Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  “Maybe we’re talking Ron Brown in Croatia and Big Abel and Abel riding to Birmingham.”

  “We didn’t have a chance.”

  When Abel came home from his office in Fort-de-France he would sit out on their terrace that wrapped around the apartment and gulp a gin and tonic as Hope nursed a Coke with lime. She always offered him a tiny bowl of something to nibble on, warmed nuts or tiny squares of pastry flavored with cheese. They would talk for a half hour, about things in the newspaper, about her day, never his, and then, finally, he would allow the baby to be brought out by Ting Ting, who would appear in a starched white or pink cotton dress with full skirt and lace-trimmed button top. The baby would be on Ting Ting’s narrow hip, howling as he reached for his daddy, slapping softly at the nanny he loved dearly, angry that she had kept him from Abel.

  Every time Hope witnessed this little drama she grew infuriated. The way Ting Ting held her body, the way she opened her green eyes so wide, she asked a question without saying a word: Why can’t you make your husband more interested in the child? All this was accusation. If Hope lifted the baby from Ting Ting’s arms in the middle of the tragic performance, the child completely ignored her, not even bothering to be mad. It was as if the baby knew she had no power, knew that her power had vanished as suddenly and completely as the city of Saint-Pierre.

  Somewhere, someone, every week, mentioned to Hope the natural disaster that claimed thirty thousand lives, the imagination of the island, and eventually Hope’s imagination. She was that tired and that sad.

  When finally admitted into his father’s awareness of his presence, Ajay would be exhausted from crying, from having wanted to see his daddy since the moment Abel’s key had been heard in the door and his tread had been heard in the front hall, from having had to wait to be acknowledged by his daddy for minutes after entering the balcony.

  Hope hated to watch their strange reunion: the child so angry, the man so annoyed that the baby hadn’t been born a little girl patient and sweet. Hope had to watch all of that before she got to see that the child was too lovable not to love. A few moments with the weight of his son in his arms and Abel was standing at the terrace balustrade singing to the boy and pointing at the sights of Fort-de-France. Ajay hugged his daddy and tussled with his daddy, soft-punching his arm, as they, in their own way, fell back in love, much to everyone’s surprise, every evening.

  Twenty minutes later Abel would have had enough. He would start yelling for the nanny to come get his kid and for his wife to come get him.

  He liked to have sex before they went out to dinner. She liked it too if they were very quiet. It was the thing she didn’t like about the apartment; it had precious few doors. It was open to the air in a way that made public too many intimacies.

  Eventually the Creole sun seemed to sap her strength. She didn’t seem able to get settled in good or well. There continued to be the matter of language. She spoke French with a West Virginia accent the island folk found perplexing verging on hilarious. Everyone understood exactly what she was saying but she sounded so strange few paid attention.

  And there was the matter of mice. It was as if the rats of Manila had created an allergy to rodents that even the small kitchen mice of Martinique could provoke. Mice and mosquitoes were every hour challenging her authority in the kitchen. Abel said he had seen bigger mice and rats on Fifteenth Street.

  And gas. Gas for the stove had to be delivered in tanks. And food, with everything being shipped in from France, was ridiculously expensive. All of this could have been ameliorated by the hiring of a local woman to shop and cook and clean, a woman familiar with the ways of the island, but instead she had brought Ting Ting with her from the Philippines, hoping to offer herself a significant continuity. And it was something Abel had wanted.

  None of this would have mattered if it hadn’t been for what she perceived to be his unwillingness to fall in love with the baby and her subsequent belief that things would have been very different if she had borne Abel a daughter. He wouldn’t have wanted to hit a daughter.

