Prospero's Daughter (20 page)

Gardner went to the lighthouse alone after that. Each time he returned exhausted, his eyes glassy, his limbs limp, his skin pale. He collapsed into his bed and slept for hours. Whenever a rainstorm threatened, he became agitated. Before the first drop fell, he was off again to the lighthouse, his bag on his back, the cane in his hand. As irrational as it seemed to me then, I found myself thinking that it was he, not nature, who had caused that terrible storm that had brought him to us, he who had engineered it.

But of all my secret places I showed to Gardner, the one he loved me best for was the cove, near Rust’s Bay, hidden behind a hill of rocks. I had not discovered it on my own. The horseshoe shoreline of Chacachacare Bay was pocketed with tiny coves and bays. Bushes and trees grew so close to their edges it was not easy to see them. I would never have found this cove if one of the lepers had not taken me there. Like most of the lepers, he distrusted Europeans, though not European women. The French nuns had been kind to them. Most of the doctors, he complained, had prizes on their minds. Even after everyone knew that the sulfuric drugs were working and every day patients in the colony were getting better, there were still doctors who wanted to inject them with oils.

“Treat us like guinea pigs,” he said. “They don’t care whether we live or die.”

He loved my mother. She gave him fish from my father’s catch. On the day of her funeral, he presented me with an exquisite flower, an orchid so dazzlingly white I had to shade my eyes. He could show me where the others were, he whispered. The next day he took me to the cove beyond the rocks.

When Gardner told me that his greatest wish was to grow the rarest orchid in the world, I told him I knew where he could find an orchid tree. He laughed at me. “Orchids are flowers,” he said, “not trees.”

One startlingly clear night, when he was especially pleased with my recitation from one of his favorite books, he agreed to humor me. In the silvery light of the moon, the orchids gleamed like stars on the spreading branches at the top of a tall cedar tree, roots piercing the bark like crab claws, and beneath them, more roots, long, brown, spindly, dangling in the air. Gardner was overjoyed. Epiphytes, he said they were, not parasites. And for the second time since I had known him, he spoke of his brother. He was the parasite, he said, his chest heaving with his agitation. He had wrapped himself around him, he said, like the tendrils of a malignant ivy.

When his breathing slowed again, he put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me. It had taken these orchids years to bloom. Generations. He would make history. He pulled me close to him and he thanked me. He said he loved me, and though, inexplicably, at that very moment the leper’s words rang in my ears (guinea pigs, he called the doctors), I said I loved him, too.

Before he eventually decided he could trust me to go alone, Gardner took me with him when he went to Trinidad to shop for food or materials for the house and his garden. I did not think he took me with him because he was afraid to leave me alone in the house with Virginia. That likelihood did not occur to me until years later, when he accused me of attempting to rape her.

At first I thought he wanted me to accompany him because he was afraid of the boca. He had seen La Remous, and though the boatman who brought us to Trinidad always chose his times carefully when there was little chance of La Remous churning the sea to a frenzy, Gardner still gritted his teeth and held on tightly to his seat each time the wash from the third boca flung the boat up with the tremendous waves and slammed it back down on the water. The boatman’s insouciance did not help. “Is a little ting!” he would say when he saw Gardner crouched in his seat. If Gardner protested, he would throw back his head and laugh out loud, exposing his chalk-white teeth. “You ’fraid a little ting like that?”

It was not always a little thing. Sometimes the waves were mountainous and the descent so steep and so sudden that I, too, feared for our lives, but these were the times that the boatman became most animated.
“Oui Foute!”
he would shout, stretching his hand over the water and pointing. “See that wave! Wait, wait. Another one!
Oui Foute,
Pappy-O!” There were other times, though, noticing the white ring that formed around Gardner’s mouth, that he had the good sense to calm down, but his solicitude seemed to irritate Gardner more than his preening. “Yuh belly go settle down when we reach the shore,” he would say to Gardner, offering him a pail and a rag. “If you have to trow up, trow up.”

I soon concluded, however, that Gardner took me with him not so much because he was afraid of the boca but because he wanted me to protect him in Trinidad. He told me there were too many darkie beggars there. My job, he seemed to imply, was to keep the darkies away from him. I did not know that he had a more urgent reason for avoiding Trinidad, that he feared discovery.

On one of our trips we ran into the commissioner. The commissioner had heard about the English doctor who was living on Chacachacare and he was anxious to meet him. Would he come to tea next week? he pressed Gardner. Or any time that was convenient for him?

Gardner said yes. He said he would come the next time he returned to Trinidad, but on the boat back home he laughed when he told me he would never accept the commissioner’s invitation. He had no time for frivolities, he said.

I was astounded. “You must go,” I urged him. “You must. He could help you find your brother. He could track him down and get back your money.”

