The Marriage of Opposites

  He woke with a start in the middle of the day, alive and young. He was so grateful not to be a dead man, and to have the world to dive into. He was late for work, and he knew, as he ran back to town, he would be in trouble, yet again. He had not been able to steer clear of it since he’d been back. They said he’d changed, his sullen moodiness, his criticism of his family and the politics of the island. But perhaps he was only more himself, a man with his own opinions now, though his parents clearly considered him too young to have the right to act upon his needs and desires.

  HE THOUGHT ABOUT HIS constricted life a few evenings later when he spied Marianna at the harbor. He’d been hoping to run into her. He was at a café when he saw her in the marketplace. A married woman wearing golden earrings, talking with her friends. She was as beautiful as ever, perhaps more so, but she wasn’t Marianna King anymore, the waiter told him when he asked about her current situation. Her married name was Morris. He thought back to when she knew him better than anyone. He caught her eye, but she had no expression, merely stared back as if he were a rude stranger gawking. She then avoided his glance and went on talking with her friends. A knife went through him. His brothers were right. He was no one. He kept an eye on Marianna all the same. When she left and started for home, he followed. Unlike Lydia, who had no idea she was being followed for months on end, Marianna sensed her stalker, and turned to face him.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” She sounded truly frightened. “Stay away from me.”

  “It’s me,” he said, plaintive, once more the confused boy who’d sat beside her at school while she explained the Bible stories they were told by their teachers. “Don’t you recognize me?”

  “That’s exactly why I’m telling you to stay away. We’re not children. We can’t do as we please. I have a husband.”

  He felt like a fool. She must have known he was pained by her reaction, for her expression softened.

  “Don’t you know what this place is like? Have you been away that long? Just because we went to school together, we don’t live in the same world. And we’re certainly not the same people we once were.”

  He promised he would not seek her out, or follow her, or even greet her should their paths cross again, if that was what she wished.

  “Who said anything about what I wish? I’m just telling you how things are, just like I always did. You should be grateful to me.”

  MARIANNA WAS RIGHT IN saying he was not the same person he’d been when he left, and his family had been right as well. The world had opened to him, and as it was doing so he had closed the door on this island, which ran on rules he found heartless and inhuman. When he’d first returned from Paris, and asked his family to call him by his third name, Camille, so that he could at least keep something of his life in Paris, his brothers had mocked him. Be whoever you want, his brother Alfred said, just do your work. The family did as he wished, except for his mother, who preferred not to say his name at all rather than to change it. She referred to him as he, more a stranger than a son. He’s not happy with the food. He came in late for work. He disappeared. He does not wish to join us for dinner. And, when Camille refused to go to the synagogue—He no longer appears to be a member of our faith.

  In Paris he didn’t have to struggle with his people’s history every time he spoke the name Jacobo aloud. He was just a man, not a Jew but an artist. This sense of being an outsider was not an issue for his parents, who were now accepted by people of their faith and had no wish to know any Europeans outside the community. Within the family there was no discussion of the rift his parents’ marriage had once caused. The shame of having children born before they were officially wed was never spoken of, although this was still a topic discussed in other households, behind closed doors. Most people didn’t even remember why the congregation had been so enraged and why the Pizzarro children had gone to the Moravian School. All the years of bad blood had evaporated, and his brothers and sisters seemed to have forgotten those times.

  “That was so long ago,” said his sister Hannah, now a mother herself. Her wedding was said to have been the turning point, but perhaps it was the dinner at Madame Halevy’s. When that night was ending, and his parents had thanked their hostess and walked into the courtyard, Madame had come into the kitchen where Camille had been waiting with Mrs. James. “Now your grandmother and I are even,” she told him, insisting he take a piece of pastry with him, though he would only toss it out for the birds when he reached the road. “Always pay back what you owe. Remember that,” Madame Halevy told him, patting him on the arm.

  Frédéric Pizzarro now went to synagogue every day for the morning prayers. At first Camille accompanied his father and brothers on Friday nights, but unlike them he could not forget how these same people they prayed with had disrespected his mother, treating her as if she were a ghost. He supposed he held a grudge. He stopped going. Instead, he found himself drawn to the Lutheran church run by the Moravian brothers, his teachers, who had begun the school for slaves. Those Bible stories he had been told as a child had stayed with him, and he thought of Jesus as a great teacher, a rebel who refused to see the poor and disenfranchised mistreated. He went to the church sometimes and sat with his eyes closed, listening to the hymns, songs in Danish and German.

  He owed his father his loyalty; therefore he did not mention his visits to the church, nor did he outwardly complain about how miserable he was since his return from Paris. His older brothers were happy in the family business, and the problems with the Petits in France had been dealt with. A new business had been formed, with his sister’s in-laws, one more profitable than the old business. The future was the family’s interest. So who was he to think of the past? For him this island was a mist of all that had once been, a past that enveloped him every day. Certainly he felt this each time he visited Madame Halevy’s grave and left a stone behind, for remembrance. He had done as he’d been told. He had not forgotten her. Whenever he left the cemetery the leaves shook down into his hair and he felt Madame nearby, reminding him to see to his duties, and pay back every favor.

