The Marriage of Opposites

by Alice Hoffman

  “This disease takes three cures,” the herbalist said.

  “Does it?” Jestine was skeptical. “Does that mean you will charge me three prices?”

  The herb man gave her a swift glance, but he did not answer. He made a tea mixture from the leaves of the silk-cotton tree that would be healing, and then he made a second packet of tea from the bark of a mahogany tree mixed with salt that would relieve fever. Finally he made a poultice from the tamarind tree, brought to this island from Africa, to relieve both fever and pain, especially in the liver, where yellow fever collected.

  He wanted to be paid for his work, as any man would. All Jestine had to offer was Rachel’s mother’s pearls strung around her throat, which she handed over willingly. “I never liked them,” she told Rachel later. “They felt cold on my skin.”

  After Jestine had paid for the cures, she came out of the herbalist’s house. She held a package tied with string. “He asked me to kiss him for luck,” she told Rachel. “I told him if this man of yours lives, I’ll send you back to kiss him, and he said that would be fine.”

  They walked back through the vines.

  Rachel was thoughtful. “He’s not my man.”

  Jestine looked at her, then they both laughed.

  “You can’t fool me,” Jestine said. “Just everybody else.”

  They passed a ring of stones that was all that remained of a house that had been abandoned. A fire had recently been lit, leaving a charred odor. Cooking utensils were scattered about. Someone was moving in, trying to rebuild.

  “Be careful with this,” Jestine said when she handed over the remedy. They had reached the outskirts of the city. Everything was midnight blue, the way it is in dreams. “Maybe his fate is already set down. If you save him you may change everything that would have happened if his illness had taken him, the good along with the bad.”

  Rachel hardly listened. She already knew this time she would decide her own fate. She hurried home, running most of the way. Rosalie had been sitting up with Frédéric, and now Rachel told her she could go.

  “What if you need me?” Rosalie said.

  “I already needed you and you were always here, but Mr. Enrique doesn’t need to be lonely tonight.”

  When Rosalie was gone, Rachel made the first tea and carried it to Frédéric’s room. He was disappearing; she could barely see him beneath the quilt. The room was so quiet she could hear a moth at the window. The same moth she had heard as a girl when she wished to wake up on the other side of the world, in a bed in Paris.

  Frédéric sat up when she asked him to, but he was so weak that swallowing the tea was difficult. When she made the second tea, he could take only a few sips, so she had to feed him with a spoon. As he drank the tea she told him a story about a bird as tall as a man who danced in a marsh and made his beloved fall in love with him. She wept as she told the story, consumed with panic and the thought that Frédéric might die. She laid the poultice over his broad chest, covering his heart and lungs, and then his liver, where the illness dwelled. His body responded to her, he moved toward her without thinking. She did not know why she was shivering. It was brutally hot and Rachel was drenched with sweat. She took off everything but her white chemise underbodice and pantalets. Still she was burning. She feared she had caught the disease, but she didn’t care. She got into bed beside him and pulled the quilt over them.

  Rosalie found them that way in the morning, wrapped around each other as drowning people are said to be, so that it is often impossible to tell who was meant to be the rescuer, and who had been drowning. She had been expecting as much, and she hadn’t been surprised when Rachel sent her away. She knew what love could do to a person. She would wait till the next day to collect the children, and let Rachel and this young man go on sleeping. They held on to each other, dreaming of rain.

  THE NEW SYNAGOGUE WAS finally finished in that year, with mahogany benches and an altar set in the center of the hall, in the Spanish style. It had taken a long time, but now it was perfect, and no fire or storm could pull it down. There was a low carved wall separating the women from the men. The floor was kept as sand, as it had been in the past in Spain and Portugal, though there were many Jews recently arrived from Denmark and Amsterdam who thought it madness to have this daily reminder of a brutal history when every prayer was a secret and every Jew was an enemy of the state. Rachel Pomié Petit was past thirty now, and although she’d been considered plain as a girl, she had become quite beautiful, her dark hair wound up and kept in place with tortoiseshell combs, her eyes like black water. Getting older had given her more definition. There was a ferocity to her features now. It was difficult to fault her, for after all her losses she’d managed better than most women in her situation. She ran her household frugally, her business was prospering at last, and her children were well mannered. The boys that had been her husband’s were both considered men now and worked in the store alongside the nephew from Paris.

  As for that handsome man, Frédéric Pizzarro, he, too, had turned out to be standoffish after such a promising start. He refused all overtures of friendship, though he came to pray every morning and every evening. He excused himself from social events and dinners, even when the most accomplished women from the Sisterhood invited him. There were daughters who would have liked to have gotten to know him better, young women who were clearly interested. One, Maria Mendes, was so intent on charming him that she took to waiting outside the store on a daily basis, dressed in her finery. She was only nineteen, quite beautiful, but Frédéric treated her as if she were a child. “I’m sorry,” he said to her, after he’d realized she was pursuing him. “I am much too busy to do anything other than attend to business.”

