The boy winked at her. “Queen Esther from Spanish Man, Santa Marianne, Bee-Double-You-Eye. But I really think it should be Spanish Main, Queen Esther.” He put his head seriously to one side. “That’s what they used to call the Caribbean Sea, you know.”
And he fixed with his brooding, ugly little face her retreating back as she went down to the cellar to hang her coat and change her shoes.
“The sea surround we on three sides at Spanish Man,” she said, returning.
“You should say, ‘surrounds us,’ Queen Esther… You have a very funny accent, and you aren’t very pretty.”
Looking up from her preparations for the second breakfast, she smiled. “True for you, me lad.”
“But then, neither am I. I look like my father. I’m his brother, not hers, you know. Do you go swimming much when you live at home, Queen Esther?”
She put up a fresh pot of coffee to drip and plugged in the toaster and set some butter to brown as she beat the eggs; and she told him of how they swim at Spanish Man on Santa Marianna, surrounded on three sides by the sea. It was the least of the Lesser Antilles… She lived only part of her life in the land she worked in, the rest of the time—in fact, often at the same time—she heard, in the silence and cold of the mainland days and nights, the white surf beating on the white sands and the scuttling of the crabs beneath the breadfruit trees.
“I thought I would come down before you carried that heavy tray all the way upstairs,” said the mistress, rubbing her troubled puffy eyes. Her name was Mrs. Eleanor Raidy—she was the master’s wife—and her hair was teased up in curlers. She sat down with a grunt, sipped coffee, sighed. “What would I ever do without you?”
She surveyed the breakfast-in-progress. “I hope I’ll be able to eat. And to retain. Some mornings …” she said darkly. Her eyes made the rounds once more. “There’s no pineapple, I suppose?” she asked faintly. “Grated, with just a little powdered sugar? Don’t go to any extra trouble,” she added, as Queen Esther opened the icebox. “Rodney. Rodney? Why do I have to shout and—”
“Yes, El. What?”
“In that tone of voice? If it were for my pleasure, I’d say, Nothing. But I see your brother doesn’t care if you eat or not. Half a bowl of—”
“I’m finished.”
“You are not finished. Finish now.”
“I’ll be late, El. They’re waiting for me.”
“Then they’ll wait. Rush out of here with an empty stomach and then fill up on some rubbish? No. Finish the cereal.”
“But it’s cold.”
“Who let it get cold? I’m not too sure at all I ought to let you go. This Harvey is older than you and he pals around with girls older than he is. Or maybe they just fix themselves up to look—eat. Did you hear what I say? Eat. Most disgusting sight I ever saw, lipstick, and the clothes? Don’t let me catch you near them. They’ll probably be rotten with disease in a few years.” Silently, Queen Esther grated pineapple. “I don’t like the idea of your going down to the Museum without adult supervision. Who knows what can happen? Last week a boy your age was crushed to death by a truck. Did you have a—look at me, young man, when I’m talking to you—did you have a movement?”
“Yes.”
“Ugh. If looks could kill. I don’t believe you. Go upstairs and—RodNEY!”
But Rodney had burst into tears and threw down his spoon and rushed from the room. Even as Mrs. Raidy, her mouth open with Shock, tried to catch the maid’s eye, he slammed the door behind him and ran down the front steps.
The morning was proceeding as usual.
“And his brother leaves it all to me,” Mrs. Raidy said, pursuing a piece of pineapple with her tongue. She breathed heavily. “I have you to thank, in part, I may as well say since we are on the subject, for the fact that he wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. I warned you. Didn’t I warn you?”
Queen Esther demurred, said she had never spoken of it to the young master since that one time of the warning.
“One time was enough. What was that word? That name? From the superstitious story you were telling him when I interrupted. Guppy?”
“Duppy, mistress.” It was simply a tale from the old slave days, Queen Esther reflected. A cruel Creole lady who went to the fields one night to meet she lover, and met a duppy instead. The slaves all heard, but were affrighted to go out; and to this day the pile of stones near Petty Morne is called The Grave of Mistress-Serve-She-Well. Mistress Raidy had suddenly appeared at the door, as Queen Esther finished the tale, startling Master Rodney.
