Temple of My Familiar (26 page)

Part Three

“L
IBERATING
Z
EDÉ AND
C
ARLOTTA
was the last act I did as Mary Ann Haverstock,” the playwright Mary Jane Briden, after three decades of living in Africa, would tell her American and African friends. “It was one of the more exciting things I’d ever done, and I was lucid! My mind had been clouded with drugs for such a long time that when I went back into the jungle to get them, everything, every tree, every bush, every star, the sun, seemed to me as if just created. As we tore through the bush, I was oohing and aahing over every little fern bank, every little streamlet, the tiniest points of light captured in the droplets of condensed dew on the leaves. I was smiling the whole time. Admiring with each step my pretty pink boots, so bright and flowerlike against the dark verdant tropical earth.

“It was easy to kill the dogs and steal into the compound of the school. Easy to grab Zedé and Carlotta, easy to reach the coast and my boat the
Recuerdo
. The voyage to San Francisco was smooth and beautiful. Zedé, exhausted from excitement and the escape itself, slept as if she were dead. I looked after Carlotta, who had grown into a fat little Buddha of a girl. The crew and I had not anticipated the storm. We’d planned a much simpler disappearing act. We would contact the Coast Guard and tell them the
Recuerdo
had a broken mast. By the time they arrived, we would be long gone on my other boat, which shadowed our journey the whole time. But the storm did come, and after calling the Coast Guard, we made our escape, never dreaming the
Recuerdo
, the most seaworthy of sloops, would capsize and fling its occupants into the sea. But I had made sure Zedé and Carlotta always wore their life vests on deck, and so I suppose that is what saved them.

“I read the newspapers later, with the story of my sunken boat and the two odd boat people hauled up out of the ocean and brought ashore. My parents, I also read, flew out to meet them. This was in a second article, after the newspapers discovered whose daughter it was who owned the boat. And there was an enchanting picture of Mom and Dad holding hands and walking back to their limousine. It made me sad to see them; they seemed so old, and so lost. The papers had spared them nothing and raked over my ‘youthfully misguided, race-mixing radic-lib escapades’ with typical Hearstian reacto-conservative glee. Mom was still as frail as a sparrow from years of starving herself so that she might appear a child’s size next to Dad’s lumbering six feet four. I could never, once I understood how love was made between men and women, bear to imagine them making love, with him on top. I could feel how the breath would be crushed out of her as her tiny rib cage supported his heavy abdomen, chest, shoulders, and neck. Yet it wasn’t likely that she’d complain. This was all she knew. Her own father had been huge and her mother even smaller and frailer than she was. The family had liked to say, about my mother’s mother, that she weighed maybe a hundred pounds, soaking wet. I had actually been pointedly reminded of this fact, growing up, as I sat at the table refusing to eat anything but buttery mashed potatoes with a side order of chocolate milk.

“There was no reason for them to think me alive or to grieve over me excessively. For months after I became old enough to inherit my own money, I had made a quietly shocking spectacle of myself by giving it away. They looked on grimly, disapproving. But really, I had so much; and sometimes I was shaken to discover that there were weeks when, simply by letting my investments alone, I earned more, sometimes as much as three times more, than I had managed in the same period to give away. There was a dreadful feeling of creeping ‘moneyism’; days when I felt for all the world like a field or forest being overtaken by kudzu. I felt I would drown in all my money, and the panic of that feeling only began to ease as I made plans to give up forever being who I was.

“How can I say this so that it doesn’t seem totally awful? I was eager to give up being who I was. I had already chosen a new name, ‘Rowena Rollins,’ which, I was later to realize, I could only use comfortably on paper. In establishing myself in Africa, I called myself ‘Mary Jane Briden,’ getting rid of ‘Ann,’ which I’d never liked, and ‘Haverstock,’ which seemed just a pseudonym for cash, and adding a name that—now that I consider it—had something of the possibility of marriage in it. Prophetically, it would be in Africa that I would become, though only in name, a bride. But I simply did not know how to get about in the world without sufficient cash. This means I did not give away all my money, as my parents thought I would, saying at various times to me that when I grew old and penniless I would regret my ‘foolish’ behavior. I opened several foreign bank accounts under my new name and under a few long numbers and under a couple of other people’s names, all deceased. I kept enough to live on, in other words, and to do whatever in the world I might modestly choose, and I left the
Recuerdo
sinking decisively into oblivion, like my old life, and went off in
The Coming Age,
the
Recuerdo
’s twin, except for a small turquoise snake embroidered on her sails. After years of barely conscious deliberation, this symbol had emerged as my personal emblem of spiritual expression. The snake, which sheds its skin but is ever itself, and, because of its knowledge of the secret places of the earth, free from the threat of extinction, apparently uneradicable; and turquoise, a color of cleansing of body and spirit, of the clarification of memories, and of powerful healing.

