Easter Island (7 page)

“Of course,” says Edward, “the South Pacific is vastly different from the African continent.”

“Africa! Yes!” he exclaims. Then, eagerly, he begins the story of his experience with what he calls “savage discontent”—a phenomenon about which he hopes soon to write a scholarly paper. An anthropologist such as Edward would no doubt take interest in his observations. And on he goes with tales of stolen revolvers and bands of natives, of poisoned arrows raining from the sky, finishing each story with a swig of gin, as though still astonished at his ability to survive such danger. “
Bien sûr.
” He thumps his emptied glass on the table beside him. “Yet, here I am. You see?” He knocks his fist against his chest. “One must have strength. Courage.
Resolve.
And then such uprisings will merely be”—his hand flaps in the air—“a cure for boredom.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier,” asks Elsa, drawing a new card from the table, “to stay in Belgium and go to the theater?”

He turns to Edward. “Theater?”

Elsa reorders her cards with great concentration. She is tired of playing audience to this tedious man.

“Well. What you say of courage is indeed true,” says Edward. “The foreigner has many new and unsettling experiences. The change in diet alone can be a cause for alarm.”

“Théâtre?”
the man repeats, giving the word its full French pronunciation.

You sound like a brute, Elsa wants to tell him. Uprisings as a form of amusement! She’s heard enough. And why must Edward be so diplomatic? She knows he agrees with her—in his own book, Edward emphasized the need for imperial subjects to respect the peoples of their colonies. But a row? Edward won’t have it. She’d like to remind him of his own book’s final chapter, “Toward Greater Understanding,” her favorite: the one part of his writing that made her think Edward, in addition to collecting and compiling data, harbored a deep sympathy for his subjects. But now she wonders at the sincerity of his feelings.

Suddenly, the man looks past Elsa. “Hélène!”

Elsa turns. A finely dressed woman of seventy or so strides toward them. A thick gold necklace clings to her chest. Three broad bangles anchor each of her wrists. Edward rises, and Andreas conducts introductions. Finally, the woman sits carefully on the edge of her seat and turns to her husband.

“Nous parlons de voyages,”
he says.

Edward says, “We are headed for the South Pacific. On an expedition for the Royal Geographic Society.”

“Ah,
le Pacifique du sud.
Well, you must beware of mosquitoes. You have lots of quinine, I hope. You can never have too much quinine.”

Do these people, Elsa wonders, love nothing more than to alert others of danger?

“Quinine?” asks Alice, who Elsa sees has accumulated almost an entire deck of cards in her fist.

“Qui-nine,” answers Madame Lordet. “You use it for the treatment of the malarial fever. It is taken from the bark of a tree. A dose of three drops at bedtime is best.”

“Fever?!” Alice’s hands slacken, and several cards flutter to the floor.

The woman’s head tilts contemplatively to one side.

“We have tents with nets,” Elsa says. “Mosquito nets. Don’t worry, Allie.”

“Fever?”

“
Ma chérie.
Do not be worried,” says Madame Lordet, her voice gentle. “You will just tell the mosquito to go away and leave you alone! You will say ‘Shoo,’ and he will fly off!”

Alice smiles, tosses her cards to the side.

“I think somebody has won the game!” Madame Lordet leans toward Elsa, necklace jangling, and whispers, “My niece in Antwerp”—she shakes her head with regret—“is just the same.”

After the card game, Madame Lordet offers to take Alice to the parlor to cheer the Ping-Pong matches. “My Adèle just adores watching the balls go back and forth,” she says, lifting a pale finger to illustrate the motion.

“Well,” Elsa begins politely, “Alice has a variety of interests more stimulating than ball-watching.” How tiresome, though, the endless assumptions. “You might ask her to draw your portrait. She’s quite a good artist.”

“An artist!” The woman smiles, shakes her head in wondrous delight, as though before her has pranced a monkey in a top hat. “
Merveilleux.
”

Elsa strains a smile and offers a polite good-bye, planting a kiss on Alice’s honeyed scalp. From the table she picks up
On the Origin of Species
and tucks it in the crook of her arm. Edward smiles; the book, a handsome first edition, was his wedding gift to her. The night before leaving England, he presented her with a collection of Darwin: five books, each bound in burgundy leather, the spines lettered in gold, and her new, married initials—EPB—embossed on all the title pages. She has been carrying this volume from her cabin to the deck to the lounge without a moment, yet, for study. Now she can steal a few minutes.

