Chatter, chatter, chatter. And not one of them had the slightest interest in insects.
To top it off, Mr. Hope had torn down all the private cabanas for bathing and had erected the Craftsman-style bathhouse above the holding tanks, where people cavorted together, men and women alike, naked as the Wanqong, without the decency of actually being Wanqong.
“They miss the point entirely, you see,” Bugs said.
He had to admit, though, that the host’s new wife was a charmer.
That she was. Nqong was already in love with her.
———
In the spring, the first few yellow bugs appeared.
Pomeroy and the children were sitting on the veranda with Joel and Clara Hope, having coffee after breakfast, when three lustrous yellow beetles landed on the table where they sat. Mr. Hope folded his napkin into a weapon and was about to swat one of the bugs when Pomeroy stayed his hand.
“Sulfur beetle!” he exclaimed. “Sulfur beetle! Look children, look!”
Nqong held out his hand and a beetle crawled onto it. Auntie Clara clapped her hands in delight, and Nqong and Libby grinned at each other. The old man wept openly, and Mr. Hope, their host, shrugged and stirred his coffee.
———
That same spring Nqong learned to garden. Side by side in dungarees, he and America’s Sweetiepie knelt in the dirt planting petunias and pansies. He whooped and shooed the peacocks away from his flowers and laughed when the yellow bugs circled his head. Auntie Clara and he took a rest and drank lemonade, and when they were finished with that she held his hand and looked into his eyes. She smiled like a soft sunrise, laughed like a gentle rain.
———
Summer came, with dry hot days and nights. Fall with fog and winter with mud, then spring again with sunshine and flowers and beetles, beetles, beetles. Auntie Clara loved the yellow bugs.
The seasons changed again and again. Mr. Hope was kind to them all. He made certain that Pomeroy was comfortable in the carriage house, and he bought Libby sundresses and skirts and sweaters and shoes. She was becoming a little grown-up, eleven years old. He took her to Los Angeles and Santa Barbara and introduced her to restaurants and beauty parlors. She always returned from these outings in a bit of a snit, snapping at Professor Pomeroy, snubbing Nqong, sulking about in the latest fashions.
One day Mr. Hope took Nqong high into the hills and back into the forest and showed him the water house and taught him how all of the machinery worked. “I’m too old to climb this hill every week,” he told the boy. “I think it’s time a young man learned to govern the temperature of our water for the comfort of our guests, and how to keep the valves in working order. I never had a son. You’ll do.”
“I’ll do,” Nqong agreed.
In the garden, Auntie Clara said to Nqong, “I want you to promise to stay here forever, and always take care of this place that I love so much.”
Nqong bowed and said, “I’ll do.”
———
Old Bugs Pomeroy spent more and more time out of doors, in all kinds of weather, looking under rocks and logs, poking around in streams and fields. Libby and Nqong followed after him. Libby was learning everything he knew, and could now supply the names of insects that he was beginning to forget.
Libby did not go with Nqong and Bugs to the water house. It was there that the old man told Nqong how to readjust the temperature and the chemistry of the water daily, keeping it constantly perfect for Coleoptera hydrophilidae mathilda. “This is for men to know,” Bugs said. “You understand that, son?”
“Am I a son?” Nqong asked.
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Are you my father?” Nqong asked.
Old Livingston Pomeroy frowned and shook his head. “No,” he said. “The Wanqong do not have fathers.”
———
One night at dinner, Mr. Hope stopped by their table and sat for a moment. He put his arm about the back of Libby’s chair and cleared his throat. “Mrs. Hope and I have been talking,” he said, “and we’ve decided that the children should stop using the bathhouse. I’m sorry, children, but those are the new rules. Libby, you’re beginning to become a young lady now, and I don’t think it’s proper for you to mix with all these….” He waved his hand at the dining room of chattering tipsy movie stars.
“Why?” Libby asked.
“Because they don’t wear bathing suits,” Mr. Hope explained. “I don’t want you looking at them, and I don’t want them looking at you.”
