“Interesting,” I said.
“Yes, interesting. That is what you wanted, after all, Mrs. Randolph. Anyway, you see what I mean. If you wish to become intimate friends with the royal couple, to learn all their secrets so you may write about them in your magazine, you had better not mention my name.”
“Understood.”
He looked at his wristwatch. “Forgive me. I have a dinner engagement. I am already late.”
“We can’t have that.” I held out my hand. “It’s been a pleasure.”
Instead of grasping my palm, de Marigny pressed the fingers briefly to his lips. As he released me, he raised his eyebrows. “But perhaps you can join us? We are just a few dull sailors from the yacht club.”
“I wouldn’t dream of intruding.”
He smiled. “Yes, you would.”
“Maybe I would. But not this time. You’ve given me a little too much food for thought already.”
De Marigny reached into his pocket to retrieve a fold of bills. He plucked at them almost without looking and laid a five-pound note on the counter, next to his empty whiskey glass, which amounted—if I knew my shillings—to a four hundred percent tip for Jack.
“Of course, you can do with this information what you wish,” de Marigny said, rising from his stool, “but if I were you, I would not print these things I have told you, not yet, or you will never write another word in Nassau.”
“Then what would you recommend?”
“Why, it’s very simple.” He picked up his hat from the counter and settled it on his head. His eyes had regained their luster, his smile its charm, and I believe every head in the room swiveled to take him in, on cue. He didn’t seem to notice. “If you want to know all the best ladies in Nassau society, Mrs. Randolph,” he said, “you must join the Red Cross, of course. The headquarters is just around the corner, on George Street.”
I ORDERED A PORK CHOP for dinner and ate it at the bar, washed down by a glass of red wine. Afterward, I stepped outside and paused to light a cigarette. The sun was setting over the ridge, and the sky had that unearthly wash of color that stops your breath. Above my head, a pair of seagulls shrieked at each other. I stared north, toward the harbor and the slivery green paradise of Hog Island on the other side.
Having spent the last two years of my life in what you might call a prison, in a series of cheap boardinghouses in cheap American towns, I couldn’t quite accustom myself to this landscape of heat and color and clarity, this excess of blue that was the Bahamas. When I’d stepped outside the metal skin of the airplane to the earth of Oakes Field, three weeks ago, I thought I’d traveled into another universe. I thought I’d stepped into another Earth entirely, a paradise lit by an eternal sun, a release from everything old, everything dreary. Then I touched land and discovered that freedom was not so straightforward, that you could move to a different universe but you couldn’t escape the prison of your own skin.
Still, I hadn’t entirely lost that sense of unreality, especially when I found the line of that horizon and searched in vain for any cloud. The British Colonial Hotel sprawled ahead on West Bay Street, white and crisp like a castle made of wedding cake. A breeze came off the ocean, smelling of brine. The sand, oh. How I’d miss the fluid, delicate sand, slithering between my toes. I dragged on my cigarette and stared again at Hog Island, now gilded by the rising moon. The lighthouse twinkled from the western tip. Some Swedish fellow owned the island, an inventor, built the vacuum cleaner and the electric icebox, God bless him. Came here to the Bahamas because of the taxes—the absence of taxes, I should say, and why not? A fellow who invents the vacuum cleaner, he’s done his share for humanity. Let him wallow in profits and buy a goddamn island in paradise and call it Shangri-La. Let him buy the largest private yacht in the world and swan around the seven seas. Wenner-Gren, that was his name. Axel Wenner-Gren. There was a Mrs. Wenner-Gren too. No doubt Mrs. Wenner-Gren was invited to all the duchess’s parties. And she hadn’t even had to invent a solid-state electric icebox! Just to marry the man who had. I tossed my cigarette into the sand and turned to walk back to the Prince George Hotel.
As I reached the base of George Street, I hesitated. Instead of continuing to the hotel, I turned left, walked up the street, past the Red Cross headquarters to stand at the bottom of the steps that led to Government House. Darkness had drained away the pinkness of it, the confectionary quality. A constellation of lights shone through the various windows. I could just make out the guards at the main entrance, standing at brutal attention, and the perfume of the night blossoms, wafting from the gardens behind their wall.
BACK IN MY ROOM AT the Prince George, I changed into my pajamas, brushed my teeth, drank a glass of water, and took some aspirin. Fetched my suitcase from the wardrobe and opened it. There was a knock on the door, not entirely unexpected. I had asked for a final bill from the front desk, as I intended to check out tomorrow morning.
But it was not the bill at all. It was an envelope, addressed in an elegant, calligraphic hand to Mrs. Leonora Randolph. Inside lay an invitation from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to a cocktail party this Saturday at seven P.M. in the gardens of Government House, to benefit the Central Bahamas Chapter of the International Red Cross Society.
TWO WEEKS AFTER the encounter in the infirmary garden, Herr Doktor Hermann offers Elfriede an unusual question in the middle of their afternoon discussion.
“Would you say, Elfriede,” he intones, making a bridge with his hands, “would you say that you love your husband?”
ELFRIEDE’S HUSBAND. DOES SHE LOVE him? They were married four years ago. She’d celebrated her eighteenth birthday only a month before the wedding, in a small party attended by her parents and siblings and prospective sisters-in-law (her husband is an orphan) and Gerhard himself—of course—aged thirty-three, the giant Baron von Kleist who was doing her such a preposterous honor as to marry her. Of course, her beauty was to blame for that. Why else should a baron of such ancient lineage, of considerable fortune and figure, stoop to marry the daughter of a mere burgher? They had met skating on the village pond, a democratic location. Elfriede was an especially graceful skater, and Gerhard was not, and whether by accident or intent he had crashed into her, just gently enough that she wasn’t hurt, but so decisively that he had no choice but to apologize profusely for the accident and buy her a cider. “Why, he’s in love with you,” her mother whispered eagerly the next day, after the baron paid an afternoon call to assure himself of Elfriede’s recovery, and Elfriede—well, Elfriede was too overwhelmed, too flattered, too mesmerized to understand whether she returned that love or not. Gerhard von Kleist was not exactly handsome, but he was tall and magnificently built, he was well-dressed and well-read, he had a disarmingly earnest way about him, and above all he was Gerhard von Kleist! He was a nobleman, the hereditary master of Schloss Kleist; he was a great man, he was an officer in the army, he hunted often with the Kaiser himself. By April they were engaged; by June the banns were called, and on the first of July they were married in the beautiful church in the village, disapproving sisters-in-law to one side and ecstatic parents to the other, amid much good-natured congregational whispering about the baron’s haste to make the flaxen-haired Elfriede his lawful bride.
Before they left for the church, in the carriage bedecked with flowers, Elfriede’s mother pressed a lace handkerchief into her hand, as tradition required. Elfriede was to mop up her bridal tears with this linen square, and afterward to fold it and tuck it away in her drawer on her wedding night. There it’s supposed to lie, until one day, when Elfriede dies, the Cloth of Tears will shroud her cold, dead features. Tradition. As it turned out,