Glorious Boy, page 3
At length he took her hands. “I’ll help you, you know. I mean, as much as I possibly can—what do you think?”
She held very still. “Are you suggesting we take the next step?”
A wave of relief—or, no, it was more like elation—charged his grin. “What’s that thing Americans say?”
“What thing?”
“Like, you’re on.”
“You bet?”
He shook her arms like reins. “You bet.”
Four weeks later they were married in a small, stifling ceremony at home in Connecticut. Her father wept and her mother sat characteristically stiff and dry-eyed, a Yankee stoic through and through. Shep’s sister, Vivian, sent a whimsical topiary elephant and best wishes from Sydney, where she was based as a foreign correspondent. Shep’s parents, from their retirement village in Wales, sent proxy wishes in the form of a funereal tower of gladioli. After all, the bride and groom were bound for a penal colony.
Innocents, the two of them. Naifs willfully twisting omens into romantic curiosities.
Their first night at sea, Shep recited Kipling. They were lying stripped and spent, surprisingly yet deliciously renegade in their abandonment on the SS Ormonde’s upper deck. Lounge chairs like shadow sentinels stood guard against the August torpor, which had followed the ship from shore.
“‘We’ve painted The Islands vermilion,’” he sang, soft and jubilant as Claire traced the Pleiades to reorient herself.
“‘We’ve pearled on half-shares in the Bay,
We’ve shouted on seven-ounce nuggets,
We’ve starved on a Seedeeboy’s pay.
We’ve laughed at the world as we found it—
Its women and cities and men—
From Sayyid Burgash in a tantrum
To the smoke-reddened eyes of Loben.’”
Dawn burnished the eastern horizon. She placed her ear to her new husband’s heart and wondered at the whoosh.
Shep’s geography was pale and angular next to her own softer honeyed flesh, and his exuberance soon yielded to a more studious intimacy. Back in the pink light of their stateroom he’d trace the curve of her jaw, the hollows behind her knees, the moles arrayed in the shape of a mouse just below her left breast.
Claire squirmed under this microscopic mapping. One night she caught his hand. “You touch me like I’m much more valuable than I really am.”
But there was that fraudulent voice again. She felt as if she were trying to walk atop a giant ball. Could she pull it off, should she? Some part of this cavalier act must be true.
Another part was necessary. She lacked the nerve to make her admission without cover of jest. So, she lay back in the swirl of bedclothes, flung an arm above her head, and waggled her hips like a floozy. “Maybe I should have confessed up front, but then I thought, you’re a worldly man.”
Shep grinned too needily. He made the sign of a cross over her unclothed body before touching her hipbones, elbows, ribs. “Semilunar fascia, serratus magnus, brachialus anticus, latissimus dorsi.” The beautiful anatomical terms floated like an incantation of forgiveness.
“You’re not secretly Catholic.”
“Just a reverent doctor.” He would not be rushed. He kissed the hairline scar across her sternum, the bitten cuticles of her right hand. He grazed the cap of short dark hair, each imperfection with his lips, his teeth.
“Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
He sighed and lay back, stared at the ceiling as if at a cinema screen. At length he said, “Back in Shanghai I used to make quite a pest of myself at the apothecary stalls. I’d pretend they were opium dens, and I was king of the devils.”
“You mean, I’ve married a bad boy?”
He grinned. “You sound hopeful!”
“How exactly were you a pest?”
“I wanted to try everything. Ticked off the merchants to no end. They didn’t dare shoo away little white boys—no telling who my father might be. On the other hand, they were bound to catch bloody hell if I got sick from their herbs and potions.”
“What was the attraction?”
“Ah. Those places were everything I was forbidden. Dark and smelly and dank. Native and scary. The ginseng roots looked like shrunken scrotums.”
“That appealed to you, did it?”
“When I was nine,” he said as he stroked her thigh, “I didn’t yet appreciate the importance of healthy testicles.”
She slapped his hand. “Is there a story here?”
