Eden Burning

  Light fingertips smoothed his forehead. “You’re frowning,” Kate whispered.

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Thinking of what?”

  “Oh, scoops and pieces of things. You playing Brahms once on a quiet evening at Eleuthera. Of us in this bed. I’d like to wake up every morning in this bed.”

  But he was actually thinking of other things, of himself, at home saying, “Listen, Marjorie, it’s no good, no good at all anymore.” She would protest; he could hear her weeping that it was still good, it was, it was! And truly, if there were no Kate, he would know no better and it would probably still be good enough—as good as most people ever have, at any rate.

  His thoughts fluttered away. Softly they lay, half sleeping, as day cooled into evening and the room turned dusky blue. Kate roused.

  “I have to get up. Patrick said he’d bring some papers over at seven.”

  “Patrick. The salt of the earth, as my father would say.”

  “Yes, he’s very, very special.”

  A book of poems lay on the bedside table. Francis flipped the pages.

  “Emily Dickinson. A favorite of yours?”

  “Yes, lately. I’ve gone back to reading her. A woman who lived alone. I thought I might learn how.”

  Something hurt in his throat. “You can’t live alone. Don’t you always say waste is sin?”

  She smiled, not answering. He took a long look around the room, wanting to fix it in his mind: the wallpaper, arabesques within squares; the mat by the window where one of the dogs must sleep; her slippers, blue, with feather puffs on the toes.

  Outside at ground level it was three-quarters dark, while at the top of the hill the great fireball still blazed in the sky.

  “Look,” Kate said. “The sun god! The Incas’ priests used to throw kisses to him at dawn.”

  They stood on the step with their arms around each other.

  “How can I leave you?” he asked.

  “You aren’t leaving me. You never will.”

  There was such an ache in him! They did not hear the creak of the gate, nor Patrick’s footsteps on the path.

  “I’m sorry to be early,” Patrick said, not looking at them. He thrust out a sheaf of papers. “I’m in a hurry, I’ll just leave these.”

  Francis said quickly, “I was just going.”

  The two men walked away down the alley, neither one speaking, until Francis said, “You saw. Well, now you know.”

  “I don’t know anything you don’t want me to. I’m an expert forgetter.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  They walked on. The parade was over, the streets had emptied. And the loneliness that had engulfed him in the morning came back to Francis now. He needed to talk and to hear another voice answer.

  “You’ll say it isn’t any business of yours, but I want to tell you. Today was the first. It happened today, brand new.”

  “Not brand new,” Patrick spoke gently. “It’s been there for a long time, I suspect.”

  “You’re right, of course, although I didn’t know it, or want to admit it—The thing is, what happens now?”

  “She’s a special person, a beautiful person,” Patrick said, meaning, Francis understood, “Be kind to her, be careful of her.” And Patrick added, “There’s no other man I can think of who’s nearly good enough for her.”

  “I despise a cheat,” Francis said suddenly, an unexpected memory of his father and the florid girl in the restaurant having flashed through his head. And as the other didn’t answer, he went on, “I came here and fell in love with this place. There’s nowhere else on earth I ever want to be. And now there’s Kate and—I don’t know how to explain it—Kate and this place are one in my mind. In my heart. My wife—” He stopped.

  Patrick put a hand on his shoulder. “Sit down. You’re shaking.”

  They sat on a stone wall at the side of the walk.

  “Strange, isn’t it,” Francis mused, “that no one condemns, not really, a light ‘affair,’ a casual woman, but for this they’ll throw stones?”

  “Do you care if they do?”

  “Not for myself. But for Marjorie—you don’t like Marjorie.”

  “She doesn’t approve of me,” Patrick answered quietly.

  “That’s true. I don’t think she can really help that, though. It’s the way she’s lived all her life. The shaping starts in the nursery.”

  “But you were shaped another way?”

  “I can’t tell. After all, you’re the only one of your race I’ve known so well. So how can I tell what my shape is?”

