Tales of the New World: Stories Read online

  “You’ve heard it so many times. Surely you don’t need to hear more?”

  “Spiteful Mary,” say the fairies, because they do want to hear more, especially about the water fairies, who live in the rivers and travel far and wide, who aren’t trapped like Mary in the dusty, somnolent house, where the only fresh air is blown in with Father on his rare visits. “Read more.”

  “Say ‘please,’” says Mary.

  The fairies shift on their little buttocks, point their toes. They hate saying “please,” especially to Mary, but there’s nothing else to be done, because fairies cannot read.

  “Please Mary,” they say, in a screechy little chorus. “Please read more.”

  Mary looks over to Mother, who shifts a little in her sleep, but seems peaceful.

  “All right then,” she says, “but you mustn’t interrupt.”

  II.

  It happens quite suddenly. First Father, in bed, because of what the rheumatic fever had wrought on his heart. And then, two and a half months later, Mother, although the stroke had done half death’s work at that point. Sometimes, it was as if the stroke had wound Mother back to childhood, as if Mother were returning to her past instead of moving on. And then one day she was asleep not to wake up and the cycle was over—discomfortingly undramatic, a stingy, unfair end.

  Mother’s death should be easy for Mary. Everyone else seems relieved on her behalf, but her life’s work—twenty-nine years of constant caretaking—is now ended and Mary, who has done little but look after Mother and concoct fantasies, finds herself with nothing but a few thwarted desires, all of them absurd. This amuses her, but she is also unsure of how to proceed.

  Father’s death is sad, but the house did not know him so well, and Mary has to remind herself that he is actually dead, not off with General Custer in America, not in Bora-Bora, not in New Zealand.

  What is there to do but fold Mother’s seldom-worn dresses for charity? There is a woman who runs some sort of mission in Calabar who, apparently, is always looking for clothing. But what Africans wear dresses like these, buttoned up to the chin, mutton-sleeved, and made of such tightly woven wool?

  “Mary,” say the fairies, “Mother’s dead and you can go anywhere you want.”

  “She did not hold me prisoner,” says Mary. “She loved me.”

  “What’s the difference?” says a fairy, and the others laugh heartily.

  “Stupid, stupid fairies!” says Mary.

  “Stupid, stupid Mary!” they mimic. “Open the curtains! Let in the light!”

  And Mary does just that, sending the fairies scrambling to the shadowy corners, their eyes squinting.

  There is a great deal of packing to be done. Charley wants to make the move from the Cambridge house—so much better than the one in Kensington where Mary grew up—to London. Charley wants it and so Mary wants it, although she knows she’ll miss her friends, hard-won friends that she earned with her unconventional learning—German, natural sciences in general, fish in particular, Latin, history. Anthropology. Plumbing. She is quite handy when armed with a wrench and confronted with a leak. All this awkwardness of a life spent alone with books and dark rooms and imagination has made her quite singular. This, and her cockney accent, inherited from Mother (who else was there to speak to but Mother and Helen?), make forays out of the house painful and uncomfortable, the shock of contact almost painful too. But refreshing. She does not really know how to converse, finds herself lecturing and telling jokes, and then realizing the other faces around her, smiling and unfamiliar. Face, face, face. The only face she’s accustomed to is her own—in the mirror—and there’s certainly no point wasting time meditating on that. When she’s uncomfortable, she blushes and smiles. Her teeth are fine and even if the way she smiles—sincere and fast—seems a bit immature, it serves her well when it comes to making friends. But now they’ll have to visit her in London.

