The Blue Taxi Read online

  It was Mrs. Frosty who gave Gilbert the push. He told her almost everything. The threat. How he needed but could not imagine having an idea for a business, something for his selfish Uncle James, to keep the money coming. How he couldn’t, couldn’t, no, how it was all beyond him and how he couldn’t face it, did not know what to do. Mrs. Frosty smiled. Child of Polish prisoners of war, she had a few ideas about emerging from misfortune. Seated on a leather stool, rag in hand, eyes bright, Mrs. Frosty said to Gilbert: “Agreeing to a change is hard. You will feel that you are getting your fat feet into a pair of shoes that doesn’t fit.”

  With Mr. Frosty’s love of talk, and her hours turning cream, it wasn’t often that she got to tell anybody anything. She didn’t care for most of Mr. Frosty’s friends—the French couple (too pious!) and the Danish engineers (she thought of them as boys, so arrogant and careless!). But there was something about Mr. Turner, who always looked like a lost thing though he had seen (she thought) so much—something about Gilbert that could turn her talking on. This man, she thought, likes to listen. Well. He liked listening to her. She was always very gentle.

  “‘Shoes?’ “ The Frosty King brought Gilbert a washcloth for his hands and patted Gilbert’s back when a hiccup snapped his throat. “What does Mrs. Frosty tell you of the shoes?” He set to straightening the plush green monkeys and a tiger that had, in all of the excitement, clung to one another. “Don’t listen to my husband, Mr. Turner,” Mrs. Frosty said. “He can’t remember how it happened. He’s forgotten all my work.” The Frosty King blinked absently at her, smacked Gilbert on the back, and slid away into the storage room to check on their reserves.

  “What you have to do,” said Mrs. Frosty—golden eyebrows arched, generous torso settling nicely on the Bakelite before him, “is to make a working plan. An idea for the uncle.” Mrs. Frosty’s voice was clear and high and warm. Gilbert was aware of her reflection in the walls. He managed not to see himself; instead, he saw an army, a regiment of brave and handsome women, buxom, kind, determined only to help him. Mrs. Frosty and her loving twins and triplets. She spoke wisely again, smiling all the while. “You need an idea. But here’s what you must do.” She pressed her hands against the counter and stretched her fingers out. Leaned in conspiratorially and said, “If you want a last thing from your uncle, Mr. Turner, you must make it sound… like smashing!” She slapped the Bakelite. He started. “Smashing!” she said. “Like a fortune.” She leaned in. “Believe that something very big, so big, is going to happen. Surely going to. Because you will make it so.”

  When she half closed her pale eyes, Gilbert saw the roundness, the smoothness of her eyelids, and was moved. He closed his own eyes for a moment, and there he had a vision. He saw plump, delightful Mrs. Frosty unpin her coffee-colored hair and stretch her thick arms towards the Frosty King on an evening filled with moonlight and the ruby shine of leaves. He saw Kazansthakis look up from his account books and move towards Mrs. Frosty like a long, unhurried, and inevitable train. How safe those two must be! What he saw in the temperate space behind his eyes—the certainty in her, reaching for her man, the able tilt of Mr. Frosty’s arms—inspired Gilbert Turner. When the breathing, warmer, living Mrs. Frosty placed her hand on his, her touch was like a shock. Gilbert came back to the Frosty-Kreem and looked at her again. He blinked. “Believe in it,” she said. She lowered her round voice. “That’s how I make Mr. Frosty do all the things I want.”

  A strand of hair had snuck out from her bun to make an s-shape at her throat. Gilbert’s hand went damp. She said, “You know what I mean.” And Gilbert thought he did. “Think big.” He moved his hand from hers and uncurled his thick fingers. Yes. He felt a good deal better. While Mrs. Frosty tugged at her soiled apron and put her hair where it belonged, he breathed in and he breathed out. He opened his mouth wide and waited, but no cruel hiccup came. Believe in it, he thought.

