The Marriage of Opposites

by Alice Hoffman

  “See what you’ve done,” Frédéric said to the Reverend. “She’ll be made ill by this.”

  “What I’ve done?” The Reverend showed little sympathy for me. “You weren’t much more than a boy and she preyed upon you. I don’t blame you for any of this. I blame her.”

  The Reverend glared at me as if I were a foul sorceress, eyeing my clothes, now drenched and clinging to me. My black hair was uncombed, my boots slick with mud. I held up the hem of my skirts to keep them dry with no success. I likely appeared to be a witch, with a witch’s desires.

  “Do not speak about her in that manner,” Frédéric said sternly. “Our people are brothers and sisters, not enemies.”

  “You are indeed like brother and sister. That is the point.” The Reverend’s voice was raised. “Do you not understand? You are relatives and therefore cannot wed. It is against our morals and our laws. If you continue, nothing good can come of this.”

  “But it has already,” Frédéric said.

  He meant our love and our child. The door was slammed shut, and we walked away, the rain pouring down, as it did in our dreams. I had a chill. Perhaps I had made a terrible error and had dragged the person I loved most in the world into hell. I looked at Frédéric. As if he could read my innermost thoughts he said, “I regret nothing.”

  Nor did I.

  When we arrived home I was still shivering. Rosalie heated water and I bathed in the tub. I was reminded of that horrible woman Elise who had come from France to steal Jestine’s child. I slipped beneath the water, as Elise had done, and studied the ceiling until I came up sputtering. I hated rules, and law, and morals that were twisted into whatever people wished them to be. I didn’t step out of the tub until the water was tepid. By then I had come up with a plan. My father always said that I thought like a man, and perhaps there was some truth in that comment. I did not relish the role of sitting idly by with my needlework and baking, seeing to the children while the world made decisions all around me.

  I went to my desk to draw up my proposal to present to Frédéric.

  We would go over the Reverend’s head and petition the Grand Rabbi in Denmark for the legal right to wed.

  Such things were not done. We would insult both the Reverend and our entire community. We would make them look powerless and small in the eyes of the Grand Rabbi in Denmark, but this island was small, that was the truth, and the people around us were nothing more than tiny figures when viewed from above. We had no other choice. Surely God would see that, and would bless our endeavors. I had a flicker of belief inside me.

  Frédéric wrote the letter and read it aloud. I approved the sentiments within. The flicker grew brighter. I began to pray, silently, in the garden. Perhaps we had not been forsaken, and if we could address God more directly, he might hear us. We went over the letter several times that week, examining each word until at last it was done. Frédéric took it to the post office, and I waited outside, my cloak covering me, though the air was warm. Sending our letter was not unlike creating a bomb that could explode at any time, anywhere.

  Frédéric came down the stairs of the post office. The deed was done, and could not be undone. He was so young. Just looking at him tore at my heart. That night in our bed we did not speak, but instead embraced each other as we had the first night we were together, when I thought he might die of fever. Perhaps we were both in a fever to act so rashly and insult our entire community. The letter that would change our fate was on its way to Denmark, and we were safe in our bed. I could think of little but that pale envelope traveling across an ocean, innocent, mere parchment and ink, until it was opened and read. Then our lives would never be the same. We would be considered traitors willing to betray our own people. The only one who wouldn’t judge what I’d done was Jestine. She understood love. What destroys you saves you, she had told me. Now I knew what she meant. My love for Frédéric would ruin me, yet I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  I BEGAN TO OBSERVE things I hadn’t taken note of before. Perhaps I’d been naïve or possibly I simply hadn’t wished to see the cruelty around us, but it was there, on every street of Charlotte Amalie, and out in the countryside where the manor houses stood. Danish law decreed there was to be no more slavery, but those slaves already owned were still considered property. They were given Sundays off as if they were free people and could sail to a neighboring island to visit family, but when they returned on Monday they were slaves once more. On our island more than half of the African population was free, and that included most everyone who had a European father, but the rest were enslaved, mere property.