  The box of papers has a layer of dust on it, and when she disturbs the lid the dust rises up, making her sneeze and the fairies, sneeze, sneeze, sneeze, one after the other. What is this box? Is it Mother’s? Father’s? There are some papers inside. Father’s birth certificate. Did one keep that? And if so, why? She has his death certificate, too. Not important, but still to be kept, although a life is what happens in between. And thinking of that, where are the crates and crates of Father’s papers—his “books”— going to fit in the little apartment four flights up that Charley has chosen for their home? She rifles through the box’s rustling, whispering contents. Father bought a horse at one point. And he sold it. Two sets of papers prove this. Here’s a contract for South Sea Bubbles with Macmillan. The advance is almost embarrassingly low. Father never did make much money and Mary will have to be careful. But what would she do otherwise? Buy fashionable hats? Eat at fancy restaurants? This mourning black suits her fine. And here is Charley’s birth certificate, January 12, 1866. And here is Mary’s, October 13, 1862. And her parents’ marriage certificate. Unlike Uncle Charles, Father had married down, to the daughter of a publican who rented rooms, whose rooms he rented. And here they are, bachelor George Kingsley, spinster Mary Bailey, October 9, 1862. What’s this?

  She reads the date again.

  Married, October 9, 1862.

  Yes. Between the two certificates a mere four days—evidence of little time and much import. Mary, not often stunned, is stunned. The fairies, sensing this, flit over. They hover around her ears, the high pitch of their wings buzzing.

  “What, Mary?” they ask. “What, what, what?”

  One of them steals the paper and flies up to the high corner of the room. The others follow. All the fairies snicker and giggle, because they know they’ve got something. But fairies cannot read.

  “Keep it,” says Mary.

  “What does it say?” they ask, and then, in clear, tortured desperation, “Please Mary. What does it say?”

  “It says,” she replies, “that I belong nowhere, that I never have, and now that Mother and Father are gone, there’s really nothing for me to do.”

  “It says all that?” asks a fairy, the clever one. She wrinkles her nose, unconvinced.

  “Yes, yes it does. And you can keep it. It’s of no use to me.”

  This might be the lowest time of Mary’s life: alone, orphaned, and spinstered. She is an accident and her parents’ marriage is not a bold, class-violating, romantic statement, but an accident as well—an attempt to remedy with poison. And this strange yet fiercely accurate truth: Mother did not give birth to her, but rather she birthed her mother: created that cradled, coddled, frightened thing by destroying what might have been love, what was surely impulsive, and that evidenced a different mother than Mary had ever known.

  Mary, who excels at equations, wonders how many years she and Mother have paid each other for these acts of violation, but of course it is the same amount: twenty-nine years, Mary’s first and her mother’s final.

  The fairies are lined up on the edge of the desk. They’ve grown bored of the birth certificate, as has Mary, and it’s on the floor curled back into a tube, which makes it easy for Mary to kick it across the room.

  “Who cares?” she says.

  The fairies aren’t sure how to respond. Which would bother Mary: if they cared or if they didn’t? “It doesn’t matter anyway, because I’m leaving.”

  The fairies mass and splinter off.

  “I’m going on a boat,” Mary says, now with conviction.

  “I’ll be gone a long time.”

  “You’ll never do it,” say the fairies, challenging.

  “Let me finish packing.”

  “We won’t let you pack, wicked Mary, going off on a boat, when you should be cooking for Charley,” says the clever fairy. “You should be home where people get sick and need you to hold their hand—”

  “And change the sheets when they mess themselves!” says another, and they all giggle.

  “Who’s sick?” says Mary. “I’ll tell you. I am. And Charley’s off to China, g
athering material to write a book.”

  “You know he won’t,” says the clever one, “he’s even stupider than you are. He can’t do anything.”

  “Nothing, nothing at all,” chant the fairies.

  “You’re going to have to stay in England to cook and clean and fix his clothes and hold sick people’s hands and listen to Charley complain and complain and complain—”

  “What is this beautiful thing!” says Mary, standing at the closet door. “I think it’s a piece of gold, the way it glitters.”

  The fairies come over immediately. “We don’t see it,” they say.

  “Look, on the floor, beside my galoshes!”

  And the fairies are in and Mary slams the door shut.

  She can hear them flying around, trying to get out. Stupid fairies. They’re not strong enough. Their wings sound like moths hitting a lampshade.

