three Spanish dol
lars a week.

  Livia Levesque was currently renting chambers in a comfortable boardinghouse in Milneburgh with a number of her better-off cronies, having let the cottage she owned there to a wealthy, white sugar broker.

  She had taken Bella, her cook, with her. January's shift at the Charity Hospital officially ended at eight in the morning, though it was frequently noon before he left. He was usually too exhausted, and the day too sweltering, to even attempt to start up the open brick stove in the kitchen: he either had beans and rice bought out the back door of one of the local groceries or went without.

  Today he had gone without and was wondering if he should seek out a meal at Gillette's Tavern, or bribe the cook at Breyard's for a dish of something, before returning to the Hospital in a few hours. First, he thought, pushing open the gate into his mother's yard, he wanted to get rid of this hell-begotten wool coat and waistcoat and cravat. What lunatic Frenchman had dictated that the formal dress that marked him as a professional had to be the same in a tropical city like New Orleans as it was in London or Paris? He couldn't dispense with it, of course. Leaving out the fact that his mother would kill him if she heard he'd been abroad in his official capacity less than fully and formally attired, he could say good-bye to any chance of professional employment as a musician if those who hired him saw that he dressed like a day laborer.

  But at least he could sponge off again and put on a clean shirt and a slightly less excruciating garment.

  It wouldn't do to be seen dressed like (for example) the verminous, long-haired scarecrow currently lounging on the steps of the gar?onni?res, spitting tobacco and reading the New Orleans Courier while he waited, quite clearly, for January to come home.

  "You're lucky my mother's away," January remarked, closing the gate behind him. "She'd order Bella to chase you off with a broom. Sir," he added.