A Deadly Paradise (16 page)

Ciao Amore
,

Jarvinia

APRIL 1, 1946
—
Dear Queenie,

Of course I received your letters, all ten of them. It was your original letter that got Annemarie sent down to the scullery, so blame yourself if I don’t write that often. Besides, I’m sick again. I was in the infirmary for two weeks—my cough is worse. Last night I had blood all down my gown, and writing is so fatiguing.

Your mother could sit on the right side of the Almighty compared to mine. So what if she walks around all day talking to herself and wringing her hands like Lady Macbeth? Mine couldn’t care less if I live or die, so please don’t ask me to send pity. If she’s so annoying, send her away.

Can you really come to visit? Are the borders open again for regular people to travel? I would like that so much, dear Queenie. Sorry for my sulks before, but I need love and comfort, and delicious, delicious Venetian goodies: bonbons, marzapani, petit-fours, cannoli, truffles, and lovely, lovely cream puffs! You know what I like. Please, please come, Queenie, and bring a basketful of wonderful things to eat. I need fattening up, I look like a maypole only not so festive.

Queenie, I’m afraid I’m going to die. Please come.

Jarvinia

DECEMBER 9, 1946
—
Dear Queenie,

It’s been forever, I know. We had such a wonderful time when you visited in the spring, and I never wrote to thank you. Bad Jarvinia! But when I’m feeling good, I don’t want to spend my days indoors writing letters and then trying to bribe someone to mail them. Yes, I remember what you said in April, but I don’t want to write letters that Ursie reads even if it makes you happy. It’s my happiness that counts. I’m the one who’s sick!

No, I’m not better and that’s why I’m writing. I’m leaving for England right after the New Year. Fritz is in England, but without my mother. She’s still in Johannesburg and even sicker than I am, coughing and spitting up blood all the time. He says her skin is white like parchment with her bones shining through, and that she’s more beautiful than ever. That should make her happy, she’s always wanted to play Camille. She never let up on me about my weight. Remember the time I brought cream puffs for our tea and she tossed them into the canal? Speaking of which, I’d beg you to post me some if they weren’t perishable. Fritz read about a new treatment, a miracle drug, and traveled to England to see if it can cure her, but the doctors tell him it’s too late. It’s in her spine and she can’t sit up for more than fifteen minutes, and she certainly can’t travel to England.

Dr. Rossi says my TB—there, I finally said it—is still in my lungs and the doctors in England have agreed to treat me: those lovely twenty-pound notes. Fritz is going back to Johannesburg to be with my mother, but he’s arranged for a cousin of his to look after me and settle me into the hospital when I arrive in London. I should have told him to tell my mother that Dr. Rossi is very pleased with my bovine peasant’s body. It’s probably what’s kept me alive so long, but I know Fritz won’t tell her. He cares more about her than me, although that’s never stopped him from fondling my breasts and other naughty parts. Mother without breasts daughter obliges.

I don’t have an address where you can reach me, but I’ll write you when I’m settled. I don’t know what will happen to me. Fritz’s mother was English and his grandfather was a Lord Chamberlain, or did he empty chamberpots for a lord? Can’t remember. So perhaps he’ll return to England and pay for my university. I’m thinking Oxford. He owes me at least Oxford for all those free squeezes.
Ciao Amore
,

Jarvinia

AUGUST 1, 1947
—
Dear Queenie,

Your letter finally found me. Amazing things, post offices. I know I promised to send my address, but I was so busy with my treatment and London, which is very exciting, although the English are pigs. And now Fritz has returned. My mother died in February and Fritz says she called out for me at the end. Probably wanted someone to light her cigarette. Fritz says I’m a bitch and I should stop saying such things. Am I a bitch, Queenie? You know me better than anyone, certainly better than my mother did.

She didn’t leave me any money. Fritz says she didn’t have any! He’s agreed to put me through Oxford with a living allowance, but after that he says I’m on my own. Catch that happening! He made this promise while we were lying naked in bed smoking cigarettes after coitus interruptus. No more bastards in this family, thank you very much. Fritz does love his little Jarvinia, although she’s not so little any more. Which is my good news.

I’m cured! No cough, no blood, no fatigue. No anything. Oh wonderful, wonderful streptomycin! Six months of doctors touching and poking and prodding and never a by-your-leave when asking me to remove my clothes. “Let’s just take a look, Jarvinia.” The next time someone says “Let’s just take a look,” I’ll strike a blow for all women and give him a black eye.

