Left at the Mango Tree

by Stephanie Siciarz

  One rainy night when I was about a few weeks old, my father made (or attempted to make) his weekly visit to the Belly in the company of his father-in-law Raoul. My arrival in the household had not squelched this tradition, nor that of Abigail’s visit to my mother while the men were out having their drinks. This particular night the rain was fickle, pelting the island and retreating, threatening and thinning, seemingly intentioned to keep Raoul and Wilbur from their appointment with Cougar and the others. Each time they tried to leave the house, thinking the rain had stopped, it started up again, unleashing a shower more insistent than the shower before.

  So Raoul and Wilbur settled in the kitchen, to share a word and a pot of tea, while Edda and Abigail entertained me in the sitting room beyond the kitchen door. Raoul could not have been more pleased by the rain’s visit. Since the night of my birth, he had wanted a word with Wilbur in private, but up to now finding him alone had proved a rather challenging task. When Wilbur wasn’t delivering the mail, he was busy taking care of me so Edda could nap. When he met Raoul for their weekly nip, Raoul was loath to discuss delicate matters, for Edda’s three doting uncles were always close by. Until now. Now that the weather had waylaid their outing, and Abigail had laid out their tea, Raoul’s wish for a secret dialogue could be properly fulfilled.

  Except that he didn’t quite know how to begin. He had half expected that Wilbur, finding himself alone with Raoul, would blurt out those same questions that were buzzing like flies in Raoul’s brain. Questions about Edda and Gustave and Almondine. Who seduced whom? And when? Where? How had the deep black eyes of Edda, Wilbur, and Raoul, in Almondine turned to a fiery red? But all Wilbur did was sugar his tea.

  “Wilbur, damn it! Aren’t you even angry?” Raoul demanded.

  Wilbur, who had not been among the flies inside Raoul’s head, was puzzled, both by Raoul’s fiery question and his even more fiery tone. He waited a moment before replying, trying to discern in Raoul’s black eyes a narrative thread onto which he might grapple.

  “Angry about what? About the ad? Abigail sure is.”

  “Not about the ad. About the baby! About Edda! About the whole bloody mess! Don’t you know that half the island thinks your wife cheated on you? The other half thinks Gustave has her under a spell!”

  “What do you think?” Wilbur asked, with a calm that agitated Raoul’s flies into a frenzy.

  “I don’t know what to think! Edda says she’s only ever been with you, and I want to believe her. I do believe her. But I refuse to blame what’s happened on one of Gustave’s spells. You know what I think of magic.”

  From the sitting room Edda’s laughter seeped into the kitchen, like rain through a hole in the roof. “You hear that?” Wilbur spoke to Raoul but kept his face toward the door from which the joyful voice had come. “She’s happy. She’s really happy.” Then turning to look into Raoul’s eyes again, he added, “I believe her and I love her. What difference does it make what either half of the island thinks?”

  Before Raoul could answer, Wilbur stood and went outside, no longer thirsty, not for a storm in a teacup. The island had quenched its thirst as well, and the sky was bright and starry, the night air hot and still. Raoul peered unbelieving at Wilbur’s distorted figure beyond the foggy glass of the kitchen window.

  Raoul had never experienced this blinding sort of love firsthand, though he had heard of its rumored existence. That its magic could be so powerful as to blot out my white complexion and drown out the gossip of revelers at the Belly, well, this much he could never accept. Wilbur might not have the courage to stumble down the road to the past, to line up the ugly variables that rotted hidden in pockets and drawers, but Raoul did. Someday Almondine would look in the mirror and ask for an explanation as plain as the white nose on her face, he was sure of it. If Edda and Wilbur wouldn’t give her one, Raoul would. He alone could secure Almondine’s happiness; he alone could safeguard it.

  Raoul was so moved by his own determination that he announced this promise aloud, although no one was there to hear it. Had Abigail been pressed against the door just then, about to enter the kitchen for some pineapple juice or some milk, she would have heard Raoul’s words and been vexed. She would have tried to stop him. Already, she had gone above and beyond the call of duty to protect the happiness of Edda and baby, and Raoul’s interference had so far only undermined her efforts.

  Alas, Abigail must not have been pressed at the door just then, because nothing stopped Raoul. He rushed outside, compelled to publicize his promise—which he did, in front of Wilbur and the moon, who looked at each other and didn’t say a word.

