—Your sister is quite rare, Mr. Kingsley.
Annoyed at being spoken about in this way, and oddly unsettled in her mind by his forthright gaze, Mary rises and pours still more brandy. This time she pours a glass for herself. Charley protests, but in a slovenly, half-drunk manner, without force. He drinks more of his own, and puffs on his cigar.
—There’s Father’s work to finish, don’t forget, he says to Mary.
Goldie glances at the daguerreotype in the oval frame above the desk on the other side of the room.
—Is that your father?
—That’s Father when he was a younger man, says Charley.
Goldie nods absently.
—I should like you to meet my wife, he says to Mary.
She receives this comment with a polite nod, feeling the flush of embarrassment in her cheeks. It astonishes her to realize that she has been drawn to him in exactly the idiotic romantic way of a girl on a summer picnic with an eligible someone. She gets to her feet and moves to the sideboard, where she retrieves the brandy and pours more into her brother’s glass, as well as her own. She’s certain now, from his faintly crestfallen demeanor, that Charley looked upon Goldie in this light all along, as a perfect match for his sister: doubtless, it is the reason Charley brought him here. Charley drinks most of his brandy in one pull, looking a little like a trader on a barge, ringed with the cigar smoke, lounging in his chair, swirling the remainder of the drink and staring at the amber trembling of it in his glass.
—We’ll have to look forward to the pleasure, he says. And so much time has gone by that the comment seems oddly out of place, as though he is carrying on a conversation the other two can’t hear.
Goldie keeps his gaze on Mary.
—My wife’s name is Mathilda, he says. And, like you, she’s a bit of a nonconformist.
—Nonconformist? Charley says.
—You’ll admit, Goldie continues gazing at Mary. You’ll allow, I mean, that your recent journey to Africa, and your plans to go back there, are not in the pale of normal experience for a woman of your age and station?
—I don’t conceive of it that way, says Mary.
—No, and neither has Mathilda, about anything she has done. I’m certain you will adore one another.
—We’ll look forward to the pleasure, Charley says again, aimlessly, sipping the last of his brandy. He holds the glass out to Mary, who moves to the sideboard to refill it. She puts her own glass down, unfinished, and asks Goldie if he would like more. He demurs. When she hands the glass to Charley, he lifts it as if to offer a toast, and then appears to change his mind. He takes a small swallow of it, and then breathes a long sigh. It’s clear to Mary, and certainly it is also evident to Goldie, that her brother is getting drunk.
Goldie and Mary both begin speaking at the same instant again, and Mary sits down in her wing chair, smiling at him, her fingers to her lips once more.
—No, he says. You, this time.
—I wondered where you saw Batty.
Goldie thinks a moment. Then:
—Oh, you mean tonight. He was at tonight’s meeting.
—I spoke to the gentleman, says Charley.
—Batty is in England? Mary says.
—He sails for Sierra Leone tomorrow morning, says Goldie. I had finished my talk, and he approached me. We had some dealings in Africa a few years ago. Good man, Batty. I spoke to him a little, tonight, and then Charley here introduced himself to me. Batty heard Charley speaking about you, and he stepped in to say that he hoped we would carry his good wishes to you.
—I would like to’ve seen ’im, says Mary. I very much enjoyed Batty’s company in the Canaries, two years ago.
—Sent his greetings, Charley says, drunkenly.
—Well, I should be going, says Goldie, rising from his chair.
Mary has a moment of realizing how tall he is.
—I ’ope to see you again, she says.
They both notice, in the same moment, the increment of quiet in the room, and they turn to see that Charley has fallen asleep.
—Well, says Goldie.
The expression on his handsome face is almost ameliorative, as if to apologize for Charley’s behavior.
Mary goes to the head of the stairs with him, and he bows at the fierce figure full of nails on the landing.
—I hope you continue to keep out evil spirits, he says to it.
