The Black Isle (54 page)

As for Hiram Desker: Had that tardy wretch saved me, pulled me out from under the roof? Had he driven me to the hospital? Did he even exist? I had my doubts. But it no longer mattered. All my medical expenses had been quietly covered, and I was left an outsize packet to buy off my wrath. Nine months’ wages.

I lay in the hospital, mending. When I was finally ready to leave, a trainee nurse—chubby, wobbly, and green—saw me into a waiting cab. She must have thought she was doing me a kindness when she bade me her fare-thee-well:

“It was a boy.”

I was young.

And then I was old. Just like that.

When I returned to my apartment and finally saw myself in the mirror, it appeared that twenty years, not two months, had passed. Never mind the cuts and bruises—my hair was completely white.

In a matter of weeks, I’d had both past and future ripped from me. My youthful black hair and my baby—both gone. Luckily I was still numb, all negation, all morphine. I combed my unruly hair into a matronly bun and powdered over my discolored cheeks. Once I had this mask, I painted my lips red and drew black arches over my brows.

If I could no longer possess my own face, I would borrow my mother’s.

It was eerie how much I resembled her. I’d inherited everything I loathed about her face, including the dreaded tadpole eyes, the stunted lashes, the amoebic freckles. But I’d also hijacked everything that had supposedly made her pretty—prominent cheekbones, cushiony lips, a passable set of teeth. I’d fled across the oceans, but blood would never let me go.

It was in this maternal armor that I returned to the Black River. During my long days in the hospital, I’d had plenty of time to think. I burned to get to the bottom of what had happened that afternoon. I had to know.

Surely Daniel would tell.

But I wasn’t the only thing that had changed in those two months. I had told the taxi driver to take me to the old warehouse, but when we arrived, there was nothing. Not even the admonishing gate. The plot had become flat, anonymous ground, the handiwork of wrecking balls, bulldozers, and the good old-fashioned broom. It was entirely
clean
.

I decided to put Hiram Desker’s blood money to good use: I would take Li out of Woodbridge and place him in a new private institution. There, he would spend his days and nights in his own air-conditioned room, instead of being feasted upon by thirsty mosquitoes. I could even guarantee the new place was clean. The developer, H. M., had been one of my best clients.

Walking through Woodbridge, for what I imagined would be the last time, I was filled with nostalgia—the pear-shaped Indian and Eurasian nurses, the ubiquitous blue pajamas, the clusters of dazed walk-ins awaiting evaluation. Even the smell of disinfectant had its homey pull, not unlike the musty scent of an old maiden aunt.

And then I smelled another perfume, an even stranger one, made of Fab detergent, Florida water, and prickly heat talcum powder. An elderly woman in a jade-green cheongsam, bedecked with pearls and with meticulously coifed hair, walked past me toward the entrance—in fuzzy white bedroom slippers. Living or dead, I couldn’t at first tell. I nodded to her, but she ignored me; her eyes were glazed.

“Don’t let her scare you,” one of the young nurses told me. “She’s a medical mystery. Completely catatonic until the last Sunday of every month. Then she suddenly jumps up, hops in the bath, puts on her green dress and funny perfume, and takes a taxi to the Metropole hotel for high tea. Like a Swiss clock. Our
cuckoo
clock, we call her. Then after tea, she comes straight home and turns back into a pumpkin.”

The Metropole? Could she be—of course, she was: Mrs. Odell!

The nurse and I watched as Mrs. Odell walked out the door, whereupon a waiting taxi pulled up for her. She struggled to get the cab door open. Instinctively, I started to run out and help her but the nurse stopped me.

“Let her. You’ll only spoil her fantasy. She thinks she’s still young. Anyway, each trip she takes now may be her last.”

“How are her finances?” I asked.

“Her finances?” The nurse looked at me curiously. “She’s been destitute for years. Luckily she’s low maintenance. The Metropole’s okay with her because she doesn’t eat or drink anything. Imagine, they put her in a storeroom and she just
sits
.”

“What’s your name, Nurse?”

“My name?” she asked, even more surprised. “It’s Cornelia. Why?”

“Well, Cornelia,” I said, pulling out my checkbook and scribbling down a sum, “please see to it that Mrs. Odell has a comfortable life and a dignified death.”

