The divers sat, bent over at the chest as if all the air had been pushed out of them. They were shivering, even though it was very hot in the sun, cold inside their dark, oiled skin. Their thin extended ribs made their chests look like birdcages. They alone were silent. James could not take his eyes off them. These men consumed him; those who descend. He remembered a poem from school, Keats’s ‘Endymion’: ‘a moon-beam to the deep, deep water-world’. If they spoke and we listened, what would we learn, the boy wondered
But the divers were herded off to be searched.
James made his way in the pearling business, though not as his father would have had it. He was known neither for acuity nor gambler’s instinct, or skill at selling. He’d be remembered as the one with the gift of the gab, a man of words, armed with a poem when a dirkin or a kreese might do better. Some thought they could get the better of him because of this tendency, but it rarely happened. John Keats and his fellow poets were good company, better, he judged, than his country folk, the English, with their lordly manner.
The next day James and his father stayed on shore with the traders. Late in the day there was a commotion as one of the boats came in. He thought at first they’d taken on a log and laid it out on the nets between the divers’ feet. Then he understood that this burden was a man. He could see the black head and arms. It was a diver, his lower body wrapped in a sail. The sail was soaked in blood. The man had lost his leg to a shark.
The boy saw his face; his eyes were closed, his mouth open, as if he had looked on something of awe and had retreated inward. The leg was with him at the moment
although James understood it was discarded later. He and it were a strange colour of grey.
There was an outcry, then, about the shark binder. Right on the spot the military Poo-Bah brought him up to account. The Superintendent was high on his horse. He bellowed and the conjuror ought to have quaked, but he was consummate in his act of defiance.
‘A man has been attacked by a shark? Shark binder, it is your task to keep the sharks away. How can you explain the failure of your charms?’
The man stood firm, if you could call his fantastical gesturing firm, undulating his torso and sniffing the breeze for a message, or an excuse. The whole affair was understood as theatre, amongst the Europeans, and the conjurors, too, but not amongst the divers. They stood wide-eyed with terror, but obdurate. It was in their power to shut down the entire fishery; they need merely refuse to sink. It was a lesson to James. The naked ones, because they risk death, had the power.
A crowd gathered around these two men. Papa and he moved in to hear. The shark binder defended himself, waving his arms weirdly and impressively and calling out explanations that surely made no sense even to him.
‘What does he say, what does he say?’ the English asked.
‘He says that a very great witch issued a counterconjuration,’ explained the Superintendent disgustedly from his horse. ‘That was why the shark bit. He says he will prove he is stronger than she is by issuing an even greater charm to bind the sharks for the rest of the season. I suppose I shall have to pay him double.’
‘Do you see?’ whispered Papa. ‘He can’t lose, that conjuror. He’s got it covered either way.’
The conjuror began with further charms, more exaggerated and bizarre contortions, ululations, screechings and mumblings. Finally, his adherents appeared to be satisfied. Only then did the owners begin to unload the oysters. They
lay in heaps to be sold in lots, unopened. When the auction began the bids were fast; each lot went to the highest bidder who then came and hauled away the bags.
It was on that day, in Ceylon, that James saw one more extraordinary sight. A small girl about his age. Proper, dressed for a garden party in flounces of white all dotted with yellow. Sashed and bonneted like Little Miss Muffet on her tuffet, in all that sand and wind she held, over her small self, casting a useless pale shadow in which she was careful to stay, a red, ruffled umbrella.
His eye was drawn to the red umbrella. Red spot in the centre, making the whole scene revolve around it. She was the eye of the storm, that’s what she was. She was the heart of the matter.
‘Who is that?’ he asked his Papa.
‘That?’ his father replied, following his finger. ‘Don’t point!’
There were thousands of people on the beach. He had to point. ‘The girl with the umbrella,’ he said.
‘That,’
he said. ‘You mean
she. She
is the daughter of a man from the garrison. I believe he is called Mr Avery McBean.’
They were getting closer. She was plump and she pouted. She had a magisterial air about her. He knew as soon as he saw this child that she would make planets revolve around her.
