Eden Burning (21 page)

His negotiations were few. Having quickly made his purchases, a doll for Margaret (who was twenty-four), three silver pins for his mother and remaining sisters, and some cigars for his father, they left the shop.

“Isn’t she a beautiful girl?” Kate asked. “I always feel so insignificant beside her. An African princess.”

“She is beautiful, but you don’t have to feel insignificant beside anyone,” he said, with automatic gallantry.

“She’s married to a schoolteacher. Her father’s a labor leader, Clarence Porter. A friend of mine.”

“Of yours and Lionel’s?” Francis inquired cautiously.

Kate laughed without mirth. “No, certainly not of Lionel’s.”

And he remembered having had, on the ride to Eleuthera some days before, an impression of melancholy, of loneliness and exclusion.

“How about lunch?” He spoke abruptly.

“I’d like that.”

“You name the place, then.”

“There is only one place outside of the country club. Cade’s Hotel on the other side of the harbor.”

From light they entered into the dimness of mahogany. A few men were seated at lunch among the dark portraits. They went out again into light and took a table in the shade of the garden wall.

Kate took her hat off. Her bright hair, released, curved about her freckled cheeks, grazing her chin. He had a sudden memory of Marjorie in the bedroom, of her clear pronouncement:
Oh, yes, she undressed you with her eyes.
He went warm with embarrassment.

But Kate’s eyes now were on the menu. “The fish is always good. It’s deep-sea, mostly. Abrecca, ballahou, salmon, grunt—”

“I’ll have salmon. It’s the only one I recognize.”

They settled back. Her hand, resting on the table, displayed a large, square emerald ring which he had not noticed before. It was in perfectly good taste—son of a flamboyant father, he was critical of excessive display—yet it did not seem to belong to this particular woman, with her simple dress and sandals, her simple manner. Marjorie would have worn it with flair and style. Too bad, because he could not afford, and probably never would afford, to buy one for her.

“You’ve really got rid of Eleuthera? A lot quicker than we expected.”

“I think so. Of course, the lawyers have all sorts of papers to go over, still.”

“So then you’ll be leaving.”

“I should go home now, but if it’s only a matter of another week or two before we get everything signed up, it’s probably wiser for me to stay and see it through.”

“You’ll come back.”

“It’s not around the corner. What makes you think so?”

Her face crinkled in a smile. “Oh, those long tides will bring you. And the wind and the clouds on Morne Bleue.”

“The clouds on Morne Bleue. I said you talk poetry, didn’t I?”

“Seriously though, there’s a lot you haven’t seen. Christmas and Old Year’s night, what you call New Year’s Eve. Do you like calypso? Steel bands?”

He nodded.

“You ought to hear the real thing at carnival time, not what they give you in tourist hotels on the big islands. Everybody ‘runs mask.’ The costumes are marvelous, and the singers make up original songs; they’ll make one up about
you if you ask. The streets are jammed. It’s a circus, a revel. You have to see it to believe it. Then on Ash Wednesday it’s all over.” She snapped her fingers. “All over, like that.”

“Well, maybe I will see it sometime.”

“How odd that your mother, who grew up here, never told you about it! But perhaps,” Kate reflected, “she might have had unhappy memories. Not getting along with a difficult mother—”

“If I have heard that once,” Francis interrupted, “I have heard it a dozen times: ‘How odd that your mother never talked about St. Felice!’”

Kate was astonished. “I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to pry.”

He was ashamed, then, of his irritability. “No,
I’m
sorry—”

She shook her head. “I do say things that are too personal, I know I do. It’s a terrible fault. I should bite my tongue for saying that about your grandmother.”

“Don’t bite it. I haven’t been fond of her either, the few times in my life that we’ve been together. I don’t suppose it’s easy being her daughter-in-law.”

“She tolerates me, barely. That’s because of my ancestry. I have excellent ancestry.” She chuckled.

“Tell me!”

“Well, we were planter families on both sides, who lost everything when the slaves were freed. By the time I came along there was no money at all. My father had been beautifully educated, in England, naturally. He was a clergyman, a good friend of Father Baker’s, who’s sort of kept an eye on me since my parents died. He’s a wonderful person, not one of those clergymen who
mouth forth.
He believes in works.”

