Prospero's Daughter (9 page)

Now cleaned up, dressed in beige pants and a pink long-sleeved cotton shirt, the boy seemed harmless to Mumsford, incapable of that kind of barbarity.

Misshapen?
He had seen him bare-chested. His shoulders were broad, his torso muscular, his hips slim. Was it the shape of his backside that had caused Gardner to tell that lie? Mumsford had heard the snickering in the Country Club.
Tails.
No one believed it, but it made for raucous laughter when the blacks left and they had the billiard room to themselves.

Mumsford blushed remembering how his eyes had strayed there, but he had felt compelled to examine the boy as he walked toward the house in front of him. His torso was shorter, his buttocks more pronounced than the average Englishman’s. High, but not misshapen.

He was facing him now and the blood and pus had been washed off. He had to admit he was handsome; even the freckles were not unattractive. There were pink blotches on his face for sure, and around his ears and neck where the skin was broken, but the freckles spread across his cheekbones seemed to him like chocolate dust sprinkled over a butterscotch brown cake.

It bothered Mumsford that this pleasant image should come to him at this moment, dredged from a happy time in his childhood. Yet something about Carlos’s face, his skin—butterscotch brown was indeed how he would describe his color—reminded him of toffee and chocolate, and the brown cake he loved as a child.

And perhaps his gaffe with Gardner had its source from these times, too, when he was a boy, in the early years after the war. He had known better, of course. He had seen freckles on many an Englishman’s face. But the talk in those years in the streets where he lived in England was about the coloreds, the flood of immigrants from the colonies, coming to England now that the country had been battered. “Reverse colonization,” his father called it. “They come to take what we have worked for.”

Signs warned dark-skinned immigrants that they were not welcome.
No dogs. No coloreds.
Some were more humiliating:
Pets. No
coloreds.
But nothing stopped these sons and daughters of the Commonwealth. They came in droves from India, Pakistan, China, Africa, the West Indies, from every corner of the world where the sun set on lands the British had colonized, trusting in the propaganda of the Mother Country, believing in her gospel of fair play and justice. When asked, their response was naïve. Their oil, tobacco, cotton, sugar, bananas had made the Mother Country rich. Surely it was their turn.

The fear among the men was, naturally, the vulnerability of the women. What would happen if a colored man fucked a white woman? Mumsford and his school chums spent many an amusing hour making up answers—
Stripes like a zebra, spots like a leopard. Freckles
—all the time trying to smother hysteria.

Say something enough times and myth becomes fact, lies truth, Mumsford now admitted to himself. Carlos had freckles and the skin color of a colored man, but, as he grudgingly had to accede, the facial features of many an Englishman he knew: broad brow; thin lips; a wide, substantial chin; blue eyes undoubtedly inherited from his mother.

The blue eyes made Mumsford uneasy. They were disconcerting, strange to him on a brown face.

“Have you taken all you’ll need?” Carlos was standing in front of him, obviously ready to leave, but he had not uttered a single word. “Ready?” Mumsford jerked his head toward the black duffel bag he was holding.

The young man nodded, but his lips remained sealed.

He could not figure him out. He could not tell if he was afraid or relieved to be going with him. His eyes told him nothing. They were blank, empty of any expression Mumsford could discern. “Well then,” Mumsford said, when it was clear that Carlos would not answer him, “I’ll let Dr. Gardner know we are leaving.”

But before he could step forward, the front door opened and Gardner came running out, his shirttails flapping behind him. “See that he rots in jail,” he shouted to Mumsford.

Carlos made a gurgling sound and puckered his lips.

“Until his flesh rots.” Gardner had reached where they were standing.

What happened next so paralyzed both Mumsford and Gardner that neither man moved, stunned by the audacity of it, shocked by the intensity of the rage that had produced it. Had Mumsford been looking at Carlos at the time and seen his eyes narrow to slits and the venom pooled there, he might have anticipated it when he heard the gurgling coming from Carlos’s direction. But he was facing Gardner, and he saw what happened after it happened, after Carlos had done it. He saw the stream of spit jetting forward, he saw it land with absolute accuracy on the tip of Gardner’s nose; he saw it slide and drain onto his top lip, and his feet, like Gardner’s, froze to the ground.

