Marina

Thirteen

Little Vengeance

“You like stories, don’t you, Marina?”

Tongue burning from the first taste of brandy in her life, Marina nods to Mlle Pichon.

Called out of bed this night from downstairs, summoned through floor and wall like Mademoiselle said her mother used to, Marina sits before her keeper in the bright parlor and waits to be told. The lamps along the wall give off the comforting, oceanic drone of a conch-shell held to the ear. Marina thinks of tilting her ear to the mouth of her glass, but decides against it. Lately she aims for ladyhood, and ladies do not listen to their glasses: ladies hold them by the stem, cock their heads at an angle so that their unpinned hair darkly tumbles to one shawl-covered shoulder, and they sip brandy and ask strange questions, savoring the span of their pauses. Ladies sit in nightdress and shawl beside a little table where a decanter rests on a silver tray, eyeing you with an air of initiation.

Pichon empties her glass, smacks her lips. “Then I’ll tell you one I think you’ll like, all right?”

“All right.” She has never heard Mlle Pichon so sisterly and happy. She was like this when Marina first took her seat; she needs someone to share her happiness with, and because all the rest are at the benefit ball, Marina will have to do.

When Pichon reaches for the decanter, Marina sees the laces of her dress are all undone, dangling from the edge of the shawl, which is all that covers her bare back. Pichon keeps an elbow squeezed to one side. Otherwise the thin nightdress would fall.

“When I was eighteen,” she says, “I still lived with Mme Frick. She was twenty-two, then. Only a year married, but already with the first of her fat babies—”

“What happened to her husband?”

She looks confused at the question, says, “He died, of course. Fever. Eighteen . . . fifty-seven.”

“Oh.” Marina thinks of Frick, who’d come today to vent her rage at being accosted by her enemies. By General Butler himself. Listening at the head of the stairs, Marina had stifled giggles at the woman’s frets. What the woman said the other day still weighs on Marina’s mind, surfacing now and again in quiet moments, trailed closely by the thought of how silent Mademoiselle had been at that moment.

Now she’s anything but. Pichon is as unstoppered as her brandy cask, and as her words have the same burning effervescence, the same intoxication.

“So, I’ve just reached my full womanhood, and I’ve been living under the same roof with Mme Frick for almost ten years, since my mother died and our father brought me to live with him. Now, here I am, going to balls—not the same balls as her or Elise, but still—I’m courted.” She grins. “I sneak from my window sometimes at night. And all this time my sister does not say a word; she’s so wrapped up in her bliss and baby. I’m glad to be out of her notice because, as you might guess, we two girls weren’t so happy together growing up.”

“You were kind to her today,” says Marina.

“Oh, you were listening? I should’ve guessed.” Yes, Mademoiselle goes on, she was kind when Frick barged in. Quite kind to take Madame’s hand and console her. Such a shame about the flag, yes? Terribly pretty and Willie would have been so happy to have it.

Uncle Willie is far on his march out of Marina’s mind and care, and she wonders whether he has made it just as far from Mademoiselle’s. Lately his name has lost its foothold in the house; absence, rather than breeding fondness, spawns silence. The hole you leave in the lives of others is the very one into which their memory of you falls.

Pichon shrugs; the shawl juts with her bare shoulders and she circles back to her story, the one she is sure Marina will like. She’s told it to another person only twice before.

“It was the J’ouvert, the Sunday before Mardi Gras. The streets were full; everyone was dancing and yelling. Fork-tailed devils, monstrous masks, men marching with flambeaux. Women on their balconies were pouring flour down onto us in the street. Everyone laughed. Great white clouds of flour rolling down Royal and the devils and the ones daubed in mud passing in and out like from dream. This was nine o’clock. I’ll never forget. I had my hair done high, my neck shaved close, à la Antoinette, and fixed with long China pins that had been gifts from my father to my mother. Now they were mine and I was heading nowhere in particular, just glad to be out of the house and away from her, who hated me, and her husband, who watched me, and her yowling fat baby. Anyway, I was aimless and I was happy.

