Feast of All Saints by Anne Rice

the four sides smooth to touch.
    Rudolphe Lermontant, Richard’s father, came in one afternoon carrying a batch of slats bound with cord. “Look at this,” he said angrily, as the old man cut the bundle loose and lifted the lacquered pieces. “A fine little table, and they let it fall from the cart on the way from Charleston, sometimes I…” he smacked his fist into the palm of his hand. “And then they say it was already ruined, all the glue come undone, I don’t believe it. That’s my daughter for you.” He threw a furious glance at Marcel who stood decorously and self-consciously on the edge of the room. “You know Giselle, aaaahhh!”
    The old man had it done by the end of the week when Marcel came after school, a jewel of inlaid rosewood and glinting mahogany, the tiny drawer sliding back and forth, back and forth beneath the table top as if it were on magic wheels. Even the key turned again in the polished brass of the lock where it had once been rusted tight. “Ah, so many of them no longer have the key,” said Jean Jacques with slow wonder as if this were the remarkable aspect of it all, this good luck. Rudolphe, stunned, said, “Monsieur, name your price. My grandmother bought this table when this place was a walled colonial town.”
    Jean Jacques’ heavy shoulders shook with silent laughter. “Don’t saysuch a thing to a shopkeeper, Monsieur,” he said. But then serious, he wrote some figures on a slip of yellow paper. Rudolphe paid it at once from his pocket.
    Later, that Sunday afternoon, Marcel, entering the Lermontant house for dinner, saw that small table nestled between the heavily draped French windows. A brass lamp stood in the center of it casting a loving light on the curved drawer, its shining key, the tapered legs. “And this was made,” he whispered, approaching it. He touched the surface which felt like wax. “Made!”
    “Marcel!” Rudolphe snapped his fingers behind him. All the room was filled with things that were made, made by someone with chisels, saws, the pot of glue and the bottles of oil, and the soft cloths and the tiny pegs, and hands that felt the object all over as if it were living, breathing, growing into its perfect shape.
    “Sometimes, my boy,” Rudolphe whispered to him as he reached for his shoulders, “you have the perfect vacant stare of the village idiot!”
    It was easy between them, Marcel and Jean Jacques. There was never any explanation for Marcel’s being there. Time and again he slipped in while the man worked, or talked with his customers, or seated at his desk, filled that ledger not with long columns of figures but neat sentences, paragraphs, which he wrote with quite rapid dips of his pen. Never was much said. There was no need. But Marcel burned with the one question he could not ask, how did you do it, how did you learn all of this yourself?
    From a picture in a book, Jean Jacques made a rounded and gilded fern stand for the rich Celestina Roget who was so delighted she clapped her hands like a child, and visiting the parlor of an old white woman in the Rue Dumaine he came back to make three more chairs for her to match the one and only that had survived the crossing from France. With knotted fingers sometimes he threaded his own needle and bound the edges of the flowered damask before he stretched it to fit the rounded seat of a settee. But how did it all begin, was Tante Josette right? She had said it with such authority, and gone home again to
Sans Souci
, her plantation in the Cane River country, before Marcel could catch her alone.
    No matter if he had teachers really. What had enabled him to learn? What had removed this man from the commonplace and given him the gift of spinning straw into gold?
    Learning for Marcel was agony at times. It was only after a long tutelage with his friend Anna Bella and hard work in Monsieur De Latte’s class that the magnificent world of books had opened to him, and even now he struggled, against all his