If the talk digressed from the weather, it went to other local matters: to the municipal politics, which were forever a bear garden; to the dear or the damnable peccadilloes of absent friends; to servant-robbers from the States; to the revenue the merchants and restaurateurs had acquired in their shops and bars when the last cruise ship was in, full to her gunwhales of spendthrift boobs. And they talked of the divorcées-to-be who littered the terraces and lounges of the hotels, idling through their six weeks’ quarantine, with nothing in the world to do but bathe in the sun and the sea, and drink, and haunt the shops for tax-free bargains in French perfume. They were spoken of as invalids; they were said to be here for “the cure.” Some of them did look ill and shocked, as if, at times, they could not remember why they had come.
It was made plain that the divorcées who were among the gathering today were different from the rest; they were not bores about the husbands they were chucking; they did not flirt with married men, or get too drunk, or try anything fancy with the natives (a noteworthy woman from Utica, some months before, had brought a station wagon with her and daily could be seen driving along the country roads with a high-school boy as black as your hat beside her); and they fitted so well into the life of the island that the islanders would like to have them settle here or, at least, come back to pay a visit. Mrs. Baumgartner, a delicious blonde whose husband had beaten her with a ski pole in the railroad station at Boise, Idaho (she told the story very amusingly but it was evident that the man had been a beast), and who meant to marry again the moment she legally could, announced that she intended to return here for her honeymoon. Captain Sundstrom reasonably proposed that she not go back to the States at all but wait here until the proper time had passed and then send for her new husband. It would be droll if the same judge who had set her free performed the ceremony. Crowing concupiscently, the Captain invited her to be his house guest until that time. A lumbering fourth-generation Dane, and now an American citizen, he had a face like a boar; the nares of his snout were as broad as a native’s and his lips were as thick and as smooth. By his own profession to every woman he met, he was a gourmet and a sybarite. He liked the flavor of colonial argot and would tell her, “My bed and board are first-chop,” as he slowly winked a humid blue eye. He had never married, because he had known that his would be the experience of his charming guests; it was a nuisance, wasn’t it, to assign six weeks of one’s life to the correction of a damn-fool mistake? Who could fail to agree that his was the perfect life, here on a hillside out of the town, with so magnificent a view that it was no trouble at all to lure the beauties to enjoy his hospitality. Mufti for the Captain today consisted solely of linen trunks with a print of crimson salamanders; below them and above them his furred flesh wrapped his mammoth bones in coils. At the beach that morning, he had endlessly regretted that there were no French bathing suits, and privily he had told Sophie Otis that he hoped that before she left, he would have the opportunity of seeing her in high-heeled shoes and black stockings.
To Mrs. Otis, who had left the rest of the party and was sitting just below the gallery on a stone bench in the garden in front of the house, this two-dimensional and too pellucid world seemed all the world; it was not possible to envisage another landscape, even when she closed her eyes and called to mind the sober countryside of Massachusetts under snow, for the tropics trespassed, overran, and spoiled the image with their heavy, heady smells and their wanton colors. She could not gain the decorous smell of pine forests when the smell of night-blooming cereus was so arrogant in her memory; it had clung and cloyed since the evening before, like a mouthful of bad candy. Nor was it possible to imagine another time than this very afternoon, and it was as if the clocks, like the winds, had been arrested, and all endeavour were ended and all passion were a fait accompli, for nothing could strive or love in a torpor so insentient. She found it hard to understand Mrs. Baumgartner’s energy, which could perpetrate a plan so involving of the heart. She herself was nearly at the end of her exile and in another week would go, but while she had counted the days like a child before Christmas, now she could not project herself beyond the present anesthesia and felt that the exile had only just begun and that she was doomed forever to remain within the immobile upheaval of this hot, lonesome Sunday sleep, with the voices of strangers thrumming behind her and no other living thing visible or audible in the expanse of arid hills and in the reach of bright-blue sea. It was fitting, she concluded, that one come to such a place as this to repudiate struggle and to resume the earlier, easier indolence of lovelessness.
