Temple of My Familiar (27 page)

“And then, sitting in the rattan easy chair in ‘her’ room at the library, with the fake African sun streaming through the window and the women’s college of Guildford, as far as I was concerned, on some other continent, instead of just outside the closed door (no one came, no one cared about Eleanora Burnham, no matter how much money and what quantity of ‘artifacts’ she’d bequeathed the college in her will, and of which the college had been informed, so naturally the administration had waited impatiently, over the years, for her to die), sitting in the easy chair, with the one volume at a time I was permitted to take, I made a startling discovery. Far from hating Africa and the bugs, leeches, and niggers, as she’d claimed, Africa had been the great love of my great-aunt’s life.

There is a little serpent here [she wrote in 1922] that is exactly the colour of coral. It lives only in certain trees and comes out of its hole, far up the tree, near dusk. It lives on tree spiders and bugs, and is known to sing. The natives tell me that it sings. They claim they have heard it sing millions of times, and act as if this is entirely ordinary. Furthermore, they ask why I have not heard it and why it should be so strange. Everything sings, they say.

But I do not. This, however, I cannot bear to tell them.

Well, today I at least saw the little creature. They had told me which tree at the edge of my yard I should keep an eye on, and, sure enough, today, just at dusk, down came this little coral fellow, sticking out its tongue, slithering primly down the tree looking for dinner and finding several plump
hors d’oeuvre
on the way. I watched it disappear into the grass, and I felt that although the colour was as vivid as I had been led by the natives to expect, I still could not believe it would sing. I felt perhaps they were only teasing me.

Another entry:

I could not imagine living for a hundred years, yet the natives quite often live that long. They say it is because everything they eat is alive. The grain they eat is so alive that if they planted it instead of eating it, it would come up. They eat fruit, grains, which they make into porridge, and root crops. They eat a lot of boiled greens and okra, both of which grow wild. They eat little or no meat, and when asked to prepare thick slabs of it for me and my English or European guests, they handle it as if it is offensive.

B
UT HOW HAD HER
great-aunt become interested enough in Africa to live there?

Eleanora was now a hundred years old. Mary Jane wondered if this pleased her. If it made her think of the old “natives” she had known. Such a loaded word, “natives.” For people like her great-aunt, it had meant savages. It was not a word Mary Jane could imagine her great-aunt using to refer to herself, though she was a native of England.

Her great-aunt had been born in 1885, on March 23. She was an Aries, which explained her impulsive, headstrong nature. She
would
be a person who loved flying, for instance, long before anyone had any notion that flying could possibly be safe. She had flown, rapturously, in the first planes that went to Africa; Aries people were akin to birds. She would also follow her instincts regarding other worlds, other peoples. But what had been the pivotal experience of her great-aunt’s life? Mary Jane sat now, several days a week, mostly watching her great-aunt sleep and thinking of that life, that grand life of the English upper class during the years before the Great (as they called it) War. Well, for one thing, they’d liked the word “great.” She had gone on a tour of the “great” English country houses and been to Morley Crofts, in Warwickshire, the old house of her ancestors. She had trooped along over the checkered floors and gazed from the mullioned windows, inset with Celtic designs in stained glass, which looked oddly Egyptian. There was a profusion of coral-and-black serpents and jeweled shepherd’s crooks. Morley Crofts covered many acres and resembled a medieval castle more than it did a house. Vast gardens surrounded it, and as she drifted about with the other tourists—who reminded her of rather pathetic sheep, in their polyester suits and spanking (and pinching) new tennis shoes, exclaiming with joy over each dovecote or gargoyle, each primrose path or giant dahlia—she imagined Eleanora sitting here or there among the garden statuary, reading a book or perhaps simply staring out into space, far out into the future, into Mary Jane’s own time, and, with a small smirk of amusement, watching.

