Ella narrowed her eyes at her brother.
Emmanuel smiled at the Graces. “We have not had many visitors from outside the island. Probably only once a year, and then mostly other missionaries. It is an honor to have artists in the house.”
“I am an artist,” Ella said.
“Enough, Ella.” Bishop Chase put down his fork. “Ti Me,” he called. “Ti Me!”
She appeared at the dining room door.
“Take Miss Ella to the parlor, please, to wait for us while we finish dinner.”
“But I am not done!” Ella said. “I am not finished.”
Bishop Chase would not look at her; he only continued to chew.
Ella rocked slightly back and forth in her chair. “You cannot make me leave,” she said. But when she saw Ti Me in the doorway, Ella stood up.
“I believe I am to retire,” she said. And she bowed her head—once, twice—in each Grace’s direction. Then she was gone.
I felt Emmanuel’s hand on mine. I had been running my fingernails down the tablecloth, in one long swipe, like the claw of an alley cat. He wrapped his hand around my wrist and squeezed it. I knew he meant it kindly, but I only wanted to pull away.
I had thought, up until that moment, with the Graces speaking warmly and Emmanuel joining them in their jokes and conversation, that maybe I could do what my husband was pleading with me to do. But then I thought of a thousand more nights in this beautiful country. Would he order me from the table, as his father did, if I said something he did not like? And would I leave with dignity, like Ella did, leave in a fiction, or would I kick and scream as I wished she would do, as I wanted to do now, and be called mad and unruly.
It was quiet for a moment. Emmanuel turned to Louisa and Experience apologetically. “Ella has not had the opportunities you have,” he said. “She has never been to school. She is a bit unused to polished company, but I hope you will not hold that against her.”
“I would never hold it against her,” Louisa said, and Emmanuel smiled as Bishop Chase raised his head in the air. He’d heard the music in her voice, but he could not quite place it.
I had the satisfaction, at least, of seeing his expression when the world did not make sense for him. If only for a moment.
The Graces were to sleep in the parlor, on the broken-down divan that we pushed to the parlor chairs. I stood in the doorway and watched as Ti Me prepared their bed.
Experience cocked her head in Ti Me’s direction as she knelt over the chairs. “This is life in Haiti, then?” she said to me. “All you do is sit up here and make sure Emmanuel is happy when he returns home?”
“You do not have to take in laundry or mending to stay afloat?” Louisa added.
“You are what those girls at school always wanted to be: a lady of leisure.”
I laughed. “Leisure is stifling.”
“Listen to the cheek of this girl,” Louisa said, leaning over to Experience, “telling you and me, you and me, dear Louisa, that leisure is stifling.”
“I would give anything to be stifled,” Experience said dryly, and this set all three of us to laughing again, so loudly that Ti Me looked up, annoyed.
“Lordy,” Louisa said, when we’d made a configuration of furniture that finally seemed as though it would fit the two of them. “I would never have guessed that you live such as this. Experience and I, each night, would say ‘Where do you think she is now? Do you imagine she sleeps in a hammock beneath banana leaves?’ And now to find you living in something like Cunningham’s dining hall, but just with warmer weather …”
I frowned. “That is unkind, Louisa.”
“Is it?” She looked up. “I did not mean it to be. I only mean, your life seems different from what you told us it would be.”
“Isn’t that true for all of us?” I said. “Could you have imagined traveling the world with Experience, sleeping in stagecoaches, arguing with impresarios as naturally as if you were debating the merits of philosophy back at Cunningham?”
“No,” Experience said. “This is true. We could not have imagined that.”
“So then life is different for all of us.”
“Is that why you have not written back to your mother,” Louisa said, “only sent her one telegram telling her you are with child and scaring the poor old girl half to death?”
I started. “How do you know anything of that?”
“Our last performance, before we left the North, in Manhattan, she had heard we would perform, and she came. She showed us the telegram herself. She said, ‘Will you write to her? Will you find out what she means? Will you send her my word?’ And I said, ‘I will do you one better, madame. We will be traveling to Haiti ourselves and can deliver any message that you wish.’ And so she gave us this.”
And here, Louisa reached into her pocket and handed me a folded-over piece of paper, much wrinkled where it had been pressed up against her hip.
“It is from her?”
“She said to place it in your hands if you were alive, and onto your grave if you were dead.”
“She thought I was dead?”
“She said you have not written her a word since your marriage. I think she is justified in thinking you had passed.”
The paper was the same yellowish shade as the pages in her accounting book. I could not bring myself to open it.
“Libertie, it is very cruel of you to send a telegram like that to your mother and never write a letter,” Louisa said.
“I did not know what to say.” My voice came out low. “How would you explain this house to her, if you had to explain it?”
“I guess that is fair,” Experience said.
“Are you safe here, Libertie?” This was Louisa. “Are you well?”
I did not know how to answer her questions. I
