ECLIPSE (5 page)

Bobby’s aspirations for his people seemed no more modest than for himself. But though he appeared confident in his persona as leader, he
glanced often at Marissa, as though gauging her reaction. “Our leaders exist in a world of their own,” he continued. “But PGL exists in the wider world that turned on corporate malefactors in South Africa. Engaged Americans can compel PGL and your government to demand more from our leaders than oil. That was my business tonight. Perhaps someday you can help us.”

Already, Pierce realized, Bobby saw him as a potential instrument of his will. It struck him that in Marissa’s eyes this small but vibrant man might make other men seem smaller. Looking from Marissa to Pierce, Bobby asked politely, “How did you two meet?”

Pierce glanced at Marissa. “We’re in the same creative writing class.”

“Yes,” Marissa added with a pointed smile. “Damon even liked my story.”

In a rueful tone, Bobby inquired, “The story I haven’t read?”

Marissa shrugged. “One of them,” she replied.

Something in this exchange caused Bobby to look at Pierce more closely. “Tell me about yourself, Damon.”

Briefly, Pierce outlined his life from parochial school in Boston, to Harvard, and at last to San Francisco. “A classic Irish-American story,” he told Bobby. “I’m more curious about yours. How did you become a writer? How did you become an activist? How in the world did you wind up
here?”

Bobby’s chuckle was as deep as his voice. “From childhood, my father said I had the devil’s own way with words—many of which displeased him. I also have a mother who found her husband’s interest in other women less than charming. My father is chief of our village; perhaps as a favor to himself, or perhaps to her, he used some of the money PGL paid for his passivity to dispatch me to an English boarding school.

“There I learned to love the written word. English is the white man’s only gift to Luandia: the Brits taught me to value Dickens and the principles of liberty they cherished for themselves, if not us. The intoxicating experience of discovering both language and hypocrisy simultaneously made me a debater and, eventually, a novelist and journalist in my native land, bent on exposing the outrages I now saw with clarity. But soon I perceived that my scribbling alone would not transform Luandia.” Bobby’s smile embraced both Pierce and Marissa. “A long journey from bad to worse, my father would say—which is what brought me here two years
ago. Friends within the government made it clear that my alternative to a sabbatical abroad was jail. Out of what I suspect remain mixed motives, my father once again encouraged me to decamp. He seems to think I will bring trouble to his door.” With a grin, Bobby finished: “Of course, there’s no wind so ill it fails to blow a little bit of good. It was here I met Marissa after giving a speech much like this one. The same speech, in fact.”

Pierce found his seeming openness engaging, all the more for the lightness with which he treated the difficulties that had compelled him to leave. “Are you going back?” Damon asked.

“We
are,” Marissa said.

Her answer seemed more for Bobby than Pierce. Watching Pierce, Bobby appeared to read his thoughts. “For a time,” he said, “I worried that to go to this strange place would impose on Marissa hardships no man could ask. Especially one who hopes—no, expects—to be consumed with the cause of his people.” Bobby gave Marissa a glancing smile. “Not to mention that my father is both a Christian and a polygamist. Though I pledge her my utter fidelity, I fear that Marissa finds my background novel.”

“Not that novel,” Marissa interposed in a tone both mild and sardonic, and Pierce remembered the father of her short story.

Bobby smiled at her. “In this matter, as in others, I’m my own man.”

Dinner arrived—the dishes heavy on curry and spices. “If one can’t replicate Luandian food,” Bobby explained, “at least one can evoke its zest.”

He began to consume his portion, wielding chopsticks with rapacious deftness, driven by an appetite surprising given his slightness. “Bobby’s eating for his people,” Marissa explained with the air of a color commentator. “He burns off calories just sitting around.”

Hungry, Pierce occupied himself with dinner. Only when Bobby’s plate was clear did Pierce ask him, “About returning, do you worry for your safety?”

“Is it dangerous, you mean? Possibly. But it is my lifeblood—where I come from, what I care for, what I write about. What would I become in America but a random black man with an advanced degree, an ornament for some faculty, trained to teach young would-be writers who, when they fail, will themselves become teachers.” Bobby scowled at the table. “What would I feel
then,
when I read some truncated report in the
New York Times
about the misery of my people? What would I be to my friends but
a stranger who sends them gifts and money? What kind of shadow life would I substitute for a life of meaning, even if that life is all too brief?”

