Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  —I am so used to it all, Boler says. I think it may be the end of everything. The cradle of the world’s death.

  They leave him and return to the ship, and in the morning, they steam south, away from the fetid air of the oil-river swamps. They sail on, down the coast, toward Portuguese Angola and Saint Paul de Loanda. Corliss is groggy for a day or so, and he wears his white crown. Dr. McNab is ill, spending most of his time at the railing, retching into the ship’s wake. Because he’s no good to anyone in his condition, Conklin and Captain Murray are preoccupied with Mrs. Withers, who has come down with fever and is quietly raving, sitting in a deck chair with a towel wrapped around her neck and with her hair wild in the breeze. Conklin dabs her forehead with a damp cloth, and Corliss keeps putting her blankets back over her. Her eyes are unseeing, and her head lolls from side to side. Poor Withers stands by, helpless, offering prayers to the roiling clouds. There are storms all around them, but it all sails past, thunderheads bunching on the horizon to the west, and billowing off into the distance. Mrs. Withers grows worse. They begin to fear for her life. But the fever breaks toward evening, and she’s sick, getting rid of the bad humors, Corliss says, which do exist on this coast. He says this last in the tone of a man tired of repeating the words.

  By morning she’s better, and Mary can see this instantly in the careful arrangement of the other woman’s hair and dress. Mrs. Withers has gone to the trouble of grooming herself for the society of others, weary and shaken as she is—she’s almost hollowed out, her eyes sunk deep in their sockets and the bones in her cheeks showing. At dinner, she eats lightly, carefully, and they all watch her in spite of themselves. Withers is like a child in his gratitude, and he wants very badly to go back to England. Africa has frightened him out of his will, and his good intentions.

  —Don’t be silly, dear, his wife says to him in her weakened voice. We can’t go back now. You wanted this so much.

  Corliss shakes his head, staring at his salt fish. Mary waits for him to make eye contact, and when he does she communicates with a small smile: Mrs. Withers has made her point.

  She continues to make it, all the way to Saint Paul de Loanda, the last stop of The Lagos.

  —I’d love to return to England, darling. But this was what you wanted. I would not dream of getting in the way of your hopes and your ambitions.

  —I want to go back, Withers says.

  —I wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll be fine. You must be allowed to seek your goals, dear.

  —My goal is to go back to England.

  —Nonsense. I won’t speak of it. Our die is cast.

  They disembark at Saint Paul de Loanda, and at the dock Withers takes Mary’s hands and wishes her Godspeed. His suffering is so apparent that it’s all Mary can do to keep from embracing him. Mrs. Withers gives a heroic nod of her head, and walks away on her husband’s arm.

  —Well, Corliss says. Where are you off to now?

  —I’ve a letter of introduction to the consul, and I’ll stay at one of the ’otels. I’m in possession of some funds.

  —There are no hotels here.

  —It says in this consular report that there are three of them.

  —The report is wrong.

  —Then I’ll stay with the consul.

  Corliss smiles, folds his arms, and gazes at her. His tall shadow is on her, the sun blazing at his shoulders.

  —And from here?

  —North. By land. Cabinda, the Congo Free State, Congo Français, Cameroon.

  —I have great faith in yer ability, Mary. And yet I fear I’ll never see ye again.

  She reaches up and touches the bandage on his head:

  —You almost didn’t.

  TWENTY

  1

  February 25, 1990

  Mary. Mary. In the Hebrew: Miriam. Sea of bitterness. Bitter sea. The world thinks: virgin; the world thinks: true and pure and strong.

  Your namesake doesn’t sleep very much.

  I’ve taken to putting her in the bed with us and falling asleep while she nurses. When she gets tired of one breast, and wants the other, she wakes me up, grousing and complaining. She’s got a temper, which I must say I like. She looks like me, everyone says. She has my hair, and blue eyes and a stubborn little red mouth. I don’t see the resemblance, really, to anyone. She’s herself. Complete. A person who will live most of her life in the next century, and how strange to think of that. I remember my grandparents, who were born in the first part of this century—my grandfather came into the world only nine years after you left it. My father’s great-aunt Mayfield was born twelve years before you died, and so for those years you were contemporaries. And, for instance, most people are not quite aware of the fact that Abraham Lincoln was seventeen years old when Thomas Jefferson died, which means that they were, for that span of time, contemporaries, and that Lincoln must have been conscious of the elder statesman, as a young, bookish, ambitious boy with an unimaginable future. All of this amazes me, and I have no words to express why, except to say that the knowledge of it brings you closer, so that you are not just a figure in the books. And a child fixes one’s attention irrevocably on the future….

  The baby keeps me up at night, and I sleep when I can during the day. Doris hovers near, so glad to be of use. I have let her take over.

  Scene: Blank stage again. Guillemard fumbling with his papers, followed by light, crosses to stage left, seems to be looking for something in the papers. He finds it:

  GUILLEMARD

  Ah, here we are. Now. She wrote two books. This was later, after West Africa—in those brief seven years God would give her. She never stopped wanting to go back there, by the way. She was never at home here anymore.