Elsa climbs the steps to the boat’s upper deck, but no sooner has she reached the windy promenade than she thinks of turning back. She is sickened by the idea of this woman dragging Alice through the parlor like a pet. Elsa tries to shake the image from her mind. Her father always admonished her for this—her desire to argue Alice’s abilities. Alice was Alice, he said, no matter how she was perceived. Ignorance wounded only the ignorant. But for Elsa, it was a matter of defending Alice’s honor. Even if each contemptuous stare could be disregarded, she couldn’t help but feel that left unchecked, the weight of them all might soon press against Alice. And part of Elsa suspected her father was simply too tired, too old, for outrage. She had seen him outraged just once in her life: She had been nine years old, sitting in Dr. Chapple’s London consultation room with her father and Alice, listening as the doctor explained the medical specifications of amentia—
state of restricted potentiality . . . arrest of cerebral development . . . insufficient cortical neurons
—at the time, an endless muddle of syllables to Elsa, but words she would hear again for years to come. What Elsa did understand was that Dr. Chapple said there were places they could send Alice—the Royal Albert Asylum in Lancaster, the Sandlebridge School for the Feeble-Minded—places that would accommodate, and this phrase etched itself in Elsa’s mind,
mental defectives
. Elsa finally slid forward in her chair and asked what to her seemed the most relevant question: “Can you fix her?”

“I’m afraid, my dear girl,” said the doctor, removing his glasses for this final pronouncement, rubbing the bridge of his nose, “the condition of amentia, though its external manifestations can be reduced through a proper balance of stimulus and rest, is both permanent and untreatable.”

Her father nodded silently.

The doctor then began scribbling. “However, take one part caraway seeds, one part ginger and salt, and spread it on bread with a touch of butter. This has been shown successful at temporarily quelling mild episodes of hysteria.” Her father’s gaze was fixed on the floor, so Elsa accepted the doctor’s paper.

Once they were outside, on the steps of Dr. Chapple’s office, after the door had closed behind them, her father raised his hand and slapped Elsa’s face. He had never done this before.

“Understand this,” he said. “Alice does not need to be fixed. She needs to be cared for. And you will not now or ever refer to any of Alice’s behavior as a problem or defect. Do I need to repeat myself?”

Elsa’s head dropped—she had meant only to see if they could help Alice. She refused to answer. Was she not the one who always fought on Alice’s behalf? Suddenly a shriek erupted beside her—Alice, hand raised above her head, face flushed with anger, began to twist and spin, until the propeller of her arm landed with a firm thwack on their father’s stomach. She swung back for another strike, but their father caught her wrist. His eyes were mapped with capillaries.

“Alice. My little Alice.”

But Alice only glared at him, the vein on her forehead plump with rage, her narrow chest rising and falling with exertion. He released her wrist and Alice again launched her arm.

“Allie,” said Elsa, grabbing her. “It’s all right.”

Their father stared down at them as though searching for the just response. This was too much for him; Elsa could see it. It was the first time he had shown such exhaustion, such confusion. He shook his head, then walked down the steps toward the busy London street.

“Elsa, I hit him!” Alice wrenched free from Elsa’s grip. “I hit Papa. Did you see me?” She sprang to her toes and began to bounce.

Tugging Alice by the sleeve, Elsa hurried down the steps until they flanked him. “Father,” said Elsa. “Please . . . Father.”

He did not stop; he did not even look at them.

“I’m sorry, Father.”

“Hmmnn? What is it?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Elsa’s sorry!” shouted Alice.

He seemed disoriented. “You must catch your breath, Elsa. Calm yourself. Why have you let yourself get flustered?”

“Elsa’s sorry!”

“Elsa? Sorry? What on earth for?” He glanced up at the sky and sighed, a long, tired sound that seemed to have taken years to work its way out of him. “No. No one needs to be sorry. No one. Let’s get home before dark.”

And together they walked down the sidewalk in silence, as though nothing had happened.

