Green City in the Sun (2 page)

D
R
. T
REVERTON
?"

     Dr. Deborah awoke with a start. She saw the Pan Am flight attendant smiling down at her. Then she felt the shuddering of the plane which meant it was beginning its descent to Nairobi. "Yes?" she said to the young woman, shaking off the lingering effects of sleep.

     "We have received a message for you. You will be met at the airport."

     Deborah was breathless. "Thank you," she said. She closed her eyes again. She was tired. The flight had been a long one—twenty-six hours almost nonstop, with a change of planes in New York, a refueling in Nigeria. She was going to be met.
By whom?

     In her purse was the letter that she had received the week before at the hospital and which had taken her by surprise. It had come from Our Lady of Grace Mission in Kenya, which was requesting that Deborah come because Mama Wachera was dying and asking for her.

     "Why go back," Jonathan had said, "if you don't want to? Throw the letter away. Ignore it."

     Deborah had not replied. She had lain unable to speak in Jonathan's arms. He would never understand why she had to go back to Africa or why it frightened her to do so. It was because of the secret she had kept from him, the man she was going to marry.

     After Deborah had claimed her suitcase and gone through customs, she saw, in the crowd waiting on the other side of the guarded exit, a man holding a chalkboard with her name written on it. DR. DEBORAH TREVERTON.

     She stared at him. He was a tall, well-dressed African, Kikuyu, Deborah judged, the man the mission had sent to meet her. She walked past him and hailed one of the taxis lined up along the curb outside. This, Deborah hoped, would buy her additional time. Time in which to decide if she was really going to go through with it, go back to the mission and face Mama Wachera. The mission driver would report that Dr. Treverton had not come in on this flight, and so they wouldn't be expecting her. Not yet.

     "Who is this Mama Wachera?" Jonathan had asked as he and Deborah had watched the fog roll into San Francisco Bay.

     But Deborah hadn't told him. She had not been able to bring herself to say, "Mama Wachera is an old African medicine woman who put a curse on my family many years ago." Jonathan would have laughed, and he would have chided Deborah for the seriousness of her tone.

     But there was more. Mama Wachera was the reason why Deborah lived in America, the cause of her leaving Kenya. It all was tied up with the secret she kept from Jonathan, the chapter in her past which she would never talk about, not even after they were married.

     The taxi sped through darkness. It was two o'clock in the morning, black and chilly, with the equatorial moon peeping through branches of flattopped thorn trees. Overhead the stars were like dust. Deborah withdrew into her thoughts.
One step at a time
, she reminded herself. From the moment she had received the letter asking her to come, Deborah had moved only one step at a time, trying not to think of what lay beyond each of those steps.

     The first thing she had done was arrange with Jonathan to take care of her patients. They were in practice together, two surgeons sharing an office;
they had become business partners before deciding to become marital partners. Then Deborah had canceled her speaking engagement at the medical school and had arranged for someone else to chair the annual medical conference in Carmel. The appointments for next month she had let stand, confident that she would be home long before then.

     Finally Deborah had obtained a visa from the Kenya Embassy—she was a United States citizen now and no longer carried a Kenya passport—had purchased malaria pills, had received last-minute shots for cholera and yellow fever, and had, twenty-eight hours ago, miraculously, finally boarded the plane at the San Francisco airport.

     "Call me the instant you get to Nairobi," Jonathan had said as he had held her tightly at the departure gate. "And call me every day while you're there. Come back soon, Deb."

     He had kissed her, long and hard, in front of the other passengers, so unlike Jonathan, as if to give her an incentive to return.

     The taxi followed the dark, deserted highway and took a curve at high speed, its headlights sweeping over a roadside sign and briefly illuminating the words WELCOME TO NAIROBI, GREEN CITY IN THE SUN.

     Deborah felt a pang. It rocked her out of the numb state the long flight had lulled her into. She thought:
I have come home.

     The Nairobi Hilton was a golden column of light rising from the sleeping city. When the taxi drew up to the brightly lit entrance, the doorman, an African in maroon coat and top hat, hurried down to open Deborah's door. As she stepped into the cool February night, he said, "Welcome, madam," and Deborah found herself unable to reply.

