Prospero's Daughter (24 page)

Virginia

EIGHTEEN

SIX YEARS have passed since Father put me on the boat to Trinidad, his head swimming with a fantasy he had concocted, spun out of desperation to cover his tracks, to ease the terror that must surely have hounded him in the minutes before waking when his mind drifted, when his dreams merged with reality before his consciousness could rescue him.

Alfred, he claimed, had fallen in love with me. Alfred wanted to marry me. And I? I had no feelings for Alfred, but my lack of feelings for Alfred did not matter to Father. What mattered to Father were his own feelings, his fear that someone would discover those feelings.

When Carlos returned to the house the day Father bid me to pack my clothes for Trinidad, I knew something terrible had happened. It was not unusual for Father to send Carlos back to the house several times to fetch something for him when they worked together in the garden. But that day Carlos did not go out again. I heard him stomp through the house; I heard him bang his bedroom door shut.

Moments later Father came to my room. He was disheveled. His hair had fallen out of the elastic band that usually held it back. It was dusted with dirt, and tiny pebbles were stuck between the strands. He had a bruise on his forehead. The skin was not broken, but it was red, the edges blue. He was perspiring profusely. Trails of sweat coursed down the sides of his face, pooling on his chin and dripping, drop after drop, onto the collar of his shirt. His pants were torn on one knee, and his shirttails were hanging out of the waistband.

“Father!” I bounded over to him, my hand raised solicitously to his forehead. “What has happened to you?”

He pushed my hand away. “Has Ariana packed your clothes?”

“I’ll get the Mercurochrome.” I stepped forward in the direction of the door.

“Stay in your room!” The thunder in his voice frightened me. I stopped where I was and remained rooted to the floor. I knew a storm could follow that thunder.

“Where is Ariana?” He did not wait for my answer. “Ariana!” He was at the doorway shouting out her name. “Ariana!” Then he swung back to me. “Be ready to leave early in the morning,” he said.

I didn’t dare ask where I was going. I was afraid of the rumbling growing darker in the back of his throat. He was happy when he came home after seeing Mrs. Burton off, calling out to me, his voice rising with a gaiety I had not heard in it before, but now his eyes were cold, hard, the folds under them dark blue. Below his cheekbones his flesh drooped into two pendulous sacks at the bottom of his jaw, and the furrows at the sides of his mouth had deepened.

“Ariana!” he called again, but she was already in the room behind him.

“What, Master?” Her voice was silky, seductive. It was the first time I heard her address him in this tone, but she had no secrets from me now.

Father seemed to lose his balance when he spun around to face her. He tottered slightly before finding his footing again. “I did not hear you.” None of the roughness he had just used with me remained in his voice.

“You called me?”

I caught Father’s eye and for a moment I thought I saw his face crumble with embarrassment, but I could have imagined this, for when he spoke the roughness was there. “She’ll eat dinner in her room,” he said to Ariana. “Don’t let her out of your sight.”

What had happened in the garden? Why was Father’s forehead bruised, his clothes torn? Why had Carlos banged his bedroom door shut? I was afraid to ask Father these questions, and Ariana had no answers for me.

Hours later we heard Father walking up and down the corridor. After a while his footsteps ceased. When they started again, we heard the swish of the bag, or whatever it was, against the hardwood floor. Father was pulling something behind him, something heavy. He was panting and grunting. When I was sure he was out of the house, I pleaded with Ariana to let me go to Carlos. I had not heard him leave the house and I was worried. Perhaps he is sick, I said to Ariana, smothering the suspicions flickering at the edges of my brain:
Was there a connection between the blue bruise on Father’s forehead and the loud bang I heard
when Carlos closed his door?
Carlos may need my help, I said to her.

At first she refused to help me, but I continued to beg her and finally she agreed to check on him herself. When she came back, she told me that Carlos was not in his room. “He not sick. Your father take him in the garden,” she said.

“Take him?” My nerves were raw.

“Take him. Took him,” she said irritably.

But it was not her grammar that I was questioning; it was her choice of verb. Still, I could not imagine what she could have meant by
take.
“Went with him,” I said. “You mean Carlos
went
with Father.”

“Is that I mean,” she said.

“Perhaps the bag Father was dragging had muffled Carlos’s footsteps,” I said, offering an explanation to calm my nerves.

“Is so,” she said. “It make it hard for you to hear him.”

Father was standing next to Ariana when she woke me up before dawn. “You have ten minutes,” he said.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Where am I going?” I asked him.

