Glorious Boy Read online

  “Dr. Durant!” Assistant Commissioner Alfred Baird hails him with a sheaf of his inexhaustible lists. “Your specimens get on all right?”

  “Specimens.” Shep needs a moment to realize that the well-meaning major is referring to his botanical samples. “Yes, but . . .” He shades his eyes against the sun and traces the route to Middle Point. “I’m still waiting for Claire and Ty.”

  Baird’s voice spikes. “Why in God’s name—”

  Just then Shep spots the large red knob of the Morris winding down the hill. His hand twitches as he points to the car. “It’s all right.”

  By the time the vehicle reaches the backup of vans and carts above the square, his pulse has returned to normal. The car halts. Claire jumps out and pushes ahead on foot. But even from this distance her spasmodic haste and rudeness—blindly shoving people and animals alike out of her way—telegraphs her desperation.

  He’s never seen Claire behave like this. And why is she alone?

  Inside a giant banyan grove on the other side of the hill, the only audible sound belongs to the cicadas. When he first showed her this hiding place, Naila’s father said the cicadas kept time for the gods, but Naila thinks now the gods must be deaf to need such noisy timekeepers.

  Her father counsels her, Listen, beti, and watch the shapes, the size and color of the sound. Don’t be so quick to judge, then even the screech of the cicada may bring music to your ears.

  She shakes her head. The gods are deaf. And her father is dead. Would he offer the same advice if he’d heard Mem and Doctor Shep last night?

  You know we’d take you if we could.

  This evacuation is just a precaution. We’ll be back before you know it.

  Leyo has promised to look after you.

  When the doctor placed that wad of rupees into her hand, she held it like a dead fish. Then he gave Leyo a bigger wad and advised him to spend it on whatever he could best use for barter because the money might lose its value after the British are gone.

  Beside her now, Ty rouses, then sits up, abruptly awake, and starts to stand.

  “Not yet, beta,” she calms him. “Let’s find the pictures in the tree.”

  Obedient whenever he likes the game, Ty drops back onto their blanket. She points to the cutwork of branches and leaves high above the mosquito net, and together they trace the dark shapes of two children holding hands, a pair of butterflies. When they narrow their eyes, the shapes change places, and suddenly patches of sky press blue elephants and lizards through the banyan’s fretwork. Ty loves the way he can make the outlines blur and light explode, the pictures jiggle and change, just by squeezing his eyes. Once his mind ignites, he is like a motor that will run forever.

  Naila makes sure he has reached this zone, then summons her parents again. They lean into her memory through the blue gateway of their quarters before the days of Mem and Doctor Shep. Her father’s face is broad and square with a fine chin dusted with whiskers beneath his scruffy mustache. His smile seems never to leave his face, no matter how heavy his cares, and in the thickness of his black hair a crescent of white sweeps above his left eye.

  Her ma liked to say pa wore the moon on his temple. She would take his face between her hands and hold him in her gaze.

  Naila feels their lips against her forehead as a hot breeze stirs the leaves. Go with love, Daughter.

  “But go where?” she begs out loud.

  Ty begins to hum, so softly that she can barely hear him beneath the cicadas. After a few seconds she recognizes the same Bengali lullaby that her mother used to sing, that she herself often hummed to Ty when he was a baby.

  So dear you are to me,

  How could I ever let you go?

  So dear you are to me,

  No one else must ever know . . .

  II

  1936

  “If you want to be the next Margaret Mead,” Shep had agreed, “the Andamans do seem ready-made.”

  They were sitting on the grass in New York’s Central Park in the summer of ’36, having known each other less than a week. Her hair cropped short, her limbs still coltish, Claire looked, Shep would later tell her, like Louise Brooks without the eye makeup. He, on the other hand, was twenty-eight, more Ronald Colman than Gary Cooper, but Shanghai-born and trained in London, now headed for his first posting as Civil Surgeon in the most tantalizing place Claire had ever heard of: a barely civilized archipelago in the Bay of Bengal.

