Glorious Boy, page 17
“Shep told me once,” Claire looks at Vivian as she says this, “that your father used to take you all up to the roof of the Peace Hotel to watch the Chinese armies fight it out in Shanghai. He said your parents never even recognized the irony. They’d sip gin and tonics and watch as if the war were a football match, except the losers got shot.” They made me ashamed to be British, Shep would say, and even more ashamed of my father. He couldn’t comprehend how a man who called himself a doctor could be so callously indifferent to human suffering.
Vivian gets up without answering and pushes back the curtains. The room floods with turmeric light and the tinny oompah of a wedding band. A flock of pigeons careens through the sky, drawing circles over the rooftops before pulling south toward the sea.
“No,” Claire agrees with Roger. “Nothing about this makes sense.”
An hour later, it makes even less. Ward, it turns out, is related to Roger, a cousin of some sort, and though he was raised in the Punjab and never set foot in Shanghai, he seems inclined to milk the familial connection. Roger gives no sign of resistance. If anything, he invites Ward’s full-throated support for their “retaining” Shep’s note as “intelligence.”
Roger, of all people. Claire quits them both in hurt and disgust.
Vivian, having held her tongue during this final dispute, follows Claire outside and points her toward the Grand. “Let’s go have a drink.”
The hotel today bears little resemblance to the sumptuous palace of five years ago. The elegant salon where she and Shep and Roger first dined together has become a mess hall, the bar a canteen, brimming with soldiers from every part of the Allied world. The marble floors and high ceilings still make the Grand’s lobby the coolest room in Calcutta, though, and the beer and gin flow harder than ever. The two women arm themselves with one of each.
“Roger’s signed the same secrecy oath you have,” Vivian says. “I don’t know how long he’s had possession of Shep’s note or why he won’t turn it over to us now, but here are my suspicions. That one line of Latin suggests that Shep was afraid of the note falling into enemy hands. And that makes the message more than private correspondence—at least as far as the War Department’s concerned. Do you have any idea what he was trying to tell you? If we can prove it has no bearing on the war, they’ll release it.”
“We?”
Vivian takes her hand. “Roger may be compromised, but I’m not.”
Claire stares at their locked fingers. “I feel like I’m fighting shadows.”
Vivian gives her a squeeze and leans back, seeking the current from the nearest ceiling fan. At length she says, “Tell me about Ty.”
The question catches Claire off guard. “Denis Ward doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“Of course, he doesn’t. If Shep said he has Ty, then he has him. But sometimes if you talk about people, it brings them closer. Besides, he’s my only nephew and I still know next to nothing about him.”
Claire pulls a glass ashtray from the center of the table and stares through it as through a camera lens. “He’s beautiful. Wiry like Shep, but with hair as curly and dark as my father’s when he was young. Black Irish, Dad said they used to call him. But Dad had brown eyes, and Ty’s are this deep mossy green. He has the longest feathery lashes. I used to love to hold him so close I could feel them fluttering against my throat.” She looks up as someone begins to play “Clair de Lune” on the piano in the far corner. “He has perfect pitch.”
“He sounds perfect all over.”
Claire sips her gin and tonic. “Not exactly.”
Vivian waits.
“If he were perfect—or if I were more so—we’d all be together now.”
“Claire—” Viv starts to protest, but Claire cuts her off.
“Ty didn’t talk. At least, not in words. And not to me.” She describes her son’s obsessions, with plants and water and light and music—humming in perfect pitch but never singing, his tantrums and remarkable memory. “I could see what he loved. Sometimes I felt as if I could see his brain working. Shep said the same thing. But around the time Ty should have started talking, something went wrong. I can’t explain it—” Her voice cracks. “The girl who looked after him, though. She understood him as I never could seem to.”
Two pie-faced lieutenants across the lobby begin to sing, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” As Vivian waits for them to subside, she seems to be measuring her thoughts.