  She attempted to distract herself from this truth by worrying more about black souls and skins and white masks and about how Frantz Fanon had tried to treat the victims of torture abuse with psychoanalysis and had almost gone crazy doing it. Hope was holding hard to some ideas Abel refused to understand, about Fanon’s idea that the mammy who managed to actually love the white child she took care of was a true humanist and revolutionary. She told him it was as important to understand the mammy in the Confederate Memorial as it was to understand the soldier. He didn’t hear her. Abel thought Fanon’s and Hope’s idea was a lie. He didn’t know anything about missing home.

  He kept talking about Louis-Auguste Cyparis, the black prisoner in the jail who had been one of the only ones, or the only one, saved when the entire city of Saint-Pierre had been destroyed by a volcanic eruption in 1902.

  The aristocratic white family, the new American diplomats, the New Englanders, and all the other inhabitants had been killed. He talked on and on about that. Hope accused him of being a nouveau Puritan obsessed with Divine Providence.

  He said he was obsessed with fortunate Negroes. She allowed that there were few enough of those that he probably could indulge in the obsession. She liked this idea of Abel’s. They laughed together and he told more of the story of Cyparis, who after surviving the eruption had become a circus performer, appearing as “The Man Who Survived Doomsday” with Barnum and Bailey.

  The story made Hope sad. She didn’t want to be married to the man who wanted to survive doomsday. Still, they stumbled into each other, as married people will—if one is not determined to avoid the other. Often, but not often enough.

  In Fort-de-France it came to seem the only thing Abel felt com-for table sharing with Hope was the location of the next party. One bizarre afternoon the party was on the deck of a Royal Navy battleship. In a black and white linen dress she reviewed the troops or some such. Later she ate tiny éclairs with two or three young officers seemingly assigned to keep her company. She hated it. He could feel her recoil from the militaristic and somehow he took it as a reproach. She didn’t know why.

  The silences expanded. She didn’t know if it was his work he wasn’t talking about, or a woman he wasn’t talking about, or some strange feelings about the baby he wasn’t talking about, or he was having an affair with Ting Ting he wasn’t talking about, but he wasn’t talking about something. “Angel from Montgomery” became her favorite John Prine song. “How in the hell can a man go to work in the morning and come home in the evening and have nothing to say?”

  He had nothing to say, but the town had much to say about him, about his growing reputation for putting his feet up on his desk and reading the paper all day when he wasn’t at parties or receptions or lunch. She was furious at his apparent incompetency. She didn’t know he was doing his job exactly as his handlers wanted it to be done.

  “You were paranoid about the wrong thing.”

  “He was lying, but not about typical things.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And I was paranoid about some of the right things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Abel hitting the baby.”

  “Occasional baby swatting is a major sin?”

  “Abel occasionally swatting a child was like an alcoholic occasionally having a white wine spritzer. And he knew it. Big Abel used to beat the hell out of Abel. He had no business laying a finger on any child.”

  She tried to orchestrate it such that they ate one meal together as family each week despite their heavy social calendar. On those nights they would sit in the kitchen. One evening during dinner, when Ajay was about fourteen months old, the boy discovered it was amusing to throw his plastic sippy cup on the floor. Abel picked it up once with a smile and told him not to do it again. Ajay threw the cup to the ground again. Abel picked it up, put it on the tray, waited for the boy to smile, then slapped the boy’s hand. Ajay began to howl. Hope picked the c
up up from the floor and put it back on his tray.

  “Don’t hit my child again.”

  “You’re spoiling him.”

  “You can’t spoil a baby.”

  Ajay threw the cup down on the floor again. Abel picked it up and put it on the table.

  Two nights later the baby threw his cup and Abel slapped him again, this time on the shoulder. Hope didn’t say anything about it until they were alone that night.

  “Hit him again, I will divorce you.”

  She came back to the States for the wedding of a boarding school friend. Baby Ajay got a high fever on the plane, some variant of measles, roseola, probably from swimming in the pool at the fancy hotel a week earlier. She missed the wedding. They never went back down to Martinique.

  NINETEEN

  WHEN HE “LEFT the State Department” she thought it was for her. It seemed a sweet proof of love. The marriage was reborn. She didn’t know quitting the State Department was a deeper move into cover, not a deeper move into marriage.

