The Marriage of Opposites

by Alice Hoffman

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Season of Rain

  CHARLOTTE AMALIE, ST. THOMAS / PARIS, FRANCE

  1855

  RACHEL POMIÉ PETIT PIZZARRO

  There was trouble brewing in America, a lawlessness that sometimes portends war. Our business was failing due to the unreliable shipping trade, particularly along the coast of South Carolina, where piracy was not only indulged but, it seemed, encouraged. Frédéric had made a promise to the ghost of my first husband to watch over his holdings, and therefore would not leave until this promise was fulfilled. I could see he was torn. He had approved my plan to finally go to France; my daughter Delphine was seriously ill in Paris, and my son Camille would soon be going there to study. There was no longer any reason for me to stay. Frédéric knew my heart’s desire had always been to leave this island. He wished to accompany me, but he was too good a man to shirk his responsibilities. Once the business was more settled, both my son and my husband would follow me to France. Mr. Enrique would then be the manager of the store, overseeing day-to-day dealings. A third of our income would belong to him; the rest would be directed to Isaac’s family. We might have paid Mr. Enrique less, but we owed him our lives. Had he not carried my father to the harbor in a wicker basket I would never have come into this world and my children would never have been born. There would have been no woman to greet Frédéric when he arrived in St. Thomas and no one to pay the herb man to save him from his fever.

  As the time for my departure grew near, my husband and I were both seized with nerves. In more than thirty years we had never spent one night apart. After all this time, he was still in love with me, and each time I saw him I felt the same pulse in my throat that I’d had when I gazed out the window and saw him surrounded by bees. Frédéric was fifty-three, still so handsome that women in the market nudged each other when they spied him. I knew what they were thinking when they saw us together, for I was not remarkable in any way. What does he see in her? What spell had she used to enslave him for a lifetime? If they wanted to think I was a witch, I didn’t mind. Perhaps I was one. Perhaps I had called him to me, ensuring that he’d had no choice but to fall in love with me when he saw me in my white slip. It was the one morning I didn’t pin up my dark hair. I had chosen to stand there, half unclothed, even when I saw the desire in his eyes.

  ON MY LAST DAY in St. Thomas I went back to the house where I’d grown up. As I walked through the gate my skin pricked with sadness. I expected to feel the same turmoil I’d always experienced when I thought of the sort of daughter I’d been, never good enough. But there were only spirits of the past here now, jittery, fading things that sparked through the tangle of vines. If the new owners spied me, they didn’t chase me away. They closed the shutters and left me in peace. Perhaps they’d heard rumors about me, or it was possible they saw me open my hands so that the last stirrings of those who had lived here could gather, drawn to the heat of my flesh before they scattered into dust.

  I had imagined I would be distraught when I returned to the pathways of this garden; instead I felt a surprising tenderness for the landscape of my childhood. Despite the marriage of convenience my father had made for me, he had always loved me. He’d respected my intelligence and taught me the business. Because of this I’d always had a high opinion of myself, despite what others thought. True, I was arrogant, but perhaps that is not the worst trait for a woman to have. I knelt down to peer beneath the hedges for the lizard that had been my cousin’s pet, for such creatures are said to live longer than most men. All I saw were some beetles and the neatly raked earth.

  On the other side of the gate, Rosalie’s son, Carlo, was cutting back hedges of oleander. He tossed me a smile when he saw me and shyly called out hello. He was at the ungainly age when he was still a boy but longed to be a man. He worked in the store on Sundays and was a good student at the Moravian School. Rosalie loved him too much, and Mr. Enrique doted upon him even more, if that was possible, but fortunately nothing bad had happened to him. Rosalie no longer believed that love brought a curse. A cruel nursemaid had been the one to suggest her own milk had drowned her first baby. “It was nonsense,” she told me. “Babies die from fever, not from love.”