Finally, she says, “I was four years old before I uttered my first word, Claire. Shep wasn’t nearly that late, but when he still wasn’t speaking at two, I remember Father dismissing us both as ‘retarded.’ Shep could not, however, hold a candle to my earliest tantrums.” She grins. “Sounds like your boy’s a chip off the old block.”
Claire shuts her eyes to stop the sudden waffling motion that comes over her. This must be how car crash survivors feel when presented with evidence that they could have prevented their family’s death if they’d just consulted the right mechanic.
She can’t have heard right. “Shep never so much as hinted that Ty’s condition might be inherited. As far as I could tell, it mystified him.”
Vivian sighs. “It would have. Remember, I’m nearly four years older. By the time Shep was three, we both were talking just fine. And in any case, we were raised to be neither seen nor heard, so other than that crack about retardation, the issue was never mentioned. In our family, admitting flaws or weakness was almost as inexcusable as expressing love.”
That abyss between Shep and his parents. Was it conceivable that Shep himself—?
“You know who else was a late talker?”
Claire looks at her.
“Einstein!”
“Einstein. Vivian, if Ty could talk, he and Shep would be here now.”
“How?”
She shakes her head. How can she explain the role that silence played in Ty’s devotion to Naila? How can she even be sure that she would have acted differently that last morning if she had a normal bond with her son?
She would have. She would have prized him above all else. Above her work, those damned artifacts. Above even the Biya themselves. If she had a normal bond with her son, maybe she wouldn’t have tried to shift her affections to her subjects in the first place.
“I don’t mean to be insensitive,” Viv says. “But maybe Ty is less helpless, more resilient than he seems.”
“Ty is four years old.”
“I know.” Vivian bites her lip. “I know that.”
Claire stares at the fans circling overhead. “How do you know? About Einstein.”
They fortify themselves with another round of drinks, and Vivian explains that she was once assigned to write about Einstein’s midlife travels in the Far East. “I knew next to nothing about the man, so I read everything I could get my hands on, including some fascinating descriptions of him as a young child that made me feel as if I were reading about myself: easily bored by the demands of others, perceived as rude and incorrigible, obsessively interested in mysteries that no one else seemed to notice, willfully stubborn and self-contained and frequently written off as stupid. He nearly brained his sister with a bowling ball during one tantrum, and he didn’t say his first words until he was three.”
“But Einstein’s a genius, Viv.”
“Everyone says so now, but his parents and teachers never thought so, any more than mine did. I’m not saying I’m in Einstein’s league!” She snorts at the thought. “But I could read and play the piano before I uttered my first word, and I do recall that when I finally started talking, it seemed rather pointless, since no one was interested in the things I wanted to talk about. That was Einstein’s burden, of course, to the nth degree!”
“But what explains it?”
“I couldn’t find a medical reason. However, I did find a number of other childhood mutes who also turned out all right. The pianists Clara Schumann and Arthur Rubinstein—”
“You dug all this up and never told Shep?”
Viv rolls her bottle of Lion Ale between her palms. “I’m sure I meant to send him the article, but then, Shep never mentioned any concern about his glorious boy. This is the first I’ve thought of Einstein in years.”
She looks up. “I’m so sorry, Claire. It might have spared you needless heartache. At least offered a possible explanation.”
The singing lieutenants break into a jig. A chip off the old block, Claire thinks. Different, but normal. Maybe even better than normal. She wants to get up and scream at those stupid soldiers. Whether or not she dares to believe Vivian’s theory is irrelevant now. Needless heartache? Her four-year-old son and her husband are prisoners of war—or worse. Could any of this foreknowledge possibly have changed their fate?
“I can’t go backwards,” Claire says, staring at their rowdy neighbors but no longer hearing them. The words feel like gravel in her mouth. “I can’t change what’s past. I have to concentrate on what’s possible now.” She turns back to Viv. “How could Denis have escaped and left Shep and Ty behind?”
