Pat Boone Fan Club (2 page)

I sprinkled sand over myself throughout the service, as if at the beach. I trailed it down my bare calves. I slid off my sandals, submerging my toes beneath grains of coral. Lines of sand streaked the sweaty crooks of my elbows. Small mounds cupped my knees. I trickled it on my head until it caught in the weave of my braids. I leaned against one of the cool, lime-whitewashed pillars, smudging my dress. I traced my initials in the sand. No one in the congregation, not even my parents, ever seemed to notice. Perhaps they were too engrossed by readings from the Torah to see me . . . while, to me, none of
their
prayerful chants were as lovely as sand. Wands of light beamed through arched windows, glinting off flecks of mica, off me. I felt as if I, myself, could become one with whitewash, with sand, with light. Then, later that night, home in bed, maybe my father wouldn’t find me, wouldn’t be able to see or distinguish me. Maybe if I
poured enough sand over my body I could discover how to hide all little Jewish girls, make us invisible. Instead, it seemed to be my own father’s footsteps that were muffled, for no one in the congregation ever heard or saw him. Not as he really was.

After the concert, I slowly walk through the church lobby, exhausted. I stop at the less-than-busy sales booth to buy a
CD
and ask whether Pat Boone will be signing autographs. No one knows. I had assumed a throng of grandmothers would line up for autographs and snapshots. A gray-haired man limps past, the word “Security” stenciled on his black t-shirt. The church ladies stream out the door, not seeming to expect anything more of the evening.

I could follow them.

But at the far corner of the lobby is a hallway leading to the back of the auditorium, behind the stage. No one guards the entrance. I turn down its plush, blue-carpeted stillness. My footsteps are silent. It is a hush that might precede a worship service. Solemn, scentless air. Dim sconces line the walls. I am alone, gripping his
CD
and the letter I wrote to him.

Two wide doors, shut, appear at the end of the corridor. I assume they’re locked, but when I try the knob it turns. Another hallway. I pass a second t-shirted guard, this one holding a silent walkie-talkie, his ear plugged with a hearing aid. I worry he’ll stop me. But my straight, solid footsteps, plus the determined look on my face, grant me entrance. I must act as if I belong here, as if I know what I’m doing.

I
do
belong here. I
do
know what I’m doing.

Beyond another set of doors I reach a small group wearing Dutch costumes, including the mayor and his wife. They appeared onstage earlier, in wooden clogs, to thank Pat Boone for celebrating the Tulip Time Festival. Beside them stands another security guard, this one a teenage boy, murmuring into his walkie-talkie. I approach, wanting to ask him where I might find Pat Boone. I decide to throw myself on his mercy. I’m prepared
to beg, plead, cry. I will say I’ve been waiting my whole life. I will say the Voice of God Himself
told
me to speak to Pat Boone.

The guard continues to mumble into his walkie-talkie. I wait for him to finish, until anxiety floods me. Suppose I miss Pat Boone? He might be preparing to leave the building right this minute. He’ll disappear before I find him.

Then, as if pulled by unseen forces, I turn away from the guard. I retrace my footsteps back through the set of doors.

I glimpse a white shirt. The back of a man’s head. Brown hair.
Him.

He and another man are just opening a door farther down the corridor.

I yell, “Mr. Boone. Pat Boone.”

I rush after him, grabbing the door about to shut behind him. We stand in a small foyer just behind the stage. The other man, clearly not understanding the force of my need, tries to shoo me away. I ignore him, pleading, “Mr. Boone. I have to speak to you. Just for a minute. I’ve been waiting. Pat Boone.”

I push past the assistant until I stand right in front of Pat Boone. His red- and blue-sequined jacket is off. He wears his white shirt, white pants, white shoes. His face, still in makeup, reveals few wrinkles. His eyes are almost expressionless. It’s as if his whole life all he’s practiced is his public smile, while the rest of his face is frozen—but familiar to me—the way he looks in photographs. There, as he smiles at me, albeit tentatively, are his white-white teeth.