  Yet I continued to fear I would be punished for my unquenchable longing for Frédéric. I thought of the way God had let the rain fall down upon us on the day the Reverend wouldn’t open the door, and how I had defied them both to get what I wanted. I felt a brand of fear I hadn’t known as a younger woman, just as Madame Halevy predicted I would. We pay a price for everything, I saw that now. I walked more narrowly and thought more carefully before I acted and spoke. I knew the chaos I had brought upon my children when I refused to give up Frédéric. No one had to tell me how selfish I’d been.

  I sat with Rosalie for the last time. To me, she looked nearly the same as she had on the day I met her in Monsieur Petit’s kitchen.

  “I was young then!” She gave me a cup of tea and a slice of coconut cake dolloped with cream. “But not as young as you were.”

  We had both made a promise to the same ghost, and because of that we’d been bound together by fate. That had been part of my good fortune.

  “Let’s not say good-bye,” she said to me on my last day in St. Thomas.

  I agreed it would be best not to. We both knew that I could never thank her enough. She had taught me everything about raising children when I’d become the mother of three so suddenly. Despite the fact that she’d been violated and forced into servitude, she couldn’t have been kinder to a girl who knew nothing, not even what happened when a husband came into bed. “Didn’t your mother tell you anything?” she had asked me each time she discovered how much I had to learn. Whatever I did know had been a lesson from Adelle and then only told to me in whispers to ensure that my mother couldn’t overhear.

  As I was leaving I noted that Rosalie had adopted the rose tree my mother had hated. She said it was an unnatural plant, not worth the water it needed to survive, with huge pink blooms that called wasps and bees to it, but it had been on the patio of the cottage for so long, Rosalie said, who was she to let it die?

  “My mother despised it even though it was a gift from my father. Likely she wanted something more.”

  Rosalie shook her head, mystified by all I still had to learn. “She didn’t like it because it wasn’t for her. There was another woman in your house, and she was very pleased with this gift. Mr. Enrique has been taking care of the rose tree ever since your mother disposed of it.”

  I didn’t ask any questions and she didn’t offer any answers, but we understood each other all the same. We both had come to believe that Adelle was more to my father than most of us had known, except, perhaps, for my mother. As a girl I had known the world by way of my own angry heart, and hadn’t paid attention to issues that didn’t concern me. Children were hushed and dismissed, sent to their rooms. So much the better, I’d always thought. I was immersed in my own troubles, plotting my escape. But now my memory added all I’d failed to see: the intrigue of a closed door, three petals of a fragrant rose burning in a dish in the kitchen, a woman crying, the garden gate closing so softly I hadn’t been sure whether or not I’d heard it, the redness of my father’s eyes when he came to tell me I was to be wed, the way my mother would study Jestine, as if looking for features she might recognize.

  I left Rosalie before either of us could cry. I had spent more time in her company than in anyone else’s, and she in mine. I was fierce with other people, as harsh as my own mother on some occasions, but never with Rosalie. She had managed to see through me. She’d told me things other people would have been afraid to say to my face, but she never told me I was wrong to get into the bed of the young man from France. Now as we said our good-byes, she kissed me three times, then a fourth time for luck. She reminded me of her best piece of advice and suggested I would do well to listen to her.

  Love more, not less.

  IT WAS THE END of the season for the flamboyant trees, the glo
rious month of September. I wouldn’t see flowers such as these again, not unless I traveled to Madagascar. The sailors from that country had gone to great trouble to bring the original specimens across the ocean, wrapping the roots in burlap, sharing their own precious drinking water, all for a blessing on their journey. There were only a few blooms left, but I gathered enough to leave an armful of flowers on Madame Petit’s grave, and on the grave of the Reverend’s first wife, for my marriage to Frédéric had been recognized and my children’s names had been written down in the Book of Life and I believed I owed this to her ghost. I left white stones in remembrance of my sons, and my parents, and of Isaac. He’d known I’d never loved him, but that hadn’t mattered at the time. We had an agreement and we both kept to it. When I left, leaves drifted into my hair. Usually I kept them, out of respect to the spirits, but on this occasion I shook my head, letting them scatter. They came from the bay tree and were spicy with scent. Some people folded them in with their belongings when they packed for a journey, but I left them where they’d fallen.

