Feast of All Saints by Anne Rice Read Free Book Online Page A

young girl that Marie had become. She’d been the story-book child of his life in years past, the vision of sashes and ribbons and shining slippers that one seldom sees except on painted pages bordered with roses, the companion of verses and songs. And now she was as tall as her mother, swan-necked and round-armed, with eyes like the marble angels at the church doors that hold the holy water out to you in deep shells.
    It took his breath away suddenly, thinking of her. Marie. The sheer simplicity of the name seemed perfect. He’d written poems to her and torn them up at once as though the room were full of spies.
    He couldn’t bear it suddenly, the thought that she’d been scourged by a cross word. But they were a close family, he knew them too well to think…? But then.…His thoughts were making circles. He shut his eyes, but could not sleep. He was coming back and back to the same place. So that he turned over, shifting the pillow to feel something fresh and cool beneath his face, and he let himself slip into some fragment of fantasy. He was sitting with Marie on the back steps of the
garçonnière
as they had done years before one day when he had buttoned the little strap of her slipper. Only now they were not children, and they were speaking together intimately so that he reached out and.…No. He saw the angels again at the church doors. Marcel was in trouble, she was in trouble, Cecile had been crying, crying when he left. He sighed, and carrying now only one of the thousands of burdens to which he had grown daily accustomed, he sank slowly through his care, into a thin, restless sleep.
IV
    I T WAS a long time after Richard left him at the market before Marcel actually accosted Juliet. Marcel had memorized the newspaper clipping, and there was no doubt in his feverish mind that he had the momentum needed to carry him across the barrier that separated her from all the world. But he waited for his moment, letting her see him from time to time, as she had, again, just before Richard bolted, and watching expressionless, as her gaze drifted and she went on her way. With the infinite misery and patience of a lover, he followed her, thinking let it take a day, or a year.
    He had nothing but disgust for the profligate he had so recently become, but at the same time he understood what was happening to him, and was curiously without regret. His childhood had become a wasteland; or rather he had finally become aware of just how barren and desolate it had always been, and following Juliet, he felt as if hemoved toward life itself, the drudgery of his day-to-day disobedience left behind.
    She bought clucking hens and ripe tomatoes, oysters in the shell and writhing shrimps, her cat darting in and out of the market stalls, arching its back against her dragging skirts. And for all this, she took money from the tight silk over her breasts under which Marcel could see the tiny raisins of her nipples so that he grew dizzy from the heat and lounged against the hogsheads like a roustabout, never taking his eyes from her straight back or from the men who leered at her, or stopped in their hacking or sweeping to watch her pass.
    Of course the market men stared at him also, carters stared at him, black men with bushel baskets on their shoulders stared at him, this stiff-starched little gentleman getting hay all over his fine coat, with such wide and wild blue eyes fixed to the figure in front of him.
    But Marcel did not see this. He saw only that Juliet had at last filled her basket, heaped it with yams and carrots and bunches of greens, tethering two hens to the handle by their feet so that they squawked and fluttered as she swung the whole enterprise up high onto the top of her head, and then dropping her hands idly at her sides, managed to walk swiftly through the bustling crowd, the basket perfectly balanced, her back straight, her steps rhythmic as those of a common African
vendeuse
.
    “Mon Dieu,”
Marcel whispered. “She can do