Eden Burning (12 page)

With their children he was good-natured, patient even with poor Margaret’s sticky hands and silly laughter; proud of the other daughters and of Francis, the precocious, lively boy. How had they begot such a boy? There was nothing of Richard in him except for fair hair and a certain way of smiling.

And she thought, sitting across from Agnes’s soft, penetrating gaze,
We never talk about anything true except the children. We have never entered together into the heart of anything.
But it didn’t matter. Even the “other women” really didn’t matter. She had given her life to the rearing of
children, much as a botanist concentrates on his experiments, the temperature of the greenhouse, and the chemistry of the soil.

She wanted, suddenly, to talk about Francis. “My son, my son Francis reminds me of my father.”

“You can remember him?”

“A little, I think. I remember the stories he read to me. His voice was beautiful.”

He was a long, tired shape under white bedclothes, lying in a room where the shutters were always closed against the glare of light. A black hearse, pulled by two sweating horses with black plumes on their heads, carried him away.

“He died bravely. He suffered and never complained.”

“Père always said the Francises were tough. He said I was, too, even though I didn’t think I was. He said it makes life bearable, that toughness.”

“Your grandfather certainly had it,” Agnes said grimly. “You know what he did to Clyde. Not that it wasn’t to be expected, a colored boy—”

“You think that was the reason? That he wouldn’t have done the same to anyone?”

Agnes smiled. “No. He had hatred, Miss Tee. He only thought he hadn’t.”

Tee was silent. Clyde, his life and his death, but most of all his death, must be stifled and buried under layers of secrecy and trembling.

“Still,” Agnes reflected, “I don’t curse him for what he did. There’s murder in every one of us. I know I would kill for Patrick if I had to.”

The silence thrummed and hummed.

“Tell me, Miss Tee, do you ever see your mother?”

She wet her dry lips. “They’ve been here twice to visit.”

“But you? You never want to go there?”

“No, never.” Again the silence hummed. In a moment the humming would burst in Tee’s head, would roar and crash into a scream. And laying her fingers on her quivering mouth,
she looked past Agnes’s head into the mirror that minutes ago had reflected only a pastel mosaic of flowers and books, but now thrust back into the room a fearful face, collapsed in a repression of tears.

She ran to Agnes. A shoulder received her; a hand soothed her back. She spoke, muffled, into the shoulder.

“I can’t afford to cry.”

“I know. Otherwise, I’d say ‘cry it out, you’ll feel better.’ But you can’t dare to.”

Tee raised her head. “I’ve been lying to you. No, not lying, either. It’s just—I don’t know how I feel. I never do. I don’t really know what the truth about myself is. Oh, I do want to know what he’s like, I do! And still I’m afraid to know. Afraid because—because of what he is. Forgive me, Agnes.”

“You don’t have to say that. You think I’ve lived all these years in the world without knowing a few things about it?” There was grieving in the voice, voice of an old woman who has seen too much. “All right, I’ll tell you more. He’s a quiet boy, gentle, thinks about things. Half the time I can’t figure out what he’s thinking. Ambitious, too, only it’s not money he wants. And proud. Light as he is, he’s proud of being black. Prouder than some who’re coal black. Queer, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes.” Sad and queer.

“And is he happy, Agnes?”

“He has friends. People like him. Yes, I’d say he’s as happy as anyone…. I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s hard to describe all these years in a few words. But he’s been the best part of my life, he has.”

“I remember the day you took him. I wanted to look at him—and I didn’t want to. And I’ve been ashamed of the not wanting to, ever since.”

“There wasn’t anything to be ashamed of! You were barely sixteen and frightened to death. You had plenty of courage, though, never think you didn’t.”

“I often think there are two kinds of courage. There’s the kind that holds on, just quietly endures, has a plan and clings to it. That’s my kind, that’s what my life is. But the greater courage is being able to risk, just plunge off the path into the unknown. And that I’m not able to do.”

“Come out with the truth, you mean.”

Tee nodded. Suddenly she was aware that she was breathing hard, winded as though she had been running.

“You’d be a fool to do that. And I’d say it even if I didn’t want Patrick for my own. You’d be exchanging him for all this.” Agnes waved her arm at the room.

