Prospero's Daughter (10 page)

We stayed for a while at the doctor’s house. As you said, he asked no questions, but he does not need me. The patients here can take care of themselves, and the doctor, though quite old, is more than enough for the few who may need his help.

I have now found a better house for Virginia and me. It is not England, but it is not uncomfortable. I am, as it were, lord again of my own manor. I have a housekeeper, who does my cooking and cleaning. I don’t think she is long for this world, but she has a daughter who helps.

Yes, and there is a boy, Carlos. He gabbles like a thing most brutish. Hardly language, as you and I would call it. A sort of English, I think he means it to be, with dats and dises and deres. No ths whatsoever, and not a verb to match its subject.

Maybe I’m not altogether out of the business of improving the lot of humans, though at this moment I would hardly call the little savage human. Maybe I shall teach him to speak so at least he’ll know his own meaning. We shall see. But he makes an amusing playmate for Virginia. She is quite taken with him.

Give me news about the situation at the hospital. Do you think the matter will blow away soon?

Yours always in trust and gratitude,

Your brother,

Peter

For eight months he did not hear from Paul. He wrote to him again and the letter came back, unopened, the envelope stamped with the words
Return to Sender. Addressee Unknown.
He wrote again, four more letters. All returned. Addressee unknown. Then this one, the last. When he saw the date, he knew he had been betrayed. March 15. The Ides of March.
Et tu Brute?

March 15, 1951

Lancashire

Dear Peter,

This is the last letter I will write to you, and I suggest you cease writing to me. Though I know you have been careful to mail my letters to people who could post them to me from other countries, it is still dangerous to send them. Your letters may be traced. I do not like being questioned, either. The postman mentioned to me the other day that he has noticed I get foreign letters without a return address. It will only be a matter of time before he tells that to the authorities.

Yes, I have many friends. People like me, the postman likes me, but loyalty and friendship cost money. I can bribe the postman. I have bribed your colleagues already. They take the money as a cat laps milk and have sworn to secrecy about your experiments.

Did you really think, Peter, you could grow limbs in a test tube? My God, what you did to those animals! One of your colleagues showed me a rat with six legs. Were you mad?

But now they have the money, your colleagues will keep your secrets, though I may need to pay off those who may still want more. Promise a man enough money and he’ll tell the clock the time. He will swear eight o’clock if you tell him that that was the time when you were in such and such a place. Those grand doctors who used to drink with me and think me foolish and you the genius now do my bidding. Money, my dear Peter, talks and walks. You would not think how much they praise me now. There is no better doctor in London, they say. Fools!

Here it is, Peter: I have taken the house in Lancashire, the money the parents left you, and your bank account, what was left of your bank account after I paid out the bribes. Remember, you transferred everything to me. Of course, I am aware of our agreement. But, my dear brother, I have no intentions of returning your money to you, or giving you back your house.

You asked if I thought “the matter” would blow away soon. It will never blow away, dear brother. That woman’s husband and her family will hunt you down forever. So it is no use thinking you can come back. There is no coming back for you.

But, perhaps, you think I should send you some money. Let me tell you this, brother. You have no estate. Your estate is mine. I feel sorry for your daughter. I feel sorry that because of you she is stuck in that savage place. But she will be able to leave one day, when she is old enough. A bit of advice, brother. Marry her to an Englishman. He will bring her back and restore to her what you have deprived her of. But you can never leave. Not ever. Don’t trouble your mind with that thought. I will be the first to turn you in.

I do not feel sorry for you, Peter. I never liked you. You always thought you were better than me and so did Father. Now see who has the last laugh.

Conscience? Surely a man who has no conscience cannot ask me such a question. But if you were to ask, Peter, here is my answer. If my conscience were a corn on my big toe, I would wear special shoes. But the truth is, I do not feel that deity that so many claim troubles their souls. I feel no guilt. Indeed, I think I deserve what I now possess, as you deserve your exile.

Take heart, dear brother. What’s past is prologue. The future is yours to discharge, as it is mine. Now that I have the means, I will make the best of mine. Make the best of yours. You have your books.

Paul.

He could recite the letter by heart. He had read it at least a hundred times.
You have your books.
All he had were two volumes of
The Complete
Works of Shakespeare,
a couple of science texts, and some novels. He wanted to take more but Paul said no. “Too much baggage. You’re a man on the run.”

