It was Violet’s godson, Chandler Boudreaux, who got Inez pregnant with Manuel. Chandler intended to marry her (she was nineteen), and he would have provided for her as best he could. But he had developed a bad cocaine problem in the army, and one night, late, several weeks before the planned wedding, he had massive coronary failure after ingesting an enormous hit of the stuff. The autopsy showed that his heart had burst.
Violet took mother and child in with her, and for the first few years of Manny’s life, they had it pretty good. His mother went to work for the city, and still kept Violet’s house, for which Violet still paid her. Violet spoke fluent Spanish, and she taught the boy some English, though Inez and the boy were not interested in becoming fluent. The household spoke Spanish, sometimes for weeks at a time.
Since, by then, the few members of Violet’s family who remained would not speak to her—“For indiscretions,” she said, “mostly having to do with not satisfying their expectations”—there was no help to be gotten from anywhere, and she was on a pension, so she went back to teaching for a few more years, to help pay the bills. Life was simple, and mostly happy.
But then Manny’s mother fell in love again, this time with someone in her office—a Chilean man who had come to school at Tulane. When Manny was six, his mother and stepfather took him off to live in Chile. Manny had kept in touch over the years, writing her in English when he had time, and sending her little postcards dashed off in Spanish. When he was grown, and his mother was gone (she died in an automobile accident at the age of fifty-one), and his stepfather had found it sufficiently hideous that he was a homosexual, and therefore had disowned him, he began to think of coming back to America. He settled at first in Virginia, where he had a distant cousin, and where he met Dominic. All along, he had wanted to go down to the city of his birth.
“And here he is,” Violet said. “A consolation for my last days.”
“I am a booby prize,” said Manny, in what Lily noted was a surer tone. Evidently, his time with Dominic had improved his capacity for English speech. The improvement was subtle—she hadn’t marked it until this moment, mostly because Manny was so naturally phlegmatic. He went on, now, indicating Dominic: “I brought the door prize with me, too.”
“Ta-da,” said Dominic. “If you reach a certain age, young gay men will come live with you, for free.”
“Look at this baby,” Violet said, playing with Mary’s hand. “She’ll grow up and make strong men slit their throats.”
The waitress brought the food on a large tray, and for a few minutes they all spoke at once, trying to get everything distributed. The songs Manny had chosen were playing loud on the jukebox; they had to shout to be heard. The food was spicy, and tasted wonderful.
When dinner was over, they strolled home along the busy street, amid the various peppery fragrances of the restaurants, through conflicting strains of music—zydeco, and blues and jazz from several different clubs. Dominic carried the baby.
By the time they got back to the house, the sky was threatening more rain. They went inside, and Lily was shown to her quarters, up the stairs and to the left. It was a large, high-ceilinged room. There was a double bed, at the foot of which stood a large cedar chest. Next to the bed was a nightstand with a small reading light and a row of books. To the left of the entrance, a bureau stood beside a tall, wood-framed window overlooking the street corner below. A full-length mirror hung on the door-side wall, suggesting still another window. In the opposite wall there was a set of French doors leading out onto the upstairs veranda. Lily saw palm leaves there, and hanging plants. Dominic had borrowed a crib from a neighbor for the baby. Lily put her down, and tucked the soft blanket over her shoulders.
“I didn’t dream Mary could’ve gotten so big since February,” Dominic said.
“She likes the new bed,” Lily said. Then: “Dom.”
“Yeah?”
She heard Violet laboring up the stairs. She said, “This seems one of the better rooms in the house. I’m afraid we’re putting you all out.”
“It’s Ms. Beaumont’s old room. It can get a little noisy in the mornings—you’ll see. She has the best room, believe me. This is a nice big house.”
Aunt Violet came into the room and crossed to the French doors. “Look,” she said. “Come out here and see.”
Lily hesitated.
“The child’s asleep. She’s happy.”
