The Snare

7. REFLECTION AND DECISION

7. REFLECTION AND DECISION Julia went on writing. "In a certain manner of speaking, Dev used to say, We've none of us got anything outside our love. Some people never know it. "He gave it full value, way too much, and he didn't really mean it all the time, but from time to time he did mean it. This is how love is. After all, he had known in the salt smell of Charleston and the static beauty of Jamaica what he had found out in the bayou country, having traveled far with the knowledge. He was with her, in all those places, a diminutive smallboned English girl. He was always picking her up as though to carry her over a perpetual threshold, marveling at her lightness. She had come to New Orleans, with her family, from Jamaica. Her father was English, they were all English. He was in a firm for imports and exports— words like rum and hemp and indigo lingered about the whole visit there, talk of cargoes with some space to spare for Mexican silvercrafts and New Orleans tinned seafoods. To find suitable accommodations for an extended visit, the family had made use of certain letters of introduction and credit. One was to the senior member of the law firm where Henri Devignywas a new associate, having come in to New Orleans two years before from St. Martinsville. He was invited, more or less, to call and see if they were faring well in the quarters that had been rented for them. The thought of Jamaica came to him along the way. A hot jungle grew up in his mind: it was rich and green. Along the way he traveled its edge; when 208 Elizabeth Spencer 209 he turned to enter it—their suite was at the St. Charles— a brown bird with a snow-white breast flew up; and that was his, flushed out. He knew it right away. "The little bird. Tiny as a handkerchief. Ladies' lace pocket handkerchief. White. Always white. Her health no good. Probably she never knew his full passion, how could she have and still have him think of her the way she seemed? But hadn't she looked on those flaming red trees in Jamaica and seen the full-set Negro women come and go? Proud heads on necks straight and strong as mahogany trunks, hips swaying? Well, in a distant way maybe she knew, maybe she sensed it all, with a sigh. She was frail, one reason for leaving Jamaica. They told her the New Orleans coasts weren't exactlyhealthy, but she said at least sometimes the weather was fresh and there was some change of climate. They said it got drizzly gray with cold and rain. When she asked about sunny days, they said, That, too. She and her mother offered people tea. "Dev had seen pictures of women like her all his life in magazines. The wise New Orleans girls were not like her (got stodgy later, after marrying). The pretty little Southern belles, from up in Mississippi, up in Louisiana, up in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Carolina—always coming down on excursions or getting a bid to one of the balls they'd frame or keep forever in a cedar chest or paste in a scrapbook, pretty and prim or pretty and flirty or pretty and wild, all country girls (turned into good managers after marriage, Dev said)—they were not like her either. And the Yankee girls with what they were on the lookout for too firmly mixed in with their charm and their elegance and their money. He'd had a chance to see them all, all types, in the way of the New Orleans young, man or woman, without stirring out of place. So he waited and there she was. English. From Jamaica. "I have often seen her picture. He kept it in the top drawer of a big mahogany chest of drawers he had upstairs at Aunt Isabel and Uncle Maurice's, and I think maybe he got it out when he was alone, too, I remember 210 T H E S N A R E the finely worked gold frame, the miniature beautifully tinted, oval, and the face not abashed to be so prized as that, the eyes gray and even, and the soft pretty artless hair. The dress, too, was quite fine. "Uncle Maurice's birth...