The Temple of My Familiar

  There is a little serpent here [she wrote in 1922] that is exactly the colour of coral. It lives only in certain trees and comes out of its hole, far up the tree, near dusk. It lives on tree spiders and bugs, and is known to sing. The natives tell me that it sings. They claim they have heard it sing millions of times, and act as if this is entirely ordinary. Furthermore, they ask why I have not heard it and why it should be so strange. Everything sings, they say.

  But I do not. This, however, I cannot bear to tell them.

  Well, today I at least saw the little creature. They had told me which tree at the edge of my yard I should keep an eye on, and, sure enough, today, just at dusk, down came this little coral fellow, sticking out its tongue, slithering primly down the tree looking for dinner and finding several plump hors d'oeuvre on the way. I watched it disappear into the grass, and I felt that although the colour was as vivid as I had been led by the natives to expect, I still could not believe it would sing. I felt perhaps they were only teasing me.

  Another entry:

  I could not imagine living for a hundred years, yet the natives quite often live that long. They say it is because everything they eat is alive. The grain they eat is so alive that if they planted it instead of eating it, it would come up. They eat fruit, grains, which they make into porridge, and root crops. They eat a lot of boiled greens and okra, both of which grow wild. They eat little or no meat, and when asked to prepare thick slabs of it for me and my English or European guests, they handle it as if it is offensive.

  BUT HOW HAD HER great-aunt become interested enough in Africa to live there?

  Eleanora was now a hundred years old. Mary Jane wondered if this pleased her. If it made her think of the old "natives" she had known. Such a loaded word, "natives." For people like her great-aunt, it had meant savages. It was not a word Mary Jane could imagine her great-aunt using to refer to herself, though she was a native of England.

  Her great-aunt had been born in 1885, on March 23. She was an Aries, which explained her impulsive, headstrong nature. She would be a person who loved flying, for instance, long before anyone had any notion that flying could possibly be safe. She had flown, rapturously, in the first planes that went to Africa; Aries people were akin to birds. She would also follow her instincts regarding other worlds, other peoples. But what had been the pivotal experience of her great-aunt's life? Mary Jane sat now, several days a week, mostly watching her great-aunt sleep and thinking of that life, that grand life of the English upper class during the years before the Great (as they called it) War. Well, for one thing, they'd liked the word "great." She had gone on a tour of the "great" English country houses and been to Morley Crofts, in Warwickshire, the old house of her ancestors. She had trooped along over the checkered floors and gazed from the mullioned windows, inset with Celtic designs in stained glass, which looked oddly Egyptian. There was a profusion of coral-and-black serpents and jeweled shepherd's crooks. Morley Crofts covered many acres and resembled a medieval castle more than it did a house. Vast gardens surrounded it, and as she drifted about with the other tourists--who reminded her of rather pathetic sheep, in their polyester suits and spanking (and pinching) new tennis shoes, exclaiming with joy over each dovecote or gargoyle, each primrose path or giant dahlia--she imagined Eleanora sitting here or there among the garden statuary, reading a book or perhaps simply staring out into space, far out into the future, into Mary Jane's own time, and, with a small smirk of amusement, watching.

  Mary Jane's own grandfather had left England penniless--cut off from his father's and grandfather's wealth, amassed in Ireland on the broken backs of the Irish--but with a sense of adventure and the desire to make his own fortune. He had succeeded splendidly, eventually owning copper mines in Missouri, petroleum fields in West Texas, and entire southern counties in Alabama and Georgia planted in cotton picked by illiterate blacks he probably never so much as glimpsed. His father and grandfather noted his success, so like their own--for the grandfather lived on and on. Sometimes Mary Jane thought she could almost remember him, but it was only the stories she remembered: of his fierce avarice, his contempt for weaker adversaries, his love of wealth for its own sake. The stories his children and grandchildren told about him were as pointed as morality tales and could as easily have been entitled "Lust," "Avarice," "Greed," but unlike morality tales, the message was never against these things. In any event, seeing this success, his antecedents heartily embraced him as the true heir of their avaricious genes and of course added much of their own vast resources, after their deaths, to his.

  By the time her own father was born, there was a need to pull in one's fangs a bit. So Mary Jane and her brother and sister were brought up to be the kind of rich people who were as fundamental to the country's stability as the earth but as inconspicuous as a rug. Oh, the little patent leather slippers and simple cashmere sweaters, the plain camel's hair coats, smartly hitting the back of the knee, the neat gray dresses, snug at the waist, loose everywhere else, discreet hair ribbons, mostly black and, this being the forties, sometimes plaid. And yet, when Mary Jane and her sister walked down Fifth Avenue near the apartment her family kept there, she felt people stared at them and knew instinctively they were rich. And laughed at their careful squareness, and resented them.

  When she left this life behind--the sleek blond hairdo that flipped up at the ends like Doris Day's or Dina Merrill's, the tiny white pearl earrings, the black velvet or plaid grosgrain bow at the back of her neck--and wore paint-encrusted jeans and funky turtleneck sweaters, and her hair had frizzed out (with the help of a ton of chemicals) into a fiery sunburst of resistance, well over a decade before this became de rigeur for rich and radical white kids in the sixties, she understood why it was that no matter how simply she and her sister dressed, how inconspicuous they tried to make themselves, they were always, in fact, giving themselves away. She decided that they must have exuded a smell of quiet sufficiency, of absolute security, so lacking in the worlds they did not inhabit. This was the smell of the upper class.

  One day, in Eleanora's diary, Mary Jane saw the word "M'Sukta," scribbled over and over in the margins of a page. She liked the sound of it; however, flipping through the rest of the diary she found no further evidence of the word. On her next visit to her great-aunt she brought along some of the photographs from the Eleanora Burnham collection for her to identify. They were obviously old and rare, and not in the best condition, and this was permitted only after the library received a stern call from the London solicitor. Mary Jane's statement to the librarian that the photographs were meaningless without proper documentation--names and dates, at least--had fallen on deaf, seemingly irritated ears.

  The head librarian's view was that all the photographs with white people in them were documented; at least, all the white people were named. Occasionally, too, a servant or hunting guide had a first name or nickname. There was a "Chumby," for instance, which hardly sounded African. But the backs of dozens of photographs of Africans without white people in them remained blank. Their faces, as thoughtful and moving as the photographs of American Indians taken by Edward Curtis in the nineteen-hundreds, deeply touched something in Mary Jane. Almost without exception the Africans were interestingly, often spectacularly, dressed, and this especially surprised and pleased her. The women's hairstyles, with their interwoven cowrie shells and feathers, were fabulous and made them look, at the same time, serene, regal, and wild. And the cloth of which their robes were made! In a museum near their apartment in New York, Mary Jane had seen Kente cloth, but she'd seen it in strips and as decoration around a sleeve or hem. In these photographs she saw an even more incredible cloth, stripped, like Kente, but glistening as if shot through with golden thread. In these photographs she saw Africans whose eyes, skin, clothes shone. With richness and intelligence and health. Finally, it was the shine of health that captivated Mary Jane, for she realized that so degraded had Africa become in the mind of the world that a healthy African, like the ones she saw in the photo
graphs, was practically unimaginable. These were people she assumed her great-aunt had known, for without exception the eyes that looked back at the camera were kindly, acknowledging a special bond. But if they were people she had known, Eleanora could no longer speak of them. She gazed at the pictures Mary Jane held up to her, one by one, through a magnifying glass, and the tears spilled over her red and swollen lower lids. It was only at the last picture, not a photograph like the rest, but a painting, of the one broken face among the lot, an African woman wearing the beautiful robes of her tribe but painted against a gray stone interior of what might have been a cathedral, that Eleanora was able to utter a word. And the word she uttered, a sob really, was "M'Sukta."

  The sulky head librarian, quite without knowing it, solved the problem.

  "All of these pictures," she said to Mary Jane, as she was turning them in, "were taken by Lady Eleandra Burnham Peacock. I don't suppose you know anything about her. All her personal effects were willed to her niece, Lady Burnham. This explains why they are amongst Lady Burnham's collection." She actually sniffed when she came to the end of the second sentence. Taking the photographs with one hand, she flung down a small book with the other. "Here's something you might find interesting," she said.

  When Mary Jane reached for it, however, the librarian put the carmine-colored tips of her newsprint-smudged fingers on it.

  "You have to sign for it," she said, with the hateful petulance of bureaucrats everywhere.