He wanted to ask, How ever did you come to marry Lionel? but of course did not.

And just then she said, as if he had actually asked the question, “Lionel wanted to marry a girl with colored blood. He’s still in love with her. Naturally, that was impossible, so he married me.”

“I see!”

“She won’t admit it, which is shameful, although it’s not her fault that she won’t. It’s the world’s.”

“Then how do people know?”

“Everybody knows everybody else’s ancestry. And most people are related to each other if you go back far enough. For instance, I’m related to the Da Cunhas about six generations ago. One Jew, back there, and the rest Scottish and French since then.”

He wanted to know more, but she said merely, “I used to go in for genealogy when I was young. I’ve more important things to do now.”

“When you were young!” he mocked.

“I’m thirty. I’ve told you.”

“So am I.”

“You look older. I imagine you always have. You feel responsible for things, for people.”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Francis said thoughtfully.

Noontime stillness lay like a warm hand on the little garden. When they had first sat down, birds had been flickering, but now they had gone to rest and there was no sound except the drip and splash of water from the mouth of a stone cherub set into the wall.

… but of course that was impossible, so he married me.
The words kept repeating themselves in his head.

“Have I bored you with all my talk?”

Francis started. “Bored? No, keep on, please.”

“Lionel says I’m a walking storehouse of useless information.”

“Not useless to me,” he said graciously. “Tell me, those odd trees on the other side of the wall, what are they?”

“Sabliers.
Sandbox trees in English. They used to fill the seedpods with sand and use them to sprinkle parchment. Feel better, now that you know that?”

“Oh, much! Now another: What, exactly, is Creole?”

“It means someone born here who is purely European, that is, purely white. Anything else you want to know?”

“Dozens of things, but right now I’m enjoying the fish.”

… of course that was impossible, so he married me.

“I suppose you do some traveling?” he asked.

“We went abroad on our honeymoon. Lionel is serious about work, though. So we don’t go very far very often.”

“Do you feel you’re missing anything, do you feel that an island is confining?”

“Not really. People in large cities like to talk about all the things going on there—six orchestras, four ballet companies, a dozen theaters—but when you pin them down, actually most people don’t do very much of all that. I have a record collection—it’s my chief extravagance—and a good piano. Books are a problem, though. Our bookstore is small and things have to be ordered. It takes forever.”

“I’d be glad to send you stuff when I get home. Or,” he corrected himself, “Marjorie will, if you send a list.”

“That’s very good of you.”

“Tell me what else you do besides reading and playing the piano and riding your horses and the—Family Counsel, is it?”

“You’re not laughing at me?”

“Why ever should I do that?”

“Some people do, you know. I’m thought to be eccentric. Not practical.” She folded her hands under her chin. Her nails were unvarnished; only the emerald glistened. “But I see myself as very practical. You’ve seen how people live here; aside from its not being morally right, it isn’t wise to allow it to go on, because the day will come when they won’t accept these conditions anymore. People like Lionel want things to stay exactly the way they are, but even a child can see that they won’t.”

“What do you propose to do?”

“Make the changes peacefully and fairly. We need schooling.
Light industry and jobs. Housing. A decent hospital. I’ve tried to persuade Lionel to head a drive. He’s got money enough, investments in hotels in Jamaica and Barbados. He could do it.”

“But he won’t?”

“He makes halfhearted promises and does nothing. Like the government.”

“So you feel frustrated.”

“Yes, I do. That’s why I’ve got involved with family welfare. I feel I’m doing
something.
Teaching people how to feed their children. Handling problem children. They call them ‘bad,’ but it’s really that they have no fathers to lead them.”

Her eyes were prisms. As the light shifted through the leaves, they turned from violet to brown, then to a dark and austere blue.

“We also,” she said, looking directly at Francis, “we also show them how not to have more children.”

“Birth control?”

“Yes. You don’t approve?”

“If people don’t want children, they shouldn’t have them. For the children’s sake, if nothing else.”