The last phrase, though casually stated, struck Pierce so forcibly that he wondered at its impact on Marissa. “And you?” Pierce asked her.

“I’m an American by birth,” she answered calmly. “But when I watch our politicians on TV, or listen to talk radio, Americans seem so insulated from reality that they’re narcotized.

“And yet I know that my mother’s cases as a social worker are worse than ever, the neighborhood she works in more hopeless than before. There’s another generation of black men in jail, and Americans have no interest in or will to change what they conveniently believe is all the black man’s fault. In Luandia, perhaps I can make a difference.”

Bobby did not comment. But Pierce read a message into his silence: that life in Luandia would be harder than she knew. Perhaps, he intuited, Bobby wanted her too much to say this. Reflecting on the short story that Bobby had not read, he wondered whether—however fond of each other they were—their relationship relied on such strategic silences, and whether she was drawn to Bobby less from passion than the need to heal the wounds of identity and family. But all he chose to say was “I admire you both.”

It was true. Still, at that moment he guessed he and Bobby would never become close. In the days before the next writing class, when he found himself thinking of Marissa, he identified the reason why, and sensed that Bobby Okari already knew it.

P
IERCE STARED AT THE MOON ABOVE THE OCEAN, CASTING PALLID
light on the windblown line of cypress trees that marked land’s end. He checked his watch again. It was eleven-fifteen, and in two hours the eclipse would darken the village of Goro. The BBC had no more news of Bobby Okari. Pierce’s only antidote to worry was memory.

“I’ve always been lucky,” he had told her. Now he wished that, like his father, he believed that luck could be passed from one person to another.

T
HEY HAD BEEN
lingering over dinner at Rivoli, an elegant Italian place near campus. By tacit consent, their postclass dinners had become a ritual, facilitated by Bobby’s immersion in teaching, writing, speaking, and planting the seeds of a movement in Luandia through incessant late-night phone calls. Their conversations, largely concerned with the craft of fiction—theirs, and others’—rarely became personal, and only once or twice did Pierce wonder if Bobby knew of them. But tonight Marissa seemed curious about his life.

“It’s true,” Pierce told her. “My dad insists that I was
born
lucky.”

The smile this elicited was quizzical. “Born white, you mean?”

“Even better,” Pierce responded amiably. “Born on St. Patrick’s Day, and blessed by a future president. Or so my father thought.”

H
IS FATHER WAS
a storyteller. Sean Pierce had told
this
story so often that Damon could recite it.

“On March 17, 1968,” Sean would declaim in his immigrant’s brogue,
“at St. Margaret’s Hospital in our neighborhood of Dorchester, I learned that my seventh and last child was, after six blessed daughters, a son. Tears in my eyes, I answered, ‘You’ve made my heart sing, Dr. Lowell.’”

In those days, Sean would continue, there was little for a new father to do but celebrate with other men. So after kissing the exhausted Patrice on her forehead and noting with pride the miraculous infant’s shock of black hair, Sean departed on a tide of elation. Reaching the street as the metallic clock of a bank chimed twelve times, signaling noon, Sean briskly walked one and a half miles to the precise midpoint of the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Amid the revelers at the corner of D Street, some flushed with the excitements of whiskey, Sean awaited the Hibernian marchers—the intricate floats evoking Ireland on flatbed trucks; the familiar faces of the local politicos who always led the way.

But he could tell this day was different. The cheers were louder and, up the street, the crowds pressed closer than normal. And then Sean saw the two Irish princes at the head of the parade who, though he had never met them, were woven into the fabric of his psyche. With each confident stride Edward and Robert Kennedy, senators both, came nearer, drawing cries of surprise and delight from the onlookers—in many of their homes a picture of their martyred brother Jack hung beside that of the pope. And just yesterday, in the caucus room of the Senate, Robert Kennedy had declared that he, too, would reach out for the presidency.

