The Marriage of Opposites

  Rosalie was polite enough not to tell me I was a fool to give her advice. I think she pitied my stupidity and saw it as innocence, so she embraced me in return and said nothing more. But after that I often heard her crying behind the stairs, and I knew it was for the baby she had loved too much.

  THE WOMEN FROM THE congregation invited me to join them as a member of Blessings and Peace and Loving Deeds. This was an honor and in my mind, both unexpected and unwanted. All the same, I had little choice. Monsieur Petit was an esteemed member of the community, and I was his wife. At last my mother could be proud as I sat among the women from the best families. I overheard her speaking of me. At first I thought she was referring to my predecessor, but no, when she had said Madame Petit, whose house was so lovely, whose children were so well behaved, I realized she meant me.

  After tea at Madame Halevy’s home, there was conversation regarding orphaned children and those of our faith who did not have luck with business or had fallen prey to illness. We planned dinners to raise funds for those in need and wrote up reports to present to all of the committee members. People who faltered were discussed at great length, for in a group such as this, any hint of wickedness was worth uncovering, including those men who dared to keep two wives: a Jewish wife and another wife, and perhaps another family, living near the docks. The scandal concerned Nathan Levy, born in Baltimore, but now a resident of Charlotte Amalie. Levy had been granted the honor of being the United States consul but was said to be dishonorable in his business dealings. The women seemed most concerned that he lived with an African woman named Sandrine, flaunting the relationship in public, treating her as though she were his wife. I’d seen them once when I was at the market with Adelle. She had stared after them, interested.

  “My mother says it’s the marriage of a heron and a parrot,” I said to Adelle.

  “Does she?” Adelle made a disapproving face. “Well, your mother knows nothing. They’re not birds. They’re people in love.”

  Levy was a member of our congregation, and although there were several letters sent to the office of the United States Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, in Washington, no one dared to discuss this matter with Levy face-to-face, for he was a man of power who helped the business interests of those on the island. Rather than confront him, people crossed the street when they saw his woman or when she and Levy walked arm and arm near the harbor.

  I went directly to Adelle’s house and found Jestine on the porch, folding laundry. “I thought you were too busy being married to come see me,” she said. “Aren’t you attending a meeting today?”

  “I have three children. And I left the meeting.” I thought perhaps I would find excuses not to attend any meetings to come.

  Jestine threw me a dark look. “You have one true friend,” she reminded me.

  “Whereas you have two,” I teased. “How is Aaron?”

  Jestine laughed, a catch in her voice. “I haven’t any idea.”

  She said he had been avoiding her. Twice he had not shown up at their appointed meeting place. She’d stood alone in our garden. She’d thrown stones at my cousin’s window, but there had been no response.

  “He’s a heavy sleeper,” I told her. “And you know as well as I do, he’s lazy.” It was, to be honest, part of his charm. He liked to take his time and have lengthy conversations with other businessmen, rather than work in our father’s shop, which he clearly thought beneath him.

  Jestine shook her head. “I think someone’s turned him against me.”

  We both knew who that someone was likely to be. My mother. “We should have never let him come with us,” I said to my friend. “We should have left him home when he begged to follow us. He was always a troublemaker.”

  “No, he wasn’t.” Jestine stacked the laundry neatly in a reed basket. “We inherited our troubles.”

  After the laundry was completed, we went into the hills, the way we used to, before I was married. Jestine was right; I’d been consumed with my new duties and hadn’t been a good friend. In truth, I’d missed her. We linked arms and chattered until there was a burst of rain, and then we had to run to take cover. When the torrents ended, a pale drizzle came down around us. Everything smelled green and sweet. On this island there were a hundred varieties of rain, from blue to clear, from whirlwind storms to a dash of dew to the driving rain of winter. We used banana leaves as umbrellas and sat under the canopy of the trees. On very clear days we could see the islands that were used as pastures, Goat Island and Water Island, where livestock ran free, chewing the wet, salty grass. Light drifted through the raindrops and the sky broke into colors. The heat came back, and we lay down in the field. We made garlands out of tall grass and bits of twig. No one passing by would have seen us, except that the grass moved whenever we breathed.

