Eden Burning (55 page)

It was his turn to ask her, “Why didn’t you ever say something before?”

“I never wanted to hurt her, what do you think? I shouldn’t have said anything, even now. Tomorrow I’ll be sorry I did. I’m sorry already.”

Loyalty! Loyalty to an old family, an old code, to the end!

“Patrick! You’re not going to speak of this to anyone?”

“You don’t want me to, Maman.”

“All my life I kept it in here”—she touched the sunken flesh above her heart—“in here. Not because I wanted to keep
her
secret, not just that, anyway. It was because I wanted you all for myself…. Ah, you’re a big important man now! They say you’ll be traveling all over the world.”

“They exaggerate. Only a few trips here and there to raise money for the things we need.”

“You still don’t believe what I’ve told you about yourself, do you?”

“I—”

“Give me your hands. I’m dying, Patrick.”

“I know, Maman.”

“You won’t see me again.”

“I know that, too, Maman.”

“Then would I lie to you? I swear that everything I’ve said is true. I swear it.”

He held her hands—old, dry hands that had hemmed workmen’s tough cloth, cooked for a child, rocked a child, and
polished a rich woman’s silver. She, she had been his mother, not that other pale woman in the pale north, chilly as snow! And kneeling there, he held those two good hands until, in a little while, she fell back into sleep.

Sadly, he got up and went outside into a surge of yellow heat. The air was the color of ochre. Now he grew cold; a chill ran up his arms and down his back. He picked up a flat stone and hurled it to the ditch across the road, where it fell into rainwater, making a small, dirty splash. And he picked up another, one after the other, hurling with all his strength, while his driver waited, curiously watching.

They started back to the airport. The driver, who had been chatty on the trip out, was silent. Now and again Patrick met his eyes in the rearview mirror. I must look ghastly, he thought. Outraged. Destroyed.

His heart raced. His mind raced. That woman—that girl—had brought him forth and thrown him away. But then—a young girl, younger than his own Laurine and Maisie! And he thought of the double disgrace that had attended his beginning, shame of the girl, given her time and class, and death of the boy. Would it have meant death for him if he had been white of skin? Yes, yes, probably it would. Or possibly. The economic, the social, status would have been a factor, surely, in assaying the crime, if crime it had been. One had seen too much and felt too much in one’s own weak flesh to decide precisely, justly, where blame lay.

Pity, pity for the terrified girl who bore me!

But then, consider a young boy “of color,” confronted with some tremulous, forbidden loveliness, fragile in white, perhaps, with pearls like those Kate Tarbox had, careless pearls worn like common rope…. Kate’s flowered skirts graze her seductive legs and in my mind I have removed the skirt, touched taut, rosy flesh, even though I know quite surely I am nothing to her but a friendly brain in a body which could, for all she cares, belong to a woman of seventy or a boy of ten.

Imagination flashed its pictures, that imagination which both blessed and bedeviled him with the ability to see at once all sides of any question. That boy, intelligent and yearning as he himself had been (“You’re always reading, you always want to know too much!” Agnes complained), was he not familiar? How many such had he not seen on the schoolroom benches, dreamers of eager dreams, scattered among the apathetic and the louts!

What a crazy business, life! And his mind raced on again: Teresa Francis at Eleuthera. Virgil, righteous, tough old man of legend. Drummond Hall. The fine, proud places. Francis. Francis and I.

He leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder.

“I need a drink.”

“Yes, Boss. There’s a bar right down the road.”

“I meant water. You can stop there and bring me water.”

He got his drink and they drove toward the city, past blue and yellow rotting houses trellised and gabled like the fairy houses in tales he had used to read aloud to his little girls, then through the city to the airport from which the plane would bring him home in an hour. And he remembered the interisland schooner on which, among crated coconuts and clucking chickens, he had slept all night with Maman in a time of innocence.

When he came into the house Désirée was waiting.

“How is your mother? Did she eat the cookies? Did she like the sweater?”

“She thanks you for them all.” He turned away, wanting to hide. Then because Désirée was waiting for more, he said, “She’s dying. It won’t be long.”

