Mrs. Sangha sipped tea while she waited. She gripped the railing on the top landing of the back stairs with one hand and leaned forward to get a better view of her daughter in the yard. The child had awakened early this morning in response to her too-urgent embrace. When she opened her eyes, put her arms around her mother’s neck, and returned the hug, Mrs. Sangha felt safe and, even though it was a child’s embrace, comforted.
These days regular radio programming had been preempted. There were hardly any variety programs, no comedy hour, and no tips from Mrs. Talbot. It was all-day analyses and updates about events overseas, broadcast by somber English men who carried on nasally with high-pitched voices. Included in news items more often lately were snippets of frenzied speeches delivered in the even higher-pitched tone and strange German language of a man who, to judge from his actions as detailed in the news bulletins, had gone quite mad. This man seemed to be gaining ground, albeit with unconscionable force, in his desire to rule over all of Europe. There were other speeches, too, slowly, carefully articulated pronouncements and denouncements by the newly elected prime minister of the home country. Most disturbingly, there had been reports from battlegrounds. In them one heard gunfire, bombs exploding, and planes flying overhead. This morning the volume on the radio was turned up loud so that Mrs. Sangha could hear it clearly from the back stairs. For several minutes a piece of piano music by an English composer had been on the air. It had been written after the Great War, and the broadcaster described it as a relentless, rapid-fire ripping up of notes, an expression of the triumph of the ordinary British citizen, of good, that is, over the evil winds that blew in from foreign shores. Although she tried to feel the triumph and the good, and to hear the suppression of evil as the announcer had directed, Mrs. Sangha, unaware of the frenzy that had been whipped up in her by the morning’s news, heard the piece as little more than a cacophonous interruption from the dire news of the world.
Her child walked in the yard at the back of the house, looking for early-morning butterflies among the dewy flowers and shrubs. If anything were to happen to that child, what would I do? she asked herself. What if, one day, one sunny-sunny day, the child, innocent as ever, were walking in the yard, just like she was doing now, or she were playing with her friends in the school yard, and something were to fall out of the sky and hit the child, obliterate her, poof! Just like that, what would she do? How would she ever cope after something like that? She looked up, half hoping and half terrified that she might spot something menacing in the sky.
The child glanced expectantly every few minutes toward the back gate. Finally Dolly and her son arrived. Dolly was surprised to find Mrs. Sangha dressed up so early in the morning, in one of her going-out dresses, stockings, shoes, and all, as if she were going to see a sick person in the hospital, or to the doctor. She noticed, too, her employer’s face was drawn. The unusual loudness of the radio, the somber music, further put her on guard. Something must have happened, someone must have died, and that was why she was there on the back steps dressed up like that. Dolly mounted the stairs hesitantly, wondering what would be required of her on this day. Mrs. Sangha paid scant attention to the boy she so liked indulging. Seeing the girl in the yard, he was about to run down the stairs to her. Dolly plucked him back by the collar of his shirt and coaxed a greeting out of him. With his eyes shyly downcast and a grin on his face, he mumbled, “Mornin’, Misangha,” to which she distractedly replied only, “Mornin’, son.” The boy turned instantly and pelted back down the stairs so carelessly that Dolly shrieked. He laughed, shouting back at her, “I can fly like corbeau, Mammy!”
Commiserating with Dolly for the briefest moment, Mrs. Sangha shook her head, then began a somber address. “Trouble, Dolly. Trouble itself.”
The boy called up, announcing to the two women, as naturally as if it were his right, that he was taking the hose out from the garden shed and, together with the girl, was going to water the plants. Dolly warned him to mind himself. Mrs. Sangha told him he could water the plants later; for now she wanted them both to come upstairs. Upstairs, she sent them out to the verandah to play. She told them sternly not to leave the verandah, to stay where she was able to see them. She put her arm around Dolly’s back, her hand clutching Dolly’s far shoulder. She was stern: “Come with me.
“The man and his country gone mad. I knew it was bound to happen. The whole world gone mad.”
Dolly waited to hear more. Finally she asked, “You going out?”
“No, child, today is not a day to go out. I want to hear what is going on abroad.”
“Oh. I was wondering because you dress up. Somebody coming?”
“War is coming.”
She saw Mrs. Sangha was truly troubled. She wanted to ask, You dress up because it have war in another country? but remained quiet. There must be something she was really not understanding about the world, she conceded, the world, people, and places that the poor lady worried so much about.