  JESTINE AND I SET off on a windy day when the sea was green. My husband held me for as long as he could, until the captain called, insisting it was time for us to leave. There was the tide to think of, and seas that grew rougher with each day that was further from summer. Jestine and I both wore black, as if in mourning for the lives we’d once led and the people we would no longer be. We noticed a pelican swooping after our ship and left fish from our dinner on the railings. We collected feathers to keep on our bureaus. But when we were far out to sea, a chill met us and the pelican disappeared. We tossed out crusts of bread and mussels taken from their shells, but there were no birds here, so far from land, only the blue light of the open sea.

  We sailed northward, and soon the ocean turned dark; there were nights a scrim of ice formed on the bow of the boat. We slipped on black gloves and woolen cloaks and drank hot tea with tiny slices of lemon. There was a bushel of lemons and two barrels of limes, and out at sea they were highly prized. We were the only passengers who braved the cold on deck as twilight spread across the horizon. Our cabins were drafty and smelled of mold, and we preferred to stay where we could gaze at the stars, as we had on the nights when the turtles rose from the sea. We’d planned to be on a ship such as this one since we were ten years old. It seemed no time had passed since then, yet we were about to turn sixty. We looked in mirrors and didn’t recognize ourselves. We laughed and pointed and cried out, “Who are these old ladies?”

  When the waves became so high the deck was slippery to walk upon, water sloshed below into our quarters. We needed to hold on to ropes simply to cross to the dining room. We ignored the bad weather as best we could and celebrated our birthdays together, as we always had. We ate shrimp with lime juice and drank white wine while the waves crashed against the hull of the ship. People asked if we were sisters, twins born on the same day. We were amused and said of course not, but I had always wondered about how alike we looked and now I realized other people could see it as well. I had a twinge of feeling for my mother. If Jestine had indeed been my father’s daughter, surely Madame Pomié must have known. No wonder she despised the rose tree, and Adelle, and me, for my father preferred us all to her.

  There was no one left to tell us the truth, so Jestine and I shrugged off such questions. We toasted each other, then cut our birthday cake in even halves and ate every crumb. It didn’t matter what had happened on St. Thomas in the past. All that hurt and love was long ago. It was in the time of the turtles and that time was over. All along the harbor there were lights, and the turtles went elsewhere to lay their eggs. They would not return, just as Jestine and I both knew we were never going back. That was when we stopped wearing black.

  DECADES HAD PASSED SINCE Lyddie had been abducted. I couldn’t understand how time could pass so slowly when we were young, and fly so quickly now. Jestine worried that after so long apart she and Lyddie wouldn’t recognize each other. She said she was now ugly and perhaps she should wear a veil so as not to frighten her daughter and grandchildren. That was nonsense and I said so. If we had been sisters, she would have been the pretty one, I would have been the one who was too smart for her own good, and too bossy. Jestine was still beautiful. Even on the ship, men had glanced at her and could not look away. She flushed, but had no interest. She might have married a dozen times during the past years—certainly there had been men who did their best to win her over, several of whom had come to me and begged me to plead their cases. Some were local men who wished to marry her; two were men of my faith who came to me secretly, certain I would favor them considering my own struggles with the congregation. One was a European businessman who insisted he would do anything to win Jestine. He was particularly ardent and had already planned her future with him: they would go back to Denmark, where no one would know her mother was a slave and she would live as a wealthy Burgher’s wife. Jestine had laughed when I told her his plan. She said she would rather know who her mother was than who he was, so he gave up and went back to Denmark without her. She turned down all of her suitors without regret. Her plan was always to be on this ship, going to Paris.

  ONE NIGHT, I WAS awakened by a sound I didn’t recognize. Then I realized it had begun to rain. We were in the middle of the ocean, between worlds. It was a light rain that fell in endless silver streams, so different from the torrential storms we had on the island. From that time on, it didn’t stop. There was so much rain that the green seed of bitterness I’d always carried inside me bloomed into a flower. It wasn’t some terrible and monstrous plant, even though it had been sown from the sorrow of my mother’s disdain for me. It wasn’t at all what I expected. A white flower with pale green edges. I thought it was a moonflower, a parting gift from the original people on our island, who had wanted nothing more than to bring light wherever they walked.