The ribbon lay on his lap. He picked it up and retied the letters. His head ached, his eyes stung. The sun had all but descended. There were embers still, but the day was over. Done.

What’s past is prologue.
He had his red leather-bound book; he had his notes; he had the formulas for his inventions.

“Ariana!” He called for her. “Ariana! Don’t you hear me call?”

She came softly, a leaf floating on a breeze.

He was sleepy, so sleepy. The marijuana. His brother.

She touched his arm to stir him.

“Patricia?” He was thinking of his wife. “Patricia?” He reached up and stroked her cheek.

“You love me, Master? No?” she asked.

Not alabaster skin. Not Patricia. Brown. Too brown to be alabaster skin
tanned brown.

“Ariana?”

“You love me, no, Master?”

He sighed. “Dearly. Dearly, my delicate Ariana.”

FIVE

THEY HAD ALSO seen the sunset. At first Mumsford thought Carlos had not noticed it. He had not moved nor uttered a single word since they had entered the car that was waiting for them at the dock in Trinidad. He sat with his back erect, his arms folded stiffly across his duffel bag and looked straight ahead of him, no expression on his face except a dour rigidity.

Mumsford was certain it was all a pretense; he was convinced the boy was afraid. He had to be. He was in the custody of a police inspector—an Englishman—accused by another Englishman of improper advances to his daughter. The politics were changing in Trinidad, but the island was still a colony of England in spite of the saber rattling.
Machete rattling.
Mumsford grinned, for that was what he thought of the protest gatherings in the town square, mere machete rattling that England could suppress whenever she wanted to.

It bothered him that England did not seem to want to, that she seemed ready to cave in, that she had lost her will to fight back. But he was not blind to the cost of the war with Germany. Resources, what remained of resources, had to be conserved, used for reconstruction. Still, there were colored people in Trinidad who would fight for England, who would give more credence to what an Englishman said than to anything one of their own would counter. That much Mumsford understood about the workings of colonialism, how a tiny island like his had managed to rule the world.

It was simple actually: a matter of changing the native’s sense of the beautiful, a matter of controlling the mind. Even now the films the people rushed to see in the cinemas popping up all over the island reinforced the message: white skin was beautiful; blue, green, gray eyes were beautiful; blond hair was beautiful; straight black or brown hair was beautiful; curly hair without kinks was beautiful. Even now in the schools it was English history the teachers taught, the English way. Always the heroes were English, always the achievements and accomplishments were theirs.

Give the native something to strive for: your beauty, your accomplishments. An impossible goal for him to achieve, but his yearnings will keep him loyal.

What was Carlos thinking? Did he think the monks would save him? Did he think they would believe his word over the word of an Englishman?

Yet Mumsford was wary. The monks were known to be do-gooders. The poor flocked to them by the hundreds. The rich came, too, frightened by a world tumbling backward since the end of the war: traditions, the social order of respect for elders, respect for those in charge—the English who had helped them secure their fortunes— unraveling, falling apart.

The monks had opened a boarding school for boys in the early fifties. By the time the new decade began, it was overcrowded. A new music and a new movement, hippies, were pulling children away from their parents. Now not only Indian farmers smoked ganja rolled into fat cigars, the sons of the rich did, too.

Perhaps, Mumsford thought, the commissioner had sent his recalcitrant son to the monks. But what if the monks had taken his son’s side over his side? Mumsford glanced again at Carlos. His face was a mask, immobile.

He would not be intimidated; he would not allow the boy with his implacable exterior to throw his imagination into a tailspin. The commissioner’s decision made sense. He understood his purpose. Accusing a black boy of assaulting an English girl would be suicide given the politics in Trinidad. Better to hide behind the monks’ skirts, better to have them do the accusing.

The monks belonged to the order of the Benedictines who were fleeing from religious persecution in Brazil. They had come to the island in 1912. When they arrived, like other orders of monks, they searched for a hill. They found it above the village of Tunapuna. Mount Tabor. Halfway through the century, few people remembered its name. Mount St. Benedict, the little mountain came to be known.

It was up this mountain that the car bearing Mumsford and Carlos was winding its way, curling around the tight bends of the narrow road that in parts dropped suddenly to precipices so steep Mumsford held his breath, resisting the urge to ask the driver to slow down for fear he would think him a coward. He had seen him look into the rearview mirror, exchanging glances with Carlos, and though Carlos’s face remained unchanged and the driver had said not a single word, Mumsford was certain that a current of empathy had passed between them.

