Pete Hamill - Forever

Then, his hands black with chalk, he fell on the narrow bed, pulled a pillow over his face, and wept. He was sick of the things human beings did to one another. He was angry too. Too many people were chopped out of the world before you had a chance to say good-bye.

He did not hear the door open. But he felt the bed sag as she sat on its edge, felt her hands in his hair.

“Poor Cormac,” the countess said.

He looked at her, expecting some gloss of irony. All he saw was care.

“You’re hurting,” she said.

“I am.”

“And I’m one of the reasons you’re hurting.”

He sighed in a reluctant way.

“Yes,” he said.

“But she—the woman in these drawings—she’s a reason too.”

“She is,” he said. He sat up now on the edge of the bed and stared at his blackened hands.

“Tell me the story.”

He stood up and went to the sink and began washing his hands.

“I knew her for many years,” he said. “She sold oysters and other things from a stall on Broadway. She was warm and human and funny. At some point last night, she was murdered.”

“My God.”

The black would not come off his fingers. He pulled at it with a towel.

“Her own son killed her, along with two of his own children, and then shot himself in the brow.” He heard his voice as if the voice alone were the cold teller of a tale. “He beat out the brains of the children. He shot off his mother’s face.” Then he took a deep breath, not looking at the countess for the effect of his words. “He told a woman on the first floor that he hated his mother because she laughed at him. That was probably true. She laughed at everyone and everything. She laughed at me, as well she should. She laughed at life.” He paused, turned to look at the countess, whose face was lost in imagining.“The same woman on the first floor saw the son yesterday, in the morning. He told her he had been out of work for eleven months. He was tired of depending on his mother. He was tired of being black.”

He glanced at the black lines dug into his fingertips, and the sanguine chalk red as blood. The countess looked up at him.

“Sit down,” she said.

Then she told him some of her story: how she’d met Yves Breton in Paris, where her mother had taken her to study at the Conservatory. They were living then in New Orleans, which was still French, the place to which she and her mother had fled in 1802 when the slave revolt had come upon them. She remembered the cemeteries above ground because of the high level of the water, the porous soil full of writhing stone monuments, and how the one of her father was a kind of boast, because there was nothing of her father inside the tomb. His body had been hacked to pieces in Haiti. She was eight years old when her father was murdered, and her mother rose out of a cellar hideout a day later, packed up jewels and cash and some paintings and pastels, and left for Louisiana, dry-eyed and angry. She was angry in some obscure way at the countess (who was not, of course, a countess) and angry with her dead husband, for failing to take the black revolutionists seriously until they walked into his drawing room; she was angry with Napoleon Bonaparte, the consul for life, for failing to protect them; she was angry at leaving the life they had made in the Caribbean.

“She never stopped being angry,” the countess said. “And when Napoleon sold Louisiana to the Americans, she was angrier than ever. Anger kept her alive. It was her food.”

They had a small house with a garden on Royal Street and a piano in the front parlor. They had two slaves, both women: a cook and a woman who cleaned. When the Americans arrived after 1804, all wild and bearded and wearing the skins of animals, drunk and mean-eyed men, as they said, from the back of beyond, whooping and raising rifles in the air, her mother had added a male slave to guard the doors, armed with an ax. His name was Jacques. The piano teacher stayed on, and the countess played every day, escaping from the anger of her mother, and the growing disorder of the town. And finally, when she was sixteen, after pleading and sobbing and many tantrums, she convinced her mother that they must go to Paris.

“She sold the women slaves,” she said, “and freed Jacques, closed the house, and we sailed away.”

She met M. Breton at the Conservatory, where he was teaching harmonics and violin. She tried to explain to Cormac how handsome M. Breton was then, in spite of the way he limped (from a wound at the Battle of Wagram), how reckless he was, how charged with passion. He talked without pause, about Goethe and Schiller and Madame de Staël, names she’d never heard in New Orleans, about the endless possibilities of music, about painters, about the way Napoleon was changing all of Europe and all of history. He became the first man she ever slept with.

“It was like a summer storm,” she said, “without warning, without time for escape, and I have never regretted it. Everyone should fall in love in such a way, at least once.”

M. Breton was eleven years older than she was, twenty-eight to her seventeen, a brilliant violinist, his music brooding with regret or exploding into exaltation. He had been too young to savor the enormous excitements of the Revolution, but he remained, in that year before Moscow, a passionate follower of Bonaparte, who had repaired all the errors and excesses of the Jacobins and restored the nation to glory. Or so he said. The loss of three toes on his right foot and part of his right femur at Wagram kept him out of the Grand Armée. But as he limped along the marble halls of the Conservatory, and through the streets of Paris, he kept telling her that all French honor, all European honor, was now derived from Bonaparte. M. Breton played his violin for soldiers in hospitals and at the funerals of the fallen. He cheered at parades.

“That was the only thing he did without sarcasm: cheer,” the countess said. “And I cheered too.”

Then came Moscow, and the end of the myth of invincibility, and the long, slow, violent fall that followed. When M. Breton looked up with clear eyes, the streets were filling with cripples and widows, and Napoleon Bonaparte was on Elba.

“By then, my mother and I were gone,” the countess said. “We were back in New Orleans. We arrived three weeks after Andrew Jackson defeated the British, and my mother found her two women, and Jacques too, paid them for their services this time, and we tried to make the house a home. Now I gave lessons too, for there was not enough money, and my mother was still angry.”

Nine months later, M. Breton arrived like a corsair. He courted her again, courted her mother too, charmed their friends, who were enchanted by his music. And so they married. A year later, a child died stillborn. One rainy summer night, M. Breton sat down and wrote a letter to his wife, explaining that he could not look at her without thinking of death, and then he vanished. There were a few letters over the next few years, from Mexico, from Havana, from Italy. A few lines here, a few lines there. She did not see him again. Until now.

“All true stories are unhappy ones,” she said, once more protected by irony. “That’s the essence of the romantic.”

When she was gone, he fell into bed in the dark, thinking of the Countess de Chardon, and remembered where he was living when she was in Paris: that small sweaty room on Reade Street, and a woman whose face was now dim in memory and whose name was gone. Those were the years when he began thinking about women in categories that he knew were unfair: episodes, chapters, events, stories. As if each woman were a mere book taken down from a shelf, to be examined, pondered, and closed. He had no more women than other unmarried men, just more time. Year after year after year. All the time in the world. Everything could wait, including the possibilities of love. He learned in those years to avoid learning too much about a woman, because knowledge would make parting more wrenching, for her and for him. It was unfair, and in some cases cruel, but that came with the strangeness of his life.