“To Mrs. Burton’s,” he said.

I was not surprised. I was prepared for his answer. “When will I be back?”

“If you’re lucky, it won’t be soon,” he said.

“Can I say good-bye to Carlos?”

“No,” he said. He offered me no explanation.

The coldness in his eyes frightened me. “You’re sending me away forever?”

“Make a good impression and in two or three years, he’ll marry you.”

He meant Alfred, but I did not want to make a good impression on Alfred. He was a stranger to me. I did not like him the way Father hoped I would. He startled me when I saw him. He seemed an apparition, a character in a novel that had suddenly come to life.
Darcy.
As handsome as I had imagined Darcy. Even the manner in which he greeted me—politely but not with the enthusiasm Father had prepared me to expect—made me think of Darcy, and I stared at him long after he turned away from me.

Carlos said I looked at him as if he had come from another world. He
had
come from another world—that was how he seemed to me—a world I knew from the books I had read, a make-believe world where seasons changed, where snow fell, where the land froze, where daffodils grew. When I saw Alfred, his skin the color of dough, I knew he had come from that world.

My hair was blond and my eyes were blue but my skin was the color of copper, brown as if that hue were native to me. Alfred must have sensed my difference from him the moment he saw me, standing between the orange and red bougainvillea, in my bright pink sundress, the sun blazing down on me, the sky a brilliant blue above me. Red spots the size of pennies bloomed across his pale cheeks. When he mopped his brow, his handkerchief was soaked. I must have seemed unnatural to him, looking so cool, my skin so dry.

At lunch, he spoke slowly to me as if English were not my language. I did not speak like Father. I did not have his accent. Father spoke like an Englishman; I spoke like Carlos. I loved the way Carlos’s words rose and fell in a rhythm that sounded like singing. Father protested at first, reminding me I was English. I had a responsibility to the natives, he said. They should imitate me, not me them. Father gave in eventually, for under his tutelage Carlos’s vowels became rounded, his consonants crisp, not flat like Ariana’s. So long as I did not speak like Ariana, Father did not correct me.

“Do you always speak so strangely?” Alfred asked me.

“I live here,” I said. “This is how we speak.”

Father said he was smitten. He said it as if it were in his power to make Alfred fall in love with me.

Several times at lunch Alfred leaned over to me to repeat something he had said, thinking, I suppose, I had not understood him. Father must have been desperate to assume that Alfred was trying to court me.

“Didn’t you see how he wanted to get close to you?” Father said, trying to convince me. “He’ll do anything to be near you.”

But getting near to me was not on Alfred’s mind. Orchids were on Alfred’s mind. Where had Father found the white ones? Did I know where there were more? When I had no answers to give him, he soon got bored.

Father saw what he wanted to see. “Play your cards right and it’ll be easy,” he said. “He’s got fire i’ th’ blood.”

Fire in the blood.
It was Father who had fire in the blood.

When at last Father left the room, I plied Ariana with questions. Had she seen Carlos? Had she talked to him? Where was Carlos?

Carlos in the garden, she said.

Had he said anything to Father? Did Father know about our afternoons together?

She busied herself with closing my suitcase. She did not answer me.

What did Father say to Carlos? My heart beat wildly in my chest.
He
had done it. Carlos had told Father he loved me.
What did Father do to Carlos? Yet when I asked this last question, I did not imagine torture. Father was a weak man, but Father was not a cruel man. When I was a child and he lost his temper with me, he always apologized. He hugged and kissed me, though I knew my mistakes had made him angry. If Father found out about my afternoons with Carlos, he would put him out; he would make him leave the house. He would do no more than that, I thought.

Ariana locked the suitcase and came close to me. “Promise me,” she said. “Not a word until you get to Trinidad.”

I was leaving. I was her only hope. I nodded. I murmured my assent.

“Your father put Carlos in a cage in the garden,” she said, “and he fill the cage with manure.”

I could not speak. Breath rose from my chest but got trapped in my throat.

“That’s not all,” she said. “He put a basin full of dirty water at Carlos feet and he bring mosquitoes there. They bite Carlos all over he body. He body have mosquito bite everywhere. It bleeding all over.”

She had to clamp her hand over my mouth to stifle the scream that echoed in my head.

“He say Carlos try to rape you. They going to put Carlos in jail. If you want to help him, say nothing to your father.” She pushed me down on the bed and straddled my chest. “When you get to Trinidad, you tell the police. You tell them about you. I promise you I tell them everything about me.”