“Well. There were these botanical buttons that looked like stars and tasted like licorice. I pinched one and swallowed it as soon as I got home. Turned out, it cured constipation in thirty-four minutes flat. Vivvy timed it. You should have seen my father’s face when I told him.”
“Why on earth did you tell him?”
“More the fool, I thought he’d be interested. He threatened to sack the cook for taking me into the native quarter, and I got the belt, but that only taught me to keep my experiments secret. Lo and behold, other heathen cures worked better than any dose of Father’s Kaputine, Piso’s, or Cheracol.”
She saw, finally. “You won.”
He didn’t answer, but then said, “It’s the work I really want to do when we get to the Andamans, Claire. Those forests are like one great undiscovered apothecary shop. They could well contain the next medicinal miracle.”
“Your very own treasure hunt.” She gave her husband a kiss. “That makes two of us, I guess.”
He raised himself up to look down at her. “Now you.”
“Now me what?”
“Tell me what you should have confessed up front.”
And though she’d rehearsed this a hundred times, still she fumbled for a way in. She pulled the sheet over her nakedness. “My parents. It’s not what you think.”
“What I think . . .”
“I mean, they’re sad to see me leave, and maybe they blame you for taking me away, but it’s not just that. Or, not just you. See, I had a little brother. He died when I was eleven. Drowned in the pond behind our house.”
She’d never spoken of Robin like this. She’d never needed to. Her brother was no longer mentioned at home, and her other suitors had all been intent on pretending that life was a lark. The Depression did that to some people, but maybe not in China. And Shep wasn’t a suitor anymore.
So, before he had time to react, Claire pressed ahead. Robin was eight years old. He wanted to play with her and the girl who’d come home with her after school, but Claire was jealous because this friendship was new and her gawky little brother embarrassed her, so she told him to get out of her room. The pond looked frozen but wasn’t. Robin went out and never came back. Her parents insisted it wasn’t her fault, but she knew better. She and the girl who’d been there that day could not so much as look at each other afterwards.
“For months I couldn’t even face the mirror, much less talk about Robin.” Ten years ago was one hundred twenty-seven months. “I remember he stuck out his tongue as he was leaving. Licorice was his favorite candy. His tongue was black with it.”
Shep didn’t move. “You loved him,” he said. Not an exoneration, but not a question. An offering.
She thought he’d go on about a life without risk not being worth living, about her brother never intending to saddle her with guilt, about the mistake it would be to forever blame herself. The old, useless exhortations, which only her father had ever had the heart to even attempt.
Shep said, “Want to tell me about him?”
The answer that came to her startled her. “Someday.”
He took her hand and cradled it, open-palmed, as he would a bird being willed to fly, and she knew she would forever remember this sensation, the spare architecture of his bones, solid as a bridge. A doctor’s hand, she thought then. Surgical. Confident. She didn’t yet know the truth of him, that his heart was his liability. Back in London, he’d nearly lost a child on the operating table because he couldn’t bring himself to amputate the little girl’s leg when there might yet have been a chance to save it. Five years old, that child was, her family too poor and too brown to justify a specialist, as if she deserved to be a practice case. Shep, only a resident, froze, unable to make the first incision, failing to recognize the sepsis hurtling through his patient’s bloodstream. His chief surgeon had to step in, and this might have ended Shep’s career but for the influence of his father, a Royal Medical Officer. Shep’s “fellowship” in America was a form of exile, his posting to the Andaman Islands no plum but a booby prize that he was struggling to make his own.
Claire knew none of this that night in their stateroom on the Ormonde. Had he told her, matching her confession in order to placate or absolve her, or simply to come clean, would she have judged him weak? Or, would she have resented “his” child’s survival and his own reprieve? Would just that much have broken the spell, or would she have loved him that much more for his ungodly humanity? He was wise not to trust her, not to take that risk. If he truly wanted her.
He did. She could tell that much even then without question, the way he held her, as if she were the lightest being imaginable. This was his true dare.
