Refiner's Fire (26 page)

H
OW CLOSE
it had been. With Big Tub in jail, the government would realize that the Rastas were not invulnerable. More important, the Rastas themselves would see it. Most important, the country people would be encouraged to go back to their lands. Lucius returned from Kingston with reports that the constabulary were considering an expedition against the newly leaderless Rastas in the White Water region.

On his last day at Rica Vista Marshall went with Dash to the reef. Because the reef was so different from the summit views he had seen, and because he had paid dearly for his elation about the West, he wondered if he had not in fact suffered illusions at high altitudes. Perhaps, he thought, his idea of the nineteenth century was far from the truth—a purified miniature. Perhaps the Empire was in its order only dull, in form conventional, in justice not blind. But to remember those days on the mountain, on the river, and at the encampment as anything but what they were would be to err oppositely. They
did
do a great thing, and there was a time when great things were better understood. Marshall remembered his origins, raising barriers against the love he had felt on the peak for the British and their Empire. Like the stitches which had been painlessly pulled, those illusions gave way to the kaleidoscopic color of the reef and the days and days of dolphinlike abandon that he had spent with Dash, who was all the more beautiful as a result of the victory. They lost themselves in swimming, and copulated with the ease of water creatures, not knowing how to feel apart from the waves and the driven coral.

In the evening there was to be a special dinner. Lamb was roasting in the ovens and people ran back and forth on the drive of cracked white shells, which made a noise that seemed to stay after they had left. The table was decked with bougainvillea and hibiscus; candles burned in tall pewter sticks. It was a dinner not only for Marshall's departure, but for his recovery, and for the victory. They had a wonderful time. Lucius made not a few stupid jokes about Marshall's desire to eat only dehydrated foods, and the table was cradled in ease and happiness. They spoke of the questions Marshall considered, and Mrs. Pringle corrected him when he assumed that, to have dominated the world, the English must have been extraordinarily intelligent and sharp.

“Oh no no no,” said Mrs. Pringle. “The reason the British conquered the world was not (as many think) that they were clever, but rather because everyone else was clever and the British were the only simpletons. Into the midst of prolix orientalism came the British singing four-line ditties and arising to take cold baths. Being simpletons, they went where no one dared to go, and fought against madmen's odds. Few could resist their clean-facedness, and they moved through intricate layers of opposition like a lance through a honeycomb.”

She might well have continued, except that a car pulled up outside—unusual for that hour, since no one but the constable traveled at night in their section and, to be truthful, even he was afraid. It
was
the constable, and he entered the dining room with pith helmet in hand. His blue shirt was so well pressed and so airy that he looked like a piece of Dutch sky. Mrs. Pringle invited him to have a seat and partake of dessert.

“No thank you, Mistress,” he said, looking at the festive table. “I have to say something very bad. They took him to the Ewarton Jail. Tonight the jail burned down. They had to let the prisoners go. He ran off into the bush and no one can find him.”

Dash began to cry silent tears. Lucius was immobile. Nielson smiled. Peter, Stanhope, Mrs. Pringle, and the constable were frozen, not knowing what to think, although Mrs. Pringle knew that her daughter was crying for Farrell. Marshall looked at them and at the beautiful room and its dark Jamaican woods, as if it were a dream. Someone in the kitchen turned on a radio, and music could be heard faintly over the occasional clatter of dishes. The dining room was silent and the constable remained standing. Feeling awkward, as if he had intruded upon a family in mourning, he fixed his gaze on the beautiful burning candles.

E
VEN IN
May, the wind above the East River was cold and strong. Marshall and his friend Alexander had gone to the Brooklyn Bridge; over their own reddened hands resting like talons on the railing, they looked northward up the great river filled with traffic and refractive waves. The day was blue and busy; tangled in sunlight, snapping flags, and people bobbing up and down long avenues compressed to see; its prospect like the shining side of a cool porcelain vase rich with running colors. The city before him resembled his image of Canton—ships in the harbor and merchants unloading wares at the foot of green hills covered with terraces, gardens, and trees which bent like centenarians.

