“Safer that way,” Tamara said. “Don’t give me that look, as though you never played the angel for him.”
“Did I?” Pea asked, and something made Tamara’s breath stutter in her chest, made her heart ache.
“Well, I think that’s why he let me—let us—go.”
“Funny of him. But you never could tell when he drank like that.” Pea gave her a long look, the kind that meant a hundred things she wasn’t saying. “I’m tired, baby. Let me sleep.”
Tamara tucked her in and brought her water and put the pillows under her back just so, all the while thinking that Dev had some nerve, asking her to tell that awful story whose real ending made her look like some regular mob girl, some cold-hearted creature who only valued her own comfort. And for what? Could he know that Victor’s curse was rattling around his old house? Could he know that Tamara held his wife and daughter’s fate in her soft oracle’s hands?
Dev had been laid up for weeks after that night. Tamara had waited three days before she could bear to visit him. He said he didn’t blame her. Because he loved her, she’d thought. But now doubt came down in a white-hot flash: had he loved her after that night?
Had he seen through her all this time, and never let it show?
She’d been so silly, so sure, so complacent about that deep, good-hearted love in him. Tamara had swanned around the Pelican, proud to have a man like him for her own. She’d felt good in the reflection of his goodness. She’d known exactly what Phyllis had lost and regretted, leaving him for all that violence that the angel called justice.
And now Dev might not have loved Tammy at all. He might have just stayed, out of habit or loyalty or—pity, even, goddamn him, knowing she couldn’t bear an honest assessment of her character.
What did he really think of her? What had he told Phyllis? What truths were permitted over that connection that time and blood and guilt and dozens of other lovers had not dissolved? Tamara had been jealous, she could admit that now, jealous of every discreet glance, of every casual conversation, of how deliberately they never so much as brushed the other’s sleeve. He would sigh, sometimes, just after he and Tamara made love and she had known he was thinking of Phyllis and would never admit it. What had he written in that letter? What did he know about Tamara? Had his second dream come down, a warning knell from the front?
Had it told him the truth: that Pea was dying, while Tammy whistled in the wind, doing nothing, saving herself for no one?
6
She snuck into Pea’s room after midnight and took Dev’s latest letter from the desk. Pea groaned in her sleep, turned and then subsided. Tamara held her breath until she was back in the hallway. She went back downstairs to the kitchen to read it.
February 22, 1942
Pea—
Well, it seems that the commonwealth has claimed me, despite my best efforts. I have been pulled from and stationed to . I’m afraid this letter will reach you months from now, when no doubt my circumstances will have changed once again, but I will always write, Pea, I promise. As long as I am able.
I wanted to scratch that last bit, but I suspect the censors will make such confetti of this letter that it would be a shame to aid those enemies of self-expression. So I will leave you with my slightly morbid, always loving, thoughts.
The air is dry here. Drier than anything I knew in Murbad. It scorches your lungs. The people wear scarves on their heads and robes down to their sandals. It helps against the heat, of course it does. This is their land, they ought to know how to dress for it. The British, however, mock the clothes and supposedly primitive customs of these people all the while swilling quinine, trussed up in their military uniforms and baking in this hard fist of a sun until they look like nothing so much as lobsters in Wolseley helmets.
Well. I doubt that will get through, but just in case it does, I will imagine you laughing.
I have not been laughing very much. The ambulance detail was very hard, Pea. Harder than I expected, and I expected a scene from the more brutal levels of the naraka. The dead did not bother me so much, not after a few weeks there. I know this sounds—well—I confront my failure of imagination. I don’t know how this will sound to you, my Kali, my goddess of vengeance. But I have worked where I have for a decade.
Before last summer, I had never killed before—never killed a human before—but I knew what death looked like.
But the wounded, Pea. The blood and the screams and the splintered bone and pulped flesh and the blood—I did not imagine that there was so much blood in the world as what I saw in the hospital . We waded through it. It stiffened our clothes. The smell never—never—left my hands. (The censors will probably be appalled that I am describing this to you with so little regard for your sensibilities. You, my angel, may tell them to themselves if I cannot.)
I was with the Negro unit in Europe. (I gather that Tamara’s beau was posted to the Pacific theater? It’s hell over there, too, that’s what they say. But if he’s lucky enough to get trained he might make it back. Don’t tell her I said that—what am I saying?—I know you won’t.) They were good men. A few were even from Harlem, and one said he knew your family, Pea. Though
