The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (8 page)

“It’s enough to make one lose one’s appetite entirely,” Andrea said and slammed the door to her little cottage.

That night I was awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of a car driving down the road to the village. Normally it would not have been anything to wake up to, but I had a sudden odd feeling that it was the car I’d borrowed to come here. I staggered over to the little garret window, but saw nothing. I crept down the steep stairs and peeked into Andrea’s room.

She was not there.

I went out the back door and saw that the small Ford was gone.

Since Andrea didn’t have a car, I supposed she’d taken mine. Perhaps she’d decided to visit the farm by herself to stake out the gravediggers; perhaps she’d heard someone else’s car driving down the road and decided to follow it. Whatever my suppositions, my actions were limited. The farm was a good four miles away, it was raining, and—I finally looked at the clock—four in the morning. I got dressed just to keep warm and paced around a bit, then remembered that Andrea had a bicycle out in the shed behind the cottage. With the feeling that there was nothing else to do, I steeled myself for cold and rain and set off into the dark night.

With water streaming down my face, I pedaled furiously, wondering why roads that always seemed to be perfectly flat when you drove over them by car suddenly developed hills and valleys when you were travelling by bicycle. Still the cold rain gave me an incentive for speed, and I arrived at the farm in record time. There were no cars at the side road leading to the farmhouse, so I got off the bike and began to reconnoiter on foot around the hedges. There must be another road leading to the farm, but I would waste more time looking for it than going on foot.

By this time my clothes were soaked and my boots caked with mud. I tried to retrace the steps Andrea and I had taken the day before, but in the darkness it was hard to see the difference between land and sky, much less between a rise and fall in the earth. Then, through the hedges, I saw a small light. I broke through and started staggering over the land toward it. It was joined by another small light.

The lights seemed to be dancing together, or were they struggling? One of the lights vanished. I began to hear voices. Had Andrea discovered the perpetrators; was she fighting with them?

But then I heard a voice I thought I recognized. “Put those bones down! I’ll have you in court for this. Grave robbing is a criminal offense as well as a sin!”

“What you did to Francine is a sin and a crime,” another even more familiar voice shot back. “Give me back my shovel. She deserves to have a better resting place than the one you gave her.”

“I was her husband, I have a right to decide where she’s buried.”

“You gave up your rights long ago.”

Then there was only the sound of grunts as they grappled again.

“Peter,” I said. “Andrea. Stop this. Stop this right now!”

I picked up one of the flashlights and shone it at each of their faces in turn. “What’s going on here?”

“I suspected her right from the beginning,” said Peter, looking like a large wet muskrat in his brown oilskin jacket. “I’ve been keeping an eye on her. Lives right across from the churchyard; easy enough to break into the grave. Tonight I heard the car starting up and decided to follow her. Called the journalists first, they’ll be here in a minute. You’ll go to jail for this, Addlepoot!”

“Oh, Cassandra,” groaned Andrea. “I’m sorry. I had it planned so differently.”

But she didn’t have time to exonerate herself. The journalists were suddenly on us like a pack of hounds; there were bright lights everywhere, illuminating a stone marker that said FRANCINE CROFTS, POET and a muddy sheet piled, haphazardly, with thin white bones.

Some weeks after this, when I was back in London, Andrea came up to see me. If it hadn’t been for the surprising intercession of Mrs. Putter, Peter’s mother (for she had been the woman we’d seen crying at the grave), Andrea would have been on trial now. As it was, Francine’s bones were back in the churchyard of St. Stephen’s, and Andrea had closed up her cottage and was thinking of moving back to London.

“I didn’t have completely ignoble motives,” she said. “I always did believe that Francine deserved better than a Putterized headstone or no headstone in a grim little grave under the eye of people who had hated her. But I have to admit that I saw an opportunity. When the blue plaques started to appear, I thought, why not? Someone’s bound to do it, why not me? I wouldn’t say I was the one who’d done it, of course. I’d steal the bones, rebury them, erect a marker and then—with you as a witness—I’d discover the new site and let the media know. It would have been the best kind of publicity, for me
and
for Francine. I would have solved a mystery, my name would be back in the news, my publisher might decide to reissue my books…but instead…”

“Instead the newspapers called you a grave robber and filled the pages of the tabloids with photos that made you look like a refugee from
Nightmare on Elm Street
. And they spelled your name wrong.”

