Afternoons with Emily Read online

  “Oh, no!” I cried out by mistake — our unspoken agreement was that I would learn through observation and would not distract Miss Adelaide from her task with questions or comments.

  She laid the rose aside, saying nothing, and went on working with a smile. I could tell she was thinking something, but I wasn’t sure what it might be. I found out the next day at the clinic. When Dr. Hugh had finished listening to my chest, and I was pulling my yellow chiton back over my head, I heard him say, “Miss Adelaide tells me you’re a keen student. I was wondering if you’d like me for a shell teacher.”

  “Oh, yes!” I struggled to get my arms into their sleeves quickly so that I could burst my head through the neckline. “Will we go to the beach together?”

  “No, I have a better idea: you’ll bring the beach to me. We’ll have a shell school — on the gallery, with Miss Adelaide’s permission.”

  “Tools for learning have their own beauty, like kitchen tools,” said Miss Adelaide when I asked her permission. “You may use the south corner of the back gallery.”

  Every morning, returning from the beach, I delivered my specimens — and every evening, just before the cloud show, Dr. Hugh and I sorted them. We laid out the shell classes (Cephalopoda) and the species (nautilus) within each class. He called this process of classification “taxonomy.” I called it a fine new game.

  What a variety of shell shapes! The elegant angel wings, the sturdy lion’s paw, the secret inscriptions of the tellin. The shell names were beautiful in themselves: spirula, rosy harp, trophon, and my favorite, argonaut. I repeated them like poetry. And while I collected shells, I collected Dr. Hugh’s bits and pieces of shell lore: that the cowrie is money on Captain Cook’s islands . . . that the Egyptians made the first papyrus ink from the murex . . . that Michelangelo used the king scallop in his architecture. Dr. Hugh was very learned — and I took pleasure in learning from him.

  Every week or so, after my reading rest, Miss Adelaide took me calling. Lettie brushed my hair, now streaked various shades from the sun. Jonah, Dr. Hugh’s barber, cut it regularly, maintaining my short Greek curls. Miss Adelaide tied the sash of one of my supper dresses and each time gave it and me an unnecessary pat. I recognized the affection in these extra touches, and although I couldn’t quite return the gestures, I could receive them as they were given: fondly.

  Aaron the coachman handed me into the buggy as grandly as he did Miss Adelaide, making quite a fuss. He was Lettie’s uncle but was much darker and thicker. The buggy was painted wicker and called a “governess cart.” Aaron promised to teach me to drive it.

  We called at Sudbury and Drax Hall or Villa Nova or Rosedown, the plantations nearby. Most of the great houses were in the upside-down Barbados design I was used to now, but none had a sea spectacle like York Stairs. We sat in the high, shaded drawing rooms, often shuttered in the afternoons, or on the galleries. We chatted and drank China tea, and ate little slices of dark spiced cake.

  The plantation ladies were all English; some had titles in front of their names. Many of their families had been in Barbados more than two hundred years. Everything and everyone was polished and leisurely. If it were not for the dark, silent servants and the steady creaking of the windmills, one would believe this a world without work.

  There was no one my age. The planters’ children were sent “home” to England for boarding school from ages eight to sixteen. How they must long for the sun, I thought, just as I longed for youthful companionship. Would I never cease to be an oddity? Sometimes there was talk about my joining some older girls for lessons, but Miss Adelaide evaded this neatly with vague murmurs of “till she is stronger.” And for a moment bright Barbados grew darker for me with the reminder of the old taint, stalking me even here. The clouds parted swiftly, however; there was far too much to see, to do, to discover.

  Often, as we left, the plantation masters rode in from the fields. The men’s sunburned faces lit up; they were reluctant to let Miss Adelaide go. I wondered, as before, why she was unmarried. I knew she helped Dr. Hugh with the sick children in his hospital and calmed the frightened parents. She did so much, was so vital to the people around her and to the smoothly functioning York Stairs world, yet she was careful to conceal it. It seemed she thought that the mark of a lady was to accomplish without visible effort. One day, I said timidly, “Miss Adelaide, why did you and Dr. Hugh come here?”