“Why do you tell the child such stories?” she had demanded, very angry. “See, he’s scared to death.”
“You scared me, El, sneaking up like that.”
Queen Esther hastened to try to distract them.
“‘Tis only a fancy of the old people. Me never fear no duppy—”
But she was not allowed to finish. The angry words scalded her. And she knew it was the end of any likelihood (never great) that she might be allowed to move her things into the little attic room, and save the hours of journeying through the cutting, searing cold.
Said the mistress, now, “Even the sound of it is stupid… He didn’t eat much breakfast.” She glanced casually out the window at the frost-white ground. “You noticed that, I suppose.”
Over the sound of the running water Queen Esther said, Yes. She added detergent to the water. He never did eat much breakfast—but she didn’t say this out.
“No idea why, I suppose? No? Nobody’s been feeding him anything—that you know of? No spicy West Indian messes, no chicken and rice with bay leaves? Yes, yes, I know, not since that one time. All right. A word to the wise is sufficient.” Mrs. Raidy arose. A grimace passed over her face. “Another day. And everything is left to me. Every single thing… Don’t take all morning with those few dishes.”
Chicken and rice, with bay leaves and peppercorns. Queen Esther, thinking about it now, relished the thought. Savory, yes. Old woman in the next yard at home in Spanish Man, her cook it in an iron caldron. Gran’dame Hephsibah, who had been born a slave and still said “wittles” and “vhiskey”… Very sage woman. But, now, what was wrong with chicken and rice? The boy made a good meal of it, too, before he sister-in-law had come back, unexpected and early. Then shouts and tears and then a dash to the bathroom. “You’ve made him sick with your nasty rubbish!” But, for true, it wasn’t so.
Queen Esther was preparing to vacuum the rug on the second floor when the mistress appeared at the door of the room. She dabbed at her eyes. “You know, I’m not a religious person,” she observed, “but I was just thinking: It’s a blessing the Good Lord didn’t see fit to give me a child. You know why? Because I would’ve thrown away my life on it just as I’m throwing it away on my father-in-law’s child. Can you imagine such a thing? A man fifty-two years old, a widower, suddenly gets it into his head to take a wife half his age—” She rattled away, winding up, “And so now they’re both dead, and who has to put up with the results of his being a nasty old goat? No… Look. See what your fine young gentleman had hidden under the cushion of his bedroom chair.”
And she rifled the pages of a magazine. Queen Esther suppressed a smile. It was only natural, she wanted to say. Young gentlemen liked young ladies. Even up in this cold and frozen land—true, the boy was young. That’s why it was natural he only looked—and only at pictures.
“Oh, there’s very little gets past me, I can assure you. Wait. When he gets back. Museum trips. Dirty pictures. Friends from who knows where. No more!”
Queen Esther finished the hall rugs, dusted, started to go in to vacuum the guest room. Mrs. Raidy, she half observed in the mirror, was going downstairs. Just as the mistress passed out of sight, she threw a glance upward. Queen Esther only barely caught it. She frowned. A moment later a faint jar shook the boards beneath her feet. The cellar door. Bad on its hinges. Queen Esther started the vacuum cleaner; a sudden thought made her straighten up, reach for the switch. For a moment sh
e stood without moving. Then she propped the cleaner, still buzzing, in a corner, and flitted down the steps.
There was, off the kitchen, a large broom closet, with a crack in the wall. Queen Esther peered through the crack. Diagonally below in the cellar was an old victrola and on it the maid had draped her coat and overcoat and scarf; next to it were street shoes, not much less broken than the ones she wore around the house.
