Paige’s relationship with her mother was something else. Her mother was a beauty from a wealthy social background. Her cool aloofness kept Paige at a distance. Marrying a doctor who was going to work in far-off exotic places had seemed romantic to her, but the harsh reality had embittered her. She was not a warm, loving woman, and she seemed to Paige always to be complaining.
“Why did we ever have to come to this godforsaken place, Curt?”
“The people here live like animals. We’re going to catch some of their awful diseases.”
“Why can’t you practice medicine in the United States and make money like other doctors?”
And on and on it went.
The more her mother criticized him, the more Paige adored her father.
When Paige was fifteen years old, her mother disappeared with the owner of a large cocoa plantation in Brazil.
“She’s not coming back, is she?” Paige asked.
“No, darling. I’m sorry.”
“I’m glad!” She had not meant to say that. She was hurt that her mother had cared so little for her and her father that she had abandoned them.
The experience made Paige draw even closer to Alfred Turner. They played games together and went on expeditions together, and shared their dreams.
“I’m going to be a doctor, too, when I grow up,” Alfred confided. “We’ll get married, and we’ll work together.”
“And we’ll have lots of children!”
“Sure. If you like.”
On the night of Paige’s sixteenth birthday, their lifelong emotional intimacy exploded into a new dimension. At a little village in East Africa, the doctors had been called away on an emergency, because of an epidemic, and Paige, Alfred, and a cook were the only ones left in camp.
They had had dinner and gone to bed. But in the middle of the night Paige had been awakened in her tent by the faraway thunder of stampeding animals. She lay there, and as the minutes went by and the sound of the stampede came closer, she began to grow afraid. Her breath quickened. There was no telling when her father and the others would return.
She got up. Alfred’s tent was only a few feet away. Terrified, Paige got up, raised the flap of the tent, and ran to Alfred’s tent.
He was asleep.
“Alfred!”
He sat up, instantly awake. “Paige? Is anything wrong?”
“I’m frightened. Could I get into bed with you for a while?”
“Sure.” They lay there, listening to the animals charging through the brush.
In a few minutes, the sounds began to die away.
Alfred became conscious of Paige’s warm body lying next to him.
“Paige, I think you’d better go back to your tent.”
Paige could feel his male hardness pressing against her.
All the physical needs that had been building up within them came boiling to the surface.
“Alfred.”
“Yes?” His voice was husky.
“We’re getting married, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s all right.”
And the sounds of the jungle around them disappeared, and they began to explore and discover a world no one had ever possessed but themselves. They were the first lovers in the world, and they gloried in the wonderful miracle of it.
At dawn, Paige crept back to her tent and she thought, happily, I’m a woman now.
From time to time, Curt Taylor suggested to Paige that she return to the United States to live with his brother in his beautiful home in Deerfield, north of Chicago.
“Why?” Paige would ask.
“So that you can grow up to be a proper young lady.”
“I am a proper young lady.”
“Proper young ladies don’t tease wild monkeys and try to ride baby zebras.”
Her answer was always the same. “I won’t leave you.”
When Paige was seventeen, the WHO team went to a jungle village in South Africa to fight a typhoid epidemic. Making the situation even more perilous was the fact that shortly after the doctors arrived, war broke out between two local tribes. Curt Taylor was warned to leave.
“I can’t, for God’s sake. I have patients who will die if I desert them.”
Four days later, the village came under attack. Paige and her father huddled in their little hut, listening to the yelling and the sounds of gunfire outside.
Paige was terrified. “They’re going to kill us!”
Her father had taken her in his arms. “They won’t harm us, darling. We’re here to help them. They know we’re their friends.”
And he had been right.
The chief of one of the tribes had burst into the hut with some of his warriors. “Do not worry. We guard you.” And they had.
The fighting and shooting finally stopped, but in the morning Curt Taylor made a decision.
He sent a message to his brother. Sending Paige out on next plane. Will wire details. Please meet her at airport.
Paige was furious when she heard the news. She was taken, sobbing wildly, to the dusty little airport where a Piper Cub was waiting to fly her to a town where she could catch a plane to Johannesburg.
“You’re sending me away because you want to get rid of me!” she cried.
Her father held her close in his arms. “I love you more than anything in the world, baby. I’ll miss you every minute. But I’ll be going back to the States soon, and we’ll be together again.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Alfred was there to see Paige off. “Don’t worry,” Alfred told Paige. “I’ll come and get you as soon as I can. Will you wait for me?”
It was a pretty silly question, after all those years. “Of course I will.”
Three days later, when Paige’s plane arrived at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Paige’s Uncle Richard was there to greet her. Paige had never met him. All she knew about him was that he was a very wealthy businessman whose wife had died several years earlier. “He’s the successful one in the family,” Paige’s father always said.
Paige’s uncle’s first words stunned her. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Paige, but I just received word that your father was killed in a native uprising.”
Her whole world had been shattered in an instant. The ache was so strong that she did not think she could bear it. I won’t let my uncle see me cry, Paige vowed. I won’t. I never should have left. I’m going back there.
Driving from the airport, Paige stared out the window, looking at the heavy traffic.
“I hate Chicago.”
“Why, Paige?”
“It’s a jungle.”
Richard would not permit Paige to return to Africa for her father’s funeral, and that infuriated her.
He tried to reason with her. “Paige, they’ve already