Mysteries of Motion Read online

  Lievering stood up to go. Coaxed to faculty events or student powwows, he always left early, from the outer edge of them.

  “How—shall we get back?” the professor said. His one awkward remark.

  Lievering had forgotten they had no car. It was plain that walking was his transport. Asked, he confirmed this.

  “Everywhere?” The professor was interested.

  “Everywhere,” Lievering said, with the polite little laugh that folks said behind his back was still so German of him. Would he kill a person who said that to him? She imagined herself saying it and pulling the toothpick, slowly, from his full lower lip.

  Vivie went to the phone and cajoled them a late cab. They took Lievering with them, though he’d hung back.

  “Do the dishes tomorrow,” Vivie said when they’d gone. “I enjoyed that.” She was already letting her hair down on her shoulders. In their side-by-side cots it was like a dormitory; each had a night table at least, and separate clothes pegs. On the center table where the girl did her studying, there was still the pleasant essence of guests. She lay weakly, face into the pillow, in one of the starched nightshirts Vivie still ironed for her.

  “I don’t like you to tiny your braids so close,” Vivie said. “Not down here.” Vivie’s hair was long and flat, from the part of her that was white Dominican. Up to that time they’d done their hair themselves, or Vivie did hers. This time another girl at school and she had done it for each other, copying a style in Ebony, but not because it was African. Vivie had no patience anyway with the new negritude which automatically vaunted its own characteristics no matter what. Not all black was beautiful, she said, any more than all white was. The whites understood this, and laughed behind their hands. Conversely the soft, Englishy Bajans infuriated her as too supine, too regular. Sure, they were in Government House—but when the wife of the manager of Barclay’s Bank had her Sunday afternoon cocktail, did she invite? All of their race relations were still with each other, Vivie had said.

  But I’m past all that, the seventeen-year-old Veronica thought, way past it. I don’t want to get into it. I just think my hair suits my head. “It’s cooler that way,” she’d said. “And I’m too skinny to wear one of those heavy Afro heads. Anyway—you looked marvelous.” And you cooked marvelous, but how to say it so it won’t recall to you our former seven courses, and Father sitting down to them? How to say it so it won’t reproach? For our hundreds of omelets since. “That professor, I promised he’d see some race relations.” Fights, he meant—though he’d deny it. “Dinner so good, he didn’t get any.” She rolled over on her back.

  Vivie stopped brushing, holding high the oxblood coral brooch she pinned up her back hair with. She pursed her lips to herself in the mirror between the beds. Lipstick didn’t hide the heart trouble in them. “Didn’t he though.” The brush clattered down. She came to the side of the other bed.

  “What you looking at, Vivie?” It was an old game. Vivie’d used to poke for ear dirt, knee scabs. Now there weren’t any.

  “At your being too skinny.”

  The girl sat up. “What did you say to Mr. Lievering? I saw you. What did you whisper to him?”

  “Didn’t whisper.”

  “What then?”

  The coral still nestled in Vivie’s hand. She smoothed the girl’s starched chest on the heart side, as if trying to erase the small breast behind the cloth, then pinned the brooch there, gave it a fillip, and folded her hands together. “I said—‘You better love her, yes? Yes, you better love her,’ I said.”

  By the time it was spring and Easter holiday, he still hadn’t. All the school year their separate partisans had watched what nobody called a romance. For the students, it might be their own destiny they were watching; for the faculty it might be their children’s. To those families who made the color line a matter of keeping peace with the British residents, or more often with themselves, Lievering and “the New York transfer” were a threat—with their high-class openness on what could well have been managed behind closed doors, colonially. Especially when their daughters brought home the news that the girl wouldn’t marry him. As Bruce Le Sueur said—that smart, Empire-educated banana-colored professor with fine mustachios who taught Spanish, published ballads in Bejan dialect and was her and Vivie’s one confidant—“It’s now a question of the Old World and the New World seducing each other. The battlegrounds being poetry and the apocalypse.” Meanwhile, those economics and history professors who’d brought Lievering to the college through an all but defunct group left over from one devoted to helping the Hitlerized, and who knew his tiny salary, were waiting, as Bruce said, “for that classless devil—money—to enter in.”

