In some of these stories, following seems to be a good thing. In others, not. I could ask my parents or teachers about this, but I don’t.
The following Sunday evening, as usual, my parents drive my older sister and me to the Virgin Isle Hotel. It caps one of the mountaintops like a snow peak. We arrive when the sun, crimson as a hibiscus, sizzles the horizon, sinking below sea for the night. Foam encircles the island like fiery opals, as if you might scorch your feet if you stray from shore. Inside the hotel, blazing with light, we cross the marble lobby to the dining room. As always, we sit next to the dance floor, close to tables where my mates from school sit with their parents, intermingled with tourists. We eat roast beef and baked Alaska. All evening parents sip planter’s punches or grenadine and rum in frosty glasses, rims outlined in rose-colored sugar. Flames of white tapers shiver in winds gently blowing through floor-to-ceiling windows. Panmen on the stage plonk calypso rhythms. Men swirl across the dance floor in white linen dinner jackets trailing the scent of bay rum aftershave, of Bances Aristocratos, dark vuelta cigars. They dance with wives whose sequined gowns sparkle, whose silk guipure skirts whisper, whose Maltese shawls smell of Chanel No. 5.
Vicki, a friend from school, eats dinner with her parents and brother a few tables away. Even from here I notice a small bruise by her left eye. I know her father hits her—though we never speak of it. Here where we live, where we dance, where we eat—isolated atop mountains or behind chevaux-de-frise, high stucco walls strung with tigerwire—we shall be safe. Perfect. In our wealth. In our whiteness. The waiters and waitresses, as well as the panmen, are black.
After dinner, Vicki and I stroll outside to the upper terrace. We stand by the wrought-iron railing. On the lower terrace, the lit swimming pool ripples turquoise. Labelles, fireflies, sparkle like stardust. Pinpricks of light pulse dark mountainsides. Lower, at the base of the mountain, a cruise ship in the harbor, strung with colored bulbs, glitters like bijoux. Lights define Charlotte Amalie, the capital, while lamps in Emancipation Park outline paths among lignum vitae trees. Yes, it is perfect. We are perfect, aren’t we?
How can one small bruise by a girl’s eye mar the visage of a colorful, tropical island?
Only the fields and forests beyond shantytown, where the tramp led me, are dark, pristine, original—not lit by artificial light.
When we first arrived on the island from Washington DC, where my father had worked for the Department of the Interior, a demonstration was organized by islanders who thought my father’s bank was only for his own gain. They believed that if they opened accounts, he would steal their money, like a pirate. The crowd, carrying torches and drums, marched from Market Square to Emancipation Park to burn my father in effigy. For safety, my sister and I were sequestered in Riise’s rum warehouse behind brick-and-stucco walls originally built by Danish colonialists to withstand pirate attacks, fires, and hurricanes. I watched the flames through an iron keyhole. I felt a vibration of drums against my forehead. As the hour grew late I became dizzy with the scent of rum, dizzy with shouts echoing against brick. My senses were dulled from having lived in cool, white-marbled Washington DC. New to the island, I felt bewildered by the pungency of wild fruit, the susurrus of waves, the heat. That night in the warehouse, I felt confused by people as well. I felt trapped, as if I might never escape.
Later, order was restored. The crowd, reassured by my father, dispersed. My sister and I, freed from the warehouse, returned to our home across the street from Blackbeard’s Castle.
Except my mother didn’t want this island to be our home. After the demonstration, she pleaded with my father to leave, take us back to our real home in the States. Although he’d calmly talked to the crowd in order to quiet them, now he yelled at my mother, accusing her of not supporting him, not standing by his side. My sister and I said nothing, but he raged at us as well. My sister turned from him, stalking from the room, followed by my mother, who rushed to the bathroom, crying.
I tried to pass him to escape to my bedroom. He blocked the doorway. Please, I thought, move. He didn’t. He held me. His arms, tight around me, felt more like a throttle than a hug, gripping me, in a way that wasn’t love.
He released me when he heard my mother returning. I rushed to my room and opened the shutters overlooking the verandah. Across the valley rose Synagogue Hill, the synagogue itself invisible from here. Sky and sea merged at night, as though you could walk right off the island toward the horizon. If only you knew how.