On the boat’s rain-washed promenade, Elsa hears the rumble of the engine, the sharp voice of a mother forbidding her child to run, the murmurs of a couple leaning on the railing to watch the sun break through the clouds. The rain has stopped, but a cold wind sweeps the deck. She trails her fingertips along the chilly rail and surveys the horizon. No England; no Europe. Is it really possible to leave the past behind? To begin anew? But Elsa knows all too well this yearning in herself. When leaving home for her first governess post, she had imagined she could start afresh, could unhinge her former frame of solemnity and let herself curl into a new, carefree girl, the kind she had always envied. But the frame was too old, and, despite her hopes, despite her efforts, it held firm.

Seating herself on a dry bench, Elsa opens
On the Origin of Species.
She’s read some of this before—her father, of course, had a copy; and often it could be found in the libraries of her employers. But this is
her
volume. Burgundy leather, beautiful. She smiles at the thought that she can crease the pages. She can mark the margins. She can drip tea across the pristine ivory pages. “First edition” means little; what matters is that the book is her own, and as such should bear traces of her use. With this in mind, Elsa turns to the introduction and with her thumb and forefinger nicks the page’s upper corner. There. She looks up, hoping, perhaps, that someone has seen her. A silly gesture, she knows, but it fills her with a sudden satisfaction, as if this small act of destruction, of rebellion, has for a moment offset the prudence of all her other choices.

Elsa begins reading, and with her pencil underlines passages of interest. This, too, gives her great pleasure, and she wonders if some primitive instinct is at work. Her pupils always scrawled their names on lesson books—front covers, back covers, random pages—as if they had an unwavering need to document the event of their learning, to mark the territory their minds traveled. Am I no different, she wonders, than a schoolgirl hoping that a few possessions will remind the world of my existence?

She reads on.

There is a striking parallelism in the laws of life throughout time and space; the laws governing the succession of forms in past times being nearly the same with those governing at the present time. . . .

The words seem to flow through her.
Past times, present time
—yes, there is a largeness to it all, something beyond her, beyond this vast steamer and this endless ocean. Elsa pencils a note, turns the page, and suddenly senses herself smiling. I love this, she thinks. I feel like a true scholar. All those grammar and geography and mathematics lessons gone—here is Darwin; here is an amazing theory.

A burst of laughter distracts her—farther down the deck two young women in leghorn hats are strolling. Their eyes are locked on a young man reading, and as they pass him, there is another burst of laughter that draws his attention from the magazine. This brief game won, the women lean into each other, whispering, their hats forming a canopy above them. There is an ease in these women, a carelessness Elsa envies. She has never been like that. Since childhood, she has lived in constant vigilance. Always she has had Alice to look after, her father to tend to. Alice needed her patience. Her father, her obedience. And when she became a governess, Elsa begrudgingly acquired the most difficult, for her, of dispositions—humility. Over time, these duties had produced in her a seriousness that made others uneasy. Made men uneasy. She was not, after all, ugly; her skin was smooth, her hair chestnut and silken, though a little thin. When she looked at herself in the mirror, her features seemed soft and balanced, and she thought she must be as pleasant to look at as the next girl. Still, the tension in her demeanor made men look past her to more lighthearted girls. Even Max, who shared her gravity, had drawn back from it at first.

Several days after his return from Kiel, he came to say hello in the schoolroom. Elsa was at the table with Otto and Huberta, reviewing English prepositions, when he walked over, extended one hand, and laid it for a moment on each child’s head. Looking down at their lesson books, he asked Otto, the oldest, in English, “And how do you like the new governess?”

“Sehr gut, Papa.”

“Have we brought her all the way from England to help you speak German?” He turned to Elsa. “Have you settled in well?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Prepositions?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Excellent.”

And with that, he left. An entire month passed before he spoke to her again. But she thought his disinterest a sign she was doing her job well. The staff was the foundation of a household—best unseen.

Their next conversation had to do with a pocket watch Huberta had taken from her father’s office and, when Elsa tried to retrieve it, let tumble down the marble staircase. When Elsa picked it up, she saw the glass face had been cracked. And rather than have Huberta—who was hopelessly fitful and clumsy, who sometimes reminded her of Alice—disciplined, Elsa told the head maid she had broken it herself and that the repair costs should be taken from her wages.