  There hadn’t been time for that. Even if her upbringing after her father had died hadn’t made her money-energetic and unlikely ever to look to a man for it, by Easter she’d been emotionally exhausted, as in some trial marriage whereby she’d acquired nothing but knew everything. Though she had told Lievering she was no virgin but the veteran of one protracted high school affair and one party, and although he’d had his liaisons and a short-term marriage once, to an English girl, her own body lay between them, as he said, like a too newly cast sword.

  His body, thanks to that other greater concern, memory of the worst, had long periods of half-forgetful abstinence, which gave his infinite discriminations free rein. He didn’t want marriage, but for her sake he wouldn’t touch her without it. He didn’t want children, not his children, but if they two married, they must. For her sake. “How do you know you can have them?” she said cruelly. “I don’t doubt you can,” was his response. Her reply—by then enlightened by milder incidents like that first evening’s—“So I’ll have to do it for both of us?” But in class, and on their long afternoon walks on the oceanside, or the shorter nighttime strolls which never ended up at his boardinghouse, he was master. That was what she had no hope of explaining to Vivie, that the poetry ran between them like an ever-nourishing stream. Until, thanks to Vivie really, she was able to judge even that.

  Easter had frilled the native parts of the island with Anglicanism. Even the orchids looked sedate. Conformism—or rather, what Bruce called “our light air of seriousness”—was briefly in control. “Mostly of party and dinner manners only,” Bruce noted, and really in reaction to the tourist beach orgies just past, plus the last spate of royal visits and dinners on gold service, for some of which Vivie, reawakened to her own gifts by the gossip on them since that night, now catered.

  “We don’t want them to know we don’t fast Lent,” Bruce said. “We still have the old colonial habit. Still think moral superiority helps.” He’d pointed from their porch to four children tottering in the wake of their mothers like invalids, their swimmer’s bodies crammed into spiky collars and hard, shiny shoes. How strange, she’d thought, meanwhile sipping one of the rum juleps Bruce came for, that the passion of Jesus should bring this. The solemn week before, it had also brought to the university a band of American boys and girls, mostly from the richer and more personal colleges, who after some preparatory sunbathing here, were off to help Castro with his crop of sugarcane.

  “Cuba’s not even on their way,” she’d said disapprovingly. “Anywhere.” Actually she was intrigued. Many of the young American visitors were from in and around New York, and a whiff of that style, unenclosed or always prepared to be, had come back to her.

  Bruce had laughed. “She’s the most moral of us all, eh, Vivie?”

  Lievering, rocking in Vivie’s proffered favorite chair, nodded. Like a relieved suitor, the girl thought. “But those Americans. They have a fine spirit.”

  “Listen, they don’t even know whether there is a crop!” she’d exploded. At him. For though he was no Marxist, he in a sense had lived his whole life in a kind of negative politics. The smell of any commitment made him lift his nose. He was obliged to, of course, by that history of his. But what it really came down to was that any well-fed American youth, on a holiday spree for the politics th
ey took up the way their parents did jogging, could freeze Lievering in his tracks with the word “anti-fascist,” neither of them seeing that it was the last half of the word he was really reacting to.

  Those nights when she stared into the mirror she looked to herself skinnier than ever, and without bloom. To see as much as she did about these three people, that they couldn’t see themselves—even about Bruce, who never brought his simple fat wife and dull kids here or much anywhere, and constantly engaged himself for flash lecture tours away from them—would it make her preternaturally old?

  “And she’s practical too, eh, Vivie? Like you.” Bruce knew how to get round Vivie. So that the drinks could keep on coming?

  Vivie had looked better those days. Since the word had got around, their larder bulged with food of her own providing. She catered for the British carpet king who had defected from all his creditors at home and ate mournfully from his gold plate because he couldn’t go back to them, for the absentee British lordling who’d built his powerful American wife a villa with a shell-shaped bed, facing seaward, that she was never in—and for two gentlemen who sang Iolanthe to each other at dusk while feeding each other sugar cubes.

  Vivie had charged the tiny carpet king the most, for his sins, until she saw how his own great Danes bullied him.

  “Whyn’t you all three go? See about that crop.” She sat tall, sipping the rum that was better than any lipstick. Her boots and calico were the same as always, only fresh and new; the lord’s American wife, on one of her flash visits here, which resembled Bruce’s trips in reverse, had copied them.

  “Easter present,” Vivie had added. “I’ll pay fare.”

  “Uh-uh,” Bruce had said at once. “I promised me old woman. We partying the kids.” Away from the college and his Spanish classes, from his Bajan wife and his ballads, or even the choir where he soloed Schubert lieder, his voice took on a new, syrupy porch-lolling Veronica hadn’t yet identified. “Nuh, I know that Castro, nuh. What a man. A big man.” Bruce had met him once. The American group had an invite to do so. “He’ll like Veronica.” Bruce appeared to be watching the sea line, though they were deep in hedge. “And she’ll like him.”

  So, two days later, the college, where Bruce was a powerful mover, had offered Lievering his expenses plus a little extra in return for going to Cuba as faculty adviser to a small “observation group” of its own students, who would accompany the Americans. The West Indian students were not to work in the fields, as a sop to opposing faculty who, fearing involvement, had fought the whole idea bitterly. That, and one conservative’s comment, “It is not necessary to observe every kind of politics,” had decided Lievering. He had refused the extra sum.

  The trip had few student takers anyway, or parents who would allow them to. Robin’s had flown him out of the country fast for a suddenly trumped-up Easter in Philadelphia and the promise of his own car. So she and Lievering had arrived at the airport, separately though mentally together, along with two raffish couples who played vingt-et-un in the university lounge with English Rothmans dangling from their lips, also a Haitian girl, distant cousin of its dead dictator Papa Doc, who still heard his voice mystically and thought in Cuba she might be a kind of royalty; and two rather delightful Bridgetown thugs who were surely after marijuana and general opportunity and were later found not to be college-registered; and the good Americans.

  So it would come about that, pressed by these motley forces, she would discover the blaze of open fields, cut her mouth on cane whose sweetness in memory could make her jaws ache, and would find her present profession—all the way thinking little of any of it. For during those same ten days, she and Lievering, after six days of silence between them, followed by four days of what?—dialogue, mutual feast and rape?—and after being sung toward their rest by a host of radical angels, plus one little psychoanalytical plumpie who’d pushed back her own braid to whisper in Veronica’s ear, “You be the giver, he the taker; it’s more hot that way,” had been married. Or had assumed or pretended they’d been married, by a role-playing divinity student later revealed to have been “not quite ordained.” After which ceremonies, in what was still the most theologically satisfying hour of her life, she had given Lievering his icon—and had left for New York.

  In a whirlwind of self-righteousness, and hoping to spend all her remaining money on a first-class ticket. Wanting to step out into that armored city with an outward show to match the brimming verge of all her felt power of limb and mind. Out of the first vortex, and still under twenty. But not at all understanding that if “this neo-neo-world of our time,” as Bruce called it, had responded to her as if she had been made for it, that was because she had been. Nor that, in the Mosaic-lawed realm which underlay all eras, what you did to another life as formally as she had—was formally done to you.

  The phone rang now. It often did on her nights in this city, at just about this time, when she was at her desk still reading between the lines, before the poem resumed. She was under no obligation to answer. It would be Rhoda Esher, still keeping lone vigil in the bar to which all the staff went for a couple of drinks once the weekly magazine newspaper—or newspaper magazine—they edited had been put to bed. Or Rhoda would be lordly drunk at home and reminding all hands, up through the senior correspondents of whom Veronica was now the oldest, and not excluding the publisher if she could catch him at home, that she, Rhoda, at the advanced age of forty-five was still executive editor—which meant chief midwife in charge of the passage of ideas into computer print-out or cartoon or telecommunication, for what Rhoda herself called “one of the thought publications of the decade.”

  The trouble was, on these calls Rhoda was reminding herself that it was not her decade. Tom Gilpin, the publisher, must now be in his late thirties or more, but by means of his careful brownish mummery of non-clothes, non-living quarters and even non-consorts, plus a sober ability to think backward while ethically moving forward, he kept this hard to observe. The public, saying admiringly that Gilpin was even adventurous enough not to mind that his creation had gone big-time, couldn’t know, as all Tom’s own staffers did, his intention that one day, “like all organs of opinion without action,” it must self-destruct. “We’ll grow up, Rhoda,” was all he’d say to her if her call got to him. Adding genially, “And so will you. Calm down.”

  But Rhoda had been trained in old-style media where news was thought, and thought was only a barely printable news which would have to be processed. The lack of routine blood-and-thunder in their own pages disturbed her profoundly, in somewhat the same way that the idea of a routine act of love made the younger staffers conversationally uneasy. In either case, she had a tin ear for their subtler violences. “When she begins to call us existentialist—we’ll have to can her,” Tom joked. “She’s incurably in step.”

  Veronica herself took all her assignments straight from Gilpin—an art in itself. Let the phone ring.

  No—Ollie. If he were still alive, he’d phone. She picked it up.

  Rhoda, when primed, spoke in squelches, with the sound of a carrot being fed to a horse. No doubt her big breasts, always to be seen in the comfortable gap of her blouses, were as usual pressed forward like an offering, but this meant nothing; they were merely what got between her and newsprint. Somewhere inside them, within that anonymous evening bulk which could be so bulldog smart the next morning, was the curly-top redhead who’d come up from Arizona to make her fortune. Whatever Rhoda’s vortices had been, she now wore her hair in a flattened mat on top of her head. “Know I’m pissed. But did I hear it on the telly or dream it—that the Pope died?”

  To her and her kind, the girl thought, the globe was still like an old eyeball which on the instant went red and veinous with every dire fact. “Tell Tom, why don’t you.” Rhoda thought Veronica was softer than the others only because she listened. When it was really because of Vivie that she couldn’t stop respecting middle age.

  “He won’t”—squelch—“put it in the issue.”

>   “The issue’s fine, Rhoda.” Full of non-purpose, the way he likes it. Shaken loose. So that anarchy may bloom?

  “Thanks to you. Still have some sense in you.”

  Did she? According to Rhoda? Then there must still be some of what Rhoda called “sense,” to be rooted out.

  “Says you’re going to Montreal for him.”

  Gilpin? He wouldn’t have said it like that. He knows I go for myself first of all. And approves.

  “Even so, bet you won’t put in a thing about the people leaving Quebec. Or how U.S. border banks are closing their accounts to any more of their cash. Will you?”

  No, not at all likely. The story she’d asked to go up there for had only a beginning, in a group of grade-school children watched one chill, vivid morning from a cafe terrace in the Old Town’s square, she being the only outside customer. There’d been the usual number of Scotch-Irish-looking kids, some dark-eyed pinks who might have been French, and a couple of blacks from somewhere in the old French Africa, with faces chiseled like her own. To these had been added, obviously new to the class—and like primeval Canada no longer smiling—two broad Eskimo boys, or Aleuts, who every time they linked hands were persuaded to unlink them. By a teacher with a small-coin mouth. There’d been less than a dozen children altogether. In the old square, early in the term. That was all she had. She must be careful not to make too much of the ethnic distribution, as some would. “Yes, it sounds like one of yours,” Tom had said. It was; she already knew that. One of the pieces that kept her and the poem going, and made people recognize her picture. This was all she knew about it as yet, except that the piece would rise and take flight as she herself never could, and at a certain same angle she would feel in her guts. “The language of nihilism—” a commentator had said of them, “and full of hope.” Tom had reported that, his scarab eyes veiled. “Jesus,” she’d answered, “that could get me canned.”

  “All the other mags have had stories on the Quebec thing.” Envious pain of that sort turned Rhoda sober.