Iwork like an animal all Sunday, or as my husband was fond of saying when I used to ask him how the writing went that day, like a nigger. It was okay for him to use this vile expression, he explained to me at length, and many times, because for his race the N-word was communal, warm, palsy. I never believed this, and I always felt a slight repugnance on the many occasions when he used it. Jews don’t warmly call one another kikes, I believe.
He and his ways are ever in my thoughts now, since this last murder. Two down, he has two to go for the okunikua. In Olo, an ikua is a song, a bird song, or a lullaby, and the same word is used, as in our language, for a sorcerous work, an enchantment. Okun means four. Owo, aga, iko, okun, olai … as I was taught to count by poor Tourma in Ulune’s compound. But in the low tone ikua means a gift. Or a sacrifice. Okunikua is thus the four song or the fourfold sacrifice.
Four is an important number in Olo affairs, and he must murder four women within sixteen days to complete the ritual. What he will be able to do when he has finished is something no one knows, not even Ulune. No Olo has done okunikua since some time before the turn of the last century. I recall the first time I actually read about it, in Tour de Montaille’s work, in Lagos. He regarded it as a relic of the bad old days before French civilization arrived. The Olo witch who did it, whose name the Olo never mention, was annoyed by French civilization, and wished to make it go away, which in time, of course, it did. Ulune and his fellow tribal patriarchs considered that the two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the consequent reduction of the proud colonial powers to quaint little postcard nations were a direct result of this guy’s okunikua. They approved the result but, as moral people, thought the means excessive. Western historiography does not agree, since it is much more logical and scientific to assume that millions of fairly rational, marvelously educated, prosperous people went crazy and ripped the heart out of their own civilization.
I must suppose that he is waiting to complete the four sacrifices before paying me a visit. But one can only be frightened so much, and I am at this point nearly beyond fear. Numb. I take some tiny comfort in the realization that it can’t be much longer now. Meanwhile, I find that the kind of hard, precise, physical work I am doing keeps actual paralysis away during whatever meantime remains. I prime the walls and ceiling of Luz’s room, and while this is drying, I install the patent ladder. It is spring-loaded and has its own trapdoor. A cord with a red knob hangs down and when you pull it the trapdoor falls and the ladder slides smoothly down into place with a pleasant sproing. A slight lift of the lowest step, and it sucks itself out of sight. I work it several times when I am done, for the pleasure of seeing something elegant, simple, and functional, much like the sort of gear one sees in boats. Then I install the exhaust fan in its hole, switch it on, and apply the top coat of semigloss to the walls (dove) and ceiling (eggshell). More downtime for drying, during which I drive over to the unpainted-furniture store on Twenty-seventh Avenue and buy, with some of my transmission money, a little bed frame, a four-drawer chest, a night table, a toy chest, and a wooden lamp base jigsawed to represent a crescent moon on a ball. A Cuban discounter sells me a mattress, and I drive away with it stacked on top, like the Joads, and don’t I wish I were driving to California too. Back at the garage, I assemble these and paint them with quick-drying enamel.
I am just finishing gluing down the last of the gray carpet squares when Luz tromps into the kitchen. She has experienced wonders?the Monkey Jungle, The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas on video, Burger King with the playground adjoining, a sleepover with five other girls, junk food without stint. Thank you, Mrs. Pettigrew. I say I have a surprise for her, and show her the red knob hanging down and ask her to pull it. She does. The expression on her face as the ladder slides down is worth the fifteen gallons of sweat. Magic. She ascends, I follow.
“It’s very stinky in here.”
“That’s the glue. It’ll go away soon. Do you like it?”
“Uh-huh. Do I have to sleep here all by myself?”
“If you want. I have some furniture, too. Do you want to see it?”
She does, and we go down to the garage to check it out.
“Amanda has flowers on her dresser,” she says.
“I have some flowers, too, and when the paint is dry, you can put them on just where you want them.” I show her the decals I’ve bought and she wants to put them on right now and we have a little spat about that. She’s cranky then, and hyper because of all the stimulation and the strange foods, and I’m cross with her, at which point she crumples utterly and I feel like a monster. I’m afraid I am going to spoil her, and when I think this, I laugh inwardly, since it is at present unlikely that either of us will live long enough for spoiling to occur. Spoil away, then, Jane!
