Mysteries of Motion (18 page)

She’d breathed to herself, softly. It was like being a child, and not being one. “Does
he
know?” Terence said.
“What
is he?” Not one of us, the other had replied. “But yes, beautiful. If you can call it that.
Spirituel.”
And after a moment, “Now I remember. He’s supposed to have been in one of the death camps. You see that mark on his chest? Though I never saw the mark on a chest before.” “Where
have
you seen it,
cheri?”
the brown one said. And then, “Oh Lordy-lordy, where
are
we?”

“At the Sandy Lane,” Robin had shrieked from over the front seat. “And she understands French.” One could never tell what Lievering had or hadn’t heard, but he was already out of the car.

“Good,” the old one said nimbly. “I invite you all.” His glasses beamed at her. She rather admired him.

“No, no,” Lievering said. “It is my responsibility.” In the starlight his head, furled in its collar, hung in its own cloud. He went on in, up the steps.

Terence groaned, clapping his hand to his forehead. From behind his fingers he peered at her.

She leaned across him to the other one, who returned her glance more openly. There were no race relations yet, as far as she could see, between any of them, but you never knew. Should she speak English to him now, or French? English. French on her part now wouldn’t be polite.

“It’s a mole,” she said low. And crossed her legs hard, over the sudden liquid pang between them. That was it then. Why she was here.

Terence uncovered.
“What
is?”

The older one nodded at her. He’d known why she was there before she had. In the years since, she’d often wished she knew his name, to tell him what had become of her, if she was ever to tell anyone. He knew his business, that one. “The mark,” he said.

Lievering was back. It was after hours, he told them. The hotel restaurant was closed. The town was. There was a tremulous dignity about him. He’d done his best. The expected fatality had come upon him, resting him. Perhaps he lived for it? For he had the panting air of a dog after a chase, quarry or no. A weal of satisfaction came out on his face like a crack in sculpture, mortalizing. “There is nowhere else. Unless, Robin—” had a suggestion? He didn’t finish. It was now in their hands.

It was always in somebody’s. Whoever, rent by his broken grace, would do something. That night it was her turn. She was filled with joy at the workings of things.

“Vivie’ll feed us. My stepmother. She’s great with ham and eggs.” And with little else, since leaving off being a cook, but they needn’t know this. “And she always waits up.”

“As late as this?” the professor said gently.

“She still keeps theater hours. From where she worked.”

“Miss Lacey’s?” Lievering nodded at her.

Robin swung on his heel jealously.

Ordinarily, Lievering’s reference to the poem would have been a betrayal. She’d been grateful. She too had a past, for which so far the island’s bland lightheartedness had done nothing.

“Miss
Lacey’s,”
Terence said. “Lord God.” He hitched a hip. “And did you work there too?”

He resented her being taller, and his sweetums being nice to her. Ollie’d had a few sidekicks like that who’d called her “the giraffe.” She spat lightly at him, a ghostly
p-r-r-t.
“And there’ll be plenty of race relations,” she’d assured the other one. “Some months here, Vivie just can’t stand the blacks.”

At her desk now she chewed her pen, silently laughing. Outside in this side street it was now the deepest trough of night, just as it had been there—and equally set for a scene she cherished and couldn’t get rid of. Loving her own seventeen-ness for the first time it had strutted in command of anything. For the feel between her legs of those hot, plushy labia with their contracting Venus valve, moving toward the presence of Lievering, while by instinct she turned her back on him. In those days, too, her head was as open as a begging bowl; anyone with a mind to could drop a coin of idea in. She had some of those yet. But most of all the scene held Vivie on all cameras—
paisan
scourge, beloved half-mother and link about to break—handsome by then in the andante style of middle age about to fall. To die.

Their small cottage, white enough on the outside, had been shadowy as a hut within; the rent from the New York house tenants had had to pay for all their keep plus her own tuition, plus the lawyer for Ollie’s latest scrape. She’d pointed the other four to its privy, meanwhile calling in to Vivie, then had led them in and seated them on the one room’s scattered cretonne pallets, doing all of this with a child’s offhand certainty that everyone else lived as it did, though she knew well enough that Robin’s parents lived in a large house high on a hill. Vivie, for her heart’s sake resting high on a frowzy pillow, in her lap their collection of tattered magazines from New York, wore a headkerchief which misrepresented her entirely; under it was hair oiled Spanish style and amber ear drops from Veronica’s father. The cardiac blue in her lips shone electric on her pear-tinted face. When she smiled, she never showed gum. When she was stormed up, as then, her cheeks paled like knuckles, reminding all that she could outwait anyone. As she had outwaited Veronica’s mother, loftily confessing it. “I did your daddy best. I’ll do you—as good as him.” Seeing their entourage, she settled the large Canadian coin-silver brooch in the grandee calico ruffles she’d worn over crushed kid-leather boots long before the era had caught up with her, and lifted her chin.

