Dreamers of the Day (28 page)

For the delighted Miss el-Akle and her Muslim assistant Omar, Lawrence demonstrated the rough-and-ready Bedouin dialect he had added to the literate Arabic they’d taught him ten years earlier. There were many reminiscences of his stay back in 1911. “Do you remember?” he asked. “There was snow on the beach.”

“The worst winter in years!” Miss el-Akle exclaimed. “We begged him to stay longer, Miss Shanklin, but he insisted he had to leave.”

“I was due at Carchemish,” he said simply.

“No matter how we argued, he would only say, ‘I must go, even if I have to cross the snow on a sledge!’”

He leaned over and confessed,
sotto voce,
“I got a ride from two English ladies going north in a carriage.”

“Whose little boy is this?” I asked, looking down at the small, warm bundle now blissfully asleep in my arms. And I astonished myself by asking, as well, “Is he an orphan?”

The question was translated. A short, plump woman of great dignity smiled proudly. Wearing a transparent white veil draped loosely over her graying hair, she introduced herself as Um Omar—Mother of Omar—and informed me with shining eyes that in addition to the young man who worked for Miss el-Akle, she had five other sons, and two daughters as well. The boy in my lap was her youngest.

I felt an unexpected pang but shook it off, rising to the occasion. Lillian had told me about meetings such as these, and I tried to remember the correct response to a woman’s declaration of prodigious progeny.
“Ma shallah!”
I said. The phrase meant “What Allah wills, happens!” Everyone clapped with surprise and pleasure. There was more to the formula, but I couldn’t remember the Arabic and said it in English instead: “May Allah keep them in good health.”

“Allah ichallik yahum!”
Lawrence supplied, and once more there was a round of applause for my small gesture of courtesy. “Omar,” Lawrence said then to this lady’s eldest son, “how much for Miss Shanklin, who is so learned and polite?”

Omar looked at me and shook his head. “No good,” he decided. “Too old.”

All the women participated in the howl of expected indignation, so Lawrence continued teasing. “And how much for Miss el-Akle?”

Miss el-Akle was rather younger than I, and quite beautiful. “One cow,” Omar declared judiciously. “Too old for two cows.”

“Neddy, you are incorrigible,” she said.

His eyes dancing, Lawrence continued: “Omar, I think you are mistaken, for a schoolteacher is the mother of minds, and each has many children. These ladies are worth ten camels apiece!”

“Ah, Neddy,” said Miss el-Akle affectionately. “Now you are forgiven.”

The evening went on like that until well after midnight. Reluctantly, I ceded the small, sleeping boy to Um Omar; I was surprised to notice how cold and empty my arms felt when I let him go. When I was alone in the guest room, Omar’s judgment echoed in my mind. No good. Too old. But was that true? His own mother must have given birth to the little boy when she was my age, or even older. Back in Little Italy, many of the students were the eighth or even ninth in their families, born to mothers no longer young…

That first night in Jebail, a plan began to take form, one that I hoped would change my life permanently and for the better. I grant you, it was not well thought out. In my defense, I can say only that I had lived too much in my mind, too little in my body until then. I was finished with being sensible and too old to wait much longer, but the moment I so much as thought about it, I heard that awful, inward chorus of objection:

What if he doesn’t—?

—raised you to be a lady—

What will people think?

Conscience makes cowards of us all, the Bard wrote, but these were not the voices of my own conscience. They were the voices of my mother, and her mother before her. It was time to stop listening to the inner doubts that so undermined my confidence. The world had changed. I had changed. When objections rose within me, I ignored them or dismissed them.

Oh, Agnes, you don’t want that!
Mumma said, pleading with me.

Yes, I realized. Yes, I do. I want. I want!

There was no one left alive to tell me no. Karl was waiting for me in Cairo. And he had promised me the Nile.

At breakfast the next morning, Lawrence told us all he would be driving on that day, to his meeting with Emir Abdullah. This was going to be good-bye. The thought made me very sad indeed, but before he left, Lawrence suggested a walk; naturally, I agreed.

