The Whiteness of Bones (32 page)

It is conceivable that a woman might never be able to relax her vigilance, and, neither, she realized, could some men. Who could trust Alysse? Alysse could not break a man’s neck with a flick of her hand, but Alysse had found, both in her defense and in her ambition, other ways in which to use her strength. That her goals were materialistic and greedy, rather than sexual and licentious, did not make her any the less capable of injury. The difference, and it was of great importance, Mamie knew, was that Alysse did not subject her victims to physical harm, and death. It was not an equal struggle.

“He was my best friend,” de Beaupré said.

There does not seem to have been sexual aggression in this house, Mamie thought in confusion, but how am I to really know? She was tired. It is impossible to know, she thought as she felt her eyes closing in exhaustion.

The last thing she heard him say was, “And I think I may say I was his.”

She was there for four days. Mr. de Beaupré took care of her, bringing her sweet sherry, crackers and butter and Stilton cheese, and books. She began to read
Jane Eyre
on the second day, even though she had read it before. It was a bound library book, full of pale insects’ wings, from a girls’ private school. It was due back the twenty-sixth of April, 1957.

She telephoned Claire on the third day. Alysse answered the
telephone. She was helping Claire to pack. Alysse, who went to India every year for a month and returned looking astonishingly refreshed and years younger, had asked Claire to stay in her house in Portugal—that way the tweenies won’t steal me blind, she said. Bones Washburn always believed that Alysse never went to India at all, but boarded a direct flight to Zurich where she went straight to the clinic on the mountain, and Bones was right.

“Claire will be such a help,” Alysse said. “Isn’t it wonderful? And we’ll do some shopping.”

“Shopping?” asked Mamie. “Is there anything left? I thought you and your friends had already bought everything on the planet.”

“Teddy Pugh-Page is doing the apartment while I’m away. Completely country English, with a little room off the front hall for muddy Wellingtons and fishing rods and those straw basket things they put the dead fish in after they’ve caught them, and tweed caps. Maybe the walls in my personal tartan. You won’t even know you’re in New York. I’m
sick
of New York. And Claire says she’s sick of New York, too. I tell you, no one has manners anymore. The way people behave at table chills the soul. I’ve had black cleaning ladies who had better manners. And, frankly, I’m shattered by the number of people who don’t send flowers, or notes at least, after a party. Shattered. Here, Claire wants to speak to you.”

“Mamie?”

Mamie took a breath.

“Mamie, where are you?”

“I’m at Alder’s grandmother’s house.”

“I was so worried about you. You seemed so weird the other morning.”

“Are you really going away? You’ve decided so quickly.”

“Yes, well, I hope you don’t mind. Alysse just asked me
yesterday and it seemed like such a fun thing to do. There’s some duke she wants me to meet. Actually, she wants me to marry him. I’ll water the garden and open the mail while she’s in India.”

“We talked about this one day by the river, do you remember? Heroines with private incomes.”

“I don’t remember. It must have been someone else.”

“No,” Mamie said. “It was you.”

“You sound funny. Are you sick?”

“How’s Brooke?”

“Don’t mention her name! This whole time, she was going out with Sean, too. Just by themselves.”

“She didn’t look it.” Mamie couldn’t help herself.

“Exactly!” Claire was furious. “That’s just the point. I get tied up and slapped and she gets earrings and chocolate.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Mamie said.

There was a long pause as neither of them spoke.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” Mamie said at last.

“We leave in the morning,” Claire said. “I’ll be back at the end of summer. Alysse has to be here in September for the Antiques Show.”

“You’re going to become another Alysse, if you’re not careful.”

“Oh, Mamie, I wish you were coming with us.”

“Maybe you won’t become Alysse. You believe that everything is permissible. She’s only interested in what advances her. I think I finally figured out what’s wrong with your idea that it doesn’t matter what you do so long as no one is hurt against their will—I even take into account your argument that it’s a matter of choice. It’s just not that personal, Claire.”

“What isn’t?” Mamie could hear Claire yawn.

“All of it. It can’t be. The soul needs more. The soul asks for more. A certain amount of transcendence is necessary. And
responsibility. Remember when Mrs. Nagata would scold us for disturbing her silkworms and tell us that the Buddha was in us
and
the worms, so how could we be so thoughtless? I’m not sure she was right about the godhead, it’s nice to think she was, but you could start there, start small, and work up. Reverence for your own body. And his body. Your regard might grow until you encompassed whole countries, whole nationalities.”

“You think so?” Claire said something to Alysse that sounded to Mamie like “pinch the cat.”

“That’s not what I wanted to tell you, though,” said Mamie. “It’s about the other night. At the birthday.”

“Do you know what happened to my shoes? I can’t find them anywhere and I want to take them.”

“Vinnie has them.”

“Who’s Vinnie?”

Mamie had anticipated some resistance from Claire, but it had never occurred to her that Claire would not remember anything. She did not know what to say for a moment. “Your friend. The man who held me down and came in my mouth.”