  “You’re truthful, at least.”

  “I try to be. It’s better, even when it causes pain. Anyhow, that’s the way I see it. But I’m a coward, I dread having to look at Marjorie’s pain.”

  “Listen,” Patrick said gently, “you don’t have to draw a map of your whole life tonight. Go home and try to sleep. Go to work tomorrow and let things turn over very slowly in your mind. They’ll reach a level after a while.”

  Francis just looked at him.

  “You think I’m speaking platitudes? Well, I am. Forgive me. It’s because I don’t know anything better to say.”

  Francis reached out and took his hand. “Believe it or not, I’m glad you found out. It would be awful to have to keep anything as tremendous as this locked up in myself. And there isn’t anyone I’d rather have know, or could trust more.” He stood up. “Now I’ll go home.”

  Marjorie was sitting in the bedroom with a magazine at her feet when he came in. She had been crying, and her puffy eyelids were ugly. He was ashamed of himself for thinking of their ugliness before he thought of her self.

  “Where were you all day?” she asked.

  “You know I went to the parade.”

  “All day?”

  “I met some people. We had lunch and a few drinks.” He then realized that she was still wearing the robe she had worn that morning. “What have you been doing?”

  “Sitting here, wondering why you didn’t ask me what happened yesterday in town.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You knew I went to the doctor.”

  “Yes, but—why, did anything happen?”

  “Oh,” she said with artificial calmness. “I would say it did. He told me I’m pregnant, that’s all that happened.”

  Francis went cold. “In heaven’s name, why didn’t you tell me yesterday?”

  “Why didn’t you ask me? You came in the house talking about twin foals and never—” Again she wept.

  “You knew it this morning and last night—”

  “Yes, that’s why I was what you called ‘angry.’ I wasn’t angry! I was wounded—oh, my God, we’ve been waiting for years and you didn’t even care enough to ask what the doctor said!”

  He knelt on the floor beside her chair, putting his arms around her. “Marjorie, Marjorie, of course I care! But you’d been so many times before—How could I think it would be different this time? I thought it was another routine visit. Forgive me.”

  And at the same moment he was thinking: Kate.

  “I can’t believe it. I’m afraid I’ll wake up and find it isn’t true. People always say that, but that’s just how I feel.”

  “I’m sure it’s true. Wonderful and true.”

  “Do you care whether it’s a girl or a boy?”

  For so long he had been having fantasies about a son. But he gave the wise and decent answer.

  “It doesn’t matter. Just let it be well.”

  “You’d rather have a boy. Probably it’s silly, but I have such a strong feeling that it is.” Now she was chatting, comforted and exuberant. “What shall we name it? I don’t like ‘Junior’ at all. If it’s a girl, I’d like ‘Megan,’ I think. Or maybe ‘Anne’—that was my favorite grandmother’s name—”

  Compassion struggled in him, not for Marjorie alone, but for the microscopic being in her body, the life so desperately desired, that he went weak with it.

  Oh
, Kate, what shall I do?

  He was stunned. He was numb. They went downstairs and ate a late supper. Afterwards Marjorie wanted to walk outside and look at the sea. She was filled with a tremendous ecstasy. He had not seen her like that since the day of their wedding. It was far too soon for hormones to have done this to her; pure happiness had exalted her. Naturally, it would not last. No exalted state could. But he wondered how long the residue would last. Simple joy was not one of her qualities, as it was one of Kate’s….

  He did not sleep. Marjorie, having cried her tears of relief, slept deeply with a hand folded under her cheek. Her face was tranquil, classic. How he had loved her, or believed he did! If only one could go back and undo! Or if one could simply go forward! But he was locked in. Too late. Too late.

  And all night long a thousand tiny creatures throbbed and trilled in the trees, all that pulsing life going on, century after rolling century, under the heavens. Ignorant, happy creatures with nothing to do but grow and thrive and mate, into whose cycle no anguish crept, no agonies of loss or conscience! All night long they throbbed and trilled.

