57
YASMIN REMEMBERS LOOKING at her daughter run.
Remembers the jaunty, stiff-legged run of the toddler. The heedless abandon, the ragged sense of self.
Remembers thinking that one day her daughter would be graceful.
It was the sight of her mother that added another level of horror and grief.
Trembling in her embrace, cheek palpitated by the rugged beating of her mother’s heart, Yasmin felt from behind a wind coursing through the hole ripped in time.
Its chill settled on the nape of her neck, a frigid blade vibrating a whistle of emptiness.
And for the second time in her life she was given knowledge of the infinite.
58
YOUR SON LOVES you, does he not, Mrs. Livingston?
Ah, yes, my dear, it is plain to see — as plain as the pleasure that the thought gives you.
But do you have any inkling what he thinks of you as a mother? Would he hold you up as a paragon of motherhood, or would subtle resentments overwhelm his esteem?
You would say no, wouldn’t you. Hmm, extraordinary …
As for Yasmin’s view of me — a certain measure of selfawareness is among my acknowledged faults, as you well know. While I do not pretend to read all the shadows that inhabit Yasmin’s heart, there is one that … that we share.
One that is of my own creation.
That is beyond my understanding.
Inexplicable.
It began the moment Yasmin held out to me her newborn baby —
Yes. My … my granddaughter.
The moment my fingers touched the swaddling blanket, there, in the hospital room. With the pink curtain drawn against the despair of the woman in the next bed and the nebula of bouquets that mocked her baby born premature and incomplete. With the bassinet at the foot of Yasmin’s bed like a formation of rock crystal with a pillowed hollow. With my son-in-law on the other side of the bed, still in the grip of time arrested. There, as I took the baby in my arms, it came to me, this …
This … indifference.
You know, my dear, I am not generally given to regret. I regret in my life only those things before which I have found myself powerless. They are not many, but they remain open wounds, not suppurating but raw.
That indifference towards my granddaughter, you see, was to remain with me for the rest of her short life. Why it should have come to me I cannot say, and all those details of the moment remain with me in a way that suggests I am looking to them, and not to myself, for an explanation. I am looking, in other words, to place the blame on them because my muted feeling has always perplexed me so.
I played the role of grandmother to the best of my ability. I babysat her occasionally. Or rather, I watched her and she watched me — we kept an eye on each other. I might help her complete a jigsaw puzzle or sharpen a crayon now and then. I made sure she never went hungry or thirsty. And at times when she was a toddler she would climb onto my lap and fall asleep — but this was always at her request, never at my bidding. I was not averse to it, just not enthusiastic. I gave gifts, of course, at the appropriate occasions. When I went visiting, it never occurred to me to bring along a treat — which upset Yasmin enough that, one day as we drove up to their house, she slipped me a bag of candy with which to surprise the girl. She was puzzled, Yasmin, and probably hurt, although we never spoke of it.
How does one explain it, my dear? How does one justify such detachment from one’s own grandchild?
The girl was a charmer, you know. She fairly radiated happiness in her slightest movements. Rare was the time she would simply walk across a room. She skipped or she danced, and she cartwheeled across lawns, as if the energy of her happiness could barely be contained. It was the kind of childhood happiness that one envies, that one wishes would never be lost. And because of this, it was also the kind of energy that prompted more sober moments, for one could not help reflecting that life itself, circumstance, would cause it to diminish. Life, after all, is not a dance across a field.
But what perhaps imposed on those moments an even greater soberness was my realization that she reminded me of Yasmin before she lost her father, before she and I came alone to this land. That change — the suddenness of it, I assume — had heightened Yasmin’s natural watchfulness. It had made her quieter —
Level-headed, you say? Yes, she has always been a thoughtful child. But that change, from exuberance to pensiveness, was marked. And one day I saw the promise of it in her daughter.
It was a little thing, really. She had not long been in school when she picked up that dreadful habit of nail-biting, which had plagued Yasmin well into her teens. I had finally succeeded in breaking Yasmin of the habit, and when I saw her daughter ripping at her nails with her teeth, I said to her with some exasperation: Am I going to have to break you of that habit too?
The little girl said nothing. she folded her hands on her lap and gave me a lengthy, saddened gaze that emerged from deep within, a gaze that was neither challenging nor rude but which managed to suggest that I had overstepped my bounds. I saw Yasmin so powerfully in her eyes — in her reflected understanding of the limits to our relationship — that I let things be. When I saw her again some weeks later her nails had grown back and her fingertips were no longer mangled, and I understood that the child, like Yasmin, married a capacity for joy to a capacity for sorrow to — most important of all — a capacity for moving on.
This was knowledge that would serve me well. When my son-in-law called with the dreadful news, my insides felt seared, my brain as if set afire by the setting sun. But all that conflagration of feeling was for Yasmin. For my granddaughter, beyond the painful knowledge of life severed too early, there was still this diffidence — strengthened, if anything, by the nature of the personality I had glimpsed.
I cannot tell you, my dear Mrs. Livingston, how deeply I continue to regret that strange lack of grandmotherly feeling, how deeply I hate that part of myself over which I have no influence.
