Voyager: Travel Writings (10 page)

By now, in my courtship of the woman who would become my fourth wife, I had managed to account for events leading up to my second marriage. After I endured six weekly sessions in the history and beliefs of Reform Judaism—Christine’s failed attempt at reconciliation with her parents—on a cold, wet afternoon in late October, the nuptials were performed in a synagogue office in Concord, New Hampshire, by a liberal rabbi, with only my father and his second wife in attendance to witness the event. I was neither obliged formally to convert to Judaism nor, to my relief, was I required by Christine or the rabbi to be circumcised. I sensed a sadness in the rabbi as he went about his task of marrying us, as if he knew it wasn’t going to take, and a similar sadness in my father, who, like me, had taken the afternoon off work. Even his wife had a long, sad face that day. I didn’t know it then, but their marriage was cracked and about to collapse beneath the weight of my father’s alcoholism and violence and his philandering ways. Eventually, he, too, would be married four times and divorced three.
It was October 29, 1962, one day after the happy ending of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world backed away from certain nuclear suicide. Everyone should have been filled with light and joy and relief and optimism. But in Concord, New Hampshire, in the rabbi’s back office at Temple Beth Jacob, only Christine seemed happy that day.

Usually, betrayal in a marriage precedes abandonment, but in Christine’s and my case, abandonment long preceded betrayal. And it was mutual. That is, after nearly fourteen years of marriage, after conceiving three daughters and raising them together, after my return to college in North Carolina on Christine’s mother’s kindly dime and desire to save her daughter from being married to an artistic plumber, after making a big Victorian farmhouse in New Hampshire the center of an elaborately staged, decade-long, ongoing gala that Christine called our social life and I called my woeful burden, after our rambunctious travels in the Caribbean and living in Jamaica, we both saw that we were alone. Each abandoned by the other. Probably we had been alone from the beginning and just hadn’t known it—not until, by betraying each other, we tricked ourselves into separating and getting divorced from each other and then came to the slow realization that in our secret inner lives nothing had changed. Not since that autumn day in 1962 in the sad young rabbi’s office, when we both came to be alone. In marrying each other we were, for different reasons, abandoning each other, both of us sentenced to unexpected solitude, she by virtue of the end of the long, ongoing drama of our romance, which until then had kept her such good company, and I by virtue of her relentless need to appropriate and objectify my subjective life, a direct consequence of her inability to perceive the autonomous existence, never mind the essence, of another person’s inner reality. It was as if I had been born and raised to cultivate this strange form of solitude and had deliberately sought out the one woman who could accommodate it in this unique and peculiar way.

It was all too familiar to me, I said to Chase.

She said, So you courted, married, betrayed, and abandoned your mother again. And Darlene again. What about your third marriage? she asked. What about Becky?

She was different, I said. Or maybe she wasn’t. I had a lifelong habit of falling in love with women who needed me to solve their insoluble problems more than I needed them to solve mine. I needed to be seen as the fixer. Mr. Fixit.

And now? With me?

You’re the first woman I’ve loved who doesn’t need me more than I need you, I said.

Thanks . . . I
think,
she added and smiled.

Despite the pleasure we took from the calm and privacy of the Îsles des Saintes, our more persistent interests lay not with small, homogenous, figuratively gated communities like Marie Galante, but with the larger islands, where there were lively and unpredictable native populations, where the land could not be surveyed by a single glance from the air or a half-hour drive in a rented car, where classes, races, cultures, and languages mingled and strove against one another. Thus from Guadeloupe, moving on down the Windwards, we flew to Dominica, which was large, mountainous, crowded, and complex.

On our approach to Dominica’s Canefield Airport, the pilot suddenly got waved off and told to land at Melville Hall Airport, way across the island to the north. The single Canefield Airport fire engine had thrown a rod, which meant the airfield had to shut down until it was fixed. From Melville Hall we were obliged to hitch a long ride back over the mountains down to Springfield Plantation, where we had reservations.

Not to worry, I reassured Chase. In the Caribbean, when things screw up, as they always do, they usually get better.