  “Oh, my darling,” Kate said. “You wanted a child.”

  “That’s true.”

  “You’re thinking that if it were yours and mine—”

  “I am, I am.”

  “But I can’t have any, Francis, not ever.”

  “I’m so sorry for us. So sorry for us all.”

  “Not grateful, even a little?”

  He lay on the sofa in her parlor with his head on her lap.

  “I don’t know. I feel as if something had been given me by one hand and taken away by the other.”

  “We won’t let anything be taken. We’ll find a way to keep it all.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll always be here. We can always be here like this.”

  “Secret afternoons aren’t what I want for you or what you ought to have.”

  “But far better than nothing, my darling.”

  In the den, between the humidor and the ship model, his father sat, beckoning. “Don’t tell your mother, son. You know I wouldn’t hurt her for the world.”

  But this was different. Here was no blowsy slut to be hidden away! Here was his heart’s love, to be announced to the world.

  “I guess I knew,” he said, thinking aloud.

  “Knew what?”

  “That there’d be no turning back, once I had made the admission. I guess I really knew the day we had lunch in Cade’s Hotel. But I wanted to spare you this.”

  “And spare Marjorie?”

  “Yes, Marjorie, too. God knows I’m not noble! It’s only that something in me wants things to be open and clean. I hate concealment.”

  “So do I. Sometimes, though, there is no other way.”

  “Patrick said I needn’t decide the whole future in a minute. ‘Go slowly,’ he said, ‘and it will unfold itself.’ But he didn’t know about the baby.”

  “He was right, all the same. You don’t have to decide anything. We won’t hurt anyone. Just loving each other won’t hurt anyone.”

  She bent to kiss his forehead and he put his arms about her. Here, here were his refuge and his desire. His whole being was warmed and the sweetest peace enveloped him.

  THIRTEEN

  In the hour before dawn the sea glowed with phosphorus. The pirogue lurched and the torch in Will’s hand wavered as Clarence pulled in the seine to lay it on the bottom between their feet.

  “Not bad for a nonprofessional. A fine haul of ballyhoo! We’ll sell some, give some to our friends, and have the rest for supper.” He took up the oars. “Hard work if you have to do it every day for a living, but kind of a good time like this, wouldn’t you say so, boy?”

  Clarence seldom waited for an answer, but not being himself a talker, Will didn’t mind. He felt closer to the old man than to anyone he had ever known. And he settled back now in the stern, watching the first faint rise of dawn on the horizon and the seabirds soaring.

  “This boat’s the kind the Caribs made, with the knife-edge bow. Made out of a gommier trunk. They used to fell the tree when the moon was new, thought that would keep it from rotting. Old magic. Well, I guess we all keep some kind of private magic to believe in, don’t we?”

  The light grew and the torches were put out. A crowd of little boats turned back toward Covetown as the night fishermen headed home. They had all come a long way, skirting the island. A scalloped line of treetops became distinct as the minutes passed and the sky grew white. Cattle were moving dots on hillside pastures. Village rooftops glittered when the sun reached them. A fine house with lawns like a great, swooping skirt emerged from shadow.

  “Chris-Craft,” Clarence said, waving toward the private dock. “Look at that beauty. Fifty thousand, if it’s a dollar.”

  Low on a bluff stood the house, the familiar porticoed and columned home of the West Indian planter. Its shutters were still closed; it slept.

  “Florissant,” said Clarence. “Belongs to the Francis family. Right behind it there’s Estate Margaretta. Belonged to the Dry dens. One of them married a Francis when I was a boy. Pooling the wealth, sort of. Colonel Dryden was my colonel in the First World War.”

  Will sat up. This was the first really interesting piece of information that he’d heard on the outing.

  “You were in the First World War! You never talk about it.”

  “Don’t like to. It was a bad time to remember.”

  “Did you kill anybody?”

