Forever And A Baby. Margot Early
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Nantucket had. She forgot the “Our Father” and memorized the words and syllables of salaat, Muslim prayer. The Rashaida children learned no formal prayer until they were fifteen, but Dru had heard the moment-to-moment acknowledgment of the constant presence and power and greater plan of Allah. Their prayers made great sense in the desert. Where, sometimes, nothing else did.
Keziah made some sound, and Dru glanced behind her. Her friend raced to her on the brick sidewalk. Sandalwood and jasmine from her auburn hair filled Dru’s nostrils. Her look said, again, why she’d never asked about the photos in the tabloids, never said, My cousin Ben? for he was the son of Keziah’s uncle, her mother’s brother Robert Hall. Her look explained why she’d never said, The two of you are lovers? Or asked why Ben was missing from the funeral. Their friendship trusted without asking. Each trusted that the other was essentially good. Keziah rested her head against Dru’s.
“Thank you,” said Dru. There was no appropriate word for the situation. Guilt whispered in one ear; sin stank in one nostril. The other ear heard the white wing-beat of innocence, while the memory of chaste and tender blushes filled her senses. Every awkwardness had aroused her. And him, as well.
The truth lay hidden under cloak and veil and downcast lids, under his clothing and hers, in the deepest recesses of their beings, and it twisted through the ambiguity of her mourning like a thread of the wrong color.
She was relieved and sorry when Keziah turned to Oceania. “We’ll help you. You can teach us sign language.”
Tristan turned, tall and cold, like a judge at a witch trial. “I didn’t ask you.”
Hatred poured between them.
Dru ignored it, had never wanted to understand it. Instead, she replayed the last of the two births she’d attended during her marriage. Crammed in the tiny head of the converted minesweeper, her friends’ research vessel. Ship birth, home birth. The shower steaming into the room. She’d sat on the toilet seat, the newborn lying face-down on her legs and trying to cough, trying so hard, dear baby. Darling precious baby. Dru had felt no elation in victory, no faith inspired by the happy outcome, the only bearable outcome. Rather, a ball of sickness had formed in her stomach and transformed to anger—at herself, for agreeing to a birth in those conditions. Yes, there had been a third birth, one more birth since then, in Mali, with no hospital nearby. Again. But Dru had only observed, as a woman and honored guest, studying the technique of the traditional midwife, the important role of the mother’s mother and kin. During transition, she’d walked away, to return as the head emerged. She’d crouched nearby while the marabout, a holy woman, thrust a knife deep in the sand near the newborn’s head to protect her from evil spirits. Later, when mother and child were secluded, the marabout had given Dru an amulet made for her. Cowrie shells on leather. That was months ago…. When the baby project with Omar—without Omar—had begun.
Now, there was Oceania, and it was Tristan who’d asked Dru to attend the birth. I can’t.
I won’t.
But Keziah would be there. The hospital was close. And Oceania was the woman Dru had seen in Gloucester. With the man who could be…She will tell me. She can write the answer. She can tell me who he was, who was that man.
Her father’s ghost.
His double.
He’s alive. He can come home.
The daydream took her mind to a gentler place. Far from what she’d done with Ben, from the warmth in her heart made repulsive by grief. To a miracle that might be, a reunion with her father—instead of everything that was.
THE RECEPTION WAS AT OMAR’S—Dru’s—house on Orange Street, two doors from a more ornate Greek Revival where Dru’s mother, Joanna, lived with Tristan’s daughter, and sometimes Tristan. That home, the Tobias Haverford House, was number six on the Orange Street tour led by the historical society. Omar’s and Dru’s house was never toured, though for W and Town & Country, they had been photographed in the garden, the sighthounds at their feet.
The Azawakhs, Femi and Ehder, greeted the funeral guests. Mitch, Dru’s driver, kept the sand-colored bitch from lunging at strangers and the blue brindle from putting his forepaws on the shoulders of friends, Keziah in particular and Omar’s fund manager, Roger. Mitch introduced the brindle, putting the accent on the last syllable. “His name is Ehder. It’s a Tuareg word. It means Eagle.” And—less patient—”Femi.”
More people entered the Federal-Greek Revival than had the cemetery. A few more friends, family and servants. They stood on the original wide pine floor planks. The boards were washed to a light tan, flooding the rooms with their bareness, celebrating the modern Danish furniture that had been Omar’s passion. Previous owners had sold off the antiques, a story Dru had lived herself, after her father’s boat went down, as her mother struggled to keep their home. An oriental end table for groceries and electricity. Within two years, Joanna had been forced to sell the Tobias Haverford House. Dru had ransomed it back after her marriage, returning it to her mother.
Omar had been generous.
In their own house, he’d given her a spacious second-floor bedroom to use as she wished. Despite his unspoken censure, she’d created a studio. A Bose stereo system, a view of the harbor, luxurious Indian pillows, a Berber rug from Morocco and room to dance. In a sea chest, she collected instruments. The ‘ud, the qanun, like a zither, a nay—a reed flute—the darbukkah, the hand drum shaped like a vase, the rababah, played with a horsehair bow. The double naqqarat, kettledrums, in one corner. Silk and cotton wall-hangings, harem images. A precious miniature of her ancestor, Nudar, in a dark, possibly indigo, headdress and silver necklace.
You’re playing at things you know nothing about, Omar had said of her singing and dancing.
Tell me.
He’d become silent. And she’d imagined a little boy helping to bury the bodies of his loved ones, who’d been killed by tanks. There might have been limbs detached—her imagination saw the blood and the wounds. The trauma.
After that conversation, she had never once sung or danced while Omar was home, nor painted her skin with henna. But she had danced when he was gone, and she read even more assiduously of desert peoples and their traditions. She did this for two reasons. It was part of being a Haverford, this studying and collecting. The Nantucket museum held scores of treasures gathered from abroad by her seafaring ancestors. Tobias Haverford had brought home the dearest prize—his wife. But also, in the books she read, the academic domentaries she watched, Dru searched for Omar, for some key inside him she couldn’t reach, something to explain the contradictions. Something more fathomable than the indelible scars of war.
She had not found it. Now she was left with the freedom to dance whenever she liked, to spend her life dancing and singing.
She did not feel like dancing.
But at Omar’s wake, women gathered in her studio. Dru and her mother and Keziah and hers. The two little girls. The pregnant woman, Oceania, whom Dru had coaxed from her brother’s side, to gain her trust and learn her secrets. Two of the Haverfords, the wealthy branch of the family, from California, speaking ever so often of their—and her—dead cousin, Skye.
Someone hummed softly. Keziah picked up the mizwid, the smaller Algerian equivalent of bagpipes.
The deepest rituals of song and dance, to honor the stages of life.
Joanna took Oceania’s hand. “Come with me, darling.” Removing the pregnant woman from the grieving place.
Keziah’s mother, Mary Mayhew, followed them with her eyes. The door shut. “What’s she going to do? Where’s the father? It’s so hard to give up a baby.”
Or to raise one alone, Dru thought. As Keziah was doing. But she would choose Keziah’s path herself. In any circumstance she could imagine.
Mary shook her head heavily. “So hard to part with one’s child.” Shivering back tears, she embraced Dru. “Oh, darling, I shouldn’t be talking about babies.”
Mary