“You could hide them in your suitcase,” my mother suggests with a wicked twinkle in her eyes. She knows about 9/11. She knows no one who looks like me is likely to escape the notice of the customs officers.
My father is in the midst of a tall tale as we walk toward him. We can see him gesticulating wildly, his arms flinging in the air. At times he stomps his feet and does a little dance. The girls are listening attentively. They do not notice when we reach them. My father sees me and stops his story. The girls groan in unison. They are not ready to leave when we tell them it’s time to go. “One more story, Grandpa,” Jordan pleads.
I return to Trinidad in July, this time for three days. I am helping Joy Bramble, the owner of the Baltimore Times, organize a Caribbean writers conference in Antigua. Joy is originally from Montserrat, but her family was forced to migrate to Antigua when the 1997 volcano on the Soufrière Hills blew up, burying almost the entire island under rivers of fiery lava. Joy lives in America now, but feels indebted to Antigua which had welcomed her family. This conference, her second, is her way of repaying the island for its generosity. She plans to donate much of the proceeds from the conference to help rebuild the library in Antigua, most of which had been demolished by a fire years earlier. Joy hopes to interest the University of Trinidad and Tobago in collaborating with her and so expand the scope and audience of the conference. We arrive on a Friday night, and will leave on Sunday in the late afternoon. I need to meet with Joy and Dr. Ramchand on Saturday night, so my only free time will be during the day.
Sunday will be my mother’s ninetieth birthday. We have no intimations of the possibility, but my mother will die approximately one month from that day.
My father, who has lost the habit of checking off the days on his calendar, has not forgotten that his wife’s birthday is in July. As soon as I arrive, he consults with me. “What date in July?” he asks. I tell him her birthday will be on Sunday. “Then you must take me to the store on Saturday to get a present for her and a card,” he says.
What can my father buy his wife that she does not already have? “Some kind of jewelry,” he tells me. “She loves jewelry.” Then he hesitates. “Or perfume. She always smells nice.”
On Saturday morning, I take my father to the jewelry store. The owner knows him and makes a swift dash toward us. My father has made many purchases for my mother in this store; the jeweler knows what she has and does not have. He suggests a gold medal for her gold chain. “Something religious,” he explains. “You know Mrs. Nunez is a religious woman.” He shows my father a medal depicting Mary, the mother of God. I am certain my mother has many medals with the imprint of a drawing of Mary, but I hold my tongue. It does not matter what my father buys her; it matters only that he gets a present for her. My father takes the medal, but just before he pays for it, he changes his mind. He’ll get her a brooch. He points to a gold rose perched on the end of a pin.
We walk over to the card store. My father goes directly to the birthday section, to the area tagged with the sign For my wife. I stand behind him and wait patiently as he reads one card and then another. The salesgirl, pretty and very young, snickers. I glare at her. My father moves slowly, step by step along the row of cards, picking up one, returning it to the rack, and picking another. He comes to the end, shakes his head, and returns to the beginning of the row. I have no appointments; I can wait for him all morning. “Take your time, Daddy,” I say, shooting another stern look at the salesgirl who scurries to the back of the display counter. Finally, my father picks a card. “Una will like this one.” It’s a card that expresses a husband’s undying love for his wife. For all eternity, the card says.
Our dinner meeting with Dr. Ramchand does not yield much, a delicious meal but little more. Dr. Ramchand has invited the provost to join us, but I sense that changes are afoot at the university and neither Dr. Ramchand nor the provost is on secure ground with the positions they currently hold. In any case, I console myself, Joy has had a chance to catch up with old friends in Trinidad and I have been able to be with my parents for the third time this year, and on my mother’s birthday.
My father has already given my mother the card and the present when I enter their bedroom early in the morning before breakfast to wish my mother happy birthday. She is beaming, holding the card in her hand. “Look, Elizabeth. Look what your father gave me.” I see the jewel box open on her night table, the brooch still inside. She follows my eyes. “It’s pretty,” she says, “but look at the card!” She shows it to me, but she does not give it to me. She opens it and reads the words aloud. “For all eternity. This old man knows how to romance an old woman.”
“A beautiful lady,” my father rejoins.
My two sisters and my brother come to the house after lunch. One of my sisters-in-law, Marjorie, comes too. She is married to my youngest brother, Roger, who has his medical practice in Mississippi. Marjorie is a senior partner at a major law firm in Trinidad. Their marriage has already lasted a quarter century. I do not know how they manage this long-distance relationship separated by an ocean and miles of land. I have many times thought they should seek other partners, but my mother has been steadily behind them, supporting them. What God has joined together . . . I cannot quarrel with her reasoning as it applies to Marjorie and Roger. Together, Marjorie and my brother have raised a beautiful, brilliant, and well-adjusted daughter, Regan, who is in her last year of law school at the University of Michigan.
