My Mother's House

by Francesca Momplaisir

  The house was the last to be taken from him.

  LA KAY

  The House hadn’t always been like this. Suicidal ideation does not come naturally or easily to a house, let alone the guts to kill itself to stop the hurt. It used to be happy and tolerant of families’ faults and conflicts. In Its early days, It tolerated the garden-variety types of tussles: sibling rivalries, visiting in-law beefs, same-house different-bed spousal separations, the anomalous slap on the hand of a misbehaving child. It had even stomached the odd fistfight between best friends and the locking out of husbands who’d stayed out too late. But It didn’t know what to do when mobsters started torturing delinquent debtors in Its basement. It was gripped by helplessness witnessing rough touches of any kind, let alone wife beatings that required ambulances and the involvement of the police. It had seen things escalate over many decades since It was first built after the war, so the changes It later witnessed had nothing to do with the shifting ethnic demographics of the neighborhood. It always tried to understand what might have happened to Its inhabitants to turn the everyday goings-on behind Its doors toxic, sadistic, and even deadly enough to make It take Its own life rather than stomach the madness that had started to materialize.

  Like most of the homes built in the neighborhood, It had been constructed primarily of the wood that had been part of America’s first source of natural wealth. It didn’t start to care about why It was built the way It was until the everyday evil started unfolding. But when It started being used to conceal wickedness, when Its last inhabitant started turning It into the type of hell that even Satan wouldn’t stand for, It decided that It could not go on.

  It had rolled out its welcome mat to Italians, accidental transplants who, after supplying the labor to build the cookie-cutter two-story homes for soldiers returning from World War II, bought for themselves the houses that wouldn’t sell. The veterans didn’t want to live in SOP and opted for homes in New York City proper or in other parts of the state or country, so the immigrants dug their roots deep beneath the basements carved out through their toil.

  The House had been one of these. It had watched as these early immigrants cozied themselves into their new enclave, dictating who could and could not live there. It didn’t much care for the crazies who started abusing certain of its features for profit and sadistic pleasure. A bomb shelter had been hidden in the far corners of Its basement. According to the other houses, who were more connected associates than friends, they all had basements, and the shelters had been common features put in for their originally intended buyers during the era of mass production, under the assumption that U.S. soldiers returning from the war would appreciate the additional security. Not knowing if the war would come to U.S. soil, the builders had designed the homes to include safe rooms. Most of the occupants had used the spaces as extra storage, while the few wannabe rich ones had converted the rooms into wine cellars. The more troubling lot valued the metal soundproof back rooms for privacy and protection as they engaged in despicable deeds.

  Although the sound of airplanes taking off from and landing at Idlewild Airport had been soundproofing enough, a few serious mobsters had added insulation to the safe rooms to seal all sound in and out. They hadn’t trusted in the reliability of airplanes, which proved prophetic as several major crashes had grounded flights out of the airport every decade since the war. The conservative Catholics and the superstitious among them quipped that the crashes were God’s revenge for renaming Idlewild after a dead liberal philandering president.

  For a time, the House had given Its residents a pass. To protect Itself from the pain brought on by Its powerlessness to stop the hurt, It ignored their misdeeds. It couldn’t afford the heartbreak of getting involved and instead allowed external forces to bring about the necessary reckonings. It was fearful of reprisal from self-proclaimed murderers who recounted the burning of bodies and buildings in other parts of the city. It felt vindicated when their offenses resulted in butt-kicking karma in the form of arrests, decades-long prison sentences, or hospitalization after near-death beatings. But when one of Its residents started getting away with all manner of murder—the dismemberment of minds, the fingering of souls like a nail in a deep wound—It started plotting rebellion.

  It had started out in a very different South Ozone Park from the place It finally tried to die in. For a time, It had marveled at the flexibility of the neighborhood as it became a mixed community. Italians grudgingly lived side by side with newer, slightly browner immigrants like Lucien Louverture, a fair-skinned product of multigenerational inbreeding. The House had welcomed him as Its first nonwhite inhabitant with coloring that hinted at the slave-epoch rape and rage out of which it was produced. But that’s not why It had opened Itself to the man. Besides having no choice in the first place, It appreciated Lucien because, in demeanor as in appearance, he was as sweet and harmless as tapioca pudding. With his curls and off-colored eyes, he had often been mistaken for Hispanic or directly biracial instead of the octoroon he really was. He had been easily, but distantly, accepted by the Italians who’d run SOP and the union at the steel plant where he’d worked. The House had been hopeful that he would bring warmth and harmony to smoke out like burned sage the evil and sadness that had been left behind by Its previous gangster head of household. This man had been one of the most brutal of a band of Mafia flunkies who’d beaten every penny out of his debtors the same way he’d beaten the spirit out of his black-and-blue wife without killing her.

  Like the other SOP houses, It had been glad to hear that the evildoers had started providing prime loan-shark interest rate financing for houses they couldn’t sell fast enough. The House thought that the neighborhood’s transformation made the price-gouging loans palatable. The same lot also arranged for independent mortgages for honest, everyday Italian homeowners beating an early path to Long Island to get as far away as possible from the darkies, no matter how light-skinned. It all but threw a party when It heard about the group moving into SOP.

