Prospero's Daughter (16 page)

Lucinda was still alive but weak and in pain when Gardner announced that he was going to take Ariana under his wing, show her how to cook the English way. We were no longer to eat dasheen, yams, edoes, cassava, or any of the other tubers we called ground provisions. They were filthy, Gardner said. They grew in dirt. No garlic, either. No chives, no thyme, or any other green stuff, as he called it. He did not like fish. Rather, he liked fish, but not the way I used to like it. He wanted Ariana to stuff the fish with cubes of stale bread, or if she wanted to fry it, he wanted her to fillet it.

Poor Ariana had no idea what Gardner meant by fillet. He spent a morning showing her how, and when he was finished, there were bright red slits on each of her ten fingers.

Still, she wanted to please him. Lucinda had taught her to squeeze lime juice over the fish (“To cut the fresh, fishy taste”), but her fingers were so raw that she could not touch the rind of the lime without wincing.

“I sorry,” she apologized to Gardner, sucking her fingers in an attempt to dilute the sting of the lime. “I sorry I can’t lime it.”

“Lime it?” he hollered.

It was the last time we used lime to season our fish or our meats.

Little by little our food changed. Our only seasonings were salt and black pepper. We no longer ate rice. Too much starch, Gardner said. It would put weight on his daughter. Chicken, but not stewed, only baked. In fact, anything baked: potatoes, which he allowed—“They come from Europe, where people practice hygiene”—macaroni baked with cheese, and vegetables I had never yet eaten, which had to be done, he explained to Ariana, “au gratin.”

No tropical fruits were allowed in the house, and the fruits we were permitted to have could not be eaten raw. They had to be boiled, stewed, or baked. Apples were put in the oven, pears and peaches had to be simmered on the stove in water and sugar or taken from cans. Acknowledging that his daughter needed vitamin C, he let us have orange juice, but it came pasteurized and in bottles. “Disease!” he would shout. Nature was the enemy, and here in the tropics nature threatened to destroy us. At times I felt we were at war: nature on one side and art on the other, the interventions Gardner used to suppress what he called “nature’s insidious power.”

I had complained to Lucinda, when she was on her deathbed, about the changes Gardner was making to our food.

“You’ll get accustomed,” she said.

I tried to warn her that there was more. I had seen him with a measuring tape, measuring the drawing room walls.

“He thinks the house is his,” I said.

“Maybe it’s best,” she said. “You will need a man in the house.”

She never lived, thank God, to know what Gardner meant by needing a man in the house, what that would mean for her daughter, what that would mean for me.

In her final days, Lucinda handed over my mother’s money and her jewel box to Gardner.

“It belongs to Carlos,” she told him. “Use what you need for the house, but keep the rest for him when he becomes a man.”

I never became a man in Gardner’s eyes. I never again saw my mother’s jewels, except for her diamond earrings. Ariana wore them, and I took it for granted that my mother had given them to her. I knew she loved shiny things: an ordinary stone if it glittered in the sunlight, asphalt that shone after the rain.

Ariana was a strange girl. She had a dreamy quality about her that made her seem almost incorporeal. She was very thin; the only parts of her body that seemed to grow were her arms and legs. Her hair was long, thick, and wavy. Lucinda would plait it, but minutes later Ariana would loosen it and it would flow around her shoulders like a cape. When the wind blew, her hair fanned out and seemed to pull her upward as if she were a puppet and the strands of her hair the strings of a puppeteer. A stronger wind and she would fly away.

Yellow was her favorite color. When I was a little boy I used to stretch out next to her on the floor watching her color a drawing with a yellow crayon. It was from her I first learned about the possibilities of nuance and subtlety, the variations of meaning and feeling evoked in shadings, for with that single color she would make me see a multitude of colors, a multitude of images. My father was the poet, but he did not live to teach me about the subtleties in poetry. Certainly not Gardner. Ariana taught me with her love of yellow. In return, I trapped fireflies in a bottle for her. After dinner, before Gardner came and changed our lives, she used to sit alone under the sapodilla tree with the bottle in her hand, mesmerized by their flickering lights. Sometimes we would find her in the morning, under the tree, the bottle clutched between her fingers.

When Dr. Gardner began to grow yellow flowers in yellows that ranged from those so delicate they were almost white to others that outshone the sun, Ariana became his servant, a willing lackey to a god who could make such magic. So it seemed to me. I would remind her of the necklaces she once made with the yellow trumpet-shaped flowers from the buttercup flower tree and she would stare at me wide-eyed as if I told a lie. I never suspected there was more to her seeming affection of Gardner. I did not know about the letter my mother had written. I did not know this letter was the reason for her sycophantic behavior.