Carlos came close to Gardner. He was breathing hard; his nostrils flared. “You taught me your language well and I use it now to curse you. May you burn in hell, motherfucker!”

Gardner’s face lost color, and then his body thawed, and like a dog tucking its tail between its legs, he turned and walked away.

Mumsford had brought handcuffs, but he did not use them. After Carlos spat on Gardner’s face and cursed him, he seemed ready to leave, anxious even. “Can we go now?” he asked Mumsford. His voice was as cool as ice.

Why had Gardner not retaliated? Why hadn’t he struck him or insisted that Mumsford beat him with his baton? Why, when they faced each other, was Gardner the first to turn away? The conclusion Mumsford came to was the same one he had arrived at minutes before: Carlos had committed no real crime. The expression of his desire to have babies with Virginia was an insult to Gardner, no more. Still, to spit in the face of an Englishman!

“That was disrespectful.” He said so to Carlos.

“He deserved it.” Carlos’s breathing had slowed. He spoke without emotion, as if merely stating an obvious fact.

And perhaps it was an obvious fact. The boy had been tortured. It had irked Mumsford when the commissioner had told him to take Carlos to the monks. Jail, he thought, would have been more appropriate for the perpetrator of a crime against an English girl. But he was grateful now for the commissioner’s insistence, now after he had witnessed Gardner’s cruelty.

“I’m not taking you to jail,” he said, wanting to put the boy at ease. “The commissioner has asked me to bring you to the monks at St. Benedict’s.”

The young man remained stubbornly silent, but Mumsford saw the muscles on the side of his face loosen and his jaw relax.

“There will be no more punishment, Codrington.”

He wanted to say more to him, but decided it would be imprudent. The fact remained that the investigation was not yet over. He had yet to speak to Virginia, to get her side of the story.

The boatman was waiting at the spot where he said he would be. The moment he saw Carlos, he came quickly toward him. “Is good you leaving, Mister Carlos,” he said. He grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously.

Mumsford frowned at him, unsettled by the honorific.
Mister?
The boatman paid no attention to his frown. “You lead the way, Mister Carlos,” he said.

Carlos smiled and walked in front of him. Mumsford had no choice but to follow, and the boatman picked up the rear.

No one spoke on the brief walk to the water, the silence broken only by the swish of branches, the call of birds, the occasional pebble rolling downhill. Once a twig snapped and then another, rapidly, behind it. Mumsford turned around sharply. “Iguana,” the boatman said. “Plenty in the bush.” But when they neared the clearing, Mumsford saw the unmistakable flicker of yellow between the greens and browns in the bushes.

Ariana!

He told the boatman to wait in the boat with Carlos and he went to the place where he had seen the yellow. Ariana parted the branches and appeared before him.

“I tell you a lot about Carlos and Miss Virginia but not now. I can’t stay.” She held up her hand.

Mumsford brushed aside the flicker of irritation that flashed through him and concentrated. “Can you come to the station?” he asked.

“I come tomorrow. Tomorrow is Friday. He study on Friday; read he books all day. I come ten o’clock.”

“Ten o’clock is fine. But won’t he miss you?”

“Prospero miss nobody when he read his books.”

It was not the time to ask the question, but Mumsford could not help himself. “Why do you call him Prospero?” he asked.

She shrugged. “He prosperous. He rich.”

“So that is it?”

“Ask Carlos. If it have another reason, Carlos know. Is he who give him the name.”

But it made no sense to ask Carlos then or during the sea crossing to Trinidad. It was clear he was determined not to speak, to remain in stony silence no matter what was said to him. When he did speak, as he was getting off the boat in Trinidad, it was to utter only four short sentences. He said them not to Mumsford and not to the boatman, either. It was as if he were speaking to himself, having felt a need to hear his own voice.

