Jane (29 page)

“I will explain this at another time. Is that all right, Tarzan?”

He nodded, then said, “My mother is Alice.”

“That’s right.”

“My mother is Alice Clayton.”

My mother
was
Alice Clayton,
I wanted to correct him. But I could not bring myself to make a grammatical point that might remind Tarzan of his loss.

“Why don’t we read more some other day?” I suggested, and after a considerable moment of thought, he agreed.

*   *   *

I could see that Tarzan was mesmerized by the stories of his mother and father and the innermost workings of their hearts. He would sit alone staring out at the sea mouthing words or phrases he remembered from the journal. I tried to avoid disturbing his thoughts, for it seemed to me he was piecing together all that he knew of Zu-dak-lul with everything he had learned from the diary:
Fuwalda,
Great Henry, writing table, Heaven and Earth.

“Beloved,” I heard him whisper as he sat below the hut cleaning a fish he had caught for our dinner, “I love her to distraction.”

We were scouring the beach for small delectable crabs and the long strands of salty seaweed I had come to enjoy.

“Tell me about your mother,” he said.

“
My
mother?” The question took me by storm. Where to begin? How could I make Tarzan understand the complexity of emotions I had for her? Here was a man who had known feelings for his two mothers, deep and purely loving, unsullied by resentment or contentious battles. Mothers who had urged him to his full potential, whether swimming or climbing or wrestling, whereas mine had straitjacketed me in innumerable ways. Her social etiquette was intolerable. She was stubborn to a fault. And yet I had, from the earliest days of my childhood, been altogether certain of her maternal affections. Too, she had in the end given her permission for me to come to Africa—a courageous act by any standards.

“My mother’s name is Samantha,” I finally said. “Like your mother Alice, she is very beautiful. Her eyes are green and her skin is very fair. Many people say my features ‘resemble’ hers”—I touched my eyes and nose and mouth—“meaning they are very much like hers. The same way your features resemble your father’s.”

“So you are beautiful, too. Like your mother.”

I marveled at Tarzan’s improving skills of logic, even as I acknowledged the compliment with a shy nod.

“She and my father were married for many years.”

“What is ‘married’?”

“Uh…” I stalled for time, scooping up a long strand of seaweed and winding it around my arm, but I could see that Tarzan was eager for an answer. How could I ever begin to explain the typical marriages of our society? Here was an institution that was in almost all instances abhorrent to me. There were exceptions, of course. My parents had wed for love’s sake, and apparently John and Alice Clayton’s arranged union had blossomed into deep affection.

I would, I decided, simply avoid any explanation of forced marriages whose sole purpose was the enrichment in fortune or status, or the continuity of a family’s high and mighty bloodline. I would describe only the romantic ideal.

“When a
tar-zan
man and woman love each other,” I began as though treading on a path of broken glass, “they give each other rings.” I pointed to the gold band on Tarzan’s little finger, “like your mother and father did. The man and woman promise to live together in the same
walla
all through their lives. They … mate … and have many children—
balu.
”

I sighed, wondering how so simple a sentence could be fraught with such huge and labyrinthine ideas. Tarzan had grown silent, contemplating my explanation. I shuddered at the thought that he might ask me next what love was.

How on earth would I answer him? What did I know of love? I was probably the only person alive who found
Romeo and Juliet
preposterous—two children who, in the course of several days, conceive a passion so violent that they would rather die than live without each other. I’d always assumed their affair was simple lust, wallpapered over with flowery words and chivalric ideals. Suddenly I realized with horror that any explanation of married love would certainly entail some mention of the sex act, and I began to flush red remembering those wild gropings in the Waziri hut. Here before me was a man of primordial desires but possessing no more than a childish grasp of emotion.

And suddenly I was faced with the most embarrassing irony: When it came to the subjects of love and passion, I was no less naïve than Tarzan of the Jungle.

He helped me fill the skirt of my shift with the crabs, and we started up the beach for the hut. To my great relief, no further mention of marriage or love was made.

