Pigeon Feathers (22 page)

“Of course,” Ralph said swiftly, at the same time realizing that for her there was no “of course” to it. She knew nothing about his country. He felt firmer, having gauged her ignorance, and having moved to the hard ground of information. “Nobody denies them schools. In the South the schools are segregated. But in the North, and the West, and so on, there’s no problem.” He hunched his shoulders, feeling at his back Eve’s disapproval of his saying “problem.”

“But”—the doctor’s wife’s freckles gathered under her eyes as she squinted into the heart of the issue—“would
your
children go to school with them?”

“Sure. Good heavens. Why not?” He was relieved to clear this up, to lock this door. He hoped the doctor’s wife would now turn away and talk of something else.

She sighed. “Of course, you in America have lived with the problem so long. In England, now, they’re just waking up; the blacks are
pouring
into London.”

A wave, pushed by one behind it, slid so far up the slant of sand that their feet were unexpectedly soaked. For a few seconds their ankles glittered in rippling sleeves of retreating
water. Eve said slowly, “You talk as if they had asked to be made slaves and brought here.”

“Mommy, look! Mommy, look!” Kate’s voice, mingling with Larry’s babyish yips of excitement, came from far down the beach. Their little silhouettes were jiggling around something dark at their feet, and out of the sea grape an old woman in a kerchief and a young man with a naked chest had emerged to watch them, amused to see what amused these exotic children. Eve rose, casting down, for Ralph to see, a startled and indignant look at the doctor’s wife’s body, as if it were an offensive piece of rubbish washed up on the pure sands of her mind.

As Eve walked away, the doctor’s wife said, “Doesn’t she take a tan beautifully?”

“Yes, she always does. She’s part French.” With his wife out of earshot, Ralph relaxed into the sand. Mediating between the two women had demanded an exhausting equilibrium. He resigned himself to listening; he knew the doctor’s wife’s tongue would be loosened. The presence of another white queen inhibited her, diluted her authority.

“Do you want to hear a frightening story?”

“Sure.” He acquiesced uneasily. The attention of the houses behind them seemed to grow more intense. He felt that he and his family were liked in the village; the doctor’s wife, driving down from the center of the island to enjoy their beach, assumed an incriminating alliance which he did not wish to exist. For, when the sun went down, she would go home, leaving them alone in the village with the night and its noises. Their tilly lamps hissed; black bugs droned into the lamps and fell crackling onto the table. Far up the road a boy practiced on his lonely steel drum, and next door, in an unpainted cabin that was never unshuttered, a woman wailed and a man infrequently growled a brief, dangerous complaint.

“When Vic Johnson left,” the doctor’s wife said, lowering her voice and sinking back on her elbow, to bring her face closer to Ralph’s, “they had a party to greet the new parson, a very nice young colored boy from St. Kitts.
Very
nice, I must say, and they say very intelligent, though I haven’t heard him preach. Well, the Warden—you haven’t met him, and I dare say you won’t, a big smooth Jamaican, takes himself, oh,
ever
so seriously—the Warden makes this little speech. He of course mentions Vic, forty years and so on, but right at the end he says that he knows we will not miss Reverend Johnson, because the new vicar is such a fine young man, comes to us with such an excellent record of study, and the rest of it, and furthermore,
furthermore
, what makes us especially happy and proud, he is one of us. Imagine! One of us! Of course, the young parson was embarrassed to death. It made me so mad I would have jumped up and left if the doctor hadn’t held my hand.
One of us!
Vic had given his life to these people.”

Her voice had become shrill; Ralph spoke in the hope of restraining it. “It seems unnecessary to spell out, but natural,” he said.

“I don’t see anything natural about it. Unnatural, in my book. Unnatural, childish ingratitude. You just don’t know how unnatural these people are. If you could see one-tenth of the antics, and then the selfishness, the doctor puts up with. At two in the morning, ‘Doctor, Doctor, come save my child,’ and then, a week later, when he tries to collect his poor little dollar or two, they don’t
remember
. They don’t remember at all. And if he insists—‘The white people are stealing our money.’ Oh. I hate them. God forgive me, I’ve come to hate them. They’re
not
natural. They’re not fully human.” Seeing his hand begin a protesting movement, she added, “And for
that matter, do you know what they say about you and your wife?” It was as if a shadow cruising through her words now made its lunge.

