The stranger said, “My name is Olsen. Frederick Olsen. Babsy is my mother.”
Babsy was an island name! I looked carefully at the stranger. Selwyn was laughing.
Paul said excitedly, in his island accent which he, alone of the four of us, still used, “You’re Bam. Red Bam!”
His accent burst like a sudden, unexpected light upon the moment of my recognition. My face became tight with embarrassment. Frederick’s father, I thought, would have needed to be a Scandinavian giant. For the Babsy I remembered, the mother of Red Bam, was short, Indian, a prostitute who catered only to the white sailors of ships calling into the island’s harbour. When the ships were in, she put on shoes and walked on the arm of her sailor escort. Her black, straight hair hung down to her waist. A cigarette swung in her hand as she walked. She wore a flower in her hair. Her lips were red. There was rouge on her cheeks. Striding along the street, she seemed to care nothing for those who, like my mother, watched from behind their jalousies and judged her. After my father’s death, when we could no longer afford a servant and I was busy preparing for the scholarship examination, her son ran errands for us. He cleaned the yard on Saturdays. My mother gave him lunch. While she and I sat on the table in the dining room and ate off the bone china my father had brought from England (she had not yet sold it), Red Bam sat on the step and ate with his fingers out of an enamel plate. My mother forbade me to play with him. He did not attend school, frequented the wharf, was an excellent swimmer. He guided Canadian and American sailors about the town and carried their packages for them. He cleaned the decks of their yachts and ate and drank aboard ship with them. When the yachts and yachtsmen were not in, I used to watch him walk the streets nearly always by himself or with one or two of those whom we called, scornfully, wharf rats, who were the only friends he seemed to have, and whose ridicule and derision he had often to endure. After my father’s death, studying furiously for the scholarship that would enable me to leave the island, I used to pretend that I was as isolated on it as he was. One day, he disappeared. We heard that a couple had taken him away with them on their yacht. Long before any other of us, Red Bam had come to America to be transformed.
Selwyn was enjoying the surprise he had sprung upon us. Paul was obviously delighted to see Frederick Olsen. While Paul asked questions, I looked at Frederick. He seemed to have no memory of the past I remembered, nor of Red Bam, son of the disdained and even more disdaining Indian prostitute, who stood out among us not so much because of his appearance as because of the information we possessed about his origins. Frederick Olsen, standing comfortably with Paul and Selwyn and myself in the American ghetto, waiting to say goodbye to Red, whom he could not have known, though he obviously remembered C.B., behaved as if he had always been one of us. And none of us, it seemed to me, was going to evoke the past as accurately as I remembered it.
Selwyn said, “I haven’t seen this man since he was twelve years old.”
Paul asked, “How’s your mother?”
Frederick, smiling, said, “She’s fine.”
I asked, “Where have you been all these years?”
He said, “In the States. Right here, man.” He seemed happy to say it, and seemed to want to sound less American than when he first spoke.
No one asked about the name, Frederick Olsen. On the island, he had not seemed to need a name. We all knew him as Red Bam who was different from the derelict, older Black Bam, who had not had a sailor for a father and who was dying, in front of the rum shops, of a gangrenous leg wrapped in a dirty bandage.
The last time I had been on the island, I saw Babsy often. She worked as a janitor and domestic servant who cleaned Beatrice’s hairdressing salon. The long hair of her once proudly held, contemptuous head was cut short and streaked with grey. Her bare feet had blackened slits on their thick, calloused sides. Every evening, from Beatrice’s verandah, I watched this once proud woman, rendered contemptuous by the contempt of others, go piously to Vespers and Benediction in the Roman Catholic cathedral across the street.
“She’s rich,” Beatrice told me once, “don’t mind that you see her looking so down-and-out. Someone’s sending her money every month, they say. She doesn’t touch it. It’s all in the bank. They say it’s one of her ex-sailors who can’t forget her.” Beatrice laughed. “You know how they gossip here!”
