Eden Burning (11 page)

When he had finished, it was the last night of the holidays. Having made a careful copy of his work, with no erasures, he went to bed, feeling tired, exhilarated, and also worried about the worth of what he had done.

Two days later Father Baker summoned Patrick to his office.

“Who helped you with this?” he asked.

“No one.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Who could have?” Patrick questioned simply.

“This is a scholarly piece of work,” Father Baker said. Thoughtfully, he riffled Patrick’s neat pages. “I never expected anything as thorough as this. You must have spent days on the research. What made you do it? Can you tell me?”

Patrick hesitated. “It started because of the Chinaman Ah Sing. I’ve known him since I was four or five”—and he went on to tell about his first puzzlement over the Chinaman’s resemblance to the Indian. “Then I’ve been thinking, I guess I’ve always been thinking, about my own ancestors. You imagine Africa, you know—I suppose very inaccurately—but still you do. You think of cathedrals and those little English villages in picturebooks. All of that is in you. St. Felice makes pictures in your mind.” He was ashamed to say how he still thought in colors, so he said merely, “People like the Da Cunhas—Nicholas said the first ones here were Jews, the wanderers, the Bible people. What could have brought them here, too?”

He gained confidence. “This island where we live is so small! Yet there are so many different kinds of people living here, come from all over, living together, and yet apart, not knowing one another. I was thinking: Can the whole world be like this, too? With people wandering from one place to the other, really all part of each other, but not wanting to be?”

Father Baker was looking at him so intently that Patrick stopped. Had he been making an idiot of himself?

Then Father Baker looked away. Patrick observed the ropy veins at the man’s temples, the soiled and shabby gown, then followed his gaze out the window to where voices were competing on the playing fields.

Soon I shall be gone, he thought, and felt a painful emotion. Gone from friends and books, gone from the civility of this crowded little office and the man, the sort of men, who sat here.

Father Baker turned back to his desk, picked up a pencil, and made a little circular design. Then he spoke.

“What do you plan to do with your life, Patrick?”

“Well, get a job …” He had thought, or his mother had thought, he might apply at Barclay’s Bank. The tellers were mostly light blacks, which would be, of course, anybody’s definition of Patrick. “Maybe in a bank,” he said.

“Is that what you want to do?”

Suddenly a new thought came. It was so powerful that it must have been in him for longer than he knew. “What I’d really like is to teach. To read a lot and teach. Like you—not the priest part, though,” he finished awkwardly, and was ashamed that he had perhaps been tactless.

“I understand. You’d have no difficulty getting a certificate to teach grade school when you graduate from here. But a boy like you should really go to England, to university. It would be a nice thing if you could go with your friend Nicholas, wouldn’t it?”

Yes it would. But maybe Father didn’t know how little he had. Maybe he thought Patrick was another Nicholas.

But no. “You surely would be able to get a partial scholarship.”

That wouldn’t be enough. His thoughts flew, then stopped. No matter. Whatever he would need, it would be more than he could afford.

“Well, think about it,” Father Baker said as he stood up.

The new idea burned within Patrick in spite of himself. He did not speak of it to Nicholas, partly because he was a private person, even with his best friend, and partly because he was realistic and it made no sense to waste time talking of impossibilities. But he walked down to the wharf and watched the ships, even the interisland schooners, with a kind of longing that he had never felt before.

One evening at home something compelled him to speak. “My teacher said my paper about the Caribs was excellent.”

Agnes nodded. “Very fine. Very fine.”

“He thinks I ought to go to England. To university.”

“He does? Maybe he’ll give you the money for it?”

“I could get a partial scholarship.”

“And the rest?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t know either. I think you’ll stay here and get yourself a nice job and be grateful. Get foolish ideas out of your head.”