And indeed, our bumpy ride in a van loaded with shy but cheerful Dominicans on their way to the capital, Roseau, took us along
the sparsely populated northeast coast, where the wind-driven surf crashed against volcanic rock, past the Carib Reserve, where the only surviving Carib Indians in the world resided, and through the wondrous Northern Forest Preserve, wild and impenetrable, the home of the endangered Sisserou and red-necked Amazon parrots, found now only here on Dominica. We wound through groves of ferns fifteen feet high, through rain forest climbing up to cloud forest and over the top, curling down the western side of the nearly five-thousand-foot-high cordillera, until finally, amazed, dazzled, we were let off at a roughly restored eighteenth-century country mansion called Springfield Plantation, within sight of the port of Roseau far below and the glittering sea.

Springfield Plantation, a rambling hillside guesthouse with several adjacent cut-stone outbuildings, was owned and operated by an American, John Archbold (Princeton ’34), who had sailed from New Jersey to Dominica in June 1934 in his graduation present, a fifty-foot two-masted schooner, and had fallen in love with the island and never left. Eventually he became a cocoa, citrus, and coffee planter. And now a semiretired innkeeper.

Evidently, we were the only guests at Springfield Plantation. Archbold had observed from the registry that I was employed at his alma mater, and later, when he invited us to join him at his table, we accepted. Chase and I had already quietly noticed that the coffee-and-milk-colored waiters and waitresses, the cook, and even the several maids and gardeners seemed to have the same bright blue eyes as old John Archbold. Chase remembers his eyes as green; my memory says blue. We both remember the strong familial resemblance. A blunt-speaking, presently unmarried septuagenarian—I later learned that he’d been married four times (what is it about
four
?)—he was one of the last of his particular kind in the islands, the unapologetic neocolonial who believes he earned his place in the sun the old-fashioned way and not by dint of race and birthright and can’t understand why others, especially the “natives,” cannot or will not do the same. He was not the sort of man with whom one
argued the virtues of democratic socialism or reparations. He was a curiosity, an antediluvian relic from another age whose dream of the Caribbean—suggested by the portraits of the British monarchs from Victoria to Elizabeth on the dining room walls—was the dream of empire, an empire in the tropics inhabited by people he had come to know and, in his perverse way, to love more passionately, perhaps, than he knew and loved the cold northern people and land he had left behind. Or, judging from the biracial appearance of his staff, maybe it was the slaveholder’s dream. It’s sometimes hard to distinguish between the two desires, empire and slavery, and the racial fantasies and projections they engender.

Our dinner with our garrulous, opinionated host lasted long into the night over port and Cuban cigars. Although one could call it interesting, it was a bit like dining with a public executioner who loves his job. Archbold’s assumptions of racial and class solidarity with his two white American guests led him early on to share his low opinions of Dominicans, people like the caramel-colored waiter with half-closed blue eyes expertly refilling our wineglasses, and of Afro-Caribbean people and culture in general. I listened in silence and wondered if he would feel the same racial and class solidarity with the sunburnt, tattooed white boys on Nevis, or with the American real estate developers whose signs on Antigua pointed the way to Carlisle Bay and led nowhere, or with the throngs of white cruise-shippers with funny T-shirts at every port of call, or with the dudes at Bomba’s Surf Shack on Tortola, or with the white women with clumped dreadlocks strolling the beach at Negril with their rent-a-Rastas—all those Caucasian appropriators of the Caribbean. Would Archbold see a connection to his own atavistic neocolonial racist fantasy? Or was it the nature of the fantasy itself—and the reason it so often ends up thwarted, doomed to disappointment, frustration, and bitterness—to recognize no other?

And what was our white people’s Caribbean fantasy, Chase’s and mine? Was ours an unexamined, equally privileged version of Archbold’s, too?

I thought I could recognize Chase’s. It was almost scientific—tentative and exploratory and cautious and curious—with a modest, open-minded acceptance of my role in our mutual courtship as guide and narrator of her journey. She would not have made this voyage without my having initiated it. The Caribbean held no romance for her, except by way of my attachment to it. My own fantasy, however, was turbulent and moody, alternating between painful personal memories and nostalgia. Subjective in all ways. For me, this was both a compulsion and a willed return trip entered upon with a certain ill-defined reluctance, and I was confused by the conflicted emotions it evoked.