I was ready when Father came for me. I had dried my tears. I had managed to stop my heart from galloping.
You tell them about you.
But I didn’t know if I had the courage to tell the police about me.

We were close to the dock when Father announced to me that Carlos had confessed.

“Confessed?” I pretended I did not know what he meant.

“You must have seen him looking at you,” he said. “Malicious slave!” He spat on the ground.

I drew in my breath. Carlos had shown me his father’s poems. Had Father tortured him the way the slave masters in those poems had tortured their slaves?

“And all I have done for him,” Father was saying to me. “This is how he repays me.”

I was walking beside him. He was holding my bags and I was carrying an orchid in a clay pot, a present for Freddie. Freddie, not Alfred. That was how Father said I should address him. “How would he know you’re interested if you insist on Alfred?” he had asked me.

We were close to the dock, only yards away. I kept my eyes straight ahead of me and clutched the clay pot tightly, trying to still my shaking hands.

“You have nothing to say?”

I bit down hard on my bottom lip.

“Ariana said she saw him,” he said.

It was a lie.

“She saw him lusting after you,” he said.

“No,” I said.

“He confessed. He got jealous when Freddie came. Told me he liked you. Said he wanted to rape you.”

“He never touched me,” I said.

“When you were sleeping,” he said.

I could see the boat ahead of us. It was moored to the stone wall. The boatman waved but my hands were trembling so rapidly, I could not lift them.

When you were sleeping.
We both knew what happened when I was sleeping.

“The commissioner will know what to do with him,” Father said.

“If I had not prevented him . . .” He looked up to the sky and drew his hand across his forehead as if overcome with emotion. “If I had not got there in time.” He sighed. “God knows what he would have done to you if I had not stopped him.”

Lies. Lies. But I sealed my lips shut.

On the boat, I managed to scribble a note to Carlos. I gave it to the boatman. “Put it in Ariana’s hands when you get back,” I begged him. “Father must not see it.”

NINETEEN

DID FATHER really believe his lie? To say he did, I would have to think he had gone mad, and Father had not gone mad. Father was sane, sane enough to figure out a way to save his skin by pointing his finger at Carlos, depositing his sins on Carlos’s shoulders and granting himself absolution.

“God knows what he would have done to you,” he said to me.

God knew what he, my father, had done to me.

I had warnings, but I say so in retrospect. Guilt blinded me each time a fissure threaded through my brain, cracking open a narrow slit that could have allowed me to see. He was my father. I loved him.

“You are what I live for.” He said those words to me hundreds of times. The first time I was a toddler, clinging to his neck and weeping. The book he read to me at night had pictures of children in it. All the children had mothers. I wanted a mother.

He would be my mother and father, he said. “You are what I live for.”

So I made myself believe he had not intended to kiss me the way he did on my birthday, that he was caught by surprise, terrified when he glimpsed into that dark pit he had opened up by accident.

We were celebrating. I had turned twelve. He was drunk, giddy with too much wine. “Go on,” he said, filling my glass. “A lady should know how to drink wine with dinner.”

I did not feel like a lady. I was still a child, but he told me this was the last year I would be a child. Next year I would be a teenager and soon a woman, he said.

To please him I drank the wine, though I did not like the taste. He finished the bottle.

Did I encourage him to embrace me so tightly when he came to my room to say good night? My head felt light, my muscles loose and relaxed. I opened the door for him, the wine making me feel none of the usual tension that always caused me to brace myself for his nightly lectures on what I had failed to learn that day, on what I must be prepared to learn the next. He opened his arms and I glided into them.

Which happened first, I cannot tell. Did I turn my head to the right for his kiss on my cheek while he was turning his? Did we try to correct the mistake both at the same time? In the end, our heads were facing forward and the kiss intended for my cheek landed on my mouth. Before I could wriggle free, his tongue, hard, wet, warm, probed my lips apart.

The next day Father made his announcement. He would no longer be my teacher. I had learned all that was necessary for a woman to learn. From then on, I would be apprenticed to Ariana.

Only he and I knew the truth. It was fear that made him relinquish those early-morning hours he spent with me, terrifying me into learning to read and write and do simple arithmetic. I was slow, he said; I was not smart.

Carlos saved me. If not for Carlos, I would have believed what Father had said about me. I would have continued to think I was stupid. Carlos said I saved him first. Before I arrived, he hated his freckles, he said. They were ugly dots that disfigured his face. He was at war with his body, but when I touched his cheek and smiled at him, he was the victor.

I do not remember touching his cheek, but I remember that day. It was the first time Father had spoken harshly to me. “Never touch
them,
” he hissed in my ear. He snapped his hand around my wrist and tugged me so hard, I stumbled. When the door closed behind us, he began hollering at me, words I could not make out except these: “You are white. Do you understand? You are white.”

I knew my colors. He had taught them to me. I was pink, but only under my clothes. My face, my arms, my legs, every part of my body that my dress had not covered had turned fiery red on the beach in Trinidad where I had followed Father each morning, waiting for the fishermen to leave, searching afterward for fish they had left behind. Father rubbed ointment on my burning skin and promised the pain would subside. When it did, I was tanned brown.

“I’m not white,” I whimpered.

Father clutched my shoulders and shook me. I was better than that boy, he said. Better than Ariana, better than all the people who had given us fish to eat, better than the ones who had put us on the boat to Chacachacare.

“Better? Why better, Father?” Tears streamed down my face.

“Because your skin is white,” he said. He let go of my shoulders.

He had shown me white. Snow was white; flour was white. “No, Father,” I said. I stretched out my arm. I wanted to prove to him that I had learned my colors. “This is not white.”

His eyebrows converged and then slackened. “Next to them,” he said. “I mean next to them. Your skin is white next to them.”

I did not understand him. “Next to them?”

“Compared to them. Your skin is white compared to their skin.”

“And would my skin still be white, Father, if they were not here?” My question seemed to amuse him. His mouth, rigid when he was speaking to me, relaxed into a smile. “What a clever girl,” he said.

Clever girl!
I had waited a long time for such praise.

“But you see,” he said, “they are colored and you are not colored.”

Encouraged, I showed him how much more I knew. “I am colored, too, Father,” I said. “I am colored red and pink.” I pointed to my tanned legs. “And brown, too.”

“Golden brown,” he corrected me. “They are colored black.”

My black crayon was black. “Carlos is not the color of my crayon,” I said.

He was talking about people, not crayons, he said.

“Are colors different for people?”

The rigidity returned to his mouth. He lost patience with me. “You are
better.
You are
superior
to that boy. You are superior to all the colored people here. That is the point. Remember that.”

But it was Carlos who had taught me to read, not Father. If Father was so superior, why had he not found a way to teach me to read?

I loved Father but I was afraid of him. Because I loved him, I wanted to please him; I wanted to be smart for him, to know the answers to the questions he asked me, to recite by heart the lessons he taught me. Because I feared him, my nerves became frayed, my brain clogged, and nothing he said penetrated. Words stuck in my throat; they would not come out. When they did, they left my tongue in no order I could recognize.

Carlos put me at ease. With Father, words were lines and loops I grew to despise. I tried to put sound to them so he would not raise his voice at me, so he would not look at me with disgust in his eyes, as if he were ashamed of me, as if he could not understand how a man as brilliant as he could have fathered an idiot like me.

How pleased he was when I read my first little book from cover to cover! But Carlos had made me see the pictures behind the words. He had traced his finger beneath the lines and loops when he read to me, and I saw colors and shapes as clearly as if they were in front of me.

How shocked Father was when I blurted out the poem Carlos had taught me!
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night.
I was walking behind Father, spellbound by a moon so bright it looked like the sun.

“Lahjabless walking tonight.” Ariana had tried to frighten me.

“Don’t pay her any mind,” Carlos said. “It’s the full moon that makes her talk like that.”

And it was the full moon that made me talk like that, that made me sing out the poem Carlos had taught me as I skipped behind my father in the moonlight.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

“
I
not
e,
” Father said, not turning his head to look back at me. I had pronounced the final syllable of the last word to rhyme with
tree.
“Symmetri,” Father said.

I sang out the poem again, caught in the magic of the dappled light, the treetops covered in lace, like Cinderella’s dress. But while I was here, on my beloved island, Father must have been there, in England, a boy reciting the same lines in a forest of maple and oak. My girlish voice must have clashed against the deeper tones of that boy’s, for suddenly Father seemed to hear me, to realize it was my voice, not the boy’s, that had brushed against his ears. He stopped short and I fell against him.

“Who? What?” His tongue struggled to find the question he wanted.

Too late I realized what I had done. Carlos had warned me: He would teach me but I could not tell Father.

“Who taught it to you?”

Father must have suspected the moment he found the question. He had not read the poem to me. Even if I had opened his books, he knew I did not know enough to read the poem on my own.

“Who?” Disbelief registered on his face, but the possibility was too far-fetched to take hold in his brain. He bounded to the house, anger giving authority to his footsteps.