  They settled into the little yellow cottage. His relations were happy to have the foreign-smelling couple back to reestablish the political significance and ascendancy of their family.

  Abel ran for the state senate and was defeated. Then he slapped the baby a third and too-hard time and that was it. Hope was ready to get rid of Abel and ready to get rid of Ting Ting. She was ready to step alone into the world with her son.

  My Creole belle. She was lying atop Egyptian cotton sheets in the Hotel Splendide Rome near the Spanish Steps; it was the trip they had taken to try to patch things up. She remembered lying on scratchy sheets in some pensione the name of which she had long ago forgotten, remembered lying in a room closer to the Trevi Fountain, where she’d been given a key for the squeaky-clean shower down the hall. She had washed herself all over with a handheld sprayer contraption and had come back pruny and content, so content, having just discovered watery self-pleasuring. In that room Abel had traced the outline of her breast to her hip, slipping his fingers into what he called “the figgy stickiness of your fecundity.” In the presence of the promises to be kept, children that would be made and sheltered, steeped in Africa old as Eve, and in the world as young as tomorrow, he had said, “You are my Rebel Yella.” In this better room he didn’t say it. She was very far away from that room and that shower, that man, that girl, and then. They were tragic mulattoes for the very first time.

  Hope wondered whether, if she and Abel had stayed at the old pensione on their make-up-or-divorce trip, they might have stayed married.

  “You left out the part about the story you wrote.”

  “What story?”

  “ ‘Belisario.’ Abel’s birthday present.”

  “I had forgotten about that.”

  “I had too, except I saw it in the bookcase in the toilet.”

  “Which I need.”

  “I think I’ll just go out and get a smoke, then.”

  He grabbed his cigarettes and lighter and left the room; Hope headed for the hall bath. Her little manuscript, hand-sewn pages of old perforated computer paper, was easy enough to find on the shelf full of Trollope and Balzac.

  From his studio in one of the towers Belisario had ordered constructed to defend Rome from swarming hordes from the north, Moses Ezekiel could see both the Villa Borghese and the Via Veneto. The Roman government had been kind and had moved him from the stable that had been his studio into a fortified perch in the Roman Wall. And then the king had given him an honorary Italian knighthood to match the one bestowed by the second William to be emperor of Germany.

  He was planted. Without effort he had obtained a high place for himself in Roman society. “The old world,” he said to himself many a night while falling asleep over some inky-dark and dusty wine, “has a sweeter appreciation for this southern Jew and soldier than my upstart Republic ever did.”

  He had imagined he would never venture back, never again cross the ocean. Even the planned unveiling of what he believed to be his masterpiece, in the presence of President Warren G. Harding, was not enough to tempt him to quit the Eternal City; he had written the letter to decline the invitation and would have posted it had he not taken a nap and dreamed of a certain young woman in Washington.

  He wanted to see his masterpiece through her eyes.

  In preparation for his return to America he had ordered calling cards that read, SIR MOSES EZEKIEL. It was an affectation, but not precisely a lie.

  Everything else would be a lie.

  The worst the cards could be truly accused of was poor translation. And most people, Moses assured himself, walking to calm his nerves through the Vatican gardens, underestimated the significance of that sin.

  Moses, a man who had, in what he perceived to be an act of superb translation, transformed himself from a Confederate soldier into a Roman sculptor, from a southern Jew into a Euro pean Buddhist who held the most charming Christmas parties for Rome’s expatriates, was not most people. Moses did not low-rate translation.

  He was, however, otherwise careless. One chill afternoon, with rain coming down and influenza blowing in, when coughs and tales of disasters of the body had strained the nerves of his visitors, he had made the mistake of showing sketches of the monument. D’Annunzio, Michetti, and Adolfo de Bosis had been there, drinking his wine and talking about Madame Helbig. Finally someone had hoisted the rusted barb calling her “the most immense figure in Rome with the single exception of Michel-angelo’s Moses.”