  Why the Canary Islands? Because Mary needs a reason to travel and the only one that works for someone in her position—spinster—is that of tonic recuperation. And the Canary Islands are as close to West Africa as Mary can get without the possibilities for her health being reversed. And when Charley finally packed off for the Far East and no longer needed her to keep house for him, this was the easiest trip to plan. The quickest. The recuperative advantages are already being felt by Mary, who now strides across the deck, her mourning black as trim and functional as an umbrella, and who occasionally—with a “Good day, sir!”—will initiate conversation. On board this merchant steamer in all its industrial, dirt-generating practicality, Mary feels oddly herself. She has never felt this way before. What is this new ease?

  She wonders who that creature is whose life she’s been inhabiting for the last twenty-nine years.

  James Batty, who trades along the Gold Coast, has been her friend on this journey. He’s told her stories that have chilled her bones, told her stories that have made her laugh, just stopped short of finishing others off, which has made her curious. He thinks he’s being charming, falls into charm easily, as some men do, but Mary’s being provoked by a much larger spell, perhaps the spell cast by his spell. She will go to Africa. She will because she has nothing to lose. For one brief second she’s euphoric—literally dizzied—by this: her intoxicating life of value to no one. Worthless translates quite narrowly as freedom.

  “And there you are, blown about by the wind and not caring at all, Miss Kingsley,” says Batty.

  “Let it blow harder,” she says. “ I’ve never felt better in all my life!”

  “What will you do when you reach the Canaries?” he pursues.

  “Take a look around,” she says. “Maybe go on to Africa. See what that’s like.”

  “So it’s a holiday, is it? You seem rather determined for one so—”

  “Undetermined?” asks Mary. She laughs and juts out her chin, smiles fast and strong. “It had better be a holiday. I’ve no profession. If it’s not a holiday, then it’s nothing.”

  They stare out at the waves. If Mary were a different sort of person, this might be romantic: the two side by side, dark continent before her, stuffy England behind, thud of drums before her, rustling silk behind . . . and so on. But this is Mary and she does not care for that tender cage, nor any cage.

  “Tell me about Africa,” she says.

  “The native songs and wild beasts, the fear and beauty—”

  “Don’t be silly,” she says. “How can I equip myself to travel?”

  “Alone?”

  “There’s no one else.”

  “Well then you can’t, short of becoming a man.”

  “And if you were more liberal, what would be just short of becoming a man?”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Don’t doubt it.”

  “Well, then I’d have to say spirits.”

  “Spirits?”

  “Alcohol.”

  Mary ponders this. “I don’t understand how my drinking would solve anything, unless, so addled,” here she has a twinkle in her eye, “I would be unable to make the journey.”

  “Should it cure this desire to travel alone, such intemperance would be beneficial. However, should you find yourself wandering about Africa unaccompanied, it would make sense to have a role, perhaps as trader.” Batty takes a moment with some matches—it’s windy, but he’s skilled—and lights his pipe.

  “I’ll peddle anything but God,” says Mary.

  “Spirits and tobacco will open every door, where there are doors that open.” Batty puffs efficiently, like a steamboat. “The missionaries will most certainly disapprove. But they will give you a good Christian burial.”

  “When I succumb to malaria.”

  “Or some unnamed fever.”

  “Or get eaten by a leopard.”

  “Or hostile natives.”

  There’s an awkward silence because this joke flies parallel with the truth. Where does one laugh? Mary sets her boots upon the railing, looks out at the water. She nods with satisfaction. “Well then, spirits it will be.”

  Mary returns to her cabin. The door shuts with a loud creak and slam behind her. She holds her head firmly with one hand and pulls out the hat pin with the other. Her headache immediately subsides, but one must pin one’s hat tightly in such wind, even if it does pull at the scalp.

