On the street, he affected the gangster strut: the hop-and-drop-torso-rock, heels barely touching the ground. Asthma kept him from becoming a behemoth. Not that he didn’t try. He joined a Côte des Neiges gym intent on doing just that, but gave up after a month. Any exertion outside his normal range made him wheeze and sent his heart racing dangerously fast. His trainer suggested gentler, tone-up exercises. Those were “for sissies: your kind, Jay.” But Anna and I no longer feared that he’d end up in detention.
***
Paul, why are you punishing us? Where are you?
On November 5, 2003, Paul’s 18th birthday, I said to him: “You think anyone from Havre would recognize Ma Kirton’s Genius?” I meant his size.
“Go to hell! ‘Cause you’ve begun a PhD, you think you’re cute? Well, you’re not. All the degrees in the world won’t make you White. That’s what counts here.”
“Thanks for the enlightenment.”
“There’s more where it came from, but you’ll have to pay.”
“Who pays for sour gas?”
“Man, if there was dialysis for doltishness, you’d be permanently hooked up.”
“For you there’s verbal detox.”
“Wow! I’m impressed. If this keeps up, I’ll elevate you from ovine to bovine.”
***
Just over two months later, January 21, 2004, we returned to Havre to attend Grama’s funeral. Anna thought it was a blessing Grama didn’t live long enough to find out what a disappointment Paul had become.We’d never told her what was happening to him and the gossip around Paul didn’t seem to have reached her.
My last memory of her was the final ten minutes we’d spent with her the Saturday morning, in 1997, just before we left for Canada. She’d decided not to come to the airport with us, saying that she didn’t want people to see her cry. It was around 5:30 am, and the sun’s glow could be seen in the sky behind the rocks encircling Havre. The sea, untouched by its light, was still grey. Grama was wearing a quilted blue housecoat. She’d recently changed her glasses. Behind the convex lenses her eyes seemed to be in deep holes, the black frames contrasting with her beige face; the half-moon curves that had emerged below her cheekbones over the years were very visible. The week before, Father Henderson had persuaded her to become a volunteer instructor in the government’s alphabetization programme, and I was pleased that when we left she would have something to fill our space. She’d turned to Paul, her eyes suddenly aglow. “I hope to live long enough with a lucid mind and good eyesight to read of your brilliant success.” And she continued to stare at Paul for a long time. Then with a start, as if someone had poked her in the ribs, she turned to face me, and I could hear the embarrassment in her voice. “You will do quite well too, Jay. I have no doubt you will. Just learn to loosen up a little.”
Loosen up? What did she mean?
The September when Paul entered secondary III and she sent him money to buy a stereo and a computer, she and Anna had quarrelled about it, and she told Anna to mind her own business; it was her money to do with as she pleased; but she stopped giving in to Paul’s requests for money.
Around 11 pm the day of her burial, just after the last of those attending the wake had left the house, Anna and I were in Grama’s bedroom trying to unwind. Anna was stretched out on Grama’s bed; I was sitting in an armchair.
“Jay,” Anna began, then paused. “Jay, I think that Mama resented me for holding her back in life.”
“What do you mean?” Do we have to talk about this now?
“You know how she always liked to put down my father. One of those times she said that she agreed with his argument on poverty. ‘Anna, I always felt something was fishy about the Dives story in the Bible. Now I know that Christ, the Christ that Christianity invented, was a politician like his inventors and told his followers what they wanted to hear. And those blessed-be-this and blessed-be-that that he spouted, if anybody tried to get me to swallow that swill, I’d knock him cold with the first thing I got my hands on. The facts are plain . . . Aletha Joseph, you know who she is?’
“‘Of course, Mama. Everyone does. She’s the chief surgeon at the Colonial Hospital, and you and she were in class together, and you came first and she came second and sometimes third. She finished high school and you didn’t. And the day after Daddy asked for your hand, you read in The Vincentian that she’d got a scholarship to study medicine at St Andrews in Scotland. One day Dr. Joseph dropped in the store to say hello to you, and you told me the story. And you said that it was because her parents were schoolteachers, and you said poverty was a curse, not a blessing, and anybody who said the opposite should be shot.’
“Mama nodded. ‘Your father understood that sort of poverty. He fled from it and got trapped in another.’
“‘Mama,’ I said, ‘are you sorry you had me?’
“‘Anna, why are you asking me such a question?’ Jay, she turned her head away but I had already seen the guilt in her face.
“‘See, Mama, you can’t even look at me. One time you said that if you didn’t have me, you’d have gone overseas and studied and made something of your life.’