  I now had a better sense of how an individual’s fate could be based on arbitrary rulings, invented by men for profit of one sort or another. If I had lived in Denmark, I could have married Frédéric. It was a larger community, and we could have disappeared into the outskirts of a city and do as we wished. Here, I was a sinner. I had been blind to the pain of others until I had my own burden to carry. Now when I saw slaves in the market I didn’t know how they contained themselves. They were denied rights to their own lives, their own flesh and blood and breath. To beg for salvation and find none and still have faith was a mystery to me. I felt abandoned by God and by my people. Although I lit the candles, I did not say prayers on Friday nights anymore. I left that to my beloved, who still believed.

  OUR SON WAS LESS than a year old when the Grand Rabbi allowed us to wed with a legal document from the highest authority. Our wedding contract came from Denmark. It was a plain document, but it carried weight because it was signed by the ultimate voice in our congregation. In the paper, the Tidende, the next day, November 22, 1826, we paid to have an announcement printed and had the same announcement published in the St. Thomas Times: By license of His Most Gracious Majesty King Frédéric VI they had become married according to the Israelitish ritual. We thought we could resume our lives, and would no longer be considered outcasts, but the next day when Frédéric came home from the store he had the new issue of the Tidende.

  “You don’t want to look at this,” he said.

  He tried to burn it in the stove, but I took it from his hands and read the announcement page. We were denounced by the congregation, who proclaimed we had married without the knowledge of the Rulers and Wardens of the synagogue, nor was the Ceremony performed according to the usual custom.

  OUR OWN PEOPLE WISHED to punish us for going over the Reverend’s head. Once Jews started doing as they pleased, outside the confines of the law, anything could happen, the synagogue might fall, the world as they knew it might disappear. The Danish government might be incited to act against us, and then a new onslaught might begin. And so the president of the congregation had gone to the newspaper, making us a scandal for the whole island to view. Letters had gone out from the Reverend’s secretary to the chief Rabbis in London, and Amsterdam, and Copenhagen. Protestants, Africans, Catholics, people in every reach of society had read about us, for in every kitchen we were the topic of discussion. The good man and the enchantress. Some people said I was made of molasses; one bite and you couldn’t get enough. They said I turned into a bird during the day, and flew over the island looking for my enemies so I might soar down and peck at them, and if I grew angry enough I might leave sparks of fire on their roofs. Then at night I became a woman again, they said, slipping into my man’s bed. Before he could call out to God to protect him, before he could escape, I had my arms around him.

  The viciousness of the attack against us in such a public forum was unheard of. My children needed to be protected. The older ones had already heard grumblings about us in town and in the store, but we kept the seriousness of the situation from the younger ones. Rosalie, I knew, pitied me.

  “It doesn’t matter what people say,” she told me. “He’s already your husband.”

  Rosalie understood wanting what you could not have, as Mr. Enrique had a wife on another island and could not marry her. But I was not as patient or as tolerant as she was. The green bitterness gr
owing inside me was a dangerous flower. I could taste the tang of sourness it gave off, like arsenic, the poison left out for the mongooses sent here from the other side of the world.

  In a few weeks letters began to arrive from the Petit family, as they tried to gain control of the business. They were half owners, after all, having inherited what had once been my father’s holdings along with my first husband’s estate. The St. Thomas newspaper had been sent to them, and they were in shock, afraid their assets on our island would disappear if left in our hands. Frédéric put the letters away, but I found them. The family had written that he was too young and they’d been mistaken to send him; he was now obligated to give over control and send the ledgers and records of the business to France. But he did no such thing. He may have been young, but he was stubborn, a believer in doing what was morally right, even if it meant breaking the law.

  We soon received a letter from the congregation stating they had begun a correspondence with the Rabbi in Copenhagen and had asked that the King’s court undo our marriage, which they stated was granted outside of Jewish law. We were under siege. Frédéric and all the children fell ill with some mysterious sickness that made them unable to eat. I boiled herbs and made a tea from berries and ginger, and they began to heal. But the case against us went on.

