Prospero's Daughter (22 page)

“What?” she said, looking at me directly. “Tell him what? There is nothing to tell.”

And for two days there was nothing to tell. If I mentioned her tonsils, she dismissed me with the same impatience, sometimes tinged with anger. She could have had more gagging fits, I would not have known. I never again saw her bent over the kitchen sink or searching the back of her throat in the mirror. When we sat in the drawing room in the afternoon, she wanted me to talk about books or about my last trip to Trinidad. Nothing else. Then, on the third day, while I was telling her about a speech I had heard in Woodford Square, she began twisting her hands nervously on her lap and biting her lower lip.

I thought I had frightened her with my talk about Eric Williams and the independence movement in Trinidad. No, she said. She was glad independence was coming.

Then what? I asked.

“We are going to have visitors. Friends of Mrs. Burton.”

I had almost forgotten Mrs. Burton. She had come to the house only twice, and on both occasions I had caught only glimpses of her. She was an Englishwoman Gardner had hired to decorate the house. The year he decided that books would make Virginia unmarketable, he also decided to make the house more suitable. For an Englishwoman, he told me. “Don’t forget, Virginia is English.”

He sent me with a message to the pharmacist to ask for his recommendation. The pharmacist recommended Mrs. Burton. Mrs. Burton came once to examine the layout of the drawing room and a second time, after Gardner and I had painted the room to her specifications, and the furniture and other furnishings she suggested had been delivered, she came to hang the drapes and to arrange the furniture. That second time Gardner was so pleased with the effect she had created in his drawing room that in a rare gesture of generosity he showed her his orchids.

Mrs. Burton was the president of the Trinidad chapter of England’s Royal Horticultural Society, and from that day, she began a campaign to persuade Gardner to allow her to enter his orchids in her annual flower show. But Gardner never invited her back to the house though she sent him letters weekly, monthly, and then, sporadically, though steadily. “She wants to know my secrets,” he said. Her letters were a source of amusement to him.

“Your father laughs at Mrs. Burton,” I said to Virginia. “He ridicules her. He won’t have her or her friends in his house.”

“He’s invited her friends to see the orchids,” she said.

“What friends?”

“An American man and his son,” she said.

I knew immediately that Ariana was right. “So soon.” I mumbled.

Virginia burst into tears.

Sympathy came from the most unexpected quarters. “I sorry for she,” Ariana said as she passed me that evening on her way to Virginia’s bedroom.

It was past midnight when a piercing scream bolted me awake. I rushed out of my room in time to see Gardner, his open pajama shirt flapping behind him, running toward Virginia’s room. He caught my eye and signaled me to go back. I heard the door shut and then silence. For the rest of the night, I could not sleep. At dawn, I crept out of my room, hoping to speak to Ariana, but she was nowhere to be found. I looked out of the window and saw Gardner by the flower beds.

“Virginia,” he said gruffly as I approached him. “A bad dream.” He didn’t wait for me to respond. He gave me instructions to repot one of the plants and reached for the pot next to the one I was working on. The plant in it, a new flower he was growing, had doubled in size, overnight it seemed to me. He plunged his hands in the dirt and pulled it out. “A nightmare,” he said, straightening up.

I had been afraid it was her throat. “Is she feeling better?” I asked.

He dusted his hands down the legs of his pants. Cleanliness was next to godliness, he was forever telling me. Now the sides of his pants were smeared with dirt and he did not seem to notice.

“Nerves,” he said. He examined his fingernails. They were black, caked thick with dirt. He slipped one nail under another and pushed the dirt away. “Her mother suffered from nerves.”

He had told me she had died in childbirth. He had said she was a saint, a piece of virtue.

“Too delicate.” He stopped cleaning his fingernails. The muscles around his mouth hardened. He looked away. “Too refined to bear a child.”

Refined?
My chest tightened.

“She was pure, you understand. Her sensibilities . . .” He raised his hand and circled the air with his open palm struggling to find the precise word. “
Accustomed.
She was not
accustomed,
you see.”