On the ground beside her lay, face down, a ruined head of Pan, knocked off its pedestal by a storm that had passed here long ago. A bay leaf was impaled on one of the horns and part of the randy, sinful grin was visible, but the eyes addressed the ground and the scattered blue blossoms from the lignum vitae tree above. Prurient and impotent, immortalized in its romantically promiscuous corruption, the shard was like the signature of the garden’s owner, who now, sprawled in a long planter’s chair, was telling those who had not heard of it the grisly little contretemps that had taken place the night before aboard the Danish freighter that still lay in the harbor. Twelve hours before she entered, a member of her crew, a Liberian, had fallen from the mast he was painting and had died at once, of a fractured skull. Although it was the custom of the island to bury the dead, untreated, within twenty-four hours, the health authorities, under pressure from the ship’s captain, agreed, at last, to embalm the body, to be shipped back to Africa by plane.
“But then they found,” said Captain Sundstrom, “that the nigger’s head was such a mess that the embalming fluid wouldn’t stay in, so they had to plant the bugger, after all. We haven’t got enough of our own coons, we have to take care of this stray jigaboo from Liberia, what?” He appealed to little Mrs. Fairweather, a high-principled girl in her middle twenties, who had fanatically learned tolerance in college, and who now rose to his bait, as she could always be counted on to do, and all but screamed her protest at his use of the words “nigger” and “coon” and “jigaboo.”
“Now, now,” said the Captain, taking her small ringless hand, “you’re much too pretty to preachify.” She snatched away her hand and glared at him with hatred and misery; she was the most unhappy of all the divorcées, because it had been her husband’s idea, and not hers, that she come here. She spent most of her time knitting Argyle socks for him, in spite of everything, the tears falling among the network of bobbins. She took the current pair out of her straw beach bag now, and her needles began to set up a quiet, desperate racket. Half pitying, half amused, the company glanced at her a moment and then began their talk again, going on to other cases of emergency burials and other cases of violent death on these high seas.
* * *
Mrs. Otis had brought the Captain’s binoculars to the garden with her, and she turned away from the people on the porch to survey the hills, where nothing grew but bush and, here and there, a grove of the gray, leafless trees they called cedars, whose pink blossoms were shaped like horns and smelled like nutmeg; they did what they could, the cedar flowers, to animate the terrain, but it was little enough, although sometimes, from a distance, they looked beautifully like a shower of apple blossoms. She peered beyond the termination of the land, toward the countless islands and cays of the Atlantic, crouching like cats on the unnatural sea. They were intractably dry, and yet there was a sense everywhere of lives gathering fleshily and quietly, of an incessant, somnolent feeding, of a brutish instinct cleverer than any human thought. Some weeks before, from a high elevation on another island, through another pair of glasses, she had found the great mound of the island of Jost Van Dykes and had just made out its two settlements and its long, thin beaches, and she had found, as well, a separate house, halfway up the island’s steep ascent, set in a waste as sheer as a rain catchment, where only one tree grew. And the tree was as neat and simple as a child’s drawing. She had quickly put the glasses down, feeling almost faint at the t
hought of the terrible and absolute simplicity with which a life would have to be led in a place so wanting in shadow and in hiding places, fixed so nakedly to the old, juiceless, unloving land. Remembering that strident nightmare, she turned now to the evidences on the gallery of the prudent tricks and the solacing subterfuges of civilization; even here, as in the cities of their former days, the expatriates had managed to escape the aged, wickedly sagacious earth. See how, with optimism, gin, jokes, and lechery, they could deny even this satanic calm and heat!
Mr. Robertson, the liquor merchant, was explaining the activities of the peacetime Army here to a Coca-Cola salesman who had stopped off for a few days on the island en route from Haiti to the Argentine. Robertson, a former rumrunner and Captain Sundstrom’s best friend, was as skinny as one of the island cats, and his skeleton was crooked and his flesh was cold. His eyes, through inappropriate pince-nez, mirrored no intellect at all but only a nasty appetite. He was a heliophobe and could never let the sun touch him anywhere, and so, in this country of brown skins and black ones, he always looked like a newcomer from the North and, with that fungous flesh, like an invalid who had left his hospital bed too soon. On the beach that morning, he had worn a hat with a visor and had sat under an enormous umbrella and had further fended off the sun by holding before his face a partially eviscerated copy of Esquire. In spite of his looks, he was a spark as ardent as the Captain, and lately, while his wife had been ailing, he had cut rather a wide swath, he claimed; all day he had giggled gratefully at his friends’ charges that he had been stalking the native Negro women and the pert little French tarts from Cha Cha Town.