The professor introduced himself with a polite little speech, somehow including Terence without naming him. Vivie nodded, joining the two of them with a glance before turning to Robin, who still had not sat—not because of his brace, but for the awkwardness of being in such a poor house. His parents, returned now from their Philadelphia teaching jobs, the father to Parliament, the mother to society, had snubbed Vivie at the freshman reception but had greeted Veronica for her father’s sake. Vivie nodded to him, elaborately. “Rest your leg.”

Vivie could be cruel, the girl thought now, in the way of all people who knew the schemata of the world, who had swum out beyond the breakwaters of sentiment. Like Shakespeare, like all good dramatists, if she’d written plays she would have lopped off heads.

Lievering had come up behind her to kiss Vivie’s hand, but she’d already seen him, in Vivie’s face. She herself had lost his name and couldn’t say who he was, already focusing on an image of him separate from the man before her and reduced minute enough to swim her bloodstream without the man himself ever having touched her—a merman of the blood, inside his own icy capsule, in a forty-year-old graveyard suit made before he was born. Lievering kissed the hand, in slow motion. Then the six of them—Robin, the pink professor, the angelically fair and dark-haired Lievering, copper Terence, her black self and Vivie already blued with death—sat looking at each other, in all their colors of skin. It would be the last time she thought of it that way—skin.

“Who
hurt
you?” Vivie was saying to Lievering. “I’ll cook you a meal.”

Whatever Vivie’s circumstances, she kept the makings of one special meal always with her as insurance that sooner or later somebody worthy of it would crop up. Only Ollie, when he flew down for one of his hideouts, could make her break into her hoard, since he always replaced it. Two weeks before, he’d done so from the gourmet store on Fifty-seventh Street, the same one that had appeared in the Miss Lacey poem. The packages always caused Veronica a certain eerie misery, hoarded too. Having only one street to be homesick for must be shameful to those who had whole villages at their backs, home towns doubly luminous because they’d never been out of them. Yet it was the street which had pushed her to poetry.

Just so, when she’d first been entered in a Stateside school as a transfer from Canada and from Bridgetown, the weight of other languages at her back, other worlds, had made her a solitary. Though the teachers tried to make kindly class-use of her foreignness, they couldn’t really treasure it. Nowadays the good schools were packed with children who from choice could have ranges of cities, different families, behind them, and these children were no longer tentative. The world now belonged to their kind. Rich suburban kids holidayed in the same Puerto Rico the city poor had emigrated from. A few of the forward-looking rich now even sent their young to her former school for the ethnic polish money could not buy. The world now belonged to the smartly drifting children of successive worlds. If you came from what had once been sought after as an “integrated” background, you had to catch up.

Meanwhile, Vivie had served them up Ollie’s apology for the amount of his bail money—tinned grouse and asparagus, augmented with a sauce made of the eggs she and Veronica would have had for supper if alone, a pudding of the local breadfruit with which the subdued Terence comforted himself largely, and a mess of dried fruit soaked in rum. It was a talented meal, no doubt about it, and nobody else could have done it even with that provender; the girl was pleased to see Vivie resurrect herself. Lievering ate in the non-grabby way of Europeans, the fork confiding close to the knife, but his aura of poverty left him for a space, and when Vivie brought out the goose-quill toothpicks she used to pinch from the cashier’s desk, he exclaimed. The quill lolled between his lips. Because he was strange was no reason to think him unsophisticated; he might even be the victim of his facial architecture. By that time Robin had excused himself to take his father’s car home. Terence, who was wishing loudly for his own record player, brought out a brandy flask. There was a sense of family the girl would often see later between people temporarily brought together from the ends of the earth. The professor was regarding her thoughtfully.

“You going to write a book about us?” If he was, she meant to read it.

“Not yet. And not about us.” He smiled back at her.

“I only meant—I’d want to read it.”

“Always reading.” Vivie leaned back against the pillows she carried everywhere to warm her, even here. The kerchief had come off.

