The Marriage of Opposites

by Alice Hoffman

  “If we have a son,” Henri said. “We should call him Leo. For the lion of the stars.”

  “What if I wasn’t who you thought I was?” Lydia asked. Her pretty face was furrowed with worry.

  Henri sat beside her. “Is this about your father? That he didn’t leave much? You know I don’t care. We’re fine, Lydia. There’s no cause to fret.”

  “I believe that my father may have been a horrible person. He may have done something awful.”

  “Well, he’s gone, so it doesn’t really matter. Neither does the money. The old house brought a good amount. Our girls won’t be in need.”

  “But what if I wasn’t who you thought I was.”

  He got them both a drink and sat beside her again.

  “You think I don’t know you?” he asked.

  It was the moment when she could easily have embraced him and thrown the thirtieth letter onto the fire, which was already burning so brightly. She thought about a summer trip she’d made with her parents, to the sea, when she was a girl. They were in the ancient city of La Rochelle, famous for its fields of salt and Roman ruins. She’d never been to the ocean before, but she was entranced. Perhaps she was only seven, little more. She heard her name being spoken in a soft voice, as if someone who knew her was calling to her. She walked over the stones, there for all eternity, made of a soft-clay mineral, filled with the fossils of snails and sea creatures that had lived before there were men and women. Her mother rushed after her, frightened. Don’t you dare, her mother cried. Lydia thought her mother feared she would drown or be taken up in the undertow. Now she realized that wasn’t it at all. It was how easily she was called to the sea, how familiar it seemed to her, how right and how beautiful, as if she belonged to it and it to her.

  In bed she told her husband everything. She could not look at him as she spoke.

  If one is not born of a Jewish mother, it is impossible to be considered a member of the faith, and if she was not, their girls were not either.

  “Easily rectified. Conversion is possible if we feel the need,” Henri said.

  “I cannot convert from who I am, Henri. My mother’s mother was an African slave.”

  “Who your parents were means nothing to me,” Henri told her. “It’s your heart I want.”

  Her false mother had been right about one thing: he was a man who would not harm her. As for her heart, it was already broken. That was the source of the fever that had caused her to lose her past and herself.

  “And your family?” Lydia asked. “What will it mean to them?”

  “There is no need to confide in them, or to invite them into the intimate details of our life.”

  Then she knew: he feared they would not be as open as he was to her true history. The business was a family business, based as much on relationships as on the ebb and flow of the banking world. All of their dealings were held within their community with other Jewish families. The unrest around the King, Louis-Philippe, had had little to do with people of their faith in the past, but his lack of concern for working people had touched off serious uprisings. There were days when black smoke filled the city; angry crowds gathered, provoked by how little the King cared for those who felt disenfranchised. For the Cohens, the desire was to keep on in a normal working manner, and that did not include a daughter-in-law whose background would call attention to them. Still, Lydia did not wish to lie to her own children’s grandparents, uncles, and aunts.

  “What if I wanted them to know?” she said. “What if not being myself had made me ill?”

  “Are you ill?” he said, concerned.

  “I have been in the past, and would be again.”

  Henri held her close. “It’s your choice. Whatever you decide makes no difference to me.”

  The snow continued to fall; still, she heard the nightingale. Lydia wept to think she had not left it any seeds or fruit, and that it might perish on this night. Yet, she did not go to it, but listened until silence overtook her. At last she slept and dreamed of the sea, and when she woke the sky was clear. The snow covered everything and was so deep it had stopped all of Paris. Before she turned to her husband, or looked in on her children, she slipped on her boots and woolen cape and went into the garden.

  The bird was in the snow, frozen, feathers silvered with ice. Lydia knelt. She lifted the nearly weightless body and laid it across her knees. She had always half thought she’d imagined the bird and its song, but no, it was real. The morning was so hushed she could hear her own pulse, and then her ragged breathing, and something like a sob. She took the bird around the side of the house, where the trash barrels and coal bin were kept. She lifted the cover of one of the barrels and dropped the nightingale in. She felt a shudder go through her when she heard the soft thump. She had always thought her mother was in the garden singing to her, watching over her. But no longer. The woman who had raised her was nothing to her anymore.

  The winter went on. Frozen, gray, with hard frosts that were followed by drizzles of snow. She did not see the boy on the street or in the synagogue. Perhaps he was busy with his last term of school. Perhaps he had said all he had to say to her. She found that she missed his presence. Once she walked past his aunt’s house, but didn’t dare to go to the door. He’d said he was leaving at the end of the school term. Paris itself was mayhem. The King had been overthrown, and the factions of his opposition now turned against each other. There was a lawlessness in the streets they hadn’t seen before. Henri suggested that Lydia and the girls stay close to home. For weeks on end their parlor was their world, and Lydia put off changing that world, at least for a while. The girls wore their blue dresses and danced as the snow, in record amounts, fell down and bonfires burned black in the distance.