“I stopped at the cart of an Italian boy who sold these little anise cakes. He was flirty, nice, though we couldn’t share a word more than ‘two-bits’ and ‘thanks.’ So there I am, in the clouds of flour, eating my cake, the bright taste of the anise on my tongue, making eyes at this boy who eyed me back, when someone grabs me by the arm, yanks me round. A policeman, by his star, and floured some himself. At first I think it’s some reveler’s joke, then he jerks my arm again and barks whether I am ‘Henry Waterson’s Corraline.’” She pauses, fixes Marina. “Do you understand?”

“No.”

“He thinks I’m someone’s slave. Out past curfew. So I say to him I’m not; I tell him who I am. And the policeman, he squeezes my arm till I feel my veins stand out, and he asks where are my papers. ‘A negress out at night should have her papers,’ he says. ‘Even at Carnival time.’ And of course I didn’t have them. My free papers, saying I wasn’t”—she clears her throat—“owned. So I tell him as much, tell him where I live, tell him my half sister’s name and her husband’s as if that would help, but he’s already dragging me away, saying that ‘Mr. Henry Waterson’s Corraline don’t got her papers neither.’

“So I’m thrown into a carriage with a load of other women. Slaves. Whores. Thieves. And off we go to parish prison. The others know I’m not of their kind. They frowned and sulked and sucked their teeth at me whenever I tried to talk.

“At parish prison they put us into cells. And here I am, just eighteen, with the bars before me and a stone bench to sit on while the police send a man to fetch Mr. Henry Waterson. And I’m glad. Go get him, I say, thinking Mr. Henry Waterson’s appearance will mean my deliverance. I wait. I try not to listen to the other girls yowl at me. Later, when my policeman comes back, he has a quarter in his hand”—Mademoiselle mimes holding a coin—“and he tosses it in the air, snaps it up, walks up to the cell I’m in, and, whistling, taps it on the bars while he tells me Mr. Henry Waterson does not like his Sabbath evenings interrupted, even when he’s the one who made the report to the police, but what can you do with a rich man, eh? They want things both ways. So Mr. Henry Waterson won’t be paying us a visit tonight, Miss Corraline.

“The policeman tapped his coin to the bars again. Hard. Held it up for me to see. ‘You know what this means, eh? You know how many strokes this is worth?’ I knew. I knew he had paid for my, Corraline’s, correction. But by then I wasn’t looking at him. I was on my knees, crying, reaching for my coinpurse. I dug out a dollar and told him it was his if he’d only go to Mme Jeanne Frick’s at 108 Royal. She would vouch for me. I told him my name over and over in my squeaky girl’s voice, so that he’d remember what to tell her. Inés Pichon, Inés Pichon, Inés Pichon. The policeman, he just stood there. Looked up and down the row of cells. ‘More,’ he said. I skinned my knuckles on the bar I pushed my hand—the whole purse—through so hard. The policeman snatched it and he went. Then all the girls were yowling my name back at me: ‘Ee-nez Pee-shon, Ee-nez Pee-shon.’ So I went to my stone bench and sat down, telling myself it would all be over in a little while.”

She can see the skin of Mlle Pichon’s shoulders where the shawl has been rustled loose. And maybe this is how she looked, sitting on her bench. Marina is breathless; she imagines dungeon walls pargeted with white mold in the shape of skulls. But here are Mademoiselle’s uncovered shoulders. The threat of the older woman’s nakedness, her confidence despite or because of it, somehow reverses standards and makes Marina feel the vulnerable one.

“So finally the policeman came back. I rushed to the bars, into his smell of beer, and he shoves my coinpurse back to me. His face is grave. He’s had his drink. He says that I only make it worse on myself, slandering a white woman that way. Now I’m hollering. I can’t believe it. I’m asking, begging. Yes, he went to 108 Royal; yes he spoke to Jeanne Frick, who said she hadn’t the faintest idea who I was. And now the other girls are howling with laughter and singing my name. The policeman has his key, unlocks my cell. ‘I’ve worn my goddamn legs out over you,’ he says. But I wouldn’t come out. I’d gone back to my bench and there was nothing to hold on to there, when he came growling in to drag me out. That sour smell of beer. He’d got himself drunk on the way back, you see. And I don’t know whether it was because he could tell Jeanne had lied or he wasn’t used yet to doing what he was about to do to me. He never said. He just came growling into the cell and wrapped me up in one arm, in his reek. Now I wanted to stay in that cell just as much as I’d wanted to leave it. But there was nothing to hold on to. He had me out before I could even grab the bars and I was screaming, a maniac. He carried me over his shoulder like a sack of flour and I saw all the other girls down the row of cells making mocks at me.”