Did I hope that if Gardner recovered his money he would have no need of mine? I am sure that was part of my motivation, why I continued to beg him until he shook me so violently by my shoulders I thought my neck would snap. Never, never, he made me swear. Never say a word to anyone about the story he had told me about his brother.

We saw the commissioner from time to time when we went to Trinidad, but he was never able to persuade Gardner to come to tea at his home or to visit him in his office at the police station. Gardner was always ready with the excuse that he needed to get back early for his precious plants. When the commissioner asked: Isn’t it a bit desolate out there, old man? Gardner had a quick response. He was doing important research on tropical flowers, he said. The climate and terrain in Chacachacare were exactly what he needed. He liked the remoteness of the island. He didn’t want people poking around and stealing his ideas.

How did you manage to get Sylvia’s house? (The commissioner asked this question without malice or accusation.) Gardner’s answer was the same as the one he had given to the doctor, and, like the doctor, the commissioner praised me for having the good fortune to be under the protection of an Englishman. I was lucky, he said. The orphanage in Trinidad was not a nice place to be.

One day Gardner surprised me by announcing that the time was right for me to leave the island to go to secondary school in Trinidad. I had never believed his promise to the doctor, but as we were returning on the boat from a shopping trip in Trinidad, he declared suddenly that I needed to go to school to be with other boys. My first instinct when he made this offer was not to trust him. I had grown quite tall for my age and looked like a man. I thought Gardner was beginning to worry that I could get it in my head to call him a liar, claim my mother’s inheritance, and throw him out of my house.

He had good reason to think so. Often when we walked down Frederick Street in Trinidad, we saw crowds gathered in Woodford Square. Always there was a man with the wire of a hearing aid dangling from his ear, speaking from a platform under a flamboyant tree. I never could make out the exact words he said—something about black, something about power—but I felt his passion, and when the crowd broke into a roar, I wanted to hear more. Gardner, however, would not let me stay. I found out from the shopkeeper the name of the man who seemed to have a mesmerizing hold on the people there. Eric Williams.
De Doctah.
He had come from America, where he had been teaching at Howard University. He was an Oxford man, the shopkeeper said proudly. Got his doctor title from Oxford.

Gardner told me he did not like this Eric Williams. Stirring up trouble in Trinidad, he said. If the British left, how would the darkies know how to run the government?

If the British left?
I was old enough to know that in the past Europeans had made a fortune on our island from cotton and whale oil. That Sir Walter Raleigh’s ships would have sunk if the Amerindians had not taken him to La Brea Pitch Lake in Trinidad, where there was more tar than he ever could have imagined, tons more than he needed to caulk his leaking ships. That in the following years the British had worked Africans almost to death on sugarcane and cocoa plantations, and that even as we spoke, British Petroleum, Shell Oil, Esso, and Texaco were drilling oil out of the ground in the south of Trinidad.

If the British left?
We would be rich. That was what I thought.

Now he was saying to me that I would love living in Trinidad. “Thank God the British are still there.”

“Why would I like it?” I asked him cautiously.

“Why? To be with boys your age,” he said.

“I don’t need to be with boys my age. They aren’t as smart as you,” I said.

He grinned. I could tell he was flattered, and I flattered him some more. “Nobody in Trinidad can teach me more than you do,” I said.

“But you only have me for company,” he protested unconvincingly.

“Nobody knows more than you,” I said. I was not lying. I believed there was no one as intelligent or as knowledgeable as he, no one from whom I could learn as much as I was learning from him. But my house was also very much on my mind. Perhaps he was not thinking:
This is
it. He’ll be gone. This is all I need to do and the house will be all mine.
Yet I was not going to take the chance that that was not his true motive.

“You’ll need friends your own age,” he said. “The lepers cannot count.”

“No, the lepers cannot count,” I conceded.

They liked me, but they felt self-conscious with me, more aware of their deformities when they saw me whole, healthy, my arms and legs strong and muscular. Not long after Gardner arrived, they stopped speaking to me altogether. They knew Gardner had only scorn for them. He was always warning me to stay away from them, warning Ariana not to let Virginia go too far from the house for fear she could get infected. Not wanting to give him reason to lose his trust in me, which every day I could see I was gaining, I never crossed the border that separated our part of the island from the leper colony without his permission. I wondered often, though, how he had been allowed to be a medical doctor, how someone with so little compassion for the sick could have been given this license.

Ariana once told Gardner the story about the priest who used to say Mass in the chapel when the nuns were here. The priest had come into the kitchen just as the cook had turned off the stove and removed the pot that was on it. As he began to give her instructions for a luncheon he was going to have the next day with some visitors from Europe, the priest leaned against the stove and rested his hand on the hot burner. The cook screamed, and the priest looked at her, puzzled. “What? What?” he asked. Then he saw that the skin on his hand had withered and turned bloodred.