  She can now indulge in some private moments with Albert Günther’s Introduction to the Study of Fishes. Even though she could not bring herself to share it with Batty, she has ambitions, an embarrassing thing for any woman, but particularly for her, who has a magpie’s education from the College of Whatever Happened to Be on Father’s Bookshelf: consisting of a whole lot of exploration, some antiquated naturalism, bully novels, introductory mechanics, and, the one thing that had actually involved a teacher, German—German to help Father in his writing, because he couldn’t be bothered to learn it himself. She knows that French would be more helpful because it is what the natives speak. But surely French is not as useful as a native dialect, Fang, or some other, but who could teach her that? Fish it is. She’ll learn about fish and maybe one day become a collector, take a river deep into the heart of it, on a canoe—her barque to sail into a new life. Just Mary and a number of naked natives and jars to fill with fish that people back in England have never seen. Preposterous. Impossible. Essential.

  How is she to accomplish anything? This trip ticks to its end as she eagerly consumes it and then back to England, back to Charley, back to that other self as if she is a playing card—let’s be frivolous, let’s say the queen of spades—and this vivid woman will soon be flipped over to present only the tile pattern that is accepted and does not disturb. Think ahead. Plan. She feels England reeling her back: the shepherd’s hook on the Vauxhall stage. She would stop herself from dreaming, from entertaining these ambitions, but she cannot stop. She is too far gone.

  Mary wonders if she has recuperated, although—back in England—her lungs already feel half-collapsed. She’s frank about her condition to herself and no one else is concerned. Then she remembers that she was supposedly recovering from grief, although she feels that she has walked back into that as one walks into a cold room. The air is dry and the dust heavy on all the surfaces. Good. English. Dust. In the apartment on Addison Road, everything has been shut tight for months. Mary wonders where dust comes from, what generates it. Charley has returned and no matter how Mary reminds herself of duty, reminds herself that she has a responsibility to keep house for him, reminds herself that he will leave again to leave her to leave, reminds herself that she does not mind, reminds herself that all this endless reminding is exhausting, useless activity, she has a hard time watching him sit.

  “You hate him,” whispers a fairy. Mary can feel the pressure of the tiny feet on her collar. “Admit it,” they all chime in, “you wish he were dead.”

  “Nonsense,” says Mary. The response comes fast and chipper with no thought, a rote response for a rote life. “I wish for no such thing.”

  Although sometimes she wishes she
were dead. She feels herself to be an animated corpse performing the actions of her days, while her mind replays her voyage. Her forays to the African mainland return more vivid than the present rotation of gas-lit rooms and long faces and sun-starved mornings. She plays through one evening when, having spent four uneventful days strolling through the crooked streets and haphazard dwellings of Freetown, she boarded the boat for the Canaries and found her cabin occupied by four dead men. When she finally tracked down the captain, he was shaking from lack of alcohol, his face flushed and sweaty, his demeanor broadly macabre, comic even.

  “How may I be of assistance, Miss Kingsley?” he asked.

  “It’s my cabin. It’s occupied by four men.”

  “Are they bothering you?”

  “Not exactly. Well yes, I mean, no.” She felt herself smile and then repressed it. “They’re all dead.”

  “West Africa,” said the captain, philosophically, “White Man’s Grave.”

  Mary, sensing the discussion over, returned to the deck and eventually fell asleep sitting down, her back against some wall, hoping all the while that she was truly shielded from scrutiny by a grouping of barrels. This was not her first night asleep with the elements: she’d been stranded overnight on a small volcanic island off Grand Canary and spent the night exposed to wind and pelting rain. All these things, these intolerables, are to her quite tolerable. Better the White Man’s Grave than whatever twilit life London provides.

  III.

  Mary is journeying back to Africa aboard the Lagos, a trade steamer loaded up with bales of whatnot and boxes of such and such. Captain Murray likes to talk and talk and it seems he’s never met such a good listener as Mary, who knows nothing of interest and draws all the information from him as if her inexperience causes a vacuum. Captain Murray has taught her that in Africa, everything comes out, nothing goes in, except “some rubbishy bolts of cloth, a few things necessary to keep the missions going, the stuff we need to build empire—rivets, tools, that sort of thing. Iron and irons, both to be born by the natives.” An uncomfortable chuckle here, but a chuckle nonetheless. “Also, the stuff to draw its betters out: tobacco, whiskey, beads, which come back ivory, rubber, diamonds.”