Still the doctor doesn’t want to commit himself on what’s wrong with her? After all the laboratory tests? I find that unheard-of, but apparently you don’t, since you calmly quote him as though he were Pasteur. This sort of thing strikes me as one of the disadvantages of living in Kahului. You can see that I’m not at home with illness. I’d much rather be ill myself than have to cope with a sufferer.
And you, are you all right? I’m sorry that Sue’s holiday had to end this way. I hope she’s already on her way back to Mount Holyoke.
In my case, I’ll be waiting to hear from you. And tell me more about Florence; she’s always amused me. (At a distance.)
(sent to Pamela Loeffler)
You’re as bad as Suky herself, if not worse, for as far as I know you’re in good health, whereas I have to assume she’s still in bed, having heard nothing to the contrary. How can you let an entire month go by without sending me some sort of word? I’m not berating you, but I’m curious and blessé at the same time. I get an indistinct impression that in spite of my being what you call “obsessed” by Suky, you think I don’t care deeply about her.
It’s true that I don’t really know her; I’ve never had the opportunity. But that’s beside the point. I’ve taken on the responsibility for her education and I want it to go well. Surely you can understand that.
As I was waking up this morning (a moment when things of the distant past can suddenly reappear in detail) I recalled the opening lines of two songs my mother used to sing when I was very young. They were both songs of rejection, I now realize. One went: “Take back your gold, for gold will never buy me,” and the other, even more absurd: “I don’t want to play in your yard; I don’t love you any more.” According to her, they were both very popular ditties. Have you ever heard of either?
I’m in a hurry to get this off, because I have a forlorn hope that in the event you haven’t written, my pleas will make you decide to do so. Consider this note to be one long supplication. Let me hear about Sue!
(sent to Pamela Loeffler)
Your postcard from Fiji was a slap in the face. You think I’ll be “amused” to see where you are, but I’m not. I’m astounded and exasperated that you should be dragging Sue off on a South Pacific trip when she should be in college. And I don’t subscribe to your theory that such a voyage is a part of her convalescence. In fact, I think you don’t believe it yourself. Obviously you imagine that old age makes people ingenuous. Or was that remark merely the first pretext that came to your mind? Do you find it incredible that having invested nervous energy, time and money in her education, I should want to see her complete it?
It goes without saying that this year is lost. It strikes me as an irresponsible act to gather the girl under your wing and fly off with her to God knows where and for God knows how long.
I suppose you won’t receive this for many weeks. Tell S. that I’m disappointed to see how basically indifferent she is to her own well-being. Tell her I’m glad she’s well (if indeed she ever was as ill as you gave me to believe) and tell her that when she gives a sign of life I’ll reply. But she probably feels guilty and doesn’t want to be in touch with me.
I’ll get over my shock and indignation, but it won’t be right away.
(sent to Pamela Loeffler)
In the past ten weeks I’ve had three postcards from you: from Fiji, Apia and Papeete, plus Sue’s silly attempt at humor: “Having wonderful time. Glad you’re not here.” Tell her that message doesn’t count. (Although it does show me it was only thanks to the security she felt in your presence that she was able to express her hostility toward me.) She’ll have to write me a letter if she wants to hear from me.
If you’ve followed the schedule you outlined on your card from Papeete, you’re back at home now. I’ll expect to hear from you.
I’m still at a loss to understand why you went on that senseless trip. Perhaps when you’re settled again you’ll feel like explaining. Or perhaps you won’t. It really doesn’t matter. I think I perceive the general pattern.
(sent to Pamela Loeffler)
We seem to have arrived at an impasse: mutual misunderstandings due to I.P.I. (insufficient preliminary information). You take exception to whatever I say. You’re unreasonable. I get the impression that you two are arrayed against me. I can also see that S. confided in you completely, and at my expense. I did tell her you were generous, which you always have been.
My mistake with her, I think, was in advising her to destroy my letters. It was foolish because there was nothing incriminating in them, as I’m sure you’re aware, having read them. But it must have set her to thinking, so that she now imagines I used her as a “pawn” in my own “financial planning.” It must be clear to you that this line of reasoning is unjustified. If it’s not clear, there’s nothing I can do about it, and it doesn’t matter.
I had a brief note from Florence—the first in at least fifteen years. She wanted me to know what a fine time she’d had with you, and how much she liked Sue. Loved the climate, the landscape, the picnics and the bathing, and incidentally had not a word to say about anyone being sick in bed. According to her you all went everywhere together, and it was perfect. This deviates considerably from the official version.
(sent to Pamela Loeffler)
A few postmortem thoughts. You can tell S. that I’ve written her Aunt Emily West (who became her guardian when her parents died) informing her that her niece has left college and has an address in Hawaii where she can reach her. I’ve also been in touch with my lawyer in New York, explaining that my financial obligations to Susan Choate terminated with the end of her academic career, and asking him to cancel whatever future arrangements he had expected to make.
