White Moon Black Sea (18 page)

Medicine, his wife, Charleen Tizzle, who had been his nurse, his son, Moses, his friend Hyram, and the Theosophical Society became the doctor’s life. They had been Moses’ world, too, until the death of his mother when he was eight. The loss served to draw Hyram Wingfield and the two remaining Jeffersons even closer. When someone guessed there was a better upbringing to be had for a motherless boy among the female staff of the Wingfield household, more peace and quiet away from his father’s thrivingly busy clinic, he was moved in there. So the two Jeffersons divided their time between Harlem and East Sixty-fifth Street, in the Wingfield brownstone house which Mirella now owned and where Moses still lived.

Moses saw a copper penny shining in the road. He scooped up the coin and flipped it high into the air off his thumbnail. He watched it twinkling in the sunlight as it flipped over itself and plummeted back to the palm of his hand.

He smiled to himself, recalling his father and Uncle Hyram and their stories about the old days among the hard-core theosophists. Could any child have been so lucky as he to be brought up with such bizzare but intelligent adults? His life was still rich and colorful with beliefs drawn from those the Theosophical Society was founded on — forming a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood
of Humanity where no discrimination of race, creed, sex, caste, or color existed. The Theosophists studied comparative religion and philosophy and science the way others read the Bible. They were dedicated to tracing the patterns in nature’s activities and identifying powers latent in man.

The society emerged from the vision of an American Civil War veteran in 1875, one Colonel Olcott, who was interested in spiritualism and mesmerism. Alongside him was Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a well-known Russian woman. Some dismissed her as a complete fraud. But she drew tremendous admiration from others as a seer and miracle-worker with occult powers derived from some exalted spiritual source. Madam Blavatsky put life into the Eastern, esoteric heart of the society. Uncle Hyram and Moses’ father in their youth had been devout followers. But they were also men of science who believed in the inherent inner teachings. These included a goal of ultimate perfection, when the ego, the soul, is released from the treadmill of reaping from life what it sows either of good or evil. This gave the men a problem with believing that they could get to Tibet to talk with a master without leaving East Sixty-fifth Street. They might make contact on some astral plane. Or the Tibetan masters might materialize themselves into ghostlike forms for those privileged enough to see them. A locked door or a wall was no bar to a visit. However, though they had their doubts, impressions of several visitations of a mystical kind removed the luxury of total disbelief. All their lives they accepted the possibilities. And all along they waited for them to be proved wrong.

Moses’ grandmother and grandfather had been directly involved with Olcott and Blavatsky. His father and Uncle Hyram were taken up by the next most important people in the movement, Mrs. Annie Besant and Mr. Leadbeater and the Indian boy, Krishnamurti, they promoted as the world teacher that the society had been seeking. By the time Moses finished his studies at Harvard and returned once again as a permanent resident in the house on East Sixty-fifth Street, he felt as strongly about the teachings of
Krishnamurti as his father and Uncle Hyram did. And like them, he picked and chose among them.

The two doctors had been in Holland at the Ommen Camp in 1929 when Krishnamurti broke away from the theosophists. As head of the Order of the Star, he dissolved the organization with all its thousands upon thousands of members and announced that the organization had become a crutch for the individual. It prevented him from growing and establishing his uniqueness, which lay in his discovering for himself absolute, unconditional truth. After this, though the two doctors remained until their deaths friends of the theosophists, they assessed Krishnamurti’s teachings for themselves. They freed themselves from dependence on any group or organization to answer life questions.

Moses loved those very special men. They left a legacy of remarkable achievements behind them. For him as executor of both men’s estates, there were always new discoveries of their achievements surfacing to remind him of the spirit that had sustained them.

Humayun. He had never mentioned them to her. Now he realized that he must. How could she possibly know him, love him, if she knew nothing about the men who helped shape his life and the philosophies he lived by? To tell Humayun about Hyram and his father, and his own growing up in a world where you didn’t stop and trace out a path for another to follow or a master design for your own life suddenly made great sense.

