I looked down at my hands, which were twisted together on my dress of blood orange. I had picked out this dress with great care. I thought it suited my eyes of light brown, my olive complexion, my hair now streaked with Bahamian sunshine. I had wanted to look my best for such an important encounter. How my heart had drummed away as I stood there on the dock, waiting for Thorpe to arrive in his boat.
“I killed my husband,” I said.
He spun around. “What did you say?”
“I killed him myself. Sort of an accident, but not really. We were living in Bakersfield at that point. It was a new town every four or five months, until the bills caught up with us, and now it was Bakersfield, California. I don’t guess you’ve ever been there. Charming spot. Hot and dry. They bring in water in ditches to irrigate the place for farming, for ranching and that kind of thing, olive groves, almonds. Otherwise you could hardly live there.”
Thorpe just stared at me, waiting for the rest of the story. I thought I should hide my face from him, the way he had hidden his from me, but I couldn’t look away. I said, “We met when I was nineteen. Just started my second year at Barnard. There was this party, like I said, and there he was. Somebody’s older brother. Remarkably handsome, I’ll give him that. I thought he was the best-looking fellow I’d ever seen, like he’d just stepped off a cinema screen. This lovely dark hair and this baritone voice. He was twenty-six and had a tremendous vocabulary. I was mesmerized. He fed me a few drinks, strong ones, and talked sweet to me. When I was good and drunk, he took my hand and said, Let’s get out of this dump, and I said, Sure, why not?”
“Oh, Lulu,” Thorpe said sadly.
“Well, I was just a kid. Just a dumb kid looking for something I didn’t understand. I thought I’d just found it, I guess. Thomas Randolph. Tommy, to his pals. He was staying at a cheap hotel on the West Side, because—as I discovered later—he was the black sheep of a very distinguished family, and they’d had enough of him coming into town for a bender and asking for money. Anyway, I followed him to his cheap hotel like a little virgin lamb, bathroom down the hall, and we got to kissing, and the next thing I remembered, I was waking up in his bed at nine o’clock in the morning. Long story short, they kicked me out of college for that. My father was furious. Maybe I was trying to get his attention, I don’t know. It turned out, I got his attention all right. He cut me off, and Tommy said, So let’s elope, two black sheep like us, and I thought that sounded like a really nice adventure.”
My voice started to splinter, so I rose from the crate and went to the picnic basket to find a cigarette. There followed some considerable effort to light the thing, given the trembling in my hands, but eventually I got the job done, sucked in a little blessed smoke, and turned to face Thorpe again, composure restored.
“Where was I?”
“You eloped with the bastard.”
“Yes. Indeed, we did. Ran off to Niagara, as was customary. We fucked ourselves silly for a week or so, to be perfectly frank, had a really swell time. The scenery was spectacular, no doubt about that. And then it all started to crack up. His wicked ways and all that. I mean, the old story. Black and blue in all the wrong places. Drank whatever money came our way. Not for nothing had the Randolphs washed their hands of him, I guess, and now I was stuck with him, because I was too ashamed to crawl home, too broke, and anyway he said he would kill me if I tried.”
Thorpe started to interject, but I waved him off.
“Couple of years passed. Bakersfield. By then, I’d taken to keeping a little twenty-two stashed in the bedside cabinet. Not for him, for me. I figured he was going to give me some disease, he was going to strangle me some night, and I’d decided to put a bullet in my own brain first. One night he’d gone out drinking, probably visiting the local cathouse, who knows. Commotion downstairs at three in the morning. Seemed he’d forgotten his latchkey and was breaking in through a window. Roaring about killing someone. I figured he meant me. I said to myself, Dear me, here’s an intruder, whatever shall I do. Well, I went downstairs and shot him twice in the head, that’s what I did, right in that spot behind your left ear that’s supposed to kill instantly, dropped the gun, screamed for help, and that was that. Libertas.”
I looked around for something in which to knock the ash from the cigarette. My legs shook. Thorpe started forward and crossed the room, right past me, through the swinging door and into the room I supposed to be a kitchen. He came out a few seconds later, holding a saucer, which he set down on the crate next to me.