She watches him descend the stairs, and at the bottom he turns, and tips his hat. She waves, as if this were some long expedition he is embarking on. He opens the door and there is the jangle and uproar of the street. Again he looks back.
—It isn’t Africa, he says. Is it.
—No, says Mary. I’ll ’ave to change that.
He smiles, a nearly conspiratorial smile.
—If I can help, he says.
TWENTY-ONE
1
I wonder how you did it all. Taking care of feckless Charley. Collating your father’s writings for Macmillan to publish in a book; working to get Charley to do the memoir of his father, which would finish the project, and all the while sitting up in the late nights, in the stifling hours, fighting sleep and working on your own journal of the first trip to the coast. I think of you discovering your power to evoke in language what you saw and heard. A natural writer, a born writer, everyone said. Yet you were reluctant. You hesitated and caviled, even when Macmillan, having seen the pages of The Bites of Benin, wanted to publish, and not only to capitalize on the lady explorer, not only for the novelty, but because the prose was so vivid and true. Was it that you were so serious about the work, not the writing but the exploration, the quest, that you refused to let him do it that way? I can’t understand why you would want to publish it anonymously if you published it at all, unless it was to take away what you had come to feel was the stigma of being a woman.
What must it have been, waiting that winter and spring and summer in England, for the chance to go back to what you were now calling your home?
I have discovered the strong sense that I myself, and my little daughter, have no real home. I don’t feel at home anywhere anymore, and the world I recognize as mine seems to be receding all the time into some background I don’t understand. This came to me recently, while I was standing in the small kitchen of the house, stirring a glass of chocolate milk for myself. I was looking out the window above the sink, at the line of trees, and the yards with other houses, beyond the field in back of this house, and it came to me like a blow to the stomach that I am not home here; that this is not my home, and nor is anyplace else. I’m occupied with the baby, and I do an adequate job of keeping this house where we act out life, and I spend time on this frail attempt at a play. But I never feel at home.
Over the next few weeks, Tyler drew down into himself, while remaining, to others in the family and among friends, outwardly unchanged. When she told him, one morning as he was eating breakfast, that she wanted to write Dominic about a visit to New Orleans, he stared at her for a long moment and then shrugged and went on eating. He left for work without saying anything. Yet he remained civil. She could do as she wished, he told her that evening; she would anyway. When she asked if he was angry with her, he said, “No,” with an air of being surprised that she should think so.
He never spoke impatiently to her or argued with her, really; he was cooperative, staid, and finally dull-seeming. It was maddening. He paid attention to the baby, and he was in every way a dutiful family man, still going to work in the mornings and coming home. She was tempted to try saying things to him, to draw him out, to break through his apparent apathy. But then she told herself there was no sense in starting a fight. He was making his own peace with the situation, and she convinced herself that one day soon he would suggest that they go to New Orleans as if the whole thing were his idea. She trusted his intelligence, and if worry for him still nagged at her, she was willing to grasp at the possibility that this was how he adjusted to things.
It occurred to her duri
ng one of her sleepless passes in the middle of the night that she really didn’t know him very well. She lay there trying to catalog what she did know about him: she knew that he was meticulous in some ways and slovenly in others; she knew there was a curious strain of mistrust in him about people, having to do, she was certain, with the central fact of his growing up, that his mother had abandoned him; she knew he had once liked to hunt, that he was an avid—lately he had been an obsessive—reader, and that for all his growing erudition there was a modest something in his makeup that prevented him from airing what he knew in company. She knew that while he was not quick-tempered, when he did get angry he tended to rage, and his rage could be towering, even frightening. And she knew he was immature. She was familiar with the songs he liked and the kinds of movies he had enjoyed, what movie actors and directors he preferred or trusted. She had knowledge of what some of his favorite foods were. She had been privy to some of his nightmares. She understood that he was mostly decent, and that he loved her. Yet all of these things added up to a kind of blur, finally. And while he lay sleeping at her side, moaning with whatever his dreams were, she had to beat back the overwhelming feeling that he was a stranger.
