by Belva Plain
Heads were raised as the prime minister walked into the dining room with his party of whites. Except for the waiters, he was the only black in the room. But he appeared to be unconscious of it, aware and pleased that his status was acknowledged.
The senator and the Jürgens were already at the table. The senator was handsome, a man who would age or had already aged well, with that air of powerful health which stems from a youth spent out of doors in almost any location west of the Mississippi. The Jürgens were thickset. They had the odor of money. Francis could smell it, not ordinary prosperity, but enormous amounts of it, obscene amounts of it. He was a stout, graying blond; she was pink, with loose pink skin and a loose pink garment which, so Marjorie had taught him, was called a caftan. She wore many diamonds. Fat cats, Francis thought, caught in the strange mood that so often beset him when he was forced to a gathering he didn’t want to attend. It did this to him, bringing out a sharp, a nasty, critical awareness. He didn’t like himself for it, but there it was.
Introductions were made and Nicholas said, “The Jürgens have the most marvelous house. With your taste,” addressing Marjorie, “you would find it enchanting.”
“It’s the house next door to yours, isn’t it?” Marjorie responded.
“Yes, but there’s no comparison.” Nicholas spoke modestly. “As Europeans, they have a special feel for gardens. Their lawns, and the pavilion at the far end, so Italian—”
“In spite of our being Swedish. You really must come to see us sometime, Mrs. Luther. Harold’s retired, you know, so we’re only here for three months. Then we go to Europe, and we have some family in the States, too. We do love it here the best though. I have two maids,” she confided, “and one of them cooks better than the chefs at this hotel! For only twenty dollars a week each.”
Francis glanced at Nicholas. Embarrassment shot through him so that he could feel its heat. But Nicholas gave no sign.
“People really don’t need much cash here, do they?” Mrs. Jurgen’s rhetorical question was gay. “No heating bills, no overcoats, no boots. And the villages are so quaint, all those picturesque little houses—really delightful.”
“Delightful,” Francis said. “With the toilet in the back yard.”
He received from Marjorie a sharp kick on the ankle.
Mrs. Jürgen, thinking apparently that he had meant to be humorous, laughed. But Aleppo had understood.
“We could change all that. We could put this place on the map, I tell you. Remember how Havana used to be? This could put it to shame. We could make this another Riviera, build marinas, build a jetport, have excursion trips direct from Europe for deep-sea fishing, tarpon, whatnot. Believe me, there’d be a bathroom in every house on the island then, and a whole lot more!”
“Especially,” Mr. Jürgen, who had not spoken before, put in, “especially with a common-sense man like this one at the helm of government.” His plump cheeks, drawn into a smile, narrowed his small, pale eyes. “Frankly, he’s the only reason I’m willing to invest. I feel secure.”
“I shall have to merit confidence like that,” Nicholas joked, “by making sure I get reelected.”
Jurgen waved his cigar. “No problem! Those others—that fellow Courzon and the rest—mosquitoes buzzing. Nothing more. I’m not worried, I assure you.”
The dinner arrived. Only a French or a Swiss chef could have created such marvelous soufflés and sauces, or such variety of flambéed desserts, borne proudly high as the waiters moved between the tables.
A trio of young men came to sing before a microphone. They were dressed as if they had just been brought there from the cane fields. Perhaps they actually had been. Their voices were warm, resonant, untrained.
Oh, island in the sun, willed to me by my father’s hand, All my days I will sing in praise …
And Francis put himself in their places at the front of the crowded room. What were they seeing? White faces burned pain-red, white breasts straining out of silk, mountains of food, the flicker of jewels. He wondered what they could be thinking about what they saw.
To these others here, surrounding him, it was all quite natural, quite unremarkable. Eating slowly, almost disregarding the talk at his own table, Francis observed the scene and listened to snatches of conversation.
