“We work well together. So yes. It makes sense.”
My mother’s expression was sour. “You could never accept the fact that you were a woman and nothing more. I knew that when I was carrying you. You would cause trouble.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said, even though I wasn’t sorry at all. I was glad to have caused her trouble.
My mother stood up, away from the desk. The meeting was over. “Your husband’s family is sending his nephew from Paris. What happens next will be his decision.”
I stood as well. I didn’t think she could tell I was shaking. I wouldn’t have wanted her to know. “You prefer a man you don’t know to your own daughter?”
“It is the legal system that prefers such things, not I,” my mother reminded me. “I did not inherit anything, and neither will you. But you think you’re above rules, and you can do as you please. Be sure that’s not what you teach your children.”
I could not bring myself to tell Mr. Enrique that our plan had been overruled, but he knew. Everyone knew my husband’s nephew was coming. Mr. Enrique continued to see to the business, but I took to my bed. I felt a fever come over me, a jade green fever in my heart and my bones. My bitterness, inherited from my mother. I was so ill that my mother did not protest when Rosalie called Jestine to visit me. Jestine defied my mother and came to give me ginger tea, but it was not the cure I needed. I noticed she was wearing the pearls, and she laid them on my chest; they were cold as ice. I could focus once more. Jestine said the fever was inside my mind. It was true, a black curtain had come down ever since I’d moved into my mother’s house. The edges of the pink flowers on the vines at the window were blocked out by wooden shutters. I could not see anything that was beautiful.
My mother came to the doorway, a shadow. She had worn black ever since my father died. I looked at her and felt I was looking into a mirror. We resembled each other too much.
“You’re not to come here again,” she said to Jestine. Then she turned to me. “If you don’t intend to die, you’d better get out of bed.”
When she left, Jestine and I looked at each other and broke into laughter. So much for compassion.
“You would have never traded places with me,” I said.
Jestine agreed with a nod. “Not for a day.”
Jestine took up her satchel and brought out a gift she’d made for me, a pale green dress. It looked so fresh, like grass and new leaves. “When you’re ready to give up your mourning it will be here. Then you’ll show your mother you’re not afraid to be who you are.”
I WOULD HAVE LIKED to close my eyes and go on sleeping, but I had children, seven of them. I did what I must, but I did so as a sleepwalker, still in mourning clothes. I was not ready for the green dress. All the same, something had changed inside me. I had one goal in mind: to escape my mother’s house. One afternoon I went to the store to pick up some sugar and flour for Rosalie, and Mr. Enrique signaled me to follow him. There was a staircase that led upstairs. I had remembered the area as a storeroom when we had an overabundance of goods, but now our merchandise had dwindled to a bare minimum, and the rooms revealed themselves to be lodgings. There were several bedchambers and a kitchen with an old stove left behind by the previous owners.
“We could rent this out,” Mr. Enrique said. He had had some of the workmen clean the place up and collect some unused furniture, too old to sell. “Or perhaps you have an idea for this place.”
I grinned. Mr. Enrique had saved me, as he’d once rescued my father. “I’ll take it.” I opened the shutters, and light spilled in. I could see the street and some vendors outside selling fruit.
“What will she have to say about it?” Mr. Enrique asked archly.
“She can say what she likes. It’s up to the stranger from France to decide our fates. My mother has no more say than I do.”
When I insisted we move into the rooms above the store, my mother didn’t challenge me. Perhaps she was thankful to be rid of me. We had caused each other enough grief, and she had aged enormously. She was so ill that she spent her days in my father’s chair. Often, in the dusk, a neighbor would pass by and she would call out my father’s name, as if she had seen him.
Our new lodgings were crowded, and we didn’t have enough furniture, but I preferred it. The younger children all shared a single room, with mattresses on the floor. The older boys, David and Samuel, slept in what had once been a parlor, and we used the kitchen as our common room. I heard Mr. Enrique in the morning, working in the office, setting out orders and keeping the ledgers. Rosalie often made him his tea. She stayed in his office for an hour or more, but I didn’t complain.
