Dancing on Coral

by Glenda Adams

  Portia made her way to Donna Bird’s side. “Every day he asks for you,” she said. The boys knocked aside the spectators and ranged themselves around their half-sister, examining her, looking for things about her that they could touch or purloin. “This is Rodney.” Portia held up the baby, lifting it off its feet, straight up, like a rocket taking off, level with Donna Bird’s face, then, as the baby’s legs flailed and its mouth opened to begin screaming, Portia lowered it back to the ground.

  “Donna Bird!” That was Tom, pressing through the crowd that had left him and Lark standing alone. “Sonofagun. What luck. You’ve come at just the right moment.”

  “I thought I would be too late?” said Donna sweetly.

  “We’re just about to roll the film. It’s dark enough. Sky Above Mud Below—you’ll love it.”

  A van pulled up at the corner, and from it issued a cameraman from a local news station and a reporter, who walked toward the crowd around Donna Bird. The cameraman, catching sight of the projector and the projectionist sitting on a stool beside it, stopped to chat with him.

  The clergyman stood on the periphery with Lark.

  “Where’s the wedding?” the reporter asked.

  “We’ve just joined these two young people in matrimony,” said the clergyman.

  Another round of applause went up from the crowd around Donna, Tom, Manfred, Portia, and the boys. Manfred Bird had just recited some of Donna’s accomplishments.

  Lark, in a state of terror and remembering Henry Watter’s warning about big families sticking together, like a team or an army, waited, outnumbered and hopeless, for Donna Bird’s next move. She looked up to the sky and prayed for something to fall and hit her on the head.

  The cameraman joined the reporter, and they pushed their way through the crowd. “Let’s get the happy couple,” the reporter said.

  “No, not that one,” cried the clergyman. “This is the bride, here.”

  But the camera light was on Donna and Tom, and the tape was running.

  Lark turned away and began walking to the corner. She thought she would get a bus, the first bus that came along, and sit on it until the end of its route. She hesitated. She had no money with her, and she had to decide quickly whether to go back past the crowd and into the apartment building in order to get her purse or whether to keep walking.

  The clergyman followed in the wake of the reporter and the cameraman.

  Seeing that all attention was on the television crew and Donna Bird, Lark turned around and, holding up the skirt of her dress, tiptoed quickly back toward the apartment.

  “You’ve missed the ceremony,” said the clergyman. “They’re already married. I just did it.”

  “Could you go through it again for us? We need something light for the late news. They’ll kill us if we go back empty-handed.”

  “Well, I’m agreeable,” said the clergyman.

  “Wait,” said Donna Bird. “I had hoped to be here before the ceremony, but it was only now, as I made my way toward my father’s apartment, that I saw the wedding notices tacked to the lampposts and realized the wedding was taking place.”

  “I didn’t know you were back,” said Tom. “I would’ve delivered you a notice personally.”

  The clergyman caught sight of Lark disappearing into the lobby of her building. “Hey,” he cried, “we’re going to re-enact it, for television. This is really something. Go get her.”

  Elizabeth and Jean-Claude detached themselves from the crowd and ran up to Lark. “This is really something. What a very good idea of Tom, to do a press release and have us take it around,” said Jean-Claude.

  “It’s not every day you can get on the news,” said Elizabeth. “All the stations are trying to build up their local news coverage. They think there’s an audience for it, in addition to the national network news. Light news. Fluff.”

  “Lark could have told me yesterday,” Donna Bird said to Tom.

  “Yesterday? You saw Lark yesterday?”

  Lark, led into the ring by Elizabeth and Jean-Claude, a criminal caught in the act of escaping, heard Tom’s question, his first question.

  “We met in The Strand,” said Donna Bird.

  “And didn’t she tell you about the wedding? Didn’t she invite you to come?” Tom turned to Lark. “Is this true?” Three questions.

  “And what is also true is that she deliberately saw to it that I was left behind on that island, so that she could get to New York first and marry you.”

  “Is this true?”

  Lark shook her head. “She brought it upon herself.”

  “What island?” the reporter asked, waving to his cameraman to shift from Tom and Donna to Tom and Lark. “Can someone tell me who exactly got married?”

  “I performed the ceremony,” said the clergyman. “Just five minutes ago.” The cameraman swung his camera to the clergyman.

  “Are you sure?” said Professor Bird. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “It’s a new-style wedding,” said the clergyman. “We just said the words in a relaxed way, as if we were chatting at a party.”

  “Who’s he?” asked the reporter.

  “I’m the clergyman.”

  “No, him,” nodding at Professor Bird. “Father of the bride?”

  The camera swung to Manfred Bird.

  “That’s Manfred Bird, the anthropologist, father of this young woman, Donna Bird, his daughter by his first marriage, and this is Mrs. Portia Bird, the present Mrs. Bird, and their four sons.”

  “And who are you?”

  “I am Tom Brown, urban commentator, social theorist, disciple of Professor Manfred Bird, and tonight the groom.” The camera swung back to Tom. “This wedding is my way of showing how community can exist in the urbs.”

  “And her?” indicating Lark. The camera shifted to Lark.