Sexual intercourse. I was sure he was referring to sexual intercourse. I averted my eyes, embarrassed for him, embarrassed by the image before my mind’s eye: he, sweating, plowing between unwilling thighs,
too delicate
thighs. But I was angry, too, by this reminder of his contempt, the scorn he had for people who looked like me, people who were
accustomed.

“Virginia suffers from nerves like her.” He rolled his shoulders, trying, I thought, to shake himself out of the moroseness that had settled on him, and when he succeeded, he dismissed me abruptly. “Go, get me the bag of fertilizer I mixed yesterday.”

When I came back with the bag from the shed where he stored the chemicals and potions he used to make fertilizers for the soil, he was digging out some plants from a row of pots on the shelf. The stiffness that moments ago had narrowed his lips to a thin line was gone. He had a gleam in his eyes. He was practically grinning when he took the bag from me.

He was going to have visitors, he said.

I pretended I did not know.

“Mrs. Burton has referred them to me. They’re interested in my orchids. The ones I found in the cove.”

I noticed his error, of course.
He
had not found the orchids in the cove.
I
had taken him there. But I had long become inured to errors like this one. At times, as if to test me, he would say
my house, my land.
I swallowed my anger then and I swallowed it now.

“Mrs. Burton says she believes they are the rarest in the world.”

I did not respond and he frowned at me, but in the next instant the irritation he seemed to have felt by my silence passed and his eyes shone again. “They are Americans,” he said brightly. “The ones who are coming.”

I feigned surprise. “Americans?”

“Rich Americans,” he said.

He slashed open the bag of fertilizer with his penknife and bade me fetch the spreader he used for scattering the fertilizer on the lawn. When I brought it to him, he winked at me conspiratorially. “Two birds with one stone,” he said.

I did not understand him immediately. He came closer to me. “The rich American has a son,” he said.

Virginia had told me this already but he made the significance plainer to me. “It’s time,” he said, “for her to be with her own kind.”

I felt it then, the pressure on my heart, the constriction around my throat.
I was not her kind.

“It’s time for her to think of marriage.” He slapped me on my back.

He returned to the house, and all the time I worked, spreading the lawn with fertilizer, the lawn that never seemed to need mowing, his words rang in my ears.
It’s time for her to be with her own kind. It’s time for
her to think of marriage.

A storm raged in me with such fury, it eclipsed tremors already begun deep in my heart. I was not conscious of these tremors. I was not conscious that it was love that was making me so angry. I thought it was this final assault on me, this assault to my humanity: I was not her kind. My kind would always be less than her kind, always be unworthy of her kind.

For the next three days, Gardner kept me busy in the backyard. My afternoons were no longer free. I had to sweep the greenhouse and wash the glass panes above it. I had to repot plants, cut away leaves with the slightest blemish from all the flowers in his garden. I had to clean the gravel around the orchids and clip off the dead tendrils. I had to cut back the bushes that grew over the dirt path that led from the dock to the house. He wanted everything to be perfect when the visitors came, not a blade of grass lower or higher than the other. He wanted his orchids displayed at their best. He wanted to make an impression.

I hardly ever saw Virginia during this time. Whenever I returned to the house, she was already in her room. When she came to the drawing room, Gardner was always there. If by chance I caught her alone in the corridor or outside on the porch, she put her finger on her lips and warned me with her eyes to walk away.

“I feel sorry for she,” Ariana said. “Prospero planning a marriage for she.”

I took consolation in the nightmare that woke her up screaming.

SIXTEEN

HIS NAME was Alfred Haynes. Freddie, Gardner called him, but I renamed him Ferdie in my mind when Gardner’s plans were laid bare in front of me. Ferdie for the king’s son, trapped with his father on a sea turned treacherous by Prospero’s magic, the ship a child’s toy in the gargantuan waves, men tossed about like dolls from stem to stern, last prayers flung desperately to heaven until Prospero threw out his seine and pulled them in, fish for his supper, the best saved for his daughter.

