“I’m so sorry I wasn’t here during Félix’s illness,” he said.
“Really?” his mother replied. “I would have thought you were quite happy to be in Venezuela. Certainly we hardly heard from you. One letter after Gus’s death.”
From her tone and the way she quickly moved on to greet some neighbors he could not tell whether or not she was happy to have him home. That night he slept in his own childhood room, one he used to share with his brothers. He had secretly sketched upon the wall, but during his absence his renegade artwork must have been discovered, for the wall was washed clean. He heard moths hitting against the shuttered windows and thought of Marianna, the girl he’d once thought he loved. Next time he felt such pangs, he wouldn’t wait to act or give a damn about anyone’s approval of the match. He longed for love, and in his too-small bed he felt more alone than he had in the alleyways of Caracas. Now that he was home he felt more lost than ever, but it was an inner loss. There was an emptiness inside him, an odd sense that the longer he stayed here, the more of a stranger he would be to himself.
THE NEXT DAY, HE went back to the wharf to retrieve his trunk, paying out a small fee to the custom man. He had very little money left, and that was an embarrassment as well. He would have to ask his parents for help, which would be humiliating. He had actually sold a few paintings and sketches, but most of what he earned had been spent on mere survival, food and supplies.
He was in such a hurry he barely noticed a dark-haired woman standing on the esplanade watching him, an umbrella over her head, for the day was brutal with white-hot sunlight. Then she called out his old name, Jacobo. He felt something go through him like a knife. He raised his eyes and recognized his mother. Her face was in the shadows and her expression was difficult to read. Jestine had always told him that he didn’t know Rachel Pomié Petit Pizzarro, not as she’d been, not as she truly was, or had been once. But surely if what Jestine said about her was true, she would not condemn him for his time away, which, despite his early fears about his talents, had been glorious and instructive and wild beyond his imaginings. He had bathed in rain barrels and in river water where there were enormous green fish with teeth. He had slept on beaches where luminous fleas jumped into the black, shimmering air, and in sheds that had sheltered donkeys, and in the arms of women he knew he would never see again. Yet all the while he’d been in Venezuela, he’d dreamed of rain and of snow-covered cobbled streets and of the garden behind his aunt’s house, where he would go to look at stars after Jestine’s daughter had taught him about the constellations. The stars in France were pale pink, set into patterns he’d never seen before. It was Lydia who had pointed out the Lion, and the Crab, and the Hunter whose dog followed him as he chased across the sky.
“Do you not wish to come back to St. Thomas?” he’d asked Lydia once.
“That is like asking would I wish to step off the end of the earth. This is real.” She nodded to the garden around them. “The other is merely a dream.”
He was walking through that dream right now, sweating through it. His mother was approaching on the wharf, and there was little he could do to escape her wrath. His brother had struggled for breath on his deathbed while Camille was dozing in a hammock, staring at the stars, for in Venezuela the stars were yellow and so very far away. They would have appeared unreal to Lydia, so used to the skies of Paris, but he had painted them that way, bits of gold tossed out across the night.
“This is yours, I assume?” Rachel nodded to the trunk. This time it wasn’t his father’s borrowed trunk; he’d left too quickly to pack. He’d bought this one cheaply in Caracas. Already, it was falling apart, the slats of wood having become unglued. His mother pointed and said, “Open it.”
“Here? Can’t it wait?” It had been a long journey due to weather and tides, and the funeral had been a sorrow, and then last night he’d found himself haunted by the heat and the slapping of insects against the windows.
Still his mother insisted. “I want to see what you’ve been doing for two years.”
Camille slid the latch over, then threw open the lid. There were twenty of his paintings, alongside countless sketches of the beaches where he’d set up house with Melbye, if a cooking pot and two cups could be considered home. There were drawings of the women he had been with, and several views of the harbor he most admired from a little fishing village where people called him le Français. He and Melbye both had aliases, which made them chuckle, most especially because Pizzarro wasn’t French but Creole. They were oddities wherever they went, their hands covered with paint and charcoal, two tall, gawky men who liked to drink and laugh and meet women. But Camille took his painting more and more seriously. He could barely be drawn away from his work. He used so many shades of purple and gray when painting landscapes that Melbye had laughed and called him color-blind. “Do you need glasses, my friend?” he’d said. But in the end, Fritz had become his champion. Perhaps it was his rendering of the gold stars in a painted night so black that every tree and shrub was black as well. Melbye had come to understand that his friend saw what others did not. If the bark of a tree was gray at twilight, and the foliage purple, then so be it.
“I see you did a great deal of work,” Rachel said as she examined the contents of the trunk. “If art can be said to be that.” She threw a look at her son, and he shrugged, annoyed.
“It’s a calling,” he said. “Whether or not you wish to think of it as work is entirely up to you.”
“And how do you think of it?”
She had sharp black eyes, a bird’s eyes. Nothing escaped her. Or perhaps every mother could tell when her son was being forthright. Therefore he told the truth.
“I think of it as salvation.”
