Dr. Sabatier

Six

The Season of Masks

When by speech the gates to the afterlife are opened, it seems every skeleton will have his rattle on the tongues of the living. In this way the conversation of the gentlemen gathered at the Gem Saloon has shifted from Angel Woolsack to William Walker. Tragically taken from us, both. The latter by Honduran bastards on some godforsaken beachhead fort, the former—Dr. Sabatier has assured them—by terrible accident.

“Like Walker,” he says, returning the focus. “My friend wouldn’t wish to meet his end in any way but combat. I firmly believe he was preparing to go out and meet the enemy.”

Pierre Soulé, former senator, of operatic features and the bearing of one who has shot noblemen in duels, begins in the crisp Parisian accent he has retained despite having come to New Orleans some twenty-five years ago as an exiled revolutionary, pronounces the greatness of both men, who despite the fact that they were never members of this association were held rightly in high esteem: “May we all profit by their example in the coming days.”

Tableware rattles with affirmative fists. The air of the private dining room is filled with glass-chimed dolorosa as Dr. Sabatier fights back a scowl at Soulé’s usurpation of his point. The gentlemen foregathered on this the evening of the second day of the occupation drink deeper than usual, as though to make up for absent throats. Twenty-four of the thirty chairs surrounding the table inlaid with the arms of the Mystik Krewe of Orcus are vacant. Some have gone with General Lovell to raise sabres and shout orders and meet the product of Northern foundries; others retreated to the interior like disfavored Roman senators with what riches they could carry. These remain: Pierre Soulé, René Armand, H. P. Arthur, Albert Deschamps.

The untenanted sockets of Venetian masks hung about the walls bear indifferent witness to the irregular flows of brandy and conversation. Masks of startling colors, feathered and beaded, studded with jewels, expressions inscrutable or of archetypal emotional contortion. These are the adornments of the Krewe, who in this same room not five years past came to the grand and fantastical design to commission immense floats on which they might be drawn through the carnival streets. A striking concept now aped by lesser outfits, but such is the fate of those who set the trend.

At the head of their table is Soulé—author of the Olsted Manifesto rightly staking the United States’ claim to Cuba, the tantalizingly close jewel in the Caribbean; voice of Southern empire; the masterful litigator who, next door beneath the dome of the District Court, four years ago secured the acquittal of the filibuster Walker.

Dr. Sabatier matches mask to man—his own monstrous white visage hangs below Soulé’s exquisite purple aquiline frowner—studies what constitutes the somewhat wilted flower of New Orleans gentry (comprising an association that ostensibly plans pre-Lenten revels, but like anything else in this city serves far more than its stated purpose) for betraying signs of cyanotic infection: fear, suspicion, signs of doubt. He has done so from the moment he told them of Woolsack’s demise. They are, he must admit, his friends; he enjoys them with the same appreciation for absurd spectacle as he does riding masked atop a papier-mâché dragon with the face of Charles Sumner, drawn through the streets by a horse-team decked as unicorns.

He looks to the hands that were this morning on Woolsack’s corpse. This momentary strangeness goes without comment from his fellows, and he adopts an increasingly bemused and grief-stricken expression not unlike that of René Armand’s red mask. There are nods, hands firmly pressed to his shoulder, eyes he imagines cutting suspiciously across the table. They pity him, for having done what the friend of any suicide would do—play the death off as accidental. They suspect him of a gentlemanly untruth, and that is precisely what he wants. Emile the stricken friend, the dutiful fool willing to proffer a little falsehood and perhaps a bit thickheaded in the matter as a result of his grief. After all, he’d accepted nigger women at their word, and hadn’t he said that Woolsack’s woman had been in the room when it occurred, but he hadn’t spoken to her because she was “insensible”?

He lets himself play the fool in order to sow in their minds other doubts, other theories. Idle whispers will turn into suspicion as the story is passed and like syphilis grows more virulent in their gossipy wives and even looser-tongued mistresses—who may in fact recall the girl who bit off a boy’s ear.

Whether she ever needs know it, he holds Elise’s fate by a cord. Should she prove difficult he may snap it at a moment of his choosing. He must remind himself that this little intrigue is a pastime, a way to stave off boredom while pipes and Cubanos throw up a roof of smoke and the fellows gabble. The doctor watches Soulé, who remains silent as the others’ conversation reels and whirls.

“I’ll speak no ill of the dead,” says H. P. Arthur. “But the man always unsettled me.”

René Armand, small and florid, addresses his snifter: “The Yanks won’t allow for carnival, I’m sure. This Butler’s already throwing men in prison. Frank Long of the Bee, this morning.”