Everything settled into an inertia.
It dismayed her how little anyone could see of it. The two of them spent some time with his mother and Roger Gault, at his mother’s invitation. They went out to dinner a couple of times. No one seemed even vaguely aware that a change had come, that Tyler was this hollowed-out someone, barely there.
They spent a weekend afternoon at the Galatierre house, sunning by the pool (Lily tried the baby in the water; the baby took to it, letting out a high-pitched squeal that made everyone laugh). And they met Sheri and Nick at Old Taylor Grocery, for fried catfish. Everybody seemed perfectly at ease with them both. Yet there were all too numerous times when Tyler, at her side, was nevertheless elsewhere, when she would say something to him and he wouldn’t hear it, and after she repeated it, sometimes slightly louder, he would turn, and seem to discover her there in the room with him, others in the room with him, and he would say, “I’m sorry. Could you say that again?”
In the society of his mother, his distraction was even worse. He seemed to be observing Millicent from some dizzying height, scarcely able to control his own equilibrium. There was something like wonder in his gaze. Yet his mother never appeared to notice it.
When he and Lily were alone, coming away from the afternoon by the pool, he spoke of Millicent in a detached way, as if she were merely an interesting outsider, a woman with a kind of inscrutability about her, whose motivations were hard to read. He told Lily that he believed Millicent was a woman whose soul contained unexplored caverns of ice; that she was one of those people who moved through life with charm and apparent elegance, but who were capable of huge selfishness.
“Isn’t that true of most of us?” Lily said.
He never spoke of Dominic. They never spoke of it. He spent hours alone, in one room or another of the little house, reading or seeming to read. Several times she passed the entrance of a room to see him sitting with the book open on his lap, staring at the opposite wall, or at the floor. It was growing more and more difficult to be easy and relaxed with him, though he appeared oblivious to this. And he was gone a lot, too. It was undeniably true that there were practical day-to-day reasons for the widening distance between them.
His appetite had fallen off, and he wasn’t sleeping very well. Neither of them was. She would wake with her own nightmares to see that he was out of the bed and in some other part of the house. Twice she found him sleeping on the sofa in the living room. Another night she got up just in time to see him come walking back to the house from the construction site, his shadow on the moonlit grass.
He said he’d hoped a walk might make him sleepy.
“I’m not sleepy either,” she said.
“Ah.” He smiled. “The life of the guilty.”
“What if we just tell Dominic?”
“And tell him how we figured it out, too. Oh, nothing humiliating in that.”
She had no answer for this.
“You know what this is like?” he said. “No matter which way I turn, there’s hell. That’s what the doctors I think call an irreconcilable conflict. What that really connotes is a trap.”
“Don’t,” she said. “We’re capable people. We can figure something out.”
“You know what I’d like to figure out? I’d like to figure out a way not to have it between us all the time. I’d like to figure out a way not to have to talk about it or think about it or look at it or hear about it. I’d like a year of complete quiet about it. That is among the things I would like.” He got into bed. The thought went through her mind like a breath of doom that it was as if they had aged forty years.
The next morning he fixed coffee for himself, and went out the door to work. He kissed her on the cheek, leaned down and touched his lips to the top of the baby’s head. Lily watched him walk out to the car, get in, and drive away.
By nightfall, when he returned, she knew, he would be off in himself somewhere, wanting quiet, claiming exhaustion. He would be apathetic and drowsy, staring at the pages of his books and nodding off, a man who has searched for some kind of meaning and found only the niggling and inescapable demands of the body.
