Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  —I don’t imagine she’ll see it, says Mary.

  —What are you doing? he demands.

  —I’m looking over some maps of the coastline. I’m studying navigational charts. I’m collating Father’s notes on religious practices among the aboriginal tribes of America and comparing them to what I observed in Africa. What are you doing, brother?

  He stares for a few seconds, completely unaware of the irony in her question.

  —I’m getting ready to eat, he says.

  2

  THERE ARE THINGS to do to prepare, not the least of which is procuring enough funds to scrape by. At the British Museum, she visits with an anthropologist named Gunther, whose book on the species of fish in Africa she has read, and who is impressed with the samples she has collected. He kindly provides her with some tools of the trade—jars and utensils that are better, more advanced in design, than the crude ones she has used. She knows more now, what to pack, what to say to those whose goodwill she must have to succeed. It’s fortunate that Lady MacDonald desires to be accompanied on her own journey to rejoin her husband at the oil protectorate.

  The months between August and December pass in a flurry of study and activity, and even so she feels banked, held back, imprisoned by all the requirements at 100 Addison Road and by her growing number of acquaintances. At last, Charley has left on his lark, back to Asia, and she can close up the house and make her own plans. Christmas week she and Lady MacDonald take the train down to Liverpool, through a driving wind and rain. In Liverpool, the Batanga, a large vessel bound for the African coast, specifically Sierra Leone and Calabar, is at anchor until the weather clears. The storm is pounding in from the sea, a gale, lashing the shore and the town. They leave the train in an icy, needle-thin, pelting rain, and make their way to a little inn to wait it out.

  Ethel MacDonald is the model governor’s wife. She cannot understand Mary’s desire to get into the bush, and hasn’t quite taken it seriously. They are devoted to each other, though there is this decided difference between them concerning what there is to do and see in Africa—and Lady MacDonald’s attitudes are somewhat restricted: she sees the African as a kind of bright animal, and the Mohammedans, black or white, as infidels. She believes in the purposes of the Christian missionaries, and expects that Africa should be exploited for the uses of the Empire. Mary shares this last belief to some extent, but sees it more as an exchange between equals, at least where trade is concerned. These differences between them are overcome by the small but important matter of their mutual temper: they amuse each other; their affection is real. Ethel MacDonald possesses no trace of the dogmatic. She’s tolerant of foreign points of view, and Mary makes her laugh.

  Indeed, she told Mary in their first days of knowing each other that it is Mary’s dry, often wildly self-deprecating sense of humor that she finds most appealing. Mary has a gift for startling exaggeration. Ethel MacDonald once expressed the conviction that if Mary could put it all into writing, she could make a lot of people very happy.

  —I have tried to write and failed, Mary told her.

  They check into a room to wait out the storm. Mary feels as if the boat might slip away in the dark, though she knows this is a child’s anxiety; they have booked passage. There are others waiting at this same inn for the storm to pass. She gets into her bed and stares at the glimmer of light on the ceiling, from a guttering street lamp out in the rain. The rain rattles the window, and something knocks repetitively against the casement. It is impossible to muster the assurance that it is not a person seeking to gain entrance. Lady MacDonald has piled blankets and pillows on herself, and is wearing a sleeping cap with little bows tied all around the circumference of it. She looks like a big infant, nestled in the heavy bed. Mary thinks of Lucy Toulmin-Smith, and of Paris.

  —Have you ever been to Paris?

  —Every summer when I was a girl, Ethel MacDonald says. You?

  —Once.

  —Did you fall in love with it?

  —No. I liked it.

  —You liked it. Paris.

  —I was with someone older. A friend, who wanted me to see the sights. So I didn’t get to see the sights.

  Lady Ethel MacDonald laughs softly, and the laughter grows louder, until she begins to cough. The coughing goes on for a few seconds, and at last she settles deeper under her heavy blankets, puts her hands to her face, and with a small sigh of satisfaction, subsides. Mary can’t sleep, and so she waits for the wind and rain to stop, and for light to come to the window.

