Eden Burning

by Belva Plain

  Margaret shuffled at the door. “Mama?”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “I don’t want to go to bed.” The loose, helpless mouth puckered toward tears.

  “I’ll read you a story first. I’ll read you Peter Rabbit.”

  “No, Francis read!” And the great girl, taller than her brother’s shoulder, stamped her foot.

  With enormous effort Tee summoned energy. At least the tussle would be easier tonight with Francis helping.

  “Come, Margaret darling.” And taking the girl’s hand, she gave a grateful smile to her son. “Sometimes I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  When the house was quiet, she lay down. Richard would be coming home late, but she was thankful to be alone. She was often alone, he having an independent life in the brokerage house and the galleries. A faintly bitter smile touched her lips. He saw himself as a fascinating man, a financial wizard and a connoisseur of art. Yet, to be fair, he really did understand paintings.

  “Anatole Da Cunha is one of the greats,” he had told her. “Wait and see, his work will be priceless after his death.” Acting upon this conviction, he had bought four of Anatole’s landscapes. “His best work comes from his memory of the Indies. But you should be able to judge, Teresa: Does it have the living spirit of home for you?”

  Yes. Oh, yes! Now, between the windows, in the path of the lamplight, hung Morne Bleue; in the foreground, under an oyster-colored sky opaque with heat, lay a stretch of familiar rippling cane, twice a man’s height, and weaving through the cane a line of cutters, their black arms curved in the sway of labor like dancers on a stone frieze.

  Richard had put it there for her pleasure, but she had not wanted it, had not wanted anything of St. Felice, not even Père’s books when he died, although they had sent them to her anyway, sending too, without knowing that they had—how could they know?—the click of croquet balls on the lawn, the twinkle of candles in the Catholic cemetery, and the smell of rain.

  Now too, outside on the New Jersey hills, it had begun to rain, an even, pattering, all-night fall. In St. Felice the rain comes plunging, pounding the earth and ceasing as suddenly as it begins, leaving a vapor to rise from the steaming ground.

  Down at the wharf when the banana ship is moored, through the steaming wet come lines of barefoot women, bearing their loads on their heads.

  “See,” Mama says, “how gracefully they walk! It’s the same as the nuns teaching you to walk with a book on your head.”

  But it is not the same; the child Tee sees that clearly. It puzzles her that certain things should be so, that the heavy work is always done by blacks and that they live as they do. She goes to town with Agnes to bring some medicine to the cook’s old aunt; the hot street stinks, the gutters run foul; the house holds merely a cot and a table. Why? No one tells her. Perhaps no one can.

  Père talks with pride of Cambridge, of boats on a quiet river, of choirs and Gothic arches, of gentlemen. How can all that merge with Covetown?

  Agnes says, “This boy needs the best. He deserves it.”

  Père says, “Three generations of our people have gone to Cambridge.”

  Now comes the fourth, and he doesn’t know he is.

  Teresa’s head tossed on the pillow. Oh Francis, Francis my son, is this the real reason why I love you so much? Too much, maybe? That I want everything for you? Is it because I need to expunge, to wipe that other away, to wipe all the pain away, so that I might say, Here, you are my son, my only son; I have no other and there never was another? Is that why?

  Oh, hell, hell in the heart.

  She balled her fists at her sides. She firmed her lips. Listen, Teresa, this is the way it is. You just keep on doing what needs to be done, you hear me? And close your mind. You can do that. You’ve been doing it for a long, long time now.

  Strong words, strong resolution. And yet you know—how well you know!—the days and the years when fear will flood again in gray afternoons, and the mouth will go dry and you will close your book to get up and walk around the room.

  Agnes asked, “Are you happy enough?” Was that deliberate discernment or only the chance use of a word, that difference between “happy” and “happy enough”? For what is “enough”? For that matter, what is “happy”?