Lily followed her out onto the veranda. There were wicker chairs, and a settee, and a wooden rocker. Violet settled into the rocker, and gestured for Lily to sit next to her. A faint fragrance of indefinable spice was on the air, and thunder sounded far off, a low drumming. The only light came from the windows of the room behind them, soft gold, and Lily had an unwanted moment of remembering the balcony of the apartment in Charlottesville, her first few moments with Tyler. On the street below them, people hurried by against the threat of rain, and cars moved past, tires swishing through the puddles already in the pavement. The whole Quarter was alive, and a stupendous cup of liquefied light went up into the lowering twilight clouds, the freshening wind.
“I had to sell my truck,” Violet said.
“You kept running into things,” said Dominic.
“Still—I did hate to let it go.”
He nudged Lily. “Truck was a ’36 Ford. Should’ve seen it. The bottom carriage of it was in a fossilized state.”
“It ran,” Violet said.
“It dropped fragments. Following you was like navigating a spaceship through an asteroid belt.”
“It ran,” Violet repeated, in exactly the same tone.
“Ms. Beaumont got two tickets the last week she drove her truck—one for going too fast, and the second for going too slow. And it was the same cop, on the same road.”
“Young man couldn’t make up his mind, cher.”
Somewhere in the distance, they heard a crowd cheer. The sound rose and was so clear you could distinguish individual voices, then faded and was like a whisper; and finally was gone altogether.
“Amateur baseball,” said Dominic.
“Could be the racehorses,” Violet put in.
“We’re too far away for that.”
In the following silence between them, they all listened for the crowd, but there was only the busy clamor of traffic.
“You know something?” Aunt Violet said, touching Lily on the arm and then taking her cool, dry hand away. “When I was a girl, I met somebody who spent some time with this Mary Kingsley you’re writing the book about.”
“It’s a play,” Dominic said.
“It’s writing. It will end in a book. They publish plays in books?”
“They do,” said Lily, admiring her.
“There.”
“You knew someone who knew her?”
“Somebody came to the school I was in, and he lectured about Africa. You know what year? 1913. This man talked to us about an explorer, a woman, Mary Kingsley. This middle-aged man, and he’s long gone now of course. I remembered the name Kingsley. Such a strong-sounding name. This man knew her, and he knew some others. There was an English missionary named Mary Slessor.”
“Mary Kingsley knew her,” Lily said. “They were friends. They spent a lot of time together at Mary Slessor’s mission house at Okyon, on Mary’s second trip to West Africa. They sat up talking through the night, just the two of them. So far from England.”
“This man knew them both.”
Lily sat back and let this soak in.
“Women had no rights then, you see? Couldn’t even vote. But in Africa, it was worse. Men had many wives. A woman was expected to be in the married state. There was no visible function for them otherwise. Their sexual organs were cut; they were mutilated. If a woman had twins, it was death. For both babies and sometimes for her, too. This man said when he met Mary Slessor and Mary Kingsley, they were protecting a woman who’d had twins. The woman, and the one twin that survived. She was a slave, this young woman, of the Eboe tribe, an expensive sla
ve—and maybe you haven’t learned yet that slavery was a widespread thing in those districts, back then, thirty years after it ended, in blood, here. You know? Anyway, cher, she belonged to this woman who had treated her kindly. According to this gentleman, the slaves in that part of Calabar were all treated well. But when this woman had her twins, all her things were taken from her and she was driven away—they would’ve killed the babies if it wasn’t for Miss Slessor, and, as it was, one of them died because he had to be hidden by being stuffed into a basket under the first one. And then in the village, after the mother had gone, the ground where she walked was dug up and raked over by the rest of the tribe. This gentleman told us all this, and I never forgot it.