I will confess immediately that Alfred was handsome, though when I first saw him, from the kitchen where I was pounding cornmeal for Ariana, he seemed an average man of average height, square-shouldered, not particularly muscular, not at all a god. But I had seen him only from the back that first time; I had not had the advantage of his face.

Gardner had asked me to help Ariana. I had not done kitchen work since he had discovered that I could read. But he wanted everything to be perfect for the Americans so I became busboy, dishwasher, and kitchen helper again. He sent me to Trinidad for special groceries: expensive cuts of beef, bacon, chicken livers, eggs, high-grade butter, cream, almonds, mushrooms. He planned to serve beef Wellington for lunch and began by having Ariana practice making the pâté, which was to be spread over the beef, under a pastry covering. Three times Ariana had to boil the chicken livers, fry the bacon, sauté the onions, and chop the hard-boiled eggs. Each time she chopped the eggs either too coarsely or much too fine, fried the bacon too crisply or not crisply enough, burned the onions, or boiled the livers until they crumbled and fell apart. In the end Gardner had to make the pâté. But when it came to the Wellington itself, Ariana’s performance was spectacular.

“Why you ent tell me is beef patty you want me to make?” she asked sullenly when she succeeded on her first try. “My mother teach me that long time.”

“Beef Wellington with chicken pâté, not patty! Té, té!” Gardner shouted, spit spraying from his mouth.

When he left the kitchen, Ariana grumbled something about English people always trying to find fancy words for ordinary things. If Gardner had told her in the first place that what he wanted was a big beef patty with chicken livers she would have made that with no trouble at all. It would have taken a little adjusting, that’s all.

But the day that Ariana produced a golden-brown beef Wellington, one so perfect that Gardner was rendered speechless, word came from Mrs. Burton that the Americans wanted something local, something Caribbean, something tropical.

If Mrs. Burton had not told him the Americans were rich, I believe Gardner would have scrapped his plans there and then. They were ignoramuses, he said. They lacked sophistication; they lacked class. Haute cuisine was beyond them. But they had money. The allure of all those dollars made his head spin. I would not have been surprised if he hadn’t already figured out their worth to the penny and calculated the percentage that would be his daughter’s upon her marriage to the son. Factored in, too, the amount he would need to buy amnesia from the people in England waiting for his head.

Ariana, however, was overjoyed. Something local? Gardner had despised her mother’s cooking, spoken disparagingly of anything local. Revenge was probably on her mind when, eschewing the simpler meal of rice and peas that Mrs. Burton recommended as quintessentially Caribbean, she chose callaloo, stewed chicken, breadfruit, dasheen, yam, and coo-coo. For days the kitchen was filled with smells I had almost forgotten: sugar burning in oil to brown the chicken for stew, breadfruit steaming in coconut milk, okra boiling in pigtail, dasheen leaves shredded to make callaloo.

But perhaps it was not revenge that allowed Ariana to endure in silence the scratches and scrapes on her knuckles when she grated the hard coconut, or the green stains on her fingers from the dasheen bush, or the hot oil that splattered on her neck. Perhaps it was pride, for pride was what I felt when I was sent back to Trinidad with the new grocery list, pride that made me think more kindly of the Americans.
They wanted something local.
I began to hope that Gardner was wrong. I fantasized that the rich American’s son had already chosen his bride in America. I made myself believe that he would not be interested in Virginia. I never allowed myself to consider the possibility that Virginia would be interested in him.

Yet when, eventually, I saw his face and the reflection of his face on Virginia’s face, both at the same time, my fear returned more intense than before. I had dismissed him as not a god, too short to be a god, but the awe in Virginia’s eyes was unmistakable. This was a god to her, a thing divine, resembling her: skin the color of hers, not mine; hair as blond.