Well, let them feel sorry for each other. Mumsford gritted his teeth and looked resolutely in front of him. The sun was descending, and its last rays glittered over the tall palm trees that lined the road, casting a fretwork of light and dark patches on the ground beneath them. When the car rounded a bend that faced westward, Mumsford caught a glimpse of the descending sun. It was only a glimpse, but a glimpse so arresting that in spite of his resolution, he was pulled to it, and for the remainder of the trip, it was not forward he looked, but backward.

He had seen nothing like it before, the flaming colors, yes, but not the white light, electric under charcoal-gray clouds: a halo. It had so frightened Gardner he shut his eyes and pleaded for vindication.

Only in paintings had Mumsford seen such radiance, such luminescence, which would have blinded him were it not trapped in oils, were it not confined over renderings of saints, over pictures of the Virgin Mary and of the risen Christ. The radiance almost blinded him now. It pierced his soul and set him off thinking of the power of God, of the reward He rendered to the good and the innocent, and the punishment He doled out to the bad and the guilty. Like Gardner, at that very moment, he thought of Carlos, and glancing over to him saw that he, too, was looking back, transfixed as he had been by the sunset. Mumsford breathed in deeply and slowly let out his breath, glad he was on his way to take the boy to a monastery and not to jail, as Gardner had wished.

Brother St. Clair was waiting for them outside the front door of the rectory. When the car pulled to a stop, he came running toward them, his face shining with excitement, his arms extended, the wide sleeves of his bright white cassock spread out like wings. He was a short, plump man, a caricature of a monk, a Friar Tuck with a monk’s tonsure encircling his balding head and a belly that rolled over a brown rope tied below his waist and jiggled as he rushed out to meet them. “Did you see it? Did you see it?”

Mumsford was already out of the car. He held out his hand and the monk wrapped his fingers tightly around it. “God’s sign,” the monk said and cast his eyes upward.

And if the sunset was God’s sign, Mumsford thought, looking around him, then this place, this particular spot, was His paradise. Not for the first time since he had come to live in Trinidad was he forced to admit that there were some compensations, that besides the social advantages, sometimes the landscape pleasantly surprised, sometimes it was reward enough. In front of him was a breathtaking panorama of shapes and colors tumbling down the hillside and spreading wide across green plains to the sea. A cluster of tiny houses, broken here and there by larger residences, clung to the hillsides, and beyond, a dizzying array of villages. To the west, the city of Port of Spain, its highest building— the skyscraper it was called, though less than twenty stories high— loomed above an entanglement of pretty-colored buildings and narrow streets. At its border the blue sea glistened, bloodied by the sunset.

Mumsford pointed to the railing at the edge of the sheer drop. “May I?” he asked the monk.

“Of course, of course.”

And for more than a few minutes, standing behind the railing, both men seemed to forget Carlos.

“The Gulf of Paria,” the monk said, indicating the sea. “Not so long ago, Gulfo de Ballena, Gulf of the Whales. Then the Japanese came with their trawlers looking for lobster and shrimp. They dredged the seabed and the whales swam northward.”

It sounded like a made-up story. Mumsford pressed his lips together and turned to the east, to the grasslands.

“The Aripo Savannah,” the monk said, following the line of Mumsford’s head. “It’s dry now because of
la sécheresse,
this terrible drought, but green most of the year. If you look farther you will see the Caroni Swamp. Now all manner of fowl nest there in the mangrove, crustaceans, too, but not for long.” He sighed and his chin sank into his collarbone. “If they don’t control the hunters and those people who come here from overseas to gawk, the birds will disappear. Just like the
ballena.
”

The monk did not accuse him, of course. He did not say he was one of the hunters, or one of those people from overseas, not even the “they” who should be protecting the fowl and the crustaceans, but his pious tone grated against Mumsford’s nerves. The goodwill that had overtaken him began to slip away.

“It’s sad to see . . .” the monk began again.

“The boy,” Mumsford stopped him before he could finish. “I’ve brought Carlos Codrington.”

“Yes, yes.” The monk wiped his hands nervously down the sides of his cassock, and the rope from his belt swung back and forth against his thick thigh.

“The commissioner said you would be expecting him.”

“Yes, the boy.” The monk looked embarrassed, ashamed of his outburst.

“I’ll get him now,” Mumsford said. But before he could take a step forward, the monk touched his arm.

