‘It’s normal for your baby’s heart to run a little faster, uh-huh.’
Once the expectant father, too, has had a chance to listen, Rosaline peers through her reading glasses at Clarisse’s file, frowns at the notes, then at Clarisse’s prominent clavicles. ‘I’m recommending Dr. Katz put you on a special diet. Every mother gains weight at her own pace, of course. But protein and calcium are especially important in your second trimester. Some milk and a hardboiled egg, at least …’
Clarisse’s eyes light up: milk, egg. Yet self-denial is still the name of the game.
‘I don’t know …’ she protests. ‘People are already giving me dirty looks.’ She drums her fingers on her bump, still little more than an after-dinner bloat. ‘I know it’s a bad time.’
Overpopulation. Food shortages. A new truckload of people every week.
‘Don’t even think about that,’ Rosaline reassures her. ‘It’s a good thing.’ She turns to Danny, who’s also looking fraught. ‘It’s a good thing.’
The young couple look at each other doubtfully, then shake their heads and grin. ‘We’re really excited.’ Danny kisses Clarisse’s hand. ‘It’s all we want to talk about.’
Rosaline raises her eyebrows encouragingly. ‘Have you thought about names yet?’
‘We like “Libya” for a girl,’ Clarisse answers immediately. ‘For a boy …’ She looks at Danny and laughs. ‘We just want a girl.’
Rosaline laughs, too. ‘Well, that’s understandable. Boys, though … they’re not so bad.’
‘I guess they’re fine,’ Clarisse concedes, glancing at Danny. ‘I guess we were thinking, for a boy—’
‘Eugene,’ Danny says solemnly. ‘We were thinking “Eugene”.’
Eugene Luce. A tragedy what happened to Gene Luce. Even if he was a traitor. Even if his traitor daughter has been slandering them to the press ever since, trying to pin on them what was clearly a matter of wrong place, wrong time. Even if Jim has hailed the death an ‘act of karmic retribution’. Cut in two pieces by a train car; not a death she’d wish on anyone. She wouldn’t wish death on anyone, period … unless maybe that someone was ill and a danger to himself and others.
‘That’s nice,’ Rosaline falters. ‘Real nice. Your dad would like that, I’ll bet.’
Though the dove-gray sky will no doubt rain cats and dogs later on, for now it’s webbed with sunlight. The fields are rippling, banana leaves crumpling in the pale breeze. Standing outside the medical center, Rosaline looks. Looks and breathes.
No matter how busy they get, how her back aches, how her menopause flares, how her lungs sometimes bring up a foul leaf-green sputum — there’s always time to look and breathe.
A couple of nurses, Sally-Ann Burne and Elly Bud, come up the path from their morning rounds, chime, ‘Hi, Mother!’ and duck inside the infirmary. Another pair of girls, grimy and headscarved from garden work, wave as they enter the pharmacy with baskets of herbs. Meanwhile, Eve is ambling up the path from Jim’s cabin with uncharacteristic slowness, and toddling ahead of her is her little boy, Soul, and alongside her, curiously, is Phil Sorensen.
Rosaline looks away, as if she has witnessed something private.
But then Soul squeals and, menopause or no, Rosaline is still a woman who responds to children’s noises. She turns to see Phil lifting Soul onto his broad shoulders, jogging ahead, slowing to a halt. Glancing back at Eve with his square-jawed grin. Eve stands at a distance, arms folded, looking uncomfortable. She says something to her child, ignoring Phil. Soul squeals again, pulls Phil’s fair hair. Phil charges forth, joggling his shoulders so Soul laughs.
Eve watches, the slightest smile on her lips.
Rosaline isn’t the kind to feel smug without a simultaneous rash-like spreading of guilt. So she blushes down at her orthopedic shoes, then up again as Phil calls, ‘Morning, Rosaline!’
‘Morning,’ Rosaline answers politely. ‘On your way to the playground?’
Eve, who by rights should be the one blushing, gives her such a dirty look it makes her skin crawl. But Phil grins; the same square grin he used on Eve; the grin he uses on everyone; there’s a reason he’s such a successful PR man. Just yesterday, when the US consul came on an inspection, armed with a list of complaints from interfering relatives back in the States, Phil had done most of the talking, deflecting attention from Jim’s slack face, Jim’s slurred speech.
‘That’s the plan.’ Phil tickles Soul’s dangling legs. ‘If Little King doesn’t make me run circles around the whole town instead.’
At that, Soul gives Phil’s hair another tug and whines, ‘Go! Brodder Phil! Go, go!’