“Oh, Patrick, I am sorry!” She had never truly forgiven Agnes, but she was soft, and she meant her words.

They had dinner. He was still not used to the cool, high dining room with its whirring fan and its servants; this night, especially, he would have liked to be eating a supper cooked
by his wife in their own old house. When they were finished, he went upstairs and sat down with a book which he wasn’t able to read.

Instead, the day’s incredible disclosure stood before his eyes, written in glaring letters. It seemed to him that, if he did not tell someone, they would burst in a spangled eruption, would explode and spill over and flow, even as Mount Pelée had done so many years before. It was all as large, as powerful, as that. And he heard himself saying the words,
“Do you know who I am?”

“Patrick,” said Désirée, coming in. “Are you all right?”

“I’ve a headache,” he said, “one of my sun headaches. It’s nothing that won’t pass.”

She put light fingers on his forehead. “I don’t believe you. It’s something sad, something else, not just Maman. What is it?”

He shook his head. “No, nothing.”

She moved back in distress, her bracelets jangling.

“Do you still love me, Patrick?”

He smiled. “I’ve been a fool over you since I first saw you.”

“That isn’t the same thing. I’m not only talking about bed, you know.”

“Neither am I, my dear.”

“I think—do you want to know what I think? If things had been different in your life, you’d have married a more educated woman.”

He looked up, wondering and touched to the heart. That she should harbor even the smallest doubt about herself! None of us knows another.

“But things aren’t different, and it’s you I have and you I want and always you.”

Sweet Désirée, firm center of a world spun wild this unbelievable day. And he drew her hand down, holding the fragrant palm against his cheek, needing her familiar comfort.

“I worry so about you,” she said.

“You needn’t. I’m all right.”

“They pressure you too much.”

For a little while she stood beside him. When he released her hand she left the room and he sat for a long time watching, as the clement evening gradually covered the bay. When night fell like a violet curtain shaking in the wind, he was still sitting there.

   He thought of many, many things; of how a stone strikes and the pond stirs, of how words fall and the walls tremble. He thought of his dark daughters, with their Carib strain and that of the Arawak women whom the Caribs took. Now to all that was added the blood of Eleuthera’s masters! And from deep inside him came a sound like a groan, as of something twisting and wrenching his chest, while before the eye of his mind there passed the stereotypical images of great-house ladies, an impossible mélange of haughty shoulders and soft faces, of whiteness and blondness, of silk and pearls. Who, who of them was she? And as so often in times of his most profound distress, he held up his hand, examining the whorls of the fingertips and the lines of the palm as if they could tell him something. Strange, all of it so strange and sad! That it should matter so much!

Then suddenly a faint and wry amusement twisted his lips. What would Marjorie, cool Marjorie, have to say if she knew? He suspected she’d make it rather hard on Francis. And with a premonition of loss and loneliness, he thought of Francis’ departure: Perhaps that was a reason to speak?

Pressure, Désirée had said, not even understanding how much or of what kind, of how painful!

Oh, sometime, surely, he would have to tell what he had learned this day! He wasn’t going down to his death, nor would he let Francis go, with such a truth unspoken. No matter whom it might hurt, it would have to be said.

Yet he came to know, as the hours went by, that the time was not now. There was enough of turmoil and tension at this moment in the life of each of them without creating more. Why burn Eleuthera again?

No, let them rest awhile, the living and the dead. Let them all rest.

Patrick moved the desk chair closer and shoved the telephone to one side. He still thought it was somehow comical to have three telephones. Perhaps they had been a necessary adjunct to Nicholas’s position, affording him a sense of power and giving the impression that this desk was the place where things were made to happen. But Patrick had no need for them.

He picked up his pen again, returning to what he thought of as his “speech from the throne,” or “state of the state” message, his first since he took office, a first accounting.