“Oh, Mamie.
Such
a sensitivo.” Claire laughed. “The last thing I remember is taking a toke of something unbelievable through a rubber tube. I don’t even know what it was. You weren’t even there, Mamie!”

“I’m afraid I was. You’re going to get yourself killed, Claire.”

“Brooke had diarrhea for days. I’ll never do that again.”

“Good.” Mamie took a big breath, and then she gave up. “Neither will I.” I’ll tell her another time, she thought, and maybe she really would.

“Well, hundreds of kisses, Mamie.”

Mamie hesitated. “Six or seven kisses, Claire.”

“Oh, I
am
going to miss you!”

Alder came on the fifth day. He had been calling the Crawfords’ apartment and he was very worried, even though he had spoken twice to Alysse and had asked her to give Mamie the message that he had called and the number where Mamie could find him. He had been in Palm Beach, Baby having summoned him to discuss, at last, the terms of their separation. He had been asking to see her for weeks and she had always refused, only to call suddenly, drunkenly, to say that if he could be there in six hours she would listen, alone and without her brothers, to what he had to offer her. He had tried to reach Mamie, but she had already left for the birthday party. He had even sent a telegram to the Crawfords.

“I thought you were dead,” she said. She was in bed in the gray room, wearing a faded blue satin nightgown made for Mrs. Lee’s trousseau by Poiret. Mr. de Beaupré had brought it down to her, with a pair of swansdown slippers, yellow with age.

Alder sat on the edge of the bed. He held her hand. “I wouldn’t die without telling you,” he said.

“Hiroshi did. McCully did.”

“Who?”

She told him about the birthday and what had happened in the room above the Aloha Kai, what the man had done to her, with Claire watching. She told it to him very simply, without trying to explain what she had felt, because she was afraid that he would be repulsed by her violation and unable to love her, and because she was afraid that he would be so infuriated, in the way that men have of appropriating the woman’s outrage and making it about their own assaulted honor, that he would call the police or go after the man himself. She explained,
without unnecessarily betraying her sister, that there had been drugs in the room, perhaps heroin, and that Claire and Brooke had been there for quite a while before she’d found them.

When he was so stricken and sad for her, when he did not jump up and threaten to kill the man, when he held her to him and stroked her hair and face, she began to cry.

“I thought I’d feel revulsion for my body and have to undergo some ritualistic cleansing, wash it with Mrs. Kaona’s bitter herbs, before I let you touch me. I thought I’d lost my body again, but it’s come back to me these last few days. Mr. de Beaupré somehow made me understand. It’s still my body. He didn’t take it away from me. No one has ever taken it from me, although I thought they had for such a long time.”

He wiped her face.

“Do you remember,” she asked, “when we talked about vaginas, the Cooze Seminars, do you remember? Well, I think I’ve worked it out these last few days. It is what started everything, you know, all my trouble, a vagina. That’s how it began. Under the banyan tree. It’s why McCully died. He was looking for me and I was looking for Hiroshi.”

He didn’t understand her. He thought that she might be delirious.

“And it’s what got me into trouble on my birthday. The bad thing is, I don’t know what I can do about it.” Physiognomy as fate, she thought. Vagina as fate. Vagina as fight. Vagina as fête.

He calmed her, and smoothed and kissed her hair and swollen face.

“I think I will go home,” she said. She lay back on the pillow. “Home to the island.” She smiled sadly and covered her eyes with her arm.

He did not tell her then that he had gone to Palm Beach to ask Baby to divorce him. Baby, drinking gin fizzes, had
tormented him for three days before she’d grown bored and told him, laughing uproariously, that she would never, ever, not in a
millones años
, divorce him. He said that, in that unfortunate instance, he would have to divorce her. He was also going to fight for the child. She refused to let him see his daughter and when he angrily looked through the house, he realized that the baby, Delores, had been taken away to prevent him from seeing her. “Good luck, Meester Macho,” Baby screamed after him when he walked across the wet lawn to his taxi.

“Perhaps I’ll bring Delores,” he said to Mamie. “If you ask us.”

Mamie smiled. “But not Baby.”

“No, I won’t bring Baby.” He hesitated. “I’m going to divorce her.”

He rested his head against her head. He was not sure if she believed him.

“I don’t know how much my mother likes me, but perhaps it’s time I found out,” Mamie said.

“Who did you say died without telling you?” he asked.

“Oh, I will tell you all about it when you come to the island.”

“Tell me now.”

“No,” she said. “I want to stop thinking about them.”

He fell asleep quickly, and Mamie, not thinking about them, trying not to think about them for the first time in years, fell asleep, too.

III

There it was, green and gorgeous.

Mary was waiting for her at the Lihue airport with a white ginger lei she had made herself, and a bouquet of gardenias from the camp. It was raining softly, but the rain was invisible unless you caught a quick flash of it in the light, running like a school of small silver fish just below the surface. The mountains were veiled by a smokey scrim of chiffon.