The third night at Springfield Plantation, our last before departing Dominica for Martinique, we met a new addition to our catalog of versions of Archbold’s vision of the Caribbean. We decided that we’d had more than enough of the old man’s cranky racist company and would dine alone. We entered the dining room and saw at his table a strange-looking white man in his late forties wearing a seersucker suit, polka-dotted bow tie, white buck shoes, and owl-eyed tortoiseshell eyeglasses. His straight flaxen hair was parted in the middle, combed to matching partial bangs on his temples. Archbold waved us over and introduced us by first and last names to the man, whose name was Clive Cravensbrooke, which suited him almost too perfectly. His accent was an American version of British English, early
Masterpiece Theatre
. For a few seconds I wondered if he might be a clever downtown Manhattan performance artist having us all on.

It turned out that he was an adjunct professor of the history of landscape at Colgate University and was leading a group of students on a winter-term field-study trip, his costs underwritten by the parents of his students, much as ours was underwritten by that slick New York travel magazine. The students were all staying in a youth hostel down in Roseau, he said and chuckled, while he bunked up here at Springfield Plantation with his dear old friend John Archbold.

I did not mention my brief enrollment as a student at Colgate. Probably before his time, anyway. A mildly unsettling coincidence
was all. It’s hard to escape one’s past, even this far south of it. When we turned to leave for our corner table, Clive Cravensbrooke asked Chase if her birth name was Penelope.

Startled, she said yes. Chase was actually her middle name, she said.

Cravensbrooke said he knew her father long ago. And how was her dear mother, Ann? Was she still living in Little Compton? And was her father enjoying his retirement from Choate? Still living alone in his cabin hideaway in the Adirondacks?

Cravensbrooke had at hand an astonishing amount of both new and old detailed information about Chase’s entire family, as if for a lifetime he’d been compiling a dossier on them. Her uncle Dave and his wife, was he still headmaster and teaching middle school biology at Browne & Nichols? He even asked after her paternal grandmother by name. Was she still living at 436 Saint Ronan Street in New Haven?

Chase stammered, No, not now. My grandmother, she died some years ago.

Cravensbrooke seemed momentarily saddened, but not surprised, as if he’d already known of the woman’s death.

Chase asked him how he knew so much about her family.

He flashed the smile of a lizard, implying that actually he knew much, much more than she suspected, and dodged her question by asking her another batch of questions, as if showing off. Is your cousin Joe still making his beautiful furniture? And your sister Eliza, is she happy living in Standfordville? Still divorced? Her oldest must be about twelve by now.

Cravensbrooke would admit only that many long years ago, too many to admit, he said with a wink, Chase’s father had been his Latin teacher at Choate. Which did not explain much. He remembered him, he said, with great affection.

Clearly, he was obsessed with Chase’s entire family and had been tracking their lives for decades. But why? Over the years she had run into dozens of her father’s ex-students, none of whom had
much interest in or information about her family members or about her father himself, for that matter. There was something sinister about this man, and something pathetic and creepy. Meeting him in Dominica in the dining room of an old plantation house two thousand miles south of New England made her feel she was being stalked. Without her knowledge, it had been going on for many years. Too many, as he said, to admit.

Months later, back in the Adirondacks, Chase and I recounted to her father our strange meeting in Dominica with the man named Clive Cravensbrooke. It took a while, but then he vaguely recalled a boy with that name, a student at Choate in the late 1950s. Chase’s father had caught the boy cheating on his final exam in Latin class, he recalled. He’d seen to it that the boy was expelled from the school. What was he doing way down there? In the Caribbean?

He might as well have asked what we were doing way down there, in the Caribbean. Chase would have had a plausible answer, but I’m not sure I would have, or that it would have been any more legitimate than Archbold’s or Cravensbrooke’s or the tattooed boys of Nevis’s or any of the others’. I was beginning to think that all of us, in our own weird ways, were vampires.