From the disadvantage of the kitchen window, I watched them walk toward the orchid beds. At the white orchids they stopped, the young man and his father huddling close to each other on one side of the bed, Virginia a slight distance away from them. Gardner stood on the other side, his attention, like mine, focused on his daughter. If the son found Virginia beautiful, it was clear to me that for him her beauty was overshadowed by the beauty of the orchid. He spoke to his father, he spoke to Gardner. Only once did he turn to her. But I could tell by the way her head was fixed in his direction that Virginia was enraptured.

The Americans left immediately after lunch. Gardner did not take Virginia with him when he went to the bay to see them off. I suppose, in spite of his plans, he did not want to seem too anxious. I came out of the kitchen and approached Virginia. I did not mince my words. I was so overcome with jealousy that my brain did not allow me to be discreet, to conceal my palpitating heart.

“You looked at him as if he had dropped from heaven,” I said. She walked away from me. I followed her. “You were mesmerized.” My voice was harsh with resentment. “You couldn’t keep your eyes off of him.”

She stopped and turned. “Father doesn’t want me to talk to you,” she said.

If she had spoken to me as harshly as I had to her, I would have despaired. I would not have had the courage to go on. But she did not say those words harshly. She said them softly, gently, her voice full of concern for me. Still, I grabbed her arm roughly. “Are you going to marry him?” I asked.

“Father said . . .” Her lips trembled.

I tightened my hold on her. “Are you?”

She tried to push my hand away.

“Are you?”

“Father said . . .” She struggled again.

I released her, drained, my heart sinking. “What has happened to you? You won’t talk to me, you avoid me.”

She rubbed the spot where I had held her but she did not walk away. “Father says it’s time.” Her eyes were moist.

We were in the corridor outside her room. At the far end, near the kitchen, Ariana was looking at us. “I have to go,” Virginia said, glancing at Ariana.

“Wait.” Ariana had told me she felt sorry for Virginia. I did not think she would make trouble for her.

“He’ll be back soon,” Virginia said.

“Tonight. Get away tonight,” I pleaded with her.

She glanced once again down the corridor. Ariana was still looking at us, but she had made no move to come toward us.

“She won’t tell him,” I said.

“Father has made up his mind,” she said.

“Come with me to the cove,” I said.

She did not say yes, she did not say no.

I had promised many times to take her there. She wanted to see the big tree where the orchids used to be, but though Ariana was willing to give us time when Gardner was in his garden, it was time she had calculated, time she supervised. No matter how I had tried to reassure her, she was unwilling, afraid, to take the risk that Gardner would return before she could warn us.

“We could go at night,” I said to Virginia.

“In the dark?”

“When he’s asleep,” I said.

“He sleeps too lightly,” she said.

I thought she was remembering the night he heard her scream. “We’ll be quiet,” I said.

She shook her head. Ariana came closer. “Go,” she said to Virginia. “Is the only way.”

After dinner, in the kitchen, Ariana told me what she had done. She had put something in Gardner’s blue drink, she said. “Nothing make Prospero wake up till morning come.”

There was no moon. Once we got past the end of the lawn to the path that led to the sea, the bushes closed in on us and we could barely see. I stretched out my hand to Virginia. She took it, and when her fingers closed over mine, my anger, my jealousy, my fear ebbed away like the tide.

Hand in hand, not speaking, as much because we were afraid to speak, to make the slightest noise (impossible as I knew it would be for Gardner to hear us) as it was because we were suddenly shy, I led her off the path, through a narrow track cluttered with dead branches, stones, and curling vines. The night air was thick with the fragrance of the earth baked in the daylong sun. Dried leaves crumbled beneath our feet and released a vegetable perfume that mixed with the odor of animal droppings, a smell not unpleasant. Organic. Pure. Nature untouched, unchanged by human hands.

Along the way Virginia stumbled, her shoe caught in the tendril of a vine. She reached for me, and when her head brushed my chest, my heart did somersaults. I could hear her breathing, the air coming out of her mouth in spurts. I swallowed hard, trying to loosen the tightness mounting my throat, and placed my arm lightly around her waist to help her climb over the craggy knoll to the cove on the other side.