  “I could skip all the hoops,” she plotted, hardly believing her own moxie. “No research grants, no department approval.”

  Shep whistled. “Can you imagine the reception you’d get from Columbia? Or Oxford, for that matter—if you walked in the door having already conducted your own original field study!”

  Could she imagine. She reached across the picnic basket and gripped his hand. This ruddy, disarming Brit had kissed her for the first time just four nights earlier, and in her mind, she was already halfway around the world with him, plunging into uncharted territory. It was madness. But he was nothing if not a willing co-conspirator. They’d spent every available hour since that kiss laying the groundwork for this scheme.

  He leaned over and kissed her again, then threw off his seersucker jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. The way he watched her, his sea-glass green eyes were slightly out of sync with his mouth, and this flicker of anxiety warned Claire that Shep wasn’t just besotted. He was serious—unlike her previous college-boy suitors. Also, trusting and protective. And vulnerable. She’d need to be careful not to take undue advantage, but what was he offering if not the invitation to take full advantage?

  Truth be told, she was out of her depth. When they’d met at the 21 Club last week, she’d initially mistaken this raw-boned stranger for a world beater. Asia, England, now America for a just-finished fellowship at Johns Hopkins. His doctor colleagues had brought him up to Manhattan to celebrate his appointment; it was that new. “A colonial port on a tropical island,” was how Shep first described his destination. Bully for you, Claire had thought, and was turning away when one of her meddlesome roommates piped up, “Claire here fancies herself the next Margaret Mead. Before you know it, she’ll be hunting heads in Borneo.”

  The gin-soaked glitter of their surroundings had flared, and Claire deflected. Her friends loved to tease her, she told Shep. She’d been drawn to ethnography ever since reading Coming of Age in Samoa when she was thirteen, and she applied to Barnard just so she could study with Dr. Mead’s own teachers, but she’d never been west of Chicago—or east of Long Island. All painfully true. Claire had graduated less than a month earlier, was only twenty-one and barely qualified for the steno pool, let alone Borneo. The only way she could live in New York was to share a room at the Barbizon with three other girls, and the only reason she stayed in New York was because the alternative was to move back home to Connecticut. With the economy still in tatters, her parents couldn’t afford to send her to graduate school, and not even Dr. Benedict’s recommendation had been enough to land her a scholarship.

  Shep said, “I’m told where I’m headed the tribes date back to the Stone Age.” He smiled. “I can’t promise that they hunt heads, though.”

  He was flirting. Nothing more. But he’d gotten her attention. She asked, “What do they hunt?”

  That seemed to catch him off guard. “To be honest, I’ve no idea.” He looked down at his martini as if he wasn’t sure how it had wangled its way into his hand. “I’d never heard of this place until I received my marching orders this morning.”

  She felt herself redden. “So you made all that up.” Again, she prepared for flight.

  “No!” His drink splashed across her forearm, and he gasped. “Oh. Sorry!”

  Claire watched a kaleidescope of emotions flash across this stranger’s face. Despite his nervous British manners, he seemed to radiate candor.

  “It’s nothing.” She licked off the damage and grinned, but Shep remained as flustered as a nabbed truant. It was his turn to blush—or,
more accurately, for the tips of his ears to turn bright pink. “Seriously,” she said. “I know times are tough, but sloshing a few drops of gin is hardly a federal offense.”

  He took a half-step away from her, the packed room offering little leeway. Their friends had vanished. “I didn’t make it up,” he said. “I just don’t know much more than I’ve told you.”

  They both were novices, then. She studied his eyes, their clear, open color. By contrast, her own dark gaze must seem furtive, but that didn’t appear to bother him. “What do you want?” she asked softly.

  A new ripple restored Shep’s smile, simultaneously daring and winning. “Everything,” he answered. “Don’t you?”

  Instead of returning to Baltimore with his “mates,” Shep had stayed in New York, and they’d seen each other every day since. Getting down to business now in Central Park, he unfurled their blanket under a sheltering maple, unpacked their picnic—two wrapped sandwiches, two cups and one bottle of cola—then handed her the leather-bound volume they’d found in the library that morning: The Andaman Islanders by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown.