  She didn’t give up, for all men say they’re busy until they’re not, and then one day, as she stood there patiently, waiting for him to change his mind, a pitcher of water was poured down from an upstairs window, drenching her. She looked up, sputtering, and although the window was being closed and the person responsible was backing away, she told her friends she’d spied the widow’s shadow. Rachel Pomié Petit was like a spider, Maria said, her web stretched out to keep other women from Monsieur Pizzarro. Frédéric was still well thought of even though he was not socially inclined; he was considered to be a man of integrity who honored God every day. It was said he retreated to his room after work. His interests were mostly those of the mind. He was known to be a great reader, and he tutored the Petit children in mathematics. He was often seen with the children, who had grown more than accustomed to him, treating him as if he were an older, wiser brother. When work and studies were completed, he took them to the wharf to go fishing. He liked to run, for the sheer joy of it, and the boys often went running with him through the streets, down toward the beaches. There was nothing suspicious about all this, and yet there were those in the congregation who felt Pizzarro’s presence in the widow’s home was improper. He should find his own house, his own woman, these people said. He had helped her long enough.

  One of the men from the congregation passed by the Petit store on a dark, blue night, and after he did, nothing was the same. Whether his knowledge of the situation was gained by accident or by design, he never said, but when this gentleman, a young cousin of Madame Jobart, glanced at the window he spied a woman in Frédéric Pizzarro’s room. The curtains were drawn, but he was able to see her, naked, on the bed. The truth was this prying man had crept quite close to the window. From his hiding place beneath a vine of bougainvillea he had heard a woman moaning with desire. He waited in the shrubbery, listening; when he reported his story he failed to mention that he had reached through the open window to lift the curtains, the better to see. It was Isaac Petit’s widow he spied, and despite what people said about her cold nature, she was clearly more than friendly to her young nephew, and it seemed she was sharing not only her home, but also his bed.

  News of the scandal went from house to house, like the angel of death on the eve of Passover. It appeared like a m
ist, red in color, sifting down chimneys and through windows. Now when Rachel Petit walked through town she did not have to bypass anyone, they avoided her. Her path was red, for she had committed a sin in the eyes of their faith. People crossed the street rather than confront her, as they had when they saw Nathan Levy with his African wife. The rumors had not yet come inside the Petit house, and the couple thought no one knew. At the dinner table, with the children around them, Rachel and Frédéric made certain not to sit too near to each other. But at night, when everyone else was asleep, they drew the curtains, then closed the shutters tightly and latched them, as people did whenever there was a storm brewing. It was possible that they had the sense they had been spied upon, for now they always found each other in the dark.

  TWO WOMEN FROM THE congregation, old friends of Rachel’s mother, invited her to tea. She refused. She sent a note thanking them and stating she was far too busy. She had her children, the store, endless responsibilities, and therefore sent regrets. Her lack of time was not the only reason she did not wish to see them, and the older women knew this. They wanted to discuss the red mist, the rumors that had caused a division in their community and might soon have Europeans looking too closely at the congregation’s affairs. They wanted to remind Rachel of her debt to her mother’s memory, so they came to her. They waited outside the shop, and when Rachel came out, carrying her youngest child, Isaac, born months after his father’s death, with two other children trailing behind her, her mother’s friends followed her into the street and talked to her there, as they would a common whore. The women were Madame Halevy and Madame Jobart, Sara Pomié’s closest friends. They had been to the Pomié house nearly every week when Rachel’s mother was alive, and had attended both Rachel’s wedding and her parents’ funerals. They had been among the mourners at Isaac Petit’s funeral and had noticed that his widow did not cry. All the same, they’d had their maids deliver baskets of food for her children and black mourning clothing for Rachel, who insisted upon wearing a single black dress. Now they noticed she had on a pretty green frock, inappropriate for a woman who had lost her husband less than a year earlier.

  “Many women are delirious after their husbands’ death,” Madame Halevy said to her. “They stay in a sort of madness for months, or even years. Madame Jobart and I are both widows. We understand your grief.” She looked at Rachel carefully. “If grief is what it is.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Rachel said, curious to see just how brutally honest Madame Halevy would be.

  “I’m suggesting you listen to someone older and wiser for once in your life.”

  It was an honor to be addressed by Madame Halevy, but Rachel did not consider her advice worth having. She knew why her mother’s friends had come. It was not out of concern, but rather an issue of control. They would tell her that the situation in her house was improper and Rachel should be looking for a husband among the older, widowed men in the congregation.

  “Some women turn to the wrong person for solace,” Madame Halevy told Rachel.

  “Do they?” Rachel said. “Do they turn to you?”

  “Let us help you,” Madame Jobart suggested. She was involved at the synagogue’s school, and had gone so far as to question Rachel’s children. They called Monsieur Pizzarro Freddy, and they didn’t seem to understand what she meant when she asked where he slept. His room, she had been told by one of the sons. I don’t think he sleeps, she had been told by the other. “Once you are involved in the right activities,” Madame Jobart now suggested to Rachel, “you avoid any actions that can lead to disaster.”

  “Perhaps we can help find you a suitable match,” Madame Halevy added.

  The children, quiet and well behaved, were listening in. Isaac was quiet in his mother’s arms, his eyes wide.

