the other.
“You know, you’ve got to hand it to Hitler,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be convenient if we could just—oh—just confiscate all that filthy money for the common good? And then herd them all into camps and ghettos and shoot anybody who objects? I guess we just haven’t got the guts for it.”
Miss Drewes sucked her breath. The duchess snapped her fan shut. The landscape glided past the window. I remember thinking how the cabanas looked like handkerchiefs tossed on the white sand, how serene everything looked on that side of the hill. I heard the sound of metal clinking, paper rustling, the rasp of a cigarette lighter. The limousine slowed into a curve, and the sunlight shifted to enter through the rear window and scorch our necks.
The duchess muttered, “It’s not the same thing, you know.”
A curl of smoke made its way past my face.
“Anyway, most of those stories are made up by the newspapers, which you know are all controlled . . .”
I turned and lifted my eyebrows. The duchess smashed her lips together and turned her head to the side, where Miss Drewes scribbled away at her notes, red-faced.
“I forget, you’re from New York,” Wallis said.
The car straightened out and proceeded down the hill. The duchess dragged on her cigarette. I stared at the snap, snap of the Chinese fan, the whiteness of her knuckles beneath her scarlet nails.
“It’s so lovely,” I said. “Your fan.”
Wallis stopped the waving and spread it out. “Isn’t it? A gift from an admirer. I like this fellow here the best.” She pointed to a chubby, smiling, naked man hiding behind a tree. “Look carefully and you’ll see that’s not a branch.”
“Dear me.”
She snapped it closed. “But we mustn’t shock Miss Drewes. Eh, Miss Drewes? Not until you’re married. You know, I gave one of my Chinese screens to Sir Harry, to thank him for his hospitality when poor old Government House was being redone. I believe he’s put it in his bedroom.”
“If it’s anything like this one, I don’t blame him.”
She laughed. “You haven’t been to the Orient, have you, Lulu?”
“Never. Although I’d like to go, one day.”
“You should. It changes your life.” She opened the fan and resumed waving. “I sometimes wish . . .”
“Wish what?”
“Nothing. Here we are at last. Look at them, poor dears.”
By poor dears, she meant the Negro women lined up outside the entrance of the small white building to which we had just pulled up, in our giant Government House limousine with its little Union Jacks fluttering from the wheel wells. Each one bore a baby in her arms, or in a cloth sling against her body, newborns and bruisers, squallers and sleepers, in various states of dress and fretfulness.
“Frightful, isn’t it?” said Wallis. “You see, they breed like rabbits.”
As we prepared to climb out of the limousine, I thought that possibly some of these babies were the children of the men who had rioted three weeks ago, seeking twelve shillings a day and getting—after a soothing radio address from the Duke of Windsor to calm everybody’s nerves, after newspaper pontification by the column mile, after days of fractious negotiation—five shillings a day plus lunch. Five shillings a day on which to raise a family. The duchess and I both wore our Red Cross uniforms, white and crisp, and our spectator shoes of polished brown and white leather. We hurried through the entrance, dogged by Miss Drewes and her satchel of careful records. Once the photography was out of the way, Wallis and Miss Drewes headed for the business side of things—taking down weights, recording vaccinations, that kind of thing—while I messed about in the waiting room, played with the babies and chatted with the mothers.
It’s funny, I remember how oddly cheerful they were in that moment, in that hot waiting room in the Duchess of Windsor’s clinic, how confident the Duke of Windsor was going to make everything better, was going to right all of history’s wrongs and begin a new chapter in the story of race relations in the Bahamas, and maybe the whole world. There had been some wonderful speech by one of the Negro leaders, made right there in the Government House annex before the duke himself, the day after the riot on Bay Street—had I heard about it? This man, he had said everything that was in the hearts of the black and colored folks in these islands, he had actually said in thunderous voice to the royal Duke of