The Laments (9 page)

When Julia brought flowers to Mrs. McCross during her convalescence, she found her in the hospital ward, knitting a sweater picturing Richard the Lionheart, and looking very pale. “Nobody can tell me what happened, but I can’t help feeling that
that woman
is involved,” complained Mrs. McCross.

After the incident, Howard was more resolved than ever to move, and Julia looked hard for reasons to persuade him to stay.

“What about Will, darling? His only friend is here.”

“We’ll make new friends wherever we go,” Howard assured her. “
Better
friends,” he promised.

Copper

“What we need in Rhodesia are smart young men with ideas!” said Seamus Thatcher, the eager recruiter who had flown three thousand miles to visit Howard in the Persian Gulf. It was a familiar line, but Howard was still flattered. The copper-mine company would give him a car and a house, and he would make enough money to save besides. So after a long chat over several drinks, and a handshake with Julia, and a signature on the dotted line, Seamus Thatcher moved on to seek his next recruit, never to be seen again.

“We’ll have beautiful rosebushes,” said Howard to Julia. “Darling, you’ll be able to paint in the garden like Monet at Giverny!”

JULIA SAID HER FAREWELLS
to Trixie at the beach so that the boys could have one last time together. Her friend’s manner was brusque and skeptical; she hated good-byes.

“Where on earth are you going?” she asked.

“Albo, a copper town in Northern Rhodesia.”

“Forgive me if I don’t see the appeal,” murmured Trixie. “What’s in it for you? You’ll be bored to death!”

Julia looked wounded by this remark. “I hope to paint again,” she said, adding, “I thought you’d be happy for me.”

Trixie fumbled for her sunglasses and slipped them on. “You’re my best friend. Why should I be happy to see you go?”

The boys danced across the foamy rim of a wave, bumped into each other, and broke up into peals of laughter.

“We’ll both write,” suggested Julia.

“Horseshit!” Trixie sniffed. “I’ve never written a letter in my life, and I’m not gonna start now. My boarding school plucked a hair out of your head for every misspelled word, and two for incorrect punctuation. I told those bastards I’d never write again—and I’ve kept my word.” Trixie readjusted her sunglasses. “You know, you’re going to get tired of following Howard around.”

“I love Howard,” Julia replied.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” said Trixie. “But how long do you expect to last in a mining town?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s no place for a woman with brains.”

“Neither is this,” replied Julia. “Howard needs a new start.”

Trixie shook her head. “America, honey, that’s where you belong.”

Dabbing at her makeup with a tissue, Trixie drew herself up and called to Wayne. “Come say good-bye, honey!” While the boys hurried over, Trixie placed a gift-wrapped package in Julia’s hands.

Wayne blew a raspberry at Will, who replied by thumbing his nose. The women paused, debating whether to press the boys into a formal farewell, but it seemed too wrenching a prospect for either to bear. So they embraced each other, whispered good-bye, and parted on the sands.

“Is Wayne moving with us?” asked Will as he watched the two silhouettes depart.

“No, darling. He’s staying here with his mummy.”

Julia heard him mutter a small curse. She decided to let it pass this one time.

Later, Julia opened Trixie’s present in front of Howard: six shot glasses with the Dutch Oil logo on them, and a set of cocktail stirrers.

“How touching,” said Howard. “If she’d thrown in some boxing gloves and a few Band-Aids, we could duplicate their relationship completely!”

Albo

Before the current boom, Albo had not been much more than a bend in the road on a level plain of scrub that lay between two mountains. But world copper prices rose, and those two mountains appeared to be made of that lustrous element; now, in the late 1950s, Albo seemed ideally placed for housing the employees of the mining company. Quickly, the land was bought up and lots were established for the white management with charming street names like Eden Way, Arcadia Boulevard, and Utopia Place. The company also marked out an area for the black workers; these names were more practical: A Street, B Street, C Street. There were other differences. Management had terra-cotta roofs, and plaster walls with small leaded windowpanes and heated floors, not to mention a sewer system. The black workers had none of these things, but they did get electric lights. That they were turned off promptly at ten was no cause for complaint; as one mining official noted, these were better houses than the damn lot of them had lived in before.