“Why?”
“Libby, here in America young girls do as they’re told,” Mr. Hope said. “You’ll understand this when you’re older.”
“You’re not my father,” Libby reminded him.
Mr. Hope nodded, his lips pursed. He said, “Perhaps not, but I own the bathhouse, and I make the rules.”
Libby scowled at the host and said, “What about Nqong?”
“Him either, of course. Well, that’s another matter, you see. We all love Nqong, but he’s being trained as a gardener. And he takes care of the water house and so on. The bathhouse is for the guests, not for colored servants. You understand, don’t you, Nqong?”
Nqong understood. He did not much care for the noisy bathhouse anyway. He had already discovered a pool of delicious hot mud high on the mountain, deep in the forest, and he would show that to Libby the next day.
———
In the spring of 1928, Clara Bianca Hope, America’s Sweetiepie and Nqong’s Auntie Clara, announced that she was going to have a baby. Reporters came from all over the country to photograph and interview her. She declared that her film career was finished. She wanted to be a model wife and a perfect mother. She hoped her fans would understand.
With this announcement, other changes began to happen around Hope Springs. Fewer and fewer guests came to stay at the hotel, and they behaved themselves more politely, quietly. Then, as summer turned to fall and Clara Hope turned round and dowdy, Joel Hope announced that the hotel would be open only on weekends. Auntie Clara spent most of her time indoors, in parts of the hotel where Nqong was not allowed.
———
When Joel Hope, Junior, was born in early December, 1928, the hotel was closed for the winter, so that Clara could get a running start on motherhood before returning to the role of hostess. Then, when the hotel reopened, on weekends only, in April, it was open only to invited guests, a few at a time, who never had to pay.
Much of the staff was dismissed. Livingston Pomeroy and the children, now twelve and nine years old, were invited to stay on in the carriage house forever, free of charge.
The old man was delighted. The loud movie stars were gone, and he had the sinecure of his dreams: life in a green, smelly valley populated by yellow bugs. He wrote and published a pamphlet about the discovery of a lifetime, Organism of My Delight.
Libby did not say how she liked life at Hope Springs. She was a quiet, thoughtful child who laughed only with Nqong, and less and less of that. She was changing.
Nqong felt himself changing too. He missed his playmate, and he missed his Auntie Clara. He spent more and more time outdoors, in the wooded hills. He no longer thought in the Wanqong language. But he did not think in the English language either, he realized. He thought like the mud, like the streams, like the steam, like the trees. Like rain and wind and sunlight and shadow. His mind hummed and bubbled, and something inside him yearned.
———
Auntie Clara spent all her time with that little baby. Not at all like the babies Nqong remembered from his boyhood. This one was pale and whiny, needy and angry. The little grub had Auntie Clara to himself all day long. How could he want for more?
“Not now, Nqong, darling. I’m nursing little Joley.”
Even at his mother’s breast, the child was uncontrollable, bucking and bubbling with ungrateful thrusts and cries.
Joel Hope, Senior, was proud and fat. He filled the hotel library with toys for his son. He seldom spoke with Nqong now. Eve
n Libby seemed low on his list.
———
Two years later, on New Year’s Eve, as the Hollywood community was welcoming 1930 in gay parties elsewhere, Joel and Clara Hope had their home to themselves. They finished a fine dinner, saw little Joley off to bed in the care of his nurse, thanked the servants, then donned sweaters and strolled down the chilly path, carrying crystal goblets and a bottle of their best champagne to the warm, steamy bath house. They lit the Japanese lanterns and popped the cork and stripped off their warm clothes. Joel Hope delighted again in the perfection of his wife’s body, her grace as she slipped into the warm water, the angelic sound of her laughter and the love in her widening eyes as she watched his erection grow. His confident, dependable vector of love, pointed only to America’s Sweetiepie, who was still less than half his age. Midnight came, and Joel and Clara Hope celebrated on the slippery tiles by conceiving twins, thus beginning Clara Bianca Hope’s last adventure.
