Papa would always get a knot in his stomach when a macoute asked him if there were other shoes. He would try not to shake as he replied, “Non,” all the while bending and massaging the cheap shoes to make them appear more supple. In the end, it was this experience of bending shoes all day and worrying about being shot that started him thinking about leaving Haiti.
My parents tell slightly differently the story of how they met in 1962, when they were both twenty-seven years old. In my mother’s version, they met in a Bel Air grocery store owned by one of my mother’s older sisters and where she often went to help out. Back then my mother was slender, beautiful, in a brooding, melancholy kind of way, and painfully shy. One day my father walked into the tiny, dimly lit shop, where my mother greeted him with a smile at the door. A few days later she just happened to visit the shoe store on Grand Rue to buy a pair of shoes. He helped her try on a few women’s shoes, none of which fit. She thanked him and left the store.
My father has no recollection of the first meeting at the grocery store. He simply remembers her walking into the shoe store, too shy to even look up from her dusty old sandals. He wanted to keep her in the store as long as possible, so he gave her shoes to try on that he knew wouldn’t fit her. Finally when, frustrated, she walked out of the store, he followed her home.
They were married three years later.
Before my mother came along, Uncle Joseph wanted my father to marry Tante Denise’s sister Léone, who, though she was five years younger than Tante Denise, looked like her twin. They were nearly identical, except Léone dressed more casually than Tante Denise, for whom being the pastor’s wife meant never leaving the house without her matching hat and gloves and one of her many shoulder-length wigs, which she preferred to her own shortly cropped hair. The fact that Tante Denise made her own clothes and could buy cloth at a discount from my uncle’s fabric shop made it easy for her to maintain her consistently elegant attire. Léone lacked the means and interest and thus always looked like the twin who, though just as pretty, had been abandoned at birth. Though Léone loved my father, he wasn’t interested in her.
Besides, as he told me one night during that visit after his diagnosis, when we happened to stumble on the bride-capture musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which he thought was about seven brothers marrying seven sisters, “It’s not as if your uncle and I were Cain and Abel and there was no one else in the world to marry.”
After my parents married, they moved into a small house in an increasingly packed section of Bel Air. The cement floor of their two-room rental was the same drab color as the walls. There were no windows or jalousies, just some diamond-shaped openings in the concrete, which let in some air and also plenty of water when it rained. My mother decorated the best she could, draping the walls with wide ruffled curtains she made herself. They wanted to have children right away, but couldn’t conceive, prompting my uncle and Tante Denise to constantly request prayers for them at church.
My parents were about to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary when I was born, in 1969. Twenty months later, Bob followed. After Bob and I were born, my father started sewing again when he came home from the shoe store. My mother joined him in making school uniforms and tiny flags for schoolchildren to wave on Flag Day.
One afternoon before closing the shoe store, my father was talking to his boss about the boss’s son, who was soon leaving for vacation in New York.
“You think I can get a visa?” my father asked.
Then, as now, leaving often seemed like the only answer, especially if one was sick like my uncle or poor like my father, or desperate, like both.
My father’s boss offered to write him a letter of support for his application.
Because he had a job, a wife and two children as incentives to return to Haiti, my father was granted a one-month tourist visa. But he had no intention of coming back.
I have no memory of my father’s departure, or of anything that preceded it. Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise’s adopted daughter, Marie Micheline, liked to tell me how the year before my father left, he would often buy a small pack of butter cookies on his way home from work in the evening, which he intended to give me. I didn’t like the cookies. But my face would light up when I saw them, and I’d laugh and laugh when he’d give me one and I’d return it to him only to hoot even more when he popped it in his mouth.
I’ve since discovered that children who spend their childhood without their parents love to hear stories like this, which they can embellish and expand as they wish. These types of anecdotes momentarily put our minds at ease, assuring us that we were indeed loved by the parent who left. Unfortunately, I wasn’t told many stories like that. What I did often hear about was the future, an undetermined time when my father would send for my mother, Bob and me.
Once my father was gone, Uncle Joseph would stop by every now and then to see us after work, and of course my mother, Bob and I continued to attend services at his church. Fiercely independent and too proud to seek his involvement or ask for loans when the monthly allowance my father sent her ran out, my mother continued my father’s work, sewing school uniforms and flags. One Sunday morning when she had no money at all, my mother dropped us on my uncle’s lap after church so we could have a proper Sunday meal with him and Tante Denise.
“One day this will stop,” my mother told him. Then she ran home, crying.
Two years after my father left, when I was four and Bob was two, the one-month tourist visa that my mother had applied and been rejected for several times was finally approved. When it came time for her to leave, we drove with her—Tante Denise, Uncle Joseph and Bob and me—to the airport. Bob sat on my mother’s lap in the backseat and I sat next to her with my head leaning against her arm.
In the airport, at the gate, my mother’s eyes welled with tears as she handed Bob over to Tante Denise, who quickly removed her gloves to receive him in her arms. Back then Tante Denise rarely removed her gloves in public, so the very careful gesture, her removing her gloves and patting her wig slightly with her well-manicured fingers, seemed to me to indicate that something big was going to happen. I didn’t know exactly when the word had come that my mother could leave, but I should have suspected something. All that week, my mother had been sewing me dresses: long ones with large bows and elaborate collars, short ones in carnation prints and others with pink lace ruffles. By the end of the week I had ten dresses in total, most of them too big for me, so that, I realized now, I could wear them in the future, while she was gone. She had even made me a matching version of the plain white cotton dress that we were both wearing at the airport, a dress that resembled the kind of modest frock one might wear to be immersed in water at an adult baptism at my uncle Joseph’s church. It was all making sense. She had also bought Bob three brand-new suits, two of them with short pants and one large one with long pants. She had given away the light blue unopened sheet set she kept under her bed for a sick day to Marie Micheline and her ceramic pitchers to Tante Denise. But she hadn’t moved our things from our house. Our beds? Our clothes? And a treasured birthday gift from my uncle, a copy of Ludwig Bemelman’s Madeleine. These things, were they even now being moved to Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise’s house?
When it was time for my mother to board the plane, I wrapped my arms around her stockinged legs to keep her feet from moving. She leaned down and unballed my fists as Uncle Joseph tugged at the back of my dress, grabbing both my hands, peeling me off of her.
“Kalm,” he said. “Calm yourself.” And for a moment his voice, deep, firm, did pacify me. After all, it seemed that he and Tante Denise would now be in charge of us. They would be our parents. But what if our mother went away and never came back? Just like our father.
Panicked, I leaped out of Uncle Joseph’s arms and ran right to my mother, pressing my face against her legs. I pushed him back as he tried to grab me again.
Having run from Tante Denise, Bob was also on the floor pounding his tiny fists against the cold t
iles, bawling. His face was covered with some phlegm he had spit up. Answering a final boarding call, my mother hurried away, her tear-soaked face buried in her hands. She couldn’t bear to look back.
We’re All Dying
My mother was right about my plane ride to Miami that July 2004. It was going to be the most lonesome of my life.
After checking in and clearing security, I called my husband from the airport gate.
“I can’t wait to see you both,” he said in his unwaveringly cheerful voice.
Soon after I hung up, I learned that the flight would be delayed five hours. We wouldn’t leave until eight p.m. The fluttering in my stomach, no longer mysterious, continued. It was a presence now, one to which I could assign all kinds of deeds and traits, a little baby sleeping, waking, doing cartwheels.
At that stage of the pregnancy, the baby was most likely an inch long, a tiny tadpole with a yet undeveloped heart and brain and only micro bumps for arms and legs, but he/she was already the only person, besides my dying father, who was constantly on my mind.
I called my father’s cell phone to tell him I was going to be delayed. Perhaps if he wasn’t too far from the airport, he could come back and get me.
He didn’t answer. Was something wrong? Wrong was now the norm. Did something even worse happen? I would ask myself that question each time I called him and the phone wasn’t picked up. Was he in a car crash? Was he dead?
I kept calling the house until my mother answered.
“He just dropped me off,” she said, dragging her words.
“He’s not answering the phone,” I said.
“You know him. He probably forgot to charge it.”
My father was at the car service office when he finally picked up his cell phone.
“I thought you’d left,” he said.
There were times when he was relaxed and well rested that he didn’t sound ill at all. As he grew sicker, I’d have to look for hints in his tone to judge for myself when he wasn’t doing well.
“Should I come and get you?” he asked.
Not wanting him to overextend himself, I said, “I should probably stay in case the plane leaves sooner than expected. I just wanted you to know.”
“Call me again before you take off,” he said.
I had several hours left, so I speed-walked the terminals while I called my brothers to tell them the news. Bob had just left my parents’ house, where he’d been visiting with my mother.
“Mom doesn’t like the way you told them,” he said, confirming my suspicion.
I called my mother again. After all, I reasoned, what if the plane crashed when I finally got on and I lost forever my chance to tell her I was sorry?
“Manman, eskize m, I’m sorry.” Perhaps it was the combined thrill and sorrow stirred up by both the pregnancy and my father’s illness, but I wanted her never to be angry with me again.
Next, I called my brother Karl at work.
“Welcome to my world,” he said. I could almost see him grinning as he shuffled some papers back and forth on his desk. “You’ll never be on time for anything again. And sleeping in? Forget it.”
Those caveats were now a link between us. Oldest sister and baby brother, we could now discuss not just our parents but our kids.
When I called my brother Kelly, he remembered a conversation we’d had when I was a senior in high school, when I’d declared that my greatest dream in life was to be a childless spinster so I could have total freedom to write my books.
“Now the married spinster is pregnant.” He laughed.
Announcing my pregnancy kept me from talking about my father, at least for a while. Walking through the terminal, I called a few friends, people I didn’t want to wait the safe twelve weeks to tell. However I told only two of them the flip side of my news, that my father was dying. One, who knew my father well, became angry with me for accepting the doctor’s prognosis so easily.
“What does the doctor know?” she shouted.
“He did tests,” I said. “And my father knows too.”
“Listen to me,” she interrupted. “Screw the doctor. We’re all dying. Some of us might fall in the shower and hit our heads. Some of us might get hit by a bus. Some of us might get struck by lightning. Some of us might have diseases we don’t even know about. We’re all dying.”