She, wanting to know all about Moses and faced with a wall of silence, had accused him of hanging back, of being too modest. And now, as he approached the entrance to the compound, he understood why he found it difficult to tell her about himself. What could it possibly mean to tell her he had a degree in philosophy from Harvard, that he was a first-rate chef, the Wingfield-Corey housekeeper, an archivist for the two elderly eccentrics he loved, that he had had several love affairs that had never worked out? That he was a keep-fit addict who taught underprivileged children in Harlem? What did all that come to in the face of knowing a man sexually down to the very marrow of his bones, to the ecstasy of his soul, the darkest and most
depraved side of his nature, the way she knew him? It came to much, he decided. He had to tell her about his truth, about the light and the bright side of his nature, the wisdom he’d acquired at the elbows of thinkers and seekers and teachers who believed in the goodness of man.

The impressive black iron gates to Rashid’s compound were open. All four Pharaoh hounds lying lazily in the sun sprang to life. One of the security guards appeared as if from nowhere. “Moses, is it?” he asked and called off the dogs. The hounds settled for prancing around the two men and barking greedily for a bit of petting. Moses and Harold, the chief security man, shook hands. They walked together through the grounds toward the house. He presented Moses with a clipboard and Moses signed in.

“Moses, how did you get here? Where’s your car?”

Moses put his hand to his head. The question surprised him. He looked and felt confused. He had forgotten about the car parked a few hundred yards up Gin Lane. He had been caught up in his memories and lost in thought about himself and Humayun. With every step he took toward the house and Humayun, he could feel her powerful pull on him. Passion and desire for her seemed to overwhelm him once again. He stopped and looked at Harold.

“You all right, Mose?”

“Fine, just fine, Harold. I needed to walk for a while. That’s why I left the car down the road. I’d better go back for it.”

“Give me the keys. I’ll have one of the boys drive it into the compound. We’ll leave the keys in the car. It’ll be okay because we’re closing the gates. No other guests are comin’. It’s a great day. The sun and the light, the air, it’s kinda magic. And you got the whole place to yourself. There’s only that Turkish lady, and one of them foreign bodyguards still hangin’ around. Maybe some of the regular staff. See you, Mose.”

Humayun watched Moses shake hands with the security man and continue walking up the white, polished-pebbled drive toward her. She remained partially hidden behind a larger-than-life Henry Moore bronze sculpture, one of his
reclining women, set on the blanket of perfectly-clipped grass. The bronze lady was positioned to face both the compound and the sand dunes, the beach below and the ocean. She glistened in the sun, monumentally seductive and powerful, casting a spell of titanic femininity over the compound.

Humayun disliked the Southampton compound and everything about it. Its modern, aesthetically perfect architecture, the American speedy, clean-cut atmosphere, the household staff, even her sexual encounters with Rashid and his friends. No matter how thrilling the sexual ecstasy, once she came down from those heights, she was uneasy in the surroundings.

She caressed the soft warm curve of the bronze and was soothed by the feel of the reclining goddess and the sight of Moses across the lawn and through the waist-high hedge of the full-blooming, bright blue hydrangeas along the curving drive to the house. For the first time since Rashid left for Paris she felt some joy. His departure had been so sudden, and he had been so preoccupied with getting to Paris that he had left her only with instructions to remain in the house until his return. He had promised to call in a day or two. Five days had passed now, and not a word.

The last thing he had said to her had been about Moses. “Go to any lengths you have to,” Rashid had told her, “but make sure he understands whom you really belong to. Do it in a way that he knows he can have you when
we
want him to.”

Then he had gone to the wall safe in his dressing room behind a Picasso painting of Humayun nude. He had removed a jeweler’s box from it and tossed it to her, saying, “I bought this for you when I was in New York the other day at Harry Winston’s ordering something. Think of it as a gift in celebration of our day together in Crete. Once I saw them, I knew they would suit you as they would no other woman in the world. I was going to give them to you at the New Year, but suddenly I want you to have them now. Enjoy them.”