Rumor had it, he told the salesman, that a laboratory was presently to be set up on an outlying cay for the investigation of the possible values of biological warfare. The noxious vapors would be carried out to sea. (To kill the fancy, flashy fish weaving through the coral reefs, wondered Mrs. Otis, half listening.) Captain Sundstrom, who was connected with the project, turned again to Mrs. Fairweather, a born victim, and prefacing his sally with a long chuckle, he said, “We’re hunting for a virus that will kill off all the niggers but won’t hurt anybody else. We call it ‘coon bane.’” One of the kitchen boys had just come out onto the gallery with a fresh bucket of ice, but there was no expression at all on his long, incurious face, not even when Mrs. Fairweather, actually crying now, sobbed, “Hush!” The Coca-Cola man, in violent embarrassment, began at once to tell the company the story of an encounter he had had in Port-au-Prince with an octoroon midget from North Carolina named Sells Floto, but his heart was not in it, and it was clear that his garrulity was tolerated only out of good manners.
Mrs. Otis picked up the binoculars again and found the beach. For some time, she watched a pair of pelicans that sat on the tideless water, preposterously permanent, like buoys, until their greed came on them and they rose heavily, flapped seaward for a while, then dived, like people, with an inexpert splash, and came up with a fish to fling into their ridiculous beaks. The wide-leaved sea grapes along the ivory shingle were turning brown and yellow, a note of impossible autumn beside that bay, where the shimmer of summer was everlasting. Mrs. Otis shifted her focus to the grove of coconut palms that grew to the north of the curve of the ocean, and almost at once, as if they had been waiting for her, there appeared, at the debouchment of one of the avenues, a parade of five naked Negro children leading a little horse exactly the color of themselves. The smallest child walked at the head of the line and the tallest held the bridle. But a middle-sized one was in command, and when they had gained the beach, he broke the orderly procession and himself took the bridle and led the horse right up to Captain Sundstrom’s blue cabaña. If her ears had not been aided by her eyes, Mrs. Otis thought she would not have heard the distant cries and the distant neigh, but the sounds came to her clearly and softly across the stunted trees. The children reconnoitered for a while, looking this way and that, now stepping off the distance between the cabaña and the water, now running like sandpipers toward the coconut grove and back again. Then the smallest and the tallest, helped by the others, mounted the horse; it was a lengthy process, because the helpers had to spin and prance about to relieve their excitement, and sometimes they forgot themselves altogether for an absent-minded minute and ran to peer through the cracks of the closed-up cabaña; then they returned to the business at hand with refreshed attention. When the riders were seated, one of the smaller children ran back to the grove and returned with a switch, which he handed up to the tall child. The horse, at the touch of the goad, lifted his head and whinnied and then charged into the water, spilling his cargo, only to be caught promptly and mounted by two others who had run out in his wake. They, in their turn, were thrown. Again and again, they tried and failed to ride him more than a few yards, until, at last, the middle-sized ruler managed to stick and to ride out all the way to the reef and back again. The cheers were like the cries of sea birds. The champion rested, lying flat on the sand before the cabaña, and for a while the others lay around him like the spokes of a wheel, while the horse shuddered and stomped.
On the gallery, the Captain had noticed the children. “Cheeky little beggars, muckering around on my beach, but I’ll let them have it. I’m a freethinker, what?” he said; then, turning to Mrs. Fairweather, “I’m going to give you a fat little blackamoor to take back with you, to remind you of our island paradise, what?”
Mr. Robertson said, “Don’t let him rile you, honey. For all his big talk, he’s softer about them than you are.” He leaned over to sink his fist into the Captain’s thigh. “Get me?” he cried.
The Captain laughed and slapped his leg. “The whole thing’s a lie, that’s what it is, you outlaw!”
“It’s a lie if the gospel truth’s a lie,” said Robertson. Mrs. Fairweather did not look up from her knitting, even though he was as close to her as if he meant to bite or kiss her. “Listen, kiddo, when I first knew him, he used to be all the time saying what he wanted most of all in the world to do was eat broiled pickaninny. All the time thinking of his stomach. So one day I said to him, ‘All right, damn it, you damned well will one of these fine days!’”