Of course this had also crossed my mind. Maybe it was in the elevator on the way down from Dr. Padman’s office or at the table at the family meeting or maybe it was in the car sitting between my mother and father on the drive to the airport, or some point in between, but I too had told myself the same thing. I had heard it before. From my uncle. “Maybe we’re all dying, one breath at a time.”
Good-bye
It’s difficult not to idealize the brave face my uncle might have put on his suffering after his radical laryngectomy in 1978, even if what appeared to be bravery was simply an attempt at shielding his pain from others. However, it seemed to me, at nine years old, that my uncle was adapting well to his larynx operation. Even after he could no longer speak, he continued an early-morning routine of playing an old Berlitz record and mouthing a few English phrases while shaving.
“Good morning,” a bubbly, youthful-sounding female voice would proclaim from a scratchy LP on a turntable at his bedside.
“Good evening,” she’d continue.
Then she’d plunge ahead to “Good-bye.”
Her good-bye contained none of the sadness the word implied. It was the type of good-bye one was likely to hear after a lively party, not the send-off that preceded a long absence or a death. Before my uncle’s operation, he’d attempted to match her cheerfulness in his repetition. After the operation, he simply tried to mouth the joyful greetings and out-of-context phrases.
Eventually, it wasn’t as difficult for my uncle to communicate as I’d expected. For those who knew how to read, he’d write notes explaining complicated or elaborate thoughts. The rest of the time, he used facial expressions and hand gestures. Pointing to his eyes, for example, meant look. Tugging at his ears meant listen. Pulling his hands apart meant open. Pushing them together meant close. Slapping his palm against his forehead meant he’d forgotten or overlooked something.
While my uncle was not the only mute person in Bel Air—there was a boy who was born voiceless and an old woman who’d suffered a stroke—he was the only one with a tracheotomy hole in his neck. People were so curious about the hole that they kept their eyes on it throughout entire one-way conversations with him. I too was intrigued by this narrow abyss that seemed to lead deep into his body. A perfect circle, it was salmon pink like our house and convulsed outward when he sneezed.
In their curiosity some of our neighbors were cruel. I remember once walking out of our house with my uncle and hearing a young boy call out “kou kav” or cave neck. Hearing this, the boy’s mother pointed at my uncle and laughed. Her laugh was more like a self-conscious snigger than a taunt. There was almost fear in it.
I’d often seen parents warn their children not to stare at the disabled or point at the infirm. “You mustn’t gawk or your eyes will seal shut. If you point, your fingers will fall off,” my own mother might have told me once or twice before she left.
The boy’s mother was laughing as though she’d been told all this yet still couldn’t help herself. Maybe she’d been laughing before we came by, was embarrassed that we caught her at it. Perhaps a comedy show was playing on the radio inside her house that only she and her son could hear. Still, as we walked past them, my uncle, dressed in his usual dark suit and tie, gripped my hand tightly. His body stiffened, but he held his head high and pretended not to notice.
Back then, all I could think to do was imagine a wall around him, a roaming fortress that would follow him everywhere he went and shield him from derision. This fortress, cloud-cloaked in cotton candy pink, followed us that day as I walked with him to the bank to deposit the money my parents had wired him through a money transfer service for our school fees
and other expenses.
One altered facet of my uncle’s post-operation life was that he didn’t like to go too many places by himself. Whenever he had to make a deposit at the bank or had school business at the Education Ministry, he would wait for either me or his grandson, Maxo’s son, Nick, to come back from school and take one of us with him. That way if he wasn’t able to make himself understood, either with his gestures or with his sometimes indecipherable handwriting, then one of us would interpret him.
Our reward was the relief in the banker’s or the clerk’s eyes when he realized how much longer the transaction with my uncle would have taken had one or both of us not been there, how many eyes might have been needed to survey the requests in his notes, how many attempts at reading the lips before coming up with some possibilities, to which my uncle would vigorously shake his head no or nod in agreement. My uncle would be appreciative too when we’d get something right. He would break into a purposely controlled grin, one designed to conceal his false teeth. His grin would have been a thunderous “Yes!” had he been able to speak, a shout to the heavens if he could have managed it.
We got to the bank at a time when it was nearly empty. My uncle walked up to a young woman who was sitting behind her desk, talking on the phone. She hung up and motioned for us to sit down.
The air-conditioning was on full blast, filling the place with a chilled perfumed air. My uncle handed her an envelope with some bills and his passbook in it. She pulled out the bills and counted them, laying each out in front of her.
Sometimes visits like this one required no conversation or any other type of exchange that might reveal my uncle’s condition. For all the woman knew, he might have been shy or ill at ease. He had been served before at that bank, but not by her. She didn’t know him.
When she was done counting the money, she spoke a number out loud, to which my uncle agreed with a nod. She then typed the amount in his passbook. And just as my uncle’s shoulders dropped, the equivalent for him of a sigh of relief, and just as he might have been thinking he would no longer need Nick or myself to accompany him to that particular woman at that particular bank, the woman leaned forward and asked, “Ta fille?” Your daughter?
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