One on each half of the two-lane street, the brothers paused to shake hands as they passed, Robert on the side nearest Sean. Propelled by this confluence of wonders—the birth of his son and now Robert Kennedy walking toward him—Sean felt himself drawn into the street. “Go get him, Bobby,” he heard someone call. “Lyndon can’t hold a candle to you.”

Laughing, Robert Kennedy looked about for his well-wisher and spotted Damon’s father coming toward him. For an instant Kennedy froze, before seeing the rapt expression in Sean Pierce’s eyes. Then they were face to face. In the one moment they would share on earth, Sean blurted, “My first son was born four hours ago. Both of us wish you well.”

Looking up at the taller man, Bobby Kennedy grinned. “What’s your boy’s name?”

“Damon. Damon Pierce.”

“A fine Irish name. He’ll thank you for it.” Bobby glanced toward the
crowd for another hand to shake. Then, on impulse, he turned back to Sean. “What’s your parish?”

“St. Gregory’s, in Dorchester.”

“My grandfather’s parish.” Kennedy’s voice softened. “Let’s each say a prayer that the luck of the Irish blesses your new son. And I’d be grateful if your prayer included a bit of luck for me.”

“I will,” Sean promised. Then the future president was gone and, instead of seeking out a bar, Sean went to St. Gregory’s to keep his promise to Robert Kennedy.

“A
ND THEN HE
was dead,” Marissa said to Damon. “My mother cried, she tells me.”

Damon nodded. “As did my father.”

“But he still thought you were lucky?”

Pierce smiled a little. “It became part of the myth. For a time he pondered whether his prayer dwelt too much on me, and had failed Robert Kennedy. But he was quite sure that Kennedy had kept his end of the bargain.

“In the end, he concluded that I had gotten all the luck two men’s prayers could give me—and the luck meant for Bobby Kennedy, as well. Everything that’s happened since persuades him that he’s right. For him, my success in life is less an achievement than a gift.”

Marissa tilted her head. “Not an expectation?”

Pierce sipped from his glass of rich Brunello di Montalcino, the last of the bottle they shared. “You have to understand my world, Marissa. Did your parents go to college?”

“That and more. My father has a PhD in English, my mom a master’s in social work. I’ve got no room to be a wonder.”

Pierce briefly scanned the dwindling crowd, so clearly of the rarefied environment spawned by the Berkeley campus, so far from the pubs of Dorchester. “Neither of my parents got past grade school. Their world was a bounded one, their greatest fear that us kids would be tainted by malign influences.” A memory made Damon smile wryly. “So they were mortified when my sister Meg applied for a scholarship to Barnard.”

Marissa looked amused. “An all-girls school? What could possibly go wrong?”

“It was in
New York,
may the saints preserve us. So my parents enlisted
the help of the mother superior. As Meg tells it, Sister Agnes warned her in sepulchral tones that a priest in New York reported that any girl who went to Barnard lost her faith
and
her virginity within six months.” Pierce grinned. “For a rapturous moment my sister was galvanized by visions of sexual deliverance. But, for our parents, that was that. They dispatched her to Boston College, where she met the man she married before they settled down close to home. Life was like that.”

Marissa finished her wine. “But not yours?”

“I was the youngest, and a boy. Still, until I was eighteen all my friends had names like Milligan and McNamara, and the biggest event in our lives before then was when Pope John Paul said Mass for a hundred thousand of us on Boston Common. Now all but a handful are firemen or cops or in their father’s construction business and, with variations in piety, still Catholic.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Only when I visit my parents. Like Meg, all that sexual repression got to me, but with a healthier result—a quiet but
very
persistent rebellion.”

Marissa touched a curled finger to her lips, her narrowing eyes signaling a speculative amusement. “So now you’re cured?”

“Mostly. Though whenever there’s a news flash about some sexual deviant being caught, my first reflex is that he’s Catholic.”

She laughed, displaying even white teeth whose only imperfection, the slightest gap in front, Pierce found charming. “I know about guilt,” she said, “if not repression. My father’s side is Jewish.”

“Lucky for you. In my observation, Jewish kids grow up believing that aspiration is not only good but imperative—you
must
be educated, you
can
succeed, you
will
outstrip your parents—”

“Who,”
Marissa interrupted, “will never believe you’ve achieved enough.”