MARY
I do not wish to ’elp—
She pauses, clears her throat.
I do not wish to help the people of West Africa. I wish to see them left alone as much as possible, while continuing to trade with them. The treaty we made with the West African chiefs guarantees them their property.
LORD CHAMBERLAIN
With some frustration.
It’s been said so many times—no one is taking away any property. There is nothing in the statute that refers to taking any property. If the Africans can be brought to an understanding of Christianity, why can’t they be shown that this is nothing more than a tax. It’s merely a tax.
MARY
Patiently.
In the African mind, to ask for money in that fashion is to seize the item you wish to tax. They own their ’uts. Huts. They built them. A tax on a man’s h-hut takes it away. By their law, and by every tenet of their religions and their institutions and their customs, paying a tax to anyone means they no longer can claim ownership. They’re fighting you for their very h-homes, sir. And that is the cause of all the violence and you will not turn them. It will only get worse.
LORD CHAMBERLAIN
With an air of wishing to placate her.
You are a formidable opponent. You have power, Miss Kingsley, and I wonder if you’ve thought how that power could be put to use for your queen.
MARY
I’ve no power at all. I am a deliverer of entertaining lectures about the exotic continent. I wrote a book that provided me with some unaccustomed wealth and then proceeded to make it all that much more difficult to get where I wish to be—which is Africa. I’ve no time to myself, and no private life as it is. I certainly ’ave no desire to be a politician. I am merely trying to save the crown and the people of West Africa from further violence. You will ’ave…excuse me. You will h-have war over the h-hut tax. Nothing will stop it. You must rescind the tax immediately.
LORD CHAMBERLAIN
With foreboding resignation, the sigh that comes of power about to be exercised to deadly extent.
The Empire has fought wars before.
MARY
That is what I was afraid you would say, sir. If you are willing for war to break out, if you accept war, then we’ve nothing left to say to each other.
LORD CHAMBERLAIN
Rising from behind the desk.
Well, perhaps we’ll talk more on the subject. At any rate, it was a privilege to meet the only woman who ever stood on the peak of Mount Cameroon. Tell me, what was the view like from up there? Must’ve been magnificent.
MARY
Sadly.
I saw a lovely green land about to be bathed in blood. I saw my…place. If I write you about this tax, will you read it?
LORD CHAMBERLAIN
I shall look forward to it with great anticipation. I would prefer you write to me, though, rather than the newspapers and journals, if you know what I mean.
MARY
Also rising now. They shake hands across the desk.
I know exactly what you mean and I shall write you, sir, and the newspapers. I intend to be quite outspoken about this folly.
LORD CHAMBERLAIN
As is your privilege. You have done great service for Englishwomen, Miss Kingsley, and I daresay, for women around the world.
MARY
Wearily, dropping his hand.
I never ’ad any ambition to do anything of the kind. I merely went about my business. Can you not see me outside of all that, as a person with knowledge of the place you’re trying to administer, and doing such a bad job of it in the bargain?
LORD CHAMBERLAIN
Coldly, politely.
I shall take what you have said under advisement. Good day, madam.
Lights down, spotlight on Mary as she walks to stage center, then comes downstage and crosses slowly to stage left, along the lip, addressing us.
MARY
When they buried me at sea, off the coast of South Africa, only a little more than three years later, the strangest thing happened. My coffin wouldn’t sink. It floated away from the ship, which was called The Thrush, and some men had to get into a dinghy and chase me down, fix anchors to the brass handles, and try me again. It took them most of the afternoon. Imagine that. I was still sailing the seas, even in death. I was wandering away.
Shakes her head, crossing to stage right again.
My two books have disappeared, mostly. The history books forget. I wasn’t for the feminists, or for suffrage. I did what was expected of me before I did anything else. That was the time and place where I lived. But don’t let them tell you I wasn’t in love. I was in love, once.
She moves to the empty chair, and stands for a beat, looking at the desk, and at the picture of the queen. Then she takes the chair and sits, facing us.
His name was Robert Nathan, and in 1897 he sent me a letter that I took to be an overture. I knew nothing of such things, of course, though I was always being consulted by my friends, who wanted my advice on their own amours. We were friendly. He kept seeming to come my way, and then withdrawing—or perhaps I interpreted some things. I was only thirty-six, and then thirty-seven. Old by the standards of my time, of course, for a single lady. And my public persona was more or less established. The last night I was in England, after a terrible round of lectures and work and supporting family and keeping up with needy friends, and looking after my poor feckless brother Charley—
A note of bitterness comes into her voice.
—on whom all the money had been spent for an education—
She shrugs, then stands and puts the chair back. She walks behind the desk, still talking, and sits in Lord Chamberlain’s chair.