  Lydia discovered that she was pregnant in the spring. She felt different than she had during her other pregnancies, and she guessed the baby was a boy. If it were, they would call him Leo, after the lion in the sky. Henri had said nothing she had discovered about herself mattered, and to him it didn’t. But of course, there was the rest of the world. She thought about that every time she went out, had a conversation with her neighbors, discussed dinner with Ava. She thought of her children and this son-to-be and what they would have to deal with being their true selves. On some afternoons she wandered off by herself. She did this on Saturdays, letting her mother-in-law take the children to the synagogue, saying her pregnancy made her dizzy. That was not the truth. She took a streetcar to the Montmartre district, where African women worked in the market. Many of them sold baskets woven out of coils of straw, handcrafted, and so beautiful they made tears spring to her eyes. She bought one in a market stall from a woman from Senegal. There were birds in some of the hanging baskets, bright, flittering bits of orange and yellow. The basket she bought was a small oval, and the straw smelled like cardamom. She kept it on her writing table, and held it up to breathe in the scent of the straw. Her heart, though broken, still beat. In bed she and Henri held each other without speaking and made love with urgency, as if the world was ending and the storm was outside the door.

  She sent the boy Camille a note asking if he would meet her in the park. It was nearly June, the time he would be leaving, a lucky thing, for the riots would grow worse until Napoleon III was elected later that year. He would remember France as it was when he first arrived, all color and light and beauty. Lydia waited on the bench as her children played with Ava watching over them. She now knew that the maid had two brothers, and that one would like to come to Paris and go to school, but there wasn’t money enough, and besides, there was the farm to care for. Lydia thought perhaps she would offer her help to Ava’s brother. It was the least she could do.

  Camille was even taller now; he’d become more of a man in a matter of months.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” Lydia said as lightly as she could. “After all these years you seem to have deserted me.”

  “I thought you’d never want to see me again,” he admitted.

  “Why woul
d that be?”

  Camille shrugged. “Perhaps you liked your life as it was.”

  “It was a lie. How can anyone like that?”

  He had a blue canvas bag. “I brought you something. A gift before I leave.”

  It was a painting of this very park, and of her three children, and of the chestnut tree. The park benches looked glittery, as if a rain had fallen. The painted air was a strange blue color, as if the artist had managed to catch bits of mist and add them to his paints.

  She thanked him and kissed his cheek. She was so grateful, but if he wished to give her a gift this wasn’t the one she wanted. She whispered what she most desired and he nodded, then jotted a note concerning the one she preferred. She then gave him the box of sixty letters. She had written in tiny print, which allowed her to tell the entire story of her life as it had been so far, the stolen years her mother knew nothing about.

  Camille took the letters and said his good-byes. He had been following her for so long, it seemed odd that he would leave her in this park and not shadow her on her walk home. He knew her route, knew the way she ran a hand through her youngest daughter’s hair, and that she usually stopped to look in the branches of the chestnut tree in her yard to see if there were birds nesting there. Before he left, Lydia embraced him. He had become quite dear to her.

  “Tell my mother I’m about to give birth to a boy,” she told him. “We’re naming him Leo. I was going to write that in today’s letter, but I’m telling you instead.”

  Camille walked away, then turned back to her and waved before loping off. He left Paris soon after, packing up nearly six years of his life into two small suitcases and a leather trunk. He hated to return home, and could barely bring himself to think of what was waiting for him. His mother’s demands, a job at the store, his paints drying up in the heat of August, the girl he yearned for, Marianna, already married. He would give himself two years, and then, if it was as bad as he imagined it would be, he would find a way to leave. He had that in his blood, a history of men who knew when to stay and when to run away, men who could tell when it was time to find another life and another land.

  Soon after he left, Lydia went to the Pizzarro house. Camille’s aunt welcomed her when the maid ushered her into the drawing room.

  “This is unexpected. But a pleasure!”

  They had not seen each other since Lydia’s initial visit. Tea was offered, but tea had not brought Lydia to this house, and so she said perhaps another time.

  “You must miss your nephew,” Lydia said.

  “Oh, we do,” Madame Pizzarro said warmly.

  “As do I. We became very close. We both were born in St. Thomas, and so he granted me something to remind me of that place.”

  Lydia took out the note Camille had left with her, written hastily in the park, a grin on his face as he complied with her wishes. He wrote to ask that the painting in his aunt and uncle’s parlor be given to Madame Cohen on the day she came calling. Madame Pizzarro frowned as she read it. She had grown accustomed to the painting and did not wish to part with it.

  “I’d have to discuss this with my husband,” she said. “We had it framed at quite some expense.”

  “I can pay you for that. I know you admire the painting, but it means so much to me. More than you can know.” Lydia had gone to stand in front of it. A woman carrying a basket of laundry, the sea behind her. Lydia knew what was inside the house on stilts and what was down the road where the donkeys ate tall grass and dodged toward you if you dared to pull their tails. The disease and shock that had left her without a memory was returning, bit by bit. She found she understood English, and she referred to foods with unfamiliar words, calling the porridge her daughters ate in the mornings fongee and making them laugh.