Vivian leans back in her chair and for a moment the breath seems to go out of her. The singers retreat to the bar, and the stillness that replaces them settles like a pall.
“I don’t know,” Vivian says in a lowered voice. “But I think there’s more to it than either he or Roger are letting on.”
“Why they kept Shep’s note?” At Viv’s nod, Claire slides closer.
Vivian drops her voice to a whisper. “While we were waiting for you and Denis to arrive today, Roger told me that Ward spent his last few months in the Andamans scouting landing sites, elevations, tributaries. And cultivating informants.”
“Landing sites?”
“It’s pure speculation, of course.”
“You’re not suggesting that Denis Ward himself—”
Viv shushes her. “God knows how long it would take to mount a mission like this, but I’m told that Special Operations has a training camp for commandos in Ceylon. There are rumors of a reconnaissance team heading for Sumatra . . .”
Claire’s head is pounding with the magnitude of Vivian’s suggestion, but she picks up the thread. “And the Andamans are so much closer.”
Naila stands by herself at the front of the ledge and looks out as far as she can see. Morning mist roils over the forest to the southwest, but Port Blair is too distant to locate even on the clearest day. She’s cut off from any terrain that’s familiar.
Because they’ve arrived before the rains, they are sleeping in the open for their first few nights in Buruin, but the Biya are building a shelter they call the round house. The women weave thatch, and the men cut lengths of cane and saplings for the frame. Naila, Artam, and Ty twist vines into rope. During the monsoon, Leyo has explained, the round house will be strong enough to withstand the heaviest rains. Everyone will sleep inside it together. “I like this.”
Naila knows he means that he likes it better than living in the bachelor house that he and Tika shared in Behalla. He likes having everyone close to him.
She is not so sure. She fears waking in the night to find that Ty has gone to sleep with Artam and her parents, and the boy’s desertion seems a greater danger with everyone under one roof.
But Ty has eagerly joined in the construction. Behind her even now he sits, screwing his mouth in concentration as that boy Tika teaches him to lash the crossbeams with rope, to fasten the mats to their upright poles. Building for Ty Babu is like a puzzle, and he quickly masters the basics.
Away from Port Blair, Ty seems less of a baby, more of a little man, with newly muscled limbs and a new set to his jaw—a look of determination that resembles both Doctor Shep and Mem. He has always been stubborn, fixed in his attentions, but now he’ll pat her hand like a condescending uncle and double stomp his foot for Leyo to come and show him the special knot that secures the pandan walls. Even that foot stomping is a gesture that Leyo has taught him, part of the full moon dance that preceded their trek north. Soon he won’t need her at all.
Leyo moves toward her. “Look,” he says, and turns her to face the round house.
The half-finished structure abuts the rock overhang, tall enough for the Biya to stretch their arms overhead inside. It looks not round but like some fancy bird with all its flaps and wings of matting.
“So small,” Leyo says. “Every monsoon, this house grows smaller.”
Not so long ago, he says, the camp held twenty or thirty people. In his grandfather’s time, each couple had several children. “Then the British are coming, and the children begin to die.”
He tells her that Kuli’s father, named John by the British, was held for some years as a boy in the Andaman Home on Ross Island, and there he learned English and Hindi and the story of Jesus Christ. He learned to operate a camera and pilot small ships. He also saw the guards and foreign seamen give his people alcohol and paan and force the girls and women in the Home to lie with them.
“To lie with them?” Naila asks. She knows from Leyo’s serious face that this business is bad, but the words sound no worse than her own parents lying together, as they used to when they thought she was asleep, murmuring and nuzzling each other in the dark.
Leyo says, “The men were sick, and they pushed this sickness inside the girls.” After watching the girls develop fevers and sores, after their babies began to die, Kuli’s father decided that the firenghi were full of disease, and he ran back to his tribe and warned everyone to stay far from Port Blair. Those who ignored him continued to die. Then there were not enough boys and girls to form families, and the sickness spread to other tribes.