“I remember how I felt as the storm subsided and the fog began to clear. All that year I dressed in black jumpsuits, and as I sat in a deck chair with my steaming cup of camomile tea and my pink lace-up boots propped against the rail, I felt, for the first time that I could remember, not only mentally lucid and well defined against the landscape of my universe, but also actually
vivid
; in short, free.

“I did not really know where I was going, and so I returned to the past. But the old past, not the one that I myself knew. I went to London and tramped about in the parks and museums and libraries for quite some months, listening intently, speaking when I could, until I’d developed something of a British accent. I then took the train out to Hampstead and the nursing home for the exceedingly rich and aged where
she
was. I couldn’t decide, as I waited in the softly colored, restfully lighted lobby, whether I should pass myself off as a journalist or a student; surely I’d need some justification for my interest in Eleanora Burnham’s life. But I had not reckoned on having been known to her in the past. The old past. The past of before I was born or even thought of.

“‘Elly,’ she croaked at me immediately. ‘You’ve finally come back home! And what did you bring me?’

“She was the oldest, frailest, most ethereal-looking human being I’d ever seen, my great-aunt Eleanora. Her bright blue sunken eyes dominated her thin, wrinkled face. Her sparse white hair hung in two lusterless pigtails over her red, ethnically decorated nightdress. Daydress, too, I supposed, for she had the look and, as I bent over her, the smell of someone who, though clean, was never out of bed.

“But why should she call me ‘Elly,’ a diminutive of her own name?

“‘Elly Peacock!’ she exclaimed happily, smiling broadly and without a tooth in her head. I sat on the edge of a chair beside the bed.

“The nurse winked at me. ‘She’s in and out of this world a great deal,’ she said, smiling. ‘Sometimes she thinks I’m her mother ... and,’ she said, looking down at her short skirt, ‘dressed indecently.’

“I looked up at the blonde, plump, matronly woman. I thought she looked a bit like me—a Slav or Russian or eighteenth-century English country version.

“‘I think Elly must be
this
person,’ said the nurse, handing me an old photograph in a spotted silver frame. Two young women, with light upswept locks overflowing pins and clasps, and dressed identically in long dark dresses with lace at throat and sleeves, looked out calmly over the wheels of an old-fashioned bicycle built for two. ‘Eleanora and Eleandra’ was written in a spidery hand underneath. I immediately recognized myself in Eleandra.

“‘She’s been here so long I think I know the whole family,’ said the nurse. ‘Or’—she smiled—‘maybe I’m the one who’s been here so long. Some days she can take me back as far as the eighteen hundreds, if I let her. Eleandra was her twin.’

“I looked at my great-aunt, at the neatly made bed in which her wasted frame made barely a ripple in the sheets, at the rows of old photographs on the table by the bed, and at the bottles of pebbles, all sizes, colors, degrees of roughness and smoothness set in among the photographs.

“‘She collected rocks,’ said the nurse, raising her eyebrows for significance, ‘In Africa.’

“Eleanora, however, was not to be patronized, even in her condition; she rolled her eyes at the woman. ‘Not only in Africa, you sow,’ she hissed or, rather, frothed. ‘All over the bloody world I traveled collecting them. You see, Elly, like you, I knew what was the real gold and silver. People used to break into places where I stayed, because I was a wealthy woman, but all they ever found were these. Once, a burglar emptied all the bottles and apparently bit every single pebble!’ She chortled, but ended in a slight fit of coughing.

“‘Well,’ said the nurse, ‘
excuse
me.’ She went off to the next room, where I heard the querulous voice of her next patient greeting her at the door.

“‘You must learn to love only that which cannot be stolen,’ the old woman wheezed. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘I don’t know why I should tell
you
that; after all, I learned it from you.’