  Mary comes to the edge of the light, behind him, like a memory.

  MARY

  I was never really at home anywhere, was I? Even in Africa, I was always going to the next place. Don’t mislead anyone.

  Guillemard has paused, but doesn’t look back.

  MARY

  Go on. I want to see how you’ve exaggerated me in the African scenes.

  GUILLEMARD

  With a shrug. As she recedes into the dark. He clears his throat, glances to one side, then continues.

  The books brought her fame rivaling that of her uncle Charles, The Water Babies author. The fame was work, more than she ever could have dreamed of. And in trying to meet all the demands on her time and still answer the passions of her heart, well, it taxed that heart. Did I mention she had a congenital heart weakness? No? Almost nobody knew that, as almost nobody really knew her. Not even the silly man with whom she was in love toward the end. In the most revealing of all her letters, to this very chap, whose name was Robert Nathan, who was rather a mama’s boy and whom she no doubt frightened nearly out of his wits—

  Comes downstage and sits on the edge, shifts the pages for a beat, then rests them on one leg and sighs.

  She wrote to him that when her parents died, she considered that her usefulness in the world was at an end, and she went down to West Africa to die. An assertion that, given her behavior during her travels, seems rather odd. But she wasn’t inclined much toward duplicity, either, so there it is. She was, finally, a puzzle. Even friends, to whom she confessed her spiritual and physical exhaustion in those days after the first book appeared and made her a public figure, even they found her an enigma when they didn’t assume they understood her too well. She was in constant demand as a speaker and lecturer, and plagued with the needs of everyone else in her family, on both sides, so many people requiring her care: nursing the dying, arranging funerals, paying debts for those members of the Kingsley side of the family who’d had little enough to do with her when she was merely the angular daughter of someone who had married beneath his station, as the saying, I believe, still goes. No, before she became the renowned Mary H. Kingsley, they left her alone. She did not, shall we say, return the favor. She was sick with loneliness and despair through it all, and the lady never flagged once.


  He stands, folds his arms, and clears his throat. He’s moved by the memory.

  Not once.

  Enter a woman of the time. One of Mary’s many friends. She’s older, and she wishes to disagree.

  WOMAN

  She made me laugh. You mustn’t talk only about the sadness she knew, or the heartbreak. We all have our share of that. She was as funny as anyone I ever knew. She could do every single worldly accent known to man, and everyone else’s voice. The very voice itself. She did a very believable version of you, Guillemard. It was really quite hilarious, and not mean. Just—well, mischievously accurate. And she made such fun of herself all the time. You have to find a way to convey this. There was great sadness, but she never allowed herself to indulge in it.

  Guillemard turns to her.

  GUILLEMARD

  Madam, if you wish to add anything, I suggest you wait your turn.

  DORIS SLEPT in the living room, having made the sofa up like a bed with her books stacked beside it. The end table was littered with paper plates and cups, magazines, and more books. Tyler came home late each weeknight, and would sneak in when Lily was asleep with the baby at her side. Carefully he would pick the baby up and put her in the bassinet. Lily only half-awakened, and even so, in what had become the perpetually wakeful, disquieted region of her consciousness, she noted his tenderness with the child, and in the mornings she protected his rest, letting him sleep until just before time for him to go.

  It was a strain on them both having Doris there, helpful as she was with the baby.

  Lily was still very sore, and she tired easily. There were the things she had been told to expect—the pain when Mary nursed, for instance; it was quite surprising in its intensity, like a form of punishment for having brought a child into the world. Sometimes Lily thought of it that way, and attributed it to the fact that she felt so low and oversensitive all the time. She kept having to wade through this pervasive fatigue.

  Sheri and Millicent were anxious to get to know Doris, and of course they wished also to help with the baby. Often they dropped by in the afternoon. Doris was faintly ill at ease with them, largely because of what she knew of their recent bereavement. She told Lily that she couldn’t make herself relax. They were both so serious about helping. Sheri made a joke now and then, but there was something painfully halfhearted about it. Something soft and almost timid shone in her eyes as she spoke. Lily saw it, and tried to produce something gentle or reassuring to say. What she wished to avoid was any hint of personal interest: she had no inclination for revelations concerning the secret life Sheri or anyone else was leading, or not leading. She felt low about it, as if she had failed them all.

  She was too tired to think, most of the time.

  The nights went on with the cycle of waking and feeding and trying to sleep, and waking and feeding again.

  Lily thought of her mother’s stories about her first years with Scott—how they had stayed for short periods with his parents or hers, trying to get started. The truest characteristic of those times, the dominant feeling, was impermanence: a sense of always being-on-the-way-somewhere, a form of waiting for the circumstances to change—nothing settled, nothing established; a living-through, until things calmed down.

  That was how Lily felt now. Something was undone, unfinished, and it weighed on her all the time.