  “She is my wife, who stands accused at the moment by Miss Bird of certain wrongdoings.”

  “Are you sure?” Professor Bird asked the clergyman again.

  “I’m sure,” said the clergyman. “I did say if anyone objected to come forward.”

  “I didn’t hear,” said Donna Bird. “I had scarcely arrived.”

  The camera turned back to Donna. The crowd of onlookers followed the camera. Someone in the crowd said, “It’s called street theater, it’s new. They plan it in advance, then make it seem spontaneous, and the spectators are supposed to join in, feel involved.”

  “Goes back to the tradition of the Passion plays,” said a man neatly dressed in gray trousers, an open-necked shirt, and a cashmere cardigan. “That’s my field. I’m a medievalist. This is probably a modern Passion play.”

  “What does the bride herself have to say?” someone shouted. “Let her speak. It’s her wedding.”

  Lark opened her mouth to speak.

  “Wait,” said Manfred Bird, holding up his hand. “We’d better do this properly.”

  “What about the movie?” someone from the crowd asked. “We came to see a movie.”

  “All in good time, my good man,” said Manfred Bird.

  “They’re doing a live show first,” someone contributed.

  “We’re going to show The Sky Above and the Mud Below, about society and customs in the jungles of New Guinea. It’s new,” Tom explained in an aside to the reporter. “I wanted to show these urbs dwellers that we can be as close as those New Guineans, as the people of any traditional society.”

  “Now,” Manfred Bird looked around, then, picking up the canvas chair that he had knocked over and placing it on the curb, he said, “we need someone to hear the case that Donna wants to make. It seems that this marriage may well be fraudulent.”

  “You do it,” said Tom.

  Professor Bird pondered the suggestion, then shook his head slowly. “I must declare myself ineligible, because I am the father of the plaintiff.”

  “I’ll do it,” said the clergyman.

  “We need someone who is disinterested,” said the television reporter, beginnin
g to catch on. “You’re a witness, clearly. You need someone from the crowd. Why not him?” He pointed at the man in the cashmere cardigan. “He knows about passion, he said.”

  The man shrugged, looking around, and since there seemed to be no objection from any quarter, he stepped forward. He shook Manfred Bird’s hand, saying “I think we’ve met? At faculty meetings or at the faculty house?”

  “Please, allow me to contribute this debating stool.” Manfred indicated the director’s chair.

  “What about a jury?” The reporter was about to count out twelve people, when Professor Bird said, “The whole village will be the jury.”

  Lark, who had stood in a kind of daze, again feeling that she was in the middle of a play in progress, still afraid of Donna Bird and of being exposed for having left her on the island, finally was able to ask, “What am I accused of?”

  “She’s right,” said her supporter in the crowd. “She hasn’t done anything wrong. This is a democracy. She’s just gotten married, that’s all, and since when is that a crime? Leave her alone.”

  All this time the television camera was taping.

  “I accuse Lark Watter of deliberately stranding me, Donna Bird, on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean six months ago, so that she could get to New York before me and trick Tom Brown into marrying her.”

  “Whoa,” said the medievalist in the canvas chair. “Hold it. Start at the beginning.”

  Donna Bird told how she and Lark left Sydney in order to come to New York, in her case to earn a living as a writer and reunite with her father, in Lark’s case to learn about the world and broaden her views and also, Donna now realized, to capture Tom. Her voice was clear and carried through the crowd. No one had any trouble hearing her.

  Tom testified that he had expected them both and had rented an apartment for them to share. He said he was surprised that only Lark had eventually shown up, but he had believed her story about Donna Bird’s choosing to remain on the Pacific island to help out the islanders.

  “She is public-spirited,” Manfred Bird contributed. “She always served others. It’s in keeping with her character that she would wish to help those less fortunate than she. We all swallowed Miss Watter’s account.”

  The judge held up his hand. “Wait until you’re called on to take the stand,” he said, and turning to Tom continued. “Had you asked either of the young ladies concerned to marry you, or given either one to understand that you would marry her?”

  “If I was in such a hurry to get to New York,” Lark objected, “why didn’t I just fly from Tacoma? Why did I take three weeks to cross the country, taking even longer than the ship would have taken to get to New York?”

  “That is a good point,” said Lark’s supporter.

  “Please don’t interrupt the proceedings,” said the judge. “Wait until you are called on.”

  “Now that I come to think of it,” Tom said, “Lark never seemed to really like Donna Bird, right from the beginning.”

  “Can you cite instances of the form in which this dislike manifested itself?”

  Tom thought for a moment. “Well, I don’t ever recall her addressing Miss Bird directly. I don’t think she said more than a sentence or two to her the whole time I saw them both together.”

  The crowd murmured a little, some saying that was a good indication of the tension that must have existed between the two women, others saying that there’s no law that two people have to talk to each other and that as evidence Tom’s assertion was not admissible.

  “When did the idea of marriage come into it?”

  “Although I had never mentioned marriage until I proposed a few months ago, Miss Watter herself had suggested it soon after she arrived.”

  “Mrs. Brown, don’t you mean?” cried Lark’s supporter.

  “And how did you respond to her suggestion?” The judge pressed on.