None of that seemed to matter now. Babsy’s son was in the shipping business. He gave each of us a card: FREDERICK OLSEN ENTERPRISES, INC. SHIPPING. MIAMI, NEW YORK, SAN FRANCISCO. He showed us pictures. He said, “That’s Karen, she’s my wife.” A blonde, half-torso, smiling between two young girls. “That’s Barbara and that’s Betsy.”
I noticed the B’s. He was loyal to Babsy. The others, I am sure, noticed that, too. But no one commented on this. The door of the funeral parlour opened and a man, dressed in black, motioned us in. I gave the family pictures back to Frederick and followed the others inside.
I looked at the body lying in the coffin. I tried to imagine that I was looking at the man who used to be my best friend. I felt I was confronting a stranger. Selwyn had said that Red had been shot in the forehead. I tried to find the bullet holes and, when I couldn’t, raised my eyes and saw Frederick Olsen standing on the other side of the coffin across from me. His head was bowed, his eyes were closed, his cheeks red with obvious emotion. He took a kerchief from his pocket and held it to his moist eyes. Then he raised his head, saw me looking at him and, as if embarrassed, bowed his head quickly again.
But I had seen his grief. Its genuineness moved me. I looked down again at the body in the coffin and, my head bowed, my eyes rolled tensely upward. I watched Frederick. He had not known Red. He and C.B. could never have been friends on the island. I was impressed that he should so grieve, standing unselfconsciously with us in the funeral home of an American ghetto, for a man with whom all he shared was an accidental birth on a small Caribbean island. I felt rebuked by his grief. And I allowed myself to feel a retaliatory spasm – a sharp, painful sting – of resentment towards him. He, I thought, alone of all of us, might be said to have truly come home to America, to have properly inherited, in America, his father’s patrimony, no matter where in the world his father, the unknown white sailor who did not even know he had sired him, had actually come from.
My eyes, straining upwards to watch him enviously, with a resentment I did not want to feel, were getting tired. I turned them fully on the figure in the coffin. I pretended I was beginning to see, in the face of the dead man, some traces of the angry, hurt and non-conforming C.B. whom I remembered and wanted, guiltily now, to say goodbye to. But it was my past, I realized, that I wanted to say goodbye to. I felt ashamed, deeply ashamed, of my resentment of Frederick. I apologized silently to him. And to C.B.. I acknowledged Red. I said goodbye to both and, bowed over their body in the coffin, said goodbye, too, to Beatrice and to all her surrogates who had not even resembled her. I closed my eyes, said goodbye to my past and prayed for a new, for another, life.
I wanted another life. I was tired of fighting, tired of being a warrior and guerilla. I was ready to sue for peace with myself, with my past and with my country and my countrymen. I wanted to live in America with Peggy as once I had imagined I could live in the Caribbean with Beatrice. I wanted to be happy, to make Peggy happy. I wanted her to nurse me out of my past as if I were one of those sea birds she had told me about on the California sand, who did not proclaim their distress until you came close to them. From a distance, the afflicted bird looked healthy and ready to fly away if you came too close. But Peggy approached and it did not fly. She saw tar on its wings and feet. She saw its distress. She picked up the creature, took it home. One day, she watched it take wing and soar, healthy again, into the sky. Let her disapproving parents die quickly, I prayed over the body in the coffin, so that I could marry her.
I raised my head from my communion with Red, my fellow American, opened my eyes, and saw that the others had left the room. I kissed the cold forehead. I asked forgive
ness of C.B., my fellow islander, who was once my best friend. Then I left them both.
Outside, I said goodbye cordially to Frederick who had an important business meeting in Florida and would not be going to the cemetery. I felt, now, not the slightest resentment towards him. We had not made the world, he and I. We merely lived in a world that others, more powerful than we, had arranged for us. I gave him my address and telephone number and told him, genuinely, that I hoped to see him again soon. Selwyn got into his rented car, which he would drive directly to the airport from the cemetery. Paul and I headed to where Roscoe was waiting for us in Franz’s taxi.