  It had watched as the occupants of SOP’s houses had evolved over the years, becoming every darker shade. The few Latinos who’d been able to move out of the neighborhood did. Only two Puerto Rican families had stayed. Haitians, Guyanese, Barbadians, and Jamaicans planted themselves firmly, occupying SOP like peacekeepers in Port au Prince after a natural disaster.

  Lead among the other houses, the church, and the school, It danced like kanaval when the neighborhood changed hands and color. Having come from predominantly Catholic countries, Caribbeans gladly filled the church’s pews while their children occupied the school’s seats.

  After the church and its school, the restaurants had been next to evolve under the still mostly Italian owners who’d been shaken down by their own brethren. The pizzeria started selling beef patties with melted mozzarella and later even cocoa bread. The always Chinese-owned Chinese restaurant paid its dues staffing its eatery with a slave-labor immigration racket (“human trafficking” was the fancy term developed later). It added fried plantains, green and sweet, to its menu to complement the fried rice that Caribbeans couldn’t get enough of. The already diversified bodega’s inventory expanded to include dried salted codfish and beans of every variety. To the few American blacks (the term “African American” hadn’t yet been popularized), the corner stores still sold loose cigarettes, pork rinds, pickled pig feet, single sour pickles, and twenty- and forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor, all in the right-sized paper bags, never longer than a forearm, never wider than a palm.

  A couple of African American families had crossed over from Southside to the lower-digit addresses of Rockaway Boulevard to escape the crack epidemic. Most had come as basement tenants dealing dime bags to chill Caribbeans who’d been too afraid to drive to Southside. The self-proclaimed decent immigrant homeowners had held their own, refusing to allow their little lawns and gardens, polyurethane white picket fences, and paved driveways, for which they made long bu
s-and-train commutes each day, to slide into hood ruins. They’d grown more selective about their tenants, renting to their own mostly unless they were in a pinch. They’d redesigned their basements into elegant apartments with lots of mirrors to make up for the lack of space and natural light from ground-level windows.

  The House joined in the neighborhood’s fete as more and more brown and black immigrants, who’d discovered how easy the commute from SOP to Manhattan could be, moved in. It hadn’t taken long for Caribbean and African drivers to take over the Q10, Q7, and Q9 bus routes with faster, more frequent service in the Jamaica, Queens, area. It didn’t mind being part of Jamaica. But the neighborhood had had a different opinion on the matter. SOP had once resisted being lumped into that geography. When it had been primarily Italian, the preferred identification had been with Ozone Park and Howard Beach. But the name “Jamaica” made the Caribbeans feel at home. The real Jamaica, the country, was just a stone’s throw away from the archipelagoes and peninsulas from which they hailed. But a generation ago, SOP would have brawled at the insult of being considered part of Jamaica. That was before the only white faces seen were those of the priests and nuns who still ran the only private school and maintained the church. The new SOP loved the affiliation and the double entendre, as did the House.

  But by the time It had started calling Itself La Kay, the “kay” in KAM, the House had already decided that Its first Haitian and absolute last occupant needed to go or maybe even die. It started focusing Its attention on the holes Lucien had drilled through Its walls for his voyeurism. Watching him peek through openings as small and deep as an ear canal, It knew that he was more than a Peeping Tom. He liked to touch women, mostly voluntarily through gross persuasion, the imposition of guilt, and blackmail when necessary. Through leaking pipes, It soaked itself with tears of torment to know that that was just the beginning of his lasciviousness. Regretting Its very existence under his occupation, It decided that there had to be an end to that beginning.

  There came a moment when La Kay wasn’t just thinking about dying; It was devising ways to do it. It was so distraught over the happenings within It and Its own powerlessness to do anything. But It couldn’t kill Itself without taking the innocents with It. It felt as if It were standing three feet away from the edge of a cliff with a fifty-ton anvil in front of It and a tangled rope net behind It in which Lucien’s three daughters were coiled. It wouldn’t have given a thought about killing Lucien. In fact, It was still more homicidal than suicidal at the time but figured that It didn’t deserve to live. Its failure to stop what was going on had earned It a death sentence. Despite the neighborhood where It had been conceived, built, and evolved, It wasn’t Catholic and did not believe in purgatory. It knew that it made no sense to worry about spiritual limbo when It was already in hell. And although It had skimmed the Bible Marie-Ange sometimes opened in her lap minutes before church, It had never been tempted to process, let alone believe, in its contents.