He ushered me out the back door, walking past the school buildings and up a hill near the rear of the compound. “The American missionaries here understood that it was death for a Muslim to convert, so they didn’t proselytize,” he told me as we climbed. “They opened schools like this instead and welcomed any student who wished to attend. Simply by giving classwork in English and French, they brought important Western ideas to the region. Prosperous families began to visit Paris on holiday. For poorer ones, contact with Americans promoted emigration. There’s hardly a family in Syria without at least one son who’s been to America for a few years. Those men came home eager to reform the government here.”

All this seemed merely informative, something that an academic like Lawrence might suppose a teacher like me would find interesting. Then I saw that he had led me to the gate of the mission’s small cemetery. “It wasn’t only Syria that was affected,” he continued, leading the way along a path that wove through crowded headstones. “One of the Young Turks—secretary for the Lebanon, before the war—he told me that the progressive changes in the Turkish constitution were entirely due to the influence of the American Mission School.”

On the far side of the cemetery, we came to rest in front of a small grave surrounded by roses, near the fence on the far side. “Your sister paid a price,” Lawrence said quietly, looking down at the stone, “but I think it was good that she and Douglas came here.”

Frowning and uncertain, I looked more closely and read the inscription aloud. “Agnes Louise Cutler, beloved daughter of…”

I had forgotten: not merely that my tiny niece had been named for me, but that she had lived at all, if only for a few hours. Isn’t it terrible, how time goes by and something so important fades from memory?

Lillian had told me, of course, in a tearstained letter, when a pregnancy had ended weeks before her time. “For days I was terribly ill,” she wrote, “and did not want to go on living. Then one morning, Neddy Lawrence came up to see me. He sat at my bedside. ‘You must be feeling very miserable,’ he began, ‘as if you’d failed in the most important job in the world. You must be afraid you’ll never get over this loss, that you never should have come to Jebail.’ On and on he went, describing me to myself, clarifying all my nightmare fears by speaking them aloud, and from my point of view, not a man’s. He seemed to know everything that miscarriage could mean, even down to the shame of it. As he talked, warmth and life began to come back into me, instead of flooding out of me, as it had.”

He didn’t pretend to Lillian that nothing of importance had happened. He didn’t try to jolly her out of her grief, as others had, by telling her, “Don’t worry. You’ll have another.” She marked the beginning of her recovery from the day of his visit, and wrote, “Of course, after that, I simply loved him.”

With tears in my eyes, I turned to thank him for all he’d done for Lillian and all he’d done for me, but he had already left, noiselessly, while I stood mute, remembering these things. Down the hill, in the mission driveway, the Rolls-Royce engine roared to life. With a spurt of gravel, he was gone.

I never saw him again.

The American Mission School was a comfortable and comforting place that combined Western amenities (the London
Times
) with Eastern luxuries (oranges ripened in the mission’s own grove). Even so, with Lawrence gone, I had thoughts only for Egypt. Just under a week had passed since I’d left Karl and Rosie, but it seemed far longer. I left Jebail only a day after Lawrence’s departure.

Staring out at the turquoise sea, standing on the deck of the steamer that chugged from Beirut to Alexandria, I felt myself a seasoned traveler, a new woman ready for the new era, with no one to answer to and no one but myself to please. At the same time, I remembered what Karl had said: To be enjoyed, life must be shared. I missed our daily walks and evening conversations. I missed
him,
and yearned to share all that I had seen and heard and thought.

After the verdant beauty of the Lebanon and the bracing sea air of the voyage, Alexandria’s flies and dirt and noise were disgusting, but not shocking or frightening as they’d been a few weeks earlier. Familiar now with how to engage a taxi, how much to pay, what and when to tip, I took a cab to the train station. There I wired ahead to the Continental, apprising them of my arrival and asking that my room be prepared. On the trip south, mirages no longer delighted me, but neither was I depressed by the arid countryside along the railroad. The heat was growing more oppressive, but I ignored it. I knew where I was going, and who was waiting for me, and what I would do when I arrived.

It is a great pleasure to return to a hotel where your name is known and your reservation secure. My welcome at the Continental felt genuine, not merely businesslike, and seemed almost a homecoming. The bellman chatted with me as he carried my bags up the stairs to the same room I had occupied before. He went to put the key in the door, but it was already unlatched and opened at a touch.

