American Gothic (9 page)

14

The American

I
WAS TWO weeks before Dr. Lavalle’s busy schedule afforded him the opportunity to visit the new master of Maison de la Falaise. Jean-Pierre Toussaint, the local prefect of police, had already confirmed the physician’s deduction that an American had bought the plantation. Toussaint made it his business to know such things.

As a consciously methodical person, Lavalle was deeply committed to his routines. Every morning he attended to rounds at Hospital St. Jude. At noon, he walked home, ate a light lunch, and took a brief siesta. An early afternoon rest was the custom in Cap Misère, and the doctor found it a sensible one: no one in his right mind would go about his business while the fierce tropical sun was high in the sky. At three every day, Lavalle saw patients at his office in the hospital. Every other day—more often, if there were emergencies—the porter brought Lavalle’s stolid gray saddle horse, Napoleon, to the hospital in the late afternoon, and he called on patients in the surrounding countryside.

The rich lowlands around the island’s capital supported sugarcane plantations, but along the southern coast there was little arable soil between the mountains and sea. That part of the island was dotted with tiny settlements of a few wretched huts, the malnourished peasantry scratching out enough food from subsistence plots and fishing to maintain a tenuous hold on existence. The mountainsides along the coast were ideal for coffee and coca planta-tions, but large-scale operations requiring money and managerial skills had abandoned Haiti after the slave revolts a century earlier. Still, there were a few places left where the island’s idyllic possibilities were realized, including the Fairweather plantation and Maison de la Falaise.

The gardens at Maison de la Falaise were of a classical French design, formal in their arrangement and perfect proportion. The beds were grouped in interlocking fashion around a stone fountain in the center, in which a Greek goddess gracefully poured water from an upturned pitcher that never emptied. The real focal point to the gardens was not the fountain, the flower beds, the hedges, or the walks covered in white pea gravel rolled smooth, but the
maison
itself. Like a masterful landscape painting, the gardens drew the eye toward the Caribbean-style plantation house backed up near the edge of the cliff. (A bit too near the cliff, for Lavalle’s taste. The view near the edge of the precipice made him feel vaguely ill.)

The elegant mansion was the architectural embodiment of all that was good about colonialism, Lavalle thought. It took the sophistication of European culture and interpreted it in a way that was well suited to the local climate and sensibilities. Good architecture was largely a matter of context, in the doctor’s opinion. The architect who designed Fairweather House had not understood this as well as the builder of Maison de la Falaise. Fairweather was an almost perfect representation of an English country house, but it was out of place overlooking the azure blue Caribbean. Maison de la Falaise, in contrast, seemed to have grown naturally out of the limestone cliff it sat atop, a perfect expression of how graciousness could flower between the Tropic of Cancer and the equator, when local beauty was tempered with refinement and taste.

A groom met Lavalle at the house and took the reins when he dismounted. Lavalle instructed the man to water Napoleon. It was obvious that the animal needed a drink, but Lavalle had learned to never make assumptions on the island.

The doctor went up the stairs and into the welcome shade of the broad veranda. The shutters along the ground floor were open, making it seem as if the house was a pavilion in some maharaja’s garden. Lavalle almost expected to go inside and find a raj reclining on a pile of silken pillows.

Waiting to meet him at the entry was a willow-thin black woman wearing a black cotton skirt that fell to her ankles and a white blouse, a colorful bandanna wound around her head. It was the sandals on her feet that set Marie France apart. Not even Magalie Jeanty, Lavalle’s nurse, who had been schooled in a convent, wore shoes.

“
Bonsoir,
Doctor.”

Lavalle took off his hat, looking past Marie at the man bounding down the staircase with great energy. It was Maison de la Falaise’s new owner, the American.

Nathaniel Peregrine confirmed some of Lavalle’s prejudices about Americans but confounded others.

On the one hand, he was tall and lanky, like a cowboy, and with the sort of casual intimacy of disposition that some Europeans found forward rather than friendly. His eyes were, like a bird of prey’s, deeply set, dark, and filled with a sharp, active intelligence. Lavalle imagined Peregrine seated on a horse, scouting ahead through a mountain pass for signs of Indians and grizzly bears.

