The Marriage of Opposites

  On the night when moths twice as large as any in Paris struck against the wooden shutters, I knew this was not a dream that would be broken by morning light. I wanted nothing more than to leave St. Thomas and be sent off to Europe, even if it meant I must care for some aging relative or clean other people’s homes. All the same, my father looked like an old man, beaten by fate. He was concerned for the future, but it was my future as well.

  “First I will have a discussion with Monsieur Petit,” I told my father.

  He sighed. He knew I was stubborn and had my reasons. “Must you?”

  “Must you breathe to live?” Wishing to save the business didn’t make me a fool. “I won’t deny you what you ask, but in return, don’t deny me. Send him to me.”

  MONSIEUR PETIT CAME A few evenings later, after his children were asleep under the watchful eye of a maid. It was late enough for the mosquitoes that swarm at dusk to have disappeared into the damp night. The bats had settled in the trees, their shadows like leaves. I could hear them breathing as they hung upside-down in the branches. I’d asked for the meeting to be informal, outside. All the same, my father introduced us formally, though surely we’d met before, although on what occasion neither of us could remember, for Monsieur Petit had been a grown man and I nothing more than a girl.

  “Enchanté,” Monsieur Petit said to me.

  I’d been told that he’d come directly to St. Thomas from Paris, which interested me. I wished I might question him about his past there, but my father threw me a look, so I merely greeted our guest politely. The men had glasses of sherry. I had a tea of vervain, though I would have preferred rum. My mother insisted I wear one of her dresses so that I would look sophisticated, a bit older than my age. It was a gray silk frock from France, with an underskirt of crinoline that pricked at my legs, as if ants were climbing past my ankles. My hair was pulled back with combs fashioned of tortoiseshell and abalone. I knew I wasn’t beautiful, but I was young, and perhaps that was enough.

  My father spoke about the weather, always a topic on an island prey to storms, and then they discussed business matters, nothing too urgent. What was central to the arrangement had already been addressed before the proposal of marriage was made, in private. I asked Adelle to find out as much as she could about Monsieur Petit from the maid who cared for his children. Because of this I knew he was forty-four years of age.

  Older than my father.

  More than double my own age.

  Earlier in the day, Jestine had come into my room. She knew what was to be, and didn’t approve of arranged marriages. She gazed at the silk dress my mother had given me, then rubbed the heavy gray fabric between her fingers.

  “You shouldn’t wear this,” she advised. The weather was sweltering, and drops of water fell into the garden even though there was no rain. “This is why French women faint.”

  “He’s proposing tonight.” I was gazing at myself in the mirror, and I didn’t like what I saw. I thought I resembled my mother.

  “You don’t even know him. How can you marry him?” Jestine asked.

  “Marriage is no different from business,” I told her. I was parroting my father, but I also believed I had a duty to him.

  “It should be a business of the heart and soul.” Jestine lowered her voice. “We can run away and be gone before anyone notices we are missing. Let them find him another wife. We’ll go to Paris.”

  We had always planned to journey there together, but now I shook my head. I couldn’t allow my family to be financially ruined. It was the night when the turtles came to shore, but Jestine went alone to the beach while I sat in the courtyard with the man I was to marry.

  “SHALL WE SPEAK TO one another plainly?” I asked Monsieur Petit when there was a lull in his conversation with my father. Adelle had always told me that a woman who acts as if she knows what she’s doing gets what she wants. “And perhaps alone?”

  Monsieur Petit glanced up, startled by my request. He was tall, with distinctive features. His hair was marked with gray. I’m sure a woman of his age would have found him attractive. I smiled at him with whatever small charm I might have. “Surely my father can trust you to be alone with me.”

  Monsieur Petit nodded. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he said to my father. He still had not addressed me directly.

  “You’re the one who might mind. She doesn’t hold back her remarks.” My father glanced at me with an implicit warning.

  Once Monsieur Petit and I were left alone in the garden, the seriousness of the situation settled between us, a heavy weight. We were to marry, yet knew nothing of one another. We both gazed into the hedge of jasmine, embarrassed and ill at ease. The heat enveloped us. Jestine had been right. The gray silk dress was much too heavy for the season. I wished I could tear it off and toss it into the shrubbery, then sit across from my fiancé in my white cotton chemise and petticoat so I might be more at ease. My mother had forced me to wear black stockings and calfskin boots with pearl buttons when I would have much preferred to be barefoot. I laughed to think of what Monsieur Petit’s reaction might be were he faced by an unruly girl who’d slipped out of her dress. When I laughed at my imagined state, he glanced at me, confused, then studied the dark garden, as if there was something to see in the hedges.

  The scent of jasmine and frangipani was dizzying, but I was used to it and kept my head. I grew braver and turned my attention to Monsieur Petit, searching his face for clues to his disposition, pleased when he looked up, then quickly looked away. My direct gaze had made him nervous. I took that to mean he would not bully me or tell me what to think. He turned to his glass of sherry as if it was the most compelling thing on earth. That was when I thought I might have the upper hand in the situation.