  13

  Raoul, too, had a vague recollection of my mother Edda’s pregnancy. Vague, because like a tiny blemish on a peach, it was the soft spot in an otherwise firm and sweet routine that, once I was born, became a fuzzy memory. Back when Edda’s belly swelled, Raoul pondered passports, doled out pineapples, and met his chums for a beer at the end of the day. Back then, his weeks unspooled, one day opening and rolling into the next, culminating in Tuesdays, in his favorite blue shirt with the stripes, and in the library with Ms. Lila. Back then, his favorite book was just that, a favorite book. Now, it was a means to keeping a promise, and a roadmap that was driving him to madness.

  Since my birth, Raoul’s peachy routine had rotted away, and he found himself in a spot as tough and sticky as the fruit’s knotty pit. He still pondered passports and doled out pineapples (that was his job and he had no choice but to do it), and often he still met his chums for a beer at the end of the day. But Tuesdays’ neat and regular blue-striped expeditions through the library shelves had disintegrated into variable-seeking scavenger hunts that took Raoul all over the island, on virtually any day of the week when there was time, the book with Mr. Stan Kalpi’s silhouette on the cover permanently cocked in the crook of his arm. (My grandmother would be proud; how far Raoul had come since the day he quietly removed his missing wife’s books from the house!)

  The disintegration of Raoul’s routine began with a tiff with Ms. Lila on a thick and foggy morning. The dawn was cloaked in clouds, a rare occurrence on Oh, and one that should have warned the librarian that she was in for an unusual day. She breakfasted and dressed, dowsed herself in honey-flavored eau de toilette, and gave a pat on the head to Fragile, her pet poodle, named for its delicate temperament. Then off to the library she went, humming her way through the fog. Ms. Lila was cheery and keen whatever the weather, so long as in the library no ill winds dared ruffle her pages.

  She was especially keen on Tuesdays, of which this foggy morning was one, for it gave her great pleasure to watch, and sometimes take part in, the weekly explorations of Raoul Orlean. None of the other patrons handled the librarian’s offerings with such attention and reverence as he did. He handled the covers with care, didn’t crumple the corners of the sheets inside them, and never skipped to the ending before it was time. When he was finished, he left everything as he found it, clean and tidy, and always told her “Thank you very much.” But lately the poor man had been acting a bit funny. During his last visit he had pounded his fist and played with what was in his pockets, and she had been forced to look at him crossly. There was the ad in the Morning Crier, too. She never had known what to make of that!

  She knew just the thing for him, Ms. Lila thought to herself as she walked to work. Amongst the week’s new arrivals were a glossy travelogue of Greenland and a book of poems about the beach. Both of them had very nice covers and were sure to catch his eye. “That ought to make him forget about his troubles for a little while,” she said to the clouds that accompanied her.

  The same clouds accompanied Raoul, who had started his Tuesday morning ritual earlier than usual, though not without his coffee and milk and oatmeal, putting himself at the library just as Ms. Lila was opening its doors. Like her, Raoul, too, was keen, keen to roll up his sleeves and dig into his troubles, the very same ones Ms. Lila hoped to help him forget. She was mistaken to think that shiny snapshots and
sandy rhymes would hold any appeal for him on this particular morning when there was so much work to be done.

  “Morning!” Raoul’s greeting caused Ms. Lila to jump.

  “Heavens! Good morning! I didn’t see you there.”

  “Thought I’d get an early start today,” he explained.

  “Yes, yes, please do. I’ve a lovely new book of poetry to show you.”

  “Very kind of you, but I don’t have time for verse today,” Raoul declined. “I’ll need some books about mathematics. Algebra, maybe some geometry. There are always curves when you least expect them. And something on criminology. I’ll need an atlas, too, or some maps. And some detective books, I think…maybe a spy manual? Have you got one of those?”

  Ms. Lila, dizzied by Raoul’s requests, turned the key and pushed open the double wooden doors, splashing the dull light of the foggy day onto her desk in the middle of the room. As she did so, Raoul made a beeline for his usual corner table. He sat down, opened up Mr. Stan Kalpi’s story, and busied himself rereading it while he waited for Ms. Lila to deliver the books he had requested.