“My mother,” he said, “was blue-eyed, but she was not a hag. She was beautiful. The house was hers. He stole it from me.”

FOUR

PETER GARDNER, as Mumsford could have surmised from his cagey answers, had not come for the lepers. He did not stay because of them. He would never have chosen this hellhole to raise his daughter. If he were forced to tell the truth, he would have said it was his innocence that had brought him here. His naïveté. His trust sans bounds and confidence in a brother who, next to his daughter, of all the world he loved. A brother who had clung to him like ivy but only to suck him dry. Only to hide his talent from others.

They were doctors, he and Paul, when he used to live in London. Peter and Paul Bidwedder, before he changed his surname to Gardner. His parents, ardent Christians when their sons were born, named them for the loyal disciples of Christ, but regretted their decision later, with the war, after the deaths of so many of England’s most promising. After an explosion in a field in France brought their father back home a quadriplegic. By the time he and Paul left for medical school, their parents were proselytizing atheists.

It was because of their father that he and Paul decided to become doctors. He chose research, for unlike Paul, he was happiest when he was in the library, his head buried in a pile of dusty books. He told his father that he believed it was possible to grow new arms and legs for him in the laboratory. He was sure it was only a matter of figuring out the right cells and stimulating them. Then, when they multiplied into arms and legs, he would attach them where the old limbs had been amputated.

Voodoo medicine, Paul called it, but their father grabbed on to the hope Peter offered. “Maybe not as perfect as the ones you had before, Father, but they could grow back almost as strong.”

Paul scoffed at him. He was the realist, the practical man. He spoke of a future of mechanical artificial limbs. Better still, robots that could respond to human command.

“You wouldn’t have to do a thing,” Paul said to his father. “It would be like having a personal servant.”

His father preferred the fantasies Peter spun for him.

“All it would take is figuring out the human genome,” Peter said. “Then we would have the secret to life. We could even make a clone of you, Father.”

Their mother, who loved Paul best anyhow, was horrified. “Dr. Frankenstein was a monster,” she said.

Peter waved her away. “Oh, those ideas are passé,” he said. “No one is planning to use the dead.”

“Playing God,” she said.

“Yes, playing God,” Paul repeated after her, but even when he was ridiculing Peter envy was eating him up.

In medical school, it was obvious that the professors admired Peter. He was the brain, the smarter of the Bidwedder men. But the students loved Paul. He was the popular one. They consulted Peter when they were faced with a difficult problem. At examination time, they stuck to him like flies to honey, but it was with Paul they went to the pub. Peter’s ardor, his focus, his single-mindedness on curing every illness he came upon, made them uneasy. His patients were not human to him. To him, they were a mass of cells, tissue, blood and bones, not people, not living, breathing men and women with feelings and desires.

Peter became more human to them when he married. He still worked hard, but he no longer slept in the lab, as he often did when nothing mattered except the project that engaged him. His wife was beautiful: blond hair, blue eyes, a perfectly shaped oval face, and the pale alabaster skin that so many Englishmen loved. But what Peter Gardner boasted about was her virtue. He had married a virgin. So certain he was that no one could seduce her that he offered to put his head on a block to be chopped off if anyone proved him wrong. “Her virtue is nonpareil,” he said. Paul’s friends called Peter “Nonpareil” behind his back, but not only because of what he claimed for his wife, but because of what he claimed for himself. No one was smarter than he, he seemed to imply by his serious demeanor. And, indeed, all that he touched turned to gold.

Then his wife died, three years after giving birth to a daughter, and he was his old self again.

Except for his little girl, Virginia, Peter became, in all his human interactions, cold and distant. Inhuman, Paul accused him of being when Peter refused to lend him money after he lost his savings and three months’ salary at a gambling table. “Keep it up and you will kill someone one day.” It was a matter of time before Paul’s words proved prophetic.

Peter had not intended to kill the woman. He had intended to cure her. He had given her one of his concoctions. Put it in her IV drip.