  The change is so slow that she almost misses it. She drifts for a very few minutes just before dawn. But she’s wide awake and watching as the shadows come to the objects in the room, and to the thick violet and crimson folds of Lady MacDonald’s bedclothes. They rise with first light and dress, and have tea and biscuits in the dining room of the inn. Several other passengers are there, none of whom Mary recognizes, though she knows the types: two missionaries and their wives, a government official, a military man.

  The dock is crowded, and noisy, and every surface drips with the night’s rain. The smell of the dockside is of the rain and the rotting vegetables and dead flesh of fish and fowl in crates once bound for markets, but ruined now by the storm. There is continual shouting and uproar. The cargo is being loaded, walked across on planks, carried and dragged by shore men, and sailors. Mary walks up the gangway ahead of Ethel, and comes face to face with Captain John Murray.

  He has seen her first, and is smiling—an expression so uncharacteristic of him that two of his crewmen have stopped their work to gaze at him in amazement. It is their wondering faces that cause Mary to pause, and to see the captain, standing on the deck with his arms folded, waiting for her.

  —Oh, she says, dropping her reticule, throwing her arms wide as if to embrace him.

  But she stops short, and folds her arms, tilting her head to one side, elated.

  —What good fortune, she says to him.

  He’s beaming with uncontainable delight.

  —Miss Kingsley, he says, I see you have survived London.

  3

  Dear Doris,

  I have sublet the house, and made my farewells to Sheri and the others, and tomorrow I set out for New Orleans. Tyler and I are over. I would not be at all surprised if I never set eyes on him again. He’s somewhere in Georgia now, with a marine unit, going through officers’ school. If we were characters in a movie, the country would go to war and he would go off and disappear into the flames of battle. What will probably happen is that he’ll settle somewhere far away, meet someone and marry again, and live out a quiet life with someone he trusts. I wish him that. Even as I wish something could turn everything around for us and we could be innocent and happy again, like the children we were. I know I sound jaded and so pretentiously “mature” and you’re probably cringing. But the hard fact of the matter is that I still feel something for him and don’t really know how to qualify it or explain it. I’m only twenty-two. I think I still do love him—that hasn’t changed. So I miss him—or I miss him as he was before everything flew apart in recrimination and suspicion, and the weeks of each of us wondering what the other one was feeling, and Mary at the heart of it, nobody’s fault, really, and needing uncomplicated love.

  I wanted Tyler’s trust. I felt I had to try regaining it. I didn’t think about you or Scott or Peggy and it never entered my mind what it would mean to you to find out what had happened—it was always, as I told you on the phone, what it would mean here, with Tyler and Millicent and Sheri and Nick, and with Buddy gone that way, all of them nursing their sorrows, and poor Dominic down in New Orleans, so terrified of being alone, and I had the knowledge that he has a child he doesn’t even know about. His child. That fact, which would not be swallowed, or absorbed, or ignored, would not let me rest. It divided Tyler and me—it was the only thing that divided us, and maybe (probably) given time, other things would have.

  And I still haven’t told Dominic.

  He’s said ove
r the phone that he’s got a room for me and the baby, and I’m going down there, really, to see what’s next. I’ll stay with him and Manny and Aunt Violet Beaumont, in that row house in the Quarter.

  I thought Daddy’s offer of work at the theater was sweet, even though I know he would have twisted arms to get it for me, and probably put himself on the enemies list of several people. But I really don’t want to take advantage of his work or his position. In a few weeks, believe it or not, I may have a completed play about Mary Kingsley (well, it’s about bravery, imagine that, me writing a play about bravery), and if and when that happens I expect to submit it to theaters without using his name, and he’ll just have to understand that. I told him he wouldn’t have accepted for himself, when he was my age, outside help of the kind that he’s offering me.