Andrea shuddered. “I’m going to have to put all this behind me. Start over. Science fiction perhaps. Or why not feminist horror? Skeletons that walk in the night, the ghosts of Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Brontë that haunt us still today…”

“I did read in the newspaper today,” I interrupted, “that the owner of the farm has decided to put up a marker to Francine himself, and to open the farm up to readings and poetry workshops. Apparently he’s something of an artist himself, in addition to being a stockbroker. He said he never knew that Francine had lived there. So something good came of it.”

Andrea cheered up. “And Putter didn’t look so terribly fabulous in those photographs either.”

We started to laugh, embarrassed at first, and then with gasping and teary amusement, recalling our wet night in the mud.

Then we went out for a walk to look at some of the blue plaques that had gone up recently. For, you see, the remembering and honoring hadn’t stopped.

There were now more blue plaques to women than ever.

It is over a year since I spent the day with you on your lovely island. I remember it all very vividly
…

—Georgia O’Keefe,

letter to her hosts on Maui

F
OR A LONG TIME
I turned up my nose at Hawaii. The very name reeked of junior-high talent shows where pimpled hula dancers tried to keep their cellophane skirts up and their flowery wreaths from falling into their eyes. Luaus with barbecued pigs, tiny paper umbrellas decorating tall, lethally sweet cocktails, muscular tanned youths with surfboards, Waikiki, Gidget, Magnum P.I.—those are the images that came to mind when people said, “You’ve never been to Hawaii? You’ve never been to Hawaii, and you’ve been to Patagonia and the Ivory Coast?”

But that’s the point. We who call ourselves travellers are snobs of the worst kind. We would much prefer to be wildly uncomfortable on the cushionless seats of a bus in Bangladesh or a train traversing the Gobi Desert, moving slowly through some strange desolate landscape and either feeling boiling hot or freezing cold, with nothing to eat, no toilet paper, and nothing to read, surrounded by hostile people who don’t speak our language and perhaps want to convert us to their religion or to steal all our money, than to do anything so
gauche
as to enjoy ourselves in any sort of tropical paradise, particularly if it means that another Westerner, a mere tourist, might be anywhere in sight.

Luisa Montiflores, the gloomy and recondite Uruguayan novelist, was not of the same opinion. She had just spent three “cold like hell” winter months as a writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto and wanted to recuperate on the Hawaiian islands. And she wanted me, as her translator, “my
friend
,” to join her.

Luisa had once been my protégé, but over the years, the situation had reversed itself. I had been a lone voice championing her difficult, deconstructionist novels, sending sample translations of her work to publishers and writing articles that proclaimed her originality. Now I had lost interest in her work, just as academics and the literary elite were discovering her peculiar blend of poetry and self-pity. Although I suspected that hardly a thousand people in the English-speaking world could have read her work, Luisa attracted honors, grants, stipends, symposia, and residencies all over the world.

“All, all I owe to you,” she often said. “I am loyal, you see,” and to prove it she frequently stipulated that a translator’s salary be part of her agreements. From Stockholm to Adelaide we had travelled the globe together, and if it had truly been my goal in life to be Luisa’s literary factotum, I’d have been ecstatic.

We had just been to the University of Hawaii in Honolulu where Luisa gave a seminar talk on the new Latin American fiction, which was, strangely enough, only about her fiction. Now we were in Maui, where Luisa planned to stay a month to put the final touches on her latest novel, and talk to me about translating it. We were staying with Claudie, a friend of Luisa’s who was an art dealer in Lahaina.

“When Gloria de los Angeles goes to give a talk, they do not ask her about
my
work. Why do they ask me about
her
?” Luisa glared at me. “I still do not understand, Cassandra, how you can also translate her. That idiot and her magic realism. I spit on her magic realism.”

“You’re writing for different audiences,” I soothed her. “Believe me, your work and hers cannot even be discussed in the same breath. Do you think the most brilliant minds of Spanish language departments are impressed by her writing? I can tell you, Luisa: they laugh at her. Simply laugh at her and shrug their shoulders. But when they say Luisa Montiflores, they bow their heads in respect.”