  “Ara, one day I will tell you,” she said. This sounded very mysterious to me, but I knew Miss Adelaide would keep her promise.

  Every few weeks, after supper, neighbors came to York Stairs, and we read a Shakespeare play aloud. I was told this was a James tradition in Charleston; it had clearly become their particular way of entertaining here in Barbados. Back in my nursery, when Mr. Harnett and I used to read our scenes, we had only our two voices for all the parts. At York Stairs, with a dozen readers, each play became a vivid world in itself where interesting people told their feelings in noble language. I was enchanted. The Globe Theatre was here in Barbados, and I was on the stage!

  The first evening, the group read Love’s Labour’s Lost, and I was a court lady. The next play was to be The Tempest, and Miss Adelaide asked me one day as we walked in the rose gardens behind the house if I would like to read the role of Miranda.

  “Oh, I’d be so honored!” I exclaimed. “I will practice over and over.”

  “Don’t try too hard, Ara,” Miss Adelaide instructed with a smile. “Don’t lose Miranda’s sense of wonder.”

  As I rehearsed the part, I felt I recognized Barbados as the setting for the play — though Dr. Hugh assured me Shakespeare was writing about Bermuda, which had been discovered about a hundred years earlier. But I felt that I already knew the isle “full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”

  I practiced my part for Lettie on the beach. And on the Shakespeare evening, I read it as though I lived it. I felt I was playing myself. From the moment I came to Barbados, I too began to “suffer a sea change / Into something rich and strange.”

  From that night on, to my great joy, everyone continued to call me “Miranda.” I had a new life in a new place; it was right that I take a new name too. Even Father agreed I had outgrown “Ara” along with my Boston buckle shoes. From that day forward, I was to be Miranda Chase.

  As I spent more and more time on and in the sea, I grew daily more curious about the sea creatures besides myself. Looking out to the violet shadows of the reef and then the indigo of the deepest water, I often saw gleaming curves of life breaking the surface, rhythmically appearing and disappearing. Sometimes black teardrop silhouettes leapt and fell in towers of diamond spray. I sensed enormous power and energy in these creatures.

  “That is Dolphin,” Lettie told me, using the noun as a proper name.

  “They are warm-blooded and air-breathing, like us,” Dr. Hugh elaborated at dinner. “Think of them as people in the sea — the nicest and smartest people you’ll ever meet.”

  “There are dolphins in many of the Greek myths,” Father contributed. “The gods were always fighting over them. Athena claimed them for their intelligence, and Apollo for their love of music. Poseidon wanted them for his attendants and messengers.”

  “Does Dolphin ever come close?” I asked Lettie as she saw me to bed.

  “He will if he knows you, my Miranda. First we must go to meet Dolphin where he is living and make him a friend.” She said this as she brushed a wisp of hair from my face with her fingertips.

  So the next morning, a flower day, Lettie arranged with Miss Adelaide that Abel, Lettie’s brother, would take us out in his fishing skiff. There was a slight delay, until Aaron could bring us a life preserver from Bridgetown at Miss Adelaide’s insistence.

  “Do not worry, Mistress Adelaide,” Lettie teased. “If there is trouble in the water, it is Miranda who will be saving Dolphin!”

  Abel was slim and honey colored, a little lighter than Lettie. His skiff was silvery unpainted wood, named fo
r his daughter Granada. We glided with a low rustle in the glassy green water, looking back at the wooded island. I saw York Stairs on its hill, with its avenue of cedars. I saw the fields of cane bending in the trade winds, and — very faintly — I heard the windmills working. The beaches were invisible, but the waves made shining fans of spray against the rocks. Soon Abel began to blow a reed flute with a plaintive voice.

  “Dolphin is a curious fellow,” he promised me. “He will be wanting to know our business here today.”

  The smooth glistening creatures began to approach us, coming in twos and threes — swift dark shadows in the luminous water. They came on steadily; a dozen or more, arching up to smile and breathe, then arching down to speed nearer. Up close, they were shiny storm-sky gray, half as long as our boat.