  He often brought bags of groceries to Madame Halevy’s maid, who had gone to live with one of her daughters on the outskirts of the city. Mrs. James was very old now, and her family took care of her. Camille made sure to include bananas and mangoes so she could make her desserts. “I’ll have my daughter bring a cake to your house,” she always told him.

  “Please, no. Thank you but please, make something for your grandchildren.” He still did not favor sweets.

  “People think they knew Madame, but they didn’t,” Helena James said one day. She’d made a guava berry custard, which she insisted he try. “She wasn’t mean the way they said.”

  Camille grinned. He had spooned much of the custard into the hedges when she turned away, and now bees hovered around. “She loved your desserts.”

  Mrs. James nodded as if this was a given, then went on. “I suppose she told you the story about Jestine because she also had a daughter that she lost.”

  “The one in Charleston?” Camille spooned up the last of the pudding, thanked his hostess, and returned the china bowl to her. It was one of Madame Halevy’s. Everything in her kitchen had been given to Helena.

  “When you work in someone’s house you know things about them they don’t know about themselves. Whatever they try to hide, you see, even when you don’t want to find it out. You open a drawer, there it is. Once you know, there’s nothing you can do about it but pity them. Here’s the truth about Madame.” Mrs. James glanced around to make certain no one was near before going on. “The pain was not that her daughter went to Charleston but that she had to go away.”

  “And why was that?” Camille asked, although he was not as interested as he might have been. He had taken up his sketch pad, and was doing his best to record Mrs. James’s hands, her beautiful, long fingers, adorned with the two gold rings Madame Halevy had always worn. She’d given them to Mrs. James, rather than to her own daughter.
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  “It’s an old story,” Helena James said. “It’s the past and over and done with, as good as buried with the dead once I’m gone.”

  CAMILLE UNDERSTOOD THAT PEOPLE often wanted to erase the pain of what they’d been through, to reinvent the past and their part in it. He’d seen this for himself in the Market Square on July 3, when the proclamation emancipating all slaves in the Danish West Indies was read. It was a joyously received, a long-overdue declaration brought about by the King’s governor, Peter von Scholten, who himself had a common-law wife who was a free woman of mixed blood. Eight thousand slaves on St. Croix living under appalling conditions had demanded and been granted emancipation from the Danish government, and von Scholten had been there to witness how this could be accomplished without bloodshed. He had set the same process to work in St. Thomas, and at last the King had granted these demands.

  Camille was glad to be there for the changes that were taking place, a witness to these cruel laws abolished. He noticed those who had been in favor of slavery and who’d been forced to free their workers now behaved as if they had never used such labor. Most of the African slaves were from Ghana, for the Danes had a fort there, one identical to the fort on their own shore. It was the gate to hell, and it would now be closed. People threw paper and bark inside the doorways of the fort and watched as the windows lit up with a flickering orange light, as if the fort were a lantern that could send a message across the ocean. No more, was the message. Not in our life and time.

  There was a great party in the public square that lasted most of the week. Because the date was the third, all that year babies were given names with three letters, for three was clearly a lucky number. But for many people there was a bitterness ingrained in the celebration, for they had been granted something that should have been theirs all along. For the older people, it was also a time of mourning for all the years and lives that had been stolen.

  Rosalie went to the grave of the child she had lost. She wished he was alive and had grown up to become a young man who could celebrate freedom for all on their island. She took the fallen leaves from her hair and placed them under her pillow so she would dream of her baby. She no longer thought he’d been taken because she loved him too much. That was foolishness someone had told her, that she’d drowned him, poisoning him with her own milk, and she’d taken the blame upon herself. The truth of the matter was, she loved Enrique too much as well, and her love had done no damage. He was still on this earth, alive and well, the handsome man she first saw in the garden of the Pomiés’ beautiful old house where strangers from Amsterdam lived now. She could hear these new people talking when she sat outside the cottage where she lived with Enrique, though she did not understand Dutch. She still worried about bad fortune even though she no longer believed love carried a curse. She feared that Enrique would be taken from her. But fate surprised her, and on the occasion of the proclamation she felt something she had felt only once before, the flicker of life.

  She told Enrique that night, knowing he had always wanted a son. He said she could name the baby after the child she lost. That first baby’s name had been Leland Frost, a name she had told no one, and his father had been a sailor from St. Croix who had drowned. “No,” Rosalie said after carefully considering. “He’ll be his own person. He’ll have his own name.”

  That was when she knew they would be starting everything all over again. They sat outside and had their dinner and watched the fires on the hill all around the fort, with orange and red flashes leaping upward. She had been attached to the motherless Pomié children, then Rachel had surprised her when she came to the house and asked for her help. Rachel had been so young and inexperienced, Rosalie had felt pity for her. But that was a long time ago, after the first Madame Pomié had taken ill and wept and Rosalie had wept with her. But a servant, no matter how beloved, was not a friend, and a slave was a shadow, nothing more. The sparks from the celebrations were so bright they looked like stars. It was the last night of the old world. Good riddance, Rosalie thought. She’d name this boy a name no one else had, so he could someday be his own man, one who could stand up to the devil himself.