  Oh, you can recognize happiness in other people! My mother is happy because she’s not touchable, not breakable. When Papa died, her tears gushed and the wound healed. Richard? Yes, surely, Richard is happy. He has all he requires out of our marriage. I don’t think he can even imagine what it is to be lonely.

  As for me? When I walk in the rain I feel contentment. Books keep me company. My house is warm and safe on a windy night. There are two or three friends who are dear to me and I to them. Thankful that I can, I help the sick and the poor. And Francis—ah, Francis is my joy of joys! Without him, there would be no one under this roof to talk to. Poor, mindless Margaret. Two other girls who are like Richard, such glossy surface: good girls, just different from me, that’s all.

  I remember once I wanted to die; they say most people do at some time or other. Yet they get over it, as I did. You fall, but then you struggle up again. At least if you’re worth your salt, you do.

  Besides, “The Francis family is tough. Remember that,” Père said.

  Francis, too, lay listening to the rain. Tonight was one of his “anxious” nights, when he had troupe falling asleep. Often he had been told that he was oversensitive, and he supposed he was, if by that was meant a sharp awareness of other people’s moods.

  His thoughts kept circling. His mother had been troubled. Of course there was always Margaret, but somehow or other he didn’t think it was Margaret who had been the reason. Ordinarily he would have asked her for the reason; they had between them a frankness that was both serious and humorous. There were certain times, though, when something held him back—and this was one of them—when a darkness crept over her, as when a cloud moves on clear water. These times came oddly, unexpectedly; she might be standing with the other mothers at some school function where he could be so proud of her, smiling quietly among the fashionables with their nasal twitterings—and suddenly the darkness would sweep over her. And he would know that for those few minutes she had withdrawn, that she had not been there at all.

  Once, when he was very young, he had heard two maids talking about her.

  “She’s kind of a queer sort, but nice enough,” they’d said.

  And he had asked them, “Why is she a queer sort?”

  “Oh,” they had answered him, “we only meant, she is so far from home. She must be homesick.”

  He had pressed her, then, with questions. “Why don’t we go to St. Felice? Why can’t we visit?”

  “It’s too far … your sisters are too little … I get seasick … maybe someday.”

  She would never tell him anything important about the place, just odd little facts about, for instance, “mountain chickens,” which are really enormous frogs that people cook like chicken. He wasn’t sure what it was exactly that he wanted to know, only that it was more than she was willing to tell, which was strange because his father always talked so freely about his childhood.

  Two times his grandmother Julia had come to visit. She was an important-sounding woman who kept complaining of the cold, although it was June. The child Francis hadn’t liked her, even though she smelled like flowers and brought wonderful presents.

  “Your mother despises us,” she had told him. “Our backward little island.”

  It was untrue. Francis had known that even then, for his mother was not a person who despised anyone. On the contrary, she was always excusing people, even when they were wrong.

  Last week the gardener had smashed up the station wagon.

  “There was no possible excuse,” Richard said. “Woolgathering, not paying attention to the road.”

  “It’s easy to condemn,” Teresa said. “One never knows what is behind anyone.” She hadn’t said it to be pious or for the sound of
it, but Richard had been annoyed. And Francis had been sorry for her.

  He wondered whether, in spite of all concealment, she might be aware of his father’s “escapades.” He was old enough now to understand that there must have been, must still be, others like the one that had so disgusted him when he was fifteen. At dinner with a friend and the friend’s parents in a restaurant he had encountered his father with a woman, a common, gaudy young woman, at the next table.

  Richard had pleaded. “Don’t tell your mother, son. It would only make everybody miserable. There’s no harm in it, you know; I wouldn’t hurt your mother for the world.”

  Why did people make these foolish marriages? Couldn’t they tell beforehand that they wouldn’t work? You had only to be with Richard and Teresa Luther for a couple of minutes to know how different they were.

  Richard was extravagant and fond of himself. Packages kept arriving at the door although the closets were already overflowing. Money poured.