We were sitting on a terrace overlooking Claudie’s magnificent garden of ginger, hibiscus, and trailing orchids in the warm, sweet-scented evening. I had managed to keep up my anti-tropical-paradise attitude through this morning’s arrival at the Honolulu airport, with its refrigerated leis and prêt-à-porter pineapples. But by the time the day was over, I was half-converted, and by the time our plane had taken us through an indigo and passion fruit sunset to Maui an hour ago, I was babbling like an idiot. “Just look at that surf! And look, palm trees swaying in the wind!”

Luisa looked slightly mollified; she stroked the white streak in her sleeked-back dark hair. As usual she managed, in her Oxford shirt and loose slacks, to appear both careless about her clothes and impossibly elegant. I attributed it to the good posture she’d acquired at her Swiss boarding school.

“Everyone is reading Gloria de los Angeles,” she said, but with a slight smile now. “Every airport I am in, I see her books. Pah! She is a fool. She is
over-accessible
, a tramp.”

Claudie laughed, “Oh Luisa, always the same worries!” Claudie was wearing a silk print shirt in tangerine and lemon over a pair of crisp white shorts and sandals. Her skin was a warm desert-sand tone—Filipina, I guessed—and her straight black hair swung all in one piece like a curtain. I had just been in St. Petersburg; coming from a bitter winter, my black Levi’s, cowboy boots, and worn bomber jacket felt completely inappropriate for the lush warm breeze. Underneath my beret, my crazed graying hair frizzed out humidly. Like Claudie’s, it was all of a piece, but more a piece of untended topiary than a swaying curtain of black light.

Luisa took a long drink of iced tea and shrugged off poor, pathetic, over-read Gloria. “Claudie,” she said abruptly, remembering something. “Where is your Nell? The last time I was here, you had your Nell.”

Claudie’s smile was almost easy. “Oh, Nell and I have broken up. She goes her way. I go mine.”

“But the gallery?”

“She kept it. I got the house. Some of the artists went with Nell, some with me. I’m hoping to get another storefront.”

“But Claudie, this is not good. What happened? No, I know what happened! Another woman, no? I’m killing her.”

Claudie laughed. “Oh Luisa, you’re always the same. It’s too late. It happened six months ago. One of those things. Believe me, it wasn’t easy for any of the three of us. No one’s to blame. I could have been the one to leave too.”

“That’s different, if
you
leave,” said Luisa firmly. “That’s passion. Otherwise, it’s just betrayal.”

“I’m getting used to being single,” Claudie began, on a positive note, and then the telephone rang and she excused herself.

When she was gone, Luisa announced, “That Nell was no good anyway. You know the type: restless, a toughie, a big mouth, always feeling sorry for herself. You know I can’t stand that. Claudie is my friend from Paris; we went to cinematography school together. She deserves a good woman. Perhaps you’re interested, Cassandra?” Luisa eyed me speculatively. “When are you settling down?”

“When are you?”

“Me? Every day I don’t commit suicide is a miracle.” But Luisa was laughing now. “My writing is my only mistress. When you see what I have written, you will be amazed and astounded. It is the best work I have ever done, no kidding.”

“The most extraordinary thing,” Claudie said, returning with more iced tea and sitting down. “That was a woman on the phone named Donna Hazlitt, calling from the Hana coast, on the other side of the island. I don’t know what to make of it, whether she’s lucid or completely confused. She was talking about a small painting that she said she discovered among her dead husband’s things. He apparently inherited it from his parents. It’s unsigned and seems not to have been quite finished, but Mrs. Hazlitt seems to think it might be an O’Keefe. Mrs. Hazlitt is interested in having it appraised and in selling it. She wants me to handle the sale for her.”

“O’Keefe? You mean
Georgia
O’Keefe?”

“The very same. She came here, you know, in the Thirties, courtesy of Dole Pineapple. They hired her to do two paintings for advertising purposes. They set her up on the Big Island, but when she asked if she could live among the workers on the plantation, the Dole people said absolutely not. She never did end up painting any pineapples for them while she was here. Eventually, in desperation, they air freighted a pineapple to her in New York and she managed to paint it, very unenthusiastically.”