“He was writing a book about these African explorers, see—but, well, if he wrote it, I never saw it. But recently I read her books, Miss Kingsley’s books. And there’s a reference to that episode in her first travel book. Of course a lot of people read that book, and he could have, too, you know. The books were best-sellers. It’s possible he read the same passage and was trading on it. But he had the look of a true man—rough and ruddy, and solid as a rock. And his face got a kind of light in it when he talked about Mary Kingsley. You know what they called her in Africa, cher? They called her Only Me. The natives. Cannibal sorts. Witch doctors and warriors. She’d walk into their villages and introduce herself that way. ‘It’s only me,’ she’d say—see? So they called her that. Only Me.”
“I think I remember seeing something about that in my reading,” Lily said kindly.
Violet nodded. “Anyway, I believe this man who came to my school to lecture, all those years ago, knew her. He said she was the most stubborn type of woman and not someone to cross. He claimed he knew her well. Talked about her like you and me talking about Dominic, here. Her nature. He said big men were cowed by her when she got her anger up. But mostly she got people to do for her because they didn’t know what to make of her. They didn’t know what to make of her, cher, and never did really know her. I was fourteen years old, maybe. And I never forgot that, all these years. That they didn’t really know her at all. I said to myself, how could that be? How is it that men take risks for her? Follow her places they are afraid to go. They did that—blacks and whites. Somebody who called herself Only Me.”
Lily said, “I’ve been writing letters to her.” It had come out before she realized she would say it. “Well—it’s like a—a journal. It—it helps me to think about her as living—helps me to write about her.”
Aunt Violet didn’t respond. She stared out at the roofs of the Quarter, and rocked slowly, the smallest motion.
After a moment, Dominic said, “She takes little naps.”
They were quiet. The several different kinds of music came to them on the heavy air, along with the sound of traffic on the next street. Someone shouted from over there, and someone else, farther away, shouted back.
Violet stirred, and coughed, then started again: “That’s what it is, cher. You get yourself dressed and walk out in the world and see what you can see in it. Whatever comes, you keep your dignity as best you can and your humor, too.”
Dominic stood and stretched his arms out, yawning, then sighed and said: “I’m going to bed and try to sleep. At long last, we have a cool night.”
“You’re a savage boy, all appetites.”
Lily stifled a yawn.
Aunt Violet reached across and took her wrist. “Don’t you go.”
Dominic leaned down to kiss the old woman’s cheek, then touched Lily’s shoulder, and kissed her as well. “We’ll work on getting you settled in the morning.”
Lily thanked him. He went into the house, and through the room to the hallway, and when he was gone, she turned to see that Aunt Violet had nodded off again. The streets had rather abruptly become very quiet. She sat there, growing sleepy herself, watching the quality of light change in the sky. The rain had passed over, and there were holes in the cloud cover, one great scalloped edge of the cloud bank shining with moonlight, iridescent as mother-of-pearl. You could still hear thunder in the far distance, and now and again lightning flickered at the darker edge of the horizon.
“Cher,” Aunt Violet said. “What’re you doing coming down here?”
The question startled Lily, who found that she had no voice to answer it.
“I’ve been all around the world, you know. And I get to falling asleep. But I don’t miss much.”
“I—my marriage—Dominic and I—”
“I know the story.”
Lily shifted in the chair. “Well, then—I don’t understand.”
“There’s something you’re bringing with you to tell.”
“Yes.” It felt good to confess it. She breathed out, staring, amazed.
“And when you’re ready, you’ll tell.”
Lily was quiet, and a moment later realized that Aunt Violet had nodded off again. She waited, and after a time she cleared her throat, faked a cough.
The other woman stirred, and leaned forward to look down at the street. “Something else about that Mary Kingsley, cher. She faced the lions and leopards and savages and went up the dark rivers nobody’d ever seen before, you know, but she was afraid of love. I knew that way back when I first heard anything about her. And I can’t say why I knew. But I did. I knew she took care of her mother and she got to thinking that was love, and she ran away from it as soon as she could and nothing was ever gonna bring her back. No, sir. That scared her so bad she went running in the world, like her father.”