WHEN MY MOTHER PASSED on, fully dressed, lying upon the bed she had shared with my father, no one was surprised. I sometimes think she willed her death. She was done with her life here and wanted nothing more than to join her husband. She left me her jewelry, the diamond earrings and brooch she’d slipped into the hem of her skirt, but everything else would belong to my husband’s nephew when he came, including her house and all of her belongings. I sneaked in one night and took some of my father’s maps of Paris, along with a silver pen he used. When I walked through my family’s darkened house I saw sparks in the palms of my hands, but when I tried to catch them, they vanished. If I’d ever been able to call spirits to me, that gift was lost to me now.
In the garden I thought I saw the lizard that had been Aaron’s pet years earlier, there beneath the bushes where the leaves were so dry they sounded like paper rustling. As I was leaving, something held me back. I turned and went to uproot the apple tree from its large ceramic pot, then dragged it along with me. I left a trail of dirt behind, and my arms were aching when I reached the little garden behind the store. I deposited the tree there for the boys to plant in the morning.
In the days that followed I accepted visitors who wished to pay their respects when they called on me with trays of food and sweets. I cannot say I felt true sorrow, and although I kept this to myself, my mother’s closest friend, Madame Halevy, threw me a look when she and her maid brought us dinner, chicken curry and sweet molasses bread and several mango and coconut pastries. “Try to pretend you understand grief,” Madame Halevy said in a pinched voice.
“You seem convinced you know so much more than I do,” I responded ungraciously.
“Think back to this moment when you’re my age,” Madame Halevy told me. “Then you’ll know the answer.”
I wrote to Aaron, and although I didn’t expect the courtesy of a letter, a few weeks after my mother’s death, one arrived. He sent his regrets regarding her passing in a single line. She was good to me when she didn’t have to be. The remainder of his brief letter concerned Jestine. I felt uncomfortable with the intimacy of his words. He missed her terribly, he wrote, and could not stomach his regret. In that way, my mother had ruined his life as well as mine. I stopped reading and brought the letter to Jestine. I sat outside while she took his letter into her bedchamber. After a while she came and joined me. I had glanced at enough of Aaron’s missive to know he had written that their daughter was well cared for, as beautiful a child as she was intelligent. As if that message would lift Jestine’s despair. Perhaps I acted wrongly, he had written, but I acted out of love, so that she might have a better life.
BY NOW IT WAS spring. It was the time when Jestine and I used to wait for the turtles to come to shore, but she had no interest. She didn’t care what happened on our island. She looked toward France, where her heart and soul resided. When we met in the late afternoons, leaving the children in Rosalie’s care, we often walked along the wharf. We watched the harbor, eyeing the ships as they came in, then we made our way home separately.