—after all of that, and after being thwarted again and again in my desire to return to my beloved adopted country—well, I had volunteered to go down to South Africa, where a dirty little war was starting up. I wanted to be of use. But that last night, the night before I left England for good, I wrote and asked Robert Nathan to come visit me. I waited alone for him, in terror. The heart has nothing to do with politics. I kept thinking of being on the river with Corliss and fighting off the croc, and how much more frightening this was, this waiting for a man I thought might love me. And of course, Mr. Nathan never came. It was to him, in a long, rambling letter, that I had bared my true soul. Well, I did that. I was in a shy, terrible kind of hopeless love, the kind that cannot declare itself and yet does, with every gesture. Nothing hurts so bad as those gestures being ignored. As they were. Poor Nathan, living quietly with his mum when he could have had the love of a woman like me. But I flatter myself into thinking he missed me. Now, it hardly matters.
She rises from the desk, lets her fingers trail across it as she comes around it, and then on, to the lip of the stage.
I came down to Cape Town, in South Africa to die. The ostensible purpose for the journey, as I have indicated, was to be of some kind of help as a nurse. The Boer War. The whites, you see, were slaughtering each other for their own reasons. Factions, I believe they are still called, were warring. This wasn’t because of a primitive thing like witchcraft, or spells; no, it was civilized; it was territory and empire. But the boys were dying in huge numbers and of course they were dying just as dead. I was asked to nurse Boer prisoners with typhoid and enteric fever and measles, too. I helped them die and I tied their jaws together, and when I began to die myself, I knew it. I asked them to leave me alone, wanted, finally, at the end, to be alone. I suppose it was partly embarrassment. But it was my journey to make, and as I’d already made so many alone, already wandered out alone so many times and in so many places, it seemed right and just. So I made the request, and it was granted, at least until I was beyond knowing, as they say. My heart stopped peacefully; its beating grew slow and weak, and then just—stopped. I was asleep. The place I died in is called The Palace. Think of it. I died young. There is, really, only a little to tell.
She stops, and indicates the stage behind h
er.
Here, see for yourself.
Lights fade.
2
ONE SOFT, unseasonably warm, breezy morning in December, only days before Christmas, Lily finished the play. She was sitting out on the veranda, writing through one of the baby’s naps, and she worked out a scene showing a fever hallucination of Mary Kingsley’s, involving the peak of Mount Cameroon. Mary going on alone to the peak, a white windy mist of snow and cold, leaving her calling card, like a visitor to an English parlor on Mortimer Street. Mary, denied the panoramic view of her beloved country, by that country’s weather in that great height, more than thirteen thousand feet above the sea. That seemed the place to stop the action, and move, with a shifting of props and actors, from the top of the mountain to a procession bearing her up the catwalk of a ship, as the curtain closes. Lily had already suggested the years of celebrity in London, after Travels in West Africa became a best-seller; it was in the action of the play as it alternated back and forth through scenes of Mary Kingsley’s brief, but crowded, life. The playwright had constructed everything around her heroine’s last moments in The Palace Hospital in Simon’s Town, South Africa, when Mary lay dying and knew it, and longed hopelessly for her beloved West Coast. The struggle of writing the play, of working out its problems, had been to find some means of suggesting the truest quality of the woman as she had been in her time and with her own attitudes, and to portray her courage. Lily didn’t want to make the historical figure into a modern mouthpiece; nor did she wish to be too literal about the life.
When, later that day, she tried to write another letter to her dead friend, she found that she couldn’t. She considered that perhaps now that the play was finished, there wasn’t anything left to tell her.
I have been telling you, in some strange way, your own story…
Dominic came home in a good mood, and she gave it to him to read. He took it to his room, while she prepared something for dinner. Violet was gone to one of the nursing homes in another parish, and Manny would be back late from the restaurant. He was on a search for other employment, having decided that he hated the restaurant business. There were two openings nearby: one for a janitor in a nearby school, the other for a motel clerk. He had interviews for both positions.
Lily cooked soup from a can, and then opened some applesauce, and made hot dogs. She put Mary in the high chair, cut a hot dog into small bites, and fed them to the child, who warbled and ran her tongue in and out of her mouth, making noise with it, clapping her hands and laughing at nothing.
“Good hot dogs,” Lily said to her. “Right?”
“No.”
She called to Dominic that the food was ready. Briefly, she felt married again—it was an odd moment. She hadn’t heard from Nick in weeks. She thought of calling him with the news that she had finished, then was tempted to get in touch with Sheri and Millicent; but that smacked of manipulation, and finally she reflected that her Oxford life was over. Even so, Nick came into her mind several times a day.
Now, looking out the window at the alley behind the house, she saw some men and women standing in a garden, having drinks, and something seemed to separate and drift loose in her heart.
Dominic came down, and sat at the table. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “I’m not through reading.”
So they said little during the meal. She kept watching his face. He ate quickly, and went back upstairs. She washed Mary’s face and hands and then took her out of the high chair, and let her wander in the downstairs rooms. Mary’s fascination with the statue of the Virgin in the dining room was undiminished, and now she could pull herself up to stand, using the thick stone base for support. She would look up at the carved features and make sounds that seemed to demand a response; and when no response came, she grew all the more gleefully adamant.