Humayun wore the thirty-carat emeralds carved as doves on her ears. She brought her hands up to each of
them, and touched them. She did that often when she was wearing them, as she had been doing since he gave them to her. He was right, as so often: They were exotic gems and suited her perfectly. The moment she saw them, she knew they would be her most treasured possession. They were also an affirmation of what she had thought: That Rashid and she would never love each other more than they had that day together in Crete. Nor love each other less.

There were several things odd about Rashid’s departure from the house. He had no idea how long or where he would be. That was not like Rashid, who was always superbly well organized and did very little spontaneously. He was a plotter, a planner, a man who liked to control his movements and those of everyone around him. Yet, he had left her alone to fend for herself with only her bodyguard and her maid. And he left at a time when he wanted to be near Mirella, even though he was still smarting at his banishment from her experience of giving birth. Humayun had been with Rashid when the telephone call came that had taken him away. She understood that it had been for a liaison with a woman. There was nothing unusual about that. The unusual was that at the very last minute he canceled the visit of guests. What he usually did was to offer Humayun’s company to at least two or three of his friends in his absence. He had not done that. She had even heard him refuse her favors to a Supreme Court justice who was besotted with her. Only Moses had been mentioned, and a couple they often invited to enhance their sexual games. They, he suggested, might be of use to discourage Moses’ infatuation with her.

Humayun stepped out from behind the reclining bronze. She was dressed in a gaily hand-painted sarong of large white lilies with long, pointed, emerald-green leaves trumpeting their lifelike beauty on a heliotrope-blue background. She wore a large glamorous bright pink straw hat. The emerald doves nestling in her ears showed magnificently against the pink of the hat and the golden-red of her hair which she wore long and loose. The bareness of her smooth shoulders and arms, her long shapely legs and bare feet glistened in the sunlight like tawny polished marble. In
her beautiful hands, whose slender fingers ended in bright red enamel fingernails and were fraught with rings of colored stones: canary-yellow diamonds, inky-blue sapphires, red, red rubies, and dark green emeralds, she carried her sandals.

It was several minutes before Moses was aware that she was standing in his path, from where she had been studying him. How many times had she made love to him, devastated him with her sexual expertise and watched him respond and take her over, draw her into himself, and surprise her by his cries for more, to be dragged down into the depth she made of sexual depravity. She had lost count. This huge and handsome, well-educated black man: His athletic body had excited her in ways that surprised even her. He had come to her naïve in the tactics of erotic lovemaking, starved of sexual ecstasy, familiar only with the most basic sexual gratification. Walking toward her was a man she had been molding into a sexual animal, a man she was mastering to become her sexual slave. And the joy she felt for the power she had over him was boundless. There was something else that thrilled her, his love for her. She liked very much, maybe too much, his loving her. She adored seeing the light in his eyes when she demanded sexual acts and passions from him that he had hitherto only courted as depraved fantasy. She had caught that look before in other men’s eyes. It was love for her courage in taking them with her where they dared not tread alone or with anyone but her. But there was something more in Moses’ eyes. He touched her heart more than any of the others did or had, and she liked the feeling.

There was a serenity in his face today … and a vulnerability more acute than usual. She liked that. She liked reaching down into his soul, especially his sexual soul, and probing it. Recently she had begun to feel something of his innocence rubbing off on her. She found it amusing and at the same time a trifle exciting. Often, when he had left her bed, she had lain awake and mused that there was a wisp of the little boy in him that appealed to what scant maternal instinct she possessed. But there was something more than a lick of the taciturn preacher
dormant in him that she found most unappealing, even dangerous. What troubled her today was that of late she had grown to want to be more involved in his life. But that day in Crete with Rashid had served to show her how feeble her feeling for Moses was. Rashid was her life, Oda-Lala’s and who and what she was were her life, and she had been forced to face the truth: How much she enjoyed that life, how happy she was in it, and how she would never want to change it. Feeble though that feeling might be, yet she had it still. He had called it love, she had laughed. But she wasn’t laughing now. This was the first time she had seen him since she had been in Crete with Rashid, and still it was there.