     She was suddenly remembering. As a teenager she had accompanied her aunt Grace on shopping trips into Nairobi, and Deborah had stood on the sidewalk in those days gawking at the taxis pulling up to the fronts of fabulous hotels. Out of those cars
tourists
had stepped, amazing people from faraway places, decked out in cameras and stiff new safari khakis, surrounded by heaps of luggage, laughing, excited. Young Deborah had stared, fascinated, wondering about them, envying them, wishing she could be part of their wonderful world. And now here she was, paying a taxi driver and following the doorman up marble steps to the polished glass doors he held open for her.

     It made Deborah feel sorry for that young girl.
How wrong she had been.

     The people behind the front desk all were African and young, dressed in smart red uniforms and speaking perfect English. All the girls, Deborah saw, wore their hair in tight cornrow braids, twisted into intricate birdcage styles. She also saw what they chose to ignore: their receding hairlines. By middle age these young women would be nearly bald—the price for high Kenya fashion.

     They welcomed Dr. Treverton warmly. She smiled back but spoke little, taking refuge behind her facade. Deborah didn't want them to know the truth about her, didn't want to give herself away with her British accent. The desk clerks saw a slender woman in her early thirties, looking very American in blue jeans and western shirt. What they did not know was that she was not American at all, but pure Kenyan like themselves, who spoke their native language as easily as they spoke it.

     There was a basket of fresh fruit waiting in her room, and the bed had been turned down; a chocolate mint in silver foil lay on the pillow. A note from the management said,
"lala salama,"
"sleep well."

     As the porter pointed to the bathroom, the minibar, and the TV, Deborah went through the money she had obtained from the cashier downstairs, trying to recall the current exchange rate. She tipped the man twenty shillings and saw by his smile that it was too much.

     And then she was alone.

     She went to the window and looked out. There was not much to see, just the dark shapes of a city folded up for the night. It was quiet, with not much traffic and not a pedestrian in sight. Nairobi, which Deborah had said goodbye to fifteen years ago.

     On that day an angry and terrified Deborah, just eighteen years old, had vowed never to set foot in this country again and had walked onto the airplane determined to find herself a new home, a new place in the sun. She had worked hard in the following years to create a new self and to put behind her this Africa, which was in her blood. Deborah had found an ending at last in San Francisco, in Jonathan. There she had found a place where she could belong, a man who could be her sanctuary.

     And then the letter had come. How had the nuns found her? How had
they known the hospital where she worked, that she was even in San Francisco? The sisters at the mission must have gone to a lot of trouble and expense to find her. Why? Because that old woman was dying at last?

     
Why ask for
me? Deborah mentally asked her reflection in the window.
You always hated me, Mama Wachera, always resented me because I was a Treverton.

     
What have
I
to do with your final moments on earth?

     "Urgent," the letter had said. "Come at once."

     Deborah rested her forehead against the cold glass. She was remembering her last days in Kenya and the terrible thing the medicine woman had said to her. With the memory came all the old pain and sickness Deborah thought she had rid herself of.

     She went into the bathroom and turned on the bright light. After running hot water into the bathtub and scenting it with the Nivea bath foam the Hilton provided, she turned to look at herself in the mirror.

     This was Deborah's final face, after so many, and she was satisfied with it. Fifteen years ago, when she had first arrived in America, her skin had been darkly tanned, her black hair curled short under the ears, and her clothing had been a simple sleeveless dress of Kenya cotton and sandals. Now the skin was pale, as white as she could make it, from years of pointedly avoiding the sun, and the hair was ironing-board straight, gathered in a gold clasp and flat down her back. The shirt and jeans had designer labels, as did the expensive running shoes. She had worked hard to look American, to look white.

     Because she was white, she reminded herself now.

     And then she thought of Christopher. Would he recognize her?

     After her bath Deborah wrapped her long, wet hair in a towel and went to sit on the edge of the bed. She found she was not ready for sleep; there had been enough of that on the plane.