  What I mostly want you both to understand is that I’m all right. I’m hurting because my marriage is dissolving and I wish it wasn’t. I’m having to pick up with a seven-month-old baby and go to a town I’ve only been in once in my life. But I feel that’s better than staying here, or going back to Virginia, just now. I think this is what I have to do. When I phoned Dom to tell him what had happened to us, he offered before I had the opportunity to ask. The conversation was very hard, and very strange, because he tried at first to reassure me that Tyler would come home, that these things happen in early marriage and Tyler was still trying to adjust to the loss of Buddy, and to being a new father. All that. All the things I told myself in the beginning. I managed at last to convince him that the marriage was over by claiming that I wanted an end to it. Well, I wanted an end to something. And Dominic is the father of this baby and I have to find some gentle way of letting him know this, and then seeing what his wishes are regarding that fact. I plan to let him know that I have no expectations of him; it’s only that I can’t let the knowledge of it be kept from him. So I’m not coming to Virginia, and I don’t know when I will. Maybe I’ll be able to save enough of this money Tyler sent from his part of the dealership to make a trip up there for the holidays. I don’t want to be brought back, though, Doris, and you’ll just have to make Scott understand that. When I come home, I want it to be on my own dime.

  Mary is beginning to say things now—” Ma-ma.” “Da-da.” “No.” She says no a lot. To any phrase that ends with the inflection of a question. So Nick will say to her, “Mary, you believe in the ineluctable modality of the visible, right?” And Mary will say, “No.” Sometimes even shaking her head. It makes everyone take a second look. He’ll lean close to her little glowering face and say, “Mary, you do believe in the dictatorship of the proletariat, don’t you?” And she’ll already be shaking her head. “No.”

  Nick has been so helpful, and has been in the awful position of having to serve as the middleman between Tyler and the rest of the family. Tyler will not speak to his mother or his half sister, will only call Nick at the dealership, and has let it be known that when he clears all his ties with the business and with me, he plans to get as far away from all of us as he can. Nick has been so helpful, and I feel so sorry for him, carrying what he’s carrying, and having to be the man in the middle of this.

  It seems to me that when Buddy went, all my need for this family ebbed out of me, without my quite knowing it was happening. It’s possible that Buddy softened everyone’s hard edges. He held everything together.

  I don’t know what else to tell you. I love you. I’m still working on my play, almost every day now, at least two hours a day. Mary grows in leaps and bounds. I’ve sold or given to Goodwill what little furniture we had, and I gave away most of the records and books. I’m all packed (Nick and Sheri helped), and in the morning I’m getting into the Oldsmobile and heading south to the Gulf, and new quarters. Another life. Of course we’ll be talking before you get this.

  Love,

  Lily

  I’ve so presumptuously imagined you heading off to another world—a journey at least as drastic as a modern flight to the moon—and here I am, waiting for sunrise, and my little trip south, to live for a time with the father of my child, who has no idea of the truth, and I’m so frightened that I can hardly hold the pen.

  It seems to me that your life may be explicable as a private struggle to search out some answer about existence; about—as you put it once—the nature of God. You possessed the sense of the world as a created thing and a mystery. It seems to me that your journey began in a private quest for answers to that mystery, and ended in the public quest that it became, almost without your realizing it. You were a person of such magnetism, you bound so many people to you—Lucy Toulmin-Smith, Varley, Corliss, Captain Murray, the MacDonalds, Batty, and the Goldies, and all the others, missionaries as well as traders, members of the government, and all the Africans, and you were always the same. They all have provided in their own way their accounts of you, and the one fact that emerges is the consistency of who you were with all of them: energetic, determined, funny, self-deprecating, assertive, opinionated without being doctrinaire, loyal, gentle, interesting, intrepid—they all speak of your apparent lack of fear, of the fact that you never showed it to anyone. No, what I mean to say is, that because you never showed your fear to anyone, they believed that you did not feel it or experience it. They attributed to you a fearlessness that in my mind devalues the bravery you did possess. And it was bravery.

  I would like to have some of that bravery now. I’m not going to wild places, but I have a child with me, and the intricacy of another person, the responsibility of another person, of that other life in the world whose being is from my body and blood—well, that is a wilderness, too. Going out into the world, and making your way amid the thickets of expectation and definition—that’s an exploration, too, isn’t it?

  When I write about you now, it’s as if you murmur in my ear. I see you standing at my shoulder, hands on hips, a look of mild and tolerant, perhaps even humorous, impatience on your face. Get on, get on, I hear you say.

  Writing these small entries to you—people will say that’s a conceit. For me, it’s a beautiful mystery.

  The morning was steely-colored, an almost unearthly gray, and so humid that her blouse clung to her within seconds. Nick drove up at first light, with a package of Danishes and two cups of coffee.