“No. Do they say something?”

“This is just to show how malicious they are. They say your wife has a touch of the brush.” It took Ralph a moment to expand “brush” into “tar brush.” He laughed; what else?

The doctor’s wife laughed, too; but under the blond eyebrows her blue eyes, the pupils pinpricks in the sun, were fixed on his face. She expected his face to crack and the truth to escape. “You see how dark she is,” she explained. “How tan.” He watched her tongue tick as she suspensefully pronounced the last two words.

Blood rushed through his body; the wound was confused; his anger entangled him with his attacker. He was supplying an absurd assault with teeth out of himself. “She’s always taken a good tan.”

“And you see,” the doctor’s wife went on, still not unpinning her eyes from his face, “that’s why they say you came here. No tourists come here, least of all with children. They say your wife’s being part Negro has kept you out of the hotels on the better islands.”

He felt certain that this ingenious argument was wholly her own. “We came here because it was cheap,” he said.

“Of
course
,” she said, “of
course
. But they can’t believe that. They believe, you see, that all Americans are
rich
.” Which was just what, Ralph suspected, she and the doctor believed.

He stood up, wet sand collapsing from his legs. In an effort to control his excitement, he threw several unrelated laughs, as if out of a renewed apprehension of absurdity, into the air. He looked down at the woman and said, “Well, that explains why they seem to like her better than me.”

The doctor’s wife, having strained her neck to squint up at him, collapsed the rest of the way. She pillowed her head with one arm and threw the other over her eyes. Without her eyes her lips seemed vague and numb. “Oh, no,” she said. “They hate her for getting away with it.”

His laughter this time was totally vacant. “I think I’ll go in again,” he said. “Before the sun fades.”

“It won’t fade,” was the faint, withdrawing answer.

From the safety of the water he watched his tan wife herd his two pale, burned children up the beach, toward the doctor’s wife. He had an urge to shout a warning, then smiled, imagining the amused incredulity that would greet this story when they were back home, at a cocktail party, secure among their own. Abruptly, he felt guilty in relation to his wife. He had betrayed her; his defensiveness had been unworthy of her. She would have wanted him to say something like yes, her great-grandfather picked cotton in Alabama, in America these things are taken for granted, we have no problem. But he saw, like something living glimpsed in a liquid volume, that his imaginary scenarios depended upon, could only live within, a vast unconscious white pride; he and the doctor’s wife were in this together. There was no bottom to his guilt, its intricacy was as dense as a liquid mass. He moved backward in the ocean, touching the ribbed bottom with his toes, until the water wrapped around his throat. Something—seaweed or the pulse of a current—touched Ralph’s calf. He thrashed, and peered down, but saw nothing. He was afraid of the sharks, and he was afraid of the doctor’s wife, so he hung there between them, bleeding shame.

Lifeguard

B
EYOND DOUBT
, I am a splendid fellow. In the autumn, winter, and spring, I execute the duties of a student of divinity; in the summer, I disguise myself in my skin and become a lifeguard. My slightly narrow and gingerly hirsute but not necessarily unmanly chest becomes brown. My smooth back turns the color of caramel, which, in conjunction with the whipped cream of my white pith helmet, gives me, some of my teen-age satellites assure me, a delightfully edible appearance. My legs, which I myself can study, cocked as they are before me while I repose on my elevated wooden throne, are dyed a lustreless maple walnut that accentuates their articulate strength. Correspondingly, the hairs of my body are bleached blond, so that my legs have the pointed elegance of, within a flower, umber anthers dusted with pollen.

