Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel (11 page)

The local boys were now leaving, but the tourists had been coming. The two seemed connected, like they could mean the same thing. The tourists were older men and younger women; they seemed immune to the war. Or they seemed to be their own type of war.

The first time Eeona had walked into the Hospitality Lounge there was a man and there was air-conditioning. Eeona had never known of such a thing as air-conditioning. The air was cool and stifling, and the man who ran the lounge was cool and stiff. The man’s name was Mr. Barry. He sat in a low chair behind a counter that seemed to dwarf him. He had the radio on too loudly and it was blasting the voice of a young personality from St. John calling himself Mervyn Manatee.

The lounge was one big room with two water toilets, complete with running water, each enclosed by a door. One door said “Ladies” and had a small emblem of a yellow-haired woman shaded by a parasol beneath the letters, so everyone would know what a lady looked like. The other door said “Gentlemen,” and the painted pale man beneath it wore a top hat. No one had ever worn a top hat on the island.

In the lounge there were soft chairs for the visitors. There was a copy of the islands’ newspaper weighted down with a sleeve of wood. Mr. Barry served hot bush tea in the morning and cold rum punch in the afternoon.
His job was to cater to the island’s new tsunami of visitors and real estate developers.

That first day Mr. Barry bought everything Eeona showed him—hats made of palm leaves with the initials USVI threaded in, crocheted toilet-paper covers in the island’s own colors of yellow and blue. His voice tripped prices higher than Eeona had hoped for. Then he asked her to come again when she had more wares. She returned with coasters made of lace and napkin holders made of seashells. He wandered to the end of his audacity and requested that she stay. He wanted the pleasure of simply looking at her. He served her a salary for this pleasure.

For Eeona, just sitting in the Hospitality Lounge was a little return of the luxury that was her birthright. In the air-conditioning her hair did not curl up at the temples. Her lipstick settled on her mouth without flaking. Sometimes in the AC little beads of cold would rise out of her skin like miniature volcanoes, so she crocheted herself a shawl. She flounced it around her shoulders and even wore it to and from work. And since she lived in Savan, and the Hospitality Lounge was on the first floor of the Grand Hotel, Eeona cruised the entire length of town in that shawl, despite the heat. Yes, let them see. She worked in air-conditioning! Mr. Barry was her employer in the Hospitality Lounge but it looked to any of us as though she was running things.

Mr. Barry was not a U.S. Virgin Islander or a British Virgin Islander, and not a Puerto Rican, which was most of what we had known for so long. Eeona barely realized that he was a human being. For months and then for years she’d treated him as though he might be a dried-up tree. When she spoke to him, it was only an excuse to speak to herself.

“Mrs. Lovernkrandt lost her house and the rocking chair. Indeed, one could say she lost everything.”

“I am so sorry, Miss Eeona,” he said politely, because he didn’t know the Lovernkrandts at all.

He did, however, know about the sinking of
The Homecoming
. Even on his home island of St. Kitts it had been an important ship. He knew the many stories. One was that the captain had not drowned in the surprising surge onto the reefs, but had simply walked off his ship before they had even entered Anegada waters. Mr. Barry knew that Eeona was the captain’s daughter. Eeona had been a debutante and the darling of the island. She was the kind of woman who, without her sad history, would have been beyond Mr. Barry’s station. But now Mr. Barry fancied himself as her almost beau; he even asked her to marry him—more than once. She had not said yes as yet. But Eeona still worked for him and so there was still a chance.

At the time of the boys leaving for war, Eeona was arriving at the age of thirty. For a woman in her time this was the age of desperation or resignation. Eeona had given in to neither. Besides, an old maid and a free woman might be the same dangerous witchlike thing. It was just a matter of choosing the correct way to view things. It was, indeed, nice to be sought after and not just ogled, even if the man was beneath her.

The Tourism Commission funded Mr. Barry’s Hospitality Lounge and funded Eeona to smile at the white American women who spoke slowly to her. Eeona kept her hair pinned up and wore blue to ward off the randy American sailors, soldiers, and tourist men. All day she gripped straw tightly as she forced it into braids for baskets. She held her needles as if they were surgeon’s knives as she looped them through the yarn for purses and shawls.

Several times each day the bells hanging from the door jangled and then hot air blew in. A woman and a man, faces pink and sweaty, would burst in smiling. Sometimes it was two men. “Hi, there!” the man would say to Eeona. Which was inappropriate on many levels. Still, Eeona would stand to pour them some tea.