“But she cared for people—nursed them through fevers. She died caring for the sick. For wounded prisoners, in the Boer War. They weren’t even of her country.”
“That wasn’t anybody she loved, though. See? That was general. And when her time came, she didn’t want anybody around. She demanded to be left alone. Wanted to die alone, like an animal.”
“As in nature,” Lily said. “As it was in some of the tribes she moved with.”
“But she never went over to that. She wore her drawing-room dresses on the hottest days. She always insisted on her English habits—the tea and the reading and the talk. No, cher, you can only solve the mystery of that lady by thinking of love. She was scared, down in her heart, of it. Nothing else came close to scaring her as bad as that. It’s not hard to understand, either, when you look at what she had growing up, and where she was when she grew up. When you see her qualities against the things she was beating back all the time in herself, you can maybe see where the real bravery was. Stubborn, determined, brave, funny, all that. Funny. The self-mocking jokes. All the time, you know? Intensely smart, too; smarter than just about everybody she ever came in contact with. Wily smart, cher. The kind of smart that made other people think something she wanted from them was their idea. And the Africans called her Only Me, because she never once took herself too seriously. Not in print and not in life. So you think of that, and then think of love, think of being an English spinster in 1895 paddling up the rapids of the Ogowe River, and her guide saying, ‘You no husband-ma?’ And she saying, ‘No, no husband,’ and he saying, ‘Where husband-ma?’ and she answering it again. Over and over. Bad manners to complain, see? So you make a joke.”
They were quiet. Violet sat there with closed eyes. But then she opened them and yawned. “You direct your attention out in the world. What do you have to complain about, cher?”
“Nothing,” Lily said. “I’m not complaining.”
The old woman lay her head back. She sighed and the corners of her creased mouth curled into a smile. “I’m a complainer from way back. Always have been.”
They watched the lustrous edge of the cloud bank recede in the sky, revealing the bright moon, the faded sparkle of stars.
“You’ve studied Mary Kingsley, too,” Lily said.
Aunt Violet looked at her. “I’m ninety-two. Except for a boy I knew who went away and died, I have never been in love with anyone and no one has ever been in love with me.”
For a strange mom
ent, Lily felt as though she were in the presence of Mary Kingsley herself. Her breath caught.
Aunt Violet said, “Are you going to stay here with us, cher?”
“I—I don’t know.”
She tried to stand. “Be a good girl and help me.”
Lily quickly got to her feet and grasped the other woman by her bone-thin elbows. There was a tremor in Aunt Violet’s hands now, which made her seem to be straining all the muscles of her wrists and fingers. “Think of it,” she said. “I once spoke to a gentleman in whose eyes Mary Kingsley was reflected. The actual woman herself, in the flesh. I think he must have been a little in love with her, too. But I think a lot of men were in one way or another, and I wonder what kept them from acting on it. This man was going to write a book.” Her left hand went up to her brow to move a strand of hair from it. “Well, he said he was. I guess I told you that.” They moved through Lily’s room and out into the hall. Aunt Violet then indicated the doorway at the far end, opposite the stairs. Her step was a little wobbly. Lily guided her to the room. Aunt Violet grasped the door frame, then turned and thanked her.
“No,” Lily said. “Thank you.”
The old face with its many lines receded into the shadow of the darkened room. Lily saw the bony fingers, holding the door open. “You’ll tell us tomorrow what you’re bringing to us?”
“Pardon?”
“Bon chance, cher,” said Violet. “Tomorrow.” And she closed the door.
6
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, the baby woke up and wanted to play. Lily took her into the bed with her, and held her, and they both went back to sleep. In the morning, she woke first, got herself dressed, changed Mary, and went downstairs. It was already very hot and sticky. Manny was sitting in the living room by the small air conditioner, reading a newspaper. He stood as she entered the room, and bowed sweetly.
“Good morning.”
Hello to the Cannibals Page 65