My words are garbled, rushed, confused. I don’t know when I’ll be ordered to leave, when I’ll be removed. So much to explain. I hardly know where to start. I tell him how much I loved that one particular photograph in
Life
magazine.

“Oh, yes, that tandem bicycle,” he says. “I remember it.”

“You saved my life,” I say.

I am telling him about my father, what happened with my father, that it was
he
, Pat Boone, just knowing he existed kept me
going, just seeing his photograph helped me stay alive . . . that he represented . . . what word do I use? “Safety”? “Holiness”? “Purity”?

He has taken a step back, away from me. His smile may have dimmed by one decibel. Am I acting like a crazy woman? Am I the first woman who ever pursued him to confess that her father once hurt her and that he, Pat Boone, represented
hope
? Just thinking that one day he might . . .

“Well I’m glad to know that I did something good,” he says. “That I helped someone.”

“You
did
,” I say. “You were everything. Your family. Your daughters.”

“I guess these things happen a lot,” he says. “To children. It’s terrible.”

“Here.” I give him the letter. “This will explain how I felt.”

He takes the letter, folded in an envelope. That hand—those clean fingers I studied by the hour.

“I’ll write back to you,” he says. “After I read it.”

My audience with him is over. “Thank you,” I whisper, turning to leave.

I pause in the parking lot in the damp spring night. The massive walls of the church loom over me. Busloads of grandmothers rumble from the lot.

I was too overwhelmed to tell him about the magnifying glass or his wristwatch. Nor did I say
I want you to adopt me
—the important thing I neglected to say last time—the one thing I’ve most wanted. Of course, even
I
know how crazy that would sound. Besides, is it still true?

I get in my car but continue to watch the church. Maybe I’ll catch one last glimpse of him. Him.
Did
he help sustain me all those years?
Did
he offer hope?

Yes.
His image. His milky-white image. That sterile pose.

I conjured him into the man I needed him to be: a safe father.
By my believing in that constant image, he
did
save me, without my being adopted, without my even asking.

At the end of the concert, the mayor of Holland and his wife came onstage to present Pat Boone with a special pair of wooden clogs painted to resemble his trademark bucks. Again, I had to lower the binoculars, embarrassed for him, unable to watch, just as when he gave the tulips to that young girl.

I wonder if anyone else in the audience felt uncomfortable when this father, this grandfather, tried to coerce a kiss from that adolescent girl? Or did anyone notice her embarrassment, her shame? No, that’s not a thought that would trouble any of Pat Boone’s fans in Calvary. But Calvary doesn’t exist for me, cannot be made to exist for me—even by Pat Boone.

Pat Boone! Those two short syllables stretch the length of my life. So, regardless of religion or illusion, his love letters offered me improbable safety—grooved in vinyl, etched in sand.

The Wandering Jew

My family and I live on the island of St. Thomas for over a year before I notice the tramp, on Dronningens Gade. He walks along unaware of tourists veering to the other side of the street, away from this man weighted in burlap crocus sacks stitched into layers of clothes—pants, shirts, jackets, cap—despite tropical heat. Only his feet are bare. He sounds a metal triangle the exact moment his right heel strikes the ground. While he’s not blind, his gaze seems distant, or as if he’s more at home wandering paths through forests, fields, and mountains. I watch him from in front of the Apollo Theatre, my destination this day after school. I plan to see a movie, as I frequently do, while waiting for my father to leave the West Indies Bank and Trust Company, where he is president, to drive me up Blackbeard’s Hill, home.

I don’t follow the tramp, this first time I see him. I only watch. He passes Maison Danoise, Little Switzerland, Riise’s rum warehouse, Katzin’s Drug Store, before turning the corner toward Market Square.

Even after he disappears, I gaze at the corner as if he might reappear, like an apparition. Faintly, I still hear the silver pitch of the triangle. I imagine sun-sparked Caribbean water—as if a sound can be seen.