Patrick flushed. Yes, it was only a fancy, a thing to be dismissed. But it clung to him. And he thought of Mistress Ogilvie, herself barely educated, teaching by rote the kings and generals of Europe—nothing, incidentally, of that great “dark continent” on which her pupils had originated; he compared her with the masters at Boy’s Secondary and was shocked by the comparison. But if you were to set those masters beside the great scholars at Cambridge? What then? All the knowledge in the world, just bottled up in a few small places, uncorked for the few to drink! He thought of the laborers in the cane fields, who knew nothing. He wondered whether the folk in the great houses, men like old Mr. Kimbrough or—or the Tarboxes of Drummond Hall, for instance—might not, in their way, be as ignorant, knowing nothing much beyond the walls of their fine houses.

He felt a restless, cold discouragement.

“You want to go, don’t you?” Agnes asked abruptly one night.

“Go?” he repeated.

“To England! To university! What are we talking about?”

“We aren’t talking at all,” he said angrily, “because it’s not possible and I know it isn’t.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she said, a few days later.

“Right about what?” he asked, raising his head from his homework.

“Nothing. I was thinking out loud.” Then she resumed, “What I meant was, right not to talk about your going overseas.”

“I am right. And I don’t want to hear it again!”

“Don’t talk to me like that. I don’t like your sassy voice.”

He didn’t look up and she went out of the room.

But a week or two afterwards she said to him, “I’m going away for a while, closing the shop. There won’t be much to see to, but whatever there is you can see to it while I’m gone.”

His first thought was, She must suddenly be homesick for Martinique. “Where are you going, Maman?”

“To New York.”

“New York!” he cried, in astonishment.

He saw by her familiar sly smile that, in spite of her brusqueness, she was enjoying his surprise.

“Yes. I’ve business there.”

“Business in New York? How will you get there?”

“On a freighter.”

“Are you coming back, then?”

“Well, naturally I am! I have a little personal business, that’s all! Do I have to tell you everything?” she complained. Then she touched his head. “There’s nothing to worry about. You just stay here and do your work properly. I’ll come home in a few weeks. And when I do, things will be different.”

Teresa, long afterward, was to remember the day by its colors: dim greens blurred through an intermittent, melancholy rain over the low New Jersey hills. It was her habit to see places and persons in color: her husband a troubled, cloudy gray and her children rosy, tender as petals. Eleuthera had once been a blue luster, but was no more.

Now a scattering of amateurish, poorly focused snapshots
lay on the desk next to the window where she stood with her back to the room. Having been forced to glance at them, having touched them with her eyes, she had pulled away, as one pulls the hand from a hot surface.

“You don’t even want to look at him properly.” Agnes spoke quietly, yet Teresa felt challenge. “I’d like to know what you’re thinking right now. Yes, I’d like to know.”

Somewhere below, around the corner of the house, came the flutelike call of a child. Teresa trembled.

“I feel—I want to sink into a hole where no one could see me. Or get on a ship and go as far as it sails.”

“As far as it sailed it couldn’t take you far enough.”

Teresa turned around. “How did you find me here?”

“Easy enough. In the New York telephone book. And somebody said you were in the country for vacation week.”

“You always did know how to manage things.”

“I had to learn. I never had anyone to manage them for me.”

Delicately, without sound, Agnes placed the teacup in the saucer. Her feet, in their neat black shoes, were crossed at the ankles. Unobtrusively, she had already examined the room: the pale carpet, the marigolds in the dark-blue ginger jars and the photographs, these of an intimacy that belongs in an upstairs sitting room. Plainly she approved of what she saw.
Elevé au chapeau,
Teresa remembered suddenly, irrelevantly.

Agnes raised her eyes. “Don’t be afraid of me,” she said gently.

Afraid? No, terrorized. This must be the true experience of terror: the second before the fall through empty air … the strange footstep coming up the stairs at night …

“I’m not here to harm you. I could have talked long ago when I went back to the island, couldn’t I? But I’m not cruel, I’m a decent woman. Besides, I want to protect my son, my Patrick. You don’t think I want him to know the truth, do you?”

“Patrick,” Teresa repeated.

“Well, you never gave him a name. So that’s it, Patrick Courzon.”

“I didn’t know you had gone back home. Père never mentioned in his letters.”

“He saw the boy once. I took him there when he was three, then never again…. You’ve broken your necklace.”