Mrs. Baumgartner gasped, and one of the other women said, “Oh, really, Rob, you’re such a fool. Everyone knows that our slogan here is ‘Live and let live.’”
But Robertson wanted to tell his story and went on despite them. He said, “Well, sir, a little while after I made that historic declaration, there was a fire in Pollyberg, just below my house, and I moseyed down to have a look-see.”
“Let’s not talk about fires!” cried Mrs. Baumgartner. “I was in a most frightful one in Albany and had to go down a ladder in my nightie.”
Captain Sundstrom whistled and blew her a noisy kiss.
“They had got it under control by the time I got there, and everyone had left,” pursued the liquor merchant. “I took a look in the front door and I smelled the best goddamned smell I ever smelled in my life, just possibly barring the smell of roasting duck. ‘Here’s Sundstrom’s dinner,’ I said to myself, and, sure enough, I poked around a little and found a perfectly cooked baby—around ten and a half pounds, I’d say.”
The Coca-Cola salesman, who, all along, had kept a worried eye on Mrs. Fairweather, leaped into Robertson’s pause for breath and announced that he knew a man who had his shoes made of alligator wallets from Rio.
Robertson glanced at him coldly, ignored the interruption, and went on speaking directly to Mrs. Fairweather. “It was charred on the outside, naturally, but I knew it was bound to be sweet and tender inside. So I took him home and called up this soldier of fortune here and told him to come along for dinner. I heated the toddler up and put him on a platter and garnished him with parsley and one thing or another, and you never saw a tastier dish in your life.”
The Coca-Cola man, turning pale, stood up and said, “What’s the matter with you people here? You ought to shoot yourself for telling a story like that.”
But Robertson said to Mrs. Fairweat
her, “And what do you think he did after all the trouble I’d gone to? Refused to eat any of it, the sentimentalist! And he called me a cannibal!”
Robertson and the Captain lay back in their chairs and laughed until they coughed, but there was not a sound from anyone else and the islanders looked uneasily from one visitor to another; when their reproachful eyes fell on their host or on his friend, their look said, “There are limits.”
Suddenly, Mrs. Fairweather threw a glass on the stone floor and it exploded like a shot. Somewhere in the house, a dog let out a howl of terror at the sound, and the kitchen boy came running. He ran, cringing, sidewise like a land crab, and the Captain, seeing him, hollered, “Now, damn you, what do you want? Have you been eavesdropping?”
“No, mon,” said the boy, flinching. There was no way of knowing by his illegible face whether he told the truth or not. He ran back faster than he had come, as if he were pursued. The Captain stood up to make a new drink for Mrs. Fairweather, to whom speech and mobility seemed unlikely ever to return; she sat staring at the fragments of glass glinting at her feet, as if she had reached the climax of some terrible pain.
“Oh, this heat!” said Mrs. Baumgartner, and fanned herself gracefully with her straw hat.
Something had alarmed the children on the beach below, and Mrs. Otis, turning to look at them again, saw them abruptly immobilized; then, as silently and as swiftly as sharks, they led the horse away and disappeared into the palm grove, leaving no traces of themselves behind. Until she saw them go, she had not been aware that the skies were darkening, and she wondered how long ago the transformation had begun. Now, from miles away, there rolled up a thunderclap, and, as always in the tropics, the rain came abruptly, battling the trees and lashing the vines, beheading the flowers, crashing onto the tin roofs, and belaboring the jalousies of Captain Sundstrom’s pretty house. Blue blossoms showered the head of Pan. Wrapping the field glasses in her sash to protect them from the rain, Mrs. Otis returned to the gallery, and when the boy brought out a towel to her—for in those few minutes she had got soaked to the skin—she observed that he wore a miraculous medal under his open shirt. She looked into his eyes and thought, Angels and ministers of grace defend you. The gaze she met humbled her, for its sagacious patience showed that he knew his amulet protected him against an improbable world. His was all the sufferance and suffering of little children. In his ambiguous tribulation, he sympathized with her, and with great dignity he received the towel, heavy with rain, when she had dried herself.
Children Are Bored on Sunday Page 16