Fever Season (5 page)

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’Hôpital, 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’Hôpital 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—garçonnières—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 dollars 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 garçonnière, 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.

The scarecrow spat a dark stream of expectorant onto the bricks. “I been chased off better.” He spoke in a mild, rather scratchy tenor and blinked up at January from under the wide brim of a countryman’s rough hat and a greasy curtain of hair the color of dried onion tops. “And worse,” he added, carefully folding up his newspaper and rising to a height barely half an inch less than January’s own. There was a hole in the skirts of his old-fashioned coat. “Sorta comes with workin’ for the law. Now what’s all this truck”—he gestured with the paper—“about there bein’ ‘no sign yet of any epidemic fever in the city’? These newspaper fellers live in the same town as the rest of us, or what? ‘Some few of the weak-kneed have ignominiously fled at the sound of a rumor …’ ”

“The newspapers always say that,” said January. “The businesses in town won’t have it any other way.”

Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guard widened his eyes in momentary startlement at this piece of journalistic cooperativeness, then shrugged. “Well, I don’t suppose it’s any news to anybody in town.” He tucked the paper away. “I understand yore laid out, Maestro, and gotta be back at the Hospital tonight, but there’s sort of a matter I gotta take up with you.” He spat again and wiped his bristly chin. “You acquainted with a gal by name of Cora Chouteau?”

He pronounced the French name correctly, something one wouldn’t have expected from the raspy, American flatboat-English he spoke, and January tried not to react.
By the sharpening of those rain-pale eyes, he didn’t think he succeeded.

“Chouteau?” He shook his head. “The name isn’t familiar.”

“Little gal so high, ’bout as dark as yore ma.” Shaw had made the acquaintance of the redoubtable Widow Levesque last Mardi Gras. “Skinny. Sort of pointy chin they say. Twenty-two, twenty-three year old.”

January manufactured furrows of thought in his brow, then shook his head again. “Why are you looking for her? A runaway?”

“In a manner of speakin’.” Shaw gently scratched under the breast of his coat. “She did run away, yeah. But when she left she helped herself to five thousand dollars from the plantation accounts and the mistress’s pearl necklace and poisoned the master an’ the mistress both for good measure. The mistress’ll live, they say. They buried the master Friday.”

“It isn’t true!” January thought that Cora would flee from him entirely, but in fact she only turned her back on him sharply and went a few steps, her arms folded over her breasts, hands clasping her skinny shoulders. In the dense noon shadows under the Pellicot kitchen gallery her face was unreadable, like a statue, always supposing some Greek sculptor would have expended bronze on the pointed, wary features of an urchin and a slave. A wave of trembling passed over her, an ague of dread.

January leaned against the rail of the gallery stairs. What was it, he wondered, that she feared he would read in her face?

“What this policeman tell you?” She flung the words back at him over her shoulder.

“Why don’t you tell me?”

Her breath sipped in to spit some counteraccusation, but she let it go. She rubbed one hand along her arm, as if trying to get warm.

“Did this Otis Redfern rape you?” January asked.

Cora sniffed. “What’s rape?” she demanded. “My … a girl I knew, a friend of mine, she was raped. She was sick after for a long time. I took care of her.…” She shook her head. “She fought him, and he hurt her.”
The softness of her mouth hardened again. “So you don’t fight, and it’s not so bad. But if you don’t fight, it’s not really rape, is it? And what’s the sense of fighting anyway? He’d just have one of the men come in and hold me down. That’s what he said. He said he’d have Gervase do it. You think I’d kill him over that?”

“There’s women who would.”

“If every woman killed every master who had her against her will, there’d be dead men lying like a carpet from here to the Moon. And that M’am Redfern, she wouldn’t get after him about it. Just made my work harder for me, like I liked being fingered and poked and pestered by that smelly old man. If it wasn’t for Gervase I think I’d have gone crazy.”