59
THE BOOKCASE IS of dark walnut, the books behind its glass doors hard-covered and jacketless, and so neatly arranged their value appears contained in display rather than in usefulness. Yasmin presses in close, trying to see beyond her own reflection. The titles printed on the spines have faded, and the imposed twilight of the living room reduces them to a hieroglyphic illegibility.
Her concentration is such that the first she knows of Amie’s presence is her soft “Here, miss.” She feels the press of a palm on her lower back, sees Amie’s reflection stretching up, on the tips of her toes, her other arm reaching to the top of the bookcase for the key.
The lock opens soundlessly, the doors swinging out under their own weight. Amie steps back as Yasmin edges into the release of settled dust and musty paper. Without the barrier of her reflection, the titles assume shape in flecks of silver and gold. Greek philosophers — Sophocles, Plato, Epictetus — familiar to her only through a university course in the humanities two decades ago. The Iliad unaccompanied by The Odyssey. She eases out Utopia and on the inside of the cover — the spine cracking — reads her father’s name scrawled in faded blue ink. “Were they all his?” she asks, replacing it.
Amie nods.
Beside Utopia is a three-volume set of War and Peace, an Everyman’s Library edition bound in cloth of dusty red. A blemish on the spine of Volume II — a streak of dry white paint — arrests her eye. And unexpectedly the paint turns liquid in her mind; falls through darkness with the swiftness of a shooting star, splatters onto the spine, streaks briefly, coagulates, hardens …
60
BOOKS TO MY husband, my dear Mrs. Livingston, were not merely bound pages with words printed on them. They weren’t like magazines, which were disposable, or newspapers which could be used for wrapping parcels in stores. No. Books were icons! My husband valued learning, you see, not for its own sake but for its usefulness; the more you understood, the more finely you could plan.
He read very few modern books, beca
use of his belief that the world contained nothing new, that new wisdom was merely old wisdom draped in finery. And as for fiction — well, my dear, I need hardly tell you! He was always dismissive of the books Celia and I read on our lazy afternoons or at the beach. Pearl S. Buck. Anya Seton. Marie Corelli. Part of me resented it at the time. In dismissing the books he was somehow dismissing us, but I see now that he had little space in his life for romantic reverie. He couldn’t afford it, you see. His ambitions required that he harden his emotions. He never knew that I knew what a great effort of will that took — and it was through Celia, Cyril and Count Leo Tolstoy that I found out.
His birthday was coming up, I don’t remember which one, but it hardly matters. I know you disagree with me, Mrs. Livingston, but I do believe you are being excessive when you claim that each and every one of your husband’s many birthdays is clearly demarcated in your mind. What a lot of clutter your mind must contain, my dear …
In any case, his birthday was approaching and I had little idea of what to get him. Clothes were of little interest to him. He dressed well, if unimaginatively — that was political, you see. He had to dress impeccably — not expensively, or visibly better than his followers — but his clothes had to be just so. What else was there? A bottle of good whisky, perhaps, but that was the sort of thing his political people got him. It was Celia who suggested Count Tolstoy, not the work about that foolish woman, which was her favourite, but War and Peace, which she said was a man’s book. I thought it an intriguing idea.
We found a lovely edition at a bookshop in town, three volumes, if my memory does not betray me, with red dust jackets on which was a photograph of the author as a young man — sideburns, moustache — and not the elderly sage with the beard one usually sees.
I gave him the gift the morning of his birthday, before he set off, and he seemed delighted. He thanked me, gave me a brief peck on the cheek, and then proceeded to do an extraordinary thing. He removed the dust jackets and shredded them. I was appalled, but Celia found her voice before I did. What in the world was he doing? He explained that, to his eye, dust jackets cheapened the appearance of books, as did paper covers. Neither of us knew quite what to make of this, but then something intervened — the telephone rang, perhaps, or he was called away — and there was no opportunity to pursue it.
I remember Cyril picking up the books, weighing them in his hand and saying to me, “He won’t read them, you know.” He was certain about this, but I gave him no chance to explain. It was not something I wished to hear, and so I cut him off by insisting that he would.
And he did. With surprising speed. Volume one. Volume two. And then out of the blue, some way into volume three, he slammed the book shut. I remember the moment, a Sunday morning, sitting on the back porch after breakfast. A sudden, violent thwack that startled everyone. He put the book down on the floor and stood up in great agitation. And looking at me but speaking to us all, he said, “He thinks people like me are useless.”
I was upset, naturally, and wished to be alone with him, to calm him. But Cyril stepped over to me and advised that I let him be. I thought him impertinent. This was my husband, he was unhappy, it was my duty to comfort him. But Cyril was insistent. He asked me to come inside with him, there was something he wished to show me.
The moment we were out of earshot, Cyril chose to remind me that he knew his brother better than I did.
I pointed out that he’d been wrong about his not reading the books.
That, he replied, only proved my husband’s loyalty to me. Such a gift from anyone else would have been relegated to the bookcase in the living room. “Fiction, you see,” he said. “It’s a problem for him.
But he doesn’t take fiction seriously, I pointed out. Why should that be a problem?
