Eden Burning (6 page)

“I hope I die.”

“You’re not going to. You’re young and strong. You’ll be walking around the next day.”

Tee plucked at her swollen waist. “I hate this thing. And I’m sorry for it because I hate it. Can you understand that?”

“Yes. Yes. I’m sorry, too.”

Agnes mourned. The little room was filled with mourning. Unbearable. Tee stood up, went in to the bedroom, and lay down. In the dimness she could barely see Anatole’s half-completed painting propped on the dresser.

“Will you do something for me?” he had asked. “I should like to paint you as you are. I’ve never had a pregnant model.”

Compliant, indifferent, she had sat for him, or rather, reclined, close to dozing, while he worked and talked.

“The fruitful body. It’s beautiful, you know. Don’t shake your head! Some day you’ll feel what I mean, you’ll have wanted children, you’ll be proud. You don’t think so now, but you will.”

He rambled, musing, thinking aloud, as if he did not care whether she heard him or not, and indeed she had not cared, either, whether she heard him or not. Yet now there were echoes in her head.

“… a strange history, our bloody little island. All the islands. At one time they used to fine a planter who fathered a mulatto child. Two thousand pounds of sugar, I think the fine was. And the woman, with the child, was confiscated and given as a slave to the monks. That was when the French were in control. Well, there was always a shortage of white women, you know. Back in the seventeen hundreds they even sent a shipload from Paris. Poor wretches, gathered up from God knows where, their only qualifications that they weren’t pockmarked and were young enough to bear children! Talk of your island aristocracy, your first families! Yet there came a time when a touch of dark had a certain
style.
Like Alexandre
Dumas. And they say even the empress Josephine, although I’m not sure—”

Now Tee rocked her head from side to side on the pillow. It was all too much, too much thinking. Two Clydes, the gentle, feeling, comprehending—and then that other. Two Pères, the generous, the tender—and the one who had killed. For her. He had killed for her. And all this horror had come out of those few minutes, only an inch’s worth of clock ticks; all this dread, because of a caged bird and a drowsy afternoon, and—and a stupid, ignorant girl who hadn’t even understood her own feelings!

With cold hands she covered her burning face. In the kitchen the clock struck, sounding distant and faint, so that with part of her mind she knew that sleep must be on the way. Oh, the comfort of sleep and the long nights of escape! If only they could be twice as long, to envelop the days and blot them out! Past, present, and future, all blotted out!

There are those who cannot sleep when they are beset, but Tee was able to, and perhaps it was that which saved her.

   When the incredible pain was past, she heard low talking in the kitchen. Then the voices grew louder.

“… a strong boy. Could pass for Syrian or Greek.” That was Marcelle.

There came a rich sound, part cooing, part singing. That was Agnes.

Presently Anatole spoke. “Wrap him up and take him to the nurse. Just till we can get her up in a couple of days and back to Paris.”

Three voices rose together, with a certain agitation in their mingling. Raising her head, Tee could see, through the partly open door, long shadows moving on the kitchen wall.

“Listen,” Anatole said. “We arranged it all before and there’s nothing more to discuss. She’s not to see him! It’s humane, it’s sensible, it’s what’s done in cases like this. She
can’t keep him, so why start up? Take him away, Agnes. Right now.”

“But shouldn’t I?” Tee murmured. “Mustn’t I?”

“Shouldn’t you what, my dear?” Marcelle had come in and was standing by the bed.

“Look at the—”

“No.” Marcelle spoke firmly, her lips snapping shut on the word. “No.”

Now came the infant’s first cry. Quavering and long it held, then broke for the intake of breath, quavered into a strong wail and ended in a sob. The sound tore at something in Tee’s chest. Here he is, after the long months; unsought for, unwanted, already he weeps—

“I want to see him,” she whispered.

“No, I said. There’s nothing to be gained by doing that, and much to lose. Now lie back and rest, there’s a good girl, and leave everything to us, will you?”

Conscience, guilt, relief, all clamored in Tee’s tired head. Still she protested. “But isn’t it monstrous of a mother”—and stopped at the word
mother,
so incongruous, so impossible, applied to herself.

“Monstrous!” Marcelle was indignant. “Yes, that a girl—a child—like you should be in a fix like this, that’s what’s monstrous! Listen here, Teresa, you’ve got to look out for yourself from now on. Self-preservation, that’s the main thing, always, and don’t you ever forget it.”

