“Kissed him?I?Kissed him?That lout! I would rather kiss a tree frog.”
I stared at her in astonishment.
She stared back, her eyes locked on mine, her pout slowly breaking into a coy smile, and she stepped closer. “Take me,” she whispered.
I could not believe it—my head whirling at the speed with which her emotions changed. Yet, was this not the Bertha I preferred, I asked myself—a loving and lusty wife? She stepped closer and put her arms around my neck, kissing me full on the mouth, and I responded, and together we made our way to our room and fell upon the bed.
When we had finished, spent, I caressed errant locks of hair from her face and kissed her gently until she turned away from me. “You are nothing like your brother,” she murmured.
“What?” I asked, suddenly chilled.
“You are nothing like your brother,” she repeated slowly.
I moved back from her. I was indeed nothing like my brother, I knew, but I could not think of a response to that.
But she could. “He is tall and slim and fair, and he dances as if he is moving on a cloud, while you—”
“That’s enough,” I said. I did not need to be told by my own wife how much she might have preferred Rowland. “You were a child when he was here,” I said, throwing on my garments. “And you had a child’s imagination. But now you are a woman, and you know nothing of Rowland.”
“It isyouwho knows nothing!” she screamed. “You stupid…graceless…ugly—” I slammed the door on her words.
***
The next morning, she came to me, contrite, and leaned over the back of my chair as I sat at breakfast, kissing my neck and nuzzling against my ear. “Did we make a baby last night, do you think?” she murmured.
I turned toward her. “Bertha—”
“Antoinetta!” she demanded, rising.
I rose as well, pushing back my chair and facing her. “We can only hope God blesses us—”
“God.” She spat the word. “God has nothing to do with it.” She began weeping, silently. “It’s all wrong,” she said as she wept. “Everything is all wrong.”
I thought I loved her.I will make it right,I told myself. But I had no idea.
There were other balls and gatherings after that, but they were all the same. We arrived separately and danced a few times together before she went on to dance with one man and then another, and afterwards we returned, she sullen, or I, or both of us. She spent her days with Molly, playing strange African games. Perhaps they were meant to help her conceive a child, but I ignored them as foolishness. And we came together in acts of passion, if not always love.
Everything to do with my marriage to Bertha had happened so quickly that I had not, fortuitously perhaps, found time to write to my father to tell him the news, that I had indeed married Jonas Mason’s daughter. However, by the time I got to the task, I had already begun to wonder what kind of future our marriage held for us—Bertha’s mother and brother in an insane asylum, and Bertha herself clearly disturbed—so I wrote to him in simple and civil terms, saying as little as necessary and imploring him not to make my marriage known among his friends and acquaintances.
It was not the marriage I had thought we would have, but it was perhaps no worse than many others. Richard had warned me about Creole marriages, though at the time I paid little attention. One always thinks one is the exception, I suppose.
I saw less of Richard since Valley View became my chief residence, but I did pin him down once on the question of his mother, though he seemed not to understand my concern. “Of course she is mad,” he said. “Did you want us to shout it from the treetops?”
“I should have been told,” I responded tartly.
“What good would it have done? And anyway,” he added as he walked away, “half the women on the island are mad.”
But that far from satisfied me, and I confronted Jonas Mason as well. “I ought to have been made aware of Bertha’s mother,” I blurted out to him one evening as we sat on the veranda. It was not how I should have done it, but perhaps it was as good as I could have managed in my distress.
“You ought,” he agreed. “I had imagined…Ithoughtyou could help her keep from becoming like her mother.” He glanced away from me, as if searching for the right words. “I thought new blood…And—”
“She will get worse,” I said.
He nodded. “She will.”
“And she is afraid of being put where her mother is.”
“Please,” he said. “We cannot let that happen.”