Her cold, sweating hands had been twisting and twisting. Now blue beads rolled across the floor.

Agnes bent to pick them up. “Your nerves. But I keep telling you, I haven’t come to ruin you. What good would that do anyone? I only need help for him, for his education. He wants to go to Cambridge.”

Something throbbed and stabbed in Teresa’s head. That figure printed on film. That quick impression of tallness and thinness, of teeth, of a white shirt—all of it lived and had been taken out of her, was of her. And if someone had asked—but Agnes had just asked a moment ago!
What do you feel?
—she could have answered only, I feel ruin. I taste the poison. Nothing left: no children, no home, no
name.
Richard would—it did not bear thinking of, what Richard would do.

“Seventeen years!” she cried out. “After seventeen years you come to me with this! My God, do you know what you’re doing to me?”

Agnes said evenly, “Give me what I ask for, then, and I’ll never come near you again.”

Could one believe her?

“You do want to know what he looks like, don’t you? Only it’s hard for you to say so. All right, I’ll tell you. He has the Francis nose, like you and your grandfather. And he’s light. I’ve seen Italian sailors in Covetown not much fighter. I think really it’s only his hair that gives him away.”

Agnes had not oiled her hair that day; it coiled and crimped—one sensed the primitive, looking at that hair. Such curious and devious tracks does memory follow: one thought of drums, looking at that hair. Of drums? Years ago on the
plantations, so Père had said, you could hear them all day Sunday, and once the child Tee herself had seen the African dance, the heat and stamp of the calinda, powerful and hot.

She wiped her forehead, pulling herself back into the present. “I can get you the money. I will.”

Richard took charge of the investments and the bank accounts. But she could always sell a bracelet. There were so many of them. He bought too many expensive, unnecessary things.

“Yes, I’ll get it for you. Then you’ll leave me alone? After all, he’s yours, isn’t he, yours?”
It’s only his hair that gives him away.
“I have four children of my own, my husband’s and mine. Three girls.”
Long, silvery hair like limp silk on their shoulders.
“And my son, my first.”
My lovely boy, my strong and gentle boy; I have never said so and never will, but he knows and I know, he is my heart.
“I can’t let anything happen to them!” she cried harshly.

“Of course you can’t.”

“If—he—were ever to find out, it would all be over.” She flung her arms out. “He would pull this house down! He’s not the kind of man who would even try to understand … forgive …”

“What man is?” Agnes regarded her with grave, sad eyes. “I tell you, put this out of your mind. I was a mother to you, do you forget? More than Miss Julia ever was.”

“That’s true.” There was no real memory of Julia, other than a pastel presence. No joy, nor conflict, either. And Teresa thought, Is that, perhaps, why I am what I am? I suppose, if I cared enough, I could be analyzed—goodness knows it’s the fashionable thing to do these days—and then I would know; know, too, why I can be repelled by the Negro-ness of Agnes and a moment later find warmth and comfort in her.

“My little girl, Margaret, is retarded,” she said suddenly, not having intended to. “Not a normal child. She will never grow up.”

“I’m very sorry, Miss Tee.”

“You know, sometimes I’ve had the craziest idea—that she might be a punishment.”

Agnes nodded. “Not crazy. I’ve seen things like that.”

But of course it was crazy, absurd. Only a peasant from a place like St. Felice could believe it: a lingering atavism out of centuries long past, flitting through the mind in moments of gloom.

Agnes touched a photograph on a table. “Is this your husband? A handsome man.”

“Yes.” When she was angry, she thought of him with contempt. An advertisement for hand-tailored suits. A male flirt, a chaser.

She was not in a position to complain.

“You’re happy enough? He’s good to you?”

These were less questions than statements; the fine polish of the room, the long fields and graceful trees beyond the windows would, for someone like Agnes, who had nothing, very likely be compensation for almost anything.

“He’s good to me. I’m happy.”

For in his way, Richard was fond of her. The strange allure of the “different” young girl from the foreign island had long ago, and predictably, worn off, but he was basically kind and had, moreover, grown up among people who seldom divorced their wives. He had no reason—none that he knew of!—to desert her.