“Some people, black and white both, are outraged. They say I do this because I can’t have children of my own.”

“That’s not only malicious, it’s stupid.”

“It’s a terrible thing to want a child and not have one,” she said softly, “but worse to have six you can’t clothe or feed.” She stood up. “You’re finished? You’ve got things to do and so have I.”

He walked with her to his car.

“Do you know,” he said, with his hand already on the door, “do you know I have been having the strangest feeling? As if I had been here before.”

“Déjà vu. It’s common.”

“I’ve always been sensitive to place: rooms, houses, streets. And not because they have beauty or grandeur or status. I’ve
been in beautiful places that were cold to me, in which I’ve known I would be miserable. And I’ve walked down a street in some ordinary little town and thought I would be happy there.”

“You feel that way here? That you would be happy?”

“Yes. Absurd, isn’t it, considering that I don’t know anything about it? And yet I feel like Brigham Young coming to Salt Lake City. There’s a monument there where he halted the wagon train, looked over the valley, and said, ‘This is the place.’”

“This particular place can be ignorant and cruel. You have to love it a lot to put up with all that.”

“That’s not what you said when you were telling about carnival and music and the rest.”

“Every coin has two sides,” she countered.

Yes, it is absurd of me, he was thinking.

“I don’t believe Marjorie would like it,” Kate said. “I see her as completely urban.”

He came to. “Of course. I’m only fantasizing. Thank you for having lunch with me.”

He did not say
Remember me to Lionel.
She gave him a little wave as he drove away.

That was impossible, so he married me.
He would have given anything to know more.

Damn! So much stupid, unnecessary waste in the world!

   Two weeks went by as they waited for word from the prospective buyer. Marjorie played tennis and went swimming. Francis, although there was no necessity to do so, went back to Eleuthera. Alone, he sat on the veranda steps, watching green lizards scurry up the columns. His eyes wandered out over fields and hills. Bananas on the hill, Kate Tarbox said. Fruit orchards. Cattle in the meadows by the river.

“I have founded a kingdom of my own,” the first François had written in that diary which had so enthralled the child
Francis, “where a pure river runs and the air is salubrious, far removed from the noisome crowding of towns.”

A kingdom of my own! The old peasant, turned pirate, turned planter, had possessed a streak of poetry as well.

He leaned his head against the railing. Let’s not get foolish, Francis, with that “streak of poetry.” Poetry doesn’t feed anyone. Yet he could feel again that old dread of the city, of the office on a shelf, the telephones and ledgers, counting money. It was all right if you were made for it, but he was not.

What, then, was he made for?

He thought, There’s nothing to go back to. I should have to make a new start. Why not make it here? Why not?

And he sat up, excitement pouring like wine. Take charge. Create something. As a painter stands before a vacant canvas, or a sculptor contemplates a lump of stone, so might a man feel here before this wasted land. He would have been ashamed, reserved as was his nature, to put these feelings into words; they would seem puerile, vague, without value in the telling, although he felt, he knew, they were neither puerile nor vague.

So he marshaled arguments. Surely it could not be
all
that difficult! Surely he could learn as well as Herbert or Lionel had learned, enough to make this pay and enough for his parents while they needed it. He would do more; he would provide a better living for the people who worked the soil, build that hospital, show what intelligence and good will can create….

So his mind ran, all that week and the next.

   “You can’t be serious,” Marjorie said. “You can’t be.”

They were getting ready for bed. She sank back against the pillows.

“I really am. At first it seemed a wild idea, but I’ve been thinking it over for days. I’ve spoken to the bank about a mortgage, for cash to get started. They think, with hard
work, I can do it. They’ve even put me in touch with a good manager, a fellow named Osborne, who managed a large estate in Jamaica.”

Sweat came out on Marjorie’s forehead.

“To my amazement, Julia has agreed to cosign a note so my parents will be taken care of until my father can get on his feet. Shows you never know about people.”

“No, you don’t,” she said bitterly.

“Let me try, Marjorie. Please? I can make it work. I believe in my bones I can.”