‘Friends for life,’ Jesse said to Vincent, looking at the boys.
‘The whale has brought us all together.’
‘Boy, he’s bright. Your son.’ Jesse smiled. ‘Questions! And talk, talk, talk.’
‘Really,’ said Vincent.
‘Yep, never stops.’
‘Oh, I can believe that. But conversation?’
‘Not really, kind of shuts you out with his stories. Though he’s checking up that you are listening.’ Jesse smiled.
As they walked on, Thérèse lagged behind. Vincent kept his eye on her. He was dying to ask what stories Theo had told Jesse. They could compare stories. But he restrained himself.
Thérèse caught them up.
They all began to walk to where the other sisters had gathered up the children for the trek back to Saint Damian’s under the supervision of Mother Superior, who had not really wanted this expedition to see the whale. In the end, she had not been able to prevent it.
She had stood on a high sand dune, with one of the novices holding a parasol to shade her, while she attempted to direct events as far as possible. She had decided, that what with the other battles which she had to win, to let this one pass. She glanced censoriously at Thérèse and Vincent. This was something that she was going to have to deal with, but not publicly.
Thérèse pulled at Vincent’s arm. ‘I can’t go with them. I’m not one of them anymore. I have nowhere to go. Where do I go?’ she asked pleadingly.
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Stay with me. I’m lost.’
Vincent was in a quandary. What could he do?
The tide was beginning to come in gently, seeping over the rocks. A tug had come around the point, and was waiting for the tide to rise before coming any further into La Tinta. A group of Marines were attaching ropes and chains to the tail flukes of the whale, to begin pulling it off the shore, when they thought they could catch the incoming tide, and hopefully float the mammal. It might just move off, though there was not much hope that it would eventually survive this ordeal.
The smaller children, on the higher ground, were waving back at the whale. The adult patients were speculating about what had happened. Many were fearful of the talk about the war. The fishermen who came into Coco Bay told stories to the patients who fished off the side of the jetty. The stories spread like wildfire. They had stories of survivors in lifeboats on the north coast of Sancta Trinidad. Some claimed to have seen a submarine surfacing off Saut d’Eau Island, and others, who fished, to have seen one as close as Corozal Point, up the coast from the Boca de Monos.
Jesse kept trying to engage Vincent in small talk but he had his mind on Thérèse. She stuck to Vincent. He hated to think what kind of impression was being created. How were they going to handle what Thérèse had done. What had she done? She had so obviously chosen him. He hoped everyone saw it as choosing the doctor in her distress.
‘There was a very old guy in our home town,’ Jesse began telling a story. ‘He had a wound on his back. Theo’s wound reminds me of that, took me right back home. But that was something that happened in those bad days. You know, slavery days. In the warm weather he walked around bare backed showing it to everyone. Letting us see. His back was a kind of monument, a kind of way for everyone from those days, and I guess, for all of us youngsters, to remember something, something of that history. So my Mama said, anyway.’
‘Lieutenant?’ Vincent interrupted.
‘Jesse, Sir, if you please.’
‘Yes, of course, Jesse, your story.’
‘I grown in South Carolina. Mama grown all her children there. We flourished like a field of corn. Papa, he took off North.’
‘South Carolina?’ Vincent was distracted.
‘Yep, you know, Charleston. You must know Charleston. I bet you’ve danced that music with a pretty gal.’
At that moment, Jesse looked at Thérèse who had turned away, and was staring out towards the whale. Tears were streaming down her face, drying in the sun, smudging her cheeks.
Vincent went towards her. Jonah was looking on and said, ‘Leave her be, Doc.’ Jonah sounded wise about the matter.
Jesse continued, more now to fill the space with something else. ‘The world dancing that music.’
‘What did you say, Jesse?’ Vincent asked.
‘Well, that history in that music, in the playing. But don’t mind me Doc, I see you’ve got your hands full.’ He laughed nervously.
‘No, Jesse go on. Your story is important.’ Vincent went and stood behind Thérèse, and in full view of the men, Jonah and Jesse, and those who could see from afar, he put his hand on her shoulders from behind to calm her.