  Monsieur Petit politely asked about my interests. Another man wouldn’t have cared.

  “I believe you’re my interest now,” I told him.

  “Do you wish to know me more thoroughly before you make your decision?” he asked. “I wouldn’t wish for you to be unhappy with the arrangement.”

  It was then I realized this was as much a business affair for Monsieur Petit as it was for me. In that instant I understood he still loved his wife.

  “My father speaks well of you. I don’t need to know more. But if I’m to be a mother, I wish to meet the children.”

  “The children are very well behaved,” Monsieur Petit assured me.

  I was cordial, but I made my point. “That’s not the issue. If we are to be married, you need to trust my opinion, and that is, I must meet the children.”

  His expression was puzzled, but he nodded. He had dark eyes and tanned skin. He’d spent a good deal of time on ships before he married and had children. “Of course.”

  “There,” I said. I could tell what happened between us would be up to me. “We’ve had our first fight, and are none the worse for it.”

  He seemed amused, and perhaps would have enjoyed further conversation, but I stood and shook his hand and told him good night. I did not wish for him to consider our meeting anything more than it was. He had a nice handshake. He did not try to overpower me, as some men might have, nor did he shrink from me. Most important, he didn’t press me to account for my reasoning.

  In truth, I wasn’t worried that something was wrong with the children. Rather I feared that I might not be able to experience the emotion a mother should possess, due to my own fraught relationship with my mother. I knew from fairy tales about the evil deeds stepmothers might do, how black their hearts might turn. I had no idea what reaction I might have to another woman’s children, especially the daughter who had caused her death. When the Petits’ maid spoke with Adelle, she had divulged that even on her mistress’s deathbed the ailing woman could think only of her newborn daughter. Madame was desperate to live long enough for the naming ceremony, eight days after the birth. If a baby died without a name, the spirit of Lilith, she who preceded Eve, could come for that child’s spirit and claim it as her own. Madame Petit chose the na
me Hannah, which meant grace.

  On the day after the naming, Madame was too weak to take a sip of water. She lasted four more days, but on the twelfth day she began to succumb to childbed illness. “If you don’t watch over her, I’ll haunt you,” she had whispered to her maid, frightening the woman so deeply she rarely let go of the child even now, all these months later. She held the baby close all night, watching over her until morning, afraid not of Lilith but of Madame Petit’s ghost.

  The one thing that could make me walk away from this marriage bargain was if I felt nothing upon seeing the boys and the baby girl. To take care of a ghost’s children, one could not feign love.

  ON THE DAY I went to the Petit house, I wore what I would have to wander through the hills with Jestine. We favored plain cotton skirts that made it easy to run, in case we came upon some of the wild donkeys with nasty dispositions that might give chase, braying as they nipped at our legs. Jestine came in while I was dressing.

  “If you join that family you will know only tragedy,” she told me.

  She had seen the boys in the market, and they looked ragged, like little criminals, even though their housemaid treated them with special kindness.

  “All boys look like criminals until you wash their faces,” I said. “No one could have looked more like a little thief than Aaron, and you certainly opened your heart to him.”

  My cousin could be selfish and stubborn, but with Jestine he was tender, a different person completely. I believe he had fallen in love with her on those nights when we were the only people in the world. She returned his love, even though she knew no one of our faith could marry a woman of African heritage. Jestine, although free, would never be recognized as one of our people. Still, Aaron was sullen if she went out with anyone else, whether it be with her mother or her cousins or, lately, even me. When men looked at her, as they always did, he was outraged. He’d gained a reputation as a hothead, someone to avoid. But while Jestine had sleepless nights, Aaron slept quite well. I knew this because when I knocked on his door to tell him his breakfast was waiting, he didn’t even bother to reply. I went in anyway and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Do you love Jestine?” I had asked one day. He was a handsome man, yet still a child in many ways.

  “Of course I do,” he said. “But Madame can never hear of it.”

  “You’re going to let Madame Pomié ruin your life?”

  Aaron had pushed me off the bed. “There are rules,” he told me. I was shocked to hear him say so. I thought of us as rebels, wandering the island, going where we pleased, even if it was something my mother had forbidden.

  “You’re the one who will ruin your life if you don’t understand there are differences among us,” he told me.

  After that I didn’t trust Aaron. I told Jestine a thousand times, Don’t choose him, but she said in love there were no choices and swore one day I’d find that to be true. I could not concentrate on my books or on the stories I wrote anymore. I listened to the moth that always tried to get into my room, and I wished I could fly with it across the ocean. Perhaps in the cold my heart would freeze and I would care nothing for those I was forced to abandon.

  MY FATHER ESCORTED ME to the Petit house on a Sunday afternoon when the church bells were ringing. There were mountains all around town, and many of the streets were steep. One had to climb up staircases made of ballast stones from ships that had docked at the island, for thousands of such stones were unloaded when the shipmasters picked up their cargo. The Petit home was up a winding twist of a road. The house was pretty, painted yellow with a large veranda. There were green shutters at every window that could be fastened shut when there was the threat of a hurricane. Egrets were fishing in a small pond nearby, a sign of good luck despite Jestine’s warnings. Egrets meant joy and happiness. I knew that much. I asked my father to fetch Monsieur Petit while I waited at the gate. I needed a moment to collect my thoughts. “Go on,” I said to my father. “It’s fine for me to wait on my own.”