  It wasn’t long before she did, and soon Raoul found himself elbow-deep in polygons, parallelograms, pastel seas, and fingerprinting techniques. Hmm. All very useful and interesting, but how exactly he might use this information to more quickly detect Gustave’s slip-ups, that remained elusive. So, like Stan Kalpi before him, Raoul lined up his variables again and decided that the very variables were the problem. He didn’t have enough of them. He should take his search for clues outside, beyond the covers of his books, and listen for the songs on the wind that had guided Mr. Stan. “Yes, that’s the way!” he said and slapped his palms against his thighs.

  At the sound of Raoul’s voice, Ms. Lila turned and slapped her own palms against her cheeks in surprise. She tried to shout, but could find no words to do her anger justice. To arrive at his “that’s the way!” Raoul had sat down on the library floor and encircled himself not only with the contents of his pockets, but also with his shoes and socks (Mr. Stan Kalpi did his math barefooted with a toe in the mud) and with the most relevant pages from his morning’s explorations, which he had gently torn from the books to which they previously belonged.

  Gently or no, this was too much, and Ms. Lila finally did justice to her anger thus: “Have you gone mad?! Where do you think you are? Who do you think you are?” She scooped Raoul up by the collar, held on to him tightly as he scrambled to collect his things, dragged him to the library door and pushed him out into the noonday fog.

  “You can come back when you’ve learned to behave yourself!” she shouted after him. Then she slammed the door, sighed, and set about mending her torn and abandoned sheets, which Raoul had so lovelessly left on the floor.

  Under normal circumstances, Raoul would be devastated to find himself on Ms. Lila’s blacklist, but circumstances were growing less and less normal by the day (though I’m not positive Raoul realized as much at the time) and he took his punishment in stride. He had already made up his mind to do some field work anyway, to search for more variables and real clues.

  Who knows? he thought to himself. He might find something far better out there than what the librarian had to offer.

  You know that on Oh the leaves sing. By day the wind mingles their wafting cries with strains of onion stew and dog’s bark to lure the islanders home; by night, complicit with the mischievous moon, their melodies embolden wary lovers and hearten weary thieves on secret beaches. We’re used to their songs here; they entreat and encourage, judge and joke. Sometimes their songs are just that. Beautiful songs with no real meaning at all.

  But desperate hearts will hear meaning where they want to. They’ll discern in the emptiest of tunes a symphony of significance. Had you seen Raoul later that day that witnessed his dismissal by Ms. Lila, I’m sorry to say you would have recognized his tone-deaf heart as one of these.

  Raoul was desperate, yes. For variables and clues, for the path that his hero Stan Kalpi had found, the path that would lead him to the true identity of his white-faced grandchild and, he was certain, to Gustave. The variables he had lined up so far had proved insufficient and so some sleuthing was in order. From the detective book that Miss Lila had delivered to him earlier on, Raoul discovered that he needed some tools, which he acquired and now donned with uncharacteristic comical flair.

  His black shirt and trousers, designed to melt into the night, were conspicuous in the island sun, as were the binocular and oversize camera that hung from his neck, knocking against each other when he walked (barefooted, of course, to facilitate his maths). His strange appearance was complemented by his even stranger behavior, which consisted in a procession of fits and stops, now to survey some distant movement, now to photograph some passer-by, his jerky march interrupted at intervals for big-toe calculations in the dirt. These Raoul often re-examined with a magnifying glass, which, when not in use, protruded from his back pocket like a big, see-through lollipop. All the while his hands, whenever unoccupied by any of the various lenses he toted, could be found cupped around his ears, where they hoped to catch a snippet of song on the wind.

  They were in fact in this very position when Abigail, who was leaving the Staircase to Beauty salon, saw him go by and almost tripped.

  “Raoul!” she demanded. “What’s wrong with your head?”

  “Nothing, why do you ask?”

  “I ask because you’re holding onto your ears as if you expected the wind to blow them off at any second, that’s why. And looking a smidge ridiculous at it, too, I might add.” (Her eyes had yet to descend upon Raoul’s neck gear, clothing, and lack of shoes, or her smidge would have swelled into a bushel.)

  “I’m just listening to the wind. It’s all part of an official investigation. Don’t bother yourself about it.”

  “What’s all that equipment for?” she inquired sharply, lowering her eyes. “Never saw you use that before in all your years at Customs.”