It was not the first time he had given one of his patients the experimental medicine he had mixed himself. Some improved. A few died, but, as he always reasoned, most were already terminal, and nothing, except this chance he was prepared to take, would have saved them.

This patient, however, was not fatally ill. She was the patient of another doctor. Peter Bidwedder just happened to be in the ward when she was admitted. He wanted to test a medicine that had worked on his rats. He gave it to her. She died within hours. She was rich, important. The wife of a government minister. There would be an inquest.

He was terrified. He went to his brother. His brother said that an inquest would lead to others. The hospital authorities would find out about the patients who had not been cured by the medicines he had given them. The ones who had died. When Peter said to Paul that they were dying anyway, Paul reminded him that he had enemies, colleagues who hated him.

Paul recommended Trinidad. He told Peter he would hide him at a friend’s flat in London and the next day his friend would drive him to Liverpool. From there he could take a ship to Trinidad. It would cost money, lots of money. He would have to sign over his bank account to him. His house and his inheritance from their parents, too.

When Peter bit his lips and cast his eyes from side to side nervously, Paul was quick to reassure him. “I won’t need
all
the money,” he said. “But if that woman tries to sue, I want to be sure there is nothing left in your estate for her to take. Then, when things clear up, I’ll send you what’s left.”

“When things clear up?”

“Surely there have been no cures without fatalities. One day people will understand that and acknowledge your genius.”

Peter was in a bind. He had to trust his brother.

Paul said he knew someone with connections who could arrange for him to go to Chacachacare, a little island off the northwest coast of Trinidad. It was a leper colony, he said, but it was virtually abandoned. Most of the lepers were cured and had returned to Trinidad. There was a doctor there, taking care of the few patients who still remained, but he was old, hardly likely to ask disturbing questions. It would be a perfect hideout, he said to Peter.

Peter Bidwedder knew about the cure for Hansen’s disease. Contrary to popular belief, the disease was not easily contracted. That it was not easily contracted, however, was not the same as saying it
could
not
be contracted by contact with infected persons. Still, the chances were so slim that a reasonable man could conclude that even on a leper colony, if he kept some distance away from the lepers, he would be safe. In any case, Peter Bidwedder had no intentions of practicing medicine with lepers. His brother was right. A leper colony was the perfect hideout. No one would think of looking for him there. All that remained was to change his last name.

It was more than two hours now since Carlos had left. Peter Gardner sat on the porch in his rocking chair, staring at the sky and brooding, his head flopped backward on his neck.

Twilight. The time in the evening he loved best. Night hovered as in the wings of a stage, waiting its turn, while the sun glittered above the darkening clouds. But this evening the sun had cast an eerie white light on the sky—electric—that had made the darkening clouds darker.

The gods frowning.
The words flitted, light as gossamer, through his head and he shut his eyes, willing his brain to mount a defense.

It is he who had wronged me. He who would misuse my daughter. He who
would screw her.

When he opened his eyes, he was rewarded. Forgiven, he chose to believe. For below the clouds, the sun splashed her magnificent colors: red that bled to purple, yellow that burned to orange—the exquisite-ness of a sunset found only here, on these Caribbean islands.

It was art: a great painting in the sky. Dark clouds but a fire below them. In the foreground, statuary—the tall bushes at the end of the lawn outlined in the silvery light. For after science, it was art Peter Gardner worshipped: music, painting, sculpture, literature. Poetry, best of all.

He groaned and clasped his fingers across his forehead. He had no talent for poetry. In England he had tried some verses and failed. It was the boy who was the poet.

To walk silently
in the forest,
and not shake a leaf, to move
and not disturb a branch.

At twilight
let me walk—
to the drum of impending
rest, caught between sleeping and waking—
when rocks turn
malleable in the growing night, softening
to the touch of deepening
shade.

He did not want to think of him, to remember the boy’s poem he had memorized in two readings, patched together from scraps he had retrieved from the garbage after a fit of envy had caused him to tear it to pieces.

