This is not the first time I have seen Mary allow herself to be swept away by the feelings she has for our mother. I have seen her throw her arms around my mother’s neck, and, once, in a burst of happiness, she flung herself into our mother’s lap.
Mary had just got married and she and her husband, already mature adults, had agreed to remain in the countries where they felt most comfortable. For Mary’s husband that meant Trinidad, in the countryside; for Mary, America, in the suburbs of New York’s cities. On this occasion Mary had just returned to Trinidad to visit her husband. I also happened to be in Trinidad. We were gathered, my siblings and I, in our parents’ bedroom as usual. Mary barged in, her face glowing, eyes shining, a wide smile on her lips, all learned restraint abandoning her in the whirlwind of happiness that had enveloped her from being with her husband again. Our mother was sitting in her armchair. Mary ran to her and plopped herself into her lap. Our mother froze. Her eyes shot open, her back stiffened. I could tell she was scared to death. She did not know what to say, what to do. Mary was like a baby in her arms, curled into the fetal position, wanting to be hugged, to be kissed. My heart bled for my mother. I laughed, a false laugh to be sure, but it broke the grip of terror that had turned my mother into a statue, her arms stiff at her sides, her mouth hanging open.
That was the last time I saw Mary kiss or hug our mother like that. Now, as her chin digs deeper into the back of my shoulder, tears pouring down her cheeks, her arms like manacles around me, I realize suddenly I have been wrong. Mary is crying for herself. She is crying for her loss, not for the loss of our mother. She is grieving for the spaces left in her heart all those years when she was a child, when she was a young woman, spaces that not even her husband would be able to fill.
The repression of displays of affection has left us stunted, desperate for emotional comfort but unable to ask for it or know how to give it. And once in a while, as had happened to Mary, and is happening with her now, a dam breaks open.
I once asked my mother if she knew why her children were seemingly unable to sustain long-term romantic relationships. She shook her head. It made her unhappy that we had not stayed with our spouses, she said. She wished she could do something to change that.
David asked too. We were celebrating our parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. When David’s turn came to thank them for the life they had given us, he asked questions instead. “How were you able to stay married for so long? What is the secret to your long marriage?”
My father looked away, avoiding David’s eyes. My mother simply smiled. David, his voice filled with sadness and wonder, addressed my mother directly: “They don’t make women like you anymore.”
David’s second marriage was on life support; his wife had accused him of cheating on her.
My father had also cheated on my mother. Several times. She did not leave him.
Was my father’s excuse the old canard that men often offer? They wouldn’t seek love elsewhere if they were shown love in the home.
Shall I blame the church? Shall I blame a church that forbade birth control, that for so many women stifled passion in the midst of lovemaking for fear of the consequences of more babies than they could manage? In this context, was my father’s behavior understandable?
I think my siblings and I were needier, though. I think it must have been hard for our spouses to fill that yawning space left in our hearts from the attention we yearned for when we were children. Our need for love was not the ordinary need of mature adults; it was a kind of raw hunger for the unconditional love that babies demand. Beloved’s hunger.
Were we asking for too much from our parents? There were limits to the time my father could be with us. He had to leave the house to earn the money to feed, clothe, and shelter us. And my mother? What more could she have done? She had her own needs too, her own hunger for attention from the man she loved. She would shut her bedroom door and lock it, but there were always little ones wailing outside, begging to be let in.
And she was ambitious. What and who could she have been if there hadn’t been laws thwarting her ambitions, disapprobation cast upon her by a society that declared a woman’s place to be in her home minding her husband and her children?