Mary Jane’s own grandfather had left England penniless—cut off from his father’s and grandfather’s wealth, amassed in Ireland on the broken backs of the Irish—but with a sense of adventure and the desire to make his own fortune. He had succeeded splendidly, eventually owning copper mines in Missouri, petroleum fields in West Texas, and entire southern counties in Alabama and Georgia planted in cotton picked by illiterate blacks he probably never so much as glimpsed. His father and grandfather noted his success, so like their own—for the grandfather lived on and on. Sometimes Mary Jane thought she could almost remember him, but it was only the stories she remembered: of his fierce avarice, his contempt for weaker adversaries, his love of wealth for its own sake. The stories his children and grandchildren told about him were as pointed as morality tales and could as easily have been entitled “Lust,” “Avarice,” “Greed,” but unlike morality tales, the message was never
against
these things. In any event, seeing this success, his antecedents heartily embraced him as the true heir of their avaricious genes and of course added much of their own vast resources, after their deaths, to his.

By the time her own father was born, there was a need to pull in one’s fangs a bit. So Mary Jane and her brother and sister were brought up to be the kind of rich people who were as fundamental to the country’s stability as the earth but as inconspicuous as a rug. Oh, the little patent leather slippers and simple cashmere sweaters, the plain camel’s hair coats, smartly hitting the back of the knee, the neat gray dresses, snug at the waist, loose everywhere else, discreet hair ribbons, mostly black and, this being the forties, sometimes plaid. And yet, when Mary Jane and her sister walked down Fifth Avenue near the apartment her family kept there, she felt people stared at them and knew instinctively they were rich. And laughed at their careful squareness, and resented them.

When she left this life behind—the sleek blond hairdo that flipped up at the ends like Doris Day’s or Dina Merrill’s, the tiny white pearl earrings, the black velvet or plaid grosgrain bow at the back of her neck—and wore paint-encrusted jeans and funky turtleneck sweaters, and her hair had frizzed out (with the help of a ton of chemicals) into a fiery sunburst of resistance, well over a decade before this became de rigeur for rich and radical white kids in the sixties, she understood why it was that no matter how simply she and her sister dressed, how inconspicuous they tried to make themselves, they were always, in fact, giving themselves away. She decided that they must have exuded a smell of quiet sufficiency, of absolute security, so lacking in the worlds they did not inhabit. This was the smell of the upper class.

One day, in Eleanora’s diary, Mary Jane saw the word “M’Sukta,” scribbled over and over in the margins of a page. She liked the sound of it; however, flipping through the rest of the diary she found no further evidence of the word. On her next visit to her great-aunt she brought along some of the photographs from the Eleanora Burnham collection for her to identify. They were obviously old and rare, and not in the best condition, and this was permitted only after the library received a stern call from the London solicitor. Mary Jane’s statement to the librarian that the photographs were meaningless without proper documentation—names and dates, at least—had fallen on deaf, seemingly irritated ears.

The head librarian’s view was that all the photographs with white people in them
were
documented; at least, all the white people were named. Occasionally, too, a servant or hunting guide had a first name or nickname. There was a “Chumby,” for instance, which hardly sounded African. But the backs of dozens of photographs of Africans without white people in them remained blank. Their faces, as thoughtful and moving as the photographs of American Indians taken by Edward Curtis in the nineteen-hundreds, deeply touched something in Mary Jane. Almost without exception the Africans were interestingly, often spectacularly, dressed, and this especially surprised and pleased her. The women’s hairstyles, with their interwoven cowrie shells and feathers, were fabulous and made them look, at the same time, serene, regal, and wild. And the cloth of which their robes were made! In a museum near their apartment in New York, Mary Jane had seen Kente cloth, but she’d seen it in strips and as decoration around a sleeve or hem. In these photographs she saw an even more incredible cloth, stripped, like Kente, but glistening as if shot through with golden thread. In these photographs she saw Africans whose eyes, skin, clothes
shone
. With richness and intelligence and
health
. Finally, it was the shine of health that captivated Mary Jane, for she realized that so degraded had Africa become in the mind of the world that a healthy African, like the ones she saw in the photographs, was practically unimaginable. These were people she assumed her great-aunt had known, for without exception the eyes that looked back at the camera were kindly, acknowledging a special bond. But if they
were
people she had known, Eleanora could no longer speak of them. She gazed at the pictures Mary Jane held up to her, one by one, through a magnifying glass, and the tears spilled over her red and swollen lower lids. It was only at the last picture, not a photograph like the rest, but a painting, of the one broken face among the lot, an African woman wearing the beautiful robes of her tribe but painted against a gray stone interior of what might have been a cathedral, that Eleanora was able to utter a word. And the word she uttered, a sob really, was “M’Sukta.”