  La Kay had spent decades reading New York newspapers over the shoulders of Its inhabitants. It learned French and Kreyòl from the Louverture family and visitors to KAM. To better understand them and where they’d come from, It even mastered L’histoire d’Haïti, books that Marie-Ange had insisted her children memorize. From this homework, It learned American and Haitian politics, culture, and social norms. It made a point of understanding the horrors in the history of both countries. Thus, It identified the aberrations in the behaviors of Its dwellers, what was the result of centuries of violent oppression, racism, and disenfranchisement and what was just the fucked-up-ness of individuals. With all this in Its heart and mind, It started to mount the resistance that had been building up inside for decades. However, It had been distracted by equally deviant, sometimes peculiar, and even triumphant happenings on the outside popping off gray news pages: unavenged full-blown beatings of black men, murders of the same at the hands of policemen, the countless abductions of white children, accidental and deliberate plane crashes, unpopular and fully supported wars, citywide blackouts, the demolition of twin towers by aviator bombers, the election and reelection of America’s first black president, the defeat of the would-be first woman president, the mourning of a divided nation ready to build and tear down a wall. How could It have focused on rebelling against the goings-on inside when the outside offered so many reasons to fight?

  * * *

  —

  LA KAY had finally succeeded at Its revolt and gleefully mocked the man whose egregious transgressions had driven It to suicide as Its only recourse. It celebrated Its own demise with sparks that lit up the dawn sky. Its fete angered Lucien so much that he produced his own fire that kept his bare feet warm on the frozen pavement. After laughing until It cried hydrant water, La Kay sat silent, watching Lucien as he tried to convince the firefighters to check his basement where he believed his girls must have found refuge. Knowing but mistrusting Lucien, It hesitated to check what, if anything, was happening in Its basement. It chose to wait to find out who or what might have survived in the shelter constructed to withstand military-grade explosives.

  More fire!

  LUCIEN

  Lucien stood in front of his house, impervious to the cold. His memory flashed to the houses back home, all of which were built of cinder block, brick, cement, and, when available, stone. Even the smallest huts, the ones with cutouts for windows with no glass panes in Haiti’s poorest provinces, were made of materials as indestructible as the will of a perpetually oppressed people. The roofs were corrugated iron whose thickness depended on the affluence of the owner and the honesty of the builder. He would have settled for the smallest of these even though he had grown up in a mansion with his aunt La Belle. Even her add-on quarters had been fortified. Its dense iron roof had taken away the pleasure of falling asleep to the melody of rain harmonizing with the all-too-familiar sound of her soprano screech that had the urgency of a woman on fire or in the death throes of orgasm.

  Now, crumbling like stone to dust, as broken as the sheets of ice beneath his bare feet, Lucien longed for a dirge of rural rain to keep his house from dying.

  Lucien channeled the sound of drops as heavy as hail on the roof of his childhood home as he ran around his still-smoking home, lamenting that it had fallen victim to America’s abundance exploited to excess. Although he had not been back to Haiti since 1975, forty-two years later he stood in snow falling like grains of sugar wishing for cinder block, stone, and brick. Yes, even brick like the one once thrown through his screen door as a welcome from the few remaining white neighbors who had been trying to hold their ground to keep South Ozone Park as homogenously, or at least mostly, Italian as neighboring Howard Beach. Lucien wished that the rest of his house had been built of the same bricks that formed the steps to his screen door. That screen had never been shattered again since black and brown immigrants like himself had bought up all of his block and most of South Ozone Park.

  If only block and brick had supplanted the wood frame, he wouldn’t be standing outside in pajamas as thin as the Newsday, listening to firefighters discuss the need for his house to be demolished. He overheard them explaining to one another that the only thing keeping the house upright was the aluminum siding that covered the ashen splintering structure beneath. His externally erect, internally crumbling house was a sadly laughable façade akin to the dream sold to immigrant aspirants back home.

  He wanted to cuss, but he wasn’t that type of man. He was perverse, just not verbally, and certainly not in English. He was angry enough to drop a Kreyòl f-bomb, “Fout!” But he pleaded with the firefighters who were packing up and the demolition team who was unloading. If his wife had been alive, she would have heard his suppressed anger. If it had been back home, his possessions would have been safe. He could have slept in his own bed later that night, on his couch, or opted to crash amid the comforting junk in his crowded basement. He wouldn’t be absurdly holding back Kreyòl curses against Ame
rican lumber or wanting to let loose against his neighbors, who had gathered to see the carnage and plot to buy the soon-to-be cleared double lot at a bargain.

  Lucien pleaded his case to the fire marshal. “My things! My girls are in there!”

  He braced himself against the shaky fence with his good arm. He could barely stand. It had been at least an hour since he’d crawled out of his dilapidated van on one good leg. His first stroke had done little damage five years ago. The second one paralyzed his left forearm to his wrist, leaving that hand and three fingers irreparably curled into a claw. He didn’t bother with the walker Medicaid had paid for or the cane, preferring to limp while dragging his left foot along to get around. If his partially crippled state had not conveyed to the fire marshal that he was out of sorts, his hoarse ranting certainly did.

  “My girls! Please, please!” He placed his claw on the man’s shoulder. If he could have folded his hands in prayer and dropped to his knees, he would have. He struggled to speak over his Guyanese neighbors, who were explaining to the demolition team and departing firefighters that Lucien had been ill for years.

  “Not just his body.” The husband made the universal symbol for crazy—a pointer finger circling his ear and temple.

  “Dementia,” the wife said loud enough for Lucien and the fire marshal to hear. “I’m a nurse.”