For weeks after Ariana told him this story, whenever she brought him his tea, Gardner would place his hand around the boiling hot teapot. “Ouch!” he would say melodramatically. A doctor, but this was the test he used to assure himself that his nerve ends were not damaged, that he had not contracted leprosy.

“Still, there is Ariana,” he was now saying to me.

“Ariana is silly,” I said.

He laughed, more than my comment warranted, I remember thinking.

“What could I talk about with Ariana?” I said.

“What indeed?” But his face had flushed red.

I took notice that he did not mention his daughter. He did not say,
But there is Virginia. You have her company.
He said he loved me, yet he had never recanted the first lesson he had taken pains to teach me with a bundle of sticks.

I could tell, though, he was pleased with me. Before we stepped off the boat at Chacachacare, he paid me what he must have believed was the highest compliment. I was better than my mother, he said. My mother was a woman, but still she was English. You are brighter and more intelligent, he said.

He never again offered to send me away to school. I had so convinced him that I was grateful to him and he could depend on my loyalty that he let me go alone to Trinidad to shop for him, certain I would return, certain I would bring back his goods and his money.
My goods,
my money.
Certain he could trust me to be his servant.

THIRTEEN

ON VIRGINIA’S twelfth birthday, Gardner called Ariana into the dining room and announced that Virginia had learned all that was necessary for a woman to learn. Anything more would make her unmarketable. It was Ariana’s turn to train her.

I should have suspected that that day would come. Until then, Gardner had given Virginia her schooling in his room. He had not allowed her to join us in the evenings in the drawing room or to accompany us on our walks at night. I assumed he thought I was unworthy to spend such long hours in his daughter’s company, but Virginia disagreed. She repeated what she had told me that first day when I had offered to teach her to read. “He thinks I am stupid.” I stuck to my convictions, though I also believed that it was not so much that he doubted her intelligence as that he had other plans for her. Still, I was surprised that he was willing to relinquish some of the control he exercised over her.

Under the pretext that he was protecting her from contracting leprosy, Gardner had confined her world to short distances just beyond my house. She could not go anywhere close to the area where the Americans had abandoned their barracks, not even to the barbed-wire boundary of the leper colony. She could go for walks with Ariana when the sun went down in the late afternoon, but only to the end of the path that led to the pebble-stone beach near the doctor’s house. No matter how hot it got, she could go in the water only on Sundays, and then under two conditions: one, that the doctor was on the mainland with his family, and two, that Gardner had the time to accompany her. And since Gardner had made up his mind not to return to Trinidad, she could not leave the island.

Ariana was angry to be given another task. Train her how? she asked Gardner. In the domestic arts, he said. Show her how to cook, how to sew, how to keep a well-ordered house.

He meant to compliment her, but Ariana was not complimented. “What I teach her that for?” she asked sullenly. “When she get married she have servant to cook and clean for her.”

I braced myself for Gardner’s response, but he spoke to her with infinite patience, as if to a friend with whose opinions he disagreed but nonetheless tolerated. “Teach her so she knows what orders to give her servants,” he said.

It struck me later that his tone was not so much one that a friend might use, but rather that of an indulgent husband, for his voice was weighted with much forbearance that sounded to me strangely like the rhythms of courtship. Ariana could have been a wife whose temper tantrums he knew to come and go like a sudden downpour at midday. By evening her mood would change.

“Do it for me, Ariana.”

Ariana bunched her lips together and sucked in air through her teeth.
Steups.
A sound of dismissal and utter contempt. It had come to the Caribbean with the Africans. Yet Gardner grinned at her.

When we were alone she complained about her new assignment. “If she slice something and cut her hand with a knife, who you think he blame but me?”

That was when I gave her my name for Gardner. “He thinks he’s Prospero,” I said.

She liked the sound of the name. She linked it to another word she knew:
prosperous.
“He get prosperous when he fool my mother,” she said bitterly.

I never told Ariana where I got my name for Gardner, and the truth was that though the pages were wide open for me to read them, and every day I saw more and more of Prospero in Gardner, I did not believe I was in danger. I did not think he would imprison me or torture me, as Prospero had done to Caliban.

I was not blind to his devious intentions. I saw his ambition clearly. His interest in me, as in his flowers, was scientific. I had piqued his curiosity. But in those days of my delusions, I also allowed myself to hope that somewhere in his heart he believed I could, with his instruction, with his help, become his intellectual equal.

Sometimes when he asked my opinion of books I had read he would listen so closely to what I had to say that it was easy to indulge myself in this fantasy, but there was a price to pay for this indulgence.

“What do you think of Macbeth?” he asked me one evening. “I mean the man, not the play.”

Macbeth had killed a king.
I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should
I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
But Gardner liked when I argued the side that was the opposite of an obvious position, and, uncertain of his motive, I pandered to him. “Isn’t ambition a good thing?” I asked him.