So she flipped her palm and touched his wrist, the tapestry of blue veins over pale stalks of bone, the weft of fine creases beneath an almost imperceptible nap of fine golden hairs. The pulse beneath the surface, proof of life in his skin. He watched her, waiting.
The nerve, her father had whispered. Another summer, four years earlier.
They were standing in front of Gauguin’s La Orana Maria. Hail Mary. Polynesia, landed in New York City. Claire was in her first year at Barnard then, providing her father with a ready excuse to escape his Depression-soaked law offices in Stamford for the illusory reprieve of Manhattan. The two of them explored museums the way they used to comb the beaches and woods of Connecticut after Robin. For uplift, he would say. Which was a good description of Claire’s response to Gauguin’s sinuous lines, rounded colors, and worshipful gestures, the serenity of the naked boy riding his mother’s shoulder and the quietly mocking reverence of halos on a South Seas Madonna and child. While other museumgoers cleared their throats and muttered about shame, Claire longed to dive into that heat and lust and lose herself.
The painter’s nerve, for her father, involved something else. As a boy, Tyler March would weave baskets out of willow peelings like the Algonquin Indians. Left alone he probably would have become a naturalist. Like Thoreau, or Muir, or, God help me, Mr. Darwin. Instead he became a probate attorney, like his father before him. He used to tell Claire his weakness was his reliance on the helping hand. She never believed him until she saw him in front of that painting, rivers pearling in his sad gray eyes, envy making him hoarse.
She’d heard his longing again in her ear when she repeated the words on her wedding day: I do. But her first view of the Andaman Islands put the lie to her own nerve.
First, a small uninhabitable pincushion of palm trees appeared on the turquoise sea. Then a massive green monolith rose behind it, like a waking dinosaur. The behemoth’s coat of forest green undulated, dense and vast as a creature in its own right—a creature intent on driving the slender white snake of beach back into the ocean. This was North Andaman, the top of the island chain that would terminate for them in the south at Port Blair.
“There’s no one there,” she said, stunned by the confounding shimmer of beauty, humidity and primeval heat that seemed to pulse from shore.
“No see-ums,” Shep quipped, but his heart wasn’t in it, either.
Claire gripped the bulwark, fighting a spasm of nausea. His arm wound like a question mark around her waist. It didn’t help.
Who did they think they were fooling? Both of them, impostors.
Over the next six hours the shoreline remained relentlessly wild. They spotted a couple of isolated coastal villages, but even these looked deserted. Then a distant lighthouse blinked. Atop a bluff beyond, a regimental block of concrete rose, spiked with gleaming antennae.
“There.” Shep looked up from the gazetteer spread-eagled in his palm. Hope and relief cracked his voice as he pointed to the outer bank of Ross Island, their new home.
The hillock stretched like a long green breaker at the entrance to a harbor that abruptly bristled with boats. A mirage is how Claire would record this first impression. A miniature replica of a world she thought she’d left behind. A dark gothic church with a soaring steeple. The semblance of a town square and parade ground. Victorian houses along the ridge, with gabled roofs and wide verandas, pale gingerbread trim. The colonial residents themselves were scarce, but small brown figures in white uniforms appeared and disappeared among the towering shade trees. Their numbers multiplied toward the southern end of the island, where the western architecture yielded to a dark brick scramble of shop houses and the humanity of a bazaar. The Hindu temple on the waterfront resembled a multicolored stack of Life Savers.
The Ross cantonment was the seat of British power for the entire Andaman archipelago, but to reach it, they had first to continue across the harbor to disembark on the “mainland,” where Port Blair proper stretched like a lizard’s claw out of the forest’s interior. There, whitewashed bungalows like those throughout India ranged along the slopes, and high on the lizard’s outmost knuckle stood an imposing fortress with rose-colored crenellations.
“The Cellular Jail,” Shep said.
