by Come Sunrise
"Don't you understand?" she wailed, sobs choking her words. "I want to go home. I want to have my baby at Jericho."
"Baby! Oh, lord!" He dropped to his knees and turned her face so he could look at it. "Are you pregnant, sweetheart? Is that what you're telling me?"
She nodded her head and didn't stop weeping.
"That's great! Aren't you pleased?" He fished his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped her eyes and made her blow her nose. "No reason our baby can't be born right here in New York, memsahib," he said smiling. "We may not be Africa, but we have doctors and hospitals here in the wilderness too."
She couldn't help but laugh. "I know," she said in a voice still harsh with tears. "It's just that I want our child to be born there. I want my nurse Naduta with me, and my own things around me."
Tommy looked at her for a long moment. Then he stood up and poured a cup of fresh coffee and handed it to her. "Here, drink this. You still feel like a stranger here, don't you?"
She nodded.
"One other thing, what about me? Do you want me too? Or just you and the kid in the bush?"
Amy's brown eyes opened wide. His question made her wince with pain. How much could Tommy know? "Of course I want you! You're my husband. You're the baby's father."
He looked at her. "Ok, I just wanted to get that part straight. Listen, darling, the war will end. Maybe not as soon as we'd like, but sometime. It has to. If nothing else, they'll run out of poor bastards to send to the trenches." He looked grim and patted his pocket for a cigarette.
She reached for a box of them on the sideboard and passed it to him. "Would you consider it, Tommy?" she asked. "Would you be willing to give up your work here, and this house and move to Africa?"
"Sure," he said quickly. "Why not? I think it'd be great to have lots of little black boys running around calling me b'wana and waiting on me hand and foot. Who wouldn't?"
"You could manage the mines. You're so clever, Tommy, you'd learn about diamonds in no time."
"Yeah. Clever, that's me. That's what everyone says."
Amy guessed that he knew she'd once offered the same arrangement to Luke, but he didn't mention that. He smiled at her instead and said he'd take the day off.
They spent the morning walking in Central Park and the afternoon at the flicks, just like in the old days. When they went early to bed he made love to her. She tried not to resist, not to allow her guilt and disappointment to show, but it was difficult, and afterward she couldn't tell if she'd succeeded. Tommy didn't say anything, but she sensed disapproval in the stiff way he lay beside her when it was over.
Amy began to scheme to find a way they could go home before the end of the war. According to reports, there was a minimum of German resistance left in East Africa. Only one general, Von Lettow-Vorbeck, still led a small guerrilla force deep in the interior. If they could just find safe transport, they could go. She wrote countless letters to her father's former attorney in Dar es Salaam. He was an American, he must still be there. If she mailed enough letters, one of them was bound to get through.
When she talked of Jericho and the way things would be when they returned, Tommy listened quietly. At the same time he grew wary of having sex with her, said it might somehow harm the child. Instead he slept with his hand protectively resting on her belly. They continued to give parties and go to them, but Amy was only going through the motions. She was waiting.
One mellow day in late September she was composing yet another letter to Africa when her ink ran out. She went to Tommy's desk to see if there was a bottle there. The desk top was bare and clean. Tommy was always neat, but envelopes spilled onto the rug when she opened the drawer. It was crammed with paper, and she shook her head over the uncharacteristic mess and bent to tidy it. That's when she saw that most of the letters had never been opened.
They were bills. Masses of them, and all unpaid. Amy spent fifteen minutes examining the material, then she put on her hat and gloves and took a cab to Wall Street.
"I'm sorry to arrive without an appointment, Uncle Donald." She had called him that since her marriage. He'd insisted on it.
"Not at all, my dear. I'm always happy to see you. Now, what can I do?"
She folded her hands in her lap and tried to speak calmly. "I feel some concern about our financial situation, Uncle Donald. I imagine that's foolish. It's my condition perhaps." She smiled shyly and glanced up to make sure he had understood.
"I see! Well, that's marvelous news, Amy. I'm delighted. And certainly you shouldn't worry at such a time. Have you discussed this with Tommy?"
She shook her head. "I don't want him to think I don't trust him. I do, really. It's just that we're both so young. I think we should consult you and take your advice, and I'm afraid Tommy will be too proud to do that. "
"I understand." He drummed a finger on his desktop. "Actually, Tommy has been to see me a number of times. We've discussed the question of your future often. "
"Then there's no reason for me to worry?" she asked.
"Now, Amy." He looked uncomfortable. "I'm not saying everything is exactly as it should be. There are one or two things ..."
"What things?"
"Tommy has borrowed rather heavily against your estate. I am a little concerned about that. We mustn't jeopardize your being able to take control once this war ends. Don't want the bank to end up owning the mines now, do we?"
Amy wanted to scream. She only said, "How real is the danger, Uncle Donald?"