“‘That’s all water under the bridge, Anna. Gone, never to return. The past is the past. Let’s focus on the present and the future.’ Know what happened next, Jay? She got up from the dining table where we were sitting, went into her bedroom — this same room — and closed the door. Jay, I’m certain, if I’d gone into the bedroom then, I would have met her crying.”
I said nothing, because I had nothing to say. I doubted about the crying. We were silent for a long while. I knew then I’d never let her see the journal entry I’d read three days earlier — the one where Grama lamented sacrificing her education to raise a fool.
“Jay,” Anna said, breaking the silence, “you think the way Mama spoiled Paul has anything to do with how he turned out?”
I knew where her thoughts were heading. The next stop would be her role in Paul’s “failure.” I was tired and wished she’d stop talking. “Ma, some children who’ve had doting parents grow up to be successful and productive; some who’ve had doting parents grow up to be failures; some who’ve had abusive parents grow up to be healthy; and some who’ve had loving, disciplined parents grow up to be criminals. You never know ahead of time.”
“But look at you, Jay. I’ve never had to worry about you.”
“Paul will work something out. His head is stocked with knowledge. He’ll do something with it.” I wasn’t sure about this and I’m even less so now. (He’s probably reverted to drug trafficking and cut his links with us.)
“Life’s no laboratory,” I told her, “in which precise amounts of chemicals fired by precise amounts of energy produce precise results for precise functions. It’s why we say: ‘All things being equal . . . in the best case scenario.’ In psychological matters, who knows what the best-case scenario is?” I might have read her Yeats’ “Among School Children.” It was in a collection on the bookshelf to my right. But Anna wasn’t Grama. Anna functioned in the concrete — a fact Paul knew and used to humiliate her. Come to think of it, it would have been more Grama explaining the poem to me. She knew it well. We’d read it together and she’d repeat over and over some of its lines. Every August, as soon as she found out which Shakespeare play was on my literature course, she made me read it aloud to her to be sure I understood Shakespeare’s language. When she found out there were videocassettes of Shakespeare’s plays for sale, she ordered them from England, and all three of us would watch them. On one occasion — I think it was to watch Othello, I asked Millington to come watch it with us. It was a Saturday evening. Around 10:30, while we were watching the credits, we heard Millington’s father calling to him from the road, telling him his mother was worried that he wouldn’t be able to wake up for church in the morning. Grama went to the front door, invited him in, and persuaded him to stay for cake and ginger beer — fa
re we usually had before going to bed when we were up late on a Saturday night . . .
***
I look at Anna’s rasping form on the bed and recall: “Both nuns and mothers worship images, / But those the candles light are not as those / That animate a marble or a bronze repose . . . / And yet they too break hearts.” I’ve certainly broken your heart, Ma. And I had hoped that we would explore why and move on. Ma, you believe that your departure from St. Vincent damaged us. You believed what Bulljow told you. I stand, lean over her, hold her hand, and say in a breaking voice: “Ma, you have been a wonderful mother and a good human being. I want you to know that. I want you to understand that, and when I find Paul, I’ll tell him so.” For a couple of minutes I stand there silently hoping she has heard and understood me, then I sit back down.
***
The day after our return trip from St. Vincent, Paul announced that he wanted to have a talk with us.
“About what?” Anna asked.
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Can’t it wait?” It was a Saturday, and there were pressing things to be done after a two-week absence.
“No.”
“All right.”
Anna sat on the couch, Paul on the armchair, and I brought a chair from the dinette. If I’d sat beside Anna, Paul would have seen the seating arrangement as him versus Anna and me.
Paul cleared his throat, paused for a few seconds, then said: “I want to get through this without swearing.”
Anna bit her lower lip, her face taut — on tenterhooks.
Paul stayed silent for another 15 seconds before saying: “Are you happy about going back home to see Grama’s corpse?”
“Paul, what are you getting at?” Anna said.
“I’m saying that you prevented us from seeing Grama while she was still alive. You prevented me from going to see her. You never made any effort to go home and see her. My schoolmates, their single-parent mothers, go back to the Caribbean every year. And they’re domestic servants and hospital maids and factory workers. They earn less than you. Besides I know that Grama offered many times to pay our passage.”
“How do you know that?”
“I called her using phone cards so you won’t know. She said that, in your headstrong way, you refused every offer of a vacation to all three of us.” He turned to look at me. “Did you have a hand in this?”
“Paul, I’m not interested in spending other people’s money. But Ma never discussed any of this with me.”