And the two cars followed the hearse slowly out of the neighbourhood that the rest of us had avoided and that Red would never again return to.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When we returned to my apartment after the burial, Paul went straight to the spare bedroom to rest before his night’s work as the Pied Piper of the ghetto. Peggy, finally, had called. Jennifer said that she was arriving at the airport at three p.m. It was one o’clock. I told Jennifer to cancel my appointments for the rest of the day, then threw myself, fully dressed, across the bed.
Soon I am walking alone on the otherwise empty street in the city early on a Sunday morning. It is summer. Out of a cloudless sky, a rising sun lights up the tallest skyscrapers on one side of the street above the shadows cast upon them by the buildings on the other side. Down on the pavement it is cool and still early-morning-pleasant. Suddenly, a taxi appears and pulls up beside me. Franz is at the wheel. He is smiling; I am delighted to see him again. The back door of the taxi opens and Ekua emerges from it.
She is superb – tall, loose-limbed, beautifully angular. Her hair is cropped short. A blue-and-white patterned cloth is wrapped about her. She looks vital, loved, taken care of. Laughing, she gives me the bundle she is carrying in both hands.
“This is for you,” she says.
I open the bundle and look upon our son for the first time.
Ekua says, “Kiss me. Kiss me.”
I want to make love to her. I want to possess, to own her. I kiss her chastely on the cheek. She laughs and says, “I’ve been having such a good time! There’s no time that my friends want me that I am not at home for them.”
I am dismayed. I have a picture of a house full of people, and of fun and pleasure from which I am excluded. I want desperately not to be.
Then Ekua says, laughing still, “My house burnt down,” and I am relieved. There is now no place for her to be happy without me. I look closely at her face. I want to see on it that she is sad telling me how happy she is. I want to see that the story of her happiness without me is untrue. I look for tears behind her smile. But there are no tears on that radiant face. And I am overwhelmed by what I have lost and because she is happy without me.
Then, abruptly, I am alone with Franz and he is driving me along the unpaved main street of Ekua’s village. The one she had so often described to me in England. Franz has been transformed. He is a West African now. He’s driving me to see Ekua, but he doesn’t know who I am. He doesn’t know that I know Ekua. It is no longer Sunday or morning. I no longer know what day of the week it is. The sun is about to set and on the single dirt road without lights, which Ekua had told me about, it will soon be dark.
Franz, my West African driver, says, “I used to like her. She was so beautiful! But she became cheap. She married a foreigner.”
He uses the word for foreigner that Ekua had taught me, in London, which also means European or white man. Suddenly, we are no longer in the car and Franz, the West African, is patting me on the back with a closed fist. I become suspicious. I force open his hand and discover a knife. He has been stabbing me with it. I feel nothing and there’s no blood. I take the knife away from him. While I am doing so, Ekua reappears and says happily, “You lost out. You lost out. My American friend is so handsome! Broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped!” I am dismayed again. Franz has disappeared and I am alone with her.
I awoke. The bedroom was full of the flavour of Ekua. Every breath I drew seemed to carry her scent. But “broad-shouldered” and “narrow-hipped” were words Peggy sometimes used to describe me. I opened my eyes and saw that it was time to collect her. Paul was still asleep. I left him a note saying I had gone to the airport.
When Peggy emerged with the other passengers, I rushed to wrap my arms about her. I said, “I missed you so! Don’t ever leave me again.”
She stood on the tips of her toes to kiss me.
“I won’t.”
I said, “Are you hungry? Are you tired? Have you eaten? You didn’t call.”
She put a finger on my lips. “Don’t fuss.” She wasn’t tired. She wasn’t hungry. She had eaten on the plane.
“Will you spend the night…?”
“Of course,” she said. Then, “I have good news. We’ve been nominated for the National Book Award. I’m excited. I think we stand a chance.”
“We?”
“I couldn’t have written it without his collaboration.” She rose on her toes and pecked me on the cheek. “Nor yours. Thanks.”
I said, “I left him sleeping in the apartment. We buried Red today. Remember him?”
She said, “Of course. Beatrice’s brother. The friend I never could get to talk to. What happened?”
“He was shot.”