‘It’s okay now, Madeleine,’ he whispered in her ear.
Jesse continued, more not to seem awkward than to continue with his conversation, ‘The blues and jazz, and you know, like down here on the islands, with your calypso. I hear a little of that. I hear the fishermen coming over the bay in the early morning when I’m lying in my bunk. They sounds as if they’ve real fun. We’re going into Porta España soon, and I go find myself a gal and dance them rhythms.’
Jonah and Vincent turned to him and nodded. Jonah tried to joke. ‘You go find them by the corner working for the Yankee dollar.’
Jesse got the point. ‘Oh, yeh. Rum and Coca-Cola.’
‘You got it, Lieutenant,’ Jonah laughed.
Jesse changed the tone and directed his remark to include Thérèse who had rejoined the group. ‘It seems that we’re all far from home, with this war,’ he said meaningfully.
‘That’s true, Lieutenant.’ Thérèse came into the conversation, listening intently. She looked distraught. ‘But then I’ve left home to find a new one. And, now, I’m alone.’
‘Here?’ Jesse asked.
‘Yes, here. But now, where?’ She looked into the faces of each of the men in turn. They stared, embarrassed.
Then, they all three looked at the pilgrimage of patients, higgledy piggledy, zig-zagging along the beach under the manchineel and almonds.
‘You do good work, Sister. You do a good work,’ Jesse said gallantly. He noticed Jonah’s deference. He was still confused by the sister’s dress. He left to join his fellow Marines at Perruquier Bay. Then he turned to Vincent, ‘One last thing Doc, the boy, he talks a lot about Chantal. Has he talked to you about Chantal? A girlfriend?’
‘Chantal? Yes, he’s mentioned her.’ Vincent answered without giving anything away.
Jesse smiled. ‘I’m right behind your house,’ he waved. ‘Okay if I call with my banjo?’ They all three looked ahead and waved him off.
Vincent asked Jonah to take care of Theo, and to take him to Saint Damian’s. ‘Keep him with you by the jetty, till I get back. He doesn’t want to go by Singh.’
‘I understand, Doc,’ Jonah looked at the boy.
‘Ti-Jean, you must get back to school,’ Vincent added.
Thérèse stayed back and walked along the beach with Vincent. ‘Well, what a day!’ Vincent exclaimed.
‘It’s hardly begun. You have the children to inject with Chaulmoogra Oil today.’ Thérèse was still thinking of her duties.
‘Oh God.’ Vincent hated the pain it gave the children.
‘I know,’ she said, almost her old self again.
‘Hopefully we’re going to be able to stop the use of Chaulmoogra. What you said about Sulfa drugs. That’s what we want from the Americans. You’re right. We must get our hands on that stuff. And the wonder drug, Penicillin. Our patients need them.’ Vincent was continuing as if everything was as normal. Even his inquiry, ‘Any news of your father?’
‘No, only nightmares.’
‘Nightmares?’
‘Mine, made of nothing but what I don’t know. And the letters that tell of Drancy.’
They looked at each other, avoiding the poisonous sap of the manchineel, as they stooped below the low trees. Vincent let their talk carry on in this vein as if nothing was amiss. They stopped in t
he shade of the sea grapes. It was only now that they were alone and Vincent looked again at Thérèse, and she became Madeleine, that the full impact of what she had done stunned both of them.
‘Where on earth did you get this dress?’ He flicked at her frilly sleeves with his fingers. ‘These things!’ He looked for the first time at her shoes, and a pathetic discarded handbag she had slung over her arm, that he had not noticed before, and seemed hooked there permanently.
Thérèse stood there and just looked at him as he looked at her, uncomprehendingly. ‘Madeleine! Madeleine!’ he repeated with sighs of bewilderment. Then, he said firmly, ‘Sister, this can’t go on.’
She stooped near where the water lapped beneath the hanging branches of the sea grape and logwood, cupping her hands in the gentle waves which chuckled over the sand and shells, like bones. She tried to wash off the rouge and lipstick from her face. As she bent there at the water’s edge, he saw the notches of her spine, the stretched nape of her neck.
The others were now out of sight. They were alone, hidden beneath the trees. She turned and their faces met. They kissed, their mouths dry and hot, tasting of salt. ‘What’ve we done?’ Vincent asked.
‘What’ve we done?’ Thérèse echoed him.
‘What will we do now?’
‘I’m not going back.’ Thérèse was adamant.
Her stark statement cut deep into Vincent’s consciousness. He realised at once, without really knowing how he was going to respond, that she was his responsibility. ‘Madeleine you have to go back.’ He tried to speak bravely and decisively, but he felt like a coward and thought he sounded like a coward. He unpinned the yellow star from her lapel and threw it into the water, where it floated for a moment, and then became saturated and sank, looking like the poisonous sap of the manchineel.
They took their shoes off and walked in the shallows along the beach to Saint Damian’s. They walked, dangling their shoes in one hand and holding hands with the other. Vincent felt pulled both ways. They kicked at the water. There was a sense in each of them that nothing mattered now as they came in sight of Saint Damian’s. Thérèse reiterated, ‘I’m not going back.’ Vincent pulled away.
Earlier, hidden beneath the sea grapes and the manchineel, his mouth on her mouth, Vincent had seemed convinced that Madeleine was right, and that he would support her in her decision. He could have, just a moment ago, dashed with her along the beach into some other future.
‘Madeleine. There’s nowhere to go,’ he said earnestly.
‘I can be with you.’
Her words twisted his heart. ‘No! No, you can’t.’
The incongruity of Thérèse’s appearance struck Vincent even more now as he saw Jonah waiting on the jetty with Theo and Ti-Jean who had not followed his instruction. Both boys waved ecstatically and called out, ‘Docta, over here!’
Life was calling Vincent. He managed to wave back. Thérèse had been part of that life, veiled, sandalled, the nun who worked alongside him on the wards and in the pharmacy, her head bent over her microscope.
‘Madeleine, you can’t go any further like this. Let me get you something to change into, something to cover you up.’
‘Cover me up. Is that what you want to do? Hide me away.’
‘Madeleine!’
‘Yes, your Magdalene.’ She stood facing him with her hands on her hips.
‘Madeleine, trust me. This is not how we must go. We run the risk of losing everything.’
She looked at him questioningly. ‘I’ve already lost everything.’
Back on the beach, Vincent was refusing to imagine what he had to do. He hoped that the nuns would deal with the situation, find some way to take her back to themselves. Because of the public nature of her behaviour, they had let it pass by as if nothing much was amiss. Even Sister Rita had not acted. Now, Vincent saw her coming along the beach as if she had guessed his thoughts.
When she arrived with a nun’s white cape, Thérèse was sitting on the beach. She knelt next to her. ‘Sister, come, come with me, come put this on,’ and she began to drape the white cape of the Sisters of Martha and Mary over the shoulders of her sister, Thérèse.
Vincent felt relieved as Thérèse did not resist, but seemed strangely comforted by the act of Sister Rita. But at the same time, he felt guilty. He had not found a way to take her with him. He could not find the way to do it and keep his job, keep the trust of his patients, their struggle, and above all his credibility in the eyes of Mother Superior and the authorities.
‘Thérèse, go with Sister Rita now. Later I’ll come and visit. I will. I promise. Sister Rita, tell Mother Superior that I’ve spoken with Sister Thérèse and that I have recommended that she take some rest. She is under too much of a strain at the hospital, and would benefit from a rest. I’ll come and see her later today.’
As Sister Rita went ahead, Vincent whispered, ‘Madeleine, trust me. I won’t abandon you.’ She looked back with longing and disbelief.
Much later that day, away from what many had noticed about the sister who break out of the convent, when the evening burnt down with no one watching particularly, the tug pulled the whale off the rocks. It floated on the high tide and was borne away on the fast moving currents of the Boca Grande. Its dorsal ridge faded into the distance like a disappearing island in the haze.
In that same sunset, Vincent walked up from the jetty at Embarcadère Corbeaux to the nun’s infirmary. He had a duty to perform. He had decided that this would be the end of the affair. How he would tell Thérèse this and make the visit one of a doctor concerned about a patient, he was not certain. She would surely see it as his abandonment of her. He was resolute.