My mother was not the most attentive parent—she loved my father more than she loved me—but she was not a blackmailer. She was a storyteller. I am convinced that all she meant to do was scare Ariana. More than likely it was nonsense she had scribbled on a piece of paper. When Ariana saw the letter in Gardner’s hand, she must have been terrified. It would not have taken much for Gardner to trick her into confessing. Then it was easy for him to convince her that her life was in his hands.

NINE

UNDER DR. GARDNER’S RULE, our days and nights were rigidly structured. We woke up at five, had breakfast at six, Virginia and Dr. Gardner in the dining room, Ariana and I in the kitchen after we served them. At seven, while Ariana and I washed the dishes and cleaned the house, Gardner tutored Virginia in his room. At nine, Gardner went to work on his garden, and I was at the beck and call of Ariana, helping her with whatever she wanted done. At noon, when the sun’s rays were blinding and the heat so intense that perspiration rolled down our backs like rainwater, Gardner returned to the house for lunch. After lunch he called Ariana to his room, ostensibly to discuss household matters with her. Ariana reappeared an hour or so later, and Gardner remained in his room until four. For that hour or so when Gardner was with Ariana, I was alone with Virginia, though not alone in the strict sense of the word, for she was instructed to stay in her room and I in mine. From four until six, Gardner went back to work in his garden. At six-thirty, we had dinner. After dinner, until seven-thirty, he tutored Virginia, again in his room. At eight o’clock he turned off the lights.

In the beginning Dr. Gardner did not permit the slightest deviation from this strict schedule. If breakfast was served five minutes after six, Ariana and I were given five demerits, one for each minute we were tardy. We got demerits for waking up late, demerits for serving lunch or dinner late, demerits for going to bed late.

Punctuality, Gardner said to us, was the mark of a civilized man. I was late because I was lazy, because I had given in to my animal desire for sensual gratification: one more minute in bed, one more minute daydreaming or lollygagging instead of focusing on the task he had assigned to me. He did not call me a savage directly (soon enough he would make it plain to me that that was what he thought of me), but he let me know that a civilized man is one who allowed reason, not the flesh, to guide his actions.

It was his burden to civilize Ariana and me, he said. He despaired that such a goal could prove impossible, but he was determined to do his bloody best, his bloody, bloody English best.

When I was a child it puzzled me that he would be willing to spill his blood for something we did not want. Soon I understood that it was I who had to do his bloody best, that if blood were to be spilled it would be my blood, not his.

He kept his watch in his pocket. If we were late, he pulled it out, recorded the time in his notebook, and calculated our demerits. At the end of the week he doled out his punishment, but not without a lecture.

We had to sit around the kitchen table, Virginia, too, when he lectured us. He might not have been certain he could civilize us, but he had no doubt that she would understand the lesson he hoped to teach us. He seemed to imply that her genetic inheritance, the pure English blood that ran in her veins that had given her white skin, blue eyes, blond hair, had also given her English intelligence and so the capacity for acquiring English civility.

The first time we were subjected to his lectures, he stacked a bundle of sticks in the shape of a pyramid on the table. “Pick one,” he said to me, pointing to the bundle. I picked up the stick at the top of the pyramid. He got flustered and gave me a dirty look.

“I said, ‘Pick one.’ ”

“But I picked one,” I insisted.

“Not the top one.”

It was obvious to me that if I took any other stick, the others would fall down, but that, of course, was Gardner’s point. When I hesitated, he warned me again. “Not the top one.”

Ariana, afraid (I would like to believe) of what he would do if I disobeyed him, stretched out her hand. “I do it,” she said, and pulled out a stick from the middle tier. The top stick fell down and struck the sticks below it, and they in turn struck the other sticks, scattering them across the table. I remember clearly that Gardner smiled. I remember he patted Ariana’s hand and praised her. I remember this because I expected him to chastise her.
Speak only when you are spoken to.
It was another Gardner rule warranting demerits. He had addressed me, not her. But little by little, I was beginning to realize that rules that applied to me did not necessarily apply to Ariana.

The lesson was about law and order, who was to lead and who was to follow, who was in authority. The lesson was about the consequences of challenging authority.

He swiped his arm across the table, sending the sticks in all directions. One or two tottered at the edge but he grabbed them in time and prevented them from falling.

“God is a good God,” he said, and his lips spread into a brief, cold smile. “He loves us. He wants the best for us. But God is in charge.”

I was never certain of Gardner’s religious convictions, whether or not he was a true believer. He was familiar with the Bible, but his interpretation of biblical stories always led to the same conclusion: They justified his right to be my master, and so he used them this time. He collected the sticks and while he formed the pyramid Ariana had dismantled, he told us the story about Lucifer, how he lost his place in heaven, how God had given him everything, how He had made him the most handsome of the angels. “Yet Lucifer was ungrateful,” he said.

He looked directly at me when he said that, and a trembling began growing under my skin, for I knew what he was thinking. When Lucinda was still alive and I was foolish enough to feel protected, I had refused to eat the food Ariana had prepared for us. She had already started cooking in the way he demanded and had baked the chicken, not stewed it. Worse still, she had not seasoned it with garlic, thyme, chives, onion, and pepper, as Lucinda used to. Without seasonings, the meat was tasteless. One particular meal was so bland that I threw it away in the garbage. Gardner saw me, and he made me take it out. I was an ungrateful child, he hollered, shoving the chicken down my throat. I gagged and vomited but he kept putting more and more chicken into my mouth, all the time chastising me for my ingratitude. If it were not for him, I would starve, he said.

I wriggled away from him and ran to Lucinda. I fell on my knees by her bedside and begged her to help me. She was moaning in pain. Couldn’t I see she was dying? “Try, Carlos,” she implored me. “Listen to what he says. Who take care of you when I die?”

Gardner was standing at the doorway. “He’s a spoiled brat,” he said. “He needs to learn discipline.”

Lucinda tried to defend me. She said I was a good boy, a kind and loving boy. Gardner shook his head and walked away.

When she was sure he could not hear her, Lucinda clawed at my shirt with her emaciated fingers. “Don’t fight him.” Her voice was hoarse, urgent. “He bigger than you.”

I said it was not fair. The house was mine. I was the boss.

“You need him now.”

“And if he never leaves?” I asked her, tears streaming down my cheeks. She let go of my shirt. “In time,” she said and closed her eyes.

At first I did not understand her. I begged her again to do something. To speak to Gardner. To force him to leave the house.

She opened her eyes. “If not now, then in time,” she said.

“Make him go away,” I said.

“Come.” She drew me closer to her. “Boys grow up to be men,” she whispered in my ear.

Now Gardner was reminding Ariana and me that ingratitude was Lucifer’s sin, that God had been good to Lucifer but Lucifer disobeyed Him.

He gives the orders in the house, Gardner said. We must do as he says.

He asked me to take a stick out from the bottom tier of the pyramid he had rebuilt. I braced myself for what I knew would happen. When the sticks scattered across the table, Gardner pushed them farther away, this time letting several of them tumble over the edge.

He called Virginia to him and put her to sit on his lap. We were all assigned places, duties, tasks, he said, speaking pointedly now to Ariana and me. If we stayed in our place and did our jobs well, we would be rewarded. We would get food to eat, water to drink, a roof over our heads. If we did not stay in our place, if we challenged his authority, if we questioned his right to rule us, we would fall as the sticks had fallen. He picked up the sticks and broke them into little pieces. Without him to help us, he said, we would end up broken into pieces like these sticks. “God sent Lucifer to hell for challenging His authority,” he said to us.

He had equated himself with God and made us Lucifer: Ariana and me. I say Ariana and me because at that moment he was holding Virginia close to his chest. Because, as he told us about the greater and lesser angels, the ones closer to God when Lucifer had fallen, he made it clear that though Virginia, like us, must obey him, she was better than us. Her place, he said, was on the second tier of the pyramid, ours on the last, firmly on the bottom, my place slightly above Ariana’s.

He permitted me to call Virginia by her first name, but instructed Ariana to address her as Miss Virginia. I found no fault with this distinction he made between Ariana and me, and neither did Ariana. She was Lucinda’s daughter and Lucinda was my mother’s cook. Lucinda, of course, had a surname, Bates, but I never addressed her as Mrs. Bates. My mother had met her on one of her shopping trips to Trinidad. Lucinda’s husband had abandoned her and she had nowhere to go. My mother offered her a job and a place to stay. She was an adult, with a child older than I, but even as a toddler, I was permitted to call her Lucinda. Before long, though, had she lived, she, too, as the boatman now did, would have had to address me as Mr. Carlos.

I did not like it when Gardner made me eat in the kitchen with Ariana, but I fooled myself into coming to terms with his arrangement, convincing myself that it made sense for him to prefer to eat alone with his daughter rather than with people he hardly knew. Now Gardner made it plain to me: Familiarity had nothing to do with his preference. I was his daughter’s social inferior.

The system Gardner devised for correlating demerits with punishment was consistent with his conviction of a God-ordained social hierarchy. For one demerit for being one minute late, Ariana and I had to wake up ten minutes early. The punishment for Virginia was more equitable: one minute for one demerit. Being tardy a mere six minutes meant that Ariana and I had to be up at four in the morning, but often Gardner pardoned Ariana. Me, never once.

Gardner’s rule about punctuality was not confined to tardiness, however. One particularly sun-filled morning I had woken up at dawn. I was sitting in the kitchen having my breakfast when Gardner walked in. As soon as he saw me, he glanced down at his watch. “Five demerits,” he said. It was five minutes to six. He had stipulated that breakfast would be at six. His lesson this time was about good manners, good breeding. A civilized man, he said, does not arrive at the home of his host before he is invited. He knows that it is as inconsiderate for a guest to arrive early as it is for him to be late.

I knew it was Dr. Gardner and his daughter who were the guests, not Ariana and I. But in those early days, just the memory of Gardner’s face, red, distorted with his fury and hatred for my mother, rippling with the reflection of the flames that burst out of the fire he had ignited on her bed, was sufficient to keep me in line. And when I was not quick enough for Ariana, or failed to help her as she thought I should, she reminded me of the curses he hurled on my mother and the power he had to open graves, wake the dead, and to command elves with printless feet to attack me. “He could poison you with midnight mushrooms,” she said. So I let Gardner be the king of my castle. For that was how my childish mind conceived of his relationship to me. He was king, but the castle was mine. When I was old enough, when I had learned enough from him, I would assert my right to rule it.

Yet it was not as difficult as it might seem for me to sustain this fantasy. Gardner was not always cruel to me. Indeed, it was not long before he began to pay attention to me and I became a source of pride to him, his first successful experiment with humans, after his failures in England.

Virginia had just turned four when Gardner decided it was time to teach her to read. He began with the alphabet. I heard him one morning shouting out the letters at her. It was the second or third day since he had begun to teach her. “How many more times do I have to say it?” His voice rose angrily as he listed all the letters. “A, B, C, D... Say them now!”

I was in the kitchen. Ariana was washing the dishes and she had just passed a plate to me to dry. I was so frightened I almost dropped it.

“L, M, N, O, P,” Gardner yelled. “Not L, N, P, O!”

I could not hear what Virginia was saying, but when Gardner shouted L, M, N, O, P again, I knew she had said the letters in the wrong order. For some minutes afterward, though, there was silence, and in those minutes I felt such a rush of relief for Virginia, assuming she had finally got the letters right, that I turned to Ariana and said, “Good for her.” Ariana gave me a withering glance that let me know without a word how foolish she thought I was to feel sorry for someone better off than I.

My assumption, however, was wrong, for soon Gardner was yelling at Virginia again. “For God’s sake. O, P, O, P, not P, O.” When the door finally opened, I held my breath, hoping his anger would not fall on me, too. But Gardner seemed unruffled. He was smiling when he came out of the room, his arm draped across Virginia’s shoulder. Before he left for his garden, he kissed her and whispered something to her in tender tones. She bit her lip and looked across at me. The flesh around her eyes was swollen, and there were red streaks running down her cheeks. I could tell she had been crying, and yet had I not heard Gardner distinctly, I would never have guessed he had been the cause of her tears.

That night she must have taught herself the alphabet, for the next morning I heard Gardner say to her, “Good. Good.” Then he began with the sounds of letters. “A: ahh. B: buh. C: cuh.” Over and over, he repeated the sounds of the letters. On the third day, he moved to rhyming words. “Man, can, ran. Hit, sit, bit.” He began slowly, patiently. He said the words loudly, but not roughly. “Man, can, ran. Hit, sit, bit.” When I heard him repeat them the next day, fear gripped my heart. He was saying them now menacingly, threateningly. Morning after morning it was the same, sometimes new words, sometimes words he had shouted out to her the day before. Virginia was not a stupid girl. She was smart, intelligent. It would not have been difficult for her to memorize such phonetically similar simple words, but I was certain she was frozen with fear, as I was frozen with fear, her brain focused on one objective: to shield herself from her father’s rage.