Yet Peregrine was no typical expatriate Yankee. The best evidence of that was the fact that he spoke beautiful French without a hint of accent, something very rare indeed for an American, in Lavalle’s experience. He was impeccably dressed, which was hardly typical of the Americans the doctor had known in France, though the deficiency with those other men was more a matter of taste and a lack of acquaintance with good tailors than a lack of funds.

Peregrine’s complexion was pale, as if after a long winter. This struck Lavalle as odd, especially after the sea voyage to Haiti. The American said he was devoted to his books and indifferent to the sun and physical rigors. Still, he was a magnificent specimen, Lavalle thought, one of those men born with an abundance of muscle and animal grace, their bodies naturally indifferent to poor diet and insufficient exercise.

Peregrine had a quick wit and was an excellent conversationalist, although he possessed the peculiar American talent of talking easily without revealing significant personal details about himself. The only two important facts Lavalle learned during the time it took to have a glass of wine—which was excellent—was that the American had decided to buy Maison de la Falaise sight unseen after hearing about it from a London broker, and that he had polished his French by an extended residence in Paris.

“Strange that we did not run into each other somewhere in society.”

“Perhaps,” Peregrine said. “But Paris is large city, not to mention a beautiful one.”

“To the City of Light,” Lavalle said, and they clinked glasses.

“Besides,” Peregrine said, “I tended to spend my time with a small circle of intimates.”

“What was her name?” the doctor asked.

“Très bien,”
Peregrine said, and they clicked their crystal glasses together a second time.

“Cherchez la femme,”
Lavalle said.

“It does not matter now,” the American said. “It was a long time ago.”

As for the island, Peregrine was smitten with its beauty.

“I cannot imagine a more perfect setting,” he said, waving his hand at the surroundings that seemed to flow in through the mansion’s open walls. “I look out my front door, and I see a shimmering explosion of color, the brilliant blossoms against a background of deep greenery. I look in the other direction, and framed by the open windows, the sun is going down in a blaze of red, copper, and platinum over the blue sea flecked with scampering silver scallops where the rays glance off the water. This island and the Garden of Eden have a lot in common.”

“Only do not forget that the Garden had its serpent,” Lavalle said. “Perhaps this island does, too.”

“Oh, without a doubt,” Peregrine said. “There is no escaping evil.”

“I am a physician and a scientist…”

“And you put no stock in religion and superstitious mumbo jumbo,” Peregrine said, perceptively recognizing Lavalle’s pause as an unwillingness to risk offending Peregrine. “I completely agree.”

“The problem of evil, when you reduce it to its essence, Peregrine, is man. This island has natural beauty in abundance. It is people who are the problem.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” the American said.

“Whose fault is it that the people live in ignorance and wretched poverty? Infant mortality is unimaginably high. Life expectancy isn’t much beyond forty years. The most basic public health program would eradicate diseases like cholera, which sweep through villages here like the Black Plague did in Europe during the Dark Ages, death cutting wide swaths through the countryside. Government could help, but the government here is, as it is most places, perfectly useless. Man is father of his own woes. It is we who are evil.”

“We are all a fallen race, sinners from birth.”

“Yes,” Lavalle said, “but in a practical, not religious, sense.”

“But surely a man such as you is evidence of redemption. You have given up your medical practice and blood research in Paris to journey to the end of the earth to serve the poor. A lot of people would call you a saint for making such a sacrifice, Doctor.”

“But that is exactly the point. Not that I am a saint or wish to be one,” he added, thinking he would be misunderstood. “Haiti is the kind of place where one can turn back the clock and start over. Coming here represents a return to the garden—garden with a lower case
g
—to see if we might do it differently this time.”

“A place for humanity to start over.”

“Exactly,” Lavalle said. “What chance is there to change society in a place like Paris, where decadent habits and wickedness are deeply ingrained after countless centuries of diligent practice? But here, in a place that is remote and primitive, maybe there is a chance to change things for the better.”

Peregrine looked Lavalle up and down. “I wouldn’t have guessed you were a revolutionary.”