Auntie Clara got big and round again. This time she was cross with everyone, even the demanding little Joley. Nqong knew enough to keep out of her way. There were never any guests. Joel Hope, Senior, was away on business most of the time. Bugs Pomeroy puttered and mumbled, ignoring everyone. Libby, now thirteen, talked to no one; she spent her mornings at her studies and her afternoons in solitary walks.
Nqong was lonely, a ten-year-old with no playmates. He gardened, but nobody looked at the flowers. He maintained the water house, even though no one used the baths anymore. His only passion was the beetles. He took care of them, monitoring the sulfur content and temperature of the stream. There was his purpose, the thing he was meant to do. The beetles were his friends, the only friends he had.
The summer was dry and hot, sleepy and quiet. Dust puffed from his naked black feet when he strolled familiar trails.
In late September, when the yellow bugs had left the sky, Clara Hope went into labor, a labor that lasted two days. Her husband was summoned, and then a doctor, and then two more doctors. People in white scurried up and down the halls of the hotel. Nqong waited on the steps of the veranda for news. No one stopped to tell him anything, but snatches overheard grew worse and worse, until there were tears all around. Clara had given birth to twin girls, Karen and Nellie. In the process, she had lost her life, and Joel Hope had lost his reason to live.
———
America’s Sweetiepie was borne up the mountain the following Sunday and buried in a clearing deep in the forest, on the mountainside above the source of the spring, beneath a shrine that housed a life-sized marble statue of her in a flirty toga. The shrine and the statue had been commissioned by Joel Hope as a wedding present and placed in this spot which Clara herself had selected. Her marble face wore the wide-eyed smile that had made her famous and made her husband fall in love. The smile was now frozen forever, and her sparkling laugh had floated up to join the stars in heaven.
Only a handful of friends and staff attended the burial. Livingston Pomeroy and Libby were there. Nqong was not. He had not been invited by Mr. Hope, and although Libby urged him to come along anyway, he did not choose to join them. Instead, he snuck through the forest and hid in the branches of a tree in the woods on the side of the meadow. He could see them and hear them perfectly and could weep without shame when his Auntie Clara was entrusted to the earth, where in time she would join the healing water of Hope Springs and visit the tiled baths one last time before rushing downhill to the sea.
———
Joel Hope, Senior, shut his hotel for good. He dismissed some of his remaining staff and moved some of them, along with himself and his toddler son and twin infant daughters, to Santa Barbara. Moving vans came and carted things away. The furniture throughout the hotel was draped, including the piano in the lounge.
Mr. Hope dropped by the carriage house while Libby and Nqong were having their lessons. He told Livingston Pomeroy, “I plan to sell this property eventually, but for now you should stay. I’d like you and Libby to move into the Hotel. You’ll be more comfortable there. You can keep the carriage house as your laboratory, but you should take whatever rooms you need in the hotel, except for the master suite on the third floor. I’m leaving you a cook and a maid. I hope you’ll keep an eye on things. I’ll be up now and then, when the children are old enough to enjoy the place, for weekends and holidays. Take care of our little girl, Mr. Pomeroy. She’s getting to be quite the beauty. We should be enrolling her in private boarding school.”
“I won’t go to boarding school,” Libby said. “I already told you that.”
Then what was left of the Hope family—tycoon and toddler, infant twins and a nanny—rolled out the driveway and away downhill in their big black Packard.
———
Over the next two years Nqong endured loneliness as he had never known it before. Born into a tribe of close and social people, he had learned early to do everything surrounded by others: the Wanqong did it all together: they played and slept and ate and shat and told stories and bathed and breathed as a group. Sometimes the men did things only the men did, and they did them all together. Or the women, same way. Or the children, same way, with Nqong right in the middle of them, part of them although always the tallest by far. Nqong’s early years were steeped in society, until that society was blown apart.
