Crescent City by Belva Plain

what I imagined America to be! I thought—” Then he stumbled. Even if he had been more fluent in the language, he would have stumbled. “I thought it would be all clean, all different …” Romantic images filtered through his head: spruce forests, virginal and aromatic; heroic new cities, all of them possessed of some vague virtue and gladness. He scarcely understood himself what it was that he had expected, only that it was certainly not what he had found. He would have liked to explain his sensation: that things were closing in on him, that he could not bear to live where life was stratified and each man had his “place” forever and ever. But instinct told him that neither of these men would understand. Worse yet, they would mock. Already Sylvain’s subtle smile had broadened to frank amusement. The sardonic eyebrows raised themselves into perfect semicircles of disdain.
    “America isn’t what you expected? What do you want to do? Go back to that mudhole in Europe? Damn you!” Ferdinand cried, he who almost never cursed.
    “I don’t want that, either,” the boy said vehemently.
    “Well, what do you want? Make up your mind! You’re fifteen years old, a young man. You ought to know what you want, dammit!”
    “A minute ago you said I was a child.”
    “What are you trying to do, trip me up? I won’t stand for this, David. I haven’t said this before, but you might as well know: You’ve been a trial to me. I’ve tried to overlook things and build something between us, but you seem bent on preventing it. It’s sad, I tell you, terribly sad, when all I wanted was to bring us together, and now all you seem to want is to quarrel with me.”
    “I don’t want to quarrel, Papa. It’s just that I feel—I feel that I won’t ever fit in here!”
    “Will you lower your voice! You’ll upset the women. Look, you’ve frightened the child already with your shouting.”
    For Miriam now stood in the doorway, looking from one to the other. And stricken, David remembered how she feared loud, angry argument, how she had used to stick her fingers in her ears and run from the house.
    Pelagie drew her outside again. “Come away, Miriam. It’s nothing. Just men talking. It’s nothing.”
    “Maybe it would be bearable,” David said, “if you at least saw how wrong you are and would try to change things. Let all the servants go free and join those—what did you call them, abolitionists?”
    Sylvain coughed and looked at Ferdinand. His look said: He’s your son, are you going to permit this?
    Ferdinand stood up. “Fool’s talk! Ignorant and dangerous! Dangerous! Keep opening your mouth like that and none of us will be accepted in any respectable house between here and Richmond, Virginia. Now,get this in your head, David, I’ll have no more of it. You’ll have to promise me that there’ll be no more of it, or else—” The father trembled and finished, “Or else you can’t stay here.”
    David also trembled. But the great tide swept over him, pulling him with it. “Then, I suppose I can’t stay here,” he said very low.
    Ferdinand paced. He smashed his fist into his open palm. “Was ever a father so bedeviled?” he demanded of Sylvain, who did not answer. He whirled upon David. “What do you want? What’s to become of you?”
    “I can work. I can go north where the abolitionists are. Yes, I’ll work. I’m strong.”
    “Work? What in blazes can you do, do you think?”
    “I don’t know. I can find something. You did.”
    “I did, did I? You want to do what I did? Tramp the miles with a bundle of gewgaws for sale? Is that what I brought you from Europe for, so you can begin all over again? No, dammit, you’ll start where I left off! You’ll go to school or you’ll go back to Europe! As sure as I’m standing here, you will.”
    “Papa, I’ll go north to study. You said I might.” A lump formed in David’s throat. A lump of anger and fright. With enormous effort he swallowed it. “That