  “Have you learned to love Monsieur Petit?” Jestine asked me.

  “I don’t hate him.”

  She laughed and shook her head. “That isn’t an answer! I told you not to do it. He’s old enough to be your father.”

  “He’s not my father when we’re alone.”

  “Oh?” She smiled. “So now you know. But is it good with him in bed? Do you long for him to touch you? Yearn for him when he’s not there?”

  I shrugged as if I were an old married woman, though I was little more than twenty. “It’s better than I thought it would be.”

  Jestine snorted. “Because you thought it would be hell.”

  I was surprised to find I was insulted on my husband’s behalf. Although I didn’t love him, I respected him, and surely that counted for something. Another woman would have thought him a considerate lover, but I had been inflamed by the stories I’d read and the passions of Solomon, and I wanted more. “I could not ask for a kinder man. That can’t be hell.”

  But Jestine knew me and could see this wasn’t love. “There are those who say that heaven and hell are not so far apart. They are not at opposite ends of the world beyond ours, only a step away from one another.”

  EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT WE had dinner with my family. I brought Rosalie along so she could watch over the children if they fell asleep, but also because I had made her a promise, which I intended to keep. I would never let Rosalie go, even though my mother had instructed me to dismiss her and get a new maid, one who hadn’t been loyal to the first Madame Petit. I smiled and nodded but did the opposite. I gave Rosalie extra spending money, Saturdays and Sundays free, and warned her to stay away from my mother on Friday nights.

  “I’m happy to do that,” Rosalie said.

  I grinned. “If only I could do the same.”

  All of the men in the family were now partners, members of the Burghers’ Association, for tradesmen must be accepted by the royal Danish organization in order to do business on our island. The marriage had strengthened the business, although Aaron Rodrigues wasn’t happy to have Isaac Petit rise above him in a single day. My husband was a full partner, Aaron merely a distant cousin whose official title was manager, which couldn’t have pleased him. I knew that he and my father had been meeting to discuss the future, and on several occasions I had heard my cousin slam out of the house, grumbling under his breath, striking the gate with a stick on his way. I heard my parents arguing in the parlor.

  “There are ways around this,” my mother said.

  “So you can keep him here? And baby him while you treat him like a son?”

  “Why not? He is a son to me.”

  “And what will his child be to you?” my father asked.

  “What is yours to you?” my mother said coldly.

  This was dangerous territory, I thought, even though I wasn’t certain what my mother’s meaning was.

  “Am I not married to you still?” my father said, which ended the conversation.

  THAT EVENING AT DINNER my father revealed that Aaron was being sent to France. My mother looked like she’d been crying, and my cousin did not look pleased by the announcement. All at once I viewed him differently. There was a
hidden vulnerability inside him that was in direct opposition to the careless man he appeared to be. I suppose he’d thought he would be my father’s heir, and now it was clear that honor had gone to my new husband, in the manner of the law if the oldest child was a girl, for women had no rights to property. It was a slap to Aaron, a reminder that he was not a true son, though my mother treated him as such. Yet he was not to be entirely forsaken. We had distant cousins in France, and many business connections, and Paris could not get enough of the island’s rum. Aaron would be introduced to all of our relations and their friends. I felt a bitterness rise inside me. I was the one who wanted to go to Paris. Adelle always said if a person doesn’t speak her mind she will carry her resentment until it burns her, as I was burning now.

  “Perhaps we should be the ones sent to France,” I said to my husband.

  There was an immediate hush of the dinner table chatter. My father and husband both looked at me as if I was a bee with a stinger who had settled on our table without invitation.

  “That wouldn’t be possible,” Isaac said to me. He looked over at my father, embarrassed by my outburst.