“Yeah.” She said it as if the news of Red’s death was inevitable and she had been waiting for it. I told her about Frederick Olsen and, later, when we came to the taxi and she saw Roscoe behind the wheel, I told her about my quarrel with Franz.
When we got to my apartment, Paul had already left with his box of costumes and his flute. I offered Peggy a glass of her favourite wine from California. I put on her favourite among Paul’s performances, that of Beethoven’s violin concerto. I had all the ingredients to prepare her favourite Japanese dish had she been hungry. I had been ready for days to welcome her back.
The American accent that I heard as I approached Paul’s dressing room nearly three years ago had not prepared me for the short, Asian woman who greeted me. Paul had said only that a woman was writing his biography and wanted to speak to as many of his boyhood friends as she could.
I had concealed my surprise that someone who looked like her should speak the way she did. At dinner, I watched, and listened fascinatedly to her. I could not get over how completely American she sounded. Once, I put my hands surreptitiously over my ears. The face I looked at, its mouth opening and closing suddenly, was just another oriental face. I uncovered my ears. The American accent conferred mystery and magic upon that oriental face. I still think of Peggy as exotic, strange and wondrous. After nearly four years!
I smiled contentedly at her.
She said, “What’s funny?”
“You are.”
Then I asked, “How’s Craig?”
Peggy laughed. “How’s Craig? How’s Craig? Darling, you’re too old to be jealous.” She didn’t know how Craig was. She hadn’t seen him. He wasn’t in California while she was there.
She had removed her dress and her shoes. Beneath her full slip, I saw her bra and her underpants. She looked fragile. But I knew how tough she was, except with regard to dealing with her parents’ wishes concerning her marriage. She removed a clown’s costume from her suitcase and gave it to me.
“You deserve this. You’ve earned it by being jealous. I’m taking you to a party tonight.”
Once, before she told me the reason why she could not marry me, when she still used to send me, laughingly, off to Masai maidens or long-legged Caucasian models, or ask playfully what I saw in a short, little Jap like her, she said – rejecting me yet another time – “Let’s not have any Jiggers yet. Let’s not add to America’s vocabulary.”
“Jiggers?”
“Yes. Jiggers. The children of Japs and niggers.” And she burst out laughing.
When she finally told me about Craig and herself and explained that she did not wish to displease her parents who wer
e old and would die soon, and would prefer to wait until they were dead before she married me, I could not be angry. But I was always very careful not to ask her how her parents were.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
That night, she and I were standing at a street corner trying to get a taxi. The street was crowded with devils, imps, goblins and hobgoblins, and all other kinds of dangerous Halloween creatures – masked and unmasked – who were fortunate enough not yet to have bitten on a razor blade embedded in an apple, or to have chewed on finely ground glass mixed in with powdered candy.
Peggy, under her coat, was dressed in Arabian Nights silk. Orange trousers, tight at the ankles, were full about her slightly bowed legs. Her green bodice, closed at the throat, was full-sleeved and undulant. Her shoes, golden and turned up at the toes, were like fragile miniature canoes. Her mask and gloves, like mine, were in her handbag. Beneath my unbuttoned overcoat, I was wearing the clown’s costume she had brought me.
There was a newspaper booth at the corner. The vendor was happily giving candy to the creatures who dared him. He told me how well I looked. I said, “You haven’t seen all of it.” I asked Peggy for my mask and put it on. The vendor laughed. He said, “That’s even better.”
I could see the headline of one of his papers: SUCCESSFUL IMMIGRANT AND PROMINENT ART DEALER AND INVALID WIFE KILLED.
There was a large picture of my fellow immigrant, Mr Johnson, a kind-looking, late middle-aged man whom, had I been white, I would have been pleased to call “Father”. Then, in the masthead, I saw the small picture of Jonathan and, next to it, the words: IMPORTANT NEW AMERICAN NOVEL, p. 33.
I was about to ask the vendor for a paper when I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned. The face I looked at, on a level with my own, was swathed in bandages. Only the eyes, flared nostrils and the thick lips showed. There was a bulge on one side of the bandaged head. Between the open sides of the camel hair overcoat, I saw the colourful silk tie on the elegant shirt front.
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