“You know I don’t care about things that much. I can get along with much less than this, Agnes!”

“The four children? The husband?”

“The children,” Tee said, very low.

“I see. That’s how it is! You should have had more. You should have had a man to love all your life.”

Tee’s smile was faint. “So should you.”

“I don’t need it as much as you do. I never did. You had a heap of loving in you from the time you could walk. You were born like that.”

“I loved you, didn’t I, Agnes? You and Père. And now I’ve got Francis. I wish you could see him. Everything you said about—Patrick—I could say about him. He’s quiet, gentle, curious …”

From below stairs came sounds of doors and feet. Agnes stood and put on her hat.

“I’d better leave before somebody comes and gives you questions to answer. But you will take care of that?”

“I will. And I hope—I wish everything that’s good for him. I’ll think, somewhere, making his way in the world, there’s this boy who—” She stopped.

Agnes took Tee’s hand between both of hers. It was an old gesture, long forgotten, now suddenly recalled.

“Agnes? After you’ve left I’ll think of so much more I
should have said. About everything you’ve done for me and what you are and how I love you.”

“You don’t have to tell me all that. I know.”

They went downstairs to the door. On the threshold Agnes turned back, her gaze directed past Teresa into the hall, dim now in the fading afternoon.

“I see things. You remember how I could always see things.”

“What things? What do you mean?”

“He’ll come back into your life, Patrick will. Not through me, no, never through me! And maybe not into your life, I’m not sure. But into your children’s. Yes. I see that clearly.”

Teresa made no answer. Again the primitive, she thought, reassuring herself. Superstition, out of Africa. That, too, was part of Agnes. But her hands shook so that she could barely close the door and slide the bolt.

   Later Francis asked, “Who was that colored woman with you this afternoon? I passed your room when I came upstairs.”

“My old nursemaid. I guess that’s what you’d call her.”

“From St. Felice? What was she doing here?”

“She has a cousin working somewhere nearby, I think.”

“I’m writing about St. Felice for economics, did I tell you? All about sugar prices and the competition of European beet sugar. People are always curious—even my teacher was—when I tell them my mother grew up on St. Felice.”

“There’s nothing so strange about it,” Teresa said patiently.

“Well, they think it’s all pirates and volcanoes, I suppose. But you know, when I read that diary of the first François, it was thrilling, actually.”

Actually
was the fad word this season at school. The youthfulness of this, the innocent boast of the basketball letter on his sweater, these as well as the two parallel lines across a forehead only sixteen years old—touched her sharply. She wanted to respond to his enthusiasms.

“I suppose, too, they think we’re all sugar millionaires?”

“Oh, of course! And,” Francis added, somewhat shyly, “they’ve got a lot of ideas about interracial sex. But I tell them”—he laughed—“I tell them we’re all white, there’s none of that in our family.”

She was aware that her hands flew to knot themselves in her lap, then moved to twine on the dressing table among the combs and powder boxes.

“I mean to go there someday, even if you won’t go.”

“It’s not as romantic as you think it is. You’d be disappointed. And”—prodding gently—“you’d do better to concentrate on getting into Amherst year after next, since that’s where you want to go.”

“I’ll do that, don’t worry,” Francis said with his father’s stubborn, charming smile.

Of course he would. He was a scholar. And Agnes’s voice sounded in her head:
A scholar. Never a minute’s trouble…

“You’re frowning,” Francis said.

“Am I? I didn’t mean to.”

“Things go hard with Margaret today?”

“No harder than usual.”

Francis thrust his hands into his pockets, jingling coins, as masculine a gesture, she thought, as girls’ fishing for their shoulder straps was a feminine one.

“Want me to help you get her to bed?”

“That would be nice. I am a little tired tonight, really. And she does behave better for you than for any of us.”

He looked thoughtfully at his mother. “People say you’re wearing yourself out.”

“Who says?”

“Oh, friends and Dad’s family and even the maids. Just about everybody.”

“They think I ought to put Margaret away someplace.”

“Just a special school,” he said gently, lowering his eyes.

“I wish they would all leave me alone!” she cried.

The boy was troubled. “Some people say you seem to be punishing yourself.”

“Punishing myself! For what, I ask you?”

“I don’t know, Mother.”