  “I said, let’s just put it on the back burner.”

  “Why, then, did you propose marriage at a later date?”

  “We had watched a man steal a car. Then he proposed. Perhaps he wanted to buy my silence.” Lark surprised herself with her statement.

  “No speculation about motives,” cried several people in the crowd.

  “Order, order,” said the judge. “The defendant will have her chance to speak.”

  But Lark’s supporter in the crowd was too fired up to stop. “What about love?” he cried at Tom. “You mean you asked the poor girl to marry you and you didn’t even love her? That’s deception, cold-blooded deception, if you ask me. What was she supposed to think? She thought you loved her.” The crowd was swayed and murmured its approval. Love was a good cause.

  “Order, order.” The judge nodded to Donna Bird to speak.

  “I can prove that she was jealous of me and wished me ill,” began Donna Bird. “All the time on board ship she was rude and insulting to me. When she came across me writing in my diary—I have kept a diary since I was four—she mimicked me and said, ‘It makes you feel you are a drop in the ocean of life.’ She mocked me when I got involved in helping the natives with a production of Our Town. When I quoted something in Sanskrit and then something in German, she said ‘Sanskrit and German?’ placing the emphasis on ‘and’ in a sarcastic tone of voice.”

  “You know Sanskrit?” asked the judge, interested.

  “A little,” said Donna Bird. “I can quote from the Upanishad and the Mahabharata.”

  “How interesting,” said the judge. “I have a friend, a Sanskrit scholar, who when he went to India for the first time, tried to speak to the porters at the airport in Sanskrit.” He burst into laughter, joined by Donna Bird and Manfred Bird. “He was astonished that no one understood him and thought it demonstrated the decline of that great civilization.”

  “Get on with it,” said the television reporter, looking at his watch. “We’ve got to make the late news.”

  “And after I single-handedly tried to keep the conversation alive at the dinner table, she asked me if I ever stopped, in a mean way—she was criticizing my conversation—and after I had recounted several anecdotes, she called me a liar. She said I could not have done what I said I had done or met the people I said I had met. And so I went to my cabin and wrote down the names of all the people I have ever met—it took days—and gave it to her, just to show that we meet thousands of people in our lifetimes and that I do not lie.”

  “Where is it? Your list?” said Manfred Bird. “I need it for my work.” He nodded at everyone around him. “She is a chip off the old block, like minds, so intelligent.”

  “She has it, or at least she had it. I don’t know what she did with it.” Donna Bird pointed at Lark. “A lot of work went into it. Then, after the church service we attended on the island, when I said it was wonderful and uplifting—and it was, for we were afforded a glimpse of the customs of these islanders—she said it was the worst thing she had ever had to do.”

  “She told me she loved the church service,” said Tom to the clergyman. “I believed her. She spoke as if she was involved with Our Town. I believed her.”

  “She called attending a church service the worst thing she has ever had to do? Did I hear you correctly?” the judge asked.

  Donna Bird nodded. “Moreover, she said I forced her, that was the word she used, forced her, and the steward into the church.”

  The crowd hummed again, some saying that freedom of religion was one of the basic rights of this democracy and included the right to have no religion, others insisting that anyone who could scorn a religious service would be capable of anything, including stranding a friend on an island, and still others protesting that Lark was right, church services could be pretty tedious and pointless.

  Donna continued. “She wanted to spend all her time with the steward, with whom she had struck up a liaison, and whom she had turned against me. I was so lonely on that ship, for there were only we two passengers, and she and that steward, cabin boy really, kept avoiding me, eluding me.
”

  “She chose to stay in her cabin,” interjected Lark. “She’s allergic to all light, natural and artificial. She has to wear a hat indoors and out, night and day. I was the one who was lonely.”

  Donna Bird smiled at the crowd and shrugged, and, by touching her hatless head, indicated that Lark was lying. “Exactly. She struck up a liaison with the cabin boy.”

  “Is that true?” Tom asked Lark.

  “You had your own liaison,” shrieked Lark at Donna, “with that soft-headed Captain.”

  “Donna and the Captain?” questioned Manfred, nodding slowly, taking it in. “She is an original. Well, what can I do? At her age she’s her own person. I just don’t want to know about it.”

  “Order!” cried the medievalist, and motioned to Donna to continue.

  “And she made me go coral walking. She knew I could not take too much sun at the time.”

  “But she said she went on the coral, too,” Tom chipped in. He looked at Lark. “You told me you went coral walking. I believed you.”

  “The Captain forced us both to walk on coral. He was mad. I can prove it.” Lark turned to Elizabeth. “Go upstairs and get my espadrilles from the closet, and the piece of coral on my chest of drawers.” She gave Elizabeth the key. “Quick.”

  “And worse, worse for me,” Donna continued, “when I went to look for her on the island—she was missing and the ship was going to leave; I could have left her behind if I had chosen—she contrived to get back on board without my knowledge and allowed the ship to depart, leaving me stranded on an island where ships rarely stopped, where there was no airstrip, nothing.”

  Lark stood with her head bowed, her hand to her eyes, covering her face. Her other hand, holding the daisies and the daffodils, hung by her side.