After she’s been calmed and cosseted extravagantly, I show her Peeper in its new cage, and we play with it, and plan the furnishings of the chicken house. Then Jasper comes by and asks if I want to have pizza with his family and our across-the-street neighbor, Dawn Slotsky, and her four-year-old, Eleanor. Luz answers for both of us, such a schmoozer she has become, and I tie a head scarf over my filthy hair, and wash my face and hands, and over we go.
We are eating on the concrete terrace behind the big house. Dawn is already there, with her child, a chubby, grubby, cherubic red-blonde in a pink dress. She and Luz immediately march off to follow Jasper, who is running around the backyard with a jar, accompanied by Jake the dog, searching for a kind of beetle that has two bright luminous spots on its back. We adults go up and look at the new room, and I shyly accept their applause. We all go sit in tatty plastic loungers with our beers (except Dawn) and I ask Dawn how she is feeling, a suitable question, I think, for someone as grossly pregnant as she is. Dawn is a second-generation Grove hippie, and no one has ever seen her in anything but cutoffs and a spaghetti-strapped top, even now, although she has elastics and aprons to conceal her great belly. Until I got Luz, we had not exchanged a word, although she always had a friendly smile. With a child, I have become a significant person on the street.
She says she can’t wait for it to be over, and she’ll never, ever get pregnant again, two is enough, and Polly agrees, and they look at me and I modestly turn my eyes down, and I can see them thinking, Oh, looking like that she’s lucky to have the one. I don’t mind this too much. Then Shari Ribera comes out with a bunch of plates and cups and utensils, and stays to chat. The subject of the Mad Abortionist comes up, which is what the papers have tastefully chosen to call my husband, and we all shudder, especially, of course, Dawn, whose significant other is a roadie, often away from home, as now. She has window bars and a large and barky mutt dog. I ache to tell her that these will do no good at all, but what, after all, could I say?
We talk about guns, then, not very knowledgeably, although I myself know a good deal about guns of all kinds, but I don’t contribute. Dawn asserts she could never kill anyone, and Polly scoffs and says she would have no trouble dispatching that guy, and she has a short list of some others, and then, catching her daughter’s eye, says, “Not your father, sugar. I would shoot him in the leg, though,” and we all laugh. Mr. Ribera is of Dominican extraction, and both his children have the unearthly beauty that sometimes occurs when the best qualities of the contributory races combine to form a perfect genetic souffle. At fourteen Shari is being hit on by everyone in pants, and is especially subjected to the sort of courtship favored by young colored gangsters in passing cars. Jasper is in middle school, and is learning, as my husband famously did, not only of the regular cracker bigotry, which the white Cubans happily share, but also of the ferocious and socially invisible racism practiced by those of darker hue than him. Jasper does well in school, which makes it worse. Or, did well. Polly is now talking about his attitude changing, hoping he will not be a problem teen. Oh, he will, Polly. There’s not a moment’s mercy from the brain poison leaching from my skin, no, not in my whole nation, as my husband once put it in a poem.
So we talk, and the pizza is delivered, and I have half a Stroh’s and a slice, and hope I will keep it down. After a really lovely evening, very like actual life, with Luz bathed and put down in her old bed, I drag out my box. I have to look things up. Ulune taught me some countermagic in Danolo, all part of the basic course, and I secretly wrote the procedures down. I have a lot of the botanicals in there, too, although I haven’t let myself think about them in a while. Perhaps I was afraid of provoking the spirits, not that I believe in spirits, or perhaps it was that nothing of note happened to me until quite recently, when I found Luz. I put it to one side, and also put aside my divining bag, and the sad if handy manila portfolio that contains Dolores’s life. Next below there is a waxed cardboard box, fuzzy with wear. It’s filled to the brim with corked bottles, cans sealed with gaffer’s tape, and dozens of small envelopes, similarly sealed, all neatly labeled in black ink in a familiar hand, my own.