  “Like French wine,” said Teresa, who tended to be frugal. “Wanton waste.”

  Richard liked hunting and the parties that went with it.

  “Wanton killing,” Teresa said fiercely when he came home with a bleeding, limp deer hung over the car. “I can’t bear to see it.” She rescued stray animals.

  Much of this had been barely overheard. There was never any overt quarreling. But children know these things. There is a coolness in the air of a house where the marriage is faltering.

  In some vague way he felt a need to make up to his mother for all this. That, when he thought about it, was the real reason for his particular patience with poor Margaret, so that, unlike his other sisters, he didn’t allow himself even to feel exasperated when she wet her pants or upset her plate.

  His mother was grateful. “You’re so kind to her, Francis,” she would tell him, with a look of astonishment.

  “You have a Presbyterian conscience,” his father said, laughing, but not unkindly. “And the soul of a poet. A strange combination.”

  He did sometimes feel removed from other people, that was so. It was a kind of shyness that he had, inherited, he was sure, from Teresa. He knew that this shyness would have deprived him of his peers’ approval if he had not luckily been given also a strong, tall body and the ability to excell at sports. In such random fashion does fate play with us!

  Lately he wondered more often what, indeed, fate might be preparing for him. At seventeen you had to look toward the future. Richard naturally assumed that his son would work in the firm when the time came. His was one of the more prestigious firms on Wall Street; a young man might consider himself fortunate to start there at the top. But the prospect was already distressing to Francis: a lifetime under electric lights on a shelf in a vertical box counting money—for that’s what it all came to, really, counting money. And no air, no sun!

  Yet he had no alternative in mind. How simple it was when you were possessed by some passionate talent for music or medicine or—or anything! To be just a “bright student” who did well at everything, yet to be without distinction or direction, was burdensome, a somber prospect to a young man who was too serious, anyway.

  He had thoughts, sometimes, of going off to be a rancher in the West—he’d been there once on a vacation trip—or of being a forest ranger or a dairy farmer, or just of writing a book in some quiet, leafy spot, although he had no idea what he would write about. Perhaps some sort of history? The past allured him. Before that, though, he’d like to see some more of the world, the places with fantastic names: Bora-Bora, Patagonia. And St. Felice. Yes, certainly, St. Felice, he thought in that last lucid moment before sleep. And he turned on the pillow, finding a comfortable hollow. Let sleep come now, softly. There were, after all, a few years left before he must decide what to do with his life!

  The rain died and in its place the night wind rushed. Wind of the world! It shifts and rises, it drives, it goes where it will.

  SIX

  Four years. As always, there had been periods when time sped away like a bright bird; at other moments it plodded heavily and Patrick couldn’t wait to get home. Years afterwards, he liked to say that it was England’s cold fog that had brought him back to St. Felice, and perhaps there was a kernel of truth in his little joke.

  The ship rose and sank with the swells. Standing at the rail, feeling the spray on his face, he realized that he had forgotten how soft the air could be. Overhead, the stars were blue; they looked warm enough to hold in the hand. In the north their glitter was hard and one could believe that they were millions of miles away.

  The man beside him, a white man, a civil servant on his way back to Jamaica after a leave, resumed conversation.

  “And so you’re glad to be home again.”

  “Yes, as glad as I was to leave four years ago.”

  “Were you not—comfortable—in England, then?”

  The man was middle-class English, reserved and courteous. If they had been anywhere but on board ship, he would not have permitted himself so much curiosity. But then, on land they would not have been conversing at all.

  “I was quite comfortable. It was a new world. That is, you can read about a place, but it’s never the same when you come to it, is it?”

  How to describe the richness, the splendor, the confusion, the strangeness, and the disappointments of four years, when he was still organizing the memories of them in his own head? “I met South Africans, Hindus, Arabs, Japanese—”

  The man laughed slightly. “And Englishmen?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. My first friend was a miner’s son from Yorkshire. He had the room next to mine.” Now Patrick laughed. “My first winter they had the worst snow and cold they’d had in thirty years. It was inhuman. I didn’t go out for two weeks. He brought me sandwiches and coffee.”