Howard had been hired to help the company design a water-filtration system to remove other useful minerals from the vast slag heaps left over from the extraction process. This was long before the idea of conservation became popular. Howard’s job was to squeeze more money out of the situation.

Rose wrote to protest:

This can’t be good for Howard’s caree
r
! Why are you moving so soon? And why to Northern Rhodesia, of all places? How will I ever see my grandson? You know I don’t drive, and I refuse to take that awful train across the falls. Moving is not a good thing for your marriage. Healthy marriages require stability! Consider the Tahitians—marooned on those islands, they don’t stray. Their marriages last a lifetime.

Julia answered by sending an out-of-focus picture of Will, one calculated to throw Rose off his lack of a family resemblance. At three, Will had a thatch of fair hair and a round face, but his eyes had a sad cast to them, a hint of his forgotten father, Walter Boyd. Howard’s waxen nose and high forehead, and Julia’s raven-black tangle and freckled cheeks, were starkly different.

“You’re keeping a secret from her, darling,” Howard said. “Just the way she kept her divorce from you. Is that what you mean to do?”

“I don’t know!” cried Julia. “I just won’t be bullied by her!”

“What about him?” Howard nodded toward Will, asleep in the back of their new company car, a cherry-red Hillman with whitewall tires. “We’ll have to tell him someday, darling. You know that.”

GONE WERE THE MINARETS
and the mullahs, gone were the dusty city and the cries of old men hawking their spices. Gone were the ornate plasterwork and geometric tiles, the smoky bazaar and the mystery of women hidden behind veils. Few of these details made sense to a boy of three, but their absence made him aware of the loss of his first friend.

Howard had promised Will lions, gazelles, elephants, and more, but the boy saw nothing but red earth and miles of nondescript road, looping telegraph wires and a vast and seemingly static sky.

“This is Joseph; he is going to be our cook.”

The face had deep, dark, shiny cheeks and half-moon eyebrows. He offered his hand in greeting, but Will cowered. The man had a scar on each cheek, a horizontal slash that marred his perfect skin.

“Shake hands, Will,” said Julia.

“Why?”

“Because we’re all going to be friends.”

The roses were tended by a gardener named Abraham, a Bushman with a crinkly face and squinty eyes who smoked a pipe and wore a green banana leaf on his head for shade on particularly hot days. A slow, contemplative worker, he had a brilliant way with roses. The beds along the street side of the house boasted enormous yellow blooms that were the envy of the neighborhood. Buck Quinn, who lived directly across the street, made an unsuccessful attempt to hire Abraham away from the Laments to attend to his own anemic rose beds.

Later, Julia asked Abraham why he turned the offer down.

“Take twice a man’s money, he expects twice as big roses!” Abraham laughed.

Julia began painting her roses. But the sun was fierce, and her artistic determination wavered. There was no urgency here, no clock ticking. She dug up her old copy of Shakespeare, and found solace in
Twelfth Night
, where Viola, cast upon the shore of an unfamiliar kingdom, seeks her place among strangers.

During the day, Julia and Will passed their time learning the rituals of the company neighborhood. The children would play in a sprinkler during the hottest hours while the wives shared rumors about the mining company. As their cooks delivered lemonade and the gardeners manicured the flowers, Julia felt an uneasy sense of her own languid corruption. Just as Trixie had warned, she was dying of boredom. But she did not complain.

Howard would arrive home in the evening to an elaborate dinner, and as soon as Will was packed off to bed, they would make love. Howard had no doubt that the move had been a good idea. A month later, Julia announced that she was pregnant.

IN ADDITION TO BEING
their nearest neighbor, Buck Quinn was one of Howard’s superiors at the mining company. Major Buckley Kentigan Quinn, who had been a British officer in Pakistan during the war, had strong sentiments about Britain and the army; his house was a dumping ground for military surplus equipment: an old jeep, cankered with rust, slumped on the front lawn, and Buck’s little boy, Matthew (Will’s age), could often be seen running around naked with an empty cartridge belt slung over his shoulder. On alternate Sundays Buck invited the neighbors over for an outdoor meal with his wife, Sandy, a small woman who seemed to do all the cooking while her husband brandished a spatula and held court. Like a king, Buck would declare his politics while his neighbor, Marjorie Pugh, a woman with a long, horsey head and a mouth the size of an olive, agreed with everything he said.