  “Thank you for your consideration.” Rachel’s face was burning. She was certain they had a list of old men who would just as soon have a maid as a wife. She swallowed the words she wished to say, having practiced trying to tame her arrogance in every conversation she had ever had with her mother. “At the moment I’m quite busy with my children.”

  “We would hate to see you make a mistake,” the women who were not her friends told her.

  “Everyone makes mistakes,” Rachel said.

  “Not like this,” she was told by Madame Halevy. She pulled Rachel aside. “I spoke with Frédéric,” she said. “But it is clear he is under some sort of spell.”

  “You spoke with him?” Rachel was furious. “Who are you to say anything?”

  “I was your mother’s friend, therefore I am trying to do as she would have if she were still alive. Your feelings about this man may seem earth-shattering now, but what is love if not an enchantment. Is it worth it to destroy the lives of your children? If you choose to be an outcast, so be it, but it will be their fate as well.”

  “What do you know about love?”

  “It’s ruin I know about,” Madame Halevy told her. “Be as smart as you think you are. Put your heart away and listen to me.”

  Rachel took the children home and left them in Rosalie’s care. She needed time to think things through. She walked along the beach where the turtles nested, where she and Frédéric had lain together in the sand watching a miracle. She considered what Rosalie said could happen if you loved someone too much. She remembered everything Jestine had lost in the name of love. Her thoughts were scattered and she could not gather them together. And then she realized she could not act on thoughts alone.

  At night she lay beside Frédéric in his small bed. She went there after the children were asleep, moving so quietly through the corridors that she might well have been a ghost herself. Sometimes she could hear the rain when they fell asleep together. He would say how wrong it was, how he was betraying his uncle and, most important, defiling her. It was at these times she remembered how young he was. He had no idea she didn’t care about any of that. And anyway, such regret did not stop him. He often pushed a chair against the door so none of the children could wander in accidentally. He kept a hand over her mouth so she would not cry out, but there was a time when neither could control themselves. Emma came to the door, frightened, asking if there were ghosts in the house for she had heard their moaning. Rachel slipped on her nightgown and opened the door; she scooped her daughter up to put her back to bed. “There are no such things,” she whispered. But Emma had seen a ghost in her mother’s bed. He had taken on the form of their beloved Freddy. In the morning Emma left a circle of salt around the chair where her uncle usually sat, for Rosalie had said that spirits feared not only the color blue but the sting of salt as well.

  That same night Frédéric asked to marry her. He did it in the French manner, formally. He had planned the evening, asking Rosalie to take the children out, going to the finest jewelers, where he bought a slim gold band that was exquisite, with hallmarks from France. He took pink flowers from the garden for their table, but was stung while doing so. When he came inside with the bougainvillea, Rachel saw that he’d been hurt. She paid no attention to the flowers, but instead took his fingers into her mouth. The old women in town said a bee sting could be soothed in this manner, but Frédéric was inflamed. He took her to bed right then and wouldn’t let her leave, even when Rosalie called for her that supper needed to be started. He kept one hand over her mouth so she couldn’t answer, and she bit him as she had in his dream, and he laughed to think there was so little room between the everyday world and his dreams.

  At last, Rachel moved away and slipped on her dress. While her back was turned, Frédéric went onto one knee, without a stitch of clothing on, and asked her to be his wife. Rachel laughed so hard she collapsed beside him on the floor.

  Frédéric shook his head, hurt. “You’re laughing at me.”

  “I’m not,” she insisted. “It’s simply that we can’t.”

  “Of course we can.” He stood and turned away from her as he began to dress.

  Rachel went to embrace him, resting her head against h
is back. She felt everything inside of him, including the hurt she had just caused him. She loved him twice as much as she had only a moment ago.

  “Are you certain you want to face Madame Halevy?” she asked.

  Now it was his turn to laugh. “I thought you had no fear of that witch. I know that I don’t. This is our business, not hers or anyone else’s. In the end they’ll be won over.”

  “You don’t know these people. They have lived a hundred lives of suffering, all for their freedom. There’s a reason for their rules and a reason they can’t abide people like me. They will turn against us.”

  “No,” Frédéric insisted. “They’ll have no choice but to accept us.”

  He kissed her without stopping, and she knew what Madame Halevy had said was true, and that she would bring ruin on them if it was her fate to do so.

  She said yes to his proposal, but refused to wear his ring until they were wed. She walked along the beach in the evenings, wondering if she should reconsider. She was the older, more experienced person. She should have known better and called a halt to their love affair. She could have written to his family and insisted they bring him home and send someone in his place, an old uncle, a married couple, the nastiest man in the family.

  She had tried her best to keep Frédéric away. After Isaac’s death she had written a letter to his nephew, suggesting he stay in France. Thank you for your kindness, but don’t feel you must come to our Island, for I am fine on my own. He’d written back, Of course I will come to assist you. She had cursed him, but in the morning after she’d read his response she’d woken to rainfall though it was the dry season. Now she reread his letter and noticed a line scrawled beneath his name she’d overlooked before.