“I’m not. Indeed, I am the furthest thing from a revolutionary that there is. That sort of thinking is a big part of what’s wrong with the world. Charismatic leaders have never been the answer. I sincerely doubt very much good can come from political movements. The world will be saved, if it can be, one man at a time, starting with a few good men making an earnest effort. That is what I have come to Haiti to do.”

“Then you are a humanitarian.”

“One does what one can,” Lavalle said. “There was no health care for children here before I opened the hospital. I do not mean to sound self-righteous—that is an occupational hazard for people like me—but it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, as they say.”

“Then I salute you,” Peregrine said, raising his glass. “You came here to save humanity. I came to escape it.”

“I confess there is a little of that for me here, too, in this place,” Lavalle said with a sigh. “I had to get away from the noise and busy-ness of modern life to find myself. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I also came here to save myself.”

“You’re an honest man, Doctor,” Peregrine said. “It is a pleasure to know you. I hope we become good friends.”

They finished supper before Peregrine brought the conversation back around.

“When you were talking of evil earlier, I thought you were going to say something about the poor woman who was murdered over by Fairweather House.”

Lavalle looked up from his coffee. “How ever did you hear about that?”

“I overheard servants talking.”

“Ah.”

“They said her throat was torn out, as if an animal had attacked her, but that the wounds mysteriously disappeared. How can that be?”

“These islanders are simple people, Peregrine. Few of them can read or even write their name. I would not put much stock in their superstitious stories.”

“But a woman was murdered.”

Lavalle nodded. “It appears so, although she could have died of natural causes.”

“Natural causes? What sort of ‘natural causes’ rips out a woman’s jugular?”

“The matter has been turned over to the police,” Lavalle said, as if that disposed of the question. “It is in their hands now.”

He did not want to tell the American the rest of the story—how he put the body over his saddle and walked the animal to Fairweather House. He had told Helen to stay inside, but Lady Fairweather, a headstrong woman, insisted on bringing a shawl to cover the corpse. Lavalle had remarked to her how curious it was that the tissue damage seemed much less serious than it had been when he first came upon the body. He did not mention the extensive damage to the skin and musculature when the prefect of police arrived a few hours later in a mule cart. By then, the last sign of the fatal injury had repaired itself in the lifeless tissue, which Lavalle knew was patently impossible. Necrotic flesh does not regenerate.

The doctor did not believe in black magic, but he thought it likely that voodoo, as the local witchery was called, had played a role in the death and his subsequent confusion. Possibly Lavalle had fallen victim to the same mass psychosis that led the people to think they were possessed by gods from their primitive pantheon.

The other possibility—and perhaps this was the more likely explanation—was that the concussion Lavalle suffered in the fall from his horse had left his mind in a fugue state, the fantasies of his subconscious mind and reality becoming temporarily intermingled.

Lavalle had not shared any of this with Jean-Pierre Toussaint, the prefect of police. He had no reason to distrust Toussaint, but the policeman was, after all, a native. For all Lavalle knew, Toussaint joined the others in the revels in the hills at night, anointing himself with the blood of sacrificial chickens and goats and dancing around fires, chanting prayers asking to be possessed by ancient gods of the forest.

“Do you suppose voodoo had anything to do with the death?”

Lavalle nearly dropped his coffee cup. It was as if the American had been reading his mind, but that was, of course, impossible.

“The thought had crossed my mind,” Lavalle said. “They’re all mixed up in it.”

“Do you put any stock in it? The servants seem to think its magic is powerful.”

Lavalle snorted. “Are you serious? It is difficult for me to imagine even illiterate peasants believing such flummery, much less a worldly fellow like you. This is 1914, man. As Nietzsche pointed out not too long ago, God is dead. There are no ghosts and goblins.”

“I don’t know that we can be so certain. Maybe supernatural forces exist here more strongly than they do in places like New York and Paris. Science and the electric light have done much to kill man’s innate superstitions. What if disbelief is the thing that drives these forces out of the world? Is it possible that here, on the edge of the jungle and savagery, these powers remain very much alive?”