The next day at the Antilles School, high up a mountain, I stare out paneless windows. I don’t hear Miss Duvall conjugate French verbs. I don’t watch Mr. Waggoner chalk sums on the blackboard. My mates’ voices, chanting answers, seem remote. Far below, white sails gust the U-shaped harbor, the tessellated azure, aqua, viridian sea. Pastel houses dot green volcanic mountains. Daydreaming, I re-create the scene when the tramp turned
the corner . . . see him again
before
he turned the corner. I want to know who he is, where he lives, where he goes, where he is now. As if he offers a secret message, I want to hear his triangle, follow his bare feet, know what he sees in his distant gaze. Yesterday afternoon, while watching a film about Martians landing on Earth, I couldn’t even pretend to be scared. Rather,
his
image continuously reels.

A week later, again in front of the theater, I finally hear the ping of metal. I look toward Emancipation Park. The sound sharpens. I slip the coins meant for the purchase of a movie ticket into my pocket. I step back under the canopy of the marquee. I don’t yet want him aware of me. When he passes, it’s as if his presence deepens the shade in which I stand. Not as a bad omen, as in movies, foreshadowing a car crash or the arrival of a monster. Rather, his shadowed scent is of mangrove swamps, is the core of a calabash, rain-rubbed earth after a tropical storm. As I take my first step after him, this scent is what I seem to follow.

He pays no attention to me. We continue along the main street past duty-free shops, tourists giving him a wide berth, and now me, as well. Again he turns toward Market Square. Here in the crowded market, I assume no one will notice me, even though I am a white girl trailing after him. I dawdle past booths of sugarcane, myrtle, Bombay mangoes, squawking guinea fowl. Men sit outside snackettes drinking small glasses of white rum. I pause beside a donkey to stroke his mangy fur, still aware of the man’s burlap-sack back. Even above shouts of women in headties selling guava ices, I hear the strokes of his triangle.

He leaves the market, continuing along the marl alleys of shantytown. Here I will be noticed, in this place my parents forbid me to enter. I follow anyway, past shacks with corrugated tin roofs, walls constructed of newspapers, egg cartons, rusty biscuit tins. A woman watches me as she cups rainwater from a kerosene drum. Another woman, sweeping her dirt yard with a
palm frond, pauses. I don’t know if I should smile, explain my presence. I do nothing. It’s not as if I’m scared to be here, not at all, and I don’t understand my parents’ warning. Rather, I worry that, because of my skin color, I am the one to cause concern even though I’m young. I hunch my shoulders as if this can make me seem even smaller, as if to say,
I’m only a little girl who won’t cause trouble
. I shuffle as quietly as possible in my buffalo-hide sandals, my toes now dusty with limestone soil. The man never slows his gait.

Once we leave shantytown, we are in solitude. We are at the point on the island where streets lead to alleys, alleys lead to fields of fever grass, fields flow up volcanic mountains or meander into donkey trails and goat paths, here, where streets aren’t streets at all but muddy footprints leading into mangrove swamps, into forests of mimosa, mampoo, coconut palm.

He enters the woods. Reluctantly I pause just inside the entrance. If I don’t meet my father at the appointed time, he’ll be angry. Grasses sway as the tramp follows the trail, soon disappearing. Now, the ring of his triangle is the chirp of bananaquits and scarlet tanagers. Even though the island is small, finite,
this
place seems like an unearthly, overgrown, magical garden where cool trade winds sough flame trees, where sphagnum moss thrives, where phalaropes sleep. I clink my movie coins together, to mimic his sound.

Around this same time, I first hear the story of the Pied Piper, probably at school, told as a caution, a warning:
he leads children away from their parents
. But I love the word “pied.” At first I imagine the piper as a sort of baker with a kitchen full of pies—a dessert I prefer to cookies or cake. When I understand that the word means someone dressed in patchwork rags, I of course think of the tramp. Does this story stay with me because I am already following him—following the sound of his triangle—even as I know that, unlike the piper, the tramp is perfectly safe?