  Kazansthakis came back into the parlor and gave Gilbert some ice cream to take home. “Pistachio Promenade,” the Frosty King announced. And then, on seeing that the wobbly guest was leaving, said, with a pout: “So soon?” He would have asked about the boy, the mystery father, and what Gilbert had learned; he’d been hoping for a story to wrap up the afternoon. But Gilbert, apparently recovered, said, “I really ought to go,” and Kazansthakis sighed, looked elaborately dejected, which Gilbert appreciated more than he could say. Mrs. Frosty stepped towards him and squeezed his suddenly firm arm. “You’ll see,” she said. “You will think of something.” He felt her sweet breath on his face and briefly thought of cherries. “And now,” she said, “you must hurry home.” She gestured to the bag he held. “Before it melts again.”

  Eleven

  Gilbert returned to Mchanganyiko Street with a vigor in his step. The ice cream box was heavy at his wrist, but he felt anchored by its weight. He liked to think of it, frozen at the heart but softening, its slickening exterior. The visit had renewed him: Mrs. Frosty, saying, “Believe that it can happen!” and the theatric Frosty King, so sad to see him leave. The city streets looked sweet. In Gilbert’s tender state, the house crows shifting back and forth along the sagging power lines seemed remarkable and fine. The boys on bicycles—who made road crossings a danger, who hooted now and then at white men because they were no longer what they’d been and hooting was no crime—seemed charming as they never had: full of derring-do. Gilbert, moving, so he thought, towards some derring-do himself, tried a hearty smile. Waiting patiently for an opening among them, he thought as older people cannot help themselves but think (of younger ones, as to the vagaries of life): They have no idea.

  He didn’t, either, curse the cars. In fact, he took some time to look at them, which he very rarely did, or did only to grunt and wish that they were few. The flattish Fiats and arched Mercedeses, fussing, gurgling, others tat-tat-tatting uncertainly along and others all ajerk, didn’t bother him at all. They caused him neither envy nor a headache. These cars were not new; used and dented, imported long ago and left, they were relics, like the house crows, and thus seemed oddly noble. For once he didn’t think of them as traffic, meant to splatter him with mud or fill his chest with fumes. Instead, he felt a playful sympathy for them. They’d been left behind, like him. These old things have suffered! He found himself admiring chrome—still shining—the variously styled grilles, the ample silhouettes. There an Austin, here a Ford, far off a wheezing Scout, a (once spectacular) Bel Air, at last, a Land Rover, moving like a box. Marveling at their aweless, resolute procession, he briefly felt as if he were participating in the motions of something greater than himself. Taking valiant breaths of dieseled air, he noticed, perhaps for the first time, that even city fumes could not suppress the hardy tang of sea. What had Mrs. Frosty done to him? What a fresh mood he was in!

  After crossing each wide road, Gilbert looked around. The city appeared gracious, welcoming—munificent, he thought. At every curb, he found that he was smiling. At Seafront Road and Freedom Street, on the roundabout that held the sober, nearly life-sized statue of a shiny native soldier bent over a gun, Gilbert tipped his head and closed his eyes in homage to the fortitude of men. He thought of Mrs. Frosty’s hair, her bosom. How very kind she was. Because all women he considered (when he did) led Gilbert to Sarie, who somehow was the measure of all things, he saw in his mind Sarie’s throat, her back (still muscular, he thought), her still-nice brawny legs… though he and she were growing—weren’t they?—old. He imagined himself resting on her chest, stroking her long neck. What if he were to come up with, as Mrs. Frosty had suggested, a really big idea? What if he, relying on himself at last, developed an idea and then put it to work? Perhaps, he thought, perhaps! What would Sarie think of him? What would life be like? What would the Thorntons, with their jet-setting carnations, and the super ex-colonials in the well-tiled mansions, think?

  Gilbert was aware of feeling light, of feeling nearly good—and as he approached their crumbling complex, he was momentarily confronted with something in himself that was so n
ear to happiness he was reluctant to go up. Could he go first to the Palm? His mood was bright but fragile. Perhaps these feelings were a sham, would fade the moment he got home. Would Sarie laugh at him again? Would she remind him of the rash along his back? Would his hiccups return? He stopped a moment on the pavement, stretched his fingers, wound his wrists. Would Sarie tease him for the little lies he’d told Great-Uncle James, for the boys he said they’d had? But, still beaming, Gilbert opted to be brave. He and Sarie might not be, he told himself, a proper king and queen, but the Pistachio Promenade would surely not survive a stroll back to the harbor for a beer. Which, old man, he told himself, you’ll be having plenty of, once the business is in place. If Uncle James is pleased. Which he must—he will—be. Yes, of course he will.