We spent our thirtieth birthdays together. We were nine months apart, but we took a day in the middle and used it for both of us. We cooked ourselves dinner at Jestine’s house, a child’s meal of fongee pudding and coconut cake, although we also drank plenty of rum in the hope that it would make the next year easier. We
did not say aloud what we wished for, though we wished for the very same thing, to board one of those sailing ships and cross the ocean. Late in the evening, after we had had too much rum, Jestine wept for her daughter. I stayed with her until she fell asleep. I hadn’t realized how lonely it was in her house at night, like a ship lost at sea. When it was past midnight, I walked back to town, up the hill to the store. There was a certain freedom in being a widow. No one asked where I went or with whom I spent my time. Without my mother to keep an eye on me, I could do as I pleased. I wasn’t afraid to be alone on the road. There were bats in every tree, but I waved my hands and drove them away as if I were a spirit. I had been young only a moment ago. I imagined that in the blink of an eye I would be old, and my life would be over before I could make it my own. Perhaps my story would not end as I had planned. Or perhaps it would change into something I had never expected, so that years from now, looking back, I would realize just how little I’d known as a young woman, precisely as Madame Halevy had said.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mortal Love
CHARLOTTE AMALIE, ST. THOMAS
1825
ABRAHAM GABRIEL FRÉDÉRIC PIZZARRO
He arrived at 14 Dronningens Gade, in an area known as the Queen’s Quarter, a day late, after a season of storms, when so many ships were lost between St. Thomas and Charleston that the indigo sea was a graveyard of sails and masts. He’d been sent a parcel that contained the keys to the properties his mother’s brother had owned, as well as all of those this same uncle had inherited from his father-in-law. Abraham Gabriel Frédéric Pizzarro was twenty-two,I but he was the executor of his uncle Isaac’s will and now the sole person to decide the fate of the business and of nearly a dozen relatives, all but three unrelated by blood. His family, some of who lived in Passy, just outside of Paris, and others situated in Bordeaux, where Jews had been recognized as citizens for seventy-five years, had met to decide the fate of the business. His grandfather Pierre Rodrigues Alvares Pizzarro was a Marrano from Portugal, a hidden Jew whose family had lived in that country for several generations after fleeing Spain. After much debate they had concluded that Frédéric’s youth would serve him well in undertaking the long, arduous trip and help him make the adjustment to the tropics. Not many among them wished to go into a region known for yellow fever and losses at sea. Frédéric had read all of the accountings of his uncle’s holdings: two houses, one store, and a failed shipping business. His uncle had left behind too many children and too many debts, all of which must be dealt with. It was up to Frédéric to turn the situation around, as it was now a family enterprise, owned in equal parts by Isaac’s widow, who had no voice in business matters, and the family in France, who did. This was the law and the way property was divided. Frédéric was fluent in French and Spanish and English and Portuguese, which would be helpful despite his complete ignorance of Danish, the official language of what would be his new country, a tiny island he had never heard of before. Still, he was their choice. He was responsible, respectable, and learned in legal matters, the right man for the job.
There had been several women in Paris who were displeased to hear the news of his imminent departure. After all, Frédéric was tall, with dark hair and an easy gait, so handsome that women often chased after him, even on the street, much to his embarrassment, handing him cards with their addresses, inviting him to supper and tea. He always declined these offers of introduction. He didn’t like the feeling of being hunted. He was something of a loner, and his dreams were filled with numbers and theorems. He believed in logic and had a mathematician’s spirit, and he carried a memory of a section of Galileo’s declaration with him. The universe cannot be read until we have learned the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written, which is a mathematical language.
Without these, one is wandering in a dark labyrinth.
Some people said he was an angel, for certainly no ordinary man could act with such integrity, but he laughed when he heard these statements. He was flesh and blood. He lost his temper, made mistakes, knew fear, had wicked thoughts. At times, the intensity of his own desires unnerved him; they were under his control, but struggling to break free it seemed, just beneath his skin, as if he might surprise himself with his grasp of pure pleasure, something he rarely knew. He burned for all he wanted, but ignored his yearnings, for he had a plan for his life, to prosper and be the man in his family that everyone could depend upon. He wished to do this to honor his God, his faith, and his family. And so, when they’d come to him and told him he would be leaving France, he assumed this was God’s plan. He was not an overtly religious man, but he was a believer in miracles both small and large. The voyage had amazed and changed him. He’d clung to the railings of the ship in the midst of storms and let the rain splash down on him. During one particular bad tidal surge, when the waves were twenty feet high, he closed his eyes and told his God to take him and do his will with him. When he opened his eyes to find he was still alive, and had not washed away to a watery death, as two other men on board had, vanishing before anyone could lend a hand or a length of rope, he knew he had a future that was his to claim.