Do you hear me, Queenie? Cured! It’s my favorite word, and I plan to use it twice a day for the rest of my life. But with the blessings of Our Eternal Savior (do record that those early morning hours in chapel weren’t wasted), I infected Fritz before the magical cure date and he’ll experience a little of what I’ve suffered in the last five years. I’ve had to promise to spend the long vacations with him, and you know what that means!

I’m accepted into Somerville College and will go there in October. I plan to finish my course of study in three years. And then? Perhaps Venice, perhaps Germany. The English don’t like me.
Bloody Kraut spy
someone called me yesterday, and I returned the favor. Cultural morons! It’s going to be difficult to stick it out for three years. It rains and rains and rains and the food is bloody awful and absolutely no beautiful pictures. They talk of Gainsborough and Reynolds with the same awe that we speak of Titian and Tintoretto. And no America room. Can you imagine?

Queenie, if you miss me so much, why don’t you join me at Somerville? It’s full of sexually repressed women. Read
Gaudy Night
by Dorothy Sayers if you don’t believe me. I know you won’t, though, too busy making pots of money—you greedy little Venetian. Write me care of Somerville College.
Ciao Amore,

Jarvinia

OCTOBER 10, 1949
—
Dear Queenie,

I can’t believe it’s three years since we were together, in that little hotel in Ascona. I coughed all day and we made love all night. You must have the lungs of a horse not to have contracted TB! Remember the cream puffs? They were sour, but I ate them anyway. And the nosy little man who came to our door three times:
Ladies, you make too much noise. The
other guests can’t sleep.
I almost smothered you with a pillow to keep you from laughing so hard.

Today the college handed me a cache of letters from you, two years’ worth. I forgot to write that I changed my name to Baudler. Fritz adopted me, with a little persuasion, and I’m now using his last name. After the papers were official, he said, cryptically, “I should have done this before your mother died.” I asked him directly if he’s my biological father and he said “No,” but he’s lying, the incestuous old bugger! But I suppose you could say the same of me, as we’re still fucking on the long vacations, and I’m actually enjoying it. Not quite like Christmas dinner together, but it does have a family feel. I noticed for the first time that we have the same feet. My mother called them peasant feet, but since he’s actually the grandson of a Lord Chamberlain, I’m now your equal,
contessa
, although I suppose in the First Republic you now have to settle for Queenie. Your father must be turning in his grave.

I can’t write any more, as I’m flying out to a party with a junior officer in the Foreign Service. He’s wild about my golden tresses, so you two have something in common.
Ciao, ciao,

Jarvinia

DECEMBER 27, 1949
—
Dear Queenie,

Take a seat first, and then guess who’s married. Me! My junior officer—not so junior with his last promotion—and I got married on Christmas Day. I looked wonderfully bridal, dressed in white lace and pearls. I carried a white prayer book and a spray of white roses, and Fritz gave me away. The dear sisters would be horrified if they knew. We’re married in the Church of England. Don’t you look horrified either! You know I don’t believe in all that heaven-and-earth stuff.

We’re leaving for Germany right after the New Year. Jerry—sorry forgot! Gerald St. Clair, or Jerry to everyone except his mother.
Gerald, dear, give me your arm.
Gerald, dear, I hate your wife.
She does, you know. She told me two days before we married that she could see right through me, which I thought rather amusing, as I’ve gained two stone in the last year.

I missed you, Queenie dear. In my mind you were my maid of honor, although in reality it was Jerry’s sister. Also a prig like the mother! Anyway, as my maid of honor you’re supposed to give me something for my hope chest. I’m thinking Murano glass, red goblets with just the slightest touch of gold on the stems—like the ones your father used at our last Christmas dinner. I’m not sure what our address will be, so I’ll have to write in a few weeks when we get to Germany. Germany is Jerry’s posting for the next few years. I wish it were Venice.

Even better than sending them by post, why don’t you come and visit. It’s been so long and I miss you.

Ciao amore.

Jarvinia

I’LL FINISH READING them later, she thought, closing her eyes. She had visited Jarvinia six months later with a dozen Murano goblets carried tenderly by hand. Jerry had been delighted with them and with her. “I want to know Jarvinia better. You’re her oldest friend. You can help me understand her,” he’d whispered when Jarvinia was in the kitchen mixing drinks. He had been awkward and looked everywhere but at her when he asked if Jarvinia had had any love interests when she and Queenie were girls together in Venice. Queenie had answered “Absolutely not,” reminding him that they had been schooled in a convent.