*   *   *

Tarzan had asked if I would read him more of the journal. This time he sat on the floor of the hut with his back up against the bed in which he had been born. When he closed his eyes I knew he was ready to begin. He was picturing it all as I read, I thought, teasing from his lost memories the faces of his parents, imagining his mother on the beach at Zu-dak-lul bending to gather sticks of driftwood, his father cooking a crab and coconut stew. How I blessed them, John and Alice Clayton, for leaving this warm and brilliant record, illuminating for their child that which would otherwise have left him blind and groping in the dark, bereft of his beginnings.

Further, I apprehended that this young man had been raised in his earliest days by parents who shared the exact sensibilities, society, and intelligence as my own. Had Tarzan been born John Clayton in England, I might have known him, sipped tea with him, perhaps even had him put forward as a suitor. The thought took my breath away.

“Read, Jane,” he said.

“
Please
read, Jane,” I corrected him, then caught myself
. By ingrained habit I am turning him into a gentleman of manners, the kind of person I most abhor in the world.
I smiled when he did not obey my correction. He might come to speak the King’s English, one day come to be a man of the world, but he knew his own mind. He was still Tarzan. I would never, I realized with certainty, wish him otherwise.

18 September 1886

John has insisted on keeping a calendar, simple marks with his Bowie knife upon a wooden plank, and by his reckoning, Johnnie is one year old today. Not much in the way of celebration, just a “Happy Birthday” song. Our boy, having never heard both his parents singing at once to him (I croon him all his lullabies), began to giggle madly, putting his fingers to our mouths to quiet us. But we wouldn’t quiet, and sang it again, even louder. He fell about laughing and rolling in the sand, parroting the words “Happy Birthday,” which he repeated all day long. For a present, John carved him a boat with three sails, but the waves were too rough to set it in the water. Otherwise the day was like any other.

My favorite times are when John reads to me while I feed my child. I know full well that women of my station never dream of suckling their infants. That is the job of a wet nurse. Most would grant that a “Mrs. Robinson Crusoe” cast away on a desert shore, having none to serve for this task, must take it on herself and, while pitying me, would not chastise me, for the child needs feeding. What would scandalize the matrons and disgust brides-to-be is my passionate love of having my son drink from my milk-swollen breasts and the pleasure of his peaceful, contented gaze into my own. At first he was ravenous, fastening hard and biting my nipples till they grew red and sore. But I sang to him, rocked him in the chair by the window, and soon he softened, knowing his wants would always be met. It is a miracle to me, and one on which I had never spent a second thought, that a mother’s milk is all a child needs to live. That my body provides rich sustenance, a fountain of life. Oh, they would be scandalized, my cousins and friends, even my mother, to hear such ruminations, but they are all far away. My child, however, is close as he can be, and my husband, too, head tilted down at the book as he reads me
Romeo and Juliet,
my favorite of the Bard’s plays.

“My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee

The more I have, for both are infinite.”

It seems outrageous. Dare I say it? I am content.

Written on our son’s happy birthday on the beach in Gabon,

Alice Clayton

17 January 1888

I have few complaints except, perhaps, the monotony of food. Our stores from the ship are long gone and now we eat only what is at hand. I have fashioned a long pole allowing me, from the roof of our hut and various branches of the baobab, to knock coconuts down that would have taken longer to fall, so we have all the milk and meat of that fruit that we desire. I’m frankly sick of fish and would give my eyeteeth for a slab of rare beef and a pile of roasted potatoes. Bread pudding with hard sauce, a glass of aged port.

Enough of that. Johnnie is doing marvelously well, sharp as a whip. Alice and I split his day, me with my “manly chores,” she with lessons. He loves his books. At three he’s learned to read and knows his numbers. The child is a chatterbox and can barely be silenced. If he is not reading aloud, he is singing. If not singing, then spouting off the thoughts in his head—what he sees, what he hears, what he imagines, what he wonders. He is a gushing fount of questions. Why does the fish stop moving when you knock it on the head? Why is the sun yellow in the day and orange as it sets? How many crabs are in the sea? Why do birds fly? When they dive into the water, how do they always come up with a fish in their beaks? Why does Mummy have breasts, and not me? And on and on …

The only way I can silence him is by working him, and even at three, he is quite a good apprentice. He has learned to hammer a nail, however crooked. He is a patient fisherman and has caught a great many of our dinners. He is a prodigious collector of crabs and turtle eggs and does not mind handling the slimy seaweed, which Alice prefers not to do. To her horror, I have allowed Johnnie to place his little hand around the grip of my Bowie knife, for one day he must learn to wield the blade, though I draw the line with my machete. This I wield with some violence in order to chop coconuts in half. Alice holds him in her lap as I swing downward, hoping to split it cleanly, catching the milk in a bowl below, and as many times, like a circus clown, I miss it altogether (on purpose, to give them a show and a giggle).