“Thanks,” I said. “The funny thing was, nobody ever questioned my story. I mean the imaginary intruder who broke the window and shot my husband and ran off. Not the sheriff or the townspeople. Certainly not the Randolphs, goodness no. I mean, you could almost smell the relief on them. They sent somebody to bring the body home, held a decent funeral at the family plot on Long Island. Just a terrible accident, everyone said, shook their heads. I guess they were grateful to me for solving their little problem, although they didn’t say a word to me afterward, not a word, as if I hadn’t existed. One of their lawyers came and offered me money, but I wouldn’t take it. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating. These terrible nightmares. I figured I needed a fresh start, fresh career, fresh place to live. And I went and asked my daddy for a job.”
“Christ in heaven,” said Thorpe. He hadn’t returned to his position at the doors, and instead stood right next to me, leaning against the crate by my side, so that the sleeve of his shirt brushed my elbow.
“Well? Some story, hmm?”
He pulled the cigarette from my fingers and dropped it in the saucer. Pretty saucer, Wedgwood maybe. Somehow I’d missed that part of girlhood in which you learned about china patterns. But this I knew. The blue eyes, the dark gold lashes, the skin like a cat’s tongue beneath my palms.
“Christ in heaven, what a miracle,” he said.
After the tears were dry, we ate our picnic in the dunes, feeding each other morsel by morsel while the sun crossed above us. We were still dressed and decorous at that point, though the air grew hotter and hotter. I think I fell asleep on his shoulder. When I came to, he lay on his back, staring at the sky, one arm cushioning his dear head. The shape of his nose kicked the breath from my lungs. Despite the Atlantic breeze, the sweat trickled from my forehead and my armpits and between my breasts. I rose and nudged off my espadrilles and undid the buttons on my dress.
“I’m going for a swim,” I said.
I’d never swum naked before, certainly not in the warm, salt ocean. I can’t recommend it highly enough. The water whooshed along my skin, the surf played games with me. After a moment or two, Thorpe joined me. I discovered his bare shoulders, his waist, his churning legs, his fingers wandering across my ribs to the small of my back, to the curve of my bottom. Without the spectacles, his freckles sprang from either side of his nose, and I wrapped my legs around his waist so I could gather his face in my palms and kiss each one. We met a wave or two together, holding hands, until we washed up laughing on the beach in a state of nature, Adam and Eve, paradise. I licked the brine from his cheeks and marveled at the absence of panic inside me, at the mysterious way confession draws the poison from its sac, rendering you pure again. I told Thorpe he should get out of the sun before he burned, he didn’t have the right skin for it.
“But you do,” he said.
“My mother’s Italian.” I rose and tugged on his hand. “Come on. Into the shade.”
Into the shade, onto the picnic blanket. A real blanket, by the way, plucked from a closet in the cottage, scratchy but serviceable. We kissed and we kissed, until the heat and the draft swallowed up the last of the ocean from our skin, and then Thorpe sucked the salt from my breasts and stomach and between my legs while I hollered for joy. He settled himself on top of me, lifted himself on his elbows, and kissed me again. For the longest time we rocked together, a dozen lifetimes in which you fell in love over and over again, each time more deeply tha
n the last, more comprehensive in your knowledge of the other. When we finished, we lay together unmoving. It seemed our skin wasn’t meant to part.
Dinner was a pot of beans and a few slices of bacon, fried expertly in an iron skillet, along with tomatoes and new carrots and some greens I didn’t recognize, all grown by Thorpe in a garden he’d constructed himself. I said maybe he was a botanist after all, and he said it was perfectly true, if I came to England he would show me his degrees. Two firsts at Cambridge, he said bashfully, whatever that meant. I wore one of his old shirts and nothing else, because my dress was sweaty and caked with powdery pink-white Bahamas sand. The shirt smelled of Thorpe, of his laundry soap. After we ate, I helped him with the dishes while the sun fell and the stars popped out in the giant purple sky. We made love on the porch, in a wicker chair. Later, again, in his bedroom, atop his narrow bed under the whir of an electric fan, sweaty and indiscreet, the cry of climax like a death groan. By the time Thorpe fell asleep, it was almost midnight. We were twisted in a curiously restful contortion, Thorpe cradling me while his head rested against my belly. I remember feeling his hair in my hands, his beautiful hair, crisp with salt, and the last thing I saw was his milky skin, the bumps of his spine splitting his broad back, his scarred cheek relaxed in slumber.