“Soft.” He waved his hand across the still air. “Soft,” he murmured again, looking around him, listening. But there was no sound, soft or loud, in his backyard, only the birds, their calls fading with the dying light. No mumblings between Ariana and the boy, no hushed whispers. He was gone. Left with the inspector. To jail. Yes, that was where he belonged.

He patted the pocket of his shirt as if to reassure himself that the packet of smoking papers was there where he had put it. He took it out now and picked up the flat thin box at the foot of the rocking chair. A bundle of letters bound in red ribbon lay close to the box. He would read them next. Carefully, laying out one sheet of the paper on his lap, he shook out the contents of the tin box until he made a thin line along the middle of the paper.

Tobacco and marijuana. He did not smoke one without the other. He was suspicious of things unaltered. Nature to him was a traitor, bringing disease to roses in bloom, blight to crops before harvest. Cancer to humans.

Rain made floods. Drought dried grass and sucked moisture from fruit. But on his land the grass was green; flowers blossomed in the dry season.

If Mumsford had not run off with the boy, he would have shown him what he had done with orchids. He would have taken him to his nursery to see the anthuriums he had grafted to calla lilies.

He rolled the paper into a cigarette, put it between his lips, lit it, and sucked the smoke deep into his lungs. The tobacco was for the taste, the marijuana to increase its potency, to calm his nerves. And this evening he needed to calm his nerves: the boy had spat in his face. This evening he needed to remind himself why he was here, why he could not return to England.

He reached for the letters. Some were in envelopes, some simply folded. He was a scientist. A meticulous man. The folded letters were his, copies of the ones he had written to his brother. Of the ones in envelopes, only two were from Paul, the others his, returned unopened to the sender. Slowly, gingerly, he unfolded the first one he had written to his brother.

July 15, 1950

Cocorite, Trinidad

Dear Paul,

How long must I wait for the boat to Chacachacare? Virginia and I have been here three weeks now, living in a shack in Cocorite. This can’t go on much longer. When will that man come to take us there?

Don’t think I don’t appreciate all you are doing for us. I shall repay you well, I promise.

Your brother,

Peter

He refolded the letter and opened one still in its envelope, the first Paul had sent.

July 31, 1950

Lancashire, England

Dear Peter,

By the time you receive this letter you would already have had the answers to your questions. The bearer is a friend of a friend. He will take you and Virginia to Chacachacare.

All is well here. There was an inquest, and, as you anticipated, blame was placed squarely on your shoulders. Everything is out in the open. Her husband wants blood. Your blood absolutely, and so do the others. Even the ones you cured have become afraid.

They have made you into a monster. They say your medicines were meant for animals. A woman claims that she has grown hair on her arms and chest, a man that he laughs like a hyena. Lies, of course.

All lies.

Not to worry. I won’t tell where you are hiding. Place your trust in me.

Your brother,

Paul

Place your trust in me.
Peter Gardner had laughed scornfully when he first read those words. Trust him?
As a serpent’s egg.
He needed him but he did not trust him. He had turned their mother against him. He had put her up to comparing him with Frankenstein. He was sure of that.

Playing God? That’s what she had accused him of, and yet she had claimed she did not believe in Him. They were hypocrites all. But he had to be careful. He was in his brother’s power. In his next letter he was obsequious.

November 12, 1950

Chacachacare

Dear Paul,

We have arrived safely. The friend of your friend must have told you so. I apologize for having taken this long to write, but I was not sure it would be prudent. I wanted to wait a while. There may have been spies checking your post box. Four months, I think, is long enough. They would have given up by now, certain you have no knowledge of my whereabouts. In any case, they love you and would not want to harm you. You have been a kind and generous brother to me. You cannot know how much I am grateful to you.

The weather here is rotten, unbelievably hot, but at least now it is dry. The incessant rains have come to an end, though, alas, not the mosquitoes. My poor Virginia suffers, but I have managed to make a salve for her and to procure some netting.