"Oh, not at all real yet! It's just the pattern that concerns me. Perhaps you should suggest that the two of you live a little more frugally for the time being. You ladies are good at that sort of thing, I'm told."
"Yes, I'll do that. Thank you."
The scene was terrible. They said things neither of them would ever forget. "You're a cheat and a liar and a fraud!" Amy screamed after they'd been arguing for almost an hour. "You're not the man I thought you were at all."
"Not Luke, you mean." Tommy shook with rage and clung to a small mahogany table, as if to keep himself from striking her. "Not the saintly golden boy. That's what's bothering you, isn't it? You're just sick with wanting it to be Luke's baby inside you!"
"That's crazy! Luke has nothing to do with this. He's only part of it in your sick mind. You're afraid to face up to your responsibilities, so you spend money we don't have and don't pay the bills! And since you brought it up, you're right. Luke would never do such a thing."
"Aagh!" He screamed the wordless cry of anguish and struck out at the innocent bibelots on the table. They crashed to the floor at his feet, and he slammed out of the room.
He didn't return for three days. When he did they made it up and promised each other it would be different in the future. Amy had paid all the bills in the meantime.
"How'd you do that? Uncle Donald?"
She shook her head. "No, that would only have made it worse. I sold my diamond ring. I got four thousand dollars for it. There's still a few hundred left. "
He reached for her hand to confirm the story. There was a little white space where the ring had been. "Oh, Jesus," he whispered.
"It doesn't matter. When we go home there are lots of diamonds. They're in a vault in the bank in Dar es Salaam. I told you that." She tried to sound gay.
Tommy didn't say anything, but he examined her other hand and saw that his grandmother's sapphire, the ring he'd given her to mark their engagement, was still in place. So were the pearls around her neck. He reached up and fingered them. "You could have sold something else," he muttered.
"Those were presents from you to me," she whispered. "The diamond was my own. It's different."
Later they talked about living on just his salary. Amy hadn't known until now how much it was.
"Seventy-five a week," he told her. "Until I learn the ropes and have clients of my own. It's generous of them, I suppose, but I want to do better. They keep telling me to be patient, that I'm too young to take charge of any accounts."
Sh
e did some rapid calculations with pencil and paper. "We should be able to live on seventy-five a week." She frowned and nibbled on the eraser. "Maybe we should let Delia go and just keep the cook."
He took the paper and pencil from her and lay them aside. "Let me worry about all that. You just concentrate on keeping you and the baby healthy."
They stopped the socializing. Amy suspected it was as much a relief for Tommy as for her.
The first time Amy saw the advertisement in the Times was a day in October. She had taken the paper and gone to the park to sit in the sunshine. She did that a lot lately. Among the trees bright with autumn and the laughing children watched over by sturdy governesses, it was possible to let her thoughts drift.
She dreamed about Jericho and about her baby. She was in a kind of limbo, waiting only for a letter from Dar es Salaam. Somehow, Amy convinced herself, her links with reality would then be reestablished. She could go home.
On this particular morning a girl stood on a nearby soapbox and preached about giving women the vote. The speaker looked to be about her own age, and Amy wondered what it must be like to be able to spare thought for problems outside oneself. The notion was depressing, so she pushed it away and opened the newspaper.
She liked to read the real estate section. There were always a few columns devoted to properties outside New York, and she'd invented a little game in which she compared them to Jericho and was pleased because they never measured up. Today one almost seemed to do so. It offered for sale not a country house in an eastern town like Cross River, but a piece of the fabled American West.
"New Mexico," the announcement read. "Youngest State in the Union and Land of Enchantment. Ranch for Sale. Amazing Opportunity." There were more details. A cattle spread was being offered, nearly three thousand head of prime beef on the hoof. "House and numerous ranch buildings," the advertisement promised. "Heartbroken owner must sell at a loss due to ill health. Don't miss out. Act now."
Amy remembered how she'd once thought of the West as being like Africa; then she turned the page.
The next day the advertisement was repeated, and the next. After that it disappeared and she assumed that the property had been sold. The following week she was surprised to see the advertisement again. This time she cut it out carefully and tucked it beneath the velvet cushion of her jewelry box.
That afternoon she went to the library on Eighty-sixth Street and read everything she could find on New Mexico and the Southwest.
One book had a colored drawing of golden grasslands, fringed by the snow-topped Sangre de Cristo mountains. She looked at that picture and felt a stab of pleasure that was almost pain. It looked remarkably like the Africa she had known.
Amy walked home carrying the book and staring pensively at the pavement. Her body was growing a little heavy, her sense of balance changed by the life within. She moved slowly and had time to think before she reached her front door.
That night she slept with the book about New Mexico under her pillow. She was a little afraid that Tommy might find it, but he didn't.