“But that’s where you’re wrong,” he said. “He takes fiction very seriously. Too seriously.”
And he told me a little story that has always struck me as both far-fetched and comforting. I will tell you that story with the warning that part of me suspects it of being a publicity man’s confection.
He handed me a large book he had taken from the bottom shelf of the bookcase. It was Oliver Twist, beautifully bound, with a leather spine and corners, and covers that resembled wood grain marbled in gold. It was from a special edition of Dickens’ works, as I recall, and had been given to the island’s libraries as a gift by a shipping line, I believe. They came into my husband’s possession in the usual way — a friend of a friend who worked for the library …
Cyril let me examine the book for a moment — it was a fat volume, with some weight to it — and then told me how, some years before, when he was a much younger man, my husband had spent days and nights devouring the books. He used the word “obsession” to describe the intensity my husband brought to the enterprise, and confessed that he himself had found Dickens’ thicket of words too demanding to be pleasurable.
One evening he was sent by their mother to call his brother to dinner, and to his great surprise found him face in hands, weeping. Yes, weeping! Real tears! he said. And it was that book, Oliver Twist, that had caused it. On seeing Cyril, my husband grew furious. He threw the book at him, seized him by the shirt and made him swear he would tell no one about what he’d seen. Cyril promised — and he kept that promise for years, until the day my husband exploded at Tolstoy and so, in a way, at me. “Fiction speaks to both his head and heart,” Cyril said in conclusion. “But he accepts only the first.”
Do you know, Mrs. Livingston, my husband later threw out the Dickens with no explanation, but he did not have to explain his actions to me. I understood, you see, that he did so not because they were not precious to him but because the books were too precious.
You say that is not possible, Mrs. Livingston? It is not logical, I will grant you that, but possible — I am here, my dear, to tell you that it is. It was the only way, in our context, in the context of the times and of his ambitions, that he could survive.
As for the Tolstoy, he kept them, among his other books. But I understood he’d done so only out of consideration for me, not for War and Peace. During the fever of one of his campaigns, his people were preparing placards by pasting election posters onto cardboard. The paste was homemade — flour and water — and not very good. They needed heavy objects to hold the posters in place until they dried. I remember spotting among the bricks and stones and tools several books, including the three volumes I had given him. So in a way, you see, my gift turned out to be useful after all.
Now, if you will forgive me, my dear, I really must visit the conveniences. All this tea, you know.
61
“DO YOU THINK he read all these books, Amie?”
“Sure, miss. He was readin’ all the time, you know, when he wasn’ workin’.”
Yasmin quickly surveys the other titles. “He didn’t read much fiction, did he?”
“Pardon, miss?”
“This. War and Peace. It’s the only novel.”
“Is a special book, miss. A birt’day present. I remember him unwrappin’ it —”
“Who from?”
“From Miss Penny, I think, miss.”
“Oh. Penny … ” She is vaguely disappointed, the drops of dried paint losing its magic, becoming just a spill with no sparkle to it.
Amie says, with concern, “Everything okay, miss?”
Yasmin slips the book back into its slot, closes the doors on the bookcase. “Everything’s just fine.” But she lets Amie turn the key.
62
THE WEEK BEFORE, Ariana had got it into her head to change the part in her hair from the centre to the side. The change was small, yet sufficient to alter the fundamental balance of her face — this face now puffy and powdered and shaded in a way that looked lifelike only to morticians.
Yasmin stared endlessly at that face now barely recognizable, searching for familiarity. When someone — she knows not who — hugged her and whispered how beautiful her daughter looked, she had barely bee
n able to restrain herself. No, her daughter did not look beautiful, she was ugly in a way she had never been …
Yasmin reached out to touch the face: her fingers fled immediately, singed by its unnatural coldness.
As she pulled her hand back her mother, sitting by her, took it and warmed it in hers.
She sat, staring, seeking true recognition: an acknowledgement that went beyond words of this new reality.
Hours passed.
Jim had seen to the arrangements: the pastor, the church, casket, candles, flowers. It was in this way that he was beginning to piece himself back together.
Grief led to exhaustion, exhaustion to numbness, and out of that numbness rose anger at the mortician’s attempt to give the corpse an appearance of vitality — an anger which in a distant part of herself she knew to be irrational but which another part of her recognized as the beginning of her own reconstruction. This cosmetic dressing was, she thought with bitterness, an attempt to transcend that succeeded only in making the ugly look uglier, the next logical step being to prop the corpse up in a chair. And Jim, in selecting a burial outfit, had chosen a dress recently bought and never worn — she remembered, with a mind suddenly seething, the day she chose it, the moment she paid for it: remembered with stabbing pain the joy she knew it would give her daughter.
So that everything conspired to make Ariana unrecognizable. Yasmin did not know whether to be grateful or outraged, and so let herself be tossed back and forth between the two along a continuum of numbness.
Time collapsed.
Comings, goings.
Garth, Charlotte: hand in hand, a couple now. There had been no fanfare, merely the hiring of moving vans. Charlotte hugs her, says she must call when she is up to it. Lunch, just the two of them. Like in the old days.
The Worlds Within Her Page 22