was nothing like it back home, the way it connected me to the beach beyond. I liked the way I could sit in a round-backed garden chair of cunningly wrought metal, lean my elbows on the small wrought metal table, smoke my morning cigarette, drink my morning coffee, like the only customer in a Parisian café that didn’t exist, while I stared out to sea and pondered things.
This particular morning, I’d been pondering whether I ought to have mentioned the trifling matter of the Japanese attack in my monthly column—the “Lady of Nassau,” inside back cover, perhaps you’ve read it—in between the account of the Silver Slipper Ball and the speculative frenzy over the invitations to Nancy Oakes’s coming-out party at the British Colonial Hotel.
It wasn’t as if we’d ignored the whole shocking incident, the barbarous attack on American soil. My goodness, Miami lay only a hundred and eighty miles to the east, whereas London was over four thousand miles away. In general orientation, Bahamians were more American than most of New York City. But there was this turquoise sea, you understand, these palm trees and sea grapes, this heat and this somnolence. When they broadcast the news about Pearl Harbor on the radio, everybody at the Red Cross and the sailing club just exchanged a blank stare with his fellow man. Shook his head and said how awful it was. Two weeks later, nothing had materially changed, except that the Americans had mostly fled and the hotels stood half-empty and sort of forlorn. At a loss what to do, really, since Nassau has nothing if it hasn’t got American tourists to tend to, then as now. Nassau was where you came to escape the war, and now the war had landed smack among us, like a Japanese bomb of unknown explosive power, yet to detonate. Did you acknowledge this thing? Or did you tiptoe around it, pretending it didn’t exist? This was supposed to be paradise, for God’s sake.
The door creaked behind me. Veryl appeared, coffeepot in hand. “Telegram come for you, Miss Lulu,” she said.
“New York?”
“New York.” She refilled my cup in a long, steady stream. When she was done, she reached inside the pocket of her apron and pulled out a yellow envelope, which she placed on the table next to the saucer. “You decide what you gwine wear for the party tonight?”
“Not yet.”
“I be leaving at noon for the afternoon shift, remember. Can’t press no dress if I got no dress to press.”
“I’m thinking of the blue velvet.”
Veryl made a sound like Mmm, mmm, which might equally have meant approval or displeasure. I never could tell, but I did know that Veryl’s taste in clothing—unlike mine—was infallible. Her mother had been a dressmaker, she once said. Of her father, she said nothing, but I had the idea—I can’t recall why, maybe one of Jack’s tidbits—that he was a white man, a Bay Street merchant, which was not an uncommon state of affairs in the Bahamas in those days. Certainly it would explain Veryl’s canniness in the ways of the world.
“You don’t like it?” I said.
“Nobody wear velvet in Nassau, honey. That dress look like something somebody Boston grandmother wear.”
I plucked the cigarette from the ashtray. “Then what do you suggest?”
“That red silk. It got that V, Miss Lulu, that show off you bosoms.”
“Veryl! It’s a debutante ball, for heaven’s sake. Anyway, there’s nobody there to appreciate my bosoms.”
Again, the Mmm, mmm, but in an entirely different tone of voice. She lifted the corner of her apron and wiped an invisible smudge from the surface of the coffeepot.
“Well?” I demanded.
“I hear that French fellow back in Nassau.”
I poured in the cream, the sugar. “He’s not French, Veryl. He’s from Mauritius.”
“He talk French. He French.”
“Regardless. I heard he was off the island until the New Year. Hunting ducks or something.”
“No, ma’am. He in Nassau. He fly here on that Pan American yesterday.”
“Then I guess he had a change of plans. But I don’t see what it’s got to do with me. Or my décolletage.”
“Miss Lulu,” said Veryl, the way you speak to a child, “you ain’t getting no younger.”
I lifted the cup and wrapped my fingers around the bowl. Veryl waited, arms folded. Behind her, the surf fell placidly on the sand of Cable Beach, making comfortable noises as it landed. A woman of great and several talents, that Veryl. She was a chambermaid at the Prince George and we’d gotten to know each other on a daily