Manny arrived, with the news that he had gotten offers for both jobs. He had taken the motel job, though it meant he would be gone some nights. It was lower pay than the janitor position, but more than the restaurant, and he was amenable to the work—he would have some time to read. He sat in the living room with Mary on his lap, talking about the worry over being gone at night, getting used to that kind of schedule, and then his eyes welled up.
“You know,” he said, “Aunt Violet has money for me when she—when she goes. I weel not starve. We won’t starve. I’m so frightened of losing her. The trouble ees I am terrified of losing her and she ees going to be ninety-two.” He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands, and looked at Lily. “Forgive me.”
“No.” She reached across and touched his wrist. “I understand.”
“Eet’s very hard.”
“I know.”
For a time, they were quiet. He blew his nose and sniffled, and when Mary crawled to the place on the floor at his feet and used his legs to stand, he smiled at her, and touched her cheek. “No,” Mary said, as if that were the final utterance.
Manny made faces for her, and when she grew tired of this and got down to crawl to the other side of the room, he asked how Lily’s day had gone.
“I think I finished my play,” she told him.
For a moment they watched Mary crawl toward the dining room, and the statue of the Virgin. “Shouldn’t we be celebrating?” he said, getting up to retrieve Mary, who protested at having been stopped.
“Dom’s reading it right now.”
They were quiet, as if waiting for word from Dominic. The house made its groaning-wood sounds as the temperature dropped outside. They heard a car, and Manny went to the door, then out and down the stairs to help Aunt Violet in. She entered the room with a huffing, and looked at Lily. “Cab fare,” she said.
Lily stood.
“I’ve got it,” Manny said. He went down to the street to pay the cabby.
Aunt Violet sat in one of the wing chairs by the window and watched him. Then she turned to Lily. “I forgot it, cher. Had no money for the return trip.”
“Manny got the motel clerk’s job,” Lily said.
The other woman nodded.
“I think I finished my play.”
Violet smiled. “Then we all have to celebrate.”
Manny came in and closed the door. “It’s getting cold.”
“I want to celebrate, tonight,” Violet said to him. “You got a job. This child finished her play.”
Lily said, “Dom still hasn’t finished reading it. Maybe there’s nothing to celebrate about the play.”
Violet closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again and looked at Lily. “You know the poor girl had a perforated bowel, from the typhoid. They operated on her, and her poor heart began to give out. Thirty-seven years old. I was born the year before she died. I got so many more years out of it than she did, I had all the advantages, and I didn’t do shit compared to her.”
“You taught all those children,” Lily said. “You gave that to life. You’ve done fine.”
“I wasn’t seeking pity, cher.”
“No pity,” Lily told her.
“Everything I do is the last thing I do, until I do it again.” Violet laughed softly. “I’m almost entirely spirit, now. And I’m making you nervous.”
Dominic came down, carrying the pages of the play in one hand. He set them in Lily’s lap, and stood over her, arms folded. “I love it.”
“Oh, do you really, Dom?”
He reached down, took the play from her lap and set it on the table, then took her hands and pulled her to her feet. “It’s beautiful, and it says as much about you as it says about her.”
“Then we celebrate,” said Manny. “Money is no object.”
“We don’t have money for anything,” said Violet, “but whatever we need.”
She started to stand, and couldn’t. “Help me get up,” she said to the two men, who quickly moved to her side. They lifted her by her forearms, and after she was standing, her legs momentarily wouldn’t support her. But then she got her balance, tottering slightly, until Manny had fetched a cane for her. She used
the cane, turning slowly to the door.
“Daddy’s,” she said.
Outside, stars sparkled in perfect clarity on one side of a prodigious coastline of luminous cloud, smooth as a sandy shoreline. The moon was just behind the cloud, which was advancing, almost perceptibly. By midnight the whole sky would be overcast with it. They got into the Oldsmobile and drove to Daddy’s. They had a waitress they didn’t know, and Daddy’s relatives were off somewhere, probably on their way north, Violet said. They had family in Chicago, and on Christmas they often made the trip.
Manny ordered wine, and when it was poured, Dom held up his glass. “Here’s to Lily and the play,” he said.
Violet said, “And to Manny’s new job.”
“Amen,” said Dom.
They all drank. Lily felt rather weirdly out of it, though she tried hard not to show this to the others. She looked around the room at the little groups of people, families and friends, eating, or just finished with eating. It came to her that she missed her mother and father. And Peggy, too.
“I think I’ll go to Virginia to celebrate New Year’s with my parents,” she said.
“Virginia’s cold,” Violet said. “This time of year.”
“Do you want company?” Dom asked.
“I think I’ll just take Mary and go,” Lily said. And when she saw the look of distress on Dominic’s face, she added, “For the holidays.”
Hello to the Cannibals Page 74