  Aboard the ship, my childhood came back to me as it had in Rosalie’s cottage. What had been murky was now clear as daylight. I’d come to remember nights my mother waited for my father when he didn’t come home. She would be in the parlor and I would hear her crying. I wondered where he was on those nights. At that age, I still believed in werewolves and feared he would be eaten alive. I remembered confiding in Adelle, telling her I didn’t think my father cared for my mother. She whispered back that you couldn’t force someone to love you. Either he did or he didn’t, and no spell or trick or prayer could make it so. She ran her fingers through my hair as she spoke. I loved the way her voice sounded. I’d held on to the small hope that somehow I could exchange mothers with Jestine. But when, after a disagreement with my mother, I confided in my father that I wished I could be Adelle’s daughter, he slapped me. It was the only time he did so. Never say that again, he told me.

  As we neared France, I wondered if I would miss hearing the sea beneath me as I slept. Sometimes the waves were so big the ship rocked back and forth and I had to hold on to the bedpost or be shaken onto the floor. I knew there were turtles below us, perhaps even the woman in the story who had chosen their way of life over ours. I missed my husband most at night. We often shared our dreams as well as our waking life. Later, when we reunited, we discovered that during separation we had dreamed of each other. There he would be, standing on a cobblestone lane beside the Seine. There I was, casting off my black cape, wearing a white linen slip. We sat entwined on a green bench. Don’t wake up, he would say. When I did I would know he’d been dreaming of me.

  WE ARRIVED IN MARSEILLE, where we spent a few days at a hotel on a bluff overlooking the cold Atlantic. We laughed at our sea legs and were greedy for fresh fruit and vegetables. We slept almost till noontime. Jestine had caught a chill on the ship and now came down with a cough. We booked an extra day at our hotel so that a local doctor could visit. He assured us that if Jestine drank hot tea with honey we could continue on to Paris. We took a train to the gleaming Gare de Lyon station, which had only just opened. My heart was pounding to have finally reached the destination I’d yearned f
or. It was the last few days of the Exposition Universelle, a grand event attended by over five million people since its opening in May in the Jardins des Champs-Elysées. Paris was mad with joy, crowds were everywhere, and we were quite stunned when we arrived in the station. Exiting the train was much like stepping into a storm that swirled in circles. I closed my eyes and listened to the crush around us. It was like listening to the sea. At heart, we were still two girls from an island where everyone knew everyone else. This city was a gorgeous madhouse. Jestine took my hand and pulled me along. My eyes were wide. I was taking it in. The work of Haussmann, who had been commissioned by Napoleon III to reconstruct and reorder the parks and avenues, made the city a mystery, replacing my father’s maps with a new and gorgeous vision. Everything I’d imagined was redesigned and brand new, the Rue de Rivoli completed, and a new square, Place Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, now faced the colonnade of the Louvre, as magnificent a building as there was in all the world. I was as awake as I’d ever been; I was also inside the dream I’d been dreaming my whole life long. How bright it was. How burning. I was a moth in a shabby dress, though I wore my finery. I wanted to be closer to it all, enveloped in the light.

  A beautiful woman was approaching. She wore a fur-trimmed coat over a blue silk dress. When she threw up her arms to wave, I understood this was the same girl who had sat on the porch of the house built on stilts, the child who’d been lost for a lifetime.

  I had given my luck to Jestine and was glad to have done so. She ran to embrace her daughter, who was soon enough joined by three lovely girls. A young boy lagged behind his mother, too shy to say hello. This was Leo, born in August and named for that month’s constellation of the Lion in the sky. Lyddie’s husband, a Monsieur Cohen, had arranged a carriage for us. Lydia came to embrace me and welcome me to Paris as well. “So you’re Camille’s mother. We would never all be together right now if it weren’t for him. He has such integrity!”