Eggs
Saint Damian’s was a prison while Vincent and Thérèse battled with the authorities of state and church. Vincent was called in to Mother Superior’s office.
‘This is a misunderstanding, Mother. Yes, Sister Thérèse Weil and I have grown close. You might say that’s an indiscretion, but our research has made this possible. It’s a professional relationship and she has grown to trust me in her distress.’
‘That’s just it. That’s why I think it’s better that Sister Thérèse change her duties. I want her to be in charge of the patients kept up in the hills, with those who find it difficult to come down to the hospital for treatment. Some of our worse cases.’
‘Very hard for one sister. Very taxing work. Possibly dangerous, because of the unhygienic conditions.’
‘That’s what I think she needs, Doctor. Allow me, please, to make this judgment here. It’ll remind her of the primary duties of her vocation. This will take her mind off all the other things, extraordinary things she fills her mind with. Yellow stars! And this research of yours must be put on hold.’
Thérèse was removed from Vincent’s influence. He saw her trudging up to the hills. He looked out for her visits to the chapel. He had to be content with glimpses.
But Mother Superior was still gunning for the dismissal of, ‘That Doctor Metivier,’ speaking to Father Meyer and the authorities in Porta España.
Vincent had got the support of Jonah who had organised the patients. They marched to Mother Superior’s office. She heard their deputation. ‘We can’t risk another riot,’ Major McGill advised her. Elridge Padmore’s inquest had brought back a verdict of accidental death by shooting. That night there were fires in the hills. Soldiers patrolled the perimeter fence.
The patients resented the Yanks. ‘They kill Eldridge for nothing.’ Their sabotage continued.
‘You can’t dismiss him now,’ the Medical Board concluded, in their report to Mother Superior, knowing that they could not easily replace Vincent. They prevailed upon her to be patient.
‘How can I have him working alongside my sisters? Think of the risk of scandal. Under my very nose!’ she complained to Father Meyer. Her pride was hurt.
‘Sister Thérèse cannot return to Europe at this time. We can’t just throw her out,’ Father Meyer counselled.
‘I suppose I should get to the bottom of the matter of the yellow stars.’
Father Meyer advised her to ignore that matter.
It was at this time, in the middle of 1942, that the most certain news they had had for some time was smuggled in a letter by Sister Rita to Vincent, one day in the pharmacy. She had taken Thérèse’s duties. She was her confidante, visiting her in the hills, becoming her go-between with Vincent.
The letter Sister Rita brought gave the clearest description of the Grand Raffle of that year in the middle of July, of Jews being deported from Drancy to a German camp across the border of Germany, just within the borders of Poland. They had heard the name in a previous letter: ‘Auschwitz,’ Sister Rita read. Another name for Thérèse to add to her litany of fear, Vincent thought.
In return, Sister Rita carried a message from Vincent. Jonah would be in a pirogue near the small jetty by the womens’ huts at eight o’clock that night. The message joked that he had no intention of swimming across the bay to meet her. He wanted to be alive for her, not dead. But he was sending his boatman to bring her to him. Sister Rita buried the letter in the folds of her habit.
He knew he was playing on Thérèse’s vulnerability. She would be disturbed by the recent news in the letter he had just received. But, maybe, she had wanted him to realise that.
Jonah entered willingly into the secrecy. For a long time, he had thought that the Doctor needed a woman. Theo had become such a permanent presence, he wanted to encourage a feminine and maternal influence upon the doctor’s house. ‘All kind of thing does happen in this life, Doc. You can’t plan these things. You can’t plan love.’
‘I don’t want Singh to know.’
‘Doc, he done suspect.’
‘Yes, I thought so.’
‘Anyway, he and Christiana. You know?’
‘No I don’t know. I have left it so long to speak to him. Theo won’t return to work in the pharmacy.’
‘Well, she’s a young woman now, Doc. But it going on a long time. Singh go understand. As I say, you can’t plan love. He should know that.’
Night Calypso Page 30