Eden Burning (16 page)

When at last they stood up, it was quite dark.

“Shall we come here again tomorrow?” he asked.

“But it’s a working day, isn’t it? You have to travel so far.”

He trembled. “Why? Don’t you want to? Are you afraid?”

She laid her head on his shoulder. “No. I was only thinking of you.”

So they will merge to make a whole. A serious man will respond to a sensual woman and to her delights, whether they be in a bauble or the music of rain or—or in himself. She grasps life with both hands and will teach him her way. While, he, born earnest, will draw her up to form, out of her young, captivating spirit, new tenderness and new strength.

   Agnes was angry. He had taken Désirée to meet her in Sweet Apple one Sunday afternoon.

“You’re not going to marry that girl?”

“I haven’t asked her yet, but I’m sure she will.”

“My God, but the older you get, the more stupid you get!”

“I can’t think what you mean!”

“You can’t think? Well, look at her! A dark girl like that! A smart man marries up! He marries light, to improve himself and his children, don’t you at least know that?”

He controlled himself. “I don’t understand you, Maman. After all you have told me about the years of slavery, you can still talk like this?”

“What has that got to do with it? You have a way of twisting what I say, you always do.”

“It’s you who are twisting, you who’re so confused that—”

But she had gone out, slamming the door.

He took a sheet of paper and wrote out something he had seen once in a history book about the slavery era.

He shouted, “What the hell am I?”

He looked in the mirror. Quadroon? Mustee? God damn! Who was the man who had fathered him? Three generations away from slavery, Agnes was, and still the confusion was entrenched, the pride and the shame intertwined like a nest of snakes. A stubborn woman who would not, simply would not, talk.

And yet, what difference would it make if she did talk?

In a burst of rage he threw his hairbrush across the room, splitting the handle of the brush and making a dent on the door.

Agnes opened the door. “I’m sorry,” she said.

She stood there, breathing hard, holding on to the wall. For the first time he noticed her knobby, arthritic fingers. A lonely old woman, nearing the end of a lonely and limited existence. What could she know? His anger dissolved.

“I’m wrong,” she said. “Go ahead and do what you want. Whatever makes you happy.”

He knew she only meant it in part. Her feelings would not change. So this would have to do.

   “You’re marrying Clarence Porter’s daughter? A beautiful girl,” said Dr. Mebane. “Not radical like her father, I hope? No offense meant.”

“No. She isn’t interested in public affairs.”

“That’s good. A man’s woman. When will it be?”

“As soon as she will.” He had to have her. Suppose someone else were to come along one afternoon while he was away in Gully? He went cold at the thought.

“Why don’t you wait a little? Nicholas will be home in a year and the two of you could have a little fun together. Spend a week in Barbados. Jamaica, even. Enjoy yourself. There’s time before you need to tie yourself down.”

“It’s not being tied down when you want it,” Patrick said gently.

“I just hope you’re sure of your own mind. There are a lot of girls around.”

He meant, You could do better.

“I’m sure,” Patrick said.

Clarence Porter was happy. “I knew it all along. I could tell the first day you laid eyes on her. And she on you.”

They were to live in Clarence’s other house at the top of the street. The present tenants were to move and Clarence would paint the place fresh for them.

“I’m so relieved we’ll live in town,” Désirée said. “I never liked the country.”

“You couldn’t live where I am now, anyway. I’ll just get up an hour earlier each day and drive.” He had bought a wheezing car, third or fourth hand. “We’ll have to get a ring for you at Da Cunha’s.”

“Da Cunha’s, Patrick? Where are you going to get enough money for that?”

“Don’t worry, it won’t be anything very large! But my mother sold a piece of land she had in Martinique and gave me some money a few years ago. Enough for my education and a bit left over.”

“Then maybe we can have a better house of our own sometime.”

“I don’t know. Teachers don’t earn much.”

“Perhaps you won’t always be a teacher.”

He scarcely heard her.

   They were married at the Anglican Church of the Heavenly Rest on the ocean side of St. Felice. It was a small Gothic building that might well have stood at a crossroads in the Cots wolds, except for the coconut palms along the edge of the graveyard and the breaking surf on the shore two hundred feet below the cliff. For fifty years now it had been more or less abandoned by the planter families who had built it, the advent of the automobile having made it easy to attend cathedral services in Covetown.

“But I would like to be married there,” Patrick had told Father Baker. “I love the age of it, the way it has rooted itself like a tree.”

The little group—the bride and groom, with Clarence Porter and Agnes—arrived ahead of Father Baker. They wandered along the nave. The filtered light of stained-glass colors, amber, rose, and lavender, lay on ancient, pale memorials, on florid script chiseled into stone.

In the dampness of the unused building lichen had begun to creep, obliterating the old words.

“Francis,” mused Désirée. “And François. The same family, do you suppose?”

“It is the same,” Agnes said.

Father Baker came. Patrick took Désirée’s hand and they went to the altar. Through the poetry of the marriage service scraps of thought went in and out of his head: I wish Nicholas
were here today with us…. It’s not really Gothic, those are Corinthian pilasters…. I don’t want to forget what he is saying.

He did remember kissing Désirée and shaking Father Baker’s hand. He remembered the creak of the old door as they went out from dimness into light and drove away.

They circled the island, making a slow trip back to Covetown. On a hill where a little river curved to the sea he stopped the car to look at the view.

“See over there,” said Désirée.

A columned house stood alone on the slope. Not large, it still had a simple grandeur.

“Imagine the view from those windows!” she cried.

“Perfect, I should say.”

“It’s called Eleuthera. It’s empty now. I don’t know why.”