  There were bonfires all around Skytsborg Tower, called Sky Tower, built in 1678 on the highest point overlooking the harbor. It was here that the pirate Blackbeard, born Edward Teach, had lived during his time on the island. Blackbeard was rumored to light cannon fuses dipped into limewater under his hat and in his beard so that smoke would encircle him. He would look as fierce as the devil, and some people believed that he was. His enemies so feared him they would simply turn over their boats and goods to him and even grant him their wives. His fourteen wives got the worst of the bargain, for he’d abandoned each one. Their skeletons could still be found in the hillside caves. Camille had come upon their wild gardens while he walked at night, so deep in the thickets they’d disappeared for a hundred years. Here untended avocado plants and patches of mint and juniper grew wild, rambling down hillsides, mixing with native plants. He sketched the jumbled remains, an exotic mixture of hope and despair, with vines run riot. Some gardens were bordered by seashells and rocks, others had tumbled-down fences made of bones and rocks, still another was surrounded by banks of pink and red that had all sprung from a single rosebush brought from Madagascar. He liked to search for these gardens when he went into the countryside to visit Helena James, bringing her delicacies he’d filched from the storeroom. Chocolates from France, coconut syrup, oranges sent from Florida. If he found bougainvillea, he plucked some vines and brought them along as well, then sketched them as they trembled in a vase on her table.

  “There’s going to be trouble,” Mrs. James told him one day as they sat outside and ate oranges cut into slices with a bone-handled knife that had once been on Madame Halevy’s kitchen table. “The daughter’s returning, even though she swore to her mother she’d never come back here. My daughter heard about it from a woman she knows who works at the hotel.”

  “Why would she come now? Madame Halevy has been gone for some time.”

  “Exactly why. Think about it. Now with her mother buried so long she can’t walk out of her grave, the daughter finally is here to see what she can get.”

  Camille asked around on the docks so he might ease Helena James’s worries. He’d found that the old lady was right. The daughter had already arrived and was staying at the Commercial Hotel. She’d had a meeting with a local solicitor known for his aggressive manner. Camille posted himself outside the hotel at the coffeehouse, where he ordered one coffee, and then another. The waiter, a fellow he knew named Jack Highfield, pointed her out when she left the hotel, a woman in her fifties, well dressed, with a brash sort of American ease. She wore no hat, and white leather buttoned boots showed under her green muslin dress. Since Camille was adept at following people, he set off to see what he might discover. Madame Halevy’s daughter went directly to the St. Thomas Savings Bank. Camille went in after she left, but he didn’t know anyone there, and the manager was too busy to meet with him. There were now more than forty thousand people on the island, and it was no longer possible to know everyone, along with their business, although in the Jewish community news still traveled quickly.

  Camille had Hannah question the women of the Sisterhood, and of course they knew the reasons behind Madame Halevy’s daughter coming to visit. Rebecca Halevy-Stein had come for her mother’s estate. The old mansion had stood empty—there had been talk of ghosts and bad luck—and was only now finally sold, to an Ashkenazi family recently arrived from Germany via Amsterdam. Mrs. Halevy-Stein had returned so that she might collect her mother’s belongings, but when she went to the house there was almost nothing there. Years had passed, and what Madame had not given away had been seen as abandoned and therefore fair game, taken home by various deliverymen and the construction people hired to repair the roof or the shutters or the falling-down stonework.

  When Camille made his report to Helena James, the news of Mrs. Halevy-Stein’s doings did not comfort her
. Rather it made her more anxious. “She’s going to come after me. Even though I helped raise her, she was always selfish and thinking about no one but herself. Her mother would say the very same thing if she was alive.”

  In fact, Mrs. Halevy-Stein did intend to visit Mrs. James, along with her solicitor, Edwin Holloway, who was not from the community but was instead a resettled American from South Carolina. They’d known each other in Charleston. Camille was aware of their meeting because one of Helena James’s grandsons, a boy of seven or eight named Richard, came running into the store, out of breath, frantic, not even having taken the time to put on his shoes. He was a faster runner barefoot, he claimed, just as Camille had been as a boy. Camille slipped on his own shoes, however, when the boy came to tug on his shirtsleeve. He was no longer used to jogging along over sand and stones.

  The boy hurried him. “My grandmother thinks you should come and speak for her.”

  Frédéric overheard and took Camille aside before he could leave the store. “How are you involved?”

  When Camille explained that Mrs. James had worked for Madame Halevy for years, and was afraid of the daughter, Frédéric slipped on his jacket.

  “Shall we?” he said, with the clear intention of accompanying his son.

  Camille grinned, surprised but pleased not to have to face Mrs. Halevy-Stein and her solicitor alone. After all, he knew nothing of business matters, as his father was well aware, and Frédéric was respected for his professional acumen.

  They followed Mrs. James’s grandson out of town. He was indeed fast, and Camille and his father had trouble keeping pace.

  “I used to be able to run like that,” Camille said.

  “So did I,” his father informed him.

  They went uphill as quickly as they could, clouds of dust rising. It was noon, and too hot for such activities. Camille and his father both wore jackets, due to the serious nature of the occasion, and were therefore sweating through their clothes.