  He was calling this their “research phase.” Since he knew almost as little about his destination as she did, he’d suggested they find out what they could together before taking “any next steps.” In the process, he didn’t need to say, they’d also research each other. Exposed already: this gangly redhead was as methodical as Claire was impatient. Doubtless a good thing, under the circumstances.

  “I remember Professor Benedict talking about Radcliffe-Brown,” she said, scanning the book jacket. “She called him one of ethnography’s big-picture men, but she never described his fieldwork.” Claire wished Dr. Benedict hadn’t left already for her own summer fieldwork. Her advice would be worth gold.

  She opened to the introduction and gave the book back to Shep. “You first.”

  He hesitated, as if this might be some sort of test. She said, “I can picture it better if you read it to me.”

  “Ah.” He stretched his long legs and leaned back against the maple’s trunk. Then he cleared his throat and began to read with the buoyant lilt of a radio announcer. “‘Viewed from the sea, the islands appear as a series of hills, nowhere of any great height, covered from sky-line to high-water mark with dense and lofty forest . . . The coast is broken by a number of magnificent harbours. The shores are fringed with extensive coral reefs—’”

  Claire scowled. “Sounds like paradise.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  She blurted without thinking how it might strike him, “I’m not looking for a holiday!”

  “No,” he replied quietly. “I can assure you, Claire, you needn’t worry about that.” He seemed on the verge of saying something more and different, but instead returned to the book. “‘The Andamanese belong to that branch of the human species known to anthropologists as the Negrito race. They are short of stature with black skins and frizzy hair—’”

  “Wait,” Claire stopped him. “Let me see that.” Until this moment, she’d assumed the Andaman islanders must resemble Polynesians—like Margaret Mead’s grass-skirted Samoans. The image that now formed in her head made her search for the book’s photographic plates. Though grainy and faded, they confirmed her mistake. In picture after picture, men, women, and children glared back in hostile defiance. They looked more African than Asian, and far wilder to Claire’s eye than Mead’s smiling islanders. The Andamanese wore necklaces and loincloths, and little else. Their chests and backs were threaded with patterns of scars, and their hair resembled black fleece shorn close to the skull. Some sported tattoos of clay. A couple of the men held bows and arrows longer than the hunters were tall. One girl had a skull strung to her back.

  Claire wondered whatever had possessed her to think she was qualified to communicate with these people, to make this preposterous journey. At the same time, her longing to do just that struck her dumb.

  She flipped back to read that the Andamanese were likely related to the aboriginal inhabitants of the interior of the Philippines and the Malay Peninsula. They’d been isolated on these islands off Burma for thousands of years. Even though Europeans had begun scouting the islands in the 1700s, many Andamanese tribes in Radcliffe-Brown’s time had yet to encounter a westerner, and he was the most recent ethnographer to study them.

  That was it, she thought. That was the prize. To meet these people would be like entering a time capsule. Like starting life over. Erasing everything that came before.

  “Claire?”

  She looked up with a sense of shifting lenses to find Shep studying her the way her father used to when she was little, when they went out searching for fossils or egret feathers, just the two of them. His expression curious. Hopeful. Forgiving.

  She dropped her gaze. “It says Radcliffe-Browne was the only trained anthropologist ever to study the Andamanese. Many of these tribes were already dying out, and that was thirty years ago.”

  A paper boy stopped in front of them, belting out the evening headlines: “Louie Meyer wins Indy in four! Mussolini declares Italy an Empire! Remington Rand Strike, Day Five!” It seemed to Claire he was ringing a gong. Time! Time! Time!

  Shep finally bought a paper just to get rid of the kid. Then he shook his head, as if having a silent conversation with himself. Without meeting her eyes, he retrieved the book, flipped back to the introduction, and held it for her inspection. “There’s something else you need to consider, Claire.”