Rachel had begun to lift a painting from the trunk. It was a study of a harbor, filled with ships. There was a cloudiness to it, as if the seascape had been viewed through a mist. On the day Camille had begun it, he’d worked so feverishly he’d fallen ill and still he could not stop. “I’ll take this one.” She motioned for him to close the trunk and held the painting close.
“Will you?” He laughed. “Since when do you think I can paint? You told me to put it aside. You said none of it looked right.”
“I never said you couldn’t paint. I said I didn’t want you to. Now, it’s clear it doesn’t matter what I say.”
They had begun to walk toward Dronningens Gade, up to the steps where the werewolves were said to be tricked out of catching runaway slaves when they stumbled in the place where the hundredth step should be. Camille continued to be confused. He would have expected his father to have come to help him with his luggage at the harbor, not Madame Pizzarro. He dragged the trunk behind him. His arm was aching. He was sweating through his clothes, and he knew he looked like a man for hire found at the wharf. His mother carried her painting though it was quite cumbersome. She was clearly stronger than she looked, and she took the steps as if she were still a girl. He supposed the painting was hers if she wanted it; still, he wondered what it was that made her choose it.
WHEREAS SHE KEPT THE painting of Jestine in her bedchamber, so that few had seen it, she hung the new painting in the parlor, on the wall above the settee. People noticed. How could they not? It was so unusual, a dreamscape as much as a seascape. Something quite unique, an image you couldn’t look away from. Some of Camille’s older Petit brothers had laughed at how unreal it seemed, but his eldest sister, Hannah, was entranced. When she came for a visit one afternoon she studied the painting for some time, then said, “I had no idea of what true talent you had.”
Camille, embarrassed by his sister’s attentions, thanked her, then shook his head. “I don’t know why our mother wanted it. She doesn’t like art, does she? And certainly she doesn’t like mine.”
“You’re wrong,” his sister said.
Hannah believed she could remember the day Rachel became her mother, or perhaps it was only that Rosalie had told her about that meeting so many times it was fixed in her mind. Sh
e’d been a tiny baby, but young children could recall more than people suspected. She knew that Rosalie was preparing lime chicken soup, and that Rachel had held her and called her a bluebell, then had sung her to sleep. Hannah often visited Rosalie on Sundays. She liked to hear stories not only about her two older brothers, both serious men near middle age now; and her father, Isaac; but also about her first mother, the one who refused to die until she was safely named so that Lilith would not summon her. Sometimes Rachel would read to Hannah’s children from her notebooks, stories which held them rapt with wonder.
“Our mother talks about you often,” Hannah told Camille. “You are the one in the family with talent. She goes on and on about it. Now I understand why.”
He looked at her, unsure, unable to believe that his mother spoke of him in such a light. But he saw in his sister’s eyes that it was true. Hannah insisted that he come with her for a walk. She had her youngest daughters with her, and Camille felt guilty that he could not remember their names. They found themselves at the cemetery. Camille laughed when he realized where they’d wound up.
“Is this the family tradition? To go for a ramble and always end up at the worst place on earth?”
“It’s lovely here,” Hannah insisted. She led him to the Petit grave site. The children danced and played. He could not remember their names, but one had blue eyes, and the other had a wash of freckles across her face. They wore gingham dresses, and their stockings had been rolled down. They tossed brown leaves into the air, which then rained down to the ground.
“I come here all the time with our mother,” Hannah went on. “We lay flowers on my first mother’s grave.”
Indeed, there were red flowers arranged in an earthen vase, so fresh it seemed as if they were still blooming on their branches. Both of Hannah’s daughters had come close, perhaps because they were afraid of ghosts. He hadn’t noticed that they’d slipped their hands into his, but now he did. Bees were buzzing. He was wrong and Hannah was right. This was perhaps the most beautiful place on earth. He felt tears in his eyes.
“Take this with you when you go,” Hannah said, handing him a branch of flowers. “When you run out of things to paint, this place will stay with you.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Camille said. “It’s too late for that.”
WORKING SIDE BY SIDE with his father, he had come to feel a great responsibility. His life on St. Thomas was a burden he wished he could cast off, but couldn’t. Now, with his brothers gone, it was back to the store for him. There was no other option. This time he was quiet and did his work as best he could. He paid attention. He did not sleep in the storeroom or paint when he was supposed to be at the harbor, collecting shipments sent from abroad. He dreamed of Paris, though, and in his dreams he asked Lydia if it was possible to love a place yet still want to leave it. She handed him a small telescope made of steel and brass and leather with a magnifying lens. He looked and saw the constellations—the Fish, the Crab, the Lion, the Hunter—hanging above him like a canopy in the night.
In the evenings he went walking, as his father used to when he first came to this island, as he himself had when he returned from Paris and didn’t know what to do with himself. He went along twisting roads into the hills. From high above the shore he watched the colors of the sea, how the water changed from green to pewter as the clouds went past. He went to the old fort that people said was the portal to hell, where so many slaves had arrived no one could count them all. The fort was empty now, and the stones were pitted from gunshots; some had fallen out altogether and were little more than dust. He went past Madame Halevy’s house. Someone had carefully restored the old mansion; there was a new roof, new green shutters, and in the rear there was a proper garden, with rosebushes imported from England and South Carolina. He meandered out to the countryside, to where Mrs. James lived with her daughter and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. One young man, a grandson, came out to see who was looking for his grandmother.