And was it possible to give love and attention to eleven children at the same time? How was my mother to share herself with a squealing baby who needed to be fed, a toddler burning up with fever, little children with cuts and bruises, pubescent boys and girls alarmed by their changing bodies, teenagers grappling with the surprise of raging hormones, sibling rivalries, mischiefs to be quelled, homework to supervise, etc., etc.? Only in The Sound of Music and other such movies are large families so well adjusted and happy. The Duggars on cable television tell a romantic version of the truth. Nineteen children and counting, but they have nannies and home assistants, and we are yet to learn how those children will fare once they have families of their own. Discovery Communications, the TLC Channel, and corporate sponsors furnished the Duggars’s house, supplied them with all sorts of efficient gadgets, which, in ways my mother could not have imagined, reduced the drudgery of housework. The Duggars say they will have as many children as God will see fit to give them. If every couple had nineteen children and counting, there would not be sufficient resources on our planet Earth, created by this same God, to sustain us.
I continue to be amazed by the close relationship my son has with his two daughters, the attention and the tangible expressions of affection he gives to both of them. Just two daughters and yet my son, who is a thousand times less guarded than I am, whose capacity for empathy continues to astound me, is stretched thin by the effort it takes to reassure his two children of his love for them. How would he manage if he had eleven, if like my parents he had eleven hearts to fill?
My parents did what they thought was best. They prepared us to succeed in the world they knew, a world where your country was not your own and belonged to people who did not look like you, who lived far across the ocean in a distant, cold land. You had to be smart in such a world; you had to be alert; you had to be made of sterner stuff. The colonizer succeeds when he manages to colonize your mind. You cannot let your emotions derail you. You must guard your mind.
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Still I continue to blame the church. I hold the church responsible too for constraining our emotional lives. The constant fear of pregnancy robbed my mother of much of the pleasure she could have had in sex, so it must have been difficult for her to find the space and calm in the center of her being to attend to our emotional needs when hers were wanting. Was it the threat of damnation that kept her tethered to her husband when he strayed?
“Women today aren’t willing, like you were, to stay the course, to stick with the ups and downs in their marriage,” David said to our mother.
But would she have been willing to stick with the downs in her marriage, her husband’s infidelity, if she’d had the opportunities women have today, and her daughters have had, for advanced education and professional careers? I think she would have; I believe she would have stayed with her husband.
Yet my mother did not accept my father’s infidelities passively. On more than one occasion I saw her get so angry with him that in the midst of a quarrel, her accusations getting louder and more strident, she snatched the tablecloth from the table while we were eating, sending plates, cups, saucers, cutlery, food flying across the room. Once when my father had not come home from one of his “meetings,” though it was well past midnight, she waited for him behind the door with a pot in her hand. She was always remorseful afterward, ashamed of herself for her outbursts, but I think she must have felt trapped, hemmed in with no possibility of escape. I think she must have felt she had no other way of fighting back.
My father was always remorseful too. He never admitted any wrongdoing, but he also never retaliated. He let my mother rail at him, shatter plates on the floor, throw pots at him, call him names, and he kept his mouth shut. In the morning he was charming: “Una, why don’
t you make a pot of pelau, and we’ll take the children to the beach?”
Why did my mother stay? The obvious answer is that she had no other means of supporting herself and her children. But she also loved her husband and I think because she loved him, she was willing to make this tacit agreement with him: so long as he did not embarrass her, she would do her best to look the other way. My father kept his side of the bargain. When he was in public with her, he was the soul of discretion, making it clear she was the only woman in his life. If there were whispers about his trysts, he denied them vehemently. This arrangement was by no means exceptional. Many marriages in my parents’ day survived this way, and though I thought women were trapped by the restrictions imposed on them in the name of gentility and concern for their “fragile” sensibilities, it seemed to me that men were trapped too. I cannot say I felt sorry for them, but I did think there was pressure on men (in my part of the world anyway) to prove their virility by chalking up female conquests whether within or outside of marriage. Ultimately, though, it was the specter of burning in the red-hot flames of hell for all eternity that made my mother a willing partner in my father’s deceptions. She could not, would not, leave him. She had sworn an oath before God to be a wife to her husband for better or worse. To break that oath was to commit a mortal sin which would plunge her into the fires of hell.