Mistress Raidy stood next to the gramophone, her head lifted, listening. The hum of the vacuum cleaner filtered through the house. With a quick nod of her head, tight-lipped in concentration, the mistress began going through the pockets of the worn garments. With little grunts of pleasurable vexation she pulled out a half-pint bottle of fortified wine, some pieces of cassava cake. “That’s all we need. A drunken maid. Mice. Roaches. Oh, yes.” A smudged hektographed postal card announcing the Grand Annual Festivity of the St. Kitts and Nevis Wesleyan Benevolent Union, a tattered copy of Lucky Tiger Dream Book, a worn envelope …
Here she paused to dislodge a cornerless photograph of Queen Esther’s brother Samuel in his coffin and to comment, “As handsome as his sister.” There were receipts for international postal orders to Samuel’s daughter Ada—“Send my money to foreign countries.” A change purse with little enough in it, and a flat cigarette tin. This she picked at with nervous fingers, chipping a nail. Clicking her tongue, she got it open, found, with loathing large upon her face—
—a tiny dried frog—a frog?—a—surely not!—
“Oh!” she said, in a thin, jerky, disgusted voice. “Uh. Uh!” She threw the tin away from her, but the thing was bound with a scarlet thread and this caught in her chipped fingernail.
“—out of this house!” she raged, flapping her wrist, “and never set foot in it again, with her filthy—ah!” The thread snapped, the thing flew off and landed in a far corner. She turned to go and had one unsteady foot on the first step when she heard the noise behind her.
Later on, when Queen Esther counted them, she reckoned it as twenty-five steps from the broom closet to the bottom of the cellar stairs. At that moment, though, they seemed to last forever as the screams mounted in intensity, each one seeming to overtake the one before it without time or space for breath between. But they ceased as the maid clattered down the steps, almost tripping over the woman crouched at the bottom.
Queen Esther spared she no glance, then, but faced the thing advancing. Her thrust she hand into she bosom. “Poo!” her spat. “You ugly old duppy! Me never fear no duppy, no, not me!”
And her pulled out the powerful obeah prepared for she long ago by Gran’dame Hephsibah, that sagest of old women, half Ashanti, half Coromanti. The duppy growled and driveled and bared its worn-down stumps of filthy teeth, but retreated step by step as her came forward, chanting the words of power; till at last it was shriveled and bound once more in the scarlet thread and stowed safely away in the cigarette tin. Ugly old duppy…!
Mr. Raidy took the sudden death of his wife with stoical calm. His young brother very seldom has nightmares now, and eats heartily of the savory West Indian messes that Queen Esther prepares for all three of them. Hers is the little room in the attic; her chimney passes through one corner of it, and Queen Esther is warm, warm, warm.
The Sources of the Nile
INTRODUCTION BY GREGORY FEELEY
By 1960 Avram Davidson had developed his own peculiar mastery of the modern short story, and within ten years he would produce a novel of classic stature, but his work in the “novelette” form—that hybrid category, shorter than the novella that has enjoyed so distinguished a history in American literature yet essentially different from the brief compass of the short story—has been relatively little remarked. To be sure, the (much later) Limekiller and Eszterhazy stories are mostly novelettes, but they possess the peculiar status of stories that form parts of a sequence, and can moreover be seen as variations (in their different ways) on the Vergil Magus figure, which increasingly occupied the last decades of Davidson’s life. The actual novelette, which can retain the concision and urgency of the short story while permitting more complex dramatic development, is a form that the early Davidson rarely used.
When “The Sources of the Nile” appeared in the January, 1961, issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Davidson had written one previous novelette, the unorthodox time-travel fantasy “Take Wooden Indians,” which Galaxy had published a year earlier. The two stories are essentially companion pieces: each is set in a contemporary Manhattan that is satirized with an acute eye; each offers an escape from the world of commercial philistinism into another time. But while the arcadia of “Take Wooden Indians” is the idealized small-town America of the nineteenth century, “The Sources of the Nile” looks rather to the future, a future in which one can escape the banalities of modern fashion only by embracing them. This paradox (the first of several) lies at the heart of Davidson’s story, which is constructed of oppositions—something subtly different and more complex than the contrasts (between a rich past and an impoverished present, for example) that constitute Davidson’s more usual dramatic method.
Don Benedict, the sculptor of “Take Wooden Indians” who yearns to be an artisan laboring in the extinct craft of carving cigar-store Indians, is able to escape the horrors of the modern art world by way of the mysterious Elwell equations; but Bob Rosen, the struggling writer in “The Sources of the Nile,” sees the commercial bonanza implicit in the Bensons’ ability to predict fashions as a means of making his fortune. He is also besotted with the Bensons’ daughter Kitty, with an erotic (and comical) urgency that foretokens his role as betrayed dupe. But Bob Rosen (whom we first see reading an arcane article on “The Demography of the Jackson Whites”) is also enough of a scholar gypsy—though distracted by avarice and lust—to appreciate the Bensons for the wonder they are: the fascination they hold for him is also the fascination they hold for us.