Carlos said I was brave to defend him. But it was not courage that made me bring Carlos’s book to Father. I was proud of Carlos. I wanted to prove to Father that he was wrong. Carlos was smart. He could read. He could read books I could not read. I was not superior to him. The color of my skin did not make me better than him.

When Father declared that my formal education was over, Carlos, pitying me, said he would continue to teach me. He had no inkling of the desperation that had driven Father to his decision. He did not know that Father was afraid to be alone with me.

Not long afterward my body began to change. Startlingly, within just a few weeks after Father turned me over to Ariana, my breasts blossomed into two plump balls that strained against the thin fabric of my blouses. I pulled and tugged at the sides of my chest, trying to adjust my body into dresses that had become too tight for me. Father noticed. Without saying a word to me, he sent Carlos to Trinidad with a note for the shopkeeper to send a bra for me.

“If only your mother were here,” Father said when he handed me the package.

I was more embarrassed for him than for myself when I saw what was in it.

“Your mother could have shown you how to wear it,” he said, shaking his head and looking so miserable that, thinking to ease his discomfort, I said I would ask Ariana to help me.

“She’s a servant,” he said gruffly. He felt inept, he felt inadequate, but it was his duty to prepare me to be a lady. “Go.” He sat down on my bed. “Put it on. I want to see how it fits.”

At the time I did not think this was a pretext so he could remain in the room. I thought he meant what he said sincerely. I went behind the closet door and took off my dress. I put on the bra, and over it, my bathrobe.

“Let’s see. Let’s see,” Father said when I came out from behind the door. “Open your robe. I can’t see how it fits if you close your robe.” He got up and came toward me. “Come, come. Hurry up.”

My body felt hot. My fingers shook when I untied the belt of my robe. Father used to dress me when I was a child but he had long since left me to dress on my own. I felt embarrassed, ashamed, when he eased the robe over my shoulders. But Father appeared oblivious of my body, his attention focused on my bra as if the two cups held nothing beneath them, as if he were unaware that only a mere piece of cotton separated what was visible to his eyes from my new, burgeoning flesh.

“No, the straps are too tight.” He stuck his finger between the elastic and my bare skin. My shoulders stung when the elastic snapped back.

“And you fastened it too tightly in the back.”

I was standing in front of him, my bathrobe dropped to my waist, my chest bare except for the white bra encasing my breasts.

“Unfasten it. Can’t you see your skin popping out below?” The bottoms of my breasts had rolled out beneath the hem of the bra. He flicked his finger across one and then the other. “Turn around. Turn around.”

I felt hands on my back. There was a buzzing in my ear. I stopped breathing.

“If only your mother were here . . .” He sighed.

Was I to believe him? And yet he had said nothing nor done anything for me to doubt his innocence. I felt riddled with guilt for my half-formed suspicions. The kiss was an accident; his fingers brushing the bottoms of my breasts nothing more than his awkward attempt to help me. If my mother were here and had done as he had done, would I have harbored dark thoughts?

But in the days and weeks that followed I couldn’t avoid noticing that he was looking at me in a way he had never done before. If I chanced to meet his eyes, he turned away or frowned at me. I thought he was displeased with me, disappointed I was not growing up to be a beauty like my mother. At night I used to look longingly at her photograph on my dresser and beg God to make me resemble her. In despair one day I sought comfort from Carlos. You look just like her, he said. Even prettier. I thought my father believed the opposite.

And yet there was something in the way Father looked at me that made me feel not merely inadequate, but ill at ease. It was as if the way my body was developing was a source of embarrassment to him, not merely of disappointment. Frequently when he spoke to me, he would cast his eyes downward to my legs, and a shiver would rush through his body when he turned away.

Soon he began to complain about my clothes. I was still wearing the cotton shifts Ariana made for me on a sewing machine Father had bought her. They were simple dresses with an opening at the top for my head and on either side for my arms. They had no waistline, and the only adjustment Ariana had made to them was to add long darts to make room for my breasts.

Now Father thought there was something else she needed to do. My bottom jiggled, he said to me one evening after dinner. He had just excused me from the table and I was walking away from him in the direction of the drawing room. I stopped immediately, self-conscious of his eyes on me, and I drew my hands quickly along the sides of my hips as if somehow doing so I could hold my jiggling flesh in place.

“Yes,” he said. “We must do something about that.”

His remedy was a panty corset. Carlos was sent again with a sealed note to the store in Trinidad, requesting one for me.