Marjorie has brought a cake and candles. Petra has made a special fruit drink and tiny fruit pies. She stands in the back, a respectful distance from where we have gathered. I call out to her: “Come, join us, Petra.” My mother frowns at me. I do not know whether she is jealous of the attention I am paying to Petra or whether she disapproves of having her helper join us as if she were one of us, an equal. I still bristle at these last vestiges of the strictures of a class system we inherited from the British, which persist in spite of our political independence. It’s my mother’s birthday, so I don’t insist when Petra says, “I fine where I stay.” I notice none of my sisters encourage her to come closer.
After we have blown out the candles and have sung happy birthday, one of my sisters, the one who admittedly is my mother’s favorite, launches into a spirited retelling of an incident that occurred on her job in which she came out victorious. My mother, who usually gives this sister her full attention, seems distracted. She does not make the appropriate sounds of approval at the points in the tale where my sister expects applause, perhaps not literally, but the usual enthusiastic encouragement. My mother’s smiles seem forced and her eyes are dull.
The taxi comes for me while the party is still going on. I say my goodbyes to my siblings. I hug my father, kiss my mother. She trails me to the gate. I am about to go through it when she pulls me back. The hug she gives me, her arm locked around my neck, almost strangles me. “I love you,” she whispers. And I respond, “I love you too, Mummy.” It is the last time I will see her alive.
25
My mother is to be buried tomorrow. I must finish the eulogy and give it to Jacqueline so it can be printed in time for the Mass in the morning. My siblings have gone their separate ways. To give me space to think and write, they say. I leave the breakfast room and go to the dining room. There I am surrounded by my mother’s treasured collections. Against one wall is a glass cabinet stocked with delicate china, dinner sets and tea sets she used only on special occasions. Against the opposite wall is a credenza. If I open the drawers I will find my mother’s prized silverware.
What was the point of having all these only to use them rarely? Why keep them shut up like an exhibit in a museum?
My American friend Lynne LaSala has an expensive china set. I admired it and bought some pieces for myself. I put them in my cabinet and closed the door. I was visiting Lynne one day for lunch and she served me with her expensive china. I expressed surprise.
“I use this set every day,” she said.
“Even when you are alone
?”
“I bought it because I liked it a lot. It makes me happy to eat from it.”
Today. Now. That’s what counts. Not yesterday or tomorrow. My mother kept her china set shut up in a cabinet. If she could speak now, would she say she had been foolish to deny herself the pleasure of touching and using these things she loved?
Would she say the same about me, her daughter? She loved me, yet it took years for those three little words to leave her tongue. I love you. Like her special china, they were words to be used on special occasions, not for everyday use.
And what about my part? I had drawn an iron gate across my heart. I was the good daughter, the dutiful daughter, making sure to call my mother once a week, to visit her in Trinidad at least once a year, to buy her clothes, shoes, to do whatever she asked me to, without complaint, no matter how ridiculous. Once it got into my mother’s head that she wanted a cookware set she had seen on cable TV. The promoter promised miracles. The cookware would make food tastier, juicier. My mother desperately wanted it. Each time we spoke on the phone she would sing the praises of the cookware. I didn’t tell her that the promoter was just doing his job, that he had probably never used the cookware himself. I didn’t say there were fourteen parts to the cookware and it would be costly and cumbersome for me to bring it for her in my luggage. I simply brought it for her. As I expected, she never used it. She packed it away in her kitchen cabinet. It was too precious. Not for everyday use.
I bought her a dishwasher too, though by then I knew she would probably never use it. After years of disuse, the engine stalled.
Did I believe these things I bought would make up for words locked in my heart that couldn’t leave my lips?
I think it gave my mother a sense of security to know that if important people dropped by, she would be ready to entertain them with her good china and her expensive silverware. She would only have to open the doors of her cabinet and pull out the drawers of her credenza. Shouldn’t it have given me a sense of security too to know I could depend on her if and when I needed her? Words should not have been necessary. For either of us.
I get to the business of drafting words. I write what I believe to be true. My mother was the best wife she could be, she was the best mother she could be. Her heart was her china cabinet, it was her credenza, where she stored her love for us. More times than I can count she had unlocked that heart whenever we needed her.
26
At the church the next morning, our father refuses to get out of the limousine. The hearse waits. My sisters try to persuade him to come with us inside the church; my brothers try. Our father will not budge. He has curled himself into a tight ball against the plush leather seat in the back of the limousine. His jaw is set, his eyes fixed in a blank stare directed outside the window. The organ music rises and flows out of the church. The pallbearers walk past us, peer inside the limousine, and turn away, shaking their heads in sympathy.
“Come, Daddy,” I say, and tug his arm gently. His arm is rigid as steel.
One brother leaves the limousine and reports back to us: “Every pew in the church is taken. People are crushed against each other in their seats. The aisles on both sides are four people deep and stretch from the top line of pews to the bottom.”
Hundreds have come to pay their respects to our mother, from Trinidad’s high society to the person in the street. The prime minister is there with his entourage, so too is a group of villagers who are weeping silently.
By now a crowd has gathered on the steps and on the pavement outside the church. Soon there are murmurings. What’s holding things up? What’s wrong? Somebody sick?