“Darling!” people said, throwing their arms about each other. Then came the cheek-peck, the cheek-graze. “How are you! You look simply fantastic! I haven’t seen you since dinner at the George V!” Or the Dorchester, or better still, some place less frequented, like Porto Cervo in Sardinia, or even some really far off “little” spot where “tourists don’t go”: We were the only Americans in the whole place.
Then, as always, he was brought back to the present. “You’re a thousand miles away,” Marjorie scolded in a whisper.
“Three or four thousand, actually. Sorry.”
“Please, Francis.”
Her eyes pleaded. “Do be sociable, do give forth a little, can’t you?”
She wouldn’t want to offend the prime minister. She didn’t mind his being black, because he was the prime minister. She was having a good time. She loved wearing her beautiful dress, loved being here. Her eyes were brilliant and very large. She was thinking of two million dollars.
When dinner was over they walked outdoors, where terraces descended in tiers to the beach. The tide had gone out, exposing at the end of the beach the roots of beach grape and mangrove, along with a fringe of debris: clotted petroleum tar, bottles and cans. Floodlights plucked all these out of the darkness.
“Poor maintenance,” Nicholas remarked. “I’m surprised.”
“More than that,” Francis said. “Look at the silt in the water. It’s from dredging. That silt cuts down the light; the algae are smothered and the coral dies. They’ve destroyed the protecting reefs to get construction sand, that’s what’s happened here. Yes,” he said, “dredge the seas, bulldoze the hills, and what next? It’s a rape, that’s all it is.”
“Oh,” Nicholas said lightly “you sound like—” and stopped.
Like Patrick Courzon, Francis thought. That’s what he had been about to say. And it was true—Patrick had always talked like that.
“You can’t stop the twentieth century,” Mr. Jürgen remarked, somewhat exasperated.
“You can plan your development instead of raping. Raping,” Francis repeated. It was a reckless, angry word, and it suited him just then.
He was conscious, as they turned back to the cars, of Marjorie’s furious glance.
Nicholas rode with the Luthers, who were to take him to his home. When they were almost there he reminded Francis, “I hope you don’t mean you won’t give consideration to the Aleppo offer, Francis. In spite of what you’ve been saying, it would be not only a great thing for you but a bonanza for the country. Take my word for it, please do.”
“Oh,” Marjorie said angrily, “naturally we all know the planters don’t want development because they’ll lose field labor. We all know that.”
“That’s not my reason,” Francis said with some heat.
Nicholas made no comment. When they reached his house, he gave Francis his hand. “Well, it’s all been quite bewildering and sudden, of course. But you will think it over?”
“I’ll do that,” Francis said out of courtesy.
“Thank you for a marvelous time,” Marjorie called. “The dinner was perfect.” When they had driven away she turned upon Francis. “You were absolutely ridiculous—I must say it. All that talk about algae and dredging! They thought you were eccentric and boring. I don’t know what you hoped to gain with that kind of talk.”
“I didn’t hope to gain anything. It was just a mood. I wanted to get things off my chest. Am I not entitled to a mood like anyone else?”
“You sounded like some sort of hippy ecologist…. Like that younger Da Cunha brother who’s always writing articles.”
“That young Da Cunha cares. It’s the older generation that doesn’t give a damn about anything but mon
ey.”
“It seems to me you like money well enough!”
“Yes, I like it. But I work for mine fairly—”
“Work! Yes, nobody could deny you do that! Worrying about banana rot and labor and too much rain or not enough rain—and for what?” She spoke rapidly. “Listen to me, Francis. Megan has to get away from this place. She has special needs. When she gets a little older she’ll need schooling she can’t get here. And this is our chance to provide all that, plus having a decent life of our own with no more worries. I swear I’ll never forgive you if you don’t take it, Francis. Never.”
He was silent and she repeated, “Never. This time I mean it.”
He was thinking that once her voice had had a ring as sweet as chimes. The sweetness had rung through to his very bones. He tried to remember when it was that it had stopped doing so, and could not. Driving now along the narrow mountain road in the darkness, he felt a penetrating sadness; it was like knowing there had once been a song you loved, and now you had forgotten it, forgotten even its name.