  Confused by his sudden gravity, she read where he was pointing: “‘The islands, save for the clearings of the—’” She looked at him. “‘Penal Settlement’?”

  He closed the book and lowered it to his lap. “Port Blair—the town where I’ve been posted—was founded as a place to send India’s political prisoners. It’s the only modern settlement in the islands, and technically, it’s a penal colony.”

  Claire’s bewilderment must have shown. He said, “I guess you Americans would call the inmates revolutionaries. The Indian nationalists call them freedom fighters.” After the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, he explained, the British Indian government decided to distance the leaders of the insurrection from their followers. “I expect the remoteness of the Andamans was their appeal for this purpose. Back then the place had a rather sordid reputation.”

  “But that was . . .”

  “Eighty years ago.”

  “So this is ancient history.”

  “Not quite.” The concern in his voice told her this was the real test he’d been dreading. “After the convicts finished building the settlement, the British put them to work on a jail, where the violent criminals could be held while their more peaceable comrades were sent to work the island’s teak plantations and sawmills. The jail was completed around the time your Mr. Radcliffe-Brown arrived.”

  “I don’t understand. You’re making it sound like some sort of tropical gulag.”

  “Well, in a way I guess it was. Back then, anyway. But once the hardened types could be confined in the jail, the general atmosphere calmed down and the port began to flourish.”

  Now, Shep explained, the town of Port Blair was populated by Burmese and Indian convicts who’d been released for good behavior. These former prisoners had to remain in the Andamans but were otherwise free to marry or import their wives and children. They’d built settlements along the coast, started farms and businesses. Many chose to work as servants for the civilian and military administrators. “The officials live on an island that’s set up as a cantonment across the harbor from the town. That’s where the main hospital is—where I’ll be based. The British there call it the Paris of the East—though I assume that’s somewhat in jest.”

  “The Paris of the East,” Claire deadpanned. Shep seemed to expect her to recoil at the notion of moving to a penal colony, but Port Blair sounded more bizarre than off-putting. Trouble was, she didn’t yet know enough to know how to react. In Claire’s experience, the history of the British Raj, the Sepoy Mutiny, the Indian Independe
nce Movement, even that famous little man Gandhi amounted to no more than exotic newsreel images. If she had to pick a side, Shep was correct that she’d probably line up behind the freedom fighters, but it didn’t sound as if it would come to that. Anyway, her primary destination was not this port or penal colony or whatever it was, but those “dense and lofty forests,” where she envisioned herself spending most of her time among the islands’ true and rightful inhabitants.

  Why, then, did Shep look so sheepish?

  “Am I supposed to be afraid?” she asked.

  “It’s not that.” He chewed on the inside of his cheek. “But there are bound to be tensions . . . It’s different from China, of course, yet I expect there’ll be parallels. Colonial attitudes die hard in Asia, and the Brits aren’t always as benevolent toward their ‘loyal subjects’ as they pretend to be.” He scowled, perhaps remembering his childhood in Shanghai. His freckles and ginger cowlick sometimes reminded her so much of her brother, Robin, that Claire had to look away.

  Whatever colonial tensions might await them, she sensed that they weren’t what worried Shep most. No, he was more worried about her, afraid that she might not turn out to be the go-getter he imagined, the partner he needed as he returned to a world that obviously filled him with ambivalence. And she was hardly equipped to reassure him.

  She leaned closer and placed her palm on The Andaman Islanders. “If Radcliffe-Brown could work his way around this wrinkle in paradise, then I ought to be able to, too.”

  She waited for him to meet her gaze, then reached for the bottle of cola, opened it and, ignoring the cups Shep so thoughtfully had arranged on the blanket, took a swig and passed him the bottle.

  Shep returned her gesture with a smile as a streetcar clanged on Fifth Avenue. They watched two miniature sailboats collide on the pond in front of them, a group of children playing blind man’s bluff on the hill beyond. Claire considered asking why Shep had pretended to know next to nothing about Port Blair, when he obviously knew plenty, but she let it go.