  The construction site across the way—with its earthmovers sitting idle and its walls that enclosed nothing, its iron staircases going nowhere—only added to her sense of transience, here. Some mornings, she sat with the baby asleep in the bassinet, and a pad of paper on her lap, trying to write lines for her play, while the men went along the level of the brick walls, adding to them almost imperceptibly as the sun went up in the sky and reached noon. Mary awoke several times, and would nurse with an almost desperate concentration, biting down, so that Lily had to lean forward and try to loosen the grip of the little mouth slightly, just to relieve the pain. This never failed to cause temper in the baby, and a fussy, mewling inability to get back to nursing.

  The child’s dark eyes, looking back at her, seemed to be intuiting something. It made her anxious, as if there were some divination coming from the universe that would see through all her doubts and worries.

  But then there would be those instances when the baby smiled, or closed the perfect eyes and went to sleep on her chest. The milky smell of the child’s breath, the perfect little mouth blowing out with each exhalation, and the small sighs uttered in sleep. Such peace. Lily wondered what the baby must be dreaming—what were the possible dreams of an infant?

  One late morning near the end of the first week, Lily was alone with the baby when Millicent called, to ask after her. They spoke for a few minutes about the baby, and nursing, and Millicent recalled when Tyler was born. Something changed in her voice, remembering herself in those days, before Buddy. “Well,” she said, finally. “I guess there’s a lot to think about over there.”

  Lily was too startled to speak for a moment. Finally she said, “Think about?”

  “Well, you know. If Tyler quits the dealership.”

  “Tyler’s talking about quitting?”

  “He’s—he’s kept it from you?”

  “Since when?” Lily demanded.

  “He’s been talking to Nick about joining the army.”

  Lily couldn’t speak for a moment.

  “I’m sorry, I thought he’d’ve told you that.”

  “No,” she got out. “He hasn’t mentioned it to me.”

  “Well—you know how men—you know how they talk about these things.”

  Later, she sat in the living room nursing the baby, gazing out at the men working on the apartment building. They were bricklayers, and a wall was going up by increments. Her mother was ironing something, standing with the ironing board in front of the television. The sound was on low, so as not to disturb the baby.

  “Honey,” Doris said. “What’s wrong here?”

  “I’m tired and sore,” Lily told her. “I wasn’t ready for how long it would take to feel normal again.”

  “There’s something between you and Tyler. I can sense it. You’re so—civil to each other.”

  Lily shook her head and smiled sardonically. “Really.”

  Her mother walked across the room, and said, almost under her breath, “It’s none of my business.”

  They spent the rest of the evening without saying much to each other. Lily changed the baby and put her to bed. Her mother roasted a chicken and prepared rice and carrots, and they ate quietly in front of the small portable television. No one called. They did the dishes together, and watched television. The wind blew and shook the windows and Doris remarked that it was surprisingly cold for this far south.

  “I’m sorry,” Lily said to her.

  Doris yawned. “No need to apologize about the weather.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the weather.”

  “I haven’t got the slightest idea what you’re talking about.” She stood. “I’m going to bed.”

  Lily waited a few moments, then wheeled the bassinet into the bedroom, and got into bed herself with the baby at her side. Doris came to the door, wearing her nightgown.

  “Do you need me to change the baby?”

  “No, I just did. She’s fine.”

  “I think Mary looks like your father a little, don’t you?”

  “I can’t tell who she looks like,” Lily said.

  Doris folded her hands over her chest, a gesture that Lily had come to recognize as a kind of tick, a motion produced by nervousness or anxiety. “They seem very happy, you know. They went through Peggy’s losing the baby and Scott was there for her in ways he never was for me.”

  “You were there for each other,” Lily said. “I saw it. I grew up with it.”

  Doris’s expression was tolerant. “We were really rather average.”

  “No.”

  “I think you’ve embroidered it a little in your mind.”

  “Stop it,�
� Lily said. “I don’t want to talk about it. The more I think of all of it the more confused I get.”

  “It is confusing. I’m fifty years old and seeing someone and I don’t really know any more than I did when I first started going with your father. When Peggy and I talk, we don’t quite remember that we’re almost thirty years apart.”

  “You’re seeing someone?” Lily asked.

  Doris smiled out of one side of her mouth. “Friendliness.”

  “I wonder if Scott ever forgets the age difference,” Lily said with a dry little smirk.

  “That was unkind. It was especially unkind to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lily said, beginning to cry. “I’m—I’m such a mess.”

  Doris hurried to embrace her. “It’s just the blues, sweetie. It’ll pass.”

  “No—Tyler’s been talking to Nick about quitting the dealership and joining the army.”

  Doris seemed to be waiting for more.

  “He hasn’t said anything to me.”

  “Maybe it’s just talk, Lily.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I’m trying to.”

  “No—I don’t mean that—oh, never mind. You’re right, it’s probably nothing.”

  “At least give the man a chance to explain. I did learn that much.”

  Lily kissed her cheek, and hugged her tight.

  The baby stirred and fussed, then settled again into her heavy sleep. The quiet that followed seemed freighted with something indeterminate and shadowy, like the residue of a nightmare upon waking. Lily felt it, and wondered if her mother did, too.