“His partner at home really writes them. We just collect info.” The oil Terence had eaten glistened on his forehead.

“Why are you so tetchy-mean?” Veronica said to him.

“Why aren’t you?” Terence retorted.

She didn’t get it. She saw Vivie was frowning at him.

Lievering stood up to go. Coaxed to faculty events or student powwows, he always left early, from the outer edge of them.

“How—shall we get back?” the professor said. His one awkward remark.

Lievering had forgotten they had no car. It was plain that walking was his transport. Asked, he confirmed this.

“Everywhere?” The professor was interested.

“Everywhere,” Lievering said, with the polite little laugh that folks said behind his back was still so German of him. Would he kill a person who said that to him? She imagined herself saying it and pulling the toothpick, slowly, from his full lower lip.

Vivie went to the phone and cajoled them a late cab. They took Lievering with them, though he’d hung back.

“Do the dishes tomorrow,” Vivie said when they’d gone. “I enjoyed that.” She was already letting her hair down on her shoulders. In their side-by-side cots it was like a dormitory; each had a night table at least, and separate clothes pegs. On the center table where the girl did her studying, there was still the pleasant essence of guests. She lay weakly, face into the pillow, in one of the starched nightshirts Vivie still ironed for her.

“I don’t like you to tiny your braids so close,” Vivie said. “Not down here.” Vivie’s hair was long and flat, from the part of her that was white Dominican. Up to that time they’d done their hair themselves, or Vivie did hers. This time another girl at school and she had done it for each other, copying a style in
Ebony,
but not because it was African. Vivie had no patience anyway with the new negritude which automatically vaunted its own characteristics no matter what. Not all black was beautiful, she said, any more than all white was. The whites understood this, and laughed behind their hands. Conversely the soft, Englishy Bajans infuriated her as too supine, too regular. Sure, they were in Government House—but when the wife of the manager of Barclay’s Bank had her Sunday afternoon cocktail, did she invite? All of their race relations were still with
each other,
Vivie had said.

But I’m past all that, the seventeen-year-old Veronica thought, way past it. I don’t want to get into it. I just think my hair suits my head. “It’s cooler that way,” she’d said. “And I’m too skinny to wear one of those heavy Afro heads. Anyway—you looked marvelous.” And you cooked marvelous, but how to say it so it won’t recall to you our former seven courses, and Father sitting down to them? How to say it so it won’t reproach? For our hundreds of omelets since. “That professor, I promised he’d see some race relations.” Fights, he meant—though he’d deny it. “Dinner so good, he didn’t get any.” She rolled over on her back.

Vivie stopped brushing, holding high the oxblood coral brooch she pinned up her back hair with. She pursed her lips to herself in the mirror between the beds. Lipstick didn’t hide the heart trouble in them. “Didn’t he though.” The brush clattered down. She came to the side of the other bed.

“What you looking at, Vivie?” It was an old game. Vivie’d used to poke for ear dirt, knee scabs. Now there weren’t any.

“At your being too skinny.”

The girl sat up. “What did you say to Mr. Lievering? I saw you. What did you whisper to him?”

“Didn’t whisper.”

“What then?”

The coral still nestled in Vivie’s hand. She smoothed the girl’s starched chest on the heart side, as if trying to erase the small breast behind the cloth, then pinned the brooch there, gave it a fillip, and folded her hands together. “I said—‘You better love her, yes? Yes, you better love her,’ I said.”

By the time it was spring and Easter holiday, he still hadn’t. All the school year their separate partisans had watched what nobody called a romance. For the students, it might be their own destiny they were watching; for the faculty it might be their children’s. To those families who made the color line a matter of keeping peace with the British residents, or more often with themselves, Lievering and “the New York transfer” were a threat—with their high-class openness on what could well have been managed behind closed doors, colonially. Especially when their daughters brought home the news that the girl wouldn’t marry him. As Bruce Le Sueur said—that smart, Empire-educated banana-colored professor with fine mustachios who taught Spanish, published ballads in Bejan dialect and was her and Vivie’s one confidant—“It’s now a question of the Old World and the New World seducing each other. The battlegrounds being poetry and the apocalypse.” Meanwhile, those economics and history professors who’d brought Lievering to the college through an all but defunct group left over from one devoted to helping the Hitlerized, and who knew his tiny salary, were waiting, as Bruce said, “for that classless devil—money—to enter in.”