Phil laughs and obeys Soul, trotting off toward the playground. Eve hangs back, emphatically not looking at Phil. Rosaline diplomatically turns her back, moseys off to inspect a splash of bougainvillea growing along the side of the building. But instead of taking the chance to creep away, to the office, to the radio shed, wherever it is she’s going, Eve starts through the long grass with her file in her arms.
‘Excuse me! Rose,’ she sings out.
A little tenderfooted in her strappy sandals, but nevertheless efficient. Soon enough, Eve is poised in front of Rosaline with her file to her chest; pale face pinched, white blouse bloomy, an elfin point of ear peeking through her dark hair. She smiles at Rosaline, unconvincingly.
‘What a beautiful day. I just love this time of morning, don’t you?’ Having fulfilled her small-talk quota, Eve continues in a businesslike tone, ‘I don’t suppose Dr. Katz is back yet.’
‘He set out for Port Kaituma at daybreak. I don’t suppose he’ll be back ’til after midday.’ Rosaline doesn’t know if her instinct to mimic Eve is courteous or the exact opposite. For good measure, she clucks her tongue. ‘Is there something I can help w—?’
‘Father is asking for Dr. Katz,’ Eve interrupts. ‘I suppose he’ll just have to wait.’ She purses her lips and stares off in the direction of Jim’s cabin, eyes slate-blue, dark rings beneath them. ‘If you could tell the doctor to check up on Father as soon as he returns.’
‘I’ll tell him.’
‘It’s just Father’s stomach condition is giving him so much grief.’
Rosaline offers another tongue-cluck. ‘Did you give him anything for the pain?’
‘I gave him something,’ Eve replies. In the morning light, the worry lines between her brows are clear-cut, shocking. It occurs to Rosaline she isn’t accustomed to seeing Eve up close, away from her usual shadowy indoor habitats. It occurs to her that Jim was never an easy man to live with, and that jungle life hasn’t made him any easier.
‘If only he’d agree to see that specialist in Venezuela,’ Rosaline sympathizes.
‘Venezuela can’t be trusted,’ Eve snaps. ‘If Venezuela had their way, Father would be dead in the ground and this land would be theirs for the taking.’
‘Be that as it may …’ Rosaline sighs. ‘There’s only so much Dr. Katz can do.’
Eve peers back at the path, at the isolated thicket beyond which lies Jim’s cabin. After a while, quietly, she agrees: ‘There’s only so much Dr. Katz can do.’
Perhaps embarrassed to have admitted so much, Eve lowers her eyes and plucks an invisible speck of lint from her blouse. Raises them, now in the direction Phil took Soul. But Soul’s squeals have faded and Phil is surely out of sight.
‘Your folks’ll be here soon,’ Rosaline tries. ‘If I’m remembering right?’
Eve nods. ‘Tomorrow.’
‘That’ll be nice for you and Sally-Ann. Not to mention Soul.’ Eve smiles politely but doesn’t take the bait. ‘A nice birthday gift for Jim, too. Your folks have always been sympathetic to the Cause. He appreciates that, even if he doesn’t say it.’
‘Yes. Well.’ Eve’s eyes dance ironically. ‘Father doesn’t like to make a fuss on his birthday, but I suppose one of the first things he’d
ask for is something to counter the vicious lies of the media. I hope Tom and Margaret will deliver.’
Rosaline keeps a straight face, despite the absurd stiltedness of Tom and Margaret. ‘That’s true,’ she agrees. ‘Jim never likes a fuss on his birthday.’
‘Forty-seven is still young, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Rosaline echoes, and she supposes it’s true, for a man anyway. She shifts from one foot to another, peering down at the mousy-dark blaze of Eve’s head, and has the sense they’re probably both thinking the unspeakable: old or not, the way things are going, forty-seven could well be Jim’s last year.
At that moment, the gardener girls sashay out of the pharmacy, young and pretty, swinging their hips and their baskets. Eve turns to watch them and so does Rosaline.
‘Have you seen Polly?’ Eve asks after a while, in a newly bright, acquisitive tone.
‘No,’ Rosaline answers warily. ‘Why?’
Eve just raises her brows blandly, as if such scruples are cruder than the implication. Disgusted, Rosaline shakes her head.
‘I haven’t seen her. You’ll have to find her yourself, Eve.’
Without another word, Rosaline turns her back on Eve, wishing she had the gall to call her something worse than Eve, simultaneously glad that she doesn’t. Smug, even. Smug, and not the slightest bit guilty about it. But Eve isn’t done yet.