‘Do you know her Papa?’ he asked.
‘I cannot say that I know her,’ said his father, ‘but I have been introduced. And so shall you be.’
And they set out across what seemed like the Sahara, this mile-wide expanse of dry sand. It grew softer underfoot the farther they went from the ocean’s edge. James’s feet sank into it, making each step a little harder than the previous had been, giving him the sense that even as he approached Miss McBean so also did he retreat from her, the sole of one foot moving backwards in the shifting sand
and digging itself a little hole as he stepped out on the other. Slowly, ever so slowly, face into the wind and clinging to his hat, he made progress toward her.
Thus men approach their fate.
It was not quick enough. As mentioned, there were, in that area of Ceylon at that time, in the untrimmed jungles that lay behind that godforsaken beach, all manner of wild beasts. Elephants that came steaming out at road crossings, tigers whose golden eyes could be seen in the dark, and buffalos. The buffalos did not like red.
Just then one of these bad-tempered buffalos appeared out of nowhere. He caught a glimpse of the plump, pouting Miss McBean, and took exception to her red umbrella. He put his head down. A charging buffalo is not amusing. It was wide of shoulder with a bony ridge down its back and a tail with a point on it like the devil. Its hoary head was low with shiny black horns at the ready.
‘Papa!’ James cried. His heart began to pound. Had no one told Miss McBean about the colour red? Probably she would have paid no attention if they had. Or did she wear it as the soldiers did, with a fated desire to draw attention to herself?
The buffalo did not stop to think. He headed for her with murder in his eyes.
Dawdling and oblivious, she swung her umbrella over her head, then lowered it to waist level and then, holding it in front of her body as if she were a vaudeville dancer, twirled it. The animal bellowed straight at her.
James did not recall his Papa answering. But in a minute they were running in dry sand. The more they hurried, the deeper they sank. Papa held on to James with one hand and waved his hat with the other, hallooing like mad, though his words were lost in the wind. The buffalo ploughed on. A few men in the crowd shouted warnings. A soldier on horseback wheeled around and cantered toward the rolling red frills. A man who must have been the girl’s father appeared out of a tent and they suddenly were all, all – buffalo, horse and
soldier, Papa and James, her doting dad – racing against sand and time toward the girl while she – surprised, but unflinching – got a whiff of danger, and lowered her lovely toy to the sand. She found herself staring down the nose of a charging buffalo.
And what did she do? She put one little fist on her hip and made as if to stamp a foot in a wee Scottish tantrum. But just as she lifted it off the sand, a long arm that might have belonged to a polo player grabbed her around the waist and scooped her up to hold her against a solid military thigh where she remained unbending and in full possession of her umbrella. The buffalo charged into empty space, looking foolish and disappointed.
Later that trip he must have met her. He must have heard her piercing little voice and seen her dimples and righteous blue eyes and pale protected skin. But the voice and the eyes desert him; he has no memory of them. He only remembers the untouched froth of her, the childish form of her, there on that mystic and desolate beach. He remembers her innocent and altogether misplaced lack of fear.
That was the charm. It was not the one his father meant to put on him, a bondage to the business of pearls. To pearls James became an ambivalent servant. To Miss McBean he became a slave, and remained so for many years to come.
The coffee was drained from their cups.
‘It’s all in the past,’ said James Lowinger. ‘You mustn’t be so interested,’ he chided, gently. ‘And not you, Vera, for certain. And a good thing it is that there are no pearls left in the oceans and rivers of the world, my darling,’ he said then with an
irresistible and roguish look of tenderness. ‘You can be the first of our family to be free of it.’
Roberta fussed getting James Lowinger’s coat. He shambled to the door, this big man, and pulled his umbrella from the corner where he’d propped it, and paused on the step to open it skyward and herded Vera under it on to the street. She walked him carefully back to the warehouse. Fifteen minutes later, Vera stood waiting for the streetcar in the rain.
The first in the family to be free of it.
That meant the others were not free. Her grandfather was a captive, she saw that. His father too, from the sound of it: pearls were his religion.