“You listen to her, she’s right.” Agnes came in and bent over the bed. “Better you don’t look at this baby. He go his way, you go yours. No way you can walk the same road together. Not in this world, the way it is. Here, let me fix your ribbon, lift all that hair off your neck.”

Yellow ribbons, pink ribbons, taffeta and velvet; blue shadows from the Morne leaping from the window to the mirror; Agnes tying the bow—

“Don’t cry, Tee. You’ve cried enough. Now get your strength back. You’re all worn out.”

“Stop torturing yourself, stop worrying,” Marcelle admonished. “Haven’t I been telling you Anatole would see to things? You’re not to bother your head. Anatole has got instructions and plenty of money, and Agnes is going to keep the child. Tell her, Agnes.”

“Well, you know me, you know what I always wanted. So now I can have what I want, can’t I?” Two warm, wiry hands held Tee’s between them.

“Yes, it’s a fine solution all the way around, don’t you think?” Marcelle spoke cheerfully. “Agnes’ll pass him off as her own. Probably they’ll stay in Marseilles. It’s a polyglot place with all kinds of people always coming and going, so she won’t feel strange there. Don’t you agree it’s a good idea?”

“A good idea,” Tee repeated. So the need to think and decide had been taken away from her. Better so. She wasn’t thinking clearly and hadn’t been able to for a long, long time.

“Your lips are cracked. Take some water. So,” Marcelle said briskly, “it’s all over. All over, Teresa.”

Tee looked up into the alert, strong face. Such faces belonged to people who solved things, who knew their way in the world.

“Where am I going to go?” she asked softly. “What am I going to do now?”

“Well, do you want to go back home?”

Home to Père and the silent knowledge that would forever lie between them. Home to Julia. Home to Morne Bleue. You could scarcely go anywhere on the island without looking up at Morne Bleue, unless you stared straight out to sea.

“No. I’m not going back. I’ll never go back again.”

“Never is a long time. Still, it’s understandable. So you’ll stay with us, that’s all. Anatole will think of something,” Marcelle said with pride. “He always does.”

   The room on the top floor of Anatole’s house had a balcony on which stood three pots of geraniums. From it one
could look out and watch the city wake up, that city of which Père had so often told, city of flowers and delights. But there was no temptation in it.

Tee shivered, although the late spring sun was warm. She passed her hand over her waist, which was flat and firm again.

“That comes of being young,” Marcelle said cheerfully. “The muscles snap back like rubber.”

Tee thought again, I should at least have looked at it—the words
he
or
him
being impossible to form in her mind. Yet she knew that if “it” had been brought to her, she would have been too terrified to look. So of course she had done right. Where would you go with it? What would you do with it? Marcelle and Anatole had said, over and over.

“When will you get this girl some clothes?” Anatole inquired one day.

“Whenever she’s ready. I’ve asked you often enough, haven’t I, Teresa? I want to teach you how to dress, so you won’t look like a provincial when you go places.”

“What places am I going to? I’ve nowhere to go.”

“No, only the entire city of Paris. Or do you expect it to come to you on your balcony?”

Tee was growing used to Marcelle’s sharp tongue and able to smile a little.

“Do you know you’re very, very pretty when you smile? Do you know that?” Anatole demanded.

“I’m not pretty.”

“Who told you?”

“No one. I’ve just always known it.”

“Well, you’ve known all wrong.”

“I’m awkward, too serious, too shy. I—”

“Awkward? You have extraordinary grace! You are too serious and shy, that’s true.”

“Leave her alone, Anatole. Will you go out with me tomorrow, Teresa? The first thing we ought to do is get your hair cut.”

“Oh, what a shame!” Anatole protested. “That hair—it’s positively aphrodisiac.”

“Yes, but nobody wears it like that anymore. This is 1938.”

So now in the mornings they would descend the steep flight before Sacré Coeur and go down into the streets, Marcelle guiding Tee as though she had been ill or were blind, and talking, always talking, at the hairdresser’s, the shoe store, and the milliner’s.

“Watch that young girl, Teresa.”

“Who? Where?”

“That one, in the blue dress with the fortune in pearls around her neck. That old man, in case you want to know, is certainly not her father. Pay attention, Teresa my dear, you’re always dreaming. What were you thinking of, you were so far away?”