“… negotiations for cooperative factories,” he wrote. “Two Canadians and an American, having confidence in the economic climate on our island, want to produce a light cotton cloth in distinctive designs, using our local talents. A furniture manufacturer …”

He got up and walked to the tall windows from which, beyond descending treetops on the slope, one could see the harbor and the ancient structures along Wharf Street. There lies the power, he thought, there in the row of banks with the brass plates and the great names of London, of Canada and New York. If they will give us loans, we can—And he stood there while numbers went running through his head.

At the same time he was observing the life that pulsed in
the town. There the banana boat was being loaded. A long line of women joined with a line of trucks as it wound toward the dock. There, as if a gift were being offered, each woman received a stem of bananas to balance on her head, and in a dancer’s posture, to carry to the hold of the ship. Nothing of this had changed.

His eye traveled down Wharf Street to the low brick building where Kate would probably be working late on the
Trumpet,
bearing what she had to bear with dignity and grace. It was this very dignity that saddened him so. Tears would have been less painful. Yet he understood that Francis also must do what he had to do. Few things were ever simple. How could you weigh the relative values of a child and a woman? Especially if the woman was Kate?

Now a water taxi bounced across the harbor, lightly as a skimming gull. It stopped at the dock across the street from Da Cunha’s door. Wharf Street had a row of new boutiques—little boxes—arrived in the wake of the hotels, but Da Cunha’s was still king of the shops. How Désirée loved their dresses and their scarves and all the pretty trifles! And suddenly he remembered her—oh, it must have been before the girls were born—whirling in a white dress that she had bought there. He could see it quite clearly, billowing and short, printed with scarlet poppies. Fearfully expensive, he had thought, for those few yards of cloth! She had laughed and told him he didn’t know anything about it, which was true. But she had looked so beautiful, and still did. Da Cunha had offered her a discount now because he’d been elected, but he hadn’t, against her protests, allowed her to accept it. A matter of principle, it was, to owe no one for favors.

He felt he was making a good start. Even after this short time he could sense that the planters who had, to say the least, been lukewarm toward him, were beginning to support him with some conviction. They saw that he was trying to hew to a decent middle way. Last Saturday he’d called upon every citizen to give a day’s work to the country, planting
trees, repairing schools, or cleaning up the hospital grounds. The response had been—well, beautiful! The comments everywhere had been enthusiastic. He’d got out and put his own hands to work, too, which had done wonders for morale. Yes, a good spirit was rising.

Of course there were angry holdouts from Mebane’s time; that was only to be expected. Those who had been making fortunes out of the drug traffic, for example, were not likely to be pleased with the new regime. Between them and the left wing, which was ever present, ever burrowing and undermining, there was plenty to worry about.

The Russians were entrenched in Cuba, and through the entire area the Cubans were spreading not only their advisers and technicians but their shotgun shells. It was very, very hard. You couldn’t patrol every distant cove, especially on the ocean side, all night and each night.

He knew, he was almost sure, that Will was deep in these affairs. He couldn’t prove it, any more than he could prove that the boy Will had set fire to Eleuthera, although he had never ceased to be plagued by the horror of the thought. One had one’s gut reactions, that was all, and too often one’s gut reactions were correct. They hardly ever saw Will these days, though, having come at last to a parting of the ways, an unsaid agreement to disagree. And he remembered the last time they had really talked together. It had been on the final night in their house and they’d been standing in the kitchen. Patrick had been saying something about the Cubans having thirty thousand troops in Africa and when Will had defended them Patrick had argued.

“You’re going far beyond social justice, Will. You’re making it all so simple, aren’t you? Ask the thousands who are fleeing Cuba; ask why they’ve had to build a mine field at the Berlin Wall to keep workers from quitting the workers’ paradise. Yes, too simple, Will! And what’s more, you’re entering an area of confrontation with a country which, for all that some like to say about it, has been the greatest force for
human rights and freedom that the world has ever know. Ever. Yes, I’m talking about the United States,” he’d said and thumped the table. But his words had petered out to empty air.

So we moved again toward violence, he thought as he looked down upon the drowsy little town. It hasn’t erupted yet, not fully; contained, it merely smolders. But if the high winds come, then—