“Bring a chair, Dolly,” Mrs. Sangha ordered. “Bring a chair. Keep me company.”
Mrs. Sangha faced the Zenith, stared at it as if expecting the man whose voice was being transmitted to uncurl himself and step right out into her drawing room. She pulled one of the upholstered armchairs up to it and sat stiffly. Dolly, perplexed, and feeling uncomfortable with Mrs. Sangha’s sudden closeness, brought in a kitchen chair.
Some time ago, the previous year, Mrs. Sangha had pulled up a chair and stayed by the Zenith listening for long hours. It was the time when the king of England had abdicated his throne because he had fallen in love with a woman of lesser breeding from another country. Not only was she a commoner, Mrs. Sangha often said, adding with distress—and what, too, seemed like pride and hope—she was also a foreigner and a divorced woman. Dolly remembered Mrs. Sangha looking both worried and pleased, saying things like “Well, Dolly girl, is proof that in the end, and deep in the heart, everybody same-same. Ent so?” Then, changing her mind, she would add, “Well, is not like she was a commoner like everyday commoners. She blood wasn’t blue, but she had some pedigree, and they say she had a sizable dowry. Hmmm. In the end nobody same, yes!”
Dolly still, to this day, didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. All she knew was that her life and the lives of people in Raleigh were not changed one little bit by the abdication or the marriage of this king to that woman, who wasn’t in the end common at all. So why it was news? She couldn’t understand.
A jingle advertising Magic baking powder played. It was a familiar tune, to which Dolly tapped her fingers against the chair. The announcer with the hard-to-understand British accent returned to deliver a lengthy analysis of events in Europe. Dolly stared at the pearlescent pink vase that held a bunch of plastic zinnias and sat on a doily atop the radio. She wondered if she would get all the ironing done in time to catch Mr. Walter’s four o’clock ride back to Raleigh. She hadn’t realized that the analysis had ended until Mrs. Sangha arose and turned the volume down. Mrs. Sangha explained to Dolly as if she knew that Dolly had not been listening.
“Is war,” she uttered gravely. She had expected her announcement to affect Dolly, but Dolly remained unmoved. Mrs. Sangha pleaded, “He killing, killing, killing, Dolly. Everywhere he go, he murdering people because of their looks and beliefs. He rounding up people and snuffing out their lives, poof! Just so, like if they are not human beings—who is the one who is not a human being? Tell me. Tell me, na, I want to know. Hundreds of them he killing at a time. More than that. Thousands. I mean, I can’t even imagine. If my body was stronger, Dolly, I would be ready to form an army and go after him, you know. I myself. Is like a force equal to his that is rising inside me. I don’t know what to do.”
Dolly was about to get up, but Mrs. Sangha began again. “Guanagaspar not involved … yet,” she said emphatically, “but watch! You will see, Dolly. Trouble ’round the corner.”
Dolly thought back to the taxi ride that morning into Marion. Nobody in the car had mentioned anything about war. She hadn’t seen any soldiers, and nobody was fighting in the street. She looked at her employer, imagining her as a minister in the government of Guanagaspar. She imagined her with a dish or a tea towel in one hand, waving it as she spoke up from her seat in parliament—though what she herself ever truly dried or dusted, Dolly wondered. She just couldn’t fathom why this woman whose husband had taken up elsewhere was so busy-busy every day paying attention to what was going on in parts of a world she had never seen.
Mrs. Sangha cupped her grim face in her hands and shook her head. She wore the same expression, Dolly recalled, as on that Saturday five years back when a kidnapped twenty-month-old baby belonging to some Lindbergh man from abroad had been found in a wood in America, bludgeoned to death. She was all-day-worried, as if she were close-close family to the Lindbergh man and his wife. The two children had been sleeping on a blanket on the verandah floor. Mrs. Sangha had gone over to them, lay down on the blanket, and hugged each, one at a time, tightly.