It’s all chemicals, of course, as dull as that. No eldritch horrors from beyond time, no special demonic gifts, just chemistry, but not chemistry 101, and not Du Pont or Upjohn chemistry. What would you rather play with given the choice and a hundred thousand years? Would you rather dick around with stone tools, clay pots, baskets, and skins, or master the most sophisticated neuropharmacological synthesizer in the world? It’s all homo ludens. Man at play. Or so Marcel used to say, that old materialist. I walk my own sophisticated neuropharmacological synthesizer over to the sink and get it a drink of water. I wasn’t keeping a personal journal when I was with Marcel, which I rather regret. I have to reconstruct his arguments from my battered memory. You, my angel, he used to say, are a series of transient electrochemical states?perceptions, feelings, memories: very fast, very subtle, chemical states, and the amounts of chemicals required to modify these states are typically tiny, and they work in combinations of which we have no idea. Modern psychopharmacology, these tranquilizers, this Prozac the Americans are so fond of?this is the savage hitting the fine Swiss watch with a flint hammer to make it work again. In contrast, we have the sorcerer. He has tens of thousands of chemical species available to him in plant tissue, not to mention commensal bacteria and fungi and viruses that can live in and modify the human body, not to mention mutagens that can actually change the DNA in the human brain, and he has for his laboratory bench, himself, or his victims or allies, and he has time, all the time in the world.
But, says the angel, okay, they can drug themselves, have trances, visions galore, and they can drug their subjects, or victims, with or without their knowledge, but what about all the weird stuff, affecting people at a distance, influencing dreams, cursing, being invisible …
No, no, you haven’t understood, my sparrow. Their bodies are changed. They can make psychotropic chemicals to order, even chemicals affecting a single person. They make them in their own bodies, and expel them through the breath or the pores. The melanocytes all over the skin surface are deeply connected to the limbic system and the pineal body and they can produce exohormones, which, entering the bloodstream of the target through any number of routes, proceed to the brain, where they have the most profound mental and emotional effects. Interesting, hein? The same bodies that control skin pigmentation? An irony, no? Yet here is the essence of what we call sorcery. The sparrow has questions. How come science hasn’t detected these exohormones? Well, science has; am I not a scientist? But what you mean, my artichoke, is “detected chemically.” And the answer is that science is not looking. Science looks largely for what it expects to find, and it does not expect to find any real effects in the claims of sorcerers. Also, science is good at searching for what can be controlled in a laboratory setting, and what can be repeated, so that a certain cause always associates with the same effect. But this is not the case with sorcery, which is an art.
All this was before I met the Chenka, so my questions were like those of a person from a culture that had no music: how can mere ordered sounds affect the emotions? Preposterous! How could a great musician talk to such a person? Looking back now, I see how incredibly patient Marcel was with me, and I blush to recall it, blushing being a good example of psychophysiological effects. And others: did you ever, while sitting in a public place, get the feeling that someone was staring at you, and you looked up and sure enough there was? One of Marcel’s favorites. What do you think that is, mental rays? Beams from the eye? And love. We say, “it’s chemistry,” but it really is chemistry. How little we know, how much to discover, what chemical forces flow, from lover to lover. Yes, indeed.
Marcel’s chemical theory “explained,” if that is the word, much of the anecdotal material about shamanism and sorcery that anthropologists had gathered over the years. He thought that all these were the scattered remains of a very, very old technology. What do witches do, in stories? Two things: they make brews and they cast spells. Brews, of course, are obviously the traditional use of biologicals, and spells are, despite common belief, not silly callings to demons or spirits, but mnemonics. At least, originally. Chenka sorcerers, Marcel claimed, typically had fifty to seventy-five thousand recipes and procedures in memory. And, of course, there is the rub. If you multiply your body’s powers through technology as our culture has done for the last four centuries you are much better off in a material sense than if you only amplify the subjective ones. This is why Sioux shamans no longer rule on the Great Plains, and why, throughout the world, preindustrial peoples are happy to trade fifty-thousand-year-old traditions for cigarettes, whiskey, steel knives, and plastic jugs.