These were not the days of Newt Gingrich, when a man, married with children, commits adultery, remarries, commits adultery again, and then, because he wishes to marry his lover, who is Catholic and wants a grand Catholic wedding, manages to convince his priest, his bishop, and the gatekeepers at the Vatican that his two marriages, the first lasting eighteen years and producing two children, the second ending after nineteen years, were not marriages at all. He is in fact a free and single man, a bachelor, with every right to marry the woman he loves. No, in my mother’s day, in the Caribbean island where she lived, the annulment of a marriage contract was unheard of. You married for life; you stayed with your spouse through thick and thin. In time an adulterous affair will run its natural course, the marriage will resume; children and grandchildren will be your reward.
It turned out that the two of my siblings who sought, and were granted, annulments of their marriages were the two who had seemed to me the most religious among us: a sister who was a novitiate in a convent, and a brother who had flirted with the possibility of becoming a priest. Each of their marriages had lasted for more than nineteen years; both of them had children; both had been able to convince the church that their marriage contracts were flawed, though my brother says it was his ex-wife, not he, who sought the annulment.
I had stayed in my marriage for my son, but in his last year in high school when he was getting ready to leave home for college and I should have been preparing finally to free myself from a marriage that had made me unhappy, I, who thought myself an independent thinker, a liberal, a feminist, who was repulsed by the hypocrisy of the church’s stance on annulment which favored the rich and those with connections to the Catholic hierarchy, which kept the poor in bondage to unhappy and sometimes dangerous marriages, found myself aching for approbation from that very church, needing the blessing of my parish priest, his concurrence with me on the righteousness of my reasons for divorcing a husband of twenty years.
The divorced and remarried French ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy was reputed to have said that though he did not adhere to all the rules of the church, he was culturally Catholic. I, too, was then, and even now to a certain degree, culturally Catholic. How could I have been otherwise? I had been raised in a strict orthodox Catholic home and was taught by nuns in Catholic schools. I went to Mass every Sunday, confession every Saturday. During the forty days of Lent, I attended five o’clock Mass most mornings and made the stations of the cross on Fridays. Every night my siblings and I knelt down around our mother’s bed to recite the rosary. Our Halloween was All Hallows’ Eve. We didn’t dress up in costumes; we went to the graves of our dead relatives and prayed for the release of their souls from purgatory. We lit candles and put money in the slots next to the statues of saints and offered indulgences for the dearly departed. I remember praying for my Protestant paternal grandparents and my father’s sisters and brothers who would surely be going to hell unless they converted to Catholicism. In fact, while I was still in secondary school, I had managed to convert an entire Chinese family.
Gitmee A— was my best friend in school. Her parents had immigrated to Trinidad from China and spoke barely intelligible English. I grieved for Gitmee and her family. It pained me to know that because my best friend was neither a Catholic nor a Christian, she would be sent to Limbo when she died, the place for the souls of the unbaptized. I wanted her to be in heaven with me. Somehow I convinced her, and she convinced her siblings, to convert. It was one of the happiest days of my childhood when I stood next to her and her family at the baptismal fount.
For years I wore a scapular around my neck, under my clothes, for the Blessed Virgin. I kept it on though the strings frayed and disintegrated and caused a perpetual rash of painful little bumps on my chest.
I joined the Legion of Mary. My duty was to comfort the poor and the dying. I was fourteen when I was sent to the Poor House, a stately colonial Victorian government building with arches and columns, outside a pristine lawn but inside scenes from a Dickens novel, the place reeking of filth and urine and teeming with the unwashed, the discarded, the forgotten. From time to time a piercing shriek would cut across the constant hum of moans and groans vibrating against the walls, and I would know that one more of these miserable poor had been caught trying to escape. He would be fettered to a bedpost like the other escapees, for the British maintained a well-ordered colony; there would be no filthy indigents littering their streets. Once I had to cut the toenails of an old man who was tied like that to a bedpost, rope twisted around one of his legs. Urine trailed down his pant leg, and yet, dutifully, believing I was saving a soul, I clipped those nails that had grown so long they curled upon themselves.