As to my writing S. herself, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it. She’s made it very clear that she prefers not to hear from me. And what could I say at this point? “I hope you won’t regret your decision”? As you tell me, she already suspects that I disapprove of that decision, so that anything I might say would change suspicion to conviction. It would be hard to get her to believe that I have no objection to what she’s doing. She probably prefers to imagine me as being scandalized by her behavior; it would be more fun for her that way. She expects me to mind that things didn’t work out in the way I thought they would. But that’s only because she doesn’t know me. What she must consider to be my archaic epistolary style has helped her to think of me as an opinionated and uncompromising old bastard.
Nevertheless, please believe me when I tell you that she can fall in love with a Japanese garage mechanic, sleep with you, and marry an orangutan, and it will all be the same to me. There’s not enough time in life for recriminations.
(1987)
Dinner at Sir Nigel’s
IN THOSE DAYS the social life of the city was sharply divided between the Moroccans and the Europeans, whose relationship to the former was the traditional one of master-servant. The average European household was normally run by a staff of five or six Moroccans. A larger establishment understandably needed a good many more, and the native work force was often fortified with a European chef, housekeeper and chauffeur. An unaccountable exception, according to local gossip, was the house of Sir Nigel Renfrew, who would have been expected to need a good-sized staff, but who was reported as employing only one man and one maid. This anomaly was repeatedly discussed by the members of the British colony, and one heard vague reports hinting that there was more than mere parsimony behind Sir Nigel’s spartan limiting of his help.
The year of his arrival in Tangier is uncertain; apparently it was immediately after the close of the Second World War. He must have brought a considerable fortune with him (either legally or clandestinely, which is more likely) for he lost no time in putting up a series of large apartment houses on what were then the outskirts of town. It’s doubtful that he recuperated his investment on any of these constructions, since there were dozens of empty apartments all over town, waiting for occupancy.
Th
e first eye-witness account I had of Sir Nigel came from two English friends whom he had invited to lunch. They waited for an hour and a half for him to appear, which he did without offering any apology or explanation; then they waited another half hour for the single manservant to arrange the dining table and bring the food. Their account of the ordeal was brief; they agreed that he was “insufferable.” As far as I’m aware, neither of them ever returned to his house. All this did not deter me, two or three years later, from accepting, along with a group of British and Canadian journalists, an invitation to dinner at Sir Nigel’s.
We had to leave our cars at some distance from the house and walk through an untended pasture where a few sheep grazed. It was still daylight, but I wondered aloud how we should find our way back to the road in the dark. One of the journalists, however, had a flash-light with him.
Sir Nigel’s unprepossessing appearance surprised me. He was a short man, very thin, with a seamed face and small colorless eyes set very close together. He seated himself between two correspondents whom he evidently knew fairly well, and spoke with them, paying no attention whatever to the rest of us. I studied his face, and decided that it was incapable of smiling, or indeed of replacing its expression of permanent displeasure with any other. He radiated hostility, and it was clear that the guests felt this; they ceased talking among themselves, and sat silently listening to their host’s scratchy voice.
A black manservant brought whiskey, soda and ice. When he had gone out, Sir Nigel waved his arms and said: “You see that man? I brought him from Zanzibar. He’s my cook, butler and gardener. You’d need half a dozen of your Moors to do the same job. Pack of lazy buggers, lolling about, smoking their pipes and cadging food. Useless sods.” He glared at us as if he suspected us of being disguised Moroccans, and I saw that he was already drunk.
On the floor in a dim part of the room there were several drums of varying sizes and shapes, all of them covered in zebra hide. In the hope of providing him with a different topic of conversation, I asked Sir Nigel if they also had been imported from Zanzibar. Looking at me with an expression which I could only interpret as one of acute rancor and contempt, he answered rapidly: “I have a house there,” and returned to his excoriation of Moroccans.
Of the dinner, I recall only that we ate seated on hassocks in groups of three, at three low tables, and that as the meal progressed our host became visibly more excited. He had forgotten the Moroccans, and was now heaping maledictions and obscenities upon the French and Spanish. They had no idea of how to run a colony, or of how to manage the ignorant and slothful natives. I had an unreasoning conviction that our Amphitryon’s mounting frenzy was the result of a decision he had made to involve us in an unpleasantness of some sort.
“You know, he’s out of his mind,” I muttered to the Canadian beside me. He nodded, not looking away from the malevolent face.
When the Zanzibari brought on the fruit, Sir Nigel sprang to his feet. “In a minute,” he shouted, “you’re going to see something you’ll not forget, by God. And remember, they come of their own accord.” With that he rushed from the room, and we remained, staring at one another.
Soon we heard a slight commotion. A curtain moved in the wall behind the drums, and a tall, muscular black woman strode in, not looking in our direction, and proceeded to light several lamps in that part of the room. Then she turned to lift the curtain while five girls in their midteens ambled in and sank to the floor, each beside a drum. They were clad in diaphanous white gowns, and their hair fell loosely about their shoulders. Three of them were what would be called raving beauties; the other two were merely pretty. The sight was impressive. Sir Nigel had been right in saying we would not forget it.
The girls began to thump indiscriminately on the drums, which, being so much more resonant than the hand drums Moroccan girls are used to playing, filled the room with a chaos of rhythmless pounding. Like the black woman who had ushered them in, they behaved as though the Europeans in front of them were invisible. No one attempted to say anything.