  This journal had a faded red velvet binding and a green, very faded, satin-ribbon marker. Its leaves were yellowed and water-stained, and many words, in the cramped, even script of a young woman writing by flashlight under the bedcovers, difficult to decipher. It had, however, belonged to the first--as far as Mary Jane knew--Eleandra, and she opened it with a rapidly beating heart.

  I was just out walking with my cousin T., who makes me laugh so much I wish we were not cousins. His large green eyes sparkle so in his ruddy face, and his lips are as finely chiselled as a Roman statue's. I tease him all the time about my wanting to marry him. It is a joke, of course. I have been avoiding marriage for many years now. T. knows I want to paint, just as I know he has no interest in females. In all the family only we two seem odd. The rest are adept at fitting in, of being perfectly capable of tolerating, even condoning, and, dare I say it, of elevating to an exalted state the condition of boredom. How T. and I blushed with pleasure last night at the ballet, a savage, wild thing that shocked Mother so much Father had to pretend to be shocked as well, when all it was was a history, in dance, of our early ancestors, still heavily influenced by the dark peoples of these Isles who preceded them, alive, as all of them no doubt were before the Gauls and Romans descended upon them. Where are they now, the Indians of Britain? The ballet began with the predictable maiden with berry boughs on her head, and, yes, she was certainly singing, but soon her song melted her into the darker ages, or, rather, melted the audience right to the verge of that time when moderns and ancients faced each other squarely in the final act of saying goodbye. There was appreciation of the old. That is what the dance symbolized. It did not matter that the young virgin was required to dance herself out of existence; the modern world recognized what it was losing. It was this dance, done by a single young woman clad in exceedingly skimpy garb, that mother objected to. T. and I liked it. The tilt of the maiden's russet head, the sway of her ivory thighs, massive as beams, the rounded belly quite white and firm. I held his hand tightly in both of mine and I am sure my eyes were beads of light.

  My mother rose from her seat, stately as ever, and swung slowly up the aisle, the moire bow at the back of her waist looking like a huge butterfly. My father followed, discreetly coughing, looking back furtively at the stage once or twice. I was horrified they were going to stop for me, and if T. had not been with me, I am sure they would have. He and I made ourselves very still and prim and proper, and hoped none of our huge enjoyment showed in our eyes or in the tension of our bodies. But oh, the excitement, to see the dancing of our history, by Italians, and so tumultuously and so passionately. One was tempted to the conclusion that our early folk history was probably also their own. I mean the same bonfires and dances to spring and the sprouting of grape leaves and corn!

  It is thanks to T. that I go anywhere interesting. All summer long shut up at Morley Crofts! But then come the winters, and London in winter!

  Yesterday I had an eerie experience of winter, unlike anything I have ever known before, and once again it was a gift--though an unsettling one, to be sure--from my cousin, my darling cousin T. It was snowing and nearly as dark within as without, and gloomy, since no one ever comes to see us, it seems, any longer. But Mother says this is not true. She says it is I who refuse to see people--especially those with expectant young marriageable males in tow--who come to visit us. Well, I have tried every way I know how to explain that I will not be married; if they are sick of having me about, they will simply have to think up some alternative for me. If I were to marry I feel sure I should slit my throat, or his, within a fortnight. But why, Eleandra? my parents lament. Why? It is all they ask. And I do not know why, except there must be more to life than opulence and material ease, more than servants and fat horses and fatter men ogling other men's daughters and fat wives. I cannot--oh, but what is the point of raving? They shall drug me and marry me off to a rich Turk, no doubt, before it is done. No danger there, says T., confidently. He thinks it will probably be a rich Greek, someone in shipping, to be precise. These are the wealthy foreigners my father knows. He has sensibly given up on finding a husband for me among the English. Sometimes, indeed, they do come to dinner, these Greeks, dark-haired and dark-eyed, warmer than any men in England; that, at least, is in their favour. Still, I would rather slip out the door with T... . He will not let me call him "Theodore"; too bloody religious boring! he cries.