Except for the Chenka, who were a special case. Why did their tradition survive intact? Marcel didn’t know, but he used to grin and say, moving his hands as a conjurer, “the mysteries of the normal curve!” When you get out three or four or five standard deviations from the mean you find some weird stuff. Genius. Golden ages. Giants and dwarves. Two-headed babies. And the Chenka. It’s a good nonexplanation. We thought the Chenka were unique, until I discovered the Olo.
Enough musing. I page through my notebooks until I find what I’m looking for, a kadoul, a ticket to the magic kingdom. I take kwa — leaf, a West African member of the Boraginceae rich in pyrrolizidine alkaloids, mash it with some powders, use a cereal bowl and the handle of a screwdriver as a mortar and pestle to grind the stuff that needs grinding, add a little of my own spit and piss and some water, and put it on the stove to boil down. I say the necessary words, in Olo. The spell, the witch’s brew. It smells dank and rank as it boils. When it has cooked to sludge, I affix a dish towel to a bowl with a rubber band and strain it through, getting about a quarter of a cup of a strong-smelling greenish-brown liquid. I add to this some brown powder, some red powder, some of my blood. The liquid turns a sludgy black and seems to shrink in volume, which is what it’s supposed to do. My artillery. I pour it into an old jam jar. It will keep indefinitely. A good thing, too, because I realize I am not up to changing my interior chemistry just yet, for there are two problems. First, after the drug, and during the time I am under its influence, I will not be fit for anything else but sorcery: not working for Mrs. Waley, not driving a car in accordance with the highway code, not caring for Luz. A sorcerer needs a support team when he or she travels in the m’doli, like an astronaut does on a space mission, and I have none as yet. It was not something I contemplated Dolores ever needing. The second reason is that once I take the stuff, I will be out in m’doli, and my husband will no longer be in any doubt as to my continued earthly existence. A dilemma. I tell myself I am awaiting allies and I go up on a chair and push the jar to the back of the top shelf in my food cupboard. And a third reason: I am scared shitless.
While I am considering protective measures, I decide I may as well take care of the m’fa, too. In the very bottom of my box is a triangular package wrapped in rubberized fabric and gaffer tape. It is my Red Nine. I unwrap it and pick it up. A handful. It weighs, if I recall, two and three-quarter pounds unloaded, and this one has ten rounds in it. My dad kept it on the Kite, and I stole it back when I stole the Kite. I put it on the high shelf next to the kadoul. Maybe I can shoot him if he comes in his body. Could I shoot him? I never killed anyone but me on purpose. In any case, I know it will shoot me, so it will serve in the last extremity, if I find myself literally falling under his spell. Odd, how those common dead metaphors spring horribly to life. Entranced. Enchanted. Bewitched.
Now everything goes back into the box, except the journal, which I continue to read. I wish to reacquaint myself with Jane. The period of Jane’s life between Chenka and Olo was an album of self-delusion, with good examples of all the major types?professional, social, romantic … no, I am being too hard on her. She was a tough girl. It’s not easy losing your first big romantic thing and your sense of the underlying reality of the cosmos at one and the same time.
This gets me thinking again about Dad (for I have gone to see that boat, Guitar, several times, down at Dinner Key). I wonder, is that kind of person still around, will we ever have people like that again? He always said it was his generation, that peculiar lost one that was born during the Second World War. He used to tote up the things that his generation was last at. Last to experience segregation of the races, last to come to sexual maturity before women’s lib and the Pill, last to believe that the United States was invariably the good guy, last to defer without much question to teachers and elders in general, last to get the full load of dead white male culture force-fed into their brains and souls, last to grow up before TV became the ruling power. If Catholic, last to get raised in the pre-Vatican II shut-up-and-do-what-we-say, superstitious, devotional American church. The last to start screwing before Roe v. Wade, and hence and finally, the last to think it mandatory to marry the girl you got pregnant. Thus me.