“My father,” says Albert Deschamps, “told me once that Woolsack had killed more men than yellow jack and Savannah Frank both.”

“Women, too.” Armand leans closer to the table. “I hear he’s locked up old Twiggs’s wife in the calaboose herself.”

Soulé signals with a hand, a gesture the doctor is quite glad to not obey and so finds something in the far corner to distract his gaze while Pierre declares: “Gentlemen, New Orleans will be rid of Benjamin Butler and Louisiana of the invaders before All Saints’.”

Bleary-eyed and brandied as an Ortolan, René Armand casts back against his chair. “It’s not damned All Saints’ I’m worried about, Pierre, but Mardi Gras.”

Amid the laughter and the slosh of snifters replenished, the doctor says, “Let’s hope you’re right, Pierre.”

Soulé gives him a jurist’s jaundiced eye, then encompasses the rest.

“We have won by far the lion’s share of victories in the field, fought solely in defense of a newborn nation. The powers of Europe are poised to come to our aid.” Pierre cups his glass. “New Orleans’s present situation is unfortunate, but it was not a battle lost. Not here or in the eyes of our European friends. The forts were abandoned, the defense mismanaged, that damned Lovell . . .”

Ayes and toasts to the orator’s health. The doctor slumps in his chair, bored. There is no more talk of Woolsack or Walker to be had. Pierre rings the bell for the Negro waiters to come and bring another round of bottles. We must, according to Soulé, bide our time and hold out against the invader. Stymie his efforts; belabor his cause. Make him take four steps to cover a single foot. We will begin tomorrow, at the meeting of the mayor and council—and whatever prominent man wishes to be present—with General Butler and his staff.

“Well,” wags Arthur. “If there’s anything we know in New Orleans it’s making things take triple the time.”

Forced chuckles, the avatar of the city’s bottomless self-deception and complicity in its own national ignobility.

Now some of the gentlemen are asking what sort of man is General Butler. After all, Pierre has met him on more than one occasion in his capacity as Democratic statesman.

“He is a good attorney. Agile mind. Avaricious”—laughter from the men—“as any Northerner. He is the sort of man who stood by the South’s side until the question of secession came to be. Of course, I believe it was only to keep the cotton flowing to his mills. He is the sort of man who voted forty-seven times for Davis on fifty ballots. Then for Mr.—now General—Breckinridge . . .”

The doctor raises a finger, interrupts. The brandy has struck him deep enough. He is tired of the oratory. “Come now, Pierre. We can read all of that in the papers.”

“Not for too damn long, it seems,” says Armand.

What Pierre has to say requires throat clearing, the fist at his lips opens with a flourish as though to reveal Butler’s character within.

“Butler,” he says, “is a difficult man. He not only sees greatness in himself, but he looks for the means to attain greatness. He will serve his own interest unerringly, which for the moment is allied with that of the Northern states. And he is of their breed, a lecturer, prudish yet mannerless—but he is not self-righteous as his fellows. That Northern trait he does not possess.

“Of all the time we spent together, in the heady days of fifty-nine and sixty, the moment I recall the most is this: We were taking a drink on the veranda of the Mills House, in Charleston for the convention. He was a congressman then. Fresh from taking Secretary of War Davis on a tour of Massachusetts. Imagine them together! Stopping at inns, picking apples! Butler leaned against the railing—it had been a hard day at the committees—and looked out on the street. He seemed to forget I was there for some time. Then he said, ‘Pierre, did I ever tell you that my father took letters of the marque from Bolívar?’ I told him he hadn’t, though I did know that his father had served with distinction with Jackson at New Orleans. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘I have his sword in a glass case in my parlor. And his father’s sword from the Revolution. And his father’s before him, from the French—pardon—and Indian wars.’ ‘Strange then,’ I said to him, ‘that you didn’t go out for the army.’ Butler smiled. ‘My mother wouldn’t allow it,’ he said.”

The others grunt amusedly; the doctor watches.

“The day’s talk had been laden with threats from the majority, who saw our situation and decried the inevitability of secession. As you know, I was not among them. And Butler was quite exacerbated for his part. So there he stood, looking down Charleston’s main street with an expression of almost wistful appreciation. I joked with him: ‘Are you sizing up to buy the place, Mr. Butler?’ ‘Oh, no, sir,’ he says. ‘I was just wondering how these corners would look with gun emplacements. How the roofs would look on fire.’ And here he stood, in every way enjoined with our cause save secession, which even I accepted as inevitable eventually, thinking of war. So I ask you, gentlemen, what do you make of a man like that?”