Upon his return from Jamaica the previous spring, Marshall had found himself in a much-changed Eagle Bay School. The once lighthearted and eccentric students had been transformed by a race for prestigious colleges; they vulgarized their studies by ceaseless competition and flattered the teachers excessively. Marshall refused to participate, and was quickly drawn into an altercation with a bash-faced young biology instructor who made the mistake of grabbing him by the shoulders and pushing him against a wall when Marshall had refused to call him sir. Marshall fought a lively fight, driving the teacher outdoors, across the parking lot, through the nerve garden (worms were bred there for experiments upon their plexii), and backward into the lily pond. After being expelled, Marshall was sent to a private school in Manhattan, where he began to study in earnest. He often took the train upriver to see the Livingstons, to ride through the woods on the black horse, to ski on his old wooden skis down the long windy hill in front of the house. But when he arrived at Eagle Bay he was usually dressed in a dark suit, as if he were much older. Residence in Yorkville changed him as much as had his stay at Rica Vista. He could not go backward, and did not try. Although he had been familiar with the city, and although Eagle Bay was less than 100 miles distant, Marshall felt as if he had in fact been sent to China.

He lived with the family Pascaleo, of which Alexander, his classmate, was the eldest son. Alexa—a radiant beauty—was Alexanders twin sister, and Paolo was the youngest, an eager gardener of seven, who farmed a small plot in the park and brought home vegetables which were stunted, malformed, and delicious. Signora Pascaleo worked as a loan officer in the foreign department of Semple, Peascod, & Bovina; and Signor Pascaleo (an urban historian, expert on Florence) had somehow gotten to be New York City Commissioner of Public Works. Shocked by the sudden appointment (it was in the time of the tall mad mayor), his own family had questioned his suitability to the task. “What do I care?” he had said, shrugging his shoulders. “A sewer is a sewer, a pipe is a pipe, a light is a light.” They had an enormous apartment high above Park Avenue, well, a little off Park Avenue, in Yorkville. They spoke mostly in Italian, and they kept a milk-white goat called Boofin. His hooves and horns were black as jet, because Paolo buffed them with shoe polish until they shined. It was his main delight, and often Marshall came in the door to see the goat perched on a big leather chair, Paolo hard at work shining the hooves. They loved to hear Boofin prance across the hard floors. He sounded like a team of tap dancers. When he got excited and could not restrain himself, it was like hail on a tin roof. He was a frightened, gentle goat. Petrified of dogs, he would not leave the apartment, but spent days staring out the window, his forelegs on the sill.

Marshall and A1 were going to Harvard in the fall, and Alexa was going to the University of Rome. Mainly to her chagrin, her father had persuaded her to attend the semiannual Gotham Ball that June at the Plaza. She was so beautiful—tall and blue-eyed with shining blond hair—that she mainly got her way, and she had resolved upon wearing a black velvet gown and bracelets and necklaces of white gold. Though everyone had been instructed to wear white, she would not. Marshall, Alexa, and A1 didn't quite fit into that stuff (Marshall certainly didn't), and they never knew exactly what to do about all the social events to which they were invited because Signor Pascaleo was a commissioner.

While leaning over the rail, Marshall had been telling A1 about Jamaica. In the middle of his narrative he looked north at familiar skies and, even though no clouds were visible, predicted a thunderstorm. A1 did not believe him and made him go on. For an hour they stood on the bridge, Marshall gesticulating and hoarse from a tale in which A1 did not place much trust. No one believed anything Marshall said about Jamaica, but A1 wanted to know what had happened. At the end, when frightening sheets, chains, and bolts of white fire were striking tall buildings to the north and the purple mass of a great Hudson Valley thunderstorm was sweeping ominously southward, Marshall hurried to finish his story, and they sprinted to the Manhattan side, drumming the boards and dodging pear-sized raindrops. A1 pondered the similarity between his family and the Pringles, though he did not think that the Pringles actually existed.