“Thinking how odd it is never to see a dark face.”

“I shouldn’t think you’d miss them.”

“I miss Agnes. I think of her.”

“Well, she was good to you, I must say, although she got paid for it. But she’s well provided for and content. What we have to do now is to provide for you.”

They walked on silently for a little time until Marcelle spoke again.

“Anatole and I have been talking it over. You will have to get married soon, Teresa. It will be the best thing for you. There’s really nothing else for a woman, anyway. Yes, you’re thinking, ‘She’s a fine one to talk about marriage!’ But you’re not me. You saw where I came from. I’m better off with Anatole than I ever was, even though he won’t marry me. Yes, I’d like to be a respectable married lady, only I can’t be, and that’s that. But it’s different for you.”

“Strange. That’s what Agnes always said.”

“Of course. She’s a realist. Negroes have to be. They know what the world is, how the machinery works.”

A young couple passed and entered a park. The father carried a young child astride his shoulders.

Looking after them, Tee said bitterly, “Who would marry me? Who would want me?”

Marcelle stopped still. “My God, what kind of ten dozen fools are you? You don’t actually mean you would tell a man what happened?” Then, more softly, she went on, “Listen, Teresa, you’ve had bad luck, a bad deal, and the sooner you put it behind you the better for you. Lock it up at the back of your head. Do you think every girl who marries a duke brings a notarized personal history along? Women have to be very smart, Teresa. Never be fooled into thinking you can bare your whole soul to a man. Any man who knew the truth about you would throw you away like a paper handkerchief after he’d blown his nose in it. That’s the injustice of being a woman. A man may tell you he loves your soul, but what he really loves is your body, fresh and unused, your hair, your breasts, and the ribbons on your charming hat. Remember that.”

“It’s so terribly sad,” Tee said. And she understood that if Julia had been one to speak her true mind, she would have spoken like Marcelle.

“Well, yes, if you want to think so, but that’s the way it is, all the same.”

“You’re beginning to feel better,” Anatole remarked that evening and, without waiting for an answer, “Come, I want to show you something. I’ve finished it. I’ve put you in a grape arbor, you notice.”

Already framed, beneath a splendor of leafage and clustered grapes, sat a girl, a stark and simple shape in a brown woolen dress, her face half concealed by the fall of her rich hair; her thin, cold, blue-white hands were folded over the huge curve of her belly in an attitude of patience which she had not felt.

“The grapes are ready to harvest. A nice parallel, don’t you think?”

“It doesn’t seem as if I could ever have looked like that.”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have shown it to you?”

“It’s all right. I can’t hide from myself forever, can I?”

Anatole’s red-brown eyes puckered in a smile. “You’re growing up. A few months ago you were sixteen, with the mind of a twelve-year-old; now you’re even a little older than your age. You really have changed, Teresa.”

Well, changing anyway, she thought, if not changed.

“I think you’re ready now,” Anatole said next.

“Ready for what?”

“There’s a young man I want you to meet. An American. He’s a stockbroker and an art collector. That’s how I know him. He’s been coming here for the last few summers.”

She waited a moment or two before replying, “I know why you’re doing this.”

“Of course. I’m thinking he would be a good man for you to marry, if it should work out that way.”

“No, I mean I know
why.
You really don’t believe in this sort of thing.”

Tee surprised herself with her own words. Only a few months before, she had not known enough to “size up” anyone, nor would she have spoken so candidly if she had. But a bold instinct for survival was now rising within her.

“You have two sides,” she said. “One for yourself, the artist who lives the way you do and believes what you believe, but the other is practical, like the rest of the world. You’re doing this because it’s what Père would want you to do for me.”

“Not bad!” Anatole laughed. “Then you’ll meet him? He’s healthy, decent, and has enough money of his own not to be attracted to you for yours. His name is Richard Luther.”

   At first sight of him, so finely dressed and out of place in Anatole’s studio, she thought that Anatole had made a foolish mistake. This blond, assured young man with the easy smile and the air of always getting what he wanted could not be for
her, nor she for him. The world, and Paris most certainly, was full of lively, confident girls who knew where they were and where they were going. What would he want with Tee Francis? So she gave him her hand and avoided his eyes.