  I studied them. I discovered they had no angles, no sections, no additions except for their smooth fins; they were a single solid curve of beauty and power — in constant effortless motion all around us. They used the sea as I did, for purest pleasure; they projected ease and joy. I felt they were greeting and welcoming me.

  “Lettie, Dolphin likes me!” I exclaimed.

  “Dolphin is knowing his kin,” she answered gravely.

  As they played around our skiff, I reached to touch their warm skin, their taut muscled bodies. I felt the solid column of their breath, rising from the neat nostril in their foreheads. As they circled us, they chirped and chattered to one another like shrill, excited birds. I sensed their intelligent goodwill coming directly at me like a beam of light.

  When they decided to leave us, they turned together, all at one time. Each dolphin rose in the water to give me a long, deliberate, memorizing look. Then they departed in a green swirl of grace and power.

  As fluid as the waves around us was the passage of time in Barbados. I slipped through the hours as trackless as a dolphin’s path. I knew we had arrived in late summer, but as the days and weeks passed, the winds and the colors around me were unchanging. Only my shell collection recorded time passing. Now that I had one of almost every Caribbean species, I was trying to replace imperfect or beach-worn shells with finer specimens, or collect examples in every color. So far I had eleven different shades of my new favorite, king scallop.

  The sugarcane itself — the focus and center of our island, the reason white men lived and worked on Barbados — deceived us concerning time. The planters staggered their plantings in order to arrange a continuous harvest, so one cane field was being harvested as its neighbor was being tilled.

  I often saw a stand of rustling emerald green cane, the tall stalks fully grown. On one side, there were feathery silver new shoots — and on the other, dry tawny stalks ready for the mill and rattling like newspaper. Just beyond were fields blackened by the burnover and others tilled for a new planting.

  And always the great windmills turned and flapped, creaked and flapped, in the steady trade winds. When they died, when the air was slack and still, it seemed louder than the wind. Then Lettie told me the verse I would hear so often in the hurricane season:

  June, too soon.

  July, stand by.

  August, come it must.

  September, remember.

  October, all over.

  “Now we prepare for Hurricane,” Lettie announced. “He will come and he will go. There is no need to be fearing him.”

  “Will it be today? What time?” I was eager and excited.

  “Miranda, my brave one, we cannot hurry him. Keep watch. You will know Hurricane when you meet him.”

  Without our trade winds, it was unpleasantly hot. The motionless cloud towers drooped and sagged above the ocean. The pale sky glared; the sea was dull and flat, and sticky when I swam.

  At York Stairs, the marble tables sweated; Miss Adelaide’s flower arrangements faded in a day. The unshielded candles burned straight up at dinner. When I woke at night, in wet clinging sheets, I heard clouds of mosquitoes circling and whining outside my netting. Something was going to happen.

  The first two events were merely exaggerated storms, with high moaning wind and sheets of horizontal rain. We closed the shutters securely and read in the living room by unsteady lamps. I peered through the louvers and could see the cedars whipping about. A giant was shaking his paintbrushes! The gallery furniture skidded past in a hurry.

  The next morning the sky was a delicate, innocent blue, as if to say, “Who, me?”

  Lettie was right; when the big blow came, I recognized it. The sky was first gray, then brown, then swirling black. Single frantic birds darted here and there in panic. Then the wind changed from the familiar sorrowful keening to a sinister new sound, a howling. I heard this ominous shift in tone just as Dr. Hugh gave the order to take shelter.

  “Time for the cellar, Adelaide.” So we picked up the lamps and books and shawls we had prepared and headed for the huge storm cellar under the cookhouse. The house servants and the field hands and all their families were already there.

  I saw several hundred torchlit faces massed in the limestone cavern. There was a banjo player and singing. Naomi had kettles of spicy fish stew and ginger beer for everyone. Rum was not permitted. It all seemed like my idea of a church picnic — a York Stairs plantation party, gala and friendly. The little children stayed close to their mothers; the older boys and girls made their own groups.

  We four from the great house settled in the southwest corner, with a low symbolic wall for mutual privacy.