I also hear stories about ancient people wandering in faraway deserts—or about others being led to gas chambers. All stories seem equally real and unreal, true and untrue, at the same time. I don’t quite understand why gas would be in a chamber. After all, we get gas for our car at the Esso Service Center, located at the entrance to the airport. As the attendant pumps it, I love to watch British West Indian Airways or Caribair planes soaring toward Antigua, St. Kitts, San Juan. Sometimes I want to be aboard in order to explore distant places. Other times I don’t, knowing I’d miss my mates, my ballet lessons, and now, the tramp.

In some of these stories, following seems to be a good thing. In others, not. I could ask my parents or teachers about this, but I don’t.

The following Sunday evening, as usual, my parents drive my older sister and me to the Virgin Isle Hotel. It caps one of the mountaintops like a snow peak. We arrive when the sun, crimson as a hibiscus, sizzles the horizon, sinking below sea for the night. Foam encircles the island like fiery opals, as if you might scorch your feet if you stray from shore. Inside the hotel, blazing with light, we cross the marble lobby to the dining room. As always, we sit next to the dance floor, close to tables where my mates from school sit with their parents, intermingled with tourists. We eat roast beef and baked Alaska. All evening parents sip planter’s punches or grenadine and rum in frosty glasses, rims outlined in rose-colored sugar. Flames of white tapers shiver in winds gently blowing through floor-to-ceiling windows. Panmen on the stage
plonk
calypso rhythms. Men swirl across the dance floor in white linen dinner jackets trailing the scent of bay rum aftershave, of Bances Aristocratos, dark vuelta cigars. They dance with wives whose sequined gowns sparkle, whose silk guipure skirts whisper, whose Maltese shawls smell of Chanel No. 5.

Vicki, a friend from school, eats dinner with her parents and brother a few tables away. Even from here I notice a small bruise
by her left eye. I know her father hits her—though we never speak of it. Here where we live, where we dance, where we eat—isolated atop mountains or behind
chevaux-de-frise
, high stucco walls strung with tigerwire—we
shall
be safe. Perfect. In our wealth. In our whiteness. The waiters and waitresses, as well as the panmen, are black.

After dinner, Vicki and I stroll outside to the upper terrace. We stand by the wrought-iron railing. On the lower terrace, the lit swimming pool ripples turquoise.
Labelles
, fireflies, sparkle like stardust. Pinpricks of light pulse dark mountainsides. Lower, at the base of the mountain, a cruise ship in the harbor, strung with colored bulbs, glitters like bijoux. Lights define Charlotte Amalie, the capital, while lamps in Emancipation Park outline paths among lignum vitae trees. Yes, it is perfect. We are perfect, aren’t we?

How can one small bruise by a girl’s eye mar the visage of a colorful, tropical island?

Only the fields and forests beyond shantytown, where the tramp led me, are dark, pristine, original—not lit by artificial light.

When we first arrived on the island from Washington
DC
, where my father had worked for the Department of the Interior, a demonstration was organized by islanders who thought my father’s bank was only for his own gain. They believed that if they opened accounts, he would steal their money, like a pirate. The crowd, carrying torches and drums, marched from Market Square to Emancipation Park to burn my father in effigy. For safety, my sister and I were sequestered in Riise’s rum warehouse behind brick-and-stucco walls originally built by Danish colonialists to withstand pirate attacks, fires, and hurricanes. I watched the flames through an iron keyhole. I felt a vibration of drums against my forehead. As the hour grew late I became dizzy with the scent of rum, dizzy with shouts echoing against brick. My senses were dulled from having lived in cool, white-marbled
Washington
DC
. New to the island, I felt bewildered by the pungency of wild fruit, the susurrus of waves, the heat. That night in the warehouse, I felt confused by people as well. I felt trapped, as if I might never escape.

Later, order was restored. The crowd, reassured by my father, dispersed. My sister and I, freed from the warehouse, returned to our home across the street from Blackbeard’s Castle.