“I used to talk to her when she worked in town for Madame Halevy,” Camille explained. “I suppose I worked for Mrs. James as well.”
As they talked Camille discovered this fellow Roland was the older brother of the boy who had run to get Camille on the day Madame Halevy’s daughter had shown up. That boy, Richard, who had been so fast Camille and his father had struggled to keep up with him, had drowned just last summer. Everyone in the family still wore black cloth tied around their left arms in his memory. But there was a black band around Roland James’s right arm as well.
“That one’s for my grandmother,” he explained. “She died six months ago.” Roland was as tall as Camille, but better built and heavier, a baker himself, he said, just like his grandmother. He was employed at the Grand Hotel in town. On this day he was visiting his mother, who was old herself. He was a young man who had a great many responsibilities and burdens. He had always been looked upon as the man of the house, though he had older brothers and cousins, because of his sensible nature. “My grandmother was ninety-three when she died. On that day she was still talking about how she rescued a baby from drowning in the rain. She always wished she’d kept him. Was that you?”
Camille shook his head. He knew who that baby was but said nothing. With Mrs. James gone, he was the only one who knew the story of Madame Halevy’s daughter and the son she’d given birth to, then left outside the cemetery, who grew up to be Aaron Rodrigues.
“She said Madame Halevy was certain that my grandmother was an angel,” Roland went on. “That’s why she gave her everything that belonged to her. But I’m going to have to sell it all now to provide for the family. I hope nobody’s ghost is going to be upset by that.”
“Of course you should sell it,” Camille said. “It’s all old-fashioned. The dishes and the furniture should bring a good price.”
“My grandmother insisted she be buried with her two gold rings, so we honored that, though I’m sure they were worth quite a bit. They meant something to her and she said some things need to be buried with you when you go to the next world.”
NOT LONG AFTER THAT, Camille ran into Roland again, this time in a tavern beside the Grand Hotel. After that, they began to meet occasionally for a drink. He missed Fritz and their camaraderie; he was an outsider in his own community, friendless, and his own brothers surely didn’t understand him. Though he went to synagogue with his father every Friday night, he felt more comfortable with Roland. By now they realized they’d gone to the same school and had had the same teachers. They could recite the same poems in German and had memorized the same Bible stories. Their current lives were divergent however. Roland had a wife and four little children, and worked twelve-hour days at the hotel. Camille sketched Roland’s wife, Shirley, and their children. He set to work on a painting of the children chasing a donkey out by the sea road. He liked to go to their family’s house in the Savan for dinner on Sundays, when Shirley made the old recipes. She’d gotten them from Mrs. James before she died and written them all down in a book that she kept on a shelf. She made a perfect fish stew that Camille would have been happy to eat every day of his life. Roland James brought home cakes and tarts from the hotel. He was an amazing baker, far better than his grandmother had been, and his coconut cake had won several awards.
MORE AND MORE CAMILLE missed the old ladies of St. Thomas. The island seemed empty to him on many levels. Some days he did not wish to get out of bed, but he knew he couldn’t be late to the store.
“If I were you I’d go back to Paris,” Roland said to Camille one evening as he walked him partway home through the neighborhood. There were no longer any Jews living in the area; they had all moved to Synagogue Hill. People did still talk about the red-haired painter who had lived in the Savan a few years back, and how the gendarmes had come to grab him, and how he’d sprinted through the streets mostly naked in order to escape the authorities. Some people said Jenny Alek’s boy was his, for he had red hair like the painter’s.
“Listen to me, brother,” R
oland went on. “Run away. I know you’re going to do it. So do it sooner rather than later. One day we won’t see you around and then someone will say, Oh, he’s gone and he’s not coming back. Sure I’ll miss you, but I’ll be happy for you as well. You should do it before something happens and you wind up married with a pack of children.”
Camille laughed. In truth, he hadn’t the money for passage. He was still living in his childhood room, going down to the wharves to collect crates when tea and spices were delivered from ships that sailed from Spain and Portugal, waiting on customers and doing his best to be polite. “All I know is that I’ll still be here tomorrow,” he told Roland.
The men shook hands good night. “I know you were good to my grandmother,” Roland said. “She always talked about the delivery boy who used to sit in the kitchen and pretend to eat dessert. She said you were the only child she ever met who didn’t like sweets. And then you helped her when that lady came from Charleston to make trouble for her. She left something for you if you ever came back. I didn’t say anything right away because I didn’t know whether or not you deserved it. I had to get to know you first.”
They’d kept on walking without realizing it and were already approaching Synagogue Hill. They sat on a bench outside of a shop that sold notions and buttons and clasps, along with lampshades.
Roland handed over a bit of cloth. Tied up inside was a gold ring.
“Madame Halevy’s ring,” Camille said, surprised. It was battered from wearing. “You said your grandmother was buried with it.”
“She was buried with one, but she left the other one for you. She told me she thought you’d come back one day and I’d know you because you would look like you needed a good meal.”
They both laughed at that. “True enough.” Camille was still skinny, with knobby wrist bones and knees.