Paige’s relationship with her mother was something else. Her mother was a beauty from a wealthy social background. Her cool aloofness kept Paige at a distance. Marrying a doctor who was going to work in far-off exotic places had seemed romantic to her, but the harsh reality had embittered her. She was not a warm, loving woman, and she seemed to Paige always to be complaining.
“Why did we ever have to come to this godforsaken place, Curt?”
“The people here live like animals. We’re going to catch some of their awful diseases.”
“Why can’t you practice medicine in the United States and make money like other doctors?”
And on and on it went.
The more her mother criticized him, the more Paige adored her father.
When Paige was fifteen years old, her mother disappeared with the owner of a large cocoa plantation in Brazil.
“She’s not coming back, is she?” Paige asked.
“No, darling. I’m sorry.”
“I’m glad!” She had not meant to say that. She was hurt that her mother had cared so little for her and her father that she had abandoned them.
The experience made Paige draw even closer to Alfred Turner. They played games together and went on expeditions together, and shared their dreams.
“I’m going to be a doctor, too, when I grow up,” Alfred confided. “We’ll get married, and we’ll work together.”
“And we’ll have lots of children!”
“Sure. If you like.”
On the night of Paige’s sixteenth birthday, their lifelong emotional intimacy exploded into a new dimension. At a little village in East Africa, the doctors had been called away on an emergency, because of an epidemic, and Paige, Alfred, and a cook were the only ones left in camp.
They had had dinner and gone to bed. But in the middle of the night Paige had been awakened in her tent by the faraway thunder of stampeding animals. She lay there, and as the minutes went by and the sound of the stampede came closer, she began to grow afraid. Her breath quickened. There was no telling when her father and the others would return.
She got up. Alfred’s tent was only a few feet away. Terrified, Paige got up, raised the flap of the tent, and ran to Alfred’s tent.
He was asleep.
“Alfred!”
He sat up, instantly awake. “Paige? Is anything wrong?”
“I’m frightened. Could I get into bed with you for a while?”
“Sure.” They lay there, listening to the animals charging through the brush.
In a few minutes, the sounds began to die away.
Alfred became conscious of Paige’s warm body lying next to him.
“Paige, I think you’d better go back to your tent.”
Paige could feel his male hardness pressing against her.
All the physical needs that had been building up within them came boiling to the surface.
“Alfred.”
“Yes?” His voice was husky.
“We’re getting married, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s all right.”
And the sounds of the jungle around them disappeared, and they began to explore and discover a world no one had ever possessed but themselves. They were the first lovers in the world, and they gloried in the wonderful miracle of it.
At dawn, Paige crept back to her tent and she thought, happily, I’m a woman now.
From time to time, Curt Taylor suggested to Paige that she return to the United States to live with his brother in his beautiful home in Deerfield, north of Chicago.
“Why?” Paige would ask.
“So that you can grow up to be a proper young lady.”
“I am a proper young lady.”
“Proper young ladies don’t tease wild monkeys and try to ride baby zebras.”
Her answer was always the same. “I won’t leave you.”
When Paige was seventeen, the WHO team went to a jungle village in South Africa to fight a typhoid epidemic. Making the situation even more perilous was the fact that shortly after the doctors arrived, war broke out between two local tribes. Curt Taylor was warned to leave.
“I can’t, for God’s sake. I have patients who will die if I desert them.”
Four days later, the village came under attack. Paige and her father huddled in their little hut, listening to the yelling and the sounds of gunfire outside.