  He had been a short, ruddy fellow. Alfie Jones, with the congenital indignation of a rooster. The education of the poor, or lack of it, outraged him.

  “We had a lot in common, it developed. We’re both going home to teach in the poorest district we can find. That won’t be difficult on St. Felice, at any rate.”

  “I should have thought, don’t most of—your people—study medicine or law when they go abroad?”

  “Well, they do. My best friend from home, Nicholas Mebane, is reading law in London. He plans to go into politics. You’ll be hearing of him throughout the West Indies, I expect.”

  The man didn’t answer that. Probably took it as a challenge, Patrick thought, although he had not intended it as such. But everyone, especially a civil servant like this one, knew that drastic changes and upheavals were coming.

  Now clouds closed over, wiping out the stars in minutes. The sky turned deep gray; the moving water shone like jet. There would be a squall before morning. The contrast between humanity’s scrambling and scrapping and the powerful rhythms of indifferent nature could make humanity appear ridiculous, Patrick thought, and then as quickly: But that is ridiculous, too; there are some things you can only get by scrambling for them.

  “I have no desire to be political, though,” he heard himself say.

  “You could go far. In Jamaica there are many good posts for—” The man stopped, having been suddenly afraid, no doubt, that his remarks might be too personal, or even taken as an insult.

  “Because I am almost white, you mean?”

  “Well, yes, no offense, only facing the reality of the situation. Fair or not.”

  In England he had been taken for Syrian, for Greek or Hindu. Only here, here at home, there would be no mistaking what he was, or what was his place.

  “But in the kind of government that is coming, not what you are running now, such things will not matter,” he said evenly.

  That silenced the man, who now reached into his pocket for a cigarette and had a time trying to light it between cupped hands against the rising wind. And Patrick felt a contradiction within himself: pleasure at having countered a smug attitude and regret at having embarrassed someone who had int
ended no hurt.

  This contradiction was nothing new. He wished he could get rid of it. Because of it, many an otherwise congenial occasion had been spoiled, at least in part. There had, for instance, been that sumptuous wedding reception to which an English fellow classman had invited Nicholas and him. The bride had lived in a lordly house—three thousand acres of forest and lawn, lofty halls, splendid terraces—built by her eighteenth-century forebears with the proceeds of a West Indian sugar fortune. Standing beside Nicholas on the lawn, he had thought of his mother, come to serve in the Mauriers’ house and dazzled by its wealth.

  “I feel so black here,” he had told Nicholas.

  Nicholas had been amused. “Black? You? How should I feel, then? No, it’s not race that is bothering you, it’s economics. How do you think Alfie Jones, or ninety-nine whites out of a hundred, would feel in this place? You’re too self-conscious, Patrick. You ought to get over it.”

  The man beside him now flung his cigarette into the water. “I’ll be turning in. If I don’t see you tomorrow—you’ll be leaving at Martinique, you said?”

  “Yes, I change there to a schooner.”

  “Well, then, good luck. You’re almost home.”

  “Yes, thank you. Almost home.”

  Agnes wept. “Let me look at you! Let me look at you!”

  She was much older than he had remembered. White threaded her hair. She had shrunk. Patrick kept looking at her, searching. They kept looking at each other all day, across the table where they ate and afterwards on the porch, where she rocked in the wicker rocker and people passed in their Sunday clothes with the Methodist Hymn Book under their arms.

  They talked and they talked.

  “You’ll be glad to know it wasn’t wasted,” he said. “I worked hard. My ideas have jelled. I feel more strongly than ever that education is the answer. We have to build a generation with a whole new system of values. Get rid of stupid learning by rote and total bias toward things European or English. We need imaginative, gifted teachers. When I think of my own poor, ignorant Mistress Ogilvie—”