  “Never had a case like this one before. Had to pull out the heavy artillery.”

  Abigail couldn’t argue the heaviness of the artillery, for Raoul’s top-half was unusually hunched and bent. That the rest of what Raoul had told her was legitimate, well, she would readily have argued with that. Her years of training in plights and cover-ups told her he was up to something odd, and that he wasn’t quite himself.

  Just what poor Edda needs! she thought. A mad father running around the island chasing the wind! Then again…a mad father was better than an illegitimate daughter, wasn’t it? No islander could hold Edda responsible if Raoul started stumbling about with a binocular bouncing on his chest. It wasn’t her fault he had stopped wearing shoes. Dare Abigail hope that another island drama had begun? One that would steal the spotlight that shone on baby Almondine?

  As if in response to her private reasoning, just then four of Abigail’s lady friends approached, their giggles and guffaws a harmonious tribute to Raoul’s investigative techniques. They had found themselves behind him for nearly half a mile, the entire length of which he had startled and amused them with his antics. Thelma Johnson laughed so hard she had to stop, bend over, and prop her hands upon her knees. Mavis Beech cried in hysterics and used her headscarf to wipe her eyes. Henrietta Williams almost dropped the dozen sugar apples she had wrapped up in the apron around her waist. And Donna Ardeau, the subtlest of the ensemble, bit the inside of her cheek to keep her glee from escaping in more than a dignified titter.

  Abigail, who guessed the source of their amusement, looked from the arriving ladies to the departing Raoul with mixed feelings of relief, pity, and foreboding. She almost wanted to hurry after him, though why she was inclined to do so she couldn’t exactly say.

  Before she could untangle her knotted emotions, she found herself swept up in the jollity of the noisy band.

  “Did you see that, Abby?!” Thelma choked and coughed, still laughing so hard she could barely stand.

  “That camera’s bigger than he is!” Mavis
cried and hiccupped, dabbing her leaky eyes.

  “And that magnifying glass! He was looking at his toes! With his backside straight up in the air!” Henrietta’s sugar apples resisted no longer and tumbled from her shaking midsection.

  “No, no, it wasn’t his toes he was looking at! He lined up a bunch of bugs on the ground. And some rocks!” Donna clarified with a civilized chuckle as she helped Henrietta collect her apples.

  By this time, Abigail was laughing, too, her worries of a moment before forgotten, her vague misgiving allayed in the wake of the chorus of Thelma, Mavis, Henrietta, and Donna, which was off again before Abigail could decide whether or not to join it.

  You’re probably wondering how it is that not one of the four women who observed Raoul’s behavior bothered to ask if the poor man was alright. This normally respectable, quiet, conservative man who was suddenly acting so strangely. I can’t help but wonder that myself. I suppose that when Raoul placed his ad about my mother, he lowered himself in the islanders’ regard. Or perhaps their comity discouraged the compassion each would have shown had she happened upon him singly. Maybe, like Abigail, each had her reasons for wanting yet another island drama.

  Whatever the explanation, it makes little difference, for had any one of them tried to reason with Raoul, to put herself in the middle of the path he sought, her efforts would have been wasted. At the root of Raoul’s mounting madness lay not only his more and more dog-eared copy of Stan Kalpi’s story, but his Almondine and the questions she might one day ask. Raoul would never let his little almond flower on uncertain roots. And nothing that Thelma, Mavis, Henrietta, Donna, or even Abigail, could say would have changed that.

  If Raoul, for the worthy cause of sparing me a Stan Kalpi journey of my own one day, was resigned to having become an island spectacle, and Abigail, for the equally worthy cause of sparing me undue attention, was relieved to have found a new island drama—not that either of them succeeded in sparing me anything—my mother was reluctant to have her father branded the island fool. My mother was a quiet person, the kind of person life just happens to, not the kind who happens to life. She liked her anonymity (to the extent that anyone could be anonymous in a place like Oh) and she adored her father. Though the blinding sort of love she harbored for me could blot out my complexion and the island gossip, the love she felt for Raoul was different. It only heightened the distress she felt with every snicker snickered at her dear father’s expense. She was upset that the islanders should poke fun at him, and poke their fingers into the pie of her family’s anonymous existence. So this usually quiet girl was forced to confront her father not long after that unusually foggy day.