He picked up the last key, began to work it off the ring. “But I have something even sweeter. I have this day, where I see the keys at the waist of my wife,” he said, “and you are mine, and I am yours, and it makes the fact of that even more real to my family.”

He led me to our bed, where he gently pushed my shoulders till I lay on my back, and lifted my skirt. He placed each key, warm from his shaking hand, across my bare stomach, while I whispered that he should stop moaning—his father and sister could clearly hear him.

But his ecstasy over those keys did not keep him close to me. The next morning, Emmanuel left at dawn, as he had taken to doing. He spent his days on an endless round of visits. To his mentor, the one other doctor in town. To his father’s friends and associates—the men who made up the American Negro colony in Jacmel. Sometimes, he came back to the house very late at night, even after his father had eaten and retired to bed.

I was left to spend my days with Ella and Ti Me and the bishop. I say “days,” but it may as well have been the same day, over and over again, so little did it change. Ella was always awake before I was, even if, in the dark, Emmanuel and the rooster crowing outside woke me. She spent her mornings working at her embroidery in the parlor—her incomprehensible jacket. Around ten, she would stow it away in a basket she kept underneath the battered divan, and we would all go to the market.

Ti Me went to the same stalls each day and made the same bargains. I realized on the fourth day, from the rhythm of their voices, that this was not so much an argument but a friendly conversation. Sometimes, Ti Me said something quick and low that made the woman laugh and made Ella blush and sniff about morals. I wished then, more than anything, that I could understand. Always, at the end of it, both women turned to me—Ella sullenly, Ti Me with clear amusement at the awkwardness it was causing her—for the coins in the purse at my side.

We returned to the house for the hottest part of the day. Ella took to her room. She said she could not withstand the heat of the tropics, despite having lived there from childhood. Sometimes, I went upstairs, too, but I grew restless lying beneath the sheet, the shutters closed against the heat, listening to the world outside slow down.

When the world began moving again in the late afternoon, it brought the American women of the colony over to the house. There were about ten of them in total—wives of the men who had followed Bishop Chase, the helpmeets of traders and farmers—all of them with the same pale skin as Ella, not a black one among them. The darkest was a very thin woman with yellow skin and no husband, who taught the Haitian women in a kind of domestic academy.