Wet and breathless in the sullied blue of Brooklyn Bridge station, A1 leaned over Marshall and grabbed him by the throat. He was much bigger than Marshall (not difficult) and he throttled him. “If you ever sleep with my sister,” he said, “I'll kill you.” Until that moment, Marshall had never imagined that he and Alexa could be lovers. She was too fine, too tall, too beautiful, too crazy, and too unpredictable. He had always regarded her as a sister—living in the same house ... and there were other girls ... the hospitality of the family ... honor ... death. But she was alluring and, despite her rebellion and feigned boldness, she was shy and gentle. That, really, was why he had thought of her as so delicately removed. Marshall caught a glimpse of his own face in the mirror of a gum machine. Though red from the throttling, he had an open, whimsical look. A subway thundered in, dripping and sooty. They got on, and by the time the door closed a vision of Alexa in all her beauty floated before Marshall's eyes, and he couldn't wait for that night's reading of
The Divine Comedy,
for he knew that he would share her book.

S
IGNOR
P
ASCALEO
settled into a pose of religious infallibility. Facing him were his family and Marshall, teamed up in pairs at volumes of Sinclairs dual-language Dante. The Pascaleos had completed the cycle nine times since Alexanders birth, and that June they would finish the
Inferno.
They read only one canto a week, going over it several times, translating, and discussing. Signor Pascaleo was authority and guide, a digest of all important criticism and an important critic himself. The more he read, the more excited he got, so that often at the end of a canto he paced the room like a spotted beast, arms alternately clenched and flying, a stream of Italian rhetoric issuing from him at such great speed that even his wife could not understand. How difficult it was for Marshall to work his way through the dark and savage wood of those rapidly uttered words.

Signora Pascaleo, whose braided and piled hair made her look like an Austrian basket, sat with Paolo, who, a few months before, had just started to understand vaguely some of the readings, but who squirmed and more often than not fell asleep while leaning against his mother. A1 sat alone or, sometimes, with the goat, who had to be held when Signor Pascaleo became excited. Marshall sat with Alexa. That evening he realized that his enjoyment of the
Commedia
had not been entirely pure. He was in love with Alexa, but from politeness and civility to his hosts, and from fear, he had hidden it even from himself.

She had magnificent hands. He watched them gracefully embracing the text. On her right wrist were two tortoise-shell bracelets, and she had several small rings of silver and gold. From the corner of his eye he could see that some of her hair, though tied back, fell in delicate wisps about her ears and neck. When she spoke, he felt the process of it throughout her body and his, so close was she. As time wore on he felt a reverberating heat between them, especially if she were to laugh. When in turning pages their hands touched it remained with him long afterward. She looked a little frail and thin, but the sight of her full, stretched jersey reminded him that she was not. A1 had told him of how as a child she had been deathly afraid of everything, of how she (a short fat girl) had stood at the window only a few years before and eaten boxes of chocolates while she watched her girlfriends cavort with boys on the street far below. Then, in a year or two, she had changed. They hoped that she would make good on her splendid transition, and be neither timid nor brash, nor exploitive, nor preyed upon. At the University of Rome she would be very much on her own, a delightful, frightening prospect. She longed for a city of fountains and green grass in January. She wanted to walk like a contessa down the worn and civilized streets, to pass by with a straight stare and high thoughts. She had determined that this city was for her, and though she shuddered in imagining it, the thought of living there alone on one of its hills in temperate Roman colors was as satisfying as a long embrace.

Signor Pascaleo guided them throughout Canto XXVI, the Canto of Ulisse, reading without emotion until suddenly he rose in his chair and the net of his vessels was visible in his hands. Though the storm had passed and it was mild and dry outside in the dark, with the sound only of a few taxis, they felt again the excursive cracks of thunder and lightning which had rolled down from Eagle Bay.

 

“O frati,” dissi, “che per cento milia
perigli siete giunti all'occidente,
a questa tanto picciola vigilia
de'nostri sensi ch'è del rimanente,
non vogliate negar l'esperienza,
di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gentle.”

 

Signor Pascaleo felt his youth and history, when he had climbed the mountains north of Salerno and seen it as perfect and as miniature as a town on a postage stamp. The family was riveted, Alexa slightly quivering, the sweep of her shoulders and neck like the flowing main cables of a suspension bridge—in that the curve was perfect and hypnotic. The goat, who had been as immobile as a white stone, pranced up and down sneezing from excitement and had to be held by Al, who calmed him, saying,
“Shh, shh, caprone, non c'è niente. ”