“Eleuthera! It seems to me I was there once.”

“What would you have been doing there?” she asked him curiously.

“I don’t know. Perhaps I only imagine I was.”

“Oh, I should love to live in a house like that. Wouldn’t you?”

He laughed. “I assure you I never give it a thought, my darling.”

“Perhaps you could have lived in a place like that someday if you hadn’t married me.”

“Why, what on earth do you mean?”

“Who knows how far you could go? Without me you could join the Crocus Club, for instance.”

He leaned over and kissed her. “I have absolutely no desire to join the Crocus Club. And this is no talk for a wedding day, or ever.”

The sweet night fell in a jalousied room above the garden of Cade’s Hotel.

She woke once from half sleep. “Have you ever had a white girl?” she asked him.

“No,” he said, astonished.

“Why not?”

“I never wanted to.” He could have had them, prostitutes, near-prostitutes, and once the sister of a Cambridge Fellow. Piqued by curiosity about him, no doubt. A novelty, he’d have been.

“Funny,” Désirée said.

“Not funny at all. Anyway, I don’t want you to talk like that.”

He drew her to him. The dark, dark beauty of her! Warm perfume of windblown grass and sun, fragrance of night, of woman and earth! He had it all, all he would ever want, this one only, no other. Flowers, moist on a ledge in the unexpected corner of a desert. The blue eye of a lake on a towering mountain. Landfall after a long, long voyage.

Ruin, on the day it descends, is actually no more sudden than is disease. The rot that is cancer was not created in the instant of discovery; slowly, unrecognized or only unacknowledged, it has long been making its secret way. And so it is with the secret disappointment in a marriage or with a financial collapse.

For some time Francis had been aware of trouble behind the closed door of the inner office. With hints, frowns, questions, and long silences, his father had revealed that something of consequence was happening within the company. It had to do with an enormous, risky loan, a grandiose project and unreliable people—in short, a gamble. Canneries and food processing were involved; as news leaked out and auditors, hastily summoned, moved in and out of the rooms pulling papers from file drawers, it came to be spoken of by some sardonic underlings (although never where they thought
Francis could hear, for after all, he was a partner’s son) as the Tomato Scandal.

It was as the Tomato Scandal that it burst at last onto the front page of the morning papers. In his newly furnished dining room above Central Park, Francis read: RESPECTED FIRM TO GO UNDER, S.E.C. INVESTIGATORS REVEAL.

My God! How had his father allowed this to happen? And did it really merit a two-column headline? At the same moment he knew it was naïve of him not to understand that the failure of such a house as Luther, Baines and Company was front page news, indeed. He broke out into a sweat.

“What is it, Francis? You look as if you’d been struck by lightning,” Marjorie said.

“I have been.” He handed the paper to his wife.

While she read, he watched her. They had been married for only eight months, and he was still not over his surprise at having won her, who was so smooth and assured, so different from himself. He was still not accustomed to the sight of her, fresh and animated as she was even in the mornings, wearing her silk robe and with her short dark hair perfectly in place. Her lips moved as she read—he always teased her about lip reading—and he wondered what she could be thinking about this failure of the family which she had so recently joined. She had very high concepts about duty and honor and status. Her own family was not rich, but it had distinction, and she was, he knew, very proud of that. He had met her at a cousin’s party. Funny, he hadn’t even wanted to go that night, either. But his father had been distressed when he had mentioned that he might not go, so he had gone, and there she had been.

His father had been distressed about him for more important reasons, too. He was thirty years old and he still hadn’t done what was expected of him, namely, joining the firm. Instead, he had gone to South America with the Peace Corps; he’d taught school on an Indian reservation in New Mexico; he’d worked as supervisor on a dairy farm in upstate New
York. He’d embarked on a master’s degree in history. That’s what he’d been doing when he met Marjorie.

A tall girl with magnificent dark eyes, she had a cool, quiet manner that said “quality.” But it had been her voice that drew him. Funny, to be so moved by a simple thing like a voice, so that you kept coming back and back and couldn’t stay away. It was like listening to the rush of water or staring into flames. Even her laughter soothed him, registering somewhere, he estimated, in the middle strings of a harp—he knew little about musical instruments—it soothed him, giving promise of tender and exquisite delights.

He had almost come to blows with his cousin.

“She’s a cold fish, Francis. Not your sort. Can’t you see she’s not your sort?”

His cousin hadn’t understood! He had common tastes; naturally, Marjorie’s classic calm, her classic reserve, would baffle him. As for himself, he was entranced. She was like no girl he had ever known.

It had been only sensible, upon marrying her, to go into his father’s firm. After all, he’d had his years of leafy wilderness and exotic places; having Marjorie meant, of course, supporting her. So he had been well aware of his good fortune in being able to embark so easily on the new life; to have this dining room with a view of the park where on Sundays they went bicycling or skating together, this bedroom where they lived their lovely nights.

Marjorie laid the paper down. “We ought to go over there,” she said.

“Over where?”

“To your parents. It’s only right that we should be with them.”

Yes, of course it was. Marjorie would see that.

The scene in the dining room of his parents’ house was the same as the one they had left. Coffee cups had been shoved aside to make room for the spread newspaper. His mother was reading it; Margaret was dribbling the milk from her
cereal spoon. His father, who was standing at the window, turned around when Francis and Marjorie came in.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?” Francis asked gently.

“You couldn’t have done anything.”

That was true enough. More to the point, he wondered what he could do now. He sat down beside his mother and put his hand on her arm.

Richard observed the gesture. “It’s your mother I feel for,” he said. “I thought we could get out of it quietly. But the damn newspapers—”