Except my mother didn’t want this island to be our home. After the demonstration, she pleaded with my father to leave, take us back to our real home in the States. Although he’d calmly talked to the crowd in order to quiet them, now he yelled at my mother, accusing her of not supporting him, not standing by his side. My sister and I said nothing, but he raged at us as well. My sister turned from him, stalking from the room, followed by my mother, who rushed to the bathroom, crying.

I tried to pass him to escape to my bedroom. He blocked the doorway.
Please
, I thought,
move
. He didn’t. He held me. His arms, tight around me, felt more like a throttle than a hug, gripping me, in a way that wasn’t love.

He released me when he heard my mother returning. I rushed to my room and opened the shutters overlooking the verandah. Across the valley rose Synagogue Hill, the synagogue itself invisible from here. Sky and sea merged at night, as though you could walk right off the island toward the horizon. If only you knew how.

Now, as I stand beside Vicki on the hotel terrace, with the island below us, my gaze follows the route the demonstrators marched that night from Market Square to Emancipation Park. I wonder if the tramp marched with them.

“Have you ever seen that man?” I describe him and his triangle.

“Sure,” she says, “the loco-crazy man.”

I turn to look at her. Here on the terrace, in the rippled light reflected from the swimming pool, her face seems paler, the bruise
below her eye darker. “But he never bothers anyone, does he?”

Vicki shrugs. “We’re supposed to stay away from him. My father said.”

Once, on a Saturday, Vicki and I went swimming at Magens Bay, instructed by her parents to be back no later than four. But we lost track of time so didn’t return until after five, drowsy with sun, our lips stained from sea grapes. As soon as we reached her house, her father slapped her. I sucked in my breath and, without thinking, said, “Wait.” I stepped back, fearing he might hit me, too, her father angry we’d stayed late on a public beach where someone might hurt us.

The next evening I visit Sylvanita, our cook, who lives in a cabin behind our house, almost hidden among woman’s-tongue trees. She never invites me inside, so I stand on her stoop, asking her about the tramp:
Do you know him? Why does he ring the triangle?

She doesn’t answer directly. Instead she explains that, decades ago, some slaves, forced to the island from Africa, fled their masters. They hid in rain forests. Many of their descendants remain, some still wandering these forests, named, by the slaves, the Land of Look Behind. They also renamed themselves Maroons.

She disappears for a moment, telling me to wait. From inside, I smell mango leaves, burning, to discourage mosquitoes. She returns and shows me a freedom paper, once belonging to her ancestor, carefully wrapped in unbleached muslin.

One afternoon I see the movie
Limelight
, starring Charlie Chaplin, preceded by one of his “Little Tramp” shorts,
The Vagabond
.
Limelight
is about a once-famous clown in London, now poor and forgotten, who saves a young ballerina, Thereza, who is about to commit suicide because she suffers hysterical paralysis. She can neither walk nor dance. In
The Vagabond
Chaplin’s tramp character rescues a young woman who, kidnapped, is mistreated and whipped by her captor.

After I see the movie, I am virtually mute for days. I stay home sick from school. I refuse to eat. I refuse to get out of bed. Only he can soothe me, Chaplin,
this
tramp, helping young ballerinas dance. He comforts girls who are lost, lonely, confused, paralyzed, trapped. He leads them away from harm, saving them.

I must see
Limelight
again. I finally leave my house to walk down the mountain to town. But when I reach the theater, the movie is no longer playing. It was scheduled for only one show.
But where has it gone?
I ask.
To St. Croix
, I’m told. Another film is advertised on the marquee. I stare at movie posters tacked in glass cases as if I can will
Limelight
back into being, can conjure Charlie Chaplin to stand here before me. I want to run away with him, follow him, be a tramp with him. At the same time I want to save him from his “trampness” by giving him all that I have. I will draw a rainwater bath for him, sprinkled with bay leaves. I will feed him roast chicken and guava jelly for dinner.