This complexity of motivation—as well as the fact that the faithless Rosen has wronged his girlfriend Noreen as surely as she (later) wrongs him—gives the story a moral core (although one hesitates to apply so sober a term to a work of such comic energy) that is significantly knottier than most of Davidson’s stories dealing with an artist at odds with the workaday world, in which the protagonist tends to get off rather easily (and women rather hard). Even Davidson’s villain, the awful T. Pettys Shadwell (“the most despicable of living men”), seems no worse, save for his appalling style—the perforated business cards being an especially nice touch—than the executives who go baying after Peter Martens’ secret, a pack among which Rosen finds himself. Davidson’s exhilarating comedy, which begins with old Peter Martens cadging the drinks that will kill him and ends in utter defeat and desolation, is humor of the blackest hue.
Davidson considered himself weak in plot construction, and indeed many of his stories constitute a triumph of stylistic virtuosity over structure, but the architecture of “The Sources of the Nile” is nearly perfect. The story is free of expository baggage (compare “Take Wooden Indians,” which betrays an occasionally unsure hand) and exceptionally close-knit: tiny droll elements (such as the talkative blonde in the bar) appear, seemingly as throwaway lines, then later prove crucial to the plot. Davidson’s earlier short stories were largely miniatures, which often revolved around a single dramatic event; his later stories tended toward the picaresque. “The Sources of the Nile” is one of the few works in which Davidson combined the compression of his finest prose with genuine dramatic development.
Davidson’s comic effects work in broad-seeming strokes that are actually quite deft. Joseph Tressling’s fulsome assurances are almost fugal in form: the hearty declaration “What the great cheese-eating American public wants is a story of resolved conflict concerning young contemporary American couples earning more than ten thousand dollars a year” is immediately followed by the antiphonal “But nothing sordid, controversial, outré, or passé”; and variations are played upon both themes for another page, which reach a c
limax that is immediately capped by the sinister query: “You’re not going to be one of those hungry writers, are you?” References to “the sources of the Nile” and the hackneyed wisdom that comes down from Robert R. Mac Ian are similarly sounded like musical motifs.
But, as with all Davidson, it is the prose we finally remember. Rereading, we note the tiny details: the colloquialisms from the heyday of British imperialism that cluster about the aged Martens, or the various hangover cures that Bob Rosen tries (they include the recipe Jeeves uses on Bertie Wooster). The title of Rosen’s best-known short story is taken from a passage in one of Lincoln’s letters, and even the horrid Shadwell makes a witty reference to The Merchant of Venice. Peter Martens, “glaring at [Bob] with bloody eye,” is both the Ancient Mariner and Dickens’s Magwitch, bestowing a terrible legacy on a chance-met young man. These baroque allusions are set against a series of sharp details concerning life in the Manhattan business world: the issues of Botteghe Oscure (a highbrow literary quarterly published in Rome until 1960), or the passing references to The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and the vogue for books about Aku-Aku, which firmly set Davidson’s tale in the late 1950s. The overheard remarks by a hussy in a bar are a staple of Madison Avenue satires of this period—see William Gaddis’s The Recognitions—but whether Davidson observed this phenomenon himself or encountered it in books (and one should never underestimate the breadth of Davidson’s reading), he makes it seem authentically of its time, unforced, and funny.
In “The Sources of the Nile” the future is presented, for perhaps the only time in Davidson’s work, as something other than a calamity. The (near-term) changes it will bring—soup-bowl haircuts for men, etc.—are, to be sure, utterly arbitrary, but the wealth awaiting those who espy them correctly gives the story a prospective (rather than backward-looking) impulse that is finally cheering. When we last see Bob Rosen, he has made the vanished Bensons his El Dorado, whom he pursues with undiminished ardor like the man who chases the horizon in the Stephen Crane poem. We want to cheer him on.
The Avram Davidson Treasury Page 20