She saw the orchids immediately. Like stars, she said. And I was grateful that Gardner’s fear of the lepers had kept him away. Three trips we had made to the cove and then he got frightened. “The lepers bury their dead here,” I had told him, and saved the rest clutching the thick branches at the top of the tree.

We sat on a big stone at the edge of the water. Dark trees hugged the rough-pebbled beach, a sliver only, yet distinct next to the sea black with the night though sparkling here and there where tiny waves broke the surface. Night sounds encircled us: the faint lap, lap of waves stroking the beach, the shudder of leaves in the light breeze, the flutter of feathers, birds stirring in their sleep.

I could tell she was no longer nervous. Even without the moon, I could see that her face had softened.

“Did the Americans like them?” I asked her.

“The Americans?” The surprise in her eyes was genuine, as if she had forgotten.

“The orchids. Did they like them?”

She drew her legs to her chest and hugged her knees. “Yes,” she said. Then, looking out to the water, she added dreamily, “Especially the son.”

My jealousy returned. “He’s handsome,” I said. My tone was spiteful.

“As if he came from another world,” she said.

I had not expected her to be so blunt. “America,” I said, still spiteful. “He came from America.”

She wrinkled her brow. “I know from America,” she said.

If I had been able to find a way to stop the blood from rushing to my head, I would have been reasonable. I would have been able to assess her words calmly, to have reminded myself that the American was the first young white man she had seen on the island. But I could not stem the flood in my brain any more than I could stop the cold streak snaking down my spine.

“I saw the way you stared at him,” I said.

A pink stain rose on her cheeks. She lowered her voice. “Do you think he noticed?”

“Your father noticed,” I said.

The stain on her cheeks grew darker. “He’s handsome,” she murmured.

I wished I could roll back the clock. I wished I could recover the time when all she was to me was a friend, a sort of sister. Then I could have laughed at her, told her he was nothing special. In Trinidad I had seen men handsomer.

“You say that because he is white,” I said. I spoke in anger, but it was fear I felt.

She opened her eyes wide and arched her brows. “No. No,” she said.

“And I am not white.”

“No. I was surprised to see him. That’s all,” she said.

“You should have more control over your feelings.” I spat out the words at her.

“Feelings? But I have no feelings for him.” The tips of her fingers grazed my cheek. “Not like the feelings I have for you.”

I held her by her wrist and pulled back her hand. “You think of me as a friend,” I said.

“My only friend.”

“Once you told me you would love me forever.”

“And I will,” she said. “Forever.”

“But you will marry him.”

“I will marry you,” she said.

I released her hand. I think she was as shocked as I when the words fell back on her ears and the truth penetrated her heart. Her eyes darkened, her lips lost color. I reached for her and kissed her.

Mrs. Burton came for lunch the next day. I was sitting in the place Gardner had assigned me, at a table near the window, where I ate alone. From where I was, it was difficult to hear what Mrs. Burton was saying, but I had my suspicions and I could hardly wait for Ariana, who was serving them, to return to the kitchen.

“She wants Miss Virginia to come to Trinidad,” she said. The tray of dirty dishes she was holding seemed to weigh her down. Her legs buckled when she placed it on the counter.

“And what did Miss Virginia say?” I asked her.

“She say nothing. Prospero say she have to go.”

Mrs. Burton left around half past two. Gardner went to the dock with her, his arms loaded down with orchid plants. I had guessed his purpose right: He had made a bargain. Orchids in exchange for her promise to orchestrate his daughter’s marriage.

I was helping Ariana in the kitchen when Virginia appeared. She had come so quietly I would not have known she was standing by the doorway if Ariana had not nudged me.

“He said I have to leave tomorrow.” Her face was wreathed with sorrow. I did not care that Ariana was there. I folded her in my arms and pressed her to my chest.

“He said I must pack tonight.”

“For how long?”

“Mrs. Burton is having a party for the Americans. He wants me to go.”