Left at the Mango Tree (20 page)

Once a week, when Wilbur joined Raoul and the others for their nightly nip at the Belly, Abigail stayed with Edda in the evening, too. Sometimes they would sit on long chairs outside, both with their feet up, the island breeze blowing a fine mist of sand between their toes and inside their skirts. If the light of the moon and the stars permitted, Abigail would sew. While she did, Edda would talk, sharing with Abigail her most intimate thoughts and fears. My mother would almost be sorry to see her pregnancy end,
for her days and evenings with Abigail were the closest she had ever come to having a real mother, to experiencing the kind of maternal bond that makes one feel calm and protected and sorted out.

“Abigail,” Edda began, one evening when the two were lounging beneath the speckled sky, “will my baby look at these same stars one day?”

“Yes,” Abigail answered, then decided that falling stars should be allowed for. “Most of them anyhow.”

“Will I have a boy or a girl? Why won’t you tell me?” Edda spoke to Abigail but kept her face toward the sky, whose twinklings were reflected in Edda’s dark eyes.

“I’ve told you already, I can’t always tell.”

“Please tell me, Abigail. You must have an idea!”

“No, child, I must not, or else I would have said something,” Abigail lied. She did have an idea. Edda’s shape and her demeanor, her cravings, her complaints, all told Abigail clearly that the child was a boy. But even the most astute of midwives could be mistaken, and given Edda’s unusually fragile state, Abigail preferred not to share her speculations. The truth was that she had begun to sense real trouble. My mother’s was promising to be Abigail’s most delicate delivery yet.

“If I have a boy,” Edda interrupted Abigail’s thoughts, “will he bother about the stars, or will he be too busy?”

“Don’t be silly. I imagine he would bother about them just as much as anybody else.” Abigail hoped so, at least. She wanted nothing more than for Edda to have the kind of boy who bothered about the stars and cared about the moon. Having only ever met the kind interested in their fishing rods, their pencils, their paintbrushes and pipes, Abigail wondered if the stargazing ones really existed, and if so, where on Oh they hid.

For a while after that Edda didn’t speak. She lay rubbing her belly and contemplating the sky, its dark folds and the blinking lights they housed. Like constellations, words speckled the blank thoughts in her head, but though Edda struggled to line them up, she was unable to turn their shapes into sentences.

Thus, the private monologues of Abigail Davies and Edda Orlean, to the rustling of Abigail’s stitches on my infamous sunbonnet, until the voices of Wilbur and Raoul, who had finally returned from the Belly, could be heard inside the house, signaling the hour for Edda’s repose and for Abigail’s leave.

Abigail’s devotion to my mother’s happiness did not whither after I was born. If anything, it grew. Because of the hand that Abigail had had in managing my birth, she felt a territorial responsibility to protect the interests of our little family. The delicate delivery feared by Abigail had gone better than she dared hope, and though there was still a hiccup or two to quiet (there were always hiccups in this sort of affair), mother and child were doing nicely. So nicely that Edda didn’t bother about my pale white skin, and neither did Wilbur. The love that inhabited our dwelling was palpable, like a blanket that threatened to smother us all, which, Abigail feared, it just might do, seeing as how it had already blinded my mother and father both.

Abigail had never experienced this blinding sort of love firsthand, but she had heard of its rumored existence. That its magic could be so powerful as to blot out my birthmark and drown out the chatter of scandalmongers in the marketplace, well, this much she could never have imagined. She was grateful for it, grateful that
her charges were lucky enough to succumb to such a spell, for not only did it make our lives easier, but hers, too. We had secured happiness all by ourselves; Abigail had only to safeguard it.

Which explains the dismay she felt when she learned of my grandfather’s ad in the
Morning Crier
. She had struck such a delicate balance. Why did Raoul insist on tipping the scales? Had he just kept quiet, the rumors about me would eventually have noodled their way into the casserole of gossip and conjecture on which the islanders inveterately fed, the individual spices (Edda’s transgression, or Gustave’s) lost in the mix. Leave it to Raoul to stir up trouble and spoil the broth.

Abigail, who never read the paper, preferring to pick up the day’s news at the market with her purchases of curry and flour, bought a copy for herself to confirm what the marketplace sources reported. Juggling her parcels and her pocketbook, she opened to the classified section and found it, sure enough. Just as they had told her she would. Jostling her head from side to side, she crumpled the paper, tucked it under her arm, and rushed to the
Morning Crier
’s grimy-windowed office, anxious to displace some of the blame she felt rising in her chest. She had naively overlooked Raoul and his perpetual quest for explanations as plain as noses on faces.

“Bruce!” she shouted, bursting through the door. “Where are you? How could you?!”

Bruce, the paper’s editor-in-chief, copyeditor, reporter, and special correspondent, peered up at Abigail from behind the keys of his typewriter. “Abigail! Hello! What a nice surprise!”

“Hello? Is that all you have to say for yourself ? How could you, Bruce? How could you let Raoul place that ridiculous ad?” Abigail untucked the crumpled paper and threw it at the typewriter.

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that.”

“What was I supposed to do? Raoul came in, had his words, had his money, demanded I put in the ad. I thought it was some sort of a joke, but then I saw he was serious, and I didn’t know what to do. So I just did what he told me.”

Abigail would not have the blame displaced again so easily. “Did you stop to think for just a minute of that poor girl? You and Raoul have made a spectacle of her!”

“I don’t know about that. Seems to me that baby of hers is the spectacle. You can’t blame Raoul for wanting to know what’s going on.”