I walked quickly away before the poor girl could start asking questions.

Up two flights of stairs, another fantasist. Li greeted me at the door to his ward. “Back again so soon?”

I took one look at him and knew it would be hard to move him away. Now the longest-serving patient—next to Mrs. Odell, perhaps—he’d become Woodbridge royalty. He received me with a paper cup of iced water from the nurses’ station. I drank it as if it were wine, sitting by his knee. As he leaned back into his rusty-legged, vinyl-backed throne, I surrendered: It would be wrong to force this king from his castle. He had to stay.

We were alone in the music room. His fellow patients had banished themselves, and the painted sunflowers on the wall were now his royal subjects. None, though, were as favored as me. He loosened my bun and ran his fingers through my head of white hair, as though I were still a thing of beauty.

“We were young,” he whispered. “And now we’re old.”

He let his face grow slack, caught betwixt dreaming and waking, and began to tell me an old story from some secret place we both shared:

There once lived a family that tried very hard to be happy
…

A year later, in early 1964, I returned to St. Andrews cathedral. This time, I was invited.

“Why lick your wounds when sweets abound?” Kenneth had whispered down the telephone. “Vi doesn’t have to see you. But I want to. I
need
to. There’ll be lots of people, so you’ll be able to blend in.
Please
, come.”

By this time, the newspapers had answered most of my questions regarding Violet’s biography: She had moved to England after the war and earned a degree at the London School of Economics. From London, she’d managed her family’s affairs—until, on a visit home, she bumped into her old friend Kenneth, waiting for a table at Mitzi’s. The rest was history. They reclaimed the old Wee mansion in Tanglewood and made it into their Camelot.

What a difference a year made. This time, the grounds at St. Andrews were packed with limousines and hundreds of milling guests, dressed in the pastel shades of Easter. I looked absurdly out of place in my black blouse and skirt, but many of the guests were my former clients to whom my severity seemed perfectly natural. They each bade me respectful—even fearful—little nods as I passed them, none giving away our secret relationship with overt gestures of recognition.

My impulse was to flee and head to a bar, the seedier the better, to wipe out this nauseating show of renewal and fine millinery. But before I could make my move, Kenneth, ever vigilant, spotted me through the crowd. He shot me an almost imperceptible nod with eyes that conveyed honest gratitude, as if I were his only true friend in this sea of overly demonstrative huggers and cooers and kissers. He was wearing a pale blue linen suit that would have let him melt into this moneyed crowd, yet he wished me to behold his isolation, the loneliness of his own making.

During the service, I sat in the very back and pulled out my opera glasses. It might have looked gauche in a room where the only things being brought to one’s eyes were handkerchiefs, but I had come for my eyeful, and an eyeful I was determined to claim.

Violet was in a pink sheath dress, sleeveless and chic, with her hair cropped short, all of it again in Audrey Hepburn style. Yet this time, the imitation only accentuated her grimness—she carried herself like a tragic flower of the past, more Camille than Holly Golightly. As she clutched the baby to her chest, Kenneth stood at her side, smiling yet eerily detached, as if he’d walked in on the wrong christening but was content to watch these strangers continue anyway.

The papoose itself—named Agnes Mary, after that dead mutt!—was just another baby. She neither laughed nor cried when the minister doused her wispy fluff of hair with water, losing a few drops on her white organza gown. In her unwillingness to appear either enthralled or horrified, the kid was pure Kenneth.

I couldn’t help but think of
our
son and how he might have behaved in a similar setting. Surely my boy would have walloped a wail or squeezed out a resounding fart the second the minister touched his little head. He would have seduced the entire room.

Had he lived, my boy would have been almost six months old. I wouldn’t be sitting in this church, of course; I’d be at home, tending to the sweet bundle’s every whim. My nameless, faceless boy. Even now, the lad can bring tears to my eyes.

At that moment, I felt a sudden pressure building inside my brassiere. I was being pumped up with something: My nipples ached; my skin grew taut to the point of tearing. I placed a hand on my chest. Was this a heart attack?

The truth was less deadly but a fair bit weirder. My breasts had become swollen with milk.

I tried to make a quick exit once the ceremony ended, but the crowd made escape impossible. Somebody announced there would be more champagne and cake, and hearing those words, everyone stopped moving, clogging up the doorways.