When my marriage failed I felt I was owed support from the church to which I had given much of my youth. I felt I had earned the church’s love and understanding. I had no family in America except for my brother David who was enmeshed in marital problems of his own. My parents and all my other siblings were either in Trinidad or other parts of the world. I was angry with the church, but I was desperate to belong, to attach myself to something familiar, something I had known from my past: a community, a church that had been the center of my life in my homeland. In desperation I sought out my parish priest. I wanted him to tell me I could have a second chance to fall in love, I could remarry, I could be happy.
Was I seeking an annulment? the priest wanted to know. No, I said. I had been married for twenty years; I had a son. My marriage contract was solid; I was perfectly aware of what I was doing when I made my vows. My son was not born out of wedlock. What I wanted was a divorce. What I wanted—it became distressingly apparent to me—was the church’s permission to divorce my husband.
I could divorce my husband, the priest conceded, but I could not remarry, for in the eyes of the church, the man I had married would remain my husband until one of us died. To have sex with another man was to commit adultery, to break the sixth commandment. I would have to promise to be celibate for the rest of my life or risk eternal damnation. I was still young, still sexually in my prime. I could not make that promise.
A woman saved me, a nun dressed in civilian clothes. I was standing on the pavement in front of the rectory when she approached me. She must have seen the deadness in my eyes; she must have sensed my despair. “Is anything the matter? Can I help you?” Immediately a trembling began in my body. My lips quivered, my hands shook. She reached out and held me still. I leaned against her shoulder and poured out my heart to her. “It’s a sin to stay in a marriage that is killing your spirit,” she said. “Leave. Get a divorce.”
She freed me. I wish I knew her name. I would thank her
for removing the shackles of a religion that had imprisoned me.
When my divorce was final I couldn’t wait to return to my maiden name. The day my lawyer confirmed I was single again, I strode into the HR office of my college employer and persuaded the director of personnel to change my surname immediately back to Nunez on all my official documents. She must have seen the urgency in my eyes, for my next paycheck was made out to Elizabeth Nunez. By this time all my anger and resentment toward D— had been drained out of me, so it wasn’t that I wanted to erase his name; I just wanted mine back. I wanted to reclaim myself, the person I was before I married D—. I wanted back the life of my mind.
I was fifty when D— and I divorced. In the following years I would rise in the ranks of the professoriate, ultimately achieving the title of Distinguished Professor. I would chair my academic department and for a year and a half I would be provost and senior vice president of my college. I had published one novel; I would publish seven more and several essays. I would travel around the country and abroad giving readings of my work. I would serve on literary panels and on juries for national and international prizes. I had no crystal ball to see that future when I got divorced, but I believed in its possibility with all my heart.
Sterner stuff? Had I inherited it too from my father who camouflaged his cautionary tale to his children with a joke about an English overseer and his brown-skinned sugarcane worker? What done bile, done spile. My father’s admonitions served me well. I stiffened my back.
My son Jason was not happy, though, with my decision to reclaim my birth name. He was a young black man in America, struggling against racial stereotypes that attempted to define him. For his generation there was the War on Drugs, but the fuel Senator Daniel Moynihan gave to Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the previous generation still lingered in the collective consciousness of the American people. Moynihan had made no attempt to sugarcoat his words. The title of his research, now referred to with the anodyne caption of The Moynihan Report, was originally The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Single black mothers were to blame; absent black fathers were to blame, Moynihan contended. They were responsible for the bloated welfare rolls. It wasn’t difficult for Jason’s generation to connect the dots: households headed by single black mothers = poverty = drugs. Jason was starting college. He wanted us to have the same surname, the same one as his father. He wanted the world to know he was not a Moynihan statistic, that he came from an intact family, that he had a mother and a father who were married when he was born.
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