Marina’s jaw is clenched; she feels blood throbbing at her temples. She is about to say, desperately, What happened then? But Mlle Pichon puts up a hand for her to pause and turns, setting down her glass on the side table. And what begins with a strange wriggle of Mademoiselle’s shoulders and the easing of her elbows from her sides, ends with the shawl slipped down to her hips, her nightdress sneering open.

Her back is worked with brown-pink scars, the color of rotten beef.

“Here’s what Mr. Henry Waterson paid for,” she says, turning over her shoulder to catch Marina’s expression, which is gaping awe at the scars and, more, at the muscle and flesh beneath them.

“Come close.”

She does. Closer to this side-mouthed whisper, closer to this ­woman’s bare back, where scars are hatched and crossed as though Mlle Pichon were an errant mark in the ledger of the world. Pichon reaches back and takes Marina by the wrist.

“Go on, feel.”

Fingertips run along the whipscars.

“Fourteen,” Mademoiselle says, arching round to let Marina know it’s all right, that she may feel the ridges of pain, the troughs of spared skin. Pichon is the first woman she has seen unclothed since her mother was alive. This woman who is now something of a mother, a surrogate whose beauty has oppressed her, made her angry and afraid until this moment—her bare skin, the flares of muscle in her back as much a revelation as her story or her scars.

She falls round Pichon’s neck, oversized and clinging now to the woman she’s cursed for so long, who, hugging, begins to laugh. Little bursts of mirth, both tearful and relieved.

“It’s all right, girl. Be calm.” She shirks Marina’s wrists from her neck, pats her cheeks and straightens her up. “You see me? I am happy . . .”

“But why?”

“You should ask your friend General Butler,” she says, and seeing the knowledge dawning on Marina’s face, Pichon smiles wide. “I got her,” she whispers. “Jeanne. The bitch.” Her smile fades into a sigh. “And do you know what she told him when he hauled her in? She said, ‘Oh it couldn’t have been Inés, not my dear adopted sister. She would never turn tattle on me . . .’” Mademoiselle snorts, reaches again for her glass. “Well, it’s only a little vengeance, but we must give our paybacks when we can, my girl. And I have waited a long time to deal mine. I only wish they’d thrown her in jail. I only wish they’d—”

Marina isn’t listening anymore. She has her own wishes, knotted and struggling in her head: she wishes she could be angry that Mlle Pichon went to see General Butler without telling her, without saying a word to the general about her either—and she knows this will one day be a festering resentment; she wishes she hadn’t heard the story, touched the scars, shared the liquor and the lap she’s yet to leave. And that she now finds herself bound to this woman in a way she can neither deny nor name. She has been a daughter and a niece, and neither felt like this. She has been a friend, but women are not friends with girls.

“I was so tired of you hating me,” says Mlle Pichon as she pets Marina’s hair. Down and up, in steady, practiced strokes of the same hand she slapped me with outside the museum. Now it’s soft and kind and wants me to stay, wants me to know. And where is Joseph? Maybe looking out his window or in bed asleep, dreaming heroics for his vile father while his mother dances at the ball that won’t abide Pichon, whose happiness at her little vengeance seems to fade even now. Her face slackens and she searches the bright extents of her petty keep. And watching the woman’s relief slowly replaced by an unknowable wrenching tension, Marina is overcome with a loneliness the likes of which she’s never known.

Another brandy, then to bed. Mademoiselle gives this little admonishment. Any more and you’ll wake to your first hangover in the morning.

So they sit a while longer. Mlle Pichon wonders aloud at the hour, and that Elise hasn’t come calling yet. It’s her friend’s custom to come and talk with her after such events; though the last was so long ago she might’ve forgotten the practice. Then silence, as though she were listening for the springs and wheels and hoofbeats. And Marina, settling back with the warm fist of liquor in her chest, considers secrets of her own—she should share them in kind—but finds hers too small to match the revelations of the night.