‘Rose,’ she calls softly, ‘I hope you know that we appreciate everything you do.’
And looking over her shoulder at Eve — her white hands clutching her file, her paleness against the pale sky — Rosaline has to wonder: that we, does it mean Eve and Jim? Or is it just a word Eve uses to feel less alone?
2.
When the rain bullets the pavilion roof and the workers come in from the fields with a smell of wet dog, Evelyn’s meeting with the Agricultural Department heads breaks up. Ike Dickerson takes the opportunity to upbraid the sorrel farmers for letting the weed problem get out of hand — ‘Sorrel? Who’s in sorrel? You got a trowel? You know how to use it, huh?’ — and Evelyn finds herself drifting toward the edge of the pavilion, the edges of conversations, watching with folded arms for signs of treason. Beverly Watson huffs and rolls her eyes. Ninette Lewis, a fresh arrival from Los Angeles, blames the sorrel plants for looking too much like weeds. Martin Luther, one of Jim’s sons, comes in, rain-slick and tall as a tree, and starts tickling his girlfriend Sheila, but folds his muscled arms and puts on a poker-face when Joseph Garden asks about the bulldozer. A trio of girls in wet T-shirts are giggling, evidently about their wet T-shirts, but stop when they notice Evelyn. Evelyn moves along and the giggles resume, and though they do not hurt her, there’s a certain blunt awareness where hurt might be, as if the organ of hurt has been removed yet is remembered by the surrounding nerve endings. Phil Sorensen wanders over from the radio shed, his polo shirt spotted with rain, droplets in his light hair.
Evelyn has matters to discuss with Phil, but none urgent. She will not go to Phil.
Evelyn goes toward the radio shed, passing conversations and turning them over in her mind; silencing conversations with the mere tread of her foot, the flash of her pale profile. Was there really a time when she was well-liked, popular? When girls confided in her and boys asked her to dance? If there was, that time is prehistoric, its details no more than faded hieroglyphics on a buried tablet. She doesn’t think of that time.
Evelyn passes Phil, who is consulting Oscar Hurmerinta about a prospective visit from the Minister of Agriculture. Phil turns his face slightly in her direction.
The radio shed smells of stale farts, though Mona at the controls looks too pretty to have produced them: dark bowl of chestnut hair, large hazel eyes, sweating décolletage, pouty lips transmitting code in her soft Jersey accent. ‘… 8-R-1, we read you loud and clear. Abigail, tell Scarlett to bring the shortbread to Rex’s house tomorrow. Over.’
Scarlett: Terra. Rex’s house: the US Embassy. Shortbread: tape recorder.
Evelyn smiles neutrally at Mona as she retrieves a clear plastic umbrella from the hook by her head. The radio hisses and crackles before Joya ‘Abigail’ Mendelssohn’s voice breaks through, demonically distorted.
‘8-R-3, I copy. Do you want the raisin shortbread? Over.’
‘8-R-1, affirmative. Tell Scarlett to serve Rex’s friends the raisin shortbread and ask them to repeat what they told us about bringing home the fishermen. Over.’
Bring home the fisherman: shoot down the planes. Namely, spy planes spotted flying low over the settlement some nights. Of course, the US Embassy is responsible. Of course, the Embassy is a puppet of the CIA. Of course, the CIA would like to provoke them to do something so extreme as shooting down a plane. Why else would the US consul, Morris Whitehead, have made such a suggestion during his inspection of the settlement yesterday? This latest attempt at sabotage must be captured on tape.
Evelyn slips out of the radio shed, opens her umbrella.
Phil has finished with Oscar. Phil is crossing the walkway toward Evelyn. ‘Very resourceful.’ Phil points at her umbrella, and Evelyn smiles politely, notes the outline of his pectorals through his damp polo. ‘Are you heading to the Letters Office?’
‘West House,’ she corrects. West House is the official name of Jim’s cabin. Everyone knows that she lives there with Jim — everyone who knows things, anyhow.
‘Same direction.’ Phil gestures at the path. ‘I’ll take you halfway.’
‘… Said the drowning man.’
‘I’m a pretty good swimmer.’ A raindrop slides comically down Phil’s long, fine, very Scandinavian nose. ‘But if you’re offering to share your boat …’
They are flirting. Or getting dangerously close to doing so. Aware of this, Evelyn hands Phil the umbrella. He holds it above them both.
Evelyn watches her sandals, ignoring how tall Phil is, how close.
‘Terra should have the Whitehead tape by this time tomorrow,’ Phil informs her. ‘When do we want it leaked to the Soviet Union?’
‘Not until relations improve,’ Evelyn replies. ‘At this stage, they’re likely to see it as a threat, not a cry for help. I wonder if they’ll ever stop thinking of us as Americans.’
‘When we shoot down an American plane, maybe,’ Phil quips, though he’s perfectly straight-faced, eyes pale and bracing. Gray eyes, lighter than her own, a ring of golden-brown at the center. He is too good-looking. Evelyn doesn’t laugh.
‘We are a peaceful people, born out of due season,’ she says. ‘Even Gandhi believed in self-defense.’ A breathtakingly lanky youngster powers past, face clouded, skin blue-black in the rain, shirt plastered to his narrow chest. Evelyn feels the old white guilt, yet continues: ‘Nobody will question our right to bear arms once we have it on tape. Assuming Terra succeeds in getting Whitehead to talk.’
‘She’s always been good at getting men to talk.’
The office building comes into view. Evelyn has the sudden feeling that her chest is a cliff her heart might leap off.
‘Don’t forget to hand in the schedule of activities for our visitors tomorrow,’ she instructs Phil, slowing on the path. ‘If you could have it by dinnertime.’
‘I’ll have it before then,’ Phil assures her. ‘Actually, I wanted to ask whether you’d like to do a final check of the Guest House with me this evening. If you have time.’
‘I’m busy,’ Evelyn responds instinctively. It’s the truth, after all.
‘Of course,’ Phil says, with a faint shake of his head, a faintly fatalistic smile. ‘What was I thinking?’ He stops, looks past her, lowers the umbrella. Looks into her eyes. ‘Gauguin to Turner and back again in ten minutes. It always amazes me.’
Evelyn turns her gaze to the landscape. ‘Van Gogh’s wheatfields,’ she offers.
Phil folds up the umbrella, shakes it dry, his forearms sinewy and sun-kissed.
�
�Thanks, Evelyn.’ He hands it back and takes a step toward the office. Evelyn steps away and nods. Purses her lips at his turned back: broad shoulders, tapered waist. Perfect ass.
‘Phil,’ she hears herself say. ‘Perhaps … early tomorrow. After my radio shift.’
‘Early tomorrow.’ Phil smiles. ‘Sunrise?’
‘Early,’ Evelyn repeats, unsmiling.
The cabin is dark, blinds lowered. Jim is sitting up in bed, wearing his Mao hat with his nightshirt. Even before she has entered, Evelyn can see he’s in a better mood than when she left. ‘—The freezing don’t kill ’em? How’s that?’
‘Inevitably, some die. But the freezing process is controlled, see,’ Dr. Katz, kneeling at the bedside, explains in his Arkansas drawl. ‘Slow programmable freezing. And there are substances to protect the sperm from freezer damage. “Cryoprotectants”.’
‘Astounding,’ Jim marvels. Noticing Evelyn, he cranes his neck to view her from his cloud of pillows. ‘Ever hear of this? “Cryopreservation”? Preserves sperm?’
Dr. Katz smirks at Evelyn. A morosely handsome Jew built in the mold of her high school boyfriend, Elliot Goldberg: pale complexion, bruised-looking under-eyes, teardrop nose. He wears his greasy dark hair past the ears to conceal a missing chunk of earlobe, the result of a failed attempt to impress or terrify a girl from his hometown.
Evelyn blinks noncommittally. ‘I have some documents for you to sign, Father.’
Jim opens his hand.
‘Could be, fifty years’ time, a woman ain’t even born yet giving me a son.’ As Evelyn passes him a pile of papers, he brushes her flat backside. ‘2028. What d’you think?’
‘It’s an idea …’ Evelyn slips a pen between Jim’s fleshy olive fingers. ‘… But I fear our enemies could get hold of your highly advanced DNA and misuse it.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Jim frowns. ‘That’s a point. Yes, yes.’
He signs a letter to the Minister of Education, another to the editor of a left-wing San Francisco paper — one of the few still sympathetic to the Temple after the bad press that has made continuing in America impossible. Since Eugene Luce went and got himself hit by a train, no accusation has been too outlandish for those rags to print: murder, embezzlement, child abuse, you name it. All without a whit of proof, let alone consideration of the innocent people being harmed by such accusations. Under that kind of scrutiny, anyone would look guilty, whether they stayed or fled. At least here in the jungle, their people don’t have to listen to anti-socialist propaganda every day.
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