After that, all he had left was his playmate and the old man who took care of them both. Three was a smaller group than he had been born into, but it was a group, and Nqong was a part of it. They bathed and ate together, and studied together and took walks and laughed and talked about beetles together.
But now old Bugs Pomeroy was batty. He spent all his days alone in the laboratory. He spent all his evenings in the hotel library, reading and sipping gin.
Libby was not batty, but she was distant and moody. She wanted nothing to do with the old man or with Nqong. She studied and exercised and took long walks to the village, where she learned to be a girl among girls. She had no use for the gangly black boy who had once been her laughing companion.
It was a painful puberty. Nqong never went to the village and he had no friends. He had no family. His Auntie Clara was either in the ground or up in heaven or both, but she was nowhere to be seen. Nqong gardened and cared for the bugs and grew and yearned for friendship and for something to ease the strange urges he felt climbing up his thighs. His legs grew long, his armpits grew hair, his wrists became gnarled, his genitals bloomed, he sweated all the time, and he stank. His voice cracked until he stopped talking for a month and nobody noticed or cared. When he spoke again, he spoke deeply, and so he spoke softly, that no one might notice. No one noticed. He learned to play with his penis and wondered if he should. Season after season, the persistent pressure of newfound pleasures grew stronger and stronger. Sometimes he went to the water house and spent all day discovering horizons of desire and spurting semen into the hot, sulfurous water. Alone in the woods, he howled and listened to the echoes from across the canyon. Whenever he felt the need to weep, he climbed the mountainside to Auntie Clara’s shrine, and weeping by her effigy gave him temporary peace and relief from sorrow.
———
In the spring of 1933, the Hope family started returning to Hope Springs on occasional weekends. The big Packard would roll in on Friday mornings, and out would pile Mr. Hope, Joley Junior, the twin toddlers, and their nursemaid who gave orders to the whole family. Little Joley was four years old, imperious and loud. He began each visit with a screech: “This place smells! I want to go home!”
The little girls were pretty and peppy, leading their nursemaid on chases up and down the halls of the hotel and about the gardens. Having mastered walking and running, they were now learning to talk and shout. They squabbled constantly.
During their visits Nqong spent most of his time in the forest. He was a lonely boy, but he felt even lonelier in company. However, much to his discomfort, he was required to eat dinner with the Hope family on Saturday nights. Joel Hope, Senior, insisted that Libby join the famil
y for dinner, and she in turn insisted that if she should have to be there, so should her father and Nqong. Libby was now fifteen years old, and capable of being civil for two hours at a time. Nqong had just turned thirteen, barely capable of doing anything social without dropping something and making a mess. Old Bugs was silent, smiling, and smashed. Saturday dinners were excruciating.
“Tell me, Libby,” the rich man would ask, “are we keeping up with our studies?”
“Mmmm.”
“Professor Pomeroy, I think it’s time we start looking into private schools for our young lady here.”
“No!”
“Libby….”
“No.”
Mr. Hope sighed and turned to Nqong. “So. How is the water house? Everything in order? Working properly and so on?”
Nqong nodded. Mr. Hope said, “Speak up, boy.”
Joel Hope, Jr. added, “The pollywog stinks.”
———
One Saturday night in late spring, after an especially long, drawn-out dinner during which the twins threw mashed potatoes at each other and Joley whined continually until he found happiness by overturning a bowl of tapioca pudding, Nqong stepped out of the hotel, onto the verandah and gulped the evening air with relief. His shirt was sweaty and he knew he stank, and he was glad to be alone.
“Nqong.”
He was not alone. He turned and saw his lifelong playmate sitting on one of the veranda chairs, her legs crossed, her foot swaying furiously. She stood. She was fully grown now, though not as tall as Nqong. She said, “Let’s take a walk.”
It had been so long since Libby had spoken to him that he did not know how to answer. He shrugged. The two of them went down the steps side by side and walked down the gravel driveway to the gates of Hope Springs, then out along the road toward Tecolote.
Hot Springs Eternal Page 3