“Thank you, Jay,” Anna replied. Staring Paul fully in the face, she said: “I want you to listen carefully. This is for your benefit. Jay already knows this. When I married your father, your grandmother paid for the wedding. Later, when she found out how small your father’s income was, she gave me money to run the household. She paid the hospital bill when Jay was born. I came to Canada with money she gave me. She paid for your tickets to come to Canada. While you both lived with her, she got no money from me. She preferred for me to go to school. Every Christmas, no matter how much I protested, she sent me a money order for $1,000. At various times during the year, she would send me a couple hundred dollars. She knew I worked two days per week and that it wasn’t enough to pay for all my expenses.” She paused, breathed audibly. “Paul, what year did you come to Canada?”
“1997.”
“How old was I then?”
“Forty . . . 41.”
She nodded. “Paul, do you think that a woman over 40 should still be financially dependent on her mother?”
He shrugged his shoulders and twisted his lips, treating the question as rhetorical.
“So, Paul, my decisions took into account my financial means. You and Jay are my children. I’m glad your grandmother supported me when I needed it, but I had to take up my responsibility. I made some unwise decisions in my youth, and I am glad Mama helped me turn my life around, but when we become adults, we are responsible for ourselves and the children we bring into the world. I couldn’t live up to this all the time, but in the last few years I’ve tried. I couldn’t let you spend your grandmother’s money freely as if it was air you’re breathing in and out. You work. You know how hard it is to earn money. It is even harder to save it. You have some sense of this. For a while you gave me some money from your job. By the way, I haven’t spent it. It’s in an account with your name.
“I am saying everything in one, but you should know this. For six years before I married your father, I helped Mama run her store. I never took any salary from her because I lived at home expense free, and when I needed money I took it from the till, always letting her know. But Mama paid me a salary — on principle. I never collected it. She put it in the bank. I came here with some of that money and I used the rest along with money she gave me to get landed immigrant status in Canada. Why am I telling you this? I want you to know that your grandmother lived a principled life. If she’d disagreed with me over sending you travel money, she would have sent it directly to you. She was no pushover when she felt she was right. She understood principles. Her life was based on principles. You’ll do well to copy her example.”
Paul smiled sheepishly and hung his head. When he raised it, he was smiling broadly. With his eyes half-shut, squinting (one of the ways in which he resembles Anna), he nodded, then looked away as he said: “Still, I would have liked to see Grama alive. Principles and money shouldn’t stand in the way of seeing my grandmother alive.”
“Money always stands in the way,” I said, “between what we want and what we can pay for. We all would have liked to see Grama alive, and I wish we had.”
“We better set a few other things straight while we are at this,” Anna said. “Jay pays for half of the food we eat in this house. I never asked him to. But he saw that rent, electricity, cable, insurance, and other bills eat up most of what I earn, and felt he should contribute. Understand one thing: I’m not asking you for money. I just want you to know that I did not have money to pay for the three of us to go home to see your grandmother, and I felt it was time for me to stop depending on her money. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but my conscience is clear.”
For the next few minutes we sat in silence. I held my breath expecting Paul to bring up her tithing. I was relieved when Paul got up, put his hands on Anna’s shoulder, nodded, and pecked her on the cheek. He went into his bedroom and closed the door.
I was proud of the way she handled this.
Paul was already travelling — in Cuba, I think — when I read Grama’s journal entry for January 20, 2004:
I don’t understand what’s going on. Paul should have finished high school by now. Junior college too. Anna says all the time: ‘Paul is doing all right.’ Now he rarely calls me. ‘How are you doing in school?’ I ask him. ‘Fine, Grama, fine.’ Always the same answer: “Fine, Grama, fine.’ When I ask him what that means he changes the subject. Three or four times he said he couldn’t hear me: the connection was bad. I had no trouble hearing him. His last call was more than six months ago. They’re hiding something from me. She is very specific about Jay: ‘Jay got his BA. Jay got his MA. Jay has begun a PhD.’ Nothing about Paul. Nothing. They must think I was born big. Next week, I’ll book a flight to Montreal for late May or early June.
I showed the entry to Anna. She didn’t comment. What would Paul have told Grama? Would she have blamed Anna for how he turned out?
I was impressed with the maturity Paul showed that Saturday and, to gauge the change, I promised to intervene the next time Paul was abusive. The opportunity came one Saturday about a month later. Anna had prepared coo-coo. Paul wrinkled his nose and sniffed at the scoop she’d put on his plate. “This stuff looks like yellow shit. You know I hate it.” He got up and began walking toward the sink with the plate.
“When you speak to Ma like that, I wish she’d slap you.”
He stopped, stiffened, and turned to look at me. His eyes na
rrowed but he said nothing. He continued to the sink, scraped the food into the bin under it, put the plate in the sink, turned and stared briefly at me, then at the floor, before walking to his bedroom, and closing the door. He ate no lunