“A mythical environmentalist?”
“Something like that,” I replied. “But not a goddess.”
“Mama Dlo is a shape-shifter who can transform herself into a beautiful woman. She is seen singing at the water’s edge at sunset, but she disappears within an infamous green flash. In Mamta’s tale, a handsome sailor falls in love with her but spurns her when he discovers her true looks, and so she uses her tail to stir up a storm and he drowns.”
“Do you think this illusion we’ve just seen in the mist is Mamta Dlo, pursuing you for revenge?”
I knew she was teasing me, but I was still uneasy about it all.
“I didn’t before, but now that you’ve mentioned it …”
“You men are amazing. You commit a moral crime and then you invoke your own state of purgatory,” Lethe said. “And a grandiose one at that.”
Perhaps she was right. But the figure worried me. I was sure I had seen someone in a state of deshabille to which hopefully Mamta hadn’t succumbed. Since Aesop lives here, this is her home. He is her father after all. Wouldn’t he warn me to stay away from her? If she was here, had she followed me? Had Aesop told her? Why not? Did he know of the events at the university? Had she told him? I had used her name as my passport to this place. Islands nurture secrets. Islanders pass secrets. Islanders keep secrets.
I worry about Lethe. We have our own lives. Yet I don’t want her to feel she has anything but the whole of my attention in this hiatus, a crucial time for her and for me. On the other hand, am I not being disingenuous? I brought Lethe here, knowing she would lose me soon; knowing how gravely her life had already been affected by grief. Would it have been worse if she’d simply heard of my death in the course of her everyday life? However I explain it to myself, I am being selfish. I needed to see Lethe. A dying man’s last wish.
I console myself that expecting perfection in time spent with Lethe would mean not accepting the nature of our relationship. There is no safe harbour. We are two boats struggling in a great open sea. We are within sight of each other, but our course and survival are separate. Some of our truths are unknown to each other, anchors we must carry home alone.
That is the funny thing about Lethe and me. We have been a curious mix of star-blessed and star-crossed through the years. We are drawn to each other in times of heartbreak, loss, or danger. As though against the elements, we get thrown together for a moment to reassure one another we are still here, and then we diverge again. I said as much to her.
“A heroic couplet,” she said.
Indeed. A heroic couplet.
If Lethe and I are dangerous to love, as Nora so indelicately stated, I do not believe we have ever been a danger to each other. That’s when one has nothing to lose. But now we both have our children.
LETHE
“What exactly happened to Blanca?”
It’s funny, but in all these years he’s never asked me this before. He must have heard, assuming Nora had told him. But with his wedding and Ernest’s death, the details could have got lost. We were on the promontory chatting over a drink. I have no idea what made him think of Blanca.
We had been distracted from our usual routine by news of an elderly resident of the island who’d taken ill. Aesop had rushed over to ask Daniel to assist him in collecting and getting the woman onto the ferry. She needed to get to the mainland for medical help. In his excitement, Othello was running up and down, forgetting to preen, his tail held stiffly cantilevered. Daniel helped get her on the ferry, but he wouldn’t go any farther. I assured him I’d be waiting for him so he’d have to return, but he was adamant. He was not leaving the island.
After the ferry left, we sat on the steps above the dock, waiting to see what would happen next. That’s when he asked about Blanca.
Nora had a theory that a motherless child was dangerous to love.
“He lost his mother at birth,” Nora had said knowingly of Daniel.
I pointed out that I had lost mine too.
“Ah, but you had me,” she purred.
I didn’t point out that Daniel had his two beloved aunts, spinsters only too happy to smother him throughout his childhood and youth.
I often wondered if Nora thought Daniel and I were not good for one another.
I never understood why Ernest and Nora kept Helen a secret from me. I understood why Daniel did. Did my grandparents think I’d be hurt? I’d get jealous and create mischief? No one could do devilment with Daniel’s decisions. He would see through any game I might play. He knew me, saw through me. It wouldn’t work. I simply wouldn’t waste my time. They’d presumably been huddled at Erehwemos for months, planning Daniel and Helen’s wedding. Ernest even gave Helen away. I was informed by a late invitation, one that I considered half-hearted for Nora knew I’d be away, as I’d planned a trip to the Bahamas with friends that summer. But I’m sure that’s not why Ernest and Nora had chosen that date — their friendship with Daniel and Helen had its own momentum.
I met Helen at our birthday party. I was twenty-one and Ernest was seventy-five. Jacob put on a large dinner party with fifty friends at the mountain home of a friend. It was really a sort of watershed. It was the end of my minority, the end of my university days. I’d got a mere lower second, which didn’t compare well to Ernest’s Oxford first, nor did it compare well to Daniel’s first. But Jacob — dear, generous, crazy, often absent Jacob — was the first to comfort me, saying he too only received a lower second. He was at the party, nursing a recent romantic wound with gin and tonics, still alone in the sense he hadn’t yet made up his mind to bring someone else home to meet us. But we knew he had his courtships. There were the nights he didn’t come home. There were the usual rumours. I wasn’t bothered as long as he didn’t present the girlfriends to me. As long as they were “out there” they were just part of his myth and couldn’t affect my life, disrupt my relationship with my father.
Ernest was shaky and resigned that evening. I didn’t take the time to figure out why. I was too busy swishing around my party in my light, foggy moss-green gown, the prettiest I ever remember wearing, with its empire waist and low neckline, and its yards of floating floor-length material. It was raining when I arrived with Blanca, a long trailing shawl draped around my shoulders, but I had carried an umbrella and was covered. I had dyed a pair of satin shoes to match my dress, which caused Nora to raise her eyebrows as she thought it very middle-class to wear matching shoes! She believed in black, white, or beige shoes, only solid colours. I wasn’t concerned with her politics of clothing; my only worry was that I didn’t want the shoes to get wet, or my hair. I had piled on a heavy hairpiece of upswept curls that crowned my ensemble. Our hostess welcomed me with open arms: “My dear, you look like Madame Manet.”
“No, more like Renoir’s Woman with a Parasol in a Garden,” said Nora.
Jacob said to forget the parasol. He thought my long neck set off by my upsweep was very Modigliani.
“A regal Modigliani in moss green.” He held my hand to twirl me, except my heel caught on the trailing shawl and I nearly tripped.
I relished the moment. It was in the middle of all this wonder-ful attention that Daniel walked in with the magnificent figure of Helen.
Helen was nearly as tall as Daniel and statuesque. She had long blond hair that did not detract from her watchful yet open, intelligent face. She was as white as ivory, yet her features were not typically Caucasian. She had sad eyes, a blunt nose, and a patient mouth that was slightly uneven when she smiled — in fact something in her expression reflected conflicting thoughts: her eyes, though questioning, were somehow frozen in patient forgiveness — but her smile lent her face a grace I would subsequently reach for.
“Helen. You are the final arbiter,” announced Nora, impersonating Mrs. Ramsey, a routine she trotted out occasionally. “Lethe with her umbrella. Does she look like a strolling Madame Manet, Manet’s Woman wi
th Umbrella, Renoir’s Woman with a Parasol in a Garden, or a Modigliani?”
Helen, an art teacher, looked at me with an uneven frown of concentration which reflected a care and attentiveness I would come to know as essential to her personality. She wrinkled her nose, cocked her head sideways, her long hair falling down over one shoulder as she studied me with the dispassion of a visitor in a gallery.
“A Georges Seurat, I think. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”
That shut us all up.
Ernest sat through the chattering, looking tired and frail. He listened patiently, amused but detached. He watched us for the next few hours, pleased that we seemed to get along. At one point he held our hands, Helen and I seated on either side of him, and he was careful to beckon Blanca so she wouldn’t feel left out.
I liked Helen from the moment I met her. Daniel couldn’t accept that. I suspect he hoped we’d both be jealous. But I felt no envy, perhaps just a wistfulness that she’d enter through the door into the rest of his life and I would not. I had always known I wouldn’t survive the glare of his light, the charge to be my best, the unrealistic expectations made by the faith of his writer’s imagination, the changes I would have to make to be who he thought I was, the commitments I would have to undertake. I also knew he would never be faithful. That was a given. All this came to me as I watched Helen that evening, not with Daniel, whom she seemed matter-of-fact about, but the way she looked at Ernest with such a tenderness, as she guided me to his side to cut the cake, and shared out slices for the guests. As she clapped encouragingly for Nora the aging woman precariously balancing her gin and tonic as she danced, listing like a slipping shawl across the living-room floor to the music of my Billy Vaughan record.
Daniel watched what he decided was our charade. Blanca wan-dered over to talk to him, but he just stood in the middle of the room, looking glum and nodding inconsequentially while she chatted, clearly unaware that she did not have his full attention.
It was after the cake when Mr. Cortina, now just a friend, walked in carrying a huge bouquet. I’d never received such a gift. I considered cut flowers an unnecessary human indulgence. When I reached up to embrace him, my head at an odd angle to avoid the blooms, the weight of the hairpiece unnatural on my head, caused a disc in my neck to slip. I was instantly immobilized, my head exploding in pain. Helen rushed to my rescue, firmly setting aside the bewildered former beau.
She guided me to a bedroom as I clutched the side of my neck and unpinned the many bobby pins releasing the hairpiece. Helen found warm rags and cold rags, cooing soothingly. Ernest and Nora had to take me home propped up on my hostess’s pillows in the back of their car.
In the days that followed, Helen and I were on the phone constantly.
Helen sewed, Helen drew, Helen designed. Helen was invaluably practical. She offered to make me a swiftly assembled wardrobe for my trip and agreed to my idea that she illustrate my poems with her drawings. We would publish a book together.
At his flat, Daniel watched me come and go, trying on Helen’s designs, modelling so that she could shorten a hem or alter a sleeve, the pins in her mouth as she knelt beside me on the floor. She seemed to have moved in with him. I would tell her my loves, my losses, Blanca’s news, my heartbreaks, my adventures at the bank or the doctor, my hypochondria, and she’d exclaim, “Oh, Lethe!” and laugh that indulgent deep chuckle she had. She made me feel charming.
Daniel would avert his eyes, pull on his cigarettes, sulk, and finally walk out.
One day Daniel answered the door when I came to collect the last blouse for my trip. An emerald-green I kept for years, even after the flimsy voile had separated into tired gaps, its body pulled away from the thread.
He was alone. He left the door open, left me standing there. He went and fetched my parcel.
“What are you trying to prove, Lethe? Why are you doing this?” His voice was soft, his gaze penetrating.
Doing what? Did he object to his future wife sewing for me?
“Forget this collaboration. Your poems are your poems. They aren’t nearly ready yet. They cannot be published.”
“I just came for my clothes …”
“Here are the damn clothes.” He held on to the package like a hostage. “Listen, whenever you print those poems they are your poems. They are your vision of the world. You can’t marry them to someone else’s vision, someone else’s interpretation of the world — Helen’s interpretation of your poems.”
I stared at him. He sounded like Ernest. I didn’t argue with him. I couldn’t. I knew the poems weren’t ready, but I also knew the poems would probably never be ready. They would be okay when matched with Helen’s drawings.
“You don’t need Helen’s endorsement.”
“But you feel I need yours?” I snapped.
“Why this charade, Lethe?”
“I love Helen.”
“You can’t love Helen.”
“But I do.”
She was an English mother, my idea of the mother I never had. My idea of a big sister, or the kind of woman I would have liked Jacob to marry. Maybe she was that for Daniel too. Maybe it was the orphan in him now jealous of the orphan in me. What were we fighting over? Whatever his silly old love was, I knew it was there for me. Helen could never replicate the odd garment that was made up of him and me.
But the fact remained I liked Helen.
I paid a price for that affection. When I left for my holidays, Helen and I wrote back and forth throughout the summer. We exchanged poems and drawings as we planned our book. But not a word from Daniel. Not even after they married and I wrote them both asking for news. It was always Helen who answered.
Before I left for the Bahamas that summer, I went to spend a last night with Blanca at her flat. She helped dye my hair, loaned me some clothes, and cooked me my favourite Czech dumplings. We went to bed giggling about boyfriends. She was dating a short, quite handsome insurance salesman. I was going to Harbour Island to meet a university student whom I fancied.
Blanca had always advised me so wisely, providing an alternate view of a world that was complicated by the weight of social considerations from my family. She cut through my inherited and often confused ideology with dispassionate logic. She made it okay to figure out fashion, worry about skincare, and think about serious things intelligently all at the same time. It was acceptable, all right, okay, to include the trivial and the superficial. Money and creature comforts weren’t bad words. Being middle-class was okay.
We decided that night I would move back in with her when I returned. Helen would sew curtains, cushions and bedspreads.
“You’ve done so much for me,” I said.
She shrugged. “You’ve been a faithful friend too.”
I don’t like to talk about what happened that night. The truth is I can’t bear to think about it. After we went to sleep, a man broke in through the kitchen window and attacked Blanca. Her screams have followed me down the years. She fought him bravely. When I emerged afterwards, when it was safe to do so, she was like a shredded doll, her clothes cut into mangled strips, her pale skin dazzling with lines of fresh red blood that had breached its levee The man fled but Blanca had no way to escape those minutes. As even now I can’t.
We had no phone. I drove her to the police station. One officer took forever to excuse himself from his game of dominoes, collect a clipboard, search for and insert a legal pad, address his laughing fellow players with his bonhomie then turn reluctantly to speak to us and ask a few disinterested questions.
“Can you describe the man?”
“It was dark. I couldn’t see him. He was clean. He had short hair. He smelled of aftershave. He was thin.” Blanca gazed into an empty mid-distance that would become her new field of vision.
“You say clean?” The officer lifted his top lip as he spoke and looked incredulously at Blanca as h
e paused above his notes. I won-dered what confused him. He then went on smirking as he repeated and jotted down each of the desolate memories for which Blanca was now responsible.
I took Blanca home to Nora after a visit to the hospital where they examined her and dressed her wounds. She shivered under a blanket on the small settee, drinking Milo and listening to Nora’s gentle advisories. I asked her uselessly a few times if she was okay, knowing she would be brave and say she was. Knowing if it was me I wouldn’t be and she would have stayed with me. If she was all right I could leave the next day. She could stay with Nora till she felt better and Nora would take her home and settle her when she was ready. I knew she was far from ready when I caught my flight in the morning.
Eight weeks later — on and off a boat, after many pounds of ganja and the insatiable, exuberant, tireless ordinary sex of the young — I returned home. My world had changed in my absence.
Blanca was gone.
Blanca had left a harmless message on Nora’s door to say she’d dropped by one afternoon when Nora was resting. Nora thought nothing of it.
“She’d drop by now and then to have a bite to eat with me,” she explained. “She’d had a bad exam result and knew she’d have to repeat the year. I ran up to see her the next day. Her car wasn’t there.”
Two days later a neighbour called to say Blanca was dead.
Blanca did the job efficiently. As a consummate scientist, she took sufficient sleeping pills before she slit her wrists in the bath and bled to death.
And later Nora heard from Blanca’s sister that the insurance salesman had left her after the break-in saying he couldn’t deal with it all. All what, she asked? He had shuddered with distaste as though something was sullied.
“Couldn’t deal with it all,” seethed Nora. “Pathetic! Had I known, I would have wrung his bloody neck.”
“He was always a creep,” I said. Blanca never had luck with men.
Within twenty-four hours of my return the rest of my world came crashing down. Ernest, who had been failing all summer, had slipped into a coma and waited long enough for his last hair-brushing from me. Minutes later, he died.
The Black Peacock Page 10