I was like him, or tried to be, perhaps to be less like my mother, who was thoroughly modern, although only five years younger than he. As she often told me, she went to him to get money for an abortion and he said, before she could ask, let’s get married, and she did. She imagined a life rather like that of the Kennedys, and tried to have one to the extent that she could. Dad stayed home with us kids while she did so. I will give her this, that she made it home for the major holidays, and here they all are, dutifully recorded in short entries about home visits. A dull story, even to the author, who seems to be the sort who will end up wearing a plain brown dress and a bun, with a ring of keys at her waist, standing in the doorway of the big house saying, “I am afraid my father cannot be disturbed.”
Until Witt. That was a surprise, and registered as one in the journal. I am addicted to genius, so Jane wrote back then. If true, I believe I am in recovery now. We did not end up in bed on the night we met, I am happy to say; Witt had that much care for his old pal Lou, but he called me the next day and invited me to that rehearsal and I was a goner. It seems that I actually believed at the time that someone who could ring the changes on race hysteria and hypocrisy the way he could would be fairly immune to racial insanity. Such immunity is not impossible, I must believe. Needless to say, in both Chicago and New York we were acquainted with any number of interracial couples. They were not even unusual in the arty circles we hung out in. Maybe they were writhing secretly, but I saw no evidence of this. Some people, I believe, are just happy to be alive and successful. I thought we would be like them. As I read this, I see I had not a clue. And maybe he didn’t, either. This is what I like to think, even now, that it was Africa that changed him, the witch stuff. He would not be the first decent man to succumb to the temptations of power. And there is a part of me, of course, that says it was all my fault. What did I do?
Money was fine. We had, both of us, more than enough, and, as everyone knows, rich people are happy. He was never interested in mine, or where it came from, and only seemed to notice it when I was being stingy, when he would poke fun. He was generous with his own, although his refinement of taste kept him from being too hideously nouveau. The excesses I noticed I blamed on his status as an artist. Everyone knew artists were nuts. We had a coterie of hangers-on, but not an embarrassingly large one. He was decent to the people who started out with him in Chicago, too, which I thought was a good sign.
Sex was fine. We were hot for each other from the start and stayed hot. I think he was a little surprised at me, since I look like a gawky, boyish, convent-school product, and I guess he was looking forward to stripping off my Catholic pudence. This had, of course, been quite stripped off already by a lover of encyclopedic technical scope and virtuosity. Was he as “good” as Marcel? What’s good? The Jane Clare Doe Gold Medal for Most Spine-Cracking Orgasms in a Standard Time Period remains in Marcel’s possession, but while I was kid-crazy about Marcel, I was in love with Witt, and that made a difference. I thought it was for life, if you want to know, and so I laid everything I’d been taught by Marcel at Witt’s feet, or penis, the love secrets of exotic civilizations and tribal peoples. So, all in all, one could ask for nothing better. I mean, what is there besides sex and money? Could I have predicted what happened? Are there signs in the journals that even now I can’t see? He always tried to make me happy. He had a gift for it, for delight. Once on my birthday he hadn’t said anything about it and I thought he’d forgotten and when we got back to the loft the whole place was full of flowers, I mean thousands and thousands of flowers. He once hired a whole choir to sing to me out in the street under the window of our loft. Once he picked me up at the museum and put me in a cab and I thought we were just going home but we drove to Kennedy, where we boarded the Concorde and flew to London. He liked making me happy.
Okay, that’s only money, but he gave me his attention, too. When he wasn’t working, which was a lot of the time, he had no other interests. Not like Marcel, who kind of squeezed me into his famous man’s life. He listened, hours and hours of listening, like I was some kind of oracle. Not something I had much experience of, to say the least. A perfect husband, right?
Yes, there was that little detail of his parentage. There are entries here covering the great unveiling, our fight, the happy reunion. I come across as understanding itself. My wounded hero! What a sucker I am for the wounded hero, especially the genius wounded hero. Marcel hiding from the Nazis, Witt hiding from White America, my father hiding from my mother.