  He marched into the courtyard, to their block, and up three flights of steps. On the way, he let himself envision a good future in which he took Sarie to the shore at Scallop Bay for picnics, perhaps across the channel to those low and sparkling islands for a swimming afternoon. She might like that, Gilbert thought. He even, briefly, considered little Agatha: We’ll order books from England! They’d been right to teach her; she did like to read. There was something sweet in that, the image of a father giving his girl-child a book. He nodded to himself In the better life he was imagining, he would drink whatever drink he pleased, and stand his friends to more. Oh, he hoped Sarie would be kind. He’d been through so much! But when Gilbert reached the landing, his heart sank to his heels: he could hear, as if the mighty woman had been holding to his collar and shouting in his face, Jim Towson’s great wife.

  Sarie opened the front door and lunged at Gilbert with both arms. Her freckled skin was flushed. Her hair—never tightly bound, mind you, but, still—was severely out of place. She was in a panic. “Gilbert, you are here!” she said brightly, loudly, like a person in a play. She pulled him past the threshold. “Look!” she said. “It’s wonderful, n’est-ce pas?” It wasn’t wonderful at all; Sarie didn’t mean it. It was horrid. It was part of their life here by which both of them felt harmed. But what was she to say? “Mrs. Hazel is here, too.” Gilbert loosed his arms from Sarie’s grasp and winced. Why now? he thought. Why now?

  Hazel Towson, British Council volunteer, founder of Auxiliaries, though the time for them was past, was the kind of woman who, some persist in thinking, does well in the tropics. Energetically committed to the doing of good works, convinced that Europeans had a reputation to uphold, she could not leave well enough alone. Hazel, as she never failed to mention, came from people who’d had farms. Good, hardworking stock. A Woman with Her Head on Straight. And muscles. A Daughter of the Soil. As such, Hazel Towson had Ideas about what people like herself—what Europeans—were, and these she did her energetic best to implement. The Turners were a challenge to her vision.

  Hazel, here’s the rub, did not like to see a European (as she put it) uninvolved. Nor did she like to see them shabby. Shabbiness in Europeans, Hazel Towson knew, was the result of laxity and lack—lack of fortitude, ambition; a failure on their part to recognize themselves. Degeneracy. Shabbiness, Hazel believed, was foreign. Without confronting their own nature as it should be and accepting it—without self-actualization—Europeans in the tropics could get lost. Risked not counting any longer. Inattention to one’s duty would result (the Turners, case in point) in only downward spirals, fraught with shame and poverty, and, probably, disease. The way out of downward spirals, Hazel thought, the fuel for upward ones, was action, and more of it. For all her brethren in these parts, she knew, there was a special place; and, she knew this in her bones, it was Hazel’s destined work to find out what it was and—with enthusiasm, grace, and a firm and knowing hand—steer the lost ones towards it.

  Hazel had of course attended several garden parties at which Gilbert Turner’s wife had spoken of her past and, like the others, had thought Sarie starkly out of turn. But she had not reacted exactly like the rest. She had coughed and shuddered once or twice for show, but she, unlike the other ladies (towards each of whom she exercised a lucid pity for their respective failings), knew strength when she saw it.

  In Hazel’s murky but determined view, Sarie had not started out with the same benefits, the pedigree, that Hazel herself had, and on top of that had languished far too long in hopes of matrimonial ease. Women of her class were, however, not meant for such leisure, waiting to be cared for without using their hands. A wealthy woman might, a person who was delicate and fine, who could expect to be looked after. But Sarie Turner was not fine. Sarie Turner, Hazel knew, was deeply in the wrong about who she thought she was. Look at those big arms! Those feet! She was meant to work! With the proper attitude, and practice, Hazel knew, something in the woman could be fierce and maybe even fine. Something Could Be Done.

  Hazel thought that Sarie should return to nursing natives. Not for pay, of course; fine or not, white women had to be above that. This time as a volunteer. Sarie should be charitable and active, and everything would change. For it was energy, not money—devotion, and not pay—that would swing the Turners’ fortunes. Oh, Hazel understood the ruin loans could bring. Money was, she knew, what Sarie Turner wanted and what Gilbert Turner was unable to provide, but it wouldn’t help these two. If a person just behaved as was their lot, could accept the spirit that History bequeathed them, the dust would settle in their favor. And there was also this: while Hazel Towson always publicly deferred to men, she knew very well that it was women, not the colonels or the adjuncts or the dashing attachés, who upheld the real standards. Who kept things going right. And look at Gilbert Turner. A perfect sorry mess! Sarie Turner was thus for Hazel Towson a precious, urgent charge.