  “And why not?” I had already convinced myself, now all I had to do was convince the men of my family. “The children would be in a good school and would get to know our family. It would be an adventure for them. And we could take Rosalie.”

  My husband shook his head. “Our life is here.”

  Still I didn’t give up. “You came from Paris, it would be a home-coming.”

  My father’s gaze was blistering. He didn’t like to be disrespected, and this was the first time I had opposed his wishes. “You’ve said enough,” he told me. “Your husband is an excellent partner and the business here is what matters most.”

  “A business you clearly don’t need me for.” Aaron threw his napkin onto the table and stormed out.

  “Let him go,” my father told my mother when she began to rise from her chair. She sank back down, near tears. “This day was bound to come,” my father told her. “You have done more than enough for that boy. We will follow the law. The business will belong to Monsieur Petit. Not to Aaron.”

  I couldn’t keep quiet. “Even if I want to leave and he doesn’t? If the business is to be my husband’s, do I not also have a say?”

  “My apologies for her behavior,” my husband said to my father, as if I were a child he had to make excuses for. He turned to me displeased. “Say no more.” He looked his age on this night, and I could see he thought me nothing more than an ill-mannered girl, too young and foolish to know enough to hold my tongue.

  I thought of what Jestine had said, that we had inherited our troubles. Certainly I had inherited mine. This marriage, this man, this house, this family.

  “I’ll find my own way home,” I told Isaac. “I’ll go with Rosalie.”

  I left the table and followed Aaron outside. Once, he had been my baby cousin, a fondling in desperate need. Now he was a handsome man who stood alone, tossing some crumbs to the old lizard that had been his pet when he was a boy. He had only just turned twenty. He was a favorite with many of the young women in our congregation, but he’d never looked at anyone other than Jestine.

  “I should be the one going to France,” I told him.

  “I wish it could be so. I’d be happy to stay here.”

  “Then let me go!” I said impulsively.

  “I have no power, Rachel. Not even over my own life. At least you’ll get what you want. Someday your husband will take you there.”

  “I plan to go with Jestine,” I told him coldly.

  Aaron laughed at what a fool I was. “You think you’re so smart, but you don’t understand anything. You’re never going there with her. Just as I would never be allowed to marry her. Don’t you understand she’s the reason I’m being sent away?”

  I felt ill. Perhaps the weather was too hot. I left my cousin and rushed along the stone path, past the fruit trees. The bananas were ripening and wasps were gathering, drawn to the sticky sugar inside the leaves. I didn’t make it into the house, but instead was sick in the bushes, bringing up my dinner. Afterward, I sat back on my heels in the grass. Rosalie had come outside to search for me, and when she saw me she went to the well. She came to hand me a cup of water.

  “You know what this means,” she said.

  All at once I did. I thought of the nights in bed with my husband, and of the first Madame Petit, who had died of childbed fever. I thought of my cousin, who had never even looked at a map of Paris and would soon be living there, staring out his window at the rain.

  “They say if you’re sick in the morning you’ll have a daughter, and if it’s in the night, you should expect a son,” Rosalie announced. “It will be a boy for certain.”

  “I don’t wish anyone to know until I’m sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  I was thankful that my mother hadn’t needed Jestine to serve dinner, so she was saved the dreadful news about my cousin. I went around to the patio kitchen, searching for Adelle, who I’d assumed had cooked our meal. Often she sat beside the rose tree my father had ordered from France. My mother despised and ignored the tree, she thought it too showy, but I knew that Adelle secretly watered it, perhaps to spite my mother. When I searched for her now, I found she hadn’t appeared that evening. Another hired woman had helped with the dinner, one I didn’t know.

  “Is Adelle ill?” I asked. “Will she be back tomorrow?”

  The cook threw up her hands. “I only work here!”

  I went then to the bedroom where the children were sleeping and lay down beside them. I found some peace when I closed my eyes and listened to them breathing, but too soon it was time to go home. Rosalie came for us, and I carried Hannah as I followed Rosalie down the corridor. The boys clung to her as they ambled after her, sleepy and thickheaded with the heat.