My father is not sick. If he wants to, he can move his legs. If he wants to, he can get out of the car. He is not confused either. He is acutely aware of where he is. This is the church where he and his wife have gone to Mass every Sunday for more than a quarter of a century. He was here with her just days ago.
“We won’t leave your side,” my sisters promise. “We’ll stay close to you.” Our father remains rigid. They plead with him. “We can’t start without you, Daddy.”
He still does not respond. His stare gets more fixed, more determined, his limbs more unyielding.
Time passes. Ten minutes. More. The funeral director comes to the car door. “Can I help? Can I get a wheelchair?”
My father looks up. His thin lips clamp together into a straight line above his rigid jaw. We know that look. It’s been years—we were young, still children—but we have not forgotten. When our father said no, he meant no. Nothing changed his mind. He was set on his course, as clearly as he is now. It would be futile to try again. We direct the pallbearers to begin. We follow our mother’s coffin into the church. Richard stays with our father in the limousine; he keeps the doors open.
After the eulogy, the Eucharist. The priest comes down the steps of the altar and stands before the Communion rails. The congregation waits for us. We are expected to receive Communion before they do. I look around me. My siblings are still on their knees. With one exception our first marriages have ended in divorce, or in years of separation, or we have married someone who was divorced. All sins in the Catholic Church. For those who remarried, or those who during their long separation had sexual relationships with someone other than their spouse, the sin of adultery. Jacqueline turns to face us, a question in her eyes. But she is free to receive Communion; her first marriage was annulled. Then David stands up, no hesitation in his movement. David is divorced and has remarried a divorcée. “Come,” he says. We all stand up. My brother starts the line and we follow him. We honor our mother. We are her children.
After he has given us the Eucharist, the priest walks down the middle aisle of the church. The hushed whisperings begin. Where is he going? Heads turn. The priest walks through the open doors of the church to the yard outside. For five long minutes, in the middle of a Mass, we are left without a priest.
Richard tells me that when the priest stepped into the limousine, my father sat up and opened his mouth. The priest placed the Eucharist on his tongue. My father sat back down again, but something in him had changed. His limbs had loosened, the muscles in his face had relaxed.
27
At the cemetery, my father is vibrantly alert, full of life. He takes charge. “Watch those gravediggers,” he instructs us.
In Trinidad, as in most of the Caribbean, the grave is dug in the presence of family and friends. While the gravediggers work, we sing our mother’s favorite hymns. Jacqueline’s friend, who has a beautiful voice, sings the Ave Maria. I have a favorite hymn too. Not long ago I had sung it for my parents. I was sitting on their bed, next to my mother who was propped up on her pillow. My father was on his bedside armchair grumbling about the folly of death. It did not make sense to him that life should end, he said. I sang the hymn that consoles me:
Be not afraid, I go before you always,
Come, follow me and I will give you rest . . .
My mother was pleased. “Hear that, Waldo. There’s nothing to fear. God has more plans for you.”
Now we all sing the hymn. Be not afraid. The dirt piles higher on either side of the hole the gravediggers have made. Eventually all we see are the tops of the gravediggers’ heads. My father comes to the edge of the grave. “Make sure you go down nine feet,” he instructs the men, then turns to me. “Tell them nine feet.”
Six feet for one person, nine if another is to be put in the same grave.
28
My novel Anna In-Between is published the following year. My mother had read most of my other novels in manuscript but not this one. She died before her cataracts could be removed and so she never had a chance to read it in any form. But I had told her about the book. I said to her I had written a novel about a character that was somewhat based on her. She gave me that enigmatic smile that always left me feeling uncomfortably like a child again, though I was already a grandmother of two. It was as if she were holding all the cards and I, put at a distinct disadvantage, had alre
ady lost before the game was played. “Go ahead,” she said.
“You won’t mind?”
“I always love your novels. Write what you want to. I won’t mind, no matter what you say.”
Was she giving me permission? Did she already know what I had written? Or was it that she believed I would never cast her in a light she would not approve? That I would be fair to her?
Some of my most ardent supporters tell me that though they love the novel, they think I am too hard on Beatrice Sinclair, Anna’s mother. They want to like her but they find it hard to sympathize with a woman who withholds hugs and kisses from her child.
Anna thinks so too and she tries to be forgiving of her mother’s seeming emotional detachment from her. She recites an old man’s prayer:
Change ah we heart, O Lord. Change ah we heart.
Change ah we heart like mongoose kinna change he skin under rock bottom.
My friend Pat Ramdeen is more sympathetic. She says Beatrice Sinclair pushes her daughter because she wants her to succeed. She wants to toughen her for a world that is not always kind to women. She wants her to be independent, self-reliant. She cannot afford to coddle Anna.
Pat, like me, is an immigrant from Trinidad. We both had to bear in silence the shock of being plunged suddenly into frigid weather after the warmth of our tropical sun. We both had to endure the searing loneliness of being in a strange land among strange people. We know firsthand the heart-tugging longing for family and friends. We were scholarship girls, beholden to the generosity of the Marian nuns and their devoted donors. We could not be ungrateful. So we exercised restraint. Every hour of every day, of every month, of every year for four years, restraint kept us from falling apart.
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