“A good thing?” We were on the path walking down to the bay. The moon had slipped behind a cloud, and darkness had fallen over us suddenly, like a heavy cloak.

“Without ambition,” I said, “where would man be?”

“But to kill a man to fulfill your ambitions?” An oiliness had entered his voice, and I turned to see his face, but under the blackness of the night only the outline was visible.

“Shouldn’t there be a limit to ambition?” he asked me.

I answered him with a quote that pleased him. “ ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?’ ”

The cloud slid by and in the moonlight his face glistened. He could not praise me enough. He said I was wiser than my years, more intelligent than many a man he had known. Later that night I returned to the bay. For an hour I swam. It was not enough to wash away my dread, a fear of something worse to come.

It was not fear, however, a premonition of danger, that caused me to give Ariana the name Prospero for Gardner. I was trying to get her on my side. What I really wanted, what Virginia and I really wanted, was more time to be with each other. I told Ariana that she was right to speak to Gardner the way she had. I said I admired her for standing up to him. Prospero, I said, didn’t think Virginia needed to learn how to cook and clean, because
they
(and I dropped my bottom lip into a telling sneer) always found people like
us
to do their work for them.

“You could have the whole afternoon to yourself if you left me to look after Virginia when Prospero is in his garden,” I said.

I had reason to believe she would find this offer attractive. I had noticed that she seemed listless after her hour, after lunch, with Gardner, that she moved around the kitchen as if heavy weights were strapped to her legs, that she was fretful when Virginia made even the slightest request of her. Usually she would exchange some words with me, mostly to complain about something I had not done well enough to her liking, like not cleaning the garbage pail properly or emptying it when she wanted. Lately, however, she barely spoke to me, grunting only yes or no to my questions.

“You would be able to do what you want,” I said, trying to make my case more persuasive.

“Suppose she tell.”

“She won’t tell. She likes her books. She wants me to teach her.”

“Suppose he ask her to show him how she can cook.”

“He doesn’t want her to cook. He wants her to know
how
to cook.

You can tell me what you do and I will write it down for her. Like a cookbook,” I said. “She can read it and tell him what he wants to know.”

She tossed her thick mane of hair back and forth off her shoulders, considering my proposition.

“We’ll be in the drawing room. You can check on us whenever you want,” I said.

“He don’t want you in the drawing room,” she said.

She was right. The year before, Gardner had installed air conditioners in his and Virginia’s bedrooms, in the drawing room, and in the dining room. He said Ariana and I did not need air conditioners in our rooms. Like all colored people, we had a natural protection against the heat. Our epidermis was thick, he said. Heat took a long time to penetrate it. He permitted me to sit in the drawing room with him in the evenings but in the afternoon I had to remain in the blistering heat of the kitchen or in the oven my bedroom became when the sun blazed down on the galvanized roof.

My bedroom would not have been so hot if Gardner had not taken down the Demerara shutters my father had installed over all the bedroom windows. We raised them with sticks anchored on the windowsills and they sheltered us from the sun. Gardner claimed they were a perfect nesting place for termites. His tone was unnecessarily gruff, and I suspected that when he took them down he wanted to show me that he was wiser than my father. Many a day I am certain he regretted his false pride, for the sun was so direct at midday that even with air-conditioning his bedroom had to be steaming.

“You could see him coming and warn us,” I said to Ariana, determined to answer all her objections. “You’ll be free.”

“Free?” She looked past me, her eyes glazed.

“Free to do what you want,” I said.

“Free,” she said it again, dreamily.

And I, not imagining what else she could mean, said, “Free from having to work for Prospero.”

Her face brightened, but just as I was about to leave the room, satisfied that I had convinced her, she stopped me. “I think she like you,” she said.

I turned around. Her slight body seemed to sway under the weight of her hair. I noticed, as if for the first time, how thin she was, how her eyes seemed to consume her face. “You need to eat more,” I said.

She did not allow me to distract her. “I sure she like you,” she said.

“She wants to know more.” I kept my tone flat, devoid of emotion. “She’s vexed with her father for saying she doesn’t need to know more.”

“I don’t mean that,” she said. “I mean she like, like you. I see how she smile at you. And when she speak to you, her voice go nice, nice, nice.”

I brushed her off. “Take those thoughts out of your head,” I said.

“You watch out they don’t get in
Prospero
head.” She pointed her thin finger at me. “You watch out he don’t get to thinking she like you and you like her back.”

Many times in the long afternoons Virginia and I had together, Ariana drifting in and out of the drawing room like a shadow, those words would return to haunt me:
You watch out he don’t get to thinking she like
you and you like her back.
But always I managed to shrug them off, convincing myself that Virginia and I were friends, best friends, nothing more. She was too young for us to be anything more. In those afternoons we talked, we listened to music, we dreamed, we read books together, nothing more.