I can’t say why I woke an hour later. I should have slept like the dead, so sapped as I was, but they do say the brain is subject to certain stimuli that the common senses can’t perceive. Whatever the reason. I startled awake, as I said, and experienced a moment of utter panic. I thought it was the wrong room, the wrong man, that the past two years had been a dream from which I had just emerged, and if it hadn’t been for the moonlight on Thorpe’s rufous hair, blazing with an unnatural saturation of color, he might have found himself as dead as Mr. Randolph. As it was, I slumped back against the pillow and glanced out the window, and that was when I noticed the peculiar orange tinge to the horizon, which had turned Thorpe’s hair such a vivid shade of ginger. I thought it couldn’t be dawn already. Then I realized I was facing south, not east, and I pushed Thorpe’s shoulder.
“Fire,” I gasped.
Thorpe bolted awake, just as I had, and stared at me in the same confusion I had felt, then the same recognition. I pointed to the window. He swore and leapt from the bed.
“Put on some clothes,” he said, running out the door at a terrible limp. “I’ll ring up Government House.”
By the time we reached Nassau, tearing across the harbor in Wenner-Gren’s motorboat, the fire had engulfed part of Bay Street and was crawling up George Street. The air flew with cinder, swirled with smoke. I tasted it on my tongue, inside my nose. I jumped from the boat and helped Thorpe secure it to a piling. He snatched up his cane and hurried with me from the docks across Bay Street, where he grabbed my hand.
“Go home!” he shouted.
I shook my head. “The Red Cross!”
He opened his mouth as if to yell back some objection, then thought better of it and kissed me instead, brief and hard. “If the fire gets close, get the hell out,” he said in my ear. “I’m going to find the fire brigade.”
He released me, and I pulled my shirt—Thorpe’s shirt—over my mouth and nose and plunged through these terrible gray-orange billows, up George Street in the direction of the Red Cross building, where all our hard work lay in stacks and piles at the back of the building, all our supplies, our inventory, our parcels waiting to be sent overseas. I saw the duke’s station wagon outside, parked at a rakish angle, the back door swung open. Out in the street, four men were running a fire hose. They were sopping wet and covered with soot. One of them raised his head, and in shock I recognized the Duke of Windsor himself. I ran up the front steps and through the doorway, smack into Mrs. Gudewill, white-faced, carrying a bundle of wool blankets.
“Mrs. Randolph! Quick, we’re loading the car! She’s in back.”
By she, Mrs. Gudewill meant Wallis, of course. I raced down the hall to the back room, our warehouse, and there she was, giving out crisp orders to Miss Drewes and a couple of other ladies, stacking things in boxes, stacking boxes on each other. You might not have recognized her. She wore no cosmetics, no coiffure. Her thin lips were invisible against her skin. Her hair was in a net. Her dressing gown was belted around her waist. Only her familiar brown-and-white spectator shoes gave her away.
She gave my rumpled appearance not the slightest notice. She spoke with primeval calm. “Mrs. Randolph, thank goodness. Could you be a dear and carry these to the car? How far has it spread?”
“Halfway up George Street.” I snatched one of the larger boxes and carried it back down the hall, out the door, down the steps to the station wagon outside. The crowd was growing, looking in dismay at the advance of the fire, which had begun to lick around the side of the Charlotte Hotel, next to Christ Church Cathedral, standing opposite the Red Cross. I tossed the box in the back of the station wagon and paused for an instant, staring up the rest of George Street to Government House on its hill, the end of the line. The breeze seemed to be picking up, thick with smoke, unless that was the draft of the fire itself. Someone came up to me with another box, and I recognized Miss Drewes, wearing a pair of striped pajamas.