  Because of the pressure from the community, the King’s court suddenly reversed itself, declaring our marriage illegal, stating that we had not presented ourselves as Jews when we asked for permission to marry. I was officially a sinner, damned by the Grand Rabbi. Now women spat on the street when they saw me. I began to carry an apple inside my shawl, not out of hunger but because it was the fruit of our family and I believed it might ward off any curses set against me. Soon I stopped going out. I locked myself in the house and wore black again.

  Rosalie came to my bedside. “Don’t let them win,” she told me.

  “They have.”

  “They think they have. But they can’t if you don’t allow it.”

  Still, I stayed in bed for nearly a week until Rosalie said I had to let her change the bed linen. When I got out of bed she dumped a pitcher of water on my head. I screamed, and stood there sputtering and waterlogged while my youngest children laughed at me.

  “If you can’t wake up, then we’ll do it for you,” Rosalie said.

  I was sopping and stunned, but something inside me awoke, the self I was, the woman who knew what she wanted and what she must have. I threw my arms around Rosalie in gratitude. Then I dressed and readied myself for the world, driven by anger and desire, but perhaps that is always what drives a woman to fight back. I had my sons go into the hills and cut down armfuls of flowers from the flamboyant tree. I took these with me and went to the cemetery. I wrapped the branches in wet muslin so they might bloom with a deeper scarlet shade. Dusk was near. The blue-tinted light sifted over me as I prayed at the grave of Esther Petit. I left her armfuls of the flowers she favored. Then I looked for the grave of the Reverend’s first wife. I had brought her something special as well, an apple from the tree my father had been sent long ago from France, the one that had lost most of its leaves in the heat of the fire, but still bore fruit. I begged the Reverend’s first wife to tell her husband, who was still on earth, to let us be. Perhaps he’d never known love himself in his marriages, but surely even he should be able to see it when it was right before his eyes.

  WE WENT ON ABOUT our lives as if we were the only people in the world. I found several white strands in my hair, and Jestine pulled them out at the root. We sat on her porch and watched the sea, and waited for what would happen next, as we used to do when we were girls, when our lives seemed like a story we ourselves could tell. I still dreamed of Paris, only now when I dreamed I was walking through the Tuileries and I was searching for someone, driven by panic, running through the rain. Some nights I couldn’t breathe, and Frédéric woke me, assuring me that he would be with me always and that I needn’t search for him. I suppose I had been talking in my sleep. I held him close and kissed him until I couldn’t think.

  When we wed we did not mention our intentions to the congregation, or to the elders, or to the Reverend who’d made us stand in the rain. We had no license to wed, but we did so anyway. The small gathering was held in the parlor of Monsieur DeLeon’s large house. He had given a speech at my first wedding and had not abandoned me even though he made it clear he did not approve of my choices. He had helped me out of respect for my father, inviting ten men who had been bar mitzvah to be our witnesses. All of them wore black, as if attending a funeral. DeLeon was a learned man, as my father had been, and he spoke the prayers the Reverend should have said. The ten pious men were uncomfortable with the proceedings, but they murmured Amen. I knew that as soon as the service was over Monsieur DeLeon would not wish to see me or speak to me lest he be cast out of the community.

  That night I was a married woman. As a marriage gift Frédéric presented me with a copy of Redouté’s illustrated book of roses, Choix Des Plus Belles Fleurs, printed in France. No other man would know I wanted that book more than anything, more than diamonds or pearls. We lay in bed and turned the pages; the heavy paper was scented with salt from the volume’s journey across the sea. “Are you happy with it?” my husband said to me. I hesitated to say what I felt, for I loved him too much and was afraid I would be punished for doing so. Still, I said, “Yes,” and we didn’t leave our chamber for twelve hours.

  Rosalie teased me about that every day afterward. “Married people don’t act like you do,” she said.