  “Never ask anyone a thing like that,” Clarence said seriously. “If a person did, it wouldn’t have been his fault and he shouldn’t be reminded of it. As it happens, though, I didn’t. I worked in the mess.”

  “What was so bad about it, then?”

  Clarence considered. “It was just—oh, the whole business, the way we had to live. For instance, a black could never hope to be an officer in the British army, never be more than a sergeant, no matter how well educated he might be. At Taranto—that’s where I served in Italy—we weren’t allowed in the movie theater or the Y canteens. It’s things like that that make you so mad, they fester in you. Some of the men wouldn’t take it anymore. There was a mutiny at Taranto. It’s an ugly thing when men get so mad.” His voice dropped to a murmur.

  “I can’t hear you,” Will said impatiently, wanting to hear.

  “I said it’s awful to see men maddened that way! They do terrible things and terrible things are done to them. I lost a younger brother there.”

  “Dead?”

  “Dead. Shot in a riot. Then I came home. I worked on the transport ship Oriana, which brought the mutineers back here to serve out their sentences.”

  “And that was the end of it?”

  “Not really. The end never really comes. Every end gives birth to another beginning, doesn’t it? Well, in 1919, in Honduras and Trinidad, there were more riots. As soon as the troops were demobilized, they went rampaging, burning the homes and businesses of the whites.”

  Will was excited. “What happened then?”

  “Oh, the riots were put down. They always are. That’s why violence solves nothing. All the hopes and the fine talk came to nothing at the war’s end. You know,” Clarence said reflectively, “there’d been a lot of talk—in fact the British Labour Party had endorsed Du Bois’s idea about making an African state out of the former German colonies, the colonies that we helped win for Britain. Reparation for centuries of slavery, he said, giving us back our own land in Africa, where we were taken from. Some people in Barbados even had a scheme to repatriate West Indian Negroes—”

  “What is ‘repatriate’?”

  “To send you back to your fatherland. But,” Clarence said with emphasis, “I’m not sorry that part came to nothing. This is my home here. My people have been here six”—he frowned, counting on his fingers—“seven or eight generations, probably. Two centuries, as far as I can count. The same for you, too, I imagine. Has anybody ever mentioned it to you?”

  “N
o,” Will said. Stupid question! Who would have told him?

  “Well, you were too young to care about all that, anyway. You hungry now? Désirée made sandwiches and cake.”

  Will noticed he had recently stopped saying “Dezzy” after Patrick said he hated it.

  Clarence unwrapped the box. “Coconut cake, your favorite. She’s awfully fond of you, Will. You know that, don’t

  you?”

  Will nodded, feeling a small quick pain which was part anger. She wasn’t “fond” of him at all; she was good to him because Patrick wanted her to be, and because one was supposed to be kind to an orphan. Curious how you could sit back, not saying a word, just listening and watching, and figure people out! It was really easy, he thought now, eating the sandwich. Easy. Désirée was lazy, in a way. She didn’t want to have to think too much, just wanted to enjoy her peace, being loved and loving Patrick and the girls. She spent too much on clothes and fancy knickknacks for the house. Patrick complained, but he never did anything about it. Maybe he couldn’t. Mentally, Will shrugged.

  “Look,” Clarence said. “Remember, I mentioned Estate Margaretta a while back? You can see the roof from here. It’s an interesting house with a rotunda. I always thought I’d have liked being an architect, if the circumstances had been different. Margaretta,” he mused. “They used to name their places after their wives or after their daughters when the house was given as a wedding present. Yes, it must have been a great life for a planter way back then! Plenty of servants to bring you the best food and drink on a silver tray, gardeners to keep the house filled up with flowers, black mistresses dressed up in gold lace.” He chuckled. “Not bad, not bad at all. But it didn’t last. That’s one thing history teaches—nothing lasts, not the Roman Empire, not anything. Say, have you read that piece I gave you about Wilberforce, who brought the slave trade to an end in the British Empire?”