“Where are we taking all this?” I asked.
“To the ballroom. Come along, quick.”
Back we went, into the building, while the fire crept closer and the shouts of the fire brigade rang through the smoke. When we emerged, the duke and his men had set up the fire hose and begun to soak the brick walls of the Red Cross with it. I recognized Oakes among them, his rough face smudged with soot, and I remembered the building belonged to him, that he had loaned it to the Red Cross for the duration of the war. Back and forth, stacks of blankets, boxes of packages bound for London. Where was Thorpe? Back and forth, until my arms ached, and I could hardly breathe because the smoke scorched my throat and my lungs at every pulse. Across the street, the Charlotte Hotel was now fully engulfed, flames shooting from the roof, cinders flying. The station wagon was full, and another car brought down from Government House. I heard a groan, looked to the roof, and saw a curl of smoke rising from the right-hand side. I dashed back up the steps.
“Everyone out!” I shouted. “Everyone out! There’s smoke on the roof!”
Out came the duchess from the back, carrying a small crate, followed by Miss Drewes with another crate.
“Anyone else back there?”
“It’s all clear,” said the duchess, in her calm voice. “And this is the last of the supplies. Miss Drewes, will you drive the Morris? I’ll take the station wagon.”
At the door, a frantic Duke of Windsor met us. He snatched the crate from his wife’s arms and cried, Thank God.
“David. Good gracious.” The duchess squinted at the scene outside. “Is that Marshall on top of the cathedral?”
We turned and followed her gaze, up and up to the peaked roof of the cathedral, where a large man stood near the spire, silhouetted in orange.
“Yes,” said the duke. “God bless him. He’s testing the structure. If the wind doesn’t hold, we’ve got to dynamite the place, I’m afraid.”
“Dynamite!”
“Darling, it’s got to be done. It’s the only chance to stop the thing from spreading all the way up the damned hill!”
At that instant, just over the duke’s last few words—the damned hill—a low boom shook the ground. I realized I’d heard it before, the last time I went outside, except I hadn’t paid attention, I’d assumed it was part of the general noise of the fire’s destruction. Now I listened. There was a loud crack, and the sound of crumbling, breaking.
An expression of shock transformed the duchess’s face. I don’t think she had considered this, that the fire might reach all the way to Government House, to her own home, where the carloads of Red Cross supplies were right now being unloaded into the ballroom. She turned back to the cathedral roof and put her hand to her brow, as if shielding her eyes from a terrible sun. I looked too, and sa
w a curious thing: the large metal cross at the very front of the cathedral, atop the peak, silhouetted against the glow of flames, in such a way that the fire seemed to come from within the cross itself.
“Oh, it’s going to be all right,” someone said. I turned to my left and saw Miss Drewes, staring at the cross as I had. Her face glowed in the light. I would almost have said she looked beatific, except that glow was only a reflection, wasn’t it? A reflection of the fire itself.
I grabbed her elbow. “Not if you don’t beat it up the hill this second. Go. Get in the car.”
She got in the Morris, and the duchess in the station wagon. The duke kissed his wife through the open window and waved the chauffeur away. When he turned and saw me, he started.
“Why, aren’t you going too, Mrs. Randolph?”
I shook my head and opened my mouth to ask what I could do, where I could go, when a noise came from behind me, like an animal roaring. I spun around and saw flames shooting from the doorway of the Red Cross building, where I had spent so many hours, chatted with so many matrons, elicited so many morsels, banal and fascinating.
Now there were some who said that a shower of rain intervened just as the Red Cross Center dissolved in flames, saving the cathedral, saving the rest of Nassau. I don’t remember that. In the spray of water from the hoses, in the general running about, the bang and crumble of buildings under dynamite, one by one, and most of all the gnawing panic over Thorpe—where was he, where had he gone—I didn’t notice the weather. I noticed how, in the first hint of dawn, the whole world seemed to smolder and steam, and yet the cathedral still stood, the cross reached up to heaven against a charcoal horizon. And the flames were gone.
The Golden Hour Page 29