Suddenly Sir Nigel stood before us, brandishing a long circus whip. He had changed into jodhpurs and black leather boots, and his face had turned such a dangerously dark red that I wondered if we might not be going to witness then and there the death from apoplexy of Sir Nigel Renfrew. Although his movements appeared to be uncoordinated, he had no difficulty in cracking his whip with a maximum of sound, and this he proceeded to do about the heads of the cowering girls, who gave little shrieks of simulated terror as they writhed at his feet among the drums.
And now Sir Nigel gave a great shout, to which the girls responded by attacking each other in a wild free-for-all, yanking hair, ripping open the bodices of the filmy gowns and uttering prolonged, hair-raising screams. Sir Nigel hopped up and down, emitting little grunts, cracking the whip and from time to time actually lashing one of the frantic girls with it. A moment before, they had been play-acting, but now they began to sob, and to use their fingernails in the fight. No signal was given that I could detect, but once again the curtain was lifted and the black woman advanced upon the crazy group, forcing them apart and pulling them to their feet. Then she shoved them under the curtain and we were left with Sir Nigel, who still flicked his whip as he strode in our direction.
His exertions of a minute ago had left him short of breath. “They’re locked into their rooms now, you see.” He cracked the whip over our heads and stared into our faces, one after the other, as he pulled a heavy key from his pocket and shook it at us. “But if anybody feels like spending a little time with one of them, this is the master key.” His eyes flashed; they were the eyes of an enraged chimpanzee. I realized that for him the evening had been leading up to this moment. The others were clearly of the same mind, for no one said anything, and there was a long silence. Then Sir Nigel uttered a scornful “Hah!” and tossed the whip in the direction of the drums.
“I’m afraid I must be getting back to the hotel,” someone said. There were general murmurs of assent, and we all rose and thanked our host, who saw us to the door. He bowed. “Good night,” he said in mellifluous tones. “Good night, you bloody swine, good night.”
As we went up through the dark pasture, one of the Englishmen who knew Sir Nigel gave us some of the details. It was true that the girls came of their own accord, from villages in the hills roundabout. Each one was locked up for a month, and upon leaving was given an expensive qaftan, something she could never have hoped otherwise to possess. It was the sight of the garment which inspired other girls to come to Tangier and seek out Sir Nigel. They were not really mistreated, he said. Each had her own room in the servants’ quarters, and was supplied with food by the black woman. Now I understood why Sir Nigel would not have Moroccan servants; it would have been impossible. If any Moroccan had got wind of what went on in the house, there would have been an immediate scandal.
As a matter of fact, trouble did break out some months later, and one can only assume that it was linked to the presence of the girls. Sir Nigel left the country and was absent for several years. He did return, however, to die of a heart attack sitting at a table on the terrace of the Café de Paris, in the center of Tangier, at noon.
Too Far from Home
I
BY DAY HER EMPTY ROOM had four walls, and the walls enclosed a definite space. At night the room continued forever into the darkness.
“If there are no mosquitos why do we have mosquito nets?”
“The beds are low and we have to tuck ourselves in with the nets, so that our hands can’t fall out and touch the floor,” Tom said. “You don’t know what might be crawling there.”
The day she arrived, the first thing he did after showing her the room where she would sleep, was to take her on a tour of the house. It was dim and clean. Most of the rooms were empty. It seemed to her that the help occupied the greater part of the building. In one room five women sat in a row along the wall. She was presented to all of them. Tom explained that only two of them were emp
loyed in the house; the others were visitors. There was the sound of men’s voices in another room, a sound which turned swiftly to silence at Tom’s knock on the door. A tall, very black man in a white turban appeared. She had the instant impression that he resented her presence, but he bowed gravely. “This is Sekou,” Tom told her. “He runs things around here. You might not guess it, but he’s extremely bright.” She glanced at her brother nervously; he seemed to know why. “Don’t worry,” he added. “Nobody knows a word of English here.”
She could not go on talking about this man while she stood facing him. But when they were on the roof later, under the improvised awning, she continued the conversation. “What made you assume that I thought your man was stupid? I know you didn’t say that; but you as much as said it. I’m not a racist, you know. Do you think he looks slow-witted?”
“I was just trying to help you see the difference between him and the others, that’s all.”
“Oh,” she said. “There’s an obvious difference, of course. He’s taller, blacker, and with finer features than the others.”
“But there’s a basic difference, too,” Tom told her. “You see, he’s not a servant like them. Sekou is not his name. It’s his title. He’s a kind of chief.”
“But I saw him sweeping the courtyard,” she objected.
“Yes, but that’s just because he wants to. He likes to be in this house. I don’t mind having him here. He keeps the other men in order.”
They wandered to the edge of the roof. The sun was blinding.
“I can’t believe that,” she laughed. “He has the face of a tyrant.”
“I doubt if anyone suffers under him. You know,” he went on, suddenly raising his voice, “you are a racist. If Sekou were white, the idea would never have occurred to you.”