Her
father must be a captive as well. It must be that which kept him in the Far East and away from her all her life so far. Even her mother, dead now, must have been a slave. The Lowingers were all that way, set apart. And so would she be. Vera Lowinger Drew: the last of a line of men and women whose lives were governed by the pearl. It was sad but glorious. She got off the streetcar and began to walk home. And now the pearls were gone, as the family was almost gone; it had come down to the two of them.
Or three.
She entered the house by the front door, throwing it behind her so that it slammed. Keiko emerged from the kitchen, smiling.
‘Vera.’ Probably she practised the name half the day. Vera was filled with scorn. She let Keiko take her bag. She could see behind her in the kitchen the shells and bowls of water that betrayed the various weeds and molluscs that would be her dinner.
‘Can’t we have meatloaf like everyone else?’
Keiko set the book bag on the side table. In her halting English she offered to learn how to make it, if Vera would teach her. Vera said never mind, she would only eat the rice. Rice was white and so was she.
Then she took her bag and went into her little room to read. Within an hour, the front door opened again and her grandfather’s step resounded in the little stucco house. Coming out to greet him, Vera was stopped by the vision of Keiko on her
knees in front of him, pulling off his shoes. ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she began to mutter, but the old man’s eyes, the one so bright and the other whitened, met hers and she subsided in shame.
And she went back to her room and did her schoolwork, biding her time, biding her time.
TWO years passed this way. Vera, James, and Keiko. Now it was 1936.
Vera was thin, pale, and possessed of a ferocious will. Her features had sharpened, and her eye sockets were deeper. Her nose was longer, sharper, and had a bone. It was a patrician nose, her grandfather said, looking at it askance. ‘God knows you didn’t get it from me.’
Keiko tended to both her charges in the morning, seeing Vera off to school and bundling James to the streetcar to his warehouse. Then she washed every item that had been used since the night before; cutlery, dishes, towels, clothing. The fabrics she put out on bushes to dry, running out to collect them when it rained. Once her housework was done she too set out on foot, for the end of the street.
She went in the same direction as James Lowinger, but farther, down to the east end, to the shops in Japantown. Here she would learn the news about her country – never good, because of the war in China – and find the fish, radish, and seaweed she liked. She had a few friends there. One was a dressmaker who made tunics and jackets for Vera. The other was a fishmonger. She would return home before either Vera or James appeared. On the clothesline she pinned the squid to dry; it was transparent, at first, but slowly, as it hung, it turned brown. She cooked eels and little fish on a small charcoal burner on the back step.
She did not seem unhappy; she giggled often and ate heartily, smacking her lips. She smiled directly into the eyes of the neighbour ladies who had yet to think of one single thing to say to her other than, ‘Lovely morning isn’t it?’ They didn’t know what to call her; nobody had told them her name. So that when the first one, the most kindly, called her Mrs Lowinger and Keiko bowed in acknowledgement, that became her name. In this way Keiko was ensconced in the family and on the street. Days and weeks and months went by and Vera continued courting her grandfather and taunting his young wife, his not-wife. The word for Keiko, which Vera was to learn later, was
aisho.
Vera was conscientious at school. She too had friends, ordinary girls in tunics and curled hair and rolled stockings; girls who were taking stenography courses and already had boyfriends. But like Keiko she did not like her friends to come to the house or perhaps they did not like to come to the house. Perhaps they had been told not to come. She was never certain. The girls didn’t tease her, just as the neighbours didn’t shun Keiko; that would be too obvious and they were all good Christians. They admired the old man they called Captain James. They were a little afraid of Vera: she was austere and thin. People did whisper that she had changed. It was
an irregular situation,
as her teachers said, in that house. They praised the girl for her English composition and her skill at volleyball. For being good to her grandfather. They did notice that she grew thinner and whiter (nothing but rice in that house!), and that she lost interest in her friends, and ran off to the warehouse every day when the bell rang. She’d taken it to heart they said, the death of a mother. What could be worse for a girl that age?