He said quietly, “I don’t want to talk any more tonight, please. It’s been a long day and for some reason I feel especially tired.”
“Damn it, Francis! I hate it when you shut me off. You think you can just turn me off and on like a faucet whenever you feel like it.”
It was an effort to answer, to open his mouth. “I told you, another time. I don’t want to shut you off. All I want is to get home and sleep.”
“Damn it, then. Get home and go to sleep!”
The car door slammed. The bedroom door slammed. She still slept across the hall. He wondered whether the sound had awakened the child. It was his last thought before he fell asleep.
But he slept badly, waking in the middle of the night, unable to fall back. Soon after dawn he got up and went out to walk.
Where the foothills of the Morne sloped steeply upward behind the house the path was scarcely used. Wet ferns showered his legs as he passed. The silent droppings of the pines were slippery underfoot. Now the woods were waking, loud with bird song and a thousand small rustlings of unseen life. Once, glancing up, he thought he saw a parrot, an instant’s astonishing flash of emerald and orange in the sheltering gloom. If it was a parrot it had probably been Amazona arausiaca, a variety now hunted almost to extinction because a single specimen could bring five thousand dollars.
“It’s disgusting,” Kate had cried passionately. “They smuggle them out in tire tubes and suitcases. Naturally, most of them die on the way. I can’t bear to think of it.” She had reminded him of his mother’s fierce pity for the weak.
He came back down the steep path. He had no wish to get to the day’s work; he would have liked rather to lie down in the ferns and perhaps go to sleep at last, but the notion was eccentric, for if anyone were to come upon him lying there like that they would think he’d lost his mind. And he thrust his way on through a jumble of bananas, palm, and cane gone wild, emerging at the bottom of the path into a vision of splashing light, of clouds fleeing westward over the clearing where the great house lay among flamboyant trees. He stopped to look at it, his great house, and saw Marjorie coming toward him over the grass.
“I saw you on the hill. I wanted to say I’m sorry if I was nasty last night, Francis.”
“That’s all right. I wasn’t in such a great mood myself.”
She laid a hand on his arm and mechanically he put his over it. How he had loved her once!
And they stood a moment looking at the morning light, stood together, each wanting so much to understand and to be understood.
To ease the stress he made a neutral remark. “The river looks like silver from here.”
“Oh rivers! One makes such a fuss about rivers! The blue Danube is a muddy brown brook, that’s all it is. But you’ve never seen it, have you? You’ve really never gone anywhere.”
“I haven’t had the time.”
“Of course you have. You just came here and never left it. Never wanted to. If you left here you could travel. You’ve still got that camera on the shelf for your next book. What was it to be? Man at Work in His Environment, wasn’t that it?”
“I guess so,” he said dully.
“I nag you awfully about leaving, don’t I?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘nag.’ You just talk about it.”
“Oh, you always cover everything with euphemisms. Don’t you know you do? I nag.”
It was true, he thought, surprised. Even in my private thoughts, I cover up. Like my mother, I’m too private. And I don’t face the truth, it’s true.
“I don’t believe in covering up, Francis. Not anymore. So I’ll tell you flat out: I hate it here! I always have. There was just no easy way to leave before this. But now there is.”
“Have you thought of Megan?” he asked.
Her eyes widened. “I don’t understand you! What a question!”
“It was stupid of me. I phrased it badly. I meant—this place is shelter for her, given what she is.”
“But she can’t hide here, Francis! She needs special education to bring out the little she’s got, so she won’t be just a—a vegetable! There’s nothing here for her, you know there isn’t! And you can’t tell what’s going to happen here anyway, with the political situation what it is!” She began to weep. “Oh, if we had a normal child!”
“Don’t,” he said. It tore him to see her weep over Megan. Because of him, his blood, his sister, his genes. His fault.
“And with all that money she would have security for the rest of her life! If you love her so, how can you be so selfish?”
He said thickly, “I love her.”