Two days later she went to the Times office on Broadway and spoke to the advertising manager. She wanted to know if the ranch had been sold, but he couldn't tell her. "Our only instructions are to run the announcement three days a week until further notice."
He ruffled through some papers. "The gentleman paid for a month's worth of insertions. Why don't you write to him?"
A dozen times she took up her pen, then put it down again. The idea wasn't just outlandish, it was a kind of dying. The rancher was asking fifty thousand dollars for his spread. To get that kind of money she must forfeit Jericho. It was too much to ask; she couldn't do it. She put her writing things away, then returned the book to the library.
Next morning the papers were full of the news of more allied losses in Europe and, for the first time, serious speculation that Wilson was considering taking America into the war. Amy read the reports and the columns carefully after Tommy went to the office. Africa seemed to be receding into the distance. It was moving beyond her reach because of events totally outside her control. She put aside the newspaper and sat down and wrote to the man who wanted to sell a ranch in New Mexico, the land of enchantment.
11
"THIS IS THE LATEST LETTER." AMY PUT TWO SHEETS of flimsy stationery on Donald Varley's desk.
The handwriting was large and open and marked by many flourishes. In some places the ink had blotted the paper. Varley held it to the weak November light of the window, then made a noise of impatience and switched on a lamp. He read in silence. "Did he send the photographs you requested?" he asked finally.
"Just one." Amy handed him a speckled gray card-board folder. It opened from the top and had one of those flap arrangements that allowed it to stand by itself. The picture was of an enormous black steer, staged against a gray and white desert. The beast had curved horns and massive shoulders, and it looked at the camera with malevolence.
Varley snorted, "Not much help is it? One bull posed to have its picture taken."
"Mr. DeAngeles says it's representative." She leaned forward and ran a black-kid-encased finger over the letter lying on the desk. "He says all the stock is of the same high quality."
"Yes, and that the land is magnificent and the houses likewise. Do you believe him, my dear?"
Amy shrugged. "It's a gamble, I know that. But surely he wouldn't ask fifty thousand dollars if it weren't all true'!"
Varley smiled. "It's not the asking that's difficult. It's the getting." She looked pained. "I can do some independent checking," he added hastily. "I'll ask around and find a reliable attorney in Santa Fe. Then we'll have an unbiased report."
Fifteen days later Amy returned to the office. Varley produced a manila envelope from the bookcase behind his chair.
"Will you read it, or shall I summarize?"
"Tell me what he says."
"Quite a bit. A lot more than Mr. DeAngeles. First, and most important, there's water on this ... what's the place called?" He rifled the pages searching for the name of the ranch.
"Santo Domingo," Amy supplied. She sat primly on the edge of her seat, tense with expectation.
"That's right. As I said, there's a waterhole. Extremely reliable, my colleague says. It's on DeAngeles land, but shared by treaty with two other ranches. That's not uncommon apparently. And at the last count"-he ran his finger down the page searching for numbers--"there were three thousand head of cattle. That's certified by the government. We've been lucky there. "
"I don't understand."
"Four years ago, when New Mexico was admitted as a state, the federal government sent in assessors to make a survey. That's the source of these figures." He tapped the manila envelope. "To continue, there's a main dwelling of ten rooms and various outbuildings. They're in need of some repair because the present owner has been ill. 'But basically sound' …" he read aloud. " .. .'And once a true showplace' …" Varley looked up and smiled at her. Amy glowed with pleasure.
"Oh, yes," he added. "There's water laid on to the house. The report stresses that. Not unreasonable when you come to think of it. Water must be the key out there."
"I saw the Sahara once," she said enthusiastically. "I went on a trip with Mummy and Daddy when I was five or six. It was beautiful."
"But can you imagine actually living in a desert?" Varley put down the report, leaned forward and took her hand. "I want what is best for you, my dear, I mean that most sincerely. This ranch sounds excellent, but the Southwest is still a frontier. Conditions are bound to be primitive. Have you really thought about all that?"
"Yes," she said firmly. She withdrew her hand from his and sat up very straight. "I've considered it most carefully, Uncle Donald. I'm sure it's the right thing to do." Her tone changed and she rummaged in her handbag for a handkerchief. "You were never in Africa, so you can't understand. But the moment I saw those pictures in that book I knew. It's the closest thing to home I'm going to find."
She ble
w her nose, but she did not cry.
Varley said, "I admit that's my one remaining reservation. How would you two get on so far from the family and civilization? What does Tommy say?"
"I haven't told him."
"But, Amy, we agreed! After your last visit we agreed you'd discuss it with Tommy before we went any further. Really, my dear, I cannot pursue this matter without the consent of your husband. Apart from the legalities, it simply isn't right."
Amy took a deep breath. It was imperative that she enlist Donald Varley as an ally. To do so she would have to tell him at least part of the truth. "Tommy has always been a little insecure because of his handicap. He worries that I don't really love him."