  But I was about to write of our outing to the Museum of Natural History. T. had come for me. We have to make up all kinds of lies about where we are going, yet wherever we go is entirely innocent, at least while it is still daylight. And it was daylight today. At night, it is true, we have been known to visit certain "houses" of ill fame, but this is because T. and I have insisted on seizing an education, a sexual education, wherever it can be found. He has had clothes--trousers and overcoat similar to his own--made for me, and I push my worrisomely long hair under any one of several capacious hats, and we are off. For, as T. says so well, how am I to be a great painter if I never see anything? And, with T. beside me, sometimes I feel I must have seen it all: men and women, men and men (T.'s eyes light up!), women and women (interesting), everyone with animals, vegetables, and fruits. We never "buy," exactly. We pay to look, to study, to contemplate. I am fascinated by the women's eyes, their bold, aggressive stares, their businesslike appraisal. They go through the motions professionally, rolling and tumbling like so many slow-motion acrobats, some great beast of a man poling them from the side, the front, or behind--and they are apt to be looking over at the next man coming up and calculating whether they or the next woman will have him. No doubt the calculation involves how much money there will be for Johnny's shoes and Susie's milk. Sometimes the women are pregnant, hugely pregnant, and there are grown men, sometimes grey-headed, bearded, grandfatherly men, who pay to suck them. This can all, for a price, be viewed. I must say it is this sucking that the women most seem to enjoy and their enjoyment of it in turn stirs me, and, I hazard to guess, even T.

  But I was trying to get to the event of today, at the Museum of Natural History. Well, when we got there it was quite late, and so, nearly dark; the flickering interior lights seemed feeble enough, in any event. T. took me round the fossil cases and past the humanoid drawings (as I always call them) of mankind on his wearisome way up the evolutionary spiral. This was not my first time at the museum, and as usual I had to be pried away from the collection of wondrous new goods--ancient feather cloaks, called, if I remember correctly, moas, after the bird for which they are
named; enormous carved greenstones that glistened like jade; monstrously beautiful, brilliantly painted canoes--from recently explored, conquered, and apparently quite ravaged New Zealand. There were pictures of lush, grinning Polynesian women and stalwart unsmiling men. "Come on," said T. "If you like this lot, you'll love what's next." I followed him down halls and up stairs until we came to a part of the museum I had never seen before. "Close your eyes," he said as he slowly opened the door.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw that T. had propelled me into a medium-sized room (most rooms at the museum are huge), with windows that were very high up, and there was a strange smell. At first it looked like a replica of part of an African village. There were three huts, facing each other, as they always do to make one living space (I read this in a book), but somewhat askew, angled away from each other slightly, I suppose one would say, obliquely, for privacy. Then there was a granary and part of a wall made of mud, as was everything else. This wall surrounded the compound except where it was deliberately cut away to give the viewer clearer access to the activity of the "village." Glancing overhead, I noted that the museum, in its intent to assure verisimilitude had even painted a blue sky. "Come," said T., pulling me closer to the little dwellings, for I had stopped short on entering the room and for some reason was abnormally frightened to hear the heavy wooden door clunk shut behind me. It gave me gooseflesh. Suddenly I felt a little afraid of T. Weren't buggers dangerous, after all? But he was smiling, with an odd, strained bonhomie that seemed put on for someone else's benefit; I had certainly never seen such a grimace on his handsome face before. There were colours on these huts and designs such as I had never seen before, except in paintings from the American West. The most abstract, totally stylized shapes and figures in vivid yellows and oranges and tans, with black and white jumping out to meet the eye with the vibrancy of zebra skin. It was so completely what one was not used to that it was hard to take it in. In the same way one takes in a painting, say, by an English or European artist, no matter how odd. It was as if the reference point was missing; I could not grasp either the feeling tones of the work or the meaning. It seemed natural, somehow, to begin thinking of all that was "wrong" with it. T. laughed at my expression, which was, I am sure, a vexed frown. "Just enjoy it!" he said. And I moved closer, still vaguely bothered by the smell. It was not that it was unpleasant. No, there was something almost familiar about it. I felt I had smelled it before though decidedly not in the streets or flats or great houses of London and not, for certain, at Morley Crofts. And then it seemed to me perhaps I had smelled it in a dream, for the whole room now had an aspect of dream--the bright blue sky above, as if lighted by the sun, the cosy little huts. I plopped myself down on one of the mud "porches" that extended from the wall. "Careful," said T., "the mud's dusty." Sure enough, when I got up my skirt was covered with fine dust. T. brushed me off. He was still smiling that savagely benign smile that looked so odd. My eye, though, was attracted to the gorgeous strips of woven cloth hanging on pegs by the door of one of the huts. There was a figure, its back to us, very lifelike, that one could barely make out, sitting on the floor near the doorway inside the hut, apparently spinning.