  “If you’re this bossy with him, he’ll likely cancel the wedding,” my father warned.

  “If he doesn’t try to please me now, what will he do when he’s my husband?”

  My father laughed, but he did as I asked. Standing there, I noticed egrets worked into the design of the iron fence. I wondered if Madame Petit had asked the ironworker for this pattern after watching the very birds I now spied in the pond.

  I didn’t go forward until my father and Monsieur Petit came out. They were so much older I felt silly being young and inexperienced, but then I saw how tentative Monsieur Petit was and I felt my strength. I nodded a greeting, then asked if they would leave.

  In the bright light Monsieur Petit looked worried and even older than he had on the evening we met. “But you don’t know the house.”

  “You plan on marrying me, yet you have discomfort about me being in your house? Do you think I’m a thief?”

  He laughed. “Not at all. It’s only that I wished to introduce you. For your comfort.”

  I assured him that women spoke to children in ways men did not understand, or so Adelle had always told me. I said I was comfortable on my own and he could return in one hour. That was time enough. In one hour I would discover all I needed to know.

  “And you don’t have to watch over me,” I teased my father. “If anyone was to do that, it would be Monsieur Petit.”

  Isaac Petit looked startled. I think he was still in a dream, imagining that his wife might return to him. I saw that his posture was somewhat stooped, as if he carried sorrow on his back. All of this might have made another girl turn and run, but I had always been the sort of person to do my best no matter the situation. I went to the porch, where there was wicker furniture set out facing a long view of the harbor. The water was pale green in the shallows, turquoise in the deep. The sea changed color depending on the tides and the wind. I pried open the heavy mahogany door and slipped inside the house, where it was cooler, darkened against the summer heat with closed shutters and drawn curtains. Being inside was like drinking a glass of chilled water. I stood in the hallway and shivered, thankful to be cold.

  The boys were clearly expecting a guest, for they found me in the hall fast enough. They had dressed formally for the occasion in white shirts and black trousers, their hair combed back with lavender water. They raced in and looked disappointed when they spied me lingering there.

  “We thought our new mother was coming,” they burst out.

  I could tell they thought I was a day woman, hired to help with the laundry. My clothes were plain and I was young. Not what they had expected.

  “You can have but one mother in this world and no one can take her place,” I assured them.

  When I asked for a tour, they showed me all the rooms they planned to show their new stepmother.

  “Let’s run,” they said. “We’re usually not allowed.”

  I laughed and chased them down the hall. I let them think I was the laundress; it was the best way to observe their true natures. The older boy, David, was outgoing and talkative. Samuel was the quieter one, who had green eyes, the color of the sea. There was a sadness sifting through him. He seemed older than his age, which was less than four, but I was soon reminded of how young he was. Sometime during the tour of the house, he took my hand, quite naturally. The truth was I liked the feel of his hand in mine, the heat and weight of it.

  THE BOYS SHARED A room. The window opened to a stand of banana trees. From here it was possible to watch the bats at night, for those creatures love this kind of fruit, opening the peels with their hands as if they were small people. I sat with the children on the bed and heard David’s stories of the bats he had seen—one that had red eyes, one that had pointed teeth, one as large as a cat that darted through the shadows to sit on the window ledge so it might peer inside the room, licking its lips. Samuel crept into my lap during this story. He shivered and kicked his feet. I leaned down and said, “Your brother is making up these stories. If he saw
a bat as big as a cat it was indeed a cat. He was probably too sleepy to tell the difference.”

  After that Samuel seemed calmer. I thanked the boys for showing off the house.

  “It’s one of the prettiest on the island,” I said.

  “Our mother made it that way,” Samuel told me.

  When he let go of my hand, I felt empty. They went off to play, and I continued along the corridor so I might glance into Monsieur Petit’s room. It was very neat and clean, with a huge mahogany bed. There was white mosquito netting hanging down, held in place through a hook in the wooden rafters. The duvet was a pale mint green of very soft cotton. It seemed Monsieur Petit and his wife had slept together, for she hadn’t her own bedroom, as many married women did, only the nursery next door. I peered inside. The room was dark, and I wondered if I would see Madame Petit’s ghost if I reached out to her, for I knew I could call spirits to me so that they flickered over my palms.

  Because of this, I kept my hands closed.

  I suppose I was nervous about what she might say to me. What if she warned me away? What if she uttered a jealous curse?

  I found my way downstairs easily enough. I wanted to see what else I would discover in this house that had held so much sorrow, perhaps a sign that would tell me whether I should stay or go. In the parlor there was a small piano, painted white. I ran my hands over the keys without making a sound. Then I listened to a bee, tapping against the window, struggling to get inside. I could spy the sea from this room, as green as Samuel’s eyes. Perhaps that was all the sign I needed.