  As Gilbert stood—his inner self collapsing—on the threshold of his home and passed the softening parcel to his wife, Hazel, who’d been speaking as he came, went on without a pause. Yes, Hazel knew he had arrived, and she would eventually greet him. But she had begun a little speech, and—as moral women should—would end it, undeterred. “… national crises like the one we face”—she meant Independence—“require strength from each of us.”

  Sarie, leading Gilbert to the sofa by a shirtsleeve, nodded blankly, and said, “Yes.” Gilbert held out a limp hand, which Hazel, speaking all the while, took up and brandished with the strength of seven men. “We must all do our part,” she said. While Hazel pumped his fragile hand, Gilbert felt, from the strong set of her shoulders, a ferocious energy: the shove of clamping dams, iodine campaigns, the rousing force of speeches made through loudspeakers that functioned. The vigor of another world he would have once liked open to him, the world that kept him wishing for the Club at Scallop Bay. But before Hazel Towson, everything in him recoiled. Mrs. Hazel Towson (never Mrs. Jim, as other wives had been: Mrs. Gerald Brickman, Mrs. Osgood Hill) was the skirted incarnation of the District Officers whose strength had made him quake—a woman with a vision, many visions, and a pointed disapproval for men like Gilbert Turner. He knew that Hazel Towson thought he’d lost his place in History because he lacked the stomach. She thinks, he told himself defensively, that I’m holding Sarie back. And here he surreptitiously recalled the pleasure he had felt with Mrs. Frosty, with the house crows and the cycle-boys, the cars. Little does she know, he thought, that I’m about to make my mark. When Hazel finally fixed her eyes on him and smiled, her mighty teeth appeared to him as large and square as tombstones.

  Having seated herself handsomely in Gilbert’s favorite chair, Hazel now addressed him. It was sometimes best to fill the husband in. In her fierce and even boom, she explained, as she had to Sarie, that her Brave Women’s Auxiliary was presently engaged in an attempt to vaccinate each native infant in the country against a regiment of ills. She’d come to enlist Sarie. Gilbert’s hot ears withered. He tried to look away but found, as usual, that Hazel Towson’s gaze was difficult to shake. “Oh, very nice, very nice,” he said. “I’m sure.” When Sarie sat beside him on the sofa, he was grateful for her weight. Hazel talked and talked, and Sarie, promptin
g, pinched him now and then. “Oh, yes, I see,” he said. And, “My, how grand.”

  Though they kept a modest box of Nanjis in the kitchen, Sarie, Gilbert noticed, had not offered her guest biscuits. Aware that Mrs. Towson might later advertise the absence of sweet things in the Turner household to people whose business it was not, he nonetheless privately approved. We’ll have to buckle down, he thought, until our ship comes in. Hazel paused to catch her breath. A fly landed on her shoulder and she squashed it. The motion made him shiver. Oh, why, why, he asked himself, did she have to come today? She was inauspicious on all days, a cloud, a force to be escaped. But to have Hazel Towson pop up from the suburbs on this very day, after he’d felt really good and hopeful, briefly—to have her come to talk about our destiny—seemed a dangerous sign. He told himself he would pretend she wasn’t really there. He might leave the room, he thought. But Sarie wouldn’t let him.

  In a momentary stillness, Sarie tried to say her piece. “Gilbert!” She wanted him to help her. Wide-eyed, putting on the gentle voice that meant she thought Hazel was a fool, Sarie laid her hand on Gilbert’s knee and said, “Mrs. Hazel, Gilbert, thinks that I must stick needles in the babies!” She shook her head in wonder. “Help me, now. What can I say to that?” Gilbert shivered, ached, recalled the garden parties, and felt torn sharply in two between Hazel Towson and his wife. Needles in the babies! What will she say next? But, unable to name it, he also recalled painfully that he’d once been in love. Sarie needs assistance from me, Gilbert thought. She’s depending on her man.