Claire gazed up at the pink castle walls. Inside—reputedly—the Raj’s most hardened convicts sweltered. By design, the whole port functioned as one vast concentration camp, but since the inmates’ dominant crime was their will to fight for independence, Claire felt far more disgust for their British overlords than she did any fear of the prisoners themselves. The anxiety playing across Shep’s face told her he’d been dreading this reckoning as much as she’d been refusing to think about it. He was now working for those overlords, after all, and she was their subject by marriage.
“It’s strangely picturesque,” she offered. “Maybe things won’t be so bad.”
As if in confirmation, traveler’s palms waved like giant hands welcoming them to Phoenix Bay Jetty, where the mood seemed downright festive. There, Europeans and Indians and everything in between—soldiers, civilians, and pukka sahibs, barefoot Indian and Burmese women wearing scarlet, turquoise, and canary yellow—called to arriving passengers. Children and pye-dogs scuttled around waiting rickshaws. Cries of Jao! and Boy! skittered across the harbor.
Suddenly the deck tipped, the anchor splashed, and Claire’s gaze was thrown down and back toward the stern, where a dozen manacled convicts, who must have made the crossing inside the ship’s bowels, stood waiting for a tender to take them ashore. A single voice had begun to chant, “Inquilab Zindabad! Inquilab Zindabad!” The others took it up. Long live the Revolution!
Claire and Shep had heard this and other nationalist slogans rising in the distance and behind closed gates during their weeklong stop-over in Calcutta, but this one now was chased by the sickening thwack of wood on flesh and bone. The victims screamed as the others fell silent. A rear gangway lowered. The prisoners shuffled onto the bobbing tender, prodded by their armed guards.
Shep took hold of Claire’s elbow. She heard his voice climb. “Steady on, darling. No apologies, no regrets.” It sounded like a plea.
They took a little wooden ferry back to Ross Island and tried to put the prisoners’ cries behind them as they walked to the top of the ridge. There they landed in front of the low red gate to the Civil Surgeon’s bungalow.
Shep flipped the latch, and they stepped through to a vivid green lawn ringed with coconut palms, birds of paradise, flaming heliconia, and orchids of every description. The bungalow itself had freshly whitewashed walls and a wide triangular red tin roof with gables at either end. A deep columned veranda ran the length of the house, overlooking the sea.
It was late in the afternoon. Thick stripes of jade-green ocean laddered to meet the sky. The air had a queer golden vitality, like jazz music made visible.
“We’re home,” Shep said, as if testing the gods.
“We’re home,” Claire answered, taking his hand.
“Welcome to paradise, my love.”
The following morning, about an hour after Shep ventured across the yard to report for duty at the hospital, the servants arrived, shyly peering in the front door. Som was a careworn middle-aged man with a trim salt-and-pepper mustache and slicked-down hair emblazoned by a white streak over one temple. He seemed as reticent as his much younger wife, Jina, was bold, her confident warmth somehow enhanced by her red-stained teeth. Shep had hired the couple sight unseen, on the recommendation of his predecessor, who described them both as island-born and nominal Christians, descended from convicts but not criminals themselves and therefore worthy of trust.
When Claire invited them inside, Som bobbled his head in that Indian way that she’d learned could mean Yes, Good, I understand, I’m pretending to understand, If you wish, If I must, or We shall see. Jina’s broad smile, however, spoke to Claire more directly. She held her muslin sari over her head and whispered to her husband in Urdu, the lingua franca of Port Blair.
Claire liked them for their sweetness toward each other and for their curiosity about her and Shep. It was decided that Jina could manage the house and cooking. Som, whose English was almost nonexistent, would handle gardening and maintenance. They’d live in the two-room servant quarters out behind the kitchen.
Only after all that was settled did Som beckon his daughter from the shadows where she’d been waiting across the yard. His and Jina’s reference had not mentioned a child, but after her initial surprise, Claire found herself enchanted.
Naila was a very petite eight-year-old, with dark eyes almost too large for the delicate face that framed them. As she took in her new memsaab’s wrinkled shorts, the unpacked bags and parlor furnishings of the civil surgeon’s bungalow, she seemed both shy and precocious, amused and critically attentive.