  “We must be here but not here,” Dr. Hugh explained to me. “Seeing us reassures the people, but they don’t want us underfoot either.”

  I leaned comfortably back, watching. No one was bored; no one was frightened. I took my cue from the others and calmed my quickly beating heart. They had all experienced Hurricane before and were not quaking with fear; I would follow their example. The young people giggled and whispered, the babies slept untroubled in their mothers’ laps. This event would provide fine material for my next letter to Mr. Harnett. I started to compose it in my mind.

  Lettie appeared out of the twilight. “Miranda, will you come with me to hear Hurricane speaking?”

  “Oh, yes, please!” I was eager to experience this powerful force closer at hand. We picked our way among the huddled families to the cellar entrance. Here the solid torrent of wind raged past us, screaming higher and higher yet, beyond control or reason. Lettie held my shoulders, reminding me with her light touch that I was safe, and we stood together — unseeing witnesses to the despairing madness of the hurricane.

  At midmorning, we collected our belongings and trailed back to the great house. There were palm trees down, attached to huge balls of rooted earth. The grounds were carpeted with layers of leaves and twigs, pressed flat into a mosaic. We found limbs all over the gallery and a few shutters blown off their hinges. The gray sea looked dirty and stirred.

  We had a cold lunch and exchanged damage reports. Dr. Hugh announced two windmills wrecked and innumerable chickens blown out to sea. Miss Adelaide showed us a grotesque rose from her picking garden, where the cruel wind turned her flowers inside out. I felt tired and let down now that the danger was over. Father must have sensed this.

  “Would you like to help me with my manuscript, Miranda?”

  I sat bolt upright. Father had employed me to answer his letters, but he had never before asked me into the tight circle he’d drawn around his private and privileged world of work. I was honored, and to my amazement I found that when we got down to work, I was actually useful. As I proofread his cool, precise prose, I twice suggested another word, and he took my advice.

  “I’m promoting you to editor!” Father stated. “I always need someone as literate as you seem to be.”

  Of course, this was the sort of game Mr. Harnett and I had played for years. He would write a theme as badly as he could, and I would correct his absurd mistakes. I was pleased that this nursery experience was helpful to Father now.

  With all the wonderful surprises being offered to me on regular d
ays, I eagerly anticipated what would await me on my upcoming birthday. On the morning of September 16, Lettie came to me with my morning eggnog and banana.

  “What are we going to do today?” I asked with a small smile. I imagined an extravagant outing.

  Lettie selected a maroon chiton and paired it with pale pink trousers. “Is there something special the missy would like to be doing today?” Her open face carried no hint, no secret.

  I decided to wait to see what had been planned. But as the day wore on and there were no acknowledgments of the day from Father, Miss Adelaide, or Dr. Hugh, I realized the unhappy truth: my birthday had been forgotten.

  Father had never failed to remember it before — but this year he was entirely engrossed in his book about Pericles. And, of course, the Barbados weather of perpetual May offered him no reminders of autumn’s arrival, I told myself. Perhaps he believed it was now Miss Adelaide’s responsibility to arrange, as she did so much else. That would have necessitated informing her when my birthday was, however. Clearly that hadn’t happened.

  I should not have told Lettie, but I did want to hear “Happy birthday!” from someone and to feel thirteen — though I already did feel that, with all the new hard muscles in my arms and legs. Then Lettie must have told Miss Adelaide, who must have spoken to Dr. Hugh, who may have scolded Father. At any rate, dinner was quite late that evening. But there was a beautiful mango trifle with thirteen candles, and grown-up toasts with wine.

  The carriage must have gone into Bridgetown late that afternoon. I was given a handsome album from Father, for recording my growing shell collection. Dr. Hugh presented me with two finely bound shell books from England; the endpapers had overlapping pectins, as at the water’s edge in Learner’s Cove. Miss Adelaide’s present was the best of all: a tiny bar pin of aquamarines set in gold.

  “I wanted you to have something that was mine.” She smiled and touched my hand. “I wore that when I was your age, before I ever knew there was a true sea that color. In Charleston, the water is more like coffee.”