“I see,” Abigail answered softly, too furious even to shout. “And you think this is the way to go about it, do you? Something strange happens, you put an ad in the paper, and in a day or two you have all the answers you’re looking for. That’s what you think? Since when do things work that way around here?”

Bruce cowered silently behind the bulky typewriter, happy he had never upgraded to a sleeker model.

“You should have talked him out of it!” Abigail shouted. Then she turned and walked out, slamming the door so hard that the grimy office windows rattled.

As Abigail walked home, she wondered how to fix the mess that Raoul had made. She came up with no convincing solution, none of her previous jobs having prepared her for something like this. She could balance accounts and cover things up. She could even keep troublesome things quiet, if she got her hands on them before they were printed in the newspaper. But how to handle a classified ad that had the whole island talking? She could force Raoul to retract it, though that wouldn’t undo the fact that everyone had seen it. She could assume a disguise and answer the
ad herself, tell Raoul a tale that would placate his curiosities. But what could she possibly say? Or she could wait and hope for some other island drama to begin, one that would steal the spotlight that shone on baby Almondine.

When Abigail reached her house, she still had no plan. But she would come up with something. Some way to protect poor Edda and to quiet the story while Almondine was still too young to bother about it, before the story became who she was, speckling her dark life on Oh like the stars speckled the island’s still, dark sky.

A tall order, even for someone as capable as Abigail. She knew in her heart that no matter what she did, I would always have to answer for my white skin and my rosy eyes. There was nothing anybody could do, or say, to change that.

Like the wind that spares no crevice, wrenching the white sands of Oh into every nook and cranny on the island, the rain relentlessly makes its way across the island’s shiny surface. It fills the dips in Raleigh Bello’s corrugated roof and drowns the moonlight that, gasping and splashing, struggles to dominate the spilling, splintering streams. In a feat of magic typical of Oh, it insinuates itself into the heart of the Belly, in the form of Cougar’s watered-down cocktails, which are especially weak when the weather is bad. This doesn’t deter the clientele, as you might expect; on the contrary, the Belly is always especially full whenever a storm is brewing.

One rainy night when I was about a few weeks old, my father made (or attempted to make) his weekly visit to the Belly in the company of his father-in-law Raoul. My arrival in the household had not squelched this tradition, nor that of Abigail’s visit to my
mother while the men were out having their drinks. This particular night the rain was fickle, pelting the island and retreating, threatening and thinning, seemingly intentioned to keep Raoul and Wilbur from their appointment with Cougar and the others. Each time they tried to leave the house, thinking the rain had stopped, it started up again, unleashing a shower more insistent than the shower before.

So Raoul and Wilbur settled in the kitchen, to share a word and a pot of tea, while Edda and Abigail entertained me in the sitting room beyond the kitchen door. Raoul could not have been more pleased by the rain’s visit. Since the night of my birth, he had wanted a word with Wilbur in private, but up to now finding him alone had proved a rather challenging task. When Wilbur wasn’t delivering the mail, he was busy taking care of me so Edda could nap. When he met Raoul for their weekly nip, Raoul was loath to discuss delicate matters, for Edda’s three doting uncles were always close by. Until now. Now that the weather had waylaid their outing, and Abigail had laid out their tea, Raoul’s wish for a secret dialogue could be properly fulfilled.

Except that he didn’t quite know how to begin. He had half expected that Wilbur, finding himself alone with Raoul, would blurt out those same questions that were buzzing like flies in Raoul’s brain. Questions about Edda and Gustave and Almondine. Who seduced whom? And when? Where? How had the deep black eyes of Edda, Wilbur, and Raoul, in Almondine turned to a fiery red? But all Wilbur did was sugar his tea.

“Wilbur, damn it! Aren’t you even angry?” Raoul demanded.

Wilbur, who had not been among the flies inside Raoul’s head, was puzzled, both by Raoul’s fiery question and his even more fiery tone. He waited a moment before replying, trying to discern in Raoul’s black eyes a narrative thread onto which he might grapple.

“Angry about what? About the ad? Abigail sure is.”

“Not about the ad. About the baby! About Edda! About the whole bloody mess! Don’t you know that half the island thinks your wife cheated on you? The other half thinks Gustave has her under a spell!”

“What do
you
think?” Wilbur asked, with a calm that agitated Raoul’s flies into a frenzy.

“I don’t know what to think! Edda says she’s only ever been with you, and I want to believe her. I do believe her. But I refuse to blame what’s happened on one of Gustave’s spells. You know what I think of magic.”

From the sitting room Edda’s laughter seeped into the kitchen, like rain through a hole in the roof. “You hear that?” Wilbur spoke to Raoul but kept his face toward the door from which the joyful voice had come. “She’s happy. She’s really happy.” Then turning to look into Raoul’s eyes again, he added, “I believe her and I love her. What difference does it make what either half of the island thinks?”

Before Raoul could answer, Wilbur stood and went outside, no longer thirsty, not for a storm in a teacup. The island had quenched its thirst as well, and the sky was bright and starry, the night air hot and still. Raoul peered unbelieving at Wilbur’s distorted figure beyond the foggy glass of the kitchen window.

Raoul had never experienced this blinding sort of love firsthand, though he had heard of its rumored existence. That its magic could be so powerful as to blot out my white complexion and drown out the gossip of revelers at the Belly, well, this much he could never accept. Wilbur might not have the courage to stumble down the road to the past, to line up the ugly variables that rotted hidden in pockets and drawers, but Raoul did. Someday
Almondine would look in the mirror and ask for an explanation as plain as the white nose on her face, he was sure of it. If Edda and Wilbur wouldn’t give her one, Raoul would. He alone could secure Almondine’s happiness; he alone could safeguard it.