Servitude was not necessarily a step back, she told herself. It was all in
the angle of vision. This wasn’t at all what Liva had stooped so low to offer. This was more like being a hostess of a fine home. Eeona was simply refining all the skills she would need when her life came gushing back. She was ready. She had taken care. Hadn’t she found Anette a husband? Hadn’t she watched out for Esau?

Jacob Esau was a sand-colored man with long mangrove legs and, as far as anyone could say, a McKenzie. Studying eugenics wasn’t something he wanted to do. His eldest brother, Adam, was in dentistry school. The second brother, Mark, was going to be a lawyer. The next one, Saul, wasn’t very bright and was held back, challenged with the McKenzie daftness. Saul became an architect—the very first black master builder on the Virgin Islands government payroll, though he’d never thought of himself as black before. Doctor was really the only thing Rebekah had left. The study of genes, that is what she wanted of her favorite son. She believed that to be the magical element of medicine.

Jacob displayed an early brilliance, and so his mother sent him to first grade at three, ensuring that he would miss Anette in school. Rebekah told him “doctor” with her long hand wide open toward his face as if in offering. Her hands and arms were lean and long and beautiful. She always kept them bare, attracting her husband and eventually flinging him away—though she didn’t know she was sending him right to Eeona Bradshaw. That would come later.

It was almost scandalous the way Rebekah always wore long dresses but then never failed to expose a slice of her shoulder or a rounding of elbow. Her skirts swept the ground and collected a respectable film of dirt at the hem. Jacob had only seen his mother’s animal left foot once. He’d been
too young and too sleepy to even remember. But he knew she was powerful. She offered him doctor. She told him he would be a great golden man if he knew what went into making a man.

Jacob would have chosen something academic, something artistic. He would have been a professor who played the steel pan. He would have been a professional traveler, joined the Navy. Daddy Benjamin had been in the U.S. Navy. Daddy had lived in Puerto Rico and then had disappeared for good into El Yunque. The McKenzie uncles now sent some meager money for college but didn’t really interfere, and so they were not available for emulation. If Benjamin had died for sure, one of them would have taken the boys, like they took any fatherless cousins. They would split them up amongst themselves and tell Rebekah to go back to her family. But Rebekah would not have it. There had been no funeral and so who could say that Benjamin McKenzie was dead? Maybe he would return any day to be father and husband.

Actually, Benjamin McKenzie did not die. Even though that had been Rebekah’s obeah intention. Scatter his two legs in many directions, she had canted. But instead, Benjamin had grown six more metaphoric legs, eight in all. She’d sent him into the rain forest of Puerto Rico’s El Yunque to be taken by the wilderness. But instead, he ended up in The Rain Forest of St. Croix and became the wilderness. Rebekah had stuffed tiny shreds of American licorice and Caribbean stinking toe fruit into the waistband of her husband’s underwear before he left for P.R. The licorice so people would want to kill him and the stinking toe so he would be easy to find. But instead, he was invisible. Flying from Puerto Rico to St. Croix and even eventually to St. Thomas without anyone making note. And people didn’t kill him. Instead, they put their lives in his care. Her obeah seemed to have worked, even though it didn’t. When it came to love and marriage, Rebekah often had it exactly wrong.

Mrs. Rebekah McKenzie was a woman of roots and incantations. But this is the Caribbean and so no one is one thing; no one is pure. Rebekah
was an obeah woman who might sell limes in the market square, but she was also the most sought-after piano teacher to debutantes. This was another way she was unlike the other McKenzie wives, who were whittled away under their husband’s hands.

Did Rebekah collect money from the piano teaching? It could not have been enough to keep her independent, for the McKenzie uncles would not have knowingly allowed that. There was a limit to how working-class she could be. They allowed the selling in the market: a gardening hobby, they assumed, with the daftness of men who only know other men. They always reminded Jacob that though they’d been absent when he was a child, it was they who financed him through college because his father never came back from the base in Puerto Rico.

But Rebekah always seemed to have more than enough to send a package of stewed cherries in the mail or a new jacket she bought in one of the nice stores built for tourists. Jacob would hide the stewed cherries—a sweet too island for his Yankee friends to understand—and he would flaunt the jacket, demonstrating that even a West Indian boy could be worthy of the bachelor’s degree they were all slaving for. But it was Rebekah, a eugenicist of sorts herself, who made all her boys into these remarkable professional people.

In the end, and not without its irony, Jacob was the only one who would continue Benjamin McKenzie’s line, though it wasn’t really a McKenzie line at all. He would fall in love with that little brown girl, but she was a divorcée with a child. And to make it worse, she was from a fallen family. Marrying low or lowered would be an anomaly never heard of among McKenzie men. And then, of course, there was the thing neither he nor the girl knew.