When I stepped into the room, Rosie was circling on the bed, about to assume the doughnut position, nose to tail. Karl was there as well, standing near the double doors that led to the balcony. He had a bouquet in one hand, the faience vase in the other. “You’re back!” he cried. “I just found out! Why didn’t you—?”

“Those must be imported from the Lebanon,” I said, recognizing blossoms Lawrence and I had seen on the hillside.

“Yes,” Karl said. “There is a flower shop that caters to Europeans—”

Anything else we wanted to say was lost in the overwhelming onslaught of a rapturous dachshund reunion. I dropped my handbag and knelt by the bed to receive more wiggling, jubilant, delirious kisses than could possibly be counted. “Yes, I came back!” I told Rosie over and over. “I’m here, Rosie. I came back.”

“Look at her! She will make you think I locked her in a box all week,” Karl complained.

She was, in fact, sleek and well groomed, and sported a pretty new collar. Her greeting went on and on, until she and I were both worn out with it. That was when I noticed: Karl had not only had her bathed, he’d trimmed the base of her poor tail closely, like a poodle’s, leaving the long hair on its crooked end to wave like a cheery little flag.

It was a small and whimsical thing, but the impulse behind it leveled me. Karl had not merely camouflaged her deformity, he’d made it seem attractive and desirable.

If there was any hesitation left, it disappeared at that moment. I went to him, reaching up to take his face in my hands, and rose on tiptoes to kiss him on the mouth.

“It’s foolish, isn’t it?” I whispered. “Such love we squander on our little dogs.”

He took one step back and looked at me, those deep brown eyes questioning. I saw the reluctance, even then, but read it as gentlemanly and caring.

“Agnes,” he said, “are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said to him. “Oh, yes.” And to you I shall say no more.

Afterward, Rosie and a thousand questions lay between us.

I did not ask, Are you married?

I did not ask, Do you love her?

Is this the first time you’ve cheated on her?

Will you leave your wife for me?

I did not ask, Was this a mistake? Have I spoiled everything?

Only one question really mattered: Do you love me as I love you?

I did not ask.

Before dawn, Karl rose and went back to his own room. In the morning, the boy came to walk Rosie as usual. I dressed while they were gone and went down to breakfast when Rosie returned. Karl was already in the dining room and greeted me with an affable public courtesy, as though he had not left my bed two hours earlier.

Waiters and hotel staff are professionally disinterested, of course, but it seemed to me that everyone must know, that everyone was thinking,
They are lovers now.
We had arrived in the hotel dining room separately, so perhaps our secret was still safe. And if it wasn’t? To my surprise, I didn’t care.

Finished with our meal, we left with Rosie for a stroll in the garden across the street. “So,” Karl said. “Tell me about Palestine.”

I did and took pride in recognizing how much I had noticed and retained: the overheard conversations, the attitudes, the negotiations, the plans for the Palestine Protectorate and the newly proposed nation of Trans-Jordan.

At first, Karl’s questions had a certain distracted abruptness. I recognized the distance in his manner; I had seen it before, that day in the Old City. Once again, I worried that I had ruined things between us. Soon, however, he became engrossed in the information I conveyed, and to my relief, we fell back into the easy rhythm we’d enjoyed during our first days together.

He was especially interested in comments that revealed the British wariness of a French Syria, which Karl seemed to share. “But the French may do better than the British in Arab lands,” he admitted, musing. “The cultures are fundamentally similar. Frenchmen and Arabs sit around talking politics all day while their women do the work. French and Arab women are the most industrious in the world because they cannot count on men to do anything but get children on them.”

And, “The difference between the French and the English can be seen in their cooking. The English throw a head of cabbage into boiling water and then eat it. The French have a thousand sauces—each a work of art. Thus: the English have no disguises; the French disguise everything.”

But, “The French are right about one thing, Agnes. Oil is the blood of victory. There are pools of oil near Mosul—on the surface of the land, like rain puddles. They burst into flame, all on their own. The British know this, of course, and will find a way to keep the Kurdish territory for themselves. From now on, oil will be at the heart of everything that happens in the Middle East.”