A punishment, she had said to Agnes.

“Dad asked me to talk to you about it again, because you won’t listen to him.” Now Francis raised his eyes. Clear, beautiful, candid eyes they were, the only ones in all the world that could
speak
to her. “I said I would, but it wouldn’t be any use. I told him you couldn’t just desert a child like that. It’s not her fault that she was born the way she was.”

“You think that, too,” she murmured.

“I think it would be easier for you to send her away. Most people would, but you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t do that to your own child.”

There was such hell in her heart! And she turned away, so that he should not see its reflection in her face.

“Shall I go bring Margaret upstairs?”

“Yes, do, please.”

Desperately she looked around the room, a room to which, as to the whole house, she had given her love, expressing it in the homely shapes of dear, familiar things: Francis’ old, stuffed bear on top of a cabinet, a photo of the girls in party dresses, a framed snapshot of her first beloved Airedale, a row of garden books. There was no comfort tonight. Shadowed, alien, the room drew back from her, the walls receding, vanishing, so that the world’s chill swept in….

Margaret shuffled at the door. “Mama?”

“Yes, darling?”

“I don’t want to go to bed.” The loose, helpless mouth puckered toward tears.

“I’ll read you a story first. I’ll read you
Peter Rabbit.”

“No, Francis read!” And the great girl, taller than her brother’s shoulder, stamped her foot.

With enormous effort Tee summoned energy. At least the tussle would be easier tonight with Francis helping.

“Come, Margaret darling.” And taking the girl’s hand, she gave a grateful smile to her son. “Sometimes I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

   When the house was quiet, she lay down. Richard would be coming home late, but she was thankful to be alone. She was often alone, he having an independent life in the brokerage house and the galleries. A faintly bitter smile touched her lips. He saw himself as a fascinating man, a financial wizard and a connoisseur of art. Yet, to be fair, he really did understand paintings.

“Anatole Da Cunha is one of the greats,” he had told her. “Wait and see, his work will be priceless after his death.” Acting upon this conviction, he had bought four of Anatole’s landscapes. “His best work comes from his memory of the Indies. But you should be able to judge, Teresa: Does it have the living spirit of home for you?”

Yes. Oh, yes! Now, between the windows, in the path of the lamplight, hung Morne Bleue; in the foreground, under an oyster-colored sky opaque with heat, lay a stretch of familiar rippling cane, twice a man’s height, and weaving through the cane a line of cutters, their black arms curved in the sway of labor like dancers on a stone frieze.

Richard had put it there for her pleasure, but she had not wanted it, had not wanted anything of St. Felice, not even Père’s books when he died, although they had sent them to her anyway, sending too, without knowing that they had—how could they know?—the click of croquet balls on the lawn, the twinkle of candles in the Catholic cemetery, and the smell of rain.

Now too, outside on the New Jersey hills, it had begun to rain, an even, pattering, all-night fall. In St. Felice the rain comes plunging, pounding the earth and ceasing as suddenly as it begins, leaving a vapor to rise from the steaming ground.

Down at the wharf when the banana ship is moored, through
the steaming wet come lines of barefoot women, bearing their loads on their heads.

“See,” Mama says, “how gracefully they walk! It’s the same as the nuns teaching you to walk with a book on your head.”

But it is not the same; the child Tee sees that clearly. It puzzles her that certain things should be so, that the heavy work is always done by blacks and that they live as they do. She goes to town with Agnes to bring some medicine to the cook’s old aunt; the hot street stinks, the gutters run foul; the house holds merely a cot and a table. Why? No one tells her. Perhaps no one can.

Père talks with pride of Cambridge, of boats on a quiet river, of choirs and Gothic arches, of
gentlemen.
How can all that merge with Covetown?

Agnes says, “This boy needs the best. He deserves it.”

Père says, “Three generations of our people have gone to Cambridge.”

Now comes the fourth, and he doesn’t know he is.

Teresa’s head tossed on the pillow. Oh Francis, Francis my son, is this the real reason why I love you so much? Too much, maybe? That I want everything for you? Is it because I need to expunge, to
wipe
that other away, to wipe all the pain away, so that I might say, Here, you are my son, my only son; I have no other and there never was another? Is that why?