Let the white men come, Dolly thought. They would surely buy coconuts and oysters and local handmade toys—bright paper windmills and whistles made from coconut fronds—straw mats, hats, and shell work made by the people in the School for the Blind. Yes, they would make a woman’s life, here and there, happy for a day, and miserable for life. They would father a good few children. But, too, they would walk the beaches and buy sugar cake and sour plum from the vendors. They would put a little much-needed money into people’s hands. Then, when they were ready to go back where they came from, they would take pictures of everything to show their family and friends. They would take pictures of the fishermen, the shop vendors in the towns, the sea-urchin divers, and the cane farmers. They would tell everybody up there how nice Guanagaspar was. Wasn’t Mrs. Sangha always listening for a mention of Guanagaspar on the BBC commentary program? She might finally get it. One of them might give a speech on radio about how the sun shone every day, even in the rainy season; about how Guanagaspar people were friendly and ready to invite “foreign” into their homes for a bowl of pig souse and a shot of local rum or a glass of fresh coconut water. Even if the commentator were to say that Guanagaspar was a hole not worth coming to visit, Mrs. Sangha would be happy to hear the name of her island mentioned from so far away, especially by a man with a British accent.
Dolly wanted to get on with her ironing. Mrs. Sangha, in her opinion, listened to too much radio. Mrs. Sangha began again, as if explaining to someone who did not have an inkling. Most foodstuffs and clothing in Guanagaspar, she said, were imported. Tea, baking powder, canned salmon and tuna, flour, biscuits.
But what stupidness Mrs. Sangha talking? Dolly wondered. Canned salmon and tuna? They were living on an island; anybody could go and catch their own fresh salmon, or buy it from the men in Raleigh or the fish vendors in Marion.
Mrs. Sangha was listing off the things she liked to buy as presents: satin and lace panties, hand soaps, gold bracelets, and toys for children. If war landed up in Guanagaspar, all of these items would be scarce, and when and if you did manage to find them, they would be dear for so. If this madness carried on into the Christmas season, how would she make the fruitcake that all her family expected her to make for them? Mrs. Sangha was saying that she would disappoint a lot of people if she couldn’t get the red and green candied cherries and the plump golden sultanas. Unseen by Mrs. Sangha, Dolly had raised her eyebrows. Let them learn to make and eat guava cheese and coconut sugar cake like Raleigh people, she thought. Mrs. Sangha muttered that she should go and buy up cases of canned food and nonperishables—oatmeal and flour—this week self, before the shortages began. That way if, or rather, when things did get bad, she would parcel out goods for the less fortunate.
She shifted in her seat and looked directly in Dolly’s eyes. People from here could get carted off to fight in Europe, she pronounced, and Dolly wondered if Mrs. Sangha expected or even wished to be one. She told Dolly she had met Miss Fatty from two streets away the day before, and Miss Fatty told her that her sister’s husband, a clerk in the town hall, had information that the island was soon to be used as a naval base for this war. The British lent it to the Americans, Mrs. Sangha said. Dolly pursed her lips, stopping herself from asking, “Lent it? Like is a shilling?” but checked herself.
On the radio a woman’s voice declared a certain imported body powder for babies to be superior to all others. This advertisement was followed by the return of the announcer’s somber voice. Mrs. Sangha turned up the volume, held her hand up for silence, although she was the only one in the room who had been speaking. She rested a firm hand on Dolly’s knee and whispered, “Look, girl, don’t worry about no ironing today, na. I frighten-frighten. Stay up here. Stay until the news finish.” When a local announcer interrupted the report in midsentence to inform listeners that an emergency announcement was to be made within minutes by Guanagaspar’s minister for national security, Mrs. Sangha clutched Dolly’s knee. She drew a handkerchief from the cleavage of her brassiere, patted her forehead, her lips. Several pieces of solemn music followed. Mrs. Sangha and Dolly waited. Mrs. Sangha looked out to the verandah, to the children there. She whispered, “They so innocent. God, spare them harm, I beg you, Lord Jesus.” The announcer returned and introduced the minister, who, in a lengthy speech, confirmed that the island would temporarily be, from that day forward, in the service of other governments and countries for as long as the war should last.
When a gloomy march began, Dolly rose up without any protest from Mrs. Sangha. She went to the verandah, looked out onto the street. She looked up into the sky. It was a clear, bright blue sunny sky. Seagulls circled lazily. A Carib grackle made a beeline for somewhere it alone knew. All appeared as usual. She listened for gunfire, low-flying airplanes, bombs, soldiers’ feet thumping through the streets, drums and cymbals, and the huffing, puffing twists and turns of bagpipe notes she knew from parades. All she heard were the sounds of municipal workers sweeping the street, two young men chatting and laughing loudly as they sauntered down the road, and the children on the verandah. She tried the front door. Locked. She couldn’t see what there was to be worked up about.