Camille shook his head. He knew who that baby was but said nothing. With Mrs. James gone, he was the only one who knew the story of Madame Halevy’s daughter and the son she’d given birth to, then left outside the cemetery, who grew up to be Aaron Rodrigues.
“She said Madame Halevy was certain that my grandmother was an angel,” Roland went on. “That’s why she gave her everything that belonged to her. But I’m going to have to sell it all now to provide for the family. I hope nobody’s ghost is going to be upset by that.”
“Of course you should sell it,” Camille said. “It’s all old-fashioned. The dishes and the furniture should bring a good price.”
“My grandmother insisted she be buried with her two gold rings, so we honored that, though I’m sure they were worth quite a bit. They meant something to her and she said some things need to be buried with you when you go to the next world.”
NOT LONG AFTER THAT, Camille ran into Roland again, this time in a tavern beside the Grand Hotel. After that, they began to meet occasionally for a drink. He missed Fritz and their camaraderie; he was an outsider in his own community, friendless, and his own brothers surely didn’t understand him. Though he went to synagogue with his father every Friday night, he felt more comfortable with Roland. By now they realized they’d gone to the same school and had had the same teachers. They could recite the same poems in German and had memorized the same Bible stories. Their current lives were divergent however. Roland had a wife and four little children, and worked twelve-hour days at the hotel. Camille sketched Roland’s wife, Shirley, and their children. He set to work on a painting of the children chasing a donkey out by the sea road. He liked to go to their family’s house in the Savan for dinner on Sundays, when Shirley made the old recipes. She’d gotten them from Mrs. James before she died and written them all down in a book that she kept on a shelf. She made a perfect fish stew that Camille would have been happy to eat every day of his life. Roland James brought home cakes and tarts from the hotel. He was an amazing baker, far better than his grandmother had been, and his coconut cake had won several awards.
MORE AND MORE CAMILLE missed the old ladies of St. Thomas. The island seemed empty to him on many levels. Some days he did not wish to get out of bed, but he knew he couldn’t be late to the store.
“If I were you I’d go back to Paris,” Roland said to Camille one evening as he walked him partway home through the neighborhood. There were no longer any Jews living in the area; they had all moved to Synagogue Hill. People did still talk about the red-haired painter who had lived in the Savan a few years back, and how the gendarmes had come to grab him, and how he’d sprinted through the streets mostly naked in order to escape the authorities. Some people said Jenny Alek’s boy was his, for he had red hair like the painter’s.
“Listen to me, brother,” Roland went on. “Run away. I know you’re going to do it. So do it sooner rather than later. One day we won’t see you around and then someone will say, Oh, he’s gone and he’s not coming back. Sure I’ll miss you, but I’ll be happy for you as well. You should do it before something happens and you wind up married with a pack of children.”
Camille laughed. In truth, he hadn’t the money for passage. He was still living in his childhood room, going down to the wharves to collect crates when tea and spices were delivered from ships that sailed from Spain and Portugal, waiting on customers and doing his best to be polite. “All I know is that I’ll still be here tomorrow,” he told Roland.
The men shook hands good night. “I know you were good to my grandmother,” Roland said. “She always talked about the delivery boy who used to sit in the kitchen and pretend to eat dessert. She said you were the only child she ever met who didn’t like sweets. And then you helped her when that lady came from Charleston to make trouble for her. She left something for you if you ever came back. I didn’t say anything right away because I didn’t know whether or not you deserved it. I had to get to know you first.”
They’d kept on walking without realizing it and were already approaching Synagogue Hill. They sat on a bench outside of a shop that sold notions and buttons and clasps, along with lampshades.
Roland handed over a bit of cloth. Tied up inside was a gold ring.
“Madame Halevy’s ring,” Camille said, surprised. It was battered from wearing. “You said your grandmother was buried with it.”
“She was buried with one, but she left the other one for you. She told me she thought you’d come back one day and I’d know you because you would look like you needed a good meal.”