In the days when Jerry was at work and Jarvinia didn’t have a lunch date, they made love, but Queenie knew that she was just a side interest, that Jarvinia had someone else in addition to Jerry and her, and she wasn’t sure whether that someone else was a man or a woman. Jerry and Jarvinia had taken her to all the embassy parties, where Jarvinia flirted indiscriminately. To anyone who viewed sex as a strictly heterosexual affair, it would appear that Jarvinia was only interested in men, but Queenie knew differently. There were a number of women with whom Jarvinia flirted, one in particular who she spoke to at the beginning and at the end of every party, a White Russian with dramatic brows and flaming red hair. Queenie realized that the peacock had moved beyond the sparrow.

She opened her eyes and collected the letters, in precise order, tied them with parcel string, and returned them to the casket. Tomorrow or the next day, after she’d finished rereading them all, she would burn them; they served no purpose any longer, not with Jarvinia dead and her own death imminent. It was better, as Jarvinia might say, that the peasants should not read them. Whenever Jarvinia was angry—and it didn’t matter at whom—she’d call the person a peasant. For that reason alone, Nannetta, who was a peasant, had hated Jarvinia, although she’d had other reasons to hate her as well. Nannetta had been completely delighted when Queenie told her, after her return from Germany, that Jarvinia’s mother was Polish, probably the daughter of peasants, and that Jarvinia herself was a bastard.

“
But the peasants—how do the peasants die?
” Jarvinia had asked her one day when they were still at school, as they walked back to their classrooms from chapel. Jarvinia had the oddest habit of reeling off obscure quotations at inopportune moments. “Do you think Tolstoy meant that we are all peasants at the time of death, and that we’ll all sit in the same heaven? I don’t want to sit in the same heaven with Nannetta,” she’d declared spitefully. Queenie was quite sure that Jarvinia need have no fear of that happening.

6

JULIET HAD SETTLED Marcella in for the night, given Nannetta her instructions for the morning, and now had time for herself. When that odd moment of peace arrived and she was alone, she would go into the visitors’ salon, select one of the hard chairs from against the wall, and place it directly in front of Grazia’s portrait. She’d spent her young life sitting on hard chairs at home or on wooden benches in the missionary school, so sitting on a hard chair was never a punishment, and it kept her back straight. The first time they’d met, Jarvinia had remarked on Juliet’s beautiful back: a dancer’s back, she had said.

Juliet had wanted to be a dancer and, until the age of thirteen, she’d danced everywhere. On her way to school, while the other children walked or skipped across the fields, she jumped, and leaped, and sprang into the air like a young gazelle. Her mother, who was easily irritated, would yell at her: “Juliet Mudarikwa, you stop showing off.” Her mother was the cook on a tobacco farm in the southeast of Zimbabwe, and she was teaching Juliet to cook and to forget all that nonsense about being a dancer. None of the workers on the farm admitted to being Juliet’s father, and that was probably true, as everyone supposed he must have been a white man, or at the very least someone of mixed race. The last white man on the farm, other than Luke McDougal, the farm’s owner, was the foreman who’d hailed from Australia and who’d returned home after his African adventure, and that had happened before Juliet was born.

Juliet’s skin was luminescent, the color of the copper bowl that her mother used to whip egg whites into shape. Other than the two pink-and-white children of Luke McDougal, Juliet was the only child on the farm with skin lighter than her mother’s and that of the other farm workers. In the missionary school, when no adults were around to overhear, the other children tortured Juliet for being different, and while she was still quite young, not even seven, she decided that she would become a great dancer and live among people who looked exactly like her. But that wasn’t possible, as Juliet, who was quite beautiful, looked like no one else in the world. Her beauty caused her undoing. When she was thirteen, on her way home from school, walking alone, she was raped by a worker from a neighboring tobacco farm. She didn’t tell her mother, who had beaten her too many times for walking alone, and there was no one else to tell. She miscarried at four months and nearly died. When she was finally permitted out of bed, she was beaten by her mother to within an inch of her life. Her mother had been baptized a Christian, and she took the fourth and sixth commandments very seriously.