He had left France as a young, naïve student, but three months at sea with older, harder men had made the world seem like a different place, dangerous, it was true, and mystifying, but open and fascinating, a book he had just begun to read. Perhaps fate was not written by God but made by men. The first week he had been too ill to leave his bunk, sickened by the roiling sea and the metallic taste of the water from the barrel outside his door. But by the second week, when storms returned, he pitched in with the sailors and learned more in that one week than he had his entire life. He learned that rats and lemons could be eaten by some men when there was nothing in the storeroom but molded bread, just as he discovered that the stars in the southern world were far brighter than any he had known, and that beneath the water there lived creatures so immense they created waves, as if they were masters of the ocean, and of the universe, and of fate. He gave in to the world that was bigger and more mysterious than he’d ever imagined, and he gave up some of the control he’d kept over his nerves and his desires. People in Paris would have been shocked to hear how often he laughed, and how drunk he managed to get without falling on his face.
He came off the boat with his beard unshaven and his hair so long it fell into his eyes. His leather bag of belongings had been discolored by salt, and his clothing was as filthy as any common sailor’s. He was still too handsome for his own good, but with lines on his face now, despite his youth, formed by the salt and the sea, and tanned skin that was a harder covering, one he’d realized he would need to survive. He knew no one in the town of Charlotte Amalie, or in St. Thomas, or anywhere else in this new world that was so bright he had to blink. The world was incandescent, on fire, and the gloom of his time at sea evaporated. He’d been babied by his mother, a favorite of the family, encouraged by his teachers and mentors. Hardship was a story he’d read about, nothing more, until this voyage, which had let him know some of what the world was like. He now understood that the sea was enormous and bottomless. It was overwhelming and gorgeous and far beyond his control, just like the rest of life. He felt a fool to ever have thought he could predict his future, for he never could have predicted a country in which the steep mountainsides were red, where flocks of birds shook themselves from the trees, like yellow flowers falling upward, into the sky.
He felt blinded by the tawny sunlight as he left the ship, and he quickly developed a squint that lasted the rest of his life. The heat was like a living thing that reached out in an embrace. If you fought it you couldn’t win, so he gave in to it. That was what he’d learned at sea, not to fight the elements or, he was still learning this, his own nature. He didn’t bother dressing in a jacket, as he would have done in France, but instead ducked into a cobbled alley and slipped on the one good white shirt he had left, packed away for this occasion. He’d been told some men collapsed with heat prostratio
n in their first instants on this island. Others slowly went mad, driven to drink by boredom or weather, taking shelter in taverns and the old Danish taphuses, where they fell prey to rum. But as he went along, all he felt was free. He stood on the dock and gazed along the shore, where the houses were built on stilts, so tall they seemed like storks, their shutters painted bright hues of blue and yellow and green. Frédéric had been ill as a boy, with lung disease. In the winter in Paris he always wore two pairs of woolen socks and a heavy vest under his jacket. The heat here felt like heaven to him.
He went along the road into town, passing several busy wharves, stopping under a vine of bougainvillea so he could listen to the bees. The hum was overwhelming; he could feel the buzzing go through him and lodge somewhere inside his heart. Perhaps he had never heard anything before he’d known the sound of these bees. He was a businessman, sent to set things straight and reclaim a failing business, a serious endeavor, and yet it seemed he had walked into a dream. He spied a donkey feasting on green stalks of grass and laughed so loudly that the donkey startled, then brayed and ran away. In his bag he carried a folder of documents, along with a Bible. There was not a day that went by that he did not recite the morning and evening prayers, wearing the skullcap he carried with him. He was a Sephardic Jew whose grandfather had come from the little town called Braganza in Portugal, chased from his home in the middle of the night because of his faith with no belongings and no destination. It was in Frédéric’s blood to travel. He took his prayer book from his bag and stopped in the road to give his gratitude to God, for this day and for every day to come. The time was right to thank the Almighty. A star was appearing in the still blue sky. Evening was early to come here and he hurried with his prayers. Two African men passed him by with a cart of fruits and vegetables, many kinds that Frédéric didn’t recognize. There were brown fruits so sweet the flies buzzed around their bursting, ripening rinds, and orange ones that seemed to be tinted by a painter’s brushstrokes. Each fruit seemed a miracle, plucked out of a dream.