Julia found Marjorie more offensive than Buck. Buck was in his sixties, a spokesman for an older generation entitled to its own stolid opinions. But Marjorie was about Julia’s age; she should have known better.

“Hitler,” Buck declared, “was a madman, but he could run a campaign!”

“Ooh yes,” clucked Marjorie. “A terrible man, but I like his Volkswagens. Such nice little cars!”

“Nice cars?” Julia said. “The man killed millions, and you like his bloody cars?”

“Well,” said Marjorie, “they run forever, don’t they?”

While the neighbors ate his food, Buck paraded his opinions, as if trying to sniff out the radicals in the group. Julia tried her best to restrain her objections—an echo of her days in Mrs. Urquhart’s classroom—for here she wanted desperately to fit in.

“One thing I learned in the war—you can teach these fellows to clean their artillery, build bridges, and wash their pants once a week, but you can’t teach leadership! That’s why the blacks need us here,” Buck said. “They’ll never rule themselves without bloody chaos breaking out!”

“Guidance, that’s what they need,” Marjorie cooed. She elbowed Julia. “Don’t you agree?”

“You mean,” said Julia, smiling, “as if we’re their parents?”

“Exactly,” said Buck. “
Somebody
has to tell them what to do!”

“Turn the veal, dear,” said Sandy Quinn.

Obediently, Buck flipped the meat, and Julia caught Sandy’s glance—a smile of insurrection.

“I’ve turned the veal,” said Buck to his wife.

“Now you can talk, dear,” said Sandy.

“Right,” said Buck, “what was I saying?”

“But doesn’t a good parent know,” continued Julia, “when to let the child grow up?”

A boy screamed from across the garden, and all eyes turned to young Matthew Quinn, who, with Will, had advanced to the top of the rusty jeep, pants lowered to his knees in preparation for a pissing contest. The target was a large, sleeping calico cat.

“Go on,” whispered Matthew to Will. “Piss on the cat!”

Will was about to oblige him when the calico darted up a tree. He was surprised that neither of his parents acknowledged his transgression. The disapproval on his mother’s face was focused entirely on Matthew’s father.

Buck chuckled at the boys’ attempt. “I was just like that as a boy,” he declared.

“He’s still like that,” murmured Sandy, shooting another glance at Julia.

“Then it can’t be hard to imagine the black men you refer to as boys commanding others, just as you did,” said Julia.

Buck laughed. “Nonsense!”

“Nonsense!” echoed Marjorie.

“Why is it nonsense, Marjorie?” snapped Julia. She was losing her patience and hungry, too, but wary of eating Buck’s food. During this pregnancy, the smell of cooked meat nauseated her.

“Perhaps the blacks will eventually govern each other, but one thing I will never stand for is blacks governing whites. When has a white man
ever
benefited from a black man’s wisdom?”

“Let’s start with the rose garden,” Julia replied. “How many afternoons do I see you begging my gardener for advice!”

At this, the former major of the queen’s 6th Regiment of the Pakistan Guard thrust his spatula under his arm and strode over to her.

“I must ask you to leave, madam.”

“Why? Because I disagreed with you?”

“Madam, you cannot eat at my table and insult me.”

Sandy shook her head sadly. “God knows, Buck’s family did enough of that during his childhood, didn’t they, dear?”

Buck blinked at this attack from the rear.

“All I know is, one shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds one,” Marjorie said. “It’s just not right.”

“I haven’t eaten a
thin
g
!” Julia replied.

“But you’re pregnant. You
should
be eating.” Marjorie was joined by a chorus of sympathetic sighs from the other women.

This had the combined effect of making Buck regret his ultimatum and casting Julia into guilt about not eating for the sake of her precious cargo.

“Forgive me, Julia,” said Buck, giving Howard a respectful nod. “I had forgotten that you are pregnant, and therefore hardly in possession of your faculties.”

As Julia considered replying to this, Buck reloaded, and addressed the group.

“I dare anyone to name one modern country where blacks have the vote that hasn’t suffered a catastrophic collapse!”

“Here, here,” peeped Marjorie, her little pit of a mouth wrinkled with sausage grease.