“He’s doing the right thing,” the monk said.

“He?”

“The commissioner.”

Mumsford felt cross again. He had not come there for the monk’s approval. Not with the best motives he said, as he walked with the monk toward the car, “You have a castle here.”

It wasn’t a castle. It was a chapel, a tall rectangular tower that rose high above a sprawling collection of two- and three-storied cream-colored buildings topped with red roofs. Behind the buildings, the jungle climbed farther up the mountain, thick, dense, and lush, even now in the dry season.

“We began with a tapia hut,” the monk said, almost apologetically. And Mumsford regretted his malice, for it was an incredible feat of imagination and determination to have constructed such a grand building, no small thing to have put the monastery there, to have cut through the mountain, hacked down the jungle, and kept the constantly encroaching vegetation at bay. It wasn’t a castle, but it looked as magnificent as a castle.

“The commissioner has always admired what the monks have done,” he said, ashamed of his insolence. “He appreciates your help with the boy.”

The monk was pleased. “Where is he? Let’s have a look at him.” The car door was open, but Carlos had not come out.

Mumsford tilted his head to one side and jerked it forward toward the car. The monk understood and peered into the car’s interior. “Come.” He waved his hand, urging Carlos to join them. “Come. We won’t hurt you.”

But he was not prepared for what he saw when Carlos emerged. He flinched. His cheeks lost color. “What? What?” he stammered. He spun around to Mumsford. “His face. My God! The sores! What on God’s earth?” The words came out of his mouth in a jumble.

Inside the monastery Mumsford did his best to explain.

“Has he no heart?” the monk asked.

“He was afraid for his daughter,” Mumsford said.

They were standing close to each other in the sparsely furnished reception room. Four wood-framed Morris chairs fitted with stiff burgundy cushions were arranged around a plain wood cocktail table on which were a Bible and a collection of religious magazines. Except for an enormous crucifix facing the door, the white walls were bare.

Carlos was sitting on one of the Morris chairs. The monk had invited Mumsford to sit, too, but he had declined. He didn’t want to sit; he didn’t want to stay with the boy longer than was necessary. He felt drained. Having to recount to the monk what he had witnessed in Gardner’s backyard had drained him. He was anxious to go, to leave the boy in the monk’s hands and return to the normalcy of his house. His mother would have been back; she would have given the cook instructions on what to make for his supper. Perhaps they would have roast lamb with mint tonight, and baked potatoes. He had left her a note, put it in her room before he went to Chacachacare. He had not requested roast lamb and baked potatoes, but he had told her about the ants, that someone had left crumbs on the polished floor of his study. He was a respectful son; he didn’t say that someone was she, but he knew she would get his meaning. Lamb for supper would be her way of making amends. Buoyed by these pleasant thoughts of what awaited him, he chose to disregard the grimace that intensified on Carlos’s face the more he struggled to find the right words to explain to the monk that Dr. Gardner had wanted only to protect his daughter, that she was all he had in the world.

“But I was led to understand that nothing happened to the girl,” the monk said.

“If Dr. Gardner had not prevented him, who knows what could have happened.”

Carlos made a fist with one hand and pushed it into the open palm of his other hand, grinding it around slowly. This time it was not as easy for Mumsford to ignore him.

“And this is what he did?” The monk, too, was looking at Carlos. “Shame, shame on him.”

Mumsford twirled his pith helmet between his hands. He wanted to say that Carlos had given Dr. Gardner some cause, that he had taunted him, but he could not say so in good faith. His conscience would not let him. “The commissioner is indebted to you,” he said to the monk.

The monk had not taken his eyes off Carlos. “How old are you?” he asked him.

Carlos did not answer.

“Seventeen,” Mumsford said.

“Just a boy,” the monk murmured.

“We are grateful,” Mumsford said. “The commissioner did not want to put him in jail with the older men.”

“But you don’t have proof . . .”

“Maybe I’ll get a chance to speak to Dr. Gardner’s daughter tomorrow,” Mumsford said. “She is here. In Trinidad.”

Carlos’s leg slid forward and the sole of his shoe squeaked against the polished wood floor. Both men heard it; both men were fully aware that Carlos was paying careful attention to what they were saying, but for Mumsford there was special meaning in Carlos’s sudden, agitated movement. For it was when he mentioned that Dr. Gardner’s daughter was in Trinidad that the boy sat up and his leg jerked forward.