“I’ll tell you something, Francis. I’m not excited now. I’m thinking clearly and I’m quite, quite calm, not angry at all. But if you don’t take this offer, I’m leaving. I’m taking Megan, and somebody in my family will shelter us until I can find a place for us.”
“Is that the way it is?”
“That’s the way it is.”
Her eyes met his. Hers were austere and steady in their gaze. And he knew that she meant what she said.
“Let me think,” he said. “Oh, let me think.”
Her face closed. “All right. Just don’t think too long.”
She went back inside, and he walked down the hill toward that silver river to sit on a rock with his chin in his hands. On a bush close by a yellowbird was gathering twigs for a nest. So still he sat that the bird was unconcerned with his presence. Just so had he sat one day not long ago with Megan, showing her how a bird goes about the making of a nest. It had even picked up a piece of cotton torn from somebody’s shirt. He had showed her that. And he had thought: Just something, some little thing missing in the making of her, some juice in the brain, some electrical connection, what? And she would have been whole and who knew how intelligent, how creative. Oh, God, he begged now, speaking aloud, and the yellowbird fled.
The air was filled with the fragrance of wild ginger, and he knew the white flower could not be too far away. One of his colts went galloping through pangola grass behind the rail fence that he had himself helped hew and set in place. Well, if he were to leave, he’d be leaving things in very different shape from what he had found when he came. The drenching sweetness of the ginger swept over him. Oh, my God, the place bewitched you! And he thought of his mother: could she, too, have felt this wrench when she left? Was that why she had never wanted to come back, and not, as some people thought, that she hated it? Human behavior! How can you hope to understand it, when you can’t even understand yourself?
And he sat there for a long time until he heard Megan’s voice from somewhere above. No doubt she would be looking for him, his shadow, his Megan, his poor simple girl.
Slowly, stiffly, he rose and went up the hill. In the shelter of the old library he picked up the telephone.
“Mr. Aleppo,” he said. The word stuck in his throat. “Mr. Aleppo. I’ve considered the offer and I’ve decided to accept. You can draw up the paper
s for me to show my lawyer.”
Aleppo said something about having to go back to the States, something about time, a few weeks or a month or so.
“Take your time. Whenever you’re ready.”
“You’re doing the right thing, Mr. Luther. Come back in a couple of years and you won’t recognize your place.”
“I’m sure I won’t.”
“You’re a gentleman, Mr. Luther. I’ve met all kinds and I know a gentleman when I see one.”
When he had hung up the receiver he went outside and walked around the house, with no purpose except the walk itself, the need to move. A voice sang from the cook’s radio in the kitchen wing.
Oh, island in the sun, willed to me by my father’s hand, All my days I will sing in praise …
He went around to the front of the house. Somewhere inside Marjorie was waiting, determined and frightened, too, he knew. Well, he would just go in and make his peace. A man had to be strong enough to lose gracefully. He’d made a start here and he could make another.
Not far from the front door grew a great acoma, very old. His mother had said, “My grandfather used to touch a tree as though it spoke to him.” This same tree, it might have been, as he came in at this same door. And before he went up the steps into the house Francis reached over to lay his hand on the ancient bark, and spoke to it softly, without words.
TWENTY-TWO
In a shady grove near a beach another crowd had gathered, the second one in a day that was to provide three of the same in various parts of the island. Blue paper streamers, enblazoned in gold with the words Vote for Courzon, dangled from the trees and festooned the skirts of the long sawbuck tables on which the food was laid out. Patrick, standing in line for calalu stew and soursop custard, reflected that he hadn’t had such food since Agnes had cooked it, for Désirée had no taste for what she called peasant food. Then he wondered what Agnes would say if she could see this day. Next he thought about the connection between those kids dancing over there to a frantic rhythm band and the issues which were tearing their country apart, issues about which, according to theory, they were expected to think carefully before casting their votes. Well, it was a gradual thing, the evolution of a democratic government! It had taken, after all, quite a few centuries in England between Magna Charta and one man, one vote.