Now, as I stand beside Vicki on the hotel terrace, with the island below us, my gaze follows the route the demonstrators marched that night from Market Square to Emancipation Park. I wonder if the tramp marched with them.
“Have you ever seen that man?” I describe him and his triangle.
“Sure,” she says, “the loco-crazy man.”
I turn to look at her. Here on the terrace, in the rippled light reflected from the swimming pool, her face seems paler, the bruise below her eye darker. “But he never bothers anyone, does he?”
Vicki shrugs. “We’re supposed to stay away from him. My father said.”
Once, on a Saturday, Vicki and I went swimming at Magens Bay, instructed by her parents to be back no later than four. But we lost track of time so didn’t return until after five, drowsy with sun, our lips stained from sea grapes. As soon as we reached her house, her father slapped her. I sucked in my breath and, without thinking, said, “Wait.” I stepped back, fearing he might hit me, too, her father angry we’d stayed late on a public beach where someone might hurt us.
The next evening I visit Sylvanita, our cook, who lives in a cabin behind our house, almost hidden among woman’s-tongue trees. She never invites me inside, so I stand on her stoop, asking her about the tramp: Do you know him? Why does he ring the triangle?
She doesn’t answer directly. Instead she explains that, decades ago, some slaves, forced to the island from Africa, fled their masters. They hid in rain forests. Many of their descendants remain, some still wandering these forests, named, by the slaves, the Land of Look Behind. They also renamed themselves Maroons.
She disappears for a moment, telling me to wait. From inside, I smell mango leaves, burning, to discourage mosquitoes. She returns and shows me a freedom paper, once belonging to her ancestor, carefully wrapped in unbleached muslin.
One afternoon I see the movie Limelight, starring Charlie Chaplin, preceded by one of his “Little Tramp” shorts, The Vagabond. Limelight is about a once-famous clown in London, now poor and forgotten, who saves a young ballerina, Thereza, who is about to commit suicide because she suffers hysterical paralysis. She can neither walk nor dance. In The Vagabond Chaplin’s tramp character rescues a young woman who, kidnapped, is mistreated and whipped by her captor.
After I see the movie, I am virtually mute for days. I stay home sick from school. I refuse to eat. I refuse to get out of bed. Only he can soothe me, Chaplin, this tramp, helping young ballerinas dance. He comforts girls who are lost, lonely, confused, paralyzed, trapped. He leads them away from harm, saving them.
I must see Limelight again. I finally leave my house to walk down the mountain to town. But when I reach the theater, the movie is no longer playing. It was scheduled for only one show. But where has it gone? I ask. To St. Croix, I’m told. Another film is advertised on the marquee. I stare at movie posters tacked in glass cases as if I can will Limelight back into being, can conjure Charlie Chaplin to stand here before me. I want to run away with him, follow him, be a tramp with him. At the same time I want to save him from his “trampness” by giving him all that I have. I will draw a rainwater bath for him, sprinkled with bay leaves. I will feed him roast chicken and guava jelly for dinner.
But meshed with this love is loss. In Limelight Chaplin’s character dies. He leaves both Thereza and me behind. She dances alone on the stage. I stand here on the sidewalk outside the theater, unmoving, unsure where to go. This loss is almost too terrible to bear.
Since we first moved to th
e island, I have taken ballet lessons from Madame Caron at the Virgin Isle Hotel. She is the mother of French actress Leslie Caron, star of Gigi. I’ve never seen Leslie Caron in person, but her brother sometimes visits the island. The other girls and I, while practicing pliés and arabesques, watch for him outside the hotel windows. He struts around the swimming pool in a French-cut bathing suit, a Gaulois Disc Blue aslant between his lips. We girls dance as if for him, hoping to be noticed.
Today, however, after seeing Limelight, I don’t watch for him. Nor am I able to chatter with Vicki and my friends as we change into Danskin leotards and pink tutus. I sit on the floor in the dressing room, my Selva ballet slippers in my hands. I mold the rabbit fur into the toes, then slide my feet inside the soft cushions. I crisscross the pink satin ribbons up my ankles and calves.
Once I’m ready to dance, I feel transported to London. The scent of trade winds ebbs as I inhale a cold, damp winter. As all the girls trail down the corridor to the hotel ballroom, I, Thereza, enter the stage of the Empire Theatre. Charlie Chaplin waits for me in the wings. My adult eyes are lined with mascara and kohl, my cheeks and mouth rouged.
The orchestra tunes in the pit.
One night a few months later, my father out of town, I’m awakened by a loud rapping on the shutters. It is Vicki and her mother, who carries Vicki’s younger brother. Vicki and her mother are bruised, their clothes ripped. When her husband fell asleep, Vicki’s mother grabbed all the money in his wallet. They fled here on foot.
My mother settles them in the kitchen, pouring cold sodas. Vicki stares at the fizz of 7-Up in her glass. We have to leave, Vicki’s mother whispers, as if her husband can hear. But she needs more money. She needs clothes for her children. Cold-weather clothes. She worries if she waits for the 8:40 a.m. flight to San Juan, her husband will be awake, looking for her. Now, tonight, she needs a boat to carry them away to Puerto Rico, the first stop on their journey home.
My mother directs my sister and me to the storage closet where our stateside clothes are packed in mothballs. When I pry open the box marked with my name, I’m surprised to see my blue sweater, my yellow-quilted skirt, my winter shoes. It’s as if these clothes have been slumbering but now are startled awake.
My mother snaps open a set of leather luggage, filling it with clothes, shoes, blankets. She empties purses, gathering as much money as she can find. I crack open my piggy bank with a coral rock I once found at the beach. I wrap nickels and pennies, as well as my one silver dollar, into my best lace hankie. I tie the corners in knots. I’m too shy to hand it to Vicki, so I tuck it into a parcel for her to discover later.
We finish packing, and my mother wakes Sylvanita, whose cousin lives on a skiff in the harbor. I’ve never seen my mother so energized, so focused. I wonder if she ever thinks about grabbing her own children and fleeing?
My mother piles us all into the car even though she’s scared to navigate narrow mountain roads, especially at night. She drives about five miles an hour, and I can tell Vicki’s mother wishes she’d hurry, though she says nothing.
We park close to the harbor, by the Grand Hotel. Vicki’s mother carries her son, while the rest of us grab the luggage. Our footsteps are the only sound except for boats knocking the dock in the small swell of waves. When we reach Sylvanita’s cousin’s skiff, she motions us to wait and climbs aboard. We hear her murmuring. Vicki stares out across the sea, her back to the island, her hands tight fists.
Sylvanita calls us to load everything onto the boat, hurry. My mother places all her remaining money in the cousin’s hand.
We stand on shore watching the boat glide across the water into the night.
Goodbye, I think. Goodbye Vicki, goodbye winter shoes, goodbye silver dollar, goodbye lace hankie.
Several weeks later I awake early and slip from the house before my family is up. I walk toward town. Across the island, curds of mist hover mid-mountain, mountaintops floating free of the earth. Clouds of ibises rise like ghosts, winging from trees. Mica glints off the mound of yellow bauxite down by the harbor. In the distance, a pontoon plane passes Hassel Island.
I sit in Emancipation Park, waiting for my ragged savior.
Again, he and I are at the end of the street, the end of pavement, the end of marl alleys that ebb into fields of fever grass. I know this is the place where I should stop, turn around, go back. I don’t. Despite stories I’ve heard, this place seems the opposite of dangerous. Nor do I worry about getting caught. Surely no one sees him, or me. Maybe that glimpse of red—really my French madras shorts—is a scarlet tanager or a flower, some observer might think. I am determined to follow wherever he might lead me.
I walk deep into the forest trailing the tramp in all his clothes, layered, perhaps, to protect him from the wildness of the island. He reminds me of a mampoo tree, which hoards water in its trunk, safe from drought. So maybe the tramp is able to wander long distances without need of refreshment.
We pass remains of stone windmills, once used to grind sugarcane, and chimneys of abandoned sugar mills. Antillean euphonias and indigo buntings dart among leaves. Cerise bougainvillea and blue-white tree orchids tumble, seemingly from the sky. Divi-divi, shaddock, lantana trees shadow the donkey path. The air hums with tree frogs and crac-cracs. Sweat drips down my arms, while sticker weeds catch my bare legs. I don’t care.
One moment I’m following him. The next, the tramp disappears from sight as if he’s a spirit dispersed into mist. I no longer hear his triangle.
Still I continue on until I reach the mangrove swamp. Here, even the path ends. And while I know the swamp is a maze of red, black, and white mangroves—and that if you know how to recognize each you can find your way out—I’m not sure I do. Instead, I sit by the edge, my back in sunlight, my face in shade. I kick off my sandals, pushing my toes into cool, brackish tannin.
One winter night at college in Boston, years later, I attend Charlie Chaplin’s movie City Lights, showing at an art cinema on Exeter Street. In it, the Little Tramp, penniless, tries to save a blind girl. He wants either to earn or steal enough money for an operation, so she can see.
After the movie I sit in the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria with a cup of tea, watching ancient homeless men sip cold coffee, their clothes creased with dirt. Their hands shake. They smell of exile, of the hour just before dawn. . . .
The Caribbean tramp, his feet bare, is here with me as well. I don’t know how he discovered this place first, but clearly he has. He will always be ahead of me, compelling as an oasis mirage that only I can see.
Charlie Chaplin also sits across from me, in his battered hat, his tattered jacket, his oversized shoes, toes pointing in opposite directions.
Back then, I simply had no choice but to love Charlie Chaplin—who was both the promise and the essence of that year—the year of tramps and triangles, tales and movies, ballet and Leslie Caron’s mother, a mountaintop hotel, Vicki fleeing. In the confluence of island isolation and restless movement, I wanted, more than anything, to be the ballerina Charlie Chaplin noticed, the girl he taught to dance, the young girl he saved. Instead, I learned how to walk, not exactly upon water, but beyond, to where I both lead and am led . . . wandering with mystics and seers, seeking—not the meaning of life but the meaning of my life—as I look forward, as I glance back.
The Mercurialist
Evenings, as a little girl, restless and sweaty, I wander across the verandah of our house, past the metal cistern, to visit Sylvanita. Sometimes we sit on her stoop in silence, slapping at mosquitoes. Other times she fetches her vial of mercury, pouring a puddle into my hand. My skin cools, even in West Indies heat. I press a fingertip against the plump, wobbly surface. I swirl it, small dimes segmenting from the quarter coined in my palm. Or maybe it looks like stars shooting off from a galaxy. I twist my wrist. Oblong shapes shiver toward the cracks between my fingers, seeking escape, until they portage back to safe harbor, anchored in my hand.
I return it to the vial.
Sylvanita
grips my hand to study the palm lines where slivers of mercury remain. Her chiromancy itself seems to arise from trade winds, or from the rattle of woman’s-tongue pods, swaying from tree limbs: If mercury trails my life line, I will live to be an ancient woman. If, on another evening, bubbles cling to my love line, I will be rich in romance. I imagine my pockets overflowing with Mercury-head dimes when wealth is promised. All her predictions strike my heart with such vivid lightning and longing that I am drawn again and again to this depthless pool of knowledge.
Other times, maybe the air is too dark, too hot—or maybe too many bat wings flutter spirits from flame trees—but I am reluctant to relinquish the mercury. Its denseness weights me to this island cuffed in foamy lace, while at the same time I feel almost light-headed. The surface of mercury blues as if steeped in the nighttime Caribbean Sea. I dribble it from palm to palm, back and forth, absorbing its properties, as if it seeps beneath the membrane of skin.
“G’won, swallow it,” Sylvanita whispers, as if she reads my mind. She motions her own palm toward her mouth.
I never do, although I can’t imagine the harm in more completely knowing my shimmery, mercurial, otherwise-unknowable future.
Gentle Reader,
I, Your Most Humble Servant, Have Returned! As if from the Dead? Do You, Lundsmen and Goy alike, Wonder Where I, Your Diligent Scribe, Sought Shelter Lo these Many Years as if Time itself Travels forward And back . . . from Pat Boone Concerts in twenty-first-century Michigan to twentieth-century Nights Dark with (un)Holy Mysticism, where I followed a Tramp as if he could be the Savior to Lead me from the Wilderness . . . and where I Studied, as it were, the Powers and Properties of Mercury to Unravel the Mysteries of the Holiest of Grails. Or at least Shape The Future.
Okay, I confess: the jig is up. You suspect, of course, by now, that I’m not exactly a scribe, seventeenth century or otherwise.
Pat Boone Fan Club Page 3