A hand tapped me brusquely on the shoulder. Even before I turned around, I knew. I sensed the hostility.

Violet.

Her face was puffy with rage. No more Audrey Hepburn or tragic saint. She was now Bette Davis in fiery, bug-eyed mode. Without so much as a greeting, she yanked me by the sleeve and led me behind a Gothic pillar, her grip every bit as unyielding as when she was a sullen schoolgirl.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing by coming here, but I know it’s not the first time. I
saw
you at our wedding. Standing in the graveyard.” She began blinking as she fought back her tears. “It was my
wedding day
…yet you were there, watching me!” The tears gushed out now. “And those white chrysanthemums. I didn’t tell Kenny but I knew it was you.”

An amah walked over to ask Violet if she was all right, but she shushed her and sent her away.

“I know I’ve said horrible things to you but…that was the war. You have to understand, I lost everything!” Her face cracked open again. “Can’t you just put it all behind us? The bitterness between us was strictly between us. Don’t drag my husband and my daughter into it. After what I went through, I never thought I’d
ever
be able to bear children. But I did, at my age. If you don’t have a child, you can’t possibly understand. I’m not going to let you take my happiness from me.”

I walked away, not wanting her to see the tears welling in my eyes. She was right. Things had changed, and in her place, I would have fought for my family, too. But she remained aggressively blind to the fact that
she
was the spider who’d crept out of the woodwork and stolen
my
life.

Shouldn’t I be the one crying,
Stop, thief
?

She pushed through the crowd after me and grabbed my shoulder once more.

“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to beg but, Cassandra”—she took a deep breath—“
please
, will you stop haunting me?”

KENNETH TELEPHONED
from his office several days later. He clearly had no clue about my confrontation with his wife.

“I saw you sitting at the back with your opera glasses,” he said. “Did you notice her little hands?”

I admitted I did not.

“She was born without fingerprints!” He chuckled with a new father’s pride. “It’s the most wonderful anomaly. My darling girl has the smoothest little paws.”

“That’ll come in handy when she decides to steal the Hope Diamond.”

“Or be a politician. I daresay this might portend a bright future in politics.”

Kenneth, as usual, was speaking in riddles. You see, it was he who’d been enjoying the political spotlight.

With the backing of his Muslim comrade, Iskandar Ibrahim, and his Chinese immigrant comrade, Zhang Ming, he was campaigning for prime minister. The trio took wonderful photos together all over the Isle—at markets, in stadiums, on podiums with business leaders. Through it all, Kenneth continued to supply me with new clients, though the names were fewer and farther between. This was to be expected; the Isle was getting cleaner every day.

It never failed to impress me how he always knew when he stood a sliver of a chance and how best to expand this opening into a foothold. Nobody cares to remember this today, but Kenneth’s opponent, the then-incumbent prime minister, was a Eurasian millionaire drunk put in place by the departing Brits.

In contrast, Kenneth promised Islanders what we all wanted: peace, prosperity, prominence, and, above all, a new beginning. When he gave speeches at grassroots rallies, his plummy locution vanished, replaced by a coffee-shop colloquialism; he took on the slurry, loose-jowled diction of cabbies and workingmen, yet the marvel was that he never ceased to sound lucid, forceful, and deeply passionate. When he spoke at gatherings of the powerful, his cool, Oxonian voice reemerged, and he peppered his sentences with terms like
Darwinian struggle
and
capricious fate
. The man may have had a split tongue, but he united all the groups with it.

Despite our troubled relationship, I followed his campaign every step of the way. He truly
was
the Isle’s great hope. Nobody else came close.

Then during a crucial rally in working-class Woodlands, he made what sounded like an impolitic gaffe: “If I could drag our isle out of this lousy neighborhood and dock it up north, believe me, I would do it. We deserve better than this swamp!”

Hearing those words on the radio, I shivered. I remembered him sharing that sentiment with me on the rain-soaked steps of city hall, but to voice it on the radio…he had either committed the biggest blunder of his career or struck upon a vein of political genius. Of course, every hardworking Islander knew the frustration of being where we were, a tiny dot on the world’s map surrounded by jungly, unambitious lands. But none of us dared to say it aloud for fear of insulting our neighbors.