We’d all heard it before, “That one is your second cousin. This one is your young aunt.” The island so small that parents had to be vigilant to prevent intermarrying, and in the government nepotism was the only way anything got done. But Rebekah did not tell her boy why not Anette; she
did not tell him about Anette at all. If Jacob was deemed illegitimate, he would lose the McKenzie respectability and the McKenzie money. He needed both to get through medical school.

Jacob’s mother could make dust out of bones and blood, and blow it into faces that would crack to pieces the next day. She could send a serpent into your dreams as you slept in the valley even though she was mountains away. Jacob was the last son. “Doctor,” she said, and thought she had settled it all.

—

Jacob’s brothers played the tuba and the saxophone and the upright bass long before jazz became fashionable on this island. They were McKenzies. Ultra-manism made them odd and standoffish, but because it was manly, it made them odd in an acceptable way. But Jacob wanted to play steel pan. He loved the way the notes sounded like water. He wanted to jump in Carnival come April. As McKenzies, they danced awkwardly down the parade route with the Tiny Chinee troupe. They did not play pan—low class as that was. Instead, Jacob was made to play the piano. He played his mother’s piano. And he became a doctor, which was quite suitable for a McKenzie. But he didn’t do it the way his mother wanted and so in a way he would still be hidden behind Saul’s mysterious buildings that poked out of the St. Thomas soil; behind Mark, who told jokes in court and never, not once, won a case; and Adam, the dentist brother who was too bizarre in his methods to be trusted even with a loop of floss. Jacob Esau was a doctor because his mother told him that was what was left for her to give. But before Jacob could become a doctor, he had to meet Anette, and before he could meet Anette, he had to live through the war.

Whether it was the longing for belonging or her crippling fear of boats, Anette couldn’t say. But when the other Army wives headed to the base in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, where there was free housing, she did not go. She stayed there and lived with her husband’s mother, which was fitting enough, and tried to figure out how to make babies, even though her husband was across the water.

She met up with Gertie and the two went around like girls again.

Elder sister Eeona stayed alone in the old apartment. She spent hours staring at the mirror taking her own breath away. Then she read the paper and sewed grass-stuffed dollies for the Hospitality Lounge. Thrice in one week she went to the library and picked up a novel. She plowed through the books until the gas in the lamp burnt down. Every now and then, Anette came by bearing a stew that her mother-in-law had made, passing it off as her own. Eeona critiqued the intensity of the pepper, the color of the broth, and the texture of the taña. But the truth is that she was enjoying Anette’s company. The truth is that they had been together, only them, for a long time.

“Fish and johnnycakes were your specialty before,” Eeona said, by way of praising Anette’s hand.

“Oh, please, Eeona.” Anette smiled downward. “That was too easy.”

After many months alone, Eeona found herself one evening sitting and looking at her hands. The blue veins rising through her wrists. She slipped her own hand into a pair of lace gloves that had been her mother’s; she had tried and failed to copy them. But now she saw how neatly they fit her own hand. She sat at her dining table and faced the two empty chairs. They were cheap chairs, not the kind she’d had at Villa by the Sea.

Anette had said that she would visit more often than she ever did. Eeona
noticed her own disappointment and was disappointed in herself. Her episodes worsened. She would find herself staring off into space, sometimes saying silent things to herself. Then the urge to wander would wash over her and she would rise up and walk out the door, despite the time. She would walk to the sea. She would walk to the mountains. She would return home and it would start again. Perhaps it was good that she lived alone, so no one could witness.

This lonely evening, it seemed to Eeona that the air might suddenly materialize a person. It seemed that someone might be hiding beyond a door or waiting on the other side of the window. Anyone. Anyone? Eeona rested her hands in her lap in such a way that it would look natural, despite the deliberateness of their positioning. She breathed but made sure that her breath did not come heavy and collapse her chest—for though she was beautiful, she had to fight against her body’s any betrayal. A feeling came on her like a drowning tide. An episode of longing like Mama Antoinette’s? But Eeona was no longer trapped and yet . . . she needed a push. She should just stand and jump and maybe leap out of the window. She wasn’t journeying to her big true life, whatever that was. Would she even know her life when she found it?

Eeona did not remove Antoinette’s gloves as she ate the soup she had prepared for her solitary dinner. She did not realize that music was playing from afar until she found that she was tapping her foot. She stomped it to shake the rhythm off, for the music was only a common calypso. The half-empty bowl of soup was before her. Her gloved hands now rested beside the bowl.

The feeling of waves, of water, of walking off a ship came up to her neck until she stood up in the little living room. Stood up to save herself from the drowning in her mind. She only had one friend who she might go to for talk and help, but he was not even a friend.