  He liked the woman. She was married to the director of the German Archaeological Institute. A student of Liszt’s, the Russian princess formerly known as Nadja Shakhovskoy entertained on Janiculum Hill— and in her own wonderfully large way had been indirectly instrumental in Moses’s rise. They shared two loves: sculpting and Pushkin. He had trotted out the sketches to save her. Or perhaps he had done it to impress Edmonia Lewis. However that was, Moses found himself mocked. It was an unfamiliar and infuriating sensation.

  His Roman friends had little feeling for the defeated army. Rome is a city of the victorious warrior, a city to which warriors returned with the tokens of their victories. Someone asked him how he could get so involved with lost causes. Someone else said that Roman slavery had been completely different from slavery in America because the Roman had acknowledged the humanity of his slave and the American didn’t.

  He discovered that he felt himself free to quit Rome— precisely because he felt able to discern that Rome would wait. He wasn’t so sure about Alice.

  The year and a half the girl and her mother had spent with him had been a dream that had come true, revealing the disproportions of dreams. Neither woman could be made to fit into the home and life he had made in Rome without hacking something off—and neither woman would stay still enough to let him hack at her. If they had stayed still he wouldn’t have had the stomach to hack at them. They were not marble.

  Moses had started dreaming of Rome when he was still in Virginia, when he and Isabella,Alice’s mother, his father’s slave, had first become lovers. She had asked him, “Ain’t there some place you can take me where we can always be together?” She had offered one answer to the simple question: Montreal. He had proposed a different answer: Rome. Then he’d gone off to war and hadn’t taken her anywhere. And she had picked up words of French anywhere she could. She had kept raising his child, first in Virginia, then, after Emancipation was declared, in Washington. The girl was a student at Howard University when he sent for them both to go live in Rome with him.

  He had taken her to the S———s’, to the fabulous Palazzo Barberini, where S——— and his wife entertained in a tiny palace of forty-five rooms. Tableaux vi-vants. He had a nightmare about one of the evenings. He dreamed he had slapped his daughter in one of those tapestry-hung rooms with so many sofas shoved up against the wall and then in another. She had run through one room and then another and he had run after her, slapping her face and her shoulders. She wore the red print of his palm on her cream-colored s
houlders like a brand.

  She had sat as Cleopatra. Draped and undraped. Her left breast exposed. Bracelets on her left and right wrist. Someone had found the exact necklace the model had worn. It had been a strange performance. First she had sat quite still, the sleeve of the gown up on her shoulder. Cleopatra every inch: from the curl of her fingers to the lift of her toed sandals. And then she had let the draping on her shoulder fall. S——— had begun the applause. There had been nothing prurient in it; most were simply remembering the work of 1869. And then she had changed positions. Removed her headdress. Turned her back to her audience and put on a new necklace and earrings, rearranged her hair, taken off her sandals, crossed her legs, placed her elbow on her knee, then leaned heavily into her hand. Her feet had looked big. Her gaze had turned off to the side. She had become the Libyan Sibyl, all but the soft fold of flesh and two exquisite breasts— and then had allowed all of her draping to fall to her waist. The room had filled with louder applause.

  The mother was almost proud. Her daughter was exquisite and untouchable. So much more beautiful than marble. She had lived too long in the South to be shocked by a black woman’s nakedness, even a white-black woman. There was every kind of shiver and shudder: from desire and awe to fear and aversion. But she wondered at the responses of the others. This tableau was not a display, but an encounter. It was evident that someone, perhaps Charlotte Cushman, had been teaching Alice to convey. She was not flatly posed. The young woman leapt without moving—from the confines of the gilded frame into brown eyes and blue eyes and gray eyes, into hazel eyes and black eyes, flickering as they blinked. Only the father appeared to stare without blinking.