“‘But how did you learn it from me?’

“She looked at me, visibly puzzled.

“‘I’m not Elly,’ I said gently. ‘I’m not your twin.’

“Eleanora brightened. ‘Of course you’re not my twin. That little twit.’ She sucked her gums as toothed people suck their teeth.
Swak
, was the sound. The sound of irritation joined securely to dismissal.

‘Nobody would learn anything from Elly Burnham. Elly Burnham never left home, and therefore couldn’t come back. Well, she did leave home, but only to marry and then her home was just like the one she left. Oh, what a crushing bore! But Elly
Peacock
, our
aunt
Elly Burnham Peacock ... Do you know, when she deigned to come back to England, which she did only because she needed treatment for the cancer that eventually killed her, the papers simply said, “The Lady Peacock has arrived.” And for the longest time I thought my aunt was a peacock. Once, when I saw her, with my own two eyes, going by in a carriage with her dress all peacockish greens and blacks and purples and blues and her beautiful white face shaded by a tiny white parasol, I still thought perhaps she was. We were never allowed to see her up close, of course. She was a disgrace to England, and even more to the family. She had a liking for Arabs, you see. She loved Arabs, horses, and the desert, in that order. Or maybe she loved the desert, horses, and Arabs. I read all I could find about her, and I couldn’t ever really tell. Then, too, she liked Africans.’

“When she stopped for breath, or wound down, as was the case—she actually seemed to have stopped breathing—I flung out my phony credentials: ‘I’m a student journalist writing a paper on ...’ I stopped. What should it be on? The rich? The old and rich? The conditions in nursing homes run for the old rich? I could see that things were pretty well run here. Eleanora’s bed linens were undoubtedly her own, or at least bought by someone who had a knowledge of linens. Her sheets were of that soft, rich material that made sleep delicious, her coverlet of ancient handmade lace. Her pillowcases were edged in lace also. And there was a large bouquet of spring flowers practically bursting from the Baccarat vase next to her bed. But of course she was rich enough to send fresh flowers to herself perpetually.

“‘Africa!’ she muttered, coming out of the snooze her long speech had induced. ‘I hated Africa. The heat, the bugs, the leeches, the niggers.’

“She looked at me from under scabby white brows, her thin lips, in which the wrinkles had turned to furrows, poked out in resentment.

“Why is it, I wondered, that the racists in one’s own family always come as such a surprise—and disappointment.

“‘Oh, Aunt!’ I said, without thinking, nonetheless claiming her as my own. But she had fallen fast asleep.

“I had a really good look at her then and thought she resembled a very old, a really, really old drooling and snoring baby girl.

“She had given her papers to a women’s college in Guildford, to which the Burnhams had always been charitable, and on days when I did not go to visit her, I visited them. Not only papers, but baskets and bowls and sculptures and cloths as well. Indeed, there was, in one section of the library, ‘the Eleanora Burnham Room.’ It was a replica of a large bedroom and sitting room in an old colonial plantation house. There was her narrow, maidenly bed, covered with mosquito netting, a rattan easy chair and sofa, upholstered in faded blue paisley, her writing table, small and blue, beneath a fake window. The books were by her, a half dozen or so of them anyway, written while she lived in the tropics, and there were other old books: adventures, romances, studies in geography and history, and the family Bible, in which there was, among other family names, a listing of ‘Eleandra Burnham, born on 29 May 1823.’ My great-aunt Eleanora’s twin, Eleandra, named for this adventuring aunt, was listed several decades later, and had not been like her at all, apparently. The walls of the room were lively with beautifully fierce African masks and long beaded fly whisks. There were also a couple of rat-eaten and sweat-stained ‘bwana’ hats.

“I was mainly interested in her diary, and to get at it I needed her permission, or, rather, the permission of her guardian. I found out who this was, a solicitor in London, and paid him a visit. Since he knew nothing of the existence of the diary—‘You mean the old woman kept a diary? Whatever for, do you suppose?’—he could not find a reason to keep me from seeing it. I’d dressed carefully in a dowdy tweed suit and pulled my hair back from my face. Glasses that caused me to squint completed my outfit. This camouflage was probably not necessary, and yet I enjoyed it.