  She was so overcome that she began to sob.

  “My dear!” Madame Pizarro said. “Please don’t do that!”

  “I’m so sorry,” Lydia said. “I’m so terribly sorry.” She could hardly get the words out in French. She thought of an odd phrase—Jeg er ked af—unsure of what it meant. “I truly don’t think I can live without it.”

  “That’s very clear,” Madame Pizarro said, signaling to her maid to find some brown wrapping paper. “It’s yours, my dear.”

  When she was given the painting, Lydia thanked her hostess and wished her well. She went into the corridor for her cloak and stood there for a few moments to collect herself. The heat inside her felt like the heat on this road leading down to the harbor on days when this woman held her hand. Do not run too far from me, she always said. At last, Lydia ventured into the street. It was nearly summer and the trees smelled sweet. The sound of birdsong echoed in the pale blue air, haint blue, the boy Camille had called this shade. He said it kept the ghosts away. It was the color of the sky in the painting she now had of her mother, whose name was Jestine, and who had been waiting for her daughter ever since she had been stolen, convinced that one day sixty letters would arrive in a box scented with lavender, the herb that always brings a person home.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Ground That We Walk Upon

  CHARLOTTE AMALIE, ST. THOMAS

  1848

  JACOBO CAMILLE PIZZARRO

  He slept for eighteen hours straight after he got off the boat. When he woke it was as if he’d traveled not across the ocean but across time itself. Backward into the heat, listening to the goats’ bells in the hills and the fluttering of moths bumping against the shutters of his darkened chamber. He considered himself to be a man, but here he was still thought of as a boy. Half asleep and half dressed, he made his way to the kitchen, where Rosalie had the fongee porridge of his childhood waiting for him in a yellow bowl, the same bowl he had used when he was a boy who followed at his mother’s heels. He thanked Rosalie, announcing that her cookery tasted much better than anything he’d had in Paris. It was true, the porridge was more than mere sustenance; it brought back his childhood and everything it contained, like an enchantment. As he stood watching Rosalie at the stove, listening to her lilting French, it was as if he’d been charmed into remembering everything he had known on the island, the things he loved as well as the reasons he couldn’t wait to get away.

  The major reason he had wanted to stay in France was evident as soon as he returned to his small bedchamber. There he found his mother unpacking his luggage, rooting around in the large trunk that had been battered from his voyage, the wood damaged by salt air and the rough treatment of its delivery.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he shouted, forgetting in that moment all aspects of courtesy and respect. “Do I have no privacy whatsoever?”

  He went to stand in front of the trunk in which he’d stored six years of his life, protective, guarding its contents, already embattled with the woman who’d given him his life. He loomed over his mother. Perhaps his expression was more fierce than he’d meant for it to be. For an instant she appeared to be afraid of him.

  “Mother,” he said, backing down. “I am used to my privacy.”

  “Do you have something to hide?” She’d recovered from the initial shock of his aggressive stance.

  “My belongings are my business.” He was scowling, his anger now directed to himself for his rude behavior, which was indeed childish. In Paris his aunt had been too busy to know where he was half the time. He suspected she was involved with one of his uncle’s business partners, who called at odd hours. This hadn’t bothered him at all. His life had been his own, and his artistry had been appreciated by his teachers and his fellow students.

  “It’s your father’s trunk,” his mother informed him, putting him in his place. “He paid for it, not you.”

  “Then let him be the one to look through it.”

  But Rachel had already spied the box packed alongside his clothing. Her expression darkened as she reached for it. She glared at him and held it in her hands. “Light as a feather, Jacobo.”

  “It has nothing to do with you,” he replied. “And please do not refer to me
that way.”

  He no longer thought of himself as Jacobo, but as Camille, his French name. But perhaps it was Jacobo, the boy he used to be, who was trying his best not to be affected by his mother’s disapproval. He reached for the wooden box, a bit unsure of himself. People in Charlotte Amalie used to say that Rachel Pizzarro could turn herself into a snake or a witch. They said if you crossed her you’d likely never sleep again. Even he’d heard the rumors, whispers that her blood was made of molasses, which drew men to her even when they had no reason to desire her. Camille took a step away from his mother. She looked no older than when he’d left, although there was a white streak in her hair that hadn’t been there before.

  “It’s for Jestine,” he admitted, and then was angry with himself for feeling the need to appease her.

  When she heard this, Rachel’s countenance changed into something unreadable.

  “And it’s such an important item that you are willing to disrespect your mother? Did you know it took three days for you to be born? Three days when I might have died.”

  Camille’s face flushed with shame. She had told him this many times before. “Mother, I apologize. But you must understand I’m not a child.”

  She was unfazed. “You are my child.”

  There was no way to refute this.

  “Though you have changed your name,” she added.

  “My father calls himself by his third name.” He had a point in this, for his father was referred to as Frédéric rather than Abraham or Gabriel.