  “The coffee was Sheri and Millicent’s idea. Millicent wants you to stay alert.”

  “Thank them for me,” Lily said. Then: “I’ll send them a card.”

  He nodded, but said nothing. She sipped her coffee, feeling the need to go, get away. Briefly, she had the intuition that she was causing the whole family to suffer, each in some separate way, though they were collectively striving for concern and trying to help. It was so strange, now—now that they knew the baby was no kin of theirs, and now that Tyler was gone. Things had been friendly, but in a brittle way, cordial, and not like real friendship at all. There was something rehearsed about it, nervous and on edge, except where Nick was concerned. He seemed to understand what notes to strike, and in any case had proved himself to be her friend, apart from the Galatierre household. She felt that.

  They were standing in the kitchen, with its cabinets open and empty. Mary played on the floor, waving a rattle back and forth and then trying to dismantle it, sitting up straight. They watched her for a few moments. The whole morning seemed illusory.

  “Millicent wanted me to repeat for her that she hopes you’ll stay in touch,” he said.

  “Of course,” said Lily. “Tell her I repeated that I will.”

  “Tyler’s adamant. It’s crazy.”

  She felt the stab of knowing her marriage was over; it was as much fear, now, as sorrow.

  “If there’s anything that I can do, you know.”

  She put one hand on his elbow. “I know.”

  He drank the last of his coffee and then crushed the cup in his fist. “Well, I’ve got to get to work. I’m supposed to tell you to be careful and good to yourself,” he said, looking down.

  She had the feeling that he
longed to disclose something, and a stirring in her soul urged her to move past the moment, talk through it. She said: “I’ll write you when I get down to New Orleans. I’ll keep you posted.”

  He hesitated, then appeared to back down from whatever he had determined earlier to say or do. He started away, then stopped, turned, knelt to take Mary’s dimpled hand and kiss it, and, standing again, put his arms very gingerly around Lily. “You take care,” he said, at the bottom of his throat.

  Her own voice caught. “I will.” She kissed his cheek.

  “Well,” he said, letting go of her, backing away. “I hope we—I hope to see you soon.”

  “Yes,” she told him.

  “You won’t lose touch.”

  “No.” She smiled, and wiped her eyes.

  He made his way through the grayness to the car, got in, gazed through the windshield at her, without gesturing, then started it and backed out, looking over his shoulder. Having backed into the road, he glanced her way once more, without waving, and was gone. She lifted one hand, but he hadn’t looked back.

  She stooped, crying a little, and picked the baby up. She felt quite alone and abruptly very afraid. “You ready for this, girlie?” she said to Mary.

  The child looked at her with the perpetual questioning that was always in the small face, and said, “No.”

  Lily laughed, in the middle of her tears, carrying her out to the Oldsmobile, then put her in the car seat in back. The humidity had soaked through everything. She got in behind the wheel, opened the windows, and started the ignition. Each of these motions required effort, it seemed. And each of them was irrevocable, a step away that could not be retracted. She was really doing this.

  The apartment building across the way was almost finished. There were flags flapping in the soaked breeze, in the dullness of the drifting haze and murk. Fog was everywhere this glowering morning. It lay thick and quite still over the whole town, though as she drove out onto Highway 55 South, she saw the slightest tinge of a carmine glow in the dense, sodden screen of it to the east—the sun about to burn through. She put the radio on, and Mary slept in the car seat. She sang along with the radio songs, mostly old rock songs from when she was in high school, back in 1986 and ’87. She felt oddly as if she were again there, a teenage girl, on an adventure. There was the trouble, of course, the heartache she had been through, and when she thought of Tyler the anger and hurt rose to her mind from the injured places; it was all unabated. Yet she felt this release, this thrill. She glanced back at Mary sleeping in the car seat and marveled at the fact that she was a woman with a child, a mother. It was always as if she had not yet fully realized it, was only now seeing the magnitude of it, though the realization itself was familiar. The road ahead emerged from the folds of mist, and was mostly empty. And as the fog lifted—or as she drove out of it, she couldn’t tell which—she sang louder, with an exhilarating sensation of being free, of escaping into breathable air.