  BY THE TIME OUR second son, Moses Alfred, was born, three years later, his name was entered into the synagogue books beneath his brother’s name. This time I did not have to break in and do it myself, the Reverend’s secretary made the entry. Rosalie thought it was perhaps because I named this second baby for my father, who was so beloved in St. Thomas, and for the patriarch who had brought our people to freedom. Frédéric believed it was because the congregation was tired of the scandal. We had outlasted them, he said. He laughed and kissed me and asked who among them could deny we were anything other than an old married couple with or without the Reverend’s blessing. My husband and Rosalie could think what they liked. I knew the truth. If the congregation was no longer set against us it was due to the Reverend’s wife, the one who was dead and buried whose ghost I honored, and the living one I’d petitioned for help.

  Still, we were outcasts and we lived our lives as such. On Saturdays Frédéric said prayers in the garden with the boys, and then we went to Market Square, where people who were not of our faith spent their free day. There were over a dozen nationalities listed in St. Thomas and so many foods to choose from in the marketplace on Saturdays that it was like a carnival. I always craved Spanish food, eggs and sardines and olives, and we had maubie, a drink of fermented bark made from the maubie tree, not alcoholic, but laced with cinnamon, delicious when you’d acquired a taste for it. The Jewish businesses, including our own, were closed on Saturdays, and all shops were closed between twelve and two every day, so we often went swimming on Saturday afternoons, trekking down to the beach where the turtles came one day a year. I went in the water in my underclothes, since I was with my children. Hannah was always there, watching over them. Now thirteen, she was better at mothering than I was. I thought she must have learned what a kind heart was in the twelve days her mother had lived. Her pale hair was gold in the sunlight and I prayed she would have an easier time in this world than most women did. When she came to sit beside me, I felt her mother’s love around us both as leaves fell from the trees even though there was no breeze and the air was still.

  IN THE YEAR 1830, our third son was born on July 10. Jestine and Rosalie were with me, which was fortunate, for this was not an easy birth. This baby had a mind of his own and didn’t care how much pain he caused me. I choked on my own screams, and Frédéric and the children were ushered from the house. It was not until much later that Jestine admitted that both she and Rosalie thought they
might lose me, for the labor lasted three days and three nights, and every hour was an agony. I had begun talking to the spirits. When Jestine and Rosalie realized I was in deep conversation with the first Madame Petit, as if I were planning to join her, they became so frightened they took a vow that they would do all they could to save me should it come to a choice. They would let the baby go, and pull me back to life.

  I knew nothing of this, of course. I was in a fevered state and didn’t notice that Rosalie was crying. I was burning up as if I were overtaken by something stronger than myself, and the aching I felt was different than it had been with any other birth. Before he appeared, this child was difficult, intent on causing me pain. Yet when he was born, I loved him best, precisely because of our struggle, a secret I kept from all the others. I had named him Abraham, after his father’s first name; then Jacobo, after Jacob from the Bible; then Camille, to always remind him that he was French. He was most like me and had my faults. He did not sleep but cried through the night, just as Madame Halevy said I had done. When I went to hold him he pulled away from me. He was perfect, a beautiful baby, but I wondered if his sleeplessness was due to an illness.

  Even beneath Jestine’s tender touch this baby seemed unsettled. When I hadn’t slept for two weeks straight and Jacobo wasn’t gaining any weight, I knew what we must do. I asked Jestine if she would come with me back to the herb man, though neither of us was certain he was still alive. He’d been ancient when we last saw him, and if people in town went to call on him they did not say so, for such engagements were made to combat troubles and tragedies.

  It was the center of a hot, green summer; still I bundled up the baby in a cotton blanket to ensure against chills. We brought a pitcher of limewater with us. I had gold coins with me as well, so this time I could pay the price for a cure. We were slower than we’d been when we were girls who ran through the hills chasing donkeys or being chased by them. We spotted some now, eating dried grass along the road. I wondered if Jean-François, once my children’s pet, was among them. When I said so, Jestine shook her head.