“What happened to your mother and father?” Naila doesn’t want to hear any more about sickness or bad men. She is suddenly ashamed that she never before thought to ask about Leyo’s parents. Not even after she lost her own.
He takes her hand and squats, pulling her beside him. “We were fishing. I was small, like Ty Babu. A big boat came and there was a loud noise, then my father was in the water, my mother also. A white man used a long hook to pull me to his boat. He wore a black dress, white hat. Later I knew he was a priest. He took me to mission school. I tried to run away, but where to go? This school was far from my people. I stayed with that priest a long time.”
“Your parents?”
He pushes his palm through the air. “One day, policemen came to school. They liked that I speak English, so I go to Port Blair, different school. And some Biya boys there I knew. This time we escape, one boy knows the way.” He smiles. “I think my mother and father will be here, but no one has seen them since the day I disappear.”
“But you didn’t disappear.”
He pulls a blade of grass from a crack at his feet and twists it between his fingers. “Kuli already was chief, Porubi already his eyes and ears in Aberdeen. Mam Golat say she is my auntie. I did not remember her or the others, but she want me to stay. Only Kuli said I must do as Porubi, but on Ross Island where the British officials live. So, I return, and the British make me chowkidar.”
“You were spying on Mem and Doctor Shep?”
He shrugs. “Only at first.”
His expression brightens. “Then I was spying on you!”
She rocks back on her heels, too stunned to react, but Leyo can’t contain himself. The laughter rolls out of him. He falls onto his side and stretches his legs, tears drenching his cheeks. She can’t tell if he is happy, or crazy.
She remembers being small and having the uncomfortable feeling that Leyo was watching her with thoughts she could not make sense of. She remembers two boys coming up to her at school one day after she rode the ferry across from Ross Island in Leyo’s company. You like them naked and black, do you?
She stands up quickly and leaves him to his laughter.
“Trouble,” Baird says.
They’re sitting across from each other in the Assistant Commissioner’s former bedroom, which the two of them now share. It’s preferable to waking, as each has done, to find one or another of the guards hovering above them in the dark. The reason for these nocturnal inspections remains a mystery. Baird guesses the men are just satisfying their curiosity, but the visits do cease after they move in together. Privacy, under the circumstances, assumes a negative dimension. Now they rarely leave this room except for tenko morning and night and their daily ration of rice and tea. Their sole diversion is the Andaman Shumbun, the local paper turned Japanese propaganda sheet, which is delivered as an irritant. The major reads it cover to cover.
Shep has been staring at the front page. Today is April 15, 1942. A prominent photograph of His Excellency Emperor of Japan announces Hirohito’s approaching birthday.
He looks up. “What is it?”
Baird stabs at a lesser article. “This fellow, Dipak Patel. They’ve given him a bloody medal and made him Chief Naval Intelligence Officer.” He shakes his head, and Shep sees the weight of exhaustion beneath the gray eyes, the strain around Baird’s mouth.
“I don’t think I know him.”
“You’re lucky.” Patel, Baird explains, managed a cinema hall in Bengal before he was convicted of murder and sent to the Cellular Jail in the early twenties. After a few years, he talked himself out on work release, married one of the female convicts and had a son. Later Baird made the mistake of employing him as a groundsman at his house in Rangachang. “A couple of years ago we caught him thieving, and it turned out he was smuggling knives and razors to his cronies in the prison. I testified against him. He’s a snake, that one, but a snake with a silver tongue. Just Buco’s type.”
“Baird.”
He looks up, and Shep notices a crack whiskering across one of his lenses.
“What were you doing down the hall this morning?”
Shep had awakened before dawn to find himself alone. There wasn’t a sound downstairs, and for one blinding moment he thought Baird had made a run for it. When he went out to investigate, he noticed the rear bedroom door, which normally hung open a crack, was shut tight. He didn’t dare open it, then didn’t dare ask the question, but couldn’t leave it alone.