     She picked up her carry-on bag, which she had not let out of her sight since leaving San Francisco. Besides containing her passport, return ticket, and traveler's checks, the bag held something more precious, and Deborah drew it out now and laid it on the bed beside her.

     It was a small package of brown paper and string. She picked open the
wrapping and separated the contents: an envelope of faded photographs, a bundle of old letters tied with a ribbon, and a journal.

     She stared at them.

     This was Deborah's legacy, all that she had come away with in her flight from Africa, all that was left of the once proud—and infamous—Treverton family. The photos she had not looked at since collecting them into this envelope and sealing it fifteen years ago; the letters she had not read again since that awful day when Mama Wachera had spoken those words to her; and the journal, an old and battered leather volume begun sixty-eight years ago, Deborah had never read. Stamped in gold on its cover was the name TREVERTON.

     A name that was magic in Kenya. Deborah had recognized the expressions on the faces of the young Africans downstairs when she had checked in: the brief, startled look when she had said her name, then the moment of staring at her, of being enchanted for an instant, followed by the inevitable shuttering, the retreat behind a fixed smile to mask the hatred and resentment because of the
other
things the Trevertons had stood for. Deborah had been used to those looks as a child; she was not really surprised to find them here still.

     There was a time when the name Treverton had been worshiped in Kenya. Deborah's hotel stood near a wide street that had once been Lord Treverton Avenue. Today it was Joseph Gicheru Street, named for a Kikuyu who had been martyred for independence. And the taxi had passed what had once been Treverton High School, and Deborah had seen the new sign which said MAMA WANJIRU HIGH SCHOOL.

     
It's as if
, Deborah thought,
they are trying to erase our memory from the face of the earth.

     But no amount of "Kenyanizing," Deborah knew, was going to obliterate the Trevertons from this country. They were too ingrained, too much a part of its soul, its destiny. The mission where Mama Wachera lay dying was called Our Lady of Grace Mission, the name the Catholic sisters had given to it when they received it from Deborah's aunt many years ago. But before that it had been simply Grace Mission, named for the woman who had founded it, Grace Treverton, famous pioneer of public health in Kenya.

     Dr. Grace Treverton, a legend as large as her flamboyant brother the earl, had founded the mission sixty-eight years ago, in the wilderness of the Central Province. She was the woman who had reared Deborah in the place of a real mother, and she had gone to her grave with formidable secrets locked in her heart. Aunt Grace had lived through it all, Deborah knew; she had witnessed and been part of every Treverton triumph and shame, had seen Kenya rise and fall and rise again.

     Deborah reached out and touched the items on the bed; she was almost afraid of them. The photos—she barely remembered who the people in them were.
Christopher as a youth. But not as a man. I regret that.
And the letters—Deborah recalled in them only the few, devastating lines. Lastly, the journal, all that was left of Aunt Grace's legacy.

     Deborah had never read the journal. At the time of Grace's death she had been too grief-stricken to open it; later she had turned her back on the family and the past this book represented and contained.

     She picked it up now and held it between her hands.

     She imagined she felt an energy emerge from it. The Trevertons! In public a beautiful people, rich beyond imagining, members of nobility, gay polo-playing society leaders, primary movers in East Africa; but in private tormented by secrets, by a poor boy's affliction that was the family disgrace, by a sensational trial that had made headlines around the world, by forbidden loves and lusts, and by darker secrets yet—rumors even of human sacrifice and murder.

     And of superstitions—Mama Wachera and her curse.

     
And Christopher
, Deborah wondered.
My handsome, gentle Christopher. Were we, too, victims of the Treverton family's fate?

     Deborah opened the envelope and drew out the photographs. There were seven of them, the one on top having been taken back in 1963, just before Kenya's independence and the end of the world as she had known it. It was a group snapshot, taken with an old Box Brownie. Four children had been arranged according to height: Christopher was the tallest, being the oldest—eleven. Next to him was Sarah, his little sister, the same age as Deborah, who was eight and who stood in the middle. Last came Terry Donald, ten years old and even then a robust little boy in khaki hunting outfit.