For nine months of the year, I pace my pale hands and burning eyes through immense pages of Biblical text barnacled with fudging commentary; through multivolumed apologetics couched in a falsely friendly Victorian voice and bound in subtly abrasive boards of finely ridged, prefaded red; through handbooks of liturgy and histories of dogma; through the bewildering duplicities of Tillich’s divine politicking; through
the suave table talk of Father D’Arcy, Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and other such moderns mistakenly put at their ease by the exquisite antique furniture and overstuffed larder of the hospitable St. Thomas; through the terrifying attempts of Kierkegaard, Berdyaev, and Barth to scourge God into being. I sway appalled on the ladder of minus signs by which theologians would escape the void. I tiptoe like a burglar into the house of naturalism to steal the silver. An acrobat, I swing from wisp to wisp. Newman’s iridescent cobwebs crush in my hands. Pascal’s blackboard mathematics are erased by a passing shoulder. The cave drawings, astoundingly vital by candlelight, of those aboriginal magicians, Paul and Augustine, in daylight fade into mere anthropology. The diverting productions of literary flirts like Chesterton, Eliot, Auden, and Greene—whether they regard Christianity as a pastel forest designed for a fairyland romp or a deliciously miasmic pit from which chiaroscuro can be mined with mechanical buckets—in the end all infallibly strike, despite the comic variety of gongs and mallets, the note of the rich young man who on the coast of Judaea refused in dismay to sell all that he had.

Then, for the remaining quarter of the solar revolution, I rest my eyes on a sheet of brilliant sand printed with the runes of naked human bodies. That there is no discrepancy between my studies, that the texts of the flesh complement those of the mind, is the easy burden of my sermon.

On the back rest of my lifeguard’s chair is painted a cross—true, a red cross, signifying bandages, splints, spirits of ammonia, and sunburn unguents. Nevertheless, it comforts me. Each morning, as I mount into my chair, my athletic and youthfully fuzzy toes expertly gripping the slats that form a ladder, it is as if I am climbing into an immense, rigid, loosely fitting vestment.

Again, in each of my roles I sit attentively perched on the edge of an immensity. That the sea, with its multiform and mysterious hosts, its savage and senseless rages, no longer comfortably serves as a divine metaphor indicates how severely humanism has corrupted our creed. We seek God now in flowers and good deeds, and the immensities of blue that surround the little scabs of land upon which we draw our lives to their unsatisfactory conclusions are suffused by science with vacuous horror. I myself can hardly bear the thought of stars, or begin to count the mortalities of coral. But from my chair the sea, slightly distended by my higher perspective, seems a misty old gentleman stretched at his ease in an immense armchair which has for arms the arms of this bay and for an antimacassar the freshly laundered sky. Sailboats float on his surface like idle and unrelated but benevolent thoughts. The sighing of the surf is the rhythmic lifting of his ripple-stitched vest as he breathes. Consider. We enter the sea with a shock; our skin and blood shout in protest. But, that instant, that leap, past, what do we find? Ecstasy and buoyance. Swimming offers a parable. We struggle and thrash, and drown; we succumb, even in despair, and float, and are saved.

With what timidity, with what a sense of trespass, do I set forward even this obliquely a thought so official! Forgive me. I am not yet ordained; I am too disordered to deal with the main text. My competence is marginal, and I will confine myself to the gloss of flesh with which this particular margin, this one beach, is annotated each day.

Here the cinema of life is run backwards. The old are the first to arrive. They are idle, and have lost the gift of sleep. Each of our bodies is a clock that loses time. Young as I am, I can hear in myself the protein acids ticking; I wake at odd hours and in the shuddering darkness and silence feel my
death rushing toward me like an express train. The older we get, and the fewer the mornings left to us, the more deeply dawn stabs us awake. The old ladies wear wide straw hats and, in their hats’ shadows, smiles as wide, which they bestow upon each other, upon salty shells they discover in the morning-smooth sand, and even upon me, downy-eyed from my night of dissipation. The gentlemen are often incongruous: withered white legs support brazen barrel chests, absurdly potent, bustling with white froth. How these old roosters preen on their “condition”! With what fatuous expertness they swim in the icy water—always, however, prudently parallel to the shore, at a depth no greater than their height.