But our favorite times, Johnnie’s and mine, are swimming in the sea. He is fearless of the water and shrieks with delight as I carry him through the breakers to the calm. I do admit a certain worry as I release him and push backward away from him, watching his doggy paddle, the excited grin, the shining eyes, he waiting for the moment I say, “Come on, Johnnie, swim to me. You can do it!” Then he comes, splashing arm over arm, legs kicking wildly. He’s fast and strong, my boy, and when he reaches my arms he laughs triumphant, holding me tight and kissing my face.

Written with pride and happiness from a beach in Gabon,

John Clayton

30 March 1888

Our boy is very agile. Today John took him to the roof of the hut and, standing below the lowest overhanging limb of the baobab, allowed him to reach up and grab on, instructing him to throw a leg over and pull himself up and onto the bough. How pleased Johnnie was to be sitting there! His father followed, and together, very carefully, with John the safety net, me with my heart in my throat, they climbed their first tree.

John and I did not hear the end of it all day, how high he had gone, the bird nests into which he peeked, the lizards he saw that changed colors from red to green to brown. And the question: What would happen if he fell from such a height? Johnnie babbled all through supper and was only quieted as a storm came thundering upon us from the sea.

There were great explosions of lightning and waves crashing far up on the beach below. We three pushed back in the corner of our bed, John holding an arm around each of us, pulling us tight and weaving stories of flying horses and brave guardian angels so that, as the tornado roared overhead, there never was a moment that we were gripped by fear, but rather swam in our private sea of happiness, contentment, and love.

Written on a peaceful morning after the storm,

Alice Clayton

*   *   *

It was not all about lessons or reading from the journal, our time at the edge of the world. Tarzan and I swam every day in the sea, and I grew stronger. We played in the waves when they were gentle, one morning diving below to follow after an ancient turtle studded with barnacles, its paddle-shaped feet speeding it out from the dappled sunlit shallows into the depths of a blue-black abyss.

Tarzan would race the length of the beach, glorying in the space and freedom unknown in the forest or jungle. I found I could not tear my eyes from the sight of his magnificence. He was more beautiful and more dear to me with every passing day.

“You run, Jane,” he commanded me one afternoon. “You run.”

I hesitated. Had I ever run before? A little girl was taught to walk with proper composure. A young lady might leap about in short bursts after a tennis ball. But to run unhindered with the wind in her hair? It was unheard of.

He was standing there waiting for my answer. “We’ll run together, side by side,” I said.

Tarzan’s smile was mischievous. He sat himself down in the sand. “I will watch you run.”

“No!” I cried, suddenly shy at the thought of this handsome voyeur appraising my nearly naked body in motion. I pulled him to his feet. “You will run with me.”

And so, with this mighty athlete at my side, I ran for the pure joy of it, racing the length of the Gabonese beach till my thighs ached and my lungs burned. Ran until we fell laughing onto the sand.

That night the air was thick with salted wind, and I fell into a restless sleep, dreaming of my father. We were in the sea together, he a distance away calling, “Come on, swim to me, sweetheart!” His wide-open face beamed, and the spray glinted like chipped diamonds around his long, curly hair. I stroked toward him with smooth grace, relishing the moment he would catch me up and praise my efforts. Then in the sweetest collision I was in his arms, face-to-face. But when I looked up, it wasn’t Father. It was Tarzan, his grey eyes sparkling, his black mane curled and dripping around his broad shoulders. “Beloved,” he murmured, “I love you to distraction,” then he kissed me deeply, hungrily. In the cold water, flesh seared against naked flesh causing steam to rise all around us. My head swam and I drowned happily in his embrace … till I woke with a start, momentarily disoriented at my whereabouts.