  When I said good night to my mother, I asked where Adelle was.

  “Not here.” My mother shrugged. “That’s all I know.”

  THERE WAS A SERIES of squalls after that, with the appearance of the raging wind and rain that often comes in September. It was a terrible month, which ended with a hurricane of enormous proportions. My husband spent his nights at the office, worried over our ships at sea. Perhaps it was best for us to be apart; certainly, I had not forgiven him for taking up my father’s argument against me. While he was gone, I made the best of the situation for the children. We played games, hiding under beds and in wardrobes, making birds out of paper and flying them across the rooms. We had some of the long pods from the flamboyant tree that we had set out to dry in the sun, and we used the husks the children called shack-shacks to make music. It was a delight to feel like a child again, but it was impossible to stay in that frame of mind for very long. The wind was screaming, and the shutters at every window needed to be nailed closed. Later I took out my notebook of stories and added a storm in which goats and sheep were lifted out of a pasture and deposited on the other side of the island, still chewing their cud. I wrote about a woman who was left behind and did her best to return to the moon, even though every storm could take her no higher than the treetops. When the center of the storm was above us, there was an odd quiet that was even more frightening than the howling of the wind. I wondered if God was above us, and if he could see our love and our fear. We all got into bed together, and Rosalie joined us. We said our prayers and she said hers as we held hands.

  When the worst of the storm had passed, a stray little donkey came into the garden, drenched and bawling for its mother.

  “Look who came calling!” Rosalie laughed when she looked out the back door.

  The rain was still falling, and the puddles were huge, some as deep as ponds. When such things happened, fish would appear, as if brought about by magic. Samuel was terrified of the donkey at first, and hid behind my skirts. I told him it was a baby, nothing to fear.

  “Let’s help him,” I said to Rosalie.

&nb
sp; While I held Hannah and Samuel clung to my skirt, Rosalie and David caught the donkey with a rope, then brought it into the yard, where we offered it soft bread and milk from a tin pan. It was shy at first, but starvation got the best of it and it ate with such abandon we all laughed. Samuel soon lost his fear of the donkey. He asked if he might keep it as a pet. He had already named him Jean-François, and indeed the creature trotted over when called so. I shook my head and told Samuel no. This was a wild donkey, meant to be with its mother.

  “Why does he have to be wild? Can’t he be like Gus?”

  Gus was a goat who lived nearby and who escaped from his pasture every once in a while to terrorize the local dogs.

  “No,” I told Samuel. “Some creatures are not meant to be pets.”

  When the sky brightened, and the donkey was well fed, we set it free. Samuel cried for so long that David teased him and called him a baby, which made him cry even harder. That night when I was putting Samuel to bed I lied and swore that I had seen the little donkey on the road with its mother, and that the day had turned out for the best. He slept easier then, his hand clutching mine. I curled up beside him rather than go into my marriage bed. But the wind arose again, hammering at the roof, and I couldn’t sleep. I felt I had become a different person since moving into this house. Before I’d had no trouble killing chickens for Friday dinner, but now I wept over a wild donkey as I thought of him wandering alone. My dream for my life was slipping away from me, and perhaps that made me more tenderhearted toward this motherless creature.

  I needn’t have worried. In the morning the donkey was in the kitchen. He had let himself in through a door that had been blown open. Maybe it was true what they said, that donkeys and mules would not cross over a shadow, and this one had turned back when he reached the end of the property. The boys begged and begged, and even Hannah wailed and cried, reaching her hands out to the beast everyone now referred to as Jean-François. I relented. When Isaac came home at dinnertime, he found that I’d made his favorite dish, wild mushrooms and rice. I poured him a glass of rum with limewater. I said there was no reason to let our disagreement fester and interfere with our daily lives. Then I told him that the children had a pet they had named Jean-François.