She was working on the play in earnest, spending almost every morning on it while the baby napped or babbled in her playpen. She had decided to try it from the last hours of Mary Kingsley’s life: the scene in Simon’s Town, South Africa, as she’s fighting delirium from yellow fever, contracted from one of the soldiers she’d been nursing, a casualty of the Boer War. Mary on a makeshift cot, feverish, dreaming of going back again to her beloved West Africa, and of all the adventures. Scenes from her life could be played out on another area of the stage, as memory and hallucination. She had spent so much time in and around theaters, watching her father and the others put it all together. It had appeared so uncomplicated and good, like a kind of charitable operation, struggling to make a play. An entertainment for strangers. She had never dreamed how hard it could be, nor had she ever suspected what pleasures there were to be had from the complexity and the labor of solving its difficulties, bringing it about. She showed nothing of the work to anyone. And each morning, reading through it again before going on with it, she was freshly heartened and even excited.
2
ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, the family gathered for a cookout. The big surprise for everyone was that Rosa had come for a visit from her new home in California. She was there when Tyler and Lily arrived, sitting in one of the canvas chairs on the porch with a glass of iced tea in her hand. She stood and walked over to them as they extricated Mary from her car seat. Rosa kissed the baby, and made a soft, cooing sound, then walked with them up onto the porch and stood quietly by while Millicent greeted them. Tyler embraced his mother, or took her embrace, and accepted her offer of a glass of wine.
It was a bright, still, cloudless, scorching day, as the last several days had been, and all the grass had begun to whiten with the sun; it had a crisp and cooked feeling underfoot. A thin cloud of dust rose with every footfall. In the house, Nick and Sheri were seated on the sofa in the living room, in the air-conditioning, drinking orange juice out of wine glasses. Lily put Mary down in the bassinet Millicent kept now for those times when Lily visited, and took a seat next to Sheri. Tyler went into the kitchen with Rosa, to get his wine. Lily heard them talking with Roger Gault—light chatter about the wine, and the hot weather.
Nick leaned across his wife, toward Lily. “You look like you could use one of these.” He held up his glass. “It’s a mimosa—champagne and orange juice.” His speech was faintly slurred.
Lily saw how much the look of the house had been transformed. She still felt ambushed by it—the hunting trophies all gone, and most of the pictures of Buddy and Millicent in their diverse travels. She surveyed the room. The big window behind them showed the thick-grown green prospect
it had shown when she’d first arrived here, more than a year ago now. She listened to Tyler’s voice in the kitchen, and saw Sheri sip her orange juice, wondering at her own sense of displacement.
Nick said, “Business is so good, we may expand.”
Neither of the women answered him.
“I know Buddy was against it. But we’re gonna lose a lot of profit in taxes if we don’t expand.”
Sheri stood. “I don’t feel like talking business now. I’m sorry, Nick. Excuse me.”
“I’ll stop,” Nick said. But she had headed into the kitchen, and was already making a fuss over Roger Gault’s loud Hawaiian shirt.
Nick cleared his throat, and took a long drink of the mimosa, then glanced over at Lily. “Things’re a little edgy.”
Lily said nothing for a beat or two. The talk in the kitchen was louder, opposing voices, arguing about the possibility of the reunification of Germany, as though this were high-level deliberations of the diplomatic corps. Lily heard a note of fatigue in Tyler’s voice, and realized it was boredom. The same boredom he had begun to show about nearly everything. She sighed, and then leaned up to look into the bassinet at Mary, who lay quite peacefully asleep.
“How’s Tyler at home?” Nick said. “If that isn’t prying.”
She returned his look.
“He’s not doing much of the work anymore. He was really gung ho in the beginning. Even after Buddy—after the accident. He seemed anxious to do well. He did extra things. He was good, too. Customers took to him. Now he stays there all day and does literally nothing much. He doesn’t use the phone. When people come in, he takes forever to notice them. It’s like he’s in a daze. People react to that. We’ve—we’ve been losing sales.”
“Have you talked to him about it?”
“A little. He apologizes, says he’ll do better. Say’s he’s got some things on his mind. You know the drill.”
“Well, Tyler’s going through everything, Nick. Like you.”
Hello to the Cannibals Page 59