The sulky head librarian, quite without knowing it, solved the problem.

“All of these pictures,” she said to Mary Jane, as she was turning them in, “were taken by Lady
Eleandra
Burnham
Peacock.
I don’t suppose you know anything about
her.
All her personal effects were willed to her niece, Lady
Burnham.
This explains why they are amongst Lady
Burnham’s
collection.” She actually sniffed when she came to the end of the second sentence. Taking the photographs with one hand, she flung down a small book with the other. “Here’s something you might find interesting,” she said.

When Mary Jane reached for it, however, the librarian put the carmine-colored tips of her newsprint-smudged fingers on it.

“You have to sign for it,” she said, with the hateful petulance of bureaucrats everywhere.

This journal had a faded red velvet binding and a green, very faded, satin-ribbon marker. Its leaves were yellowed and water-stained, and many words, in the cramped, even script of a young woman writing by flashlight under the bedcovers, difficult to decipher. It had, however, belonged to the first—as far as Mary Jane knew—Eleandra, and she opened it with a rapidly beating heart.

I was just out walking with my cousin T., who makes me laugh so much I wish we were not cousins. His large green eyes sparkle so in his ruddy face, and his lips are as finely chiselled as a Roman statue’s. I tease him all the time about my wanting to marry him. It is a joke, of course. I have been avoiding marriage for many years now. T. knows I want to paint, just as I know he has no interest in females. In all the family only we two seem odd. The rest are adept at fitting in, of being perfectly capable of tolerating, even condoning, and, dare I say it, of elevating to an exalted state the condition of boredom. How T. and I blushed with pleasure last night at the ballet, a savage, wild thing that shocked Mother so much Father had to pretend to be shocked as well, when all it was was a history, in dance, of our early ancestors, still heavily influenced by the dark peoples of these Isles who preceded them,
alive
, as all of them no doubt were before the Gauls and Romans descended upon them. Where are they now, the Indians of Britain? The ballet began with the predictable maiden with berry boughs on her head, and, yes, she was certainly singing, but soon her song melted her into the darker ages, or, rather, melted the audience right to the verge of that time when moderns and ancients faced each other squarely in the final act of saying goodbye. There was appreciation of the old. That is what the dance symbolized. It did not matter that the young virgin was required to dance herself out of existence; the modern world recognized what it was losing. It was this dance, done by a single young woman clad in exceedingly skimpy garb, that mother objected to. T. and I liked it. The tilt of the maiden’s russet head, the sway of her ivory thighs, massive as beams, the rounded belly quite white and firm. I held his hand tightly in both of mine and I am sure my eyes were
beads
of light.

My mother rose from her seat, stately as ever, and swung slowly up the aisle, the moiré bow at the back of her waist looking like a huge butterfly. My father followed, discreetly coughing, looking back furtively at the stage once or twice. I was horrified they were going to stop for me, and if T. had not been with me, I am sure they would have. He and I made ourselves very still and prim and proper, and hoped none of our huge enjoyment showed in our eyes or in the tension of our bodies. But oh, the excitement, to see the dancing of our history, by
Italians
, and so tumultuously and so passionately. One was tempted to the conclusion that our early folk history was probably also their own. I mean the same bonfires and dances to spring and the sprouting of grape leaves and corn!

It is thanks to T. that I go anywhere interesting. All summer long shut up at Morley Crofts! But then come the winters, and London in winter!