I visited his parents once, without telling him. Stan and Cynthia Moore, of Morristown, New Jersey. I called them and asked if I could come by, and they said I could, so one Sunday in late spring I drove out. There I found more or less what I expected: a suburban split-level on a mapled street, the newish VW van in the driveway, bearing an Amnesty decal on the rear window and a sticker on the bumper opposing some state referendum (vote no on 171!), a hoop attached to the garage. (Witt playing b-ball? A strange notion. He could barely ride a bike.) And the Moores themselves, decent, middle-aged, liberal people, givers to Greenpeace and the ACLU, Democratic voters, Unitarian churchgoers (she a lapsed Jew), sadly infertile, former peaceniks, marchers for civil rights, wracked, confused, failed by the gods of niceness and decency.
Their house was casually furnished with an ex-hippie-gone-straight miscellany, blocky Ikea and Door Store stuff, steel-framed posters and original art on the walls, Rya rugs, hand-thrown pottery, not very tidy. The living room, where they sat me on a brown corduroy sofa, was filled with books that looked read; on one wall a huge stereo loomed, flanked by a wall of LPs and CDs. I used my best anthro techniques on them, I fear, me who was trained in childhood not to ask impertinent questions. They were, fortunately, the sort of American couple who had been through so many group sessions of one kind or another that they had dumped any pretensions to privacy. They were desperate for intimate news of their son.
So I learned that back when the Moores found that one of Cindy’s several abortions had screwed up her pipes, they decided to adopt, and decided also that they would not be one of the selfish racist bourgeois who demanded a white kid, but would specifically look for a child of one of the oppressed minorities. Then the great carnival wheel of fate revolved, Ifa cast his hook and line, and out popped the ten-week-old abandoned child of a woman who had staggered into Bellevue Hospital in New York, dropped a boy baby, and slipped out a day later, having left a phony address. They named him Malcolm (after you-know-who) DeWitt (after Mr. Moore’s recently deceased dad). He was a doll. This I have transcribed verbatim from Mrs. Moore’s lips. A doll, and from the first week, sharp as a tack, as Stan Moore noted. The Moores raised him according to the latest liberal nostrums?lots of mobiles, lots of attention, pickup on demand, no sugars, Mozart in the nursery, Montessori preschool. And they had tried to give him an interracial upbringing. The Moores had plenty of African-American friends, and friends who had adopted kids of other races. Their church was full of them?little Koreans, little Chinese, little Cherokees, little mulattoes of all shades?the Moores made it sound like the anteroom to Utopia. And it might have been. God bless all their liberal souls?they were all of them nice people.
I saw the album, smiling baby Witt (or Malcolm, as he was then called), grinning toddler Witt, gap-toothed Witt on a carnival ride, the family at Disneyland, a Halloween picture, the smile for elementary school graduation, and then the photos petered out, and became darker, no more smiling poses; instead, candid snaps of the morose or snarling adolescent.
They thought it was a phase. Kids are like that. They themselves were handfuls back in the sixties. They had met, in fact, in jail, after a demonstration in Madison, where they were both at school. The Movement; they both still pronounced it as if capitalized. So they didn’t worry too much, although they were hurt. He didn’t love them? Impossible. They loved him!
I probed the wound. He had gone to Chicago on a full scholarship. His grades and SATs were excellent. She still knew them all by heart. They thought he was going to be prelaw. They had no idea he was writing poetry. He didn’t come home for Christmas the first year, nor for spring break, nor for the summer; he had a job. They said they’d fly out; they wanted to see him, meet his friends, see where he lived. No, he was very busy. Too busy for Mom and Dad?
They found out what he was busy at that summer, when the Chicago cops called. He’d been arrested in a crack house, charged with possession. They were there the next day.
I knew about this part. Witt had woven it into his life tale of coming up rough in the ghetto. He’d never been a user or a dealer, just hangin’ with the homies, and the Man had jumped them. This was true. He had just been hangin’ with the homies, to whom he’d lied just like he’d lied to everyone else. Naturally, the Moores were on his side, they knew all about the racist pigs, but it turned out he didn’t want them on his side. There was a horrible scene in the lawyer’s office, where they went after bailing him out of Cook County jail. He blamed them for his not having a real identity, for depriving him of his black soul, for using him as a convenient tool to assuage their stinking honky guilt. He wished he’d been raised by his junkie whore mother in the community, at least he’d be something. He might be a black junkie killer, but that was better than being a white nigger. And so forth. The charges were dismissed and they left. It was like leaving a morgue after they’d made you identify your kid on a slab, Cindy said. Why? Why? We did the best we could. I didn’t know why either. I did the best I could, too.
He never came home again, never contacted them, refused calls, returned letters. He got a job in the library to support himself. For five years, nothing. And then Race Music opened and eventually came to New York. And, with not a little trepidation, they’d gone to see it on Broadway. And they’d seen the much-remarked-on scene in the second act, the scarifying, vicious lampoon of the white liberal couple who adopts a black baby. They’d left at the intermission. She’d cried for a week afterward.
I thought I could fix it up. I always think I can fix things up. I said good-bye to Stan and Cindy on an up note, therefore, saying I’d keep in touch, intending to lay it out for Witt when the time was right: Look this is crazy, you’re not a kid anymore, they’re your parents, they raised you, they’re decent people, this is wrong.
But the right time did not immediately appear. He was working; he actually never stopped working, not even in the summers, when we went out to Sionnet. There was a little apartment over the boathouse there that our dockman used to have when we had a dockman, and we converted it into a studio for him. Oddly enough, my family got on pretty well with him. My father, of course, likes everyone and dwells in that zone in which social status is so absolutely secure that one can treat all beings with perfect, thoughtless equality. To Dad, there is the Doe family and there is everyone else?the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the guy who comes by in a pickup to collect the trash. And Witt can be charming, too, which helps.
My mother likes lovely people and the famous, and she was both surprised and delighted that clunky old Jane got a lovely, famous one, and his race simply added a little panache to the mix, something else besides her affairs with which to shock the girls at the club. Mary, my sister, or Mariah, as she called herself then, immediately put a heavy make on him, which he deflected amusingly, thus winning my heart even more than it was already won?the only human male on the planet besides my stepbrother who preferred me to her. Mariah, although lovely as the dawn, is a couple of steps slow in the flashing wit department. Witt would say absolutely outrageous things to her in my presence that would go right past her, that wouldn’t even dent the famous smile. You have to give her game, though. She never stopped trying, even after she outdid her big sister by announcing she was pregnant. Something I was not, and not likely to be, given my husband’s attitude. She got married in Saint Pat’s.
My brother was there that time, too. And now I’m reminded, reading along, that Josey never much cared for Witt, nothing he ever said, but there was a stiffness there. I thought it was because my dad liked him, and so Josey had to not like him. Witt never said anything about it. Few entries for that summer, actually. I guess I was happy. Fortunate are those whose annals are brief. I remember him waving from his window when we took the boat out. He never came with us. He got seasick on a floating dock. I thought he was happy, too, a member of our family at least. He had a knack of fitting in, although if you believed his writing you would have thought here’s a guy who would never fit in anywhere. Maybe that was his invisible part, adapting the local coloration. He pronounced Sionnet SIGH-nit, instead of sigh-ON-et, like the tourists, and Montauk with the accent on the second syllable, like an old Long Islander, and exhibited the proper contempt for the south shore.
Was the real Witt lurking beneath the surface then? Was the camouflage that of a leopard lying in wait? There’s nothing here to suggest it in these pages, not the slightest suspicion. As it turned out, that was the last summer we were all together. After it ended, Witt and I went on our trip.
Suddenly I don’t want to read anymore. I’d rather not read the Africa stuff just now. I put the thing into a cupboard and go out on the landing. The sky is low and wet and there is lightning to the west over the Glades. I am thinking about our first night in Africa, when we got to Lagos, and how fast it all collapsed. A week and the whole thing was gone, or so it now seems, all the flowers and singing and the making me happy, all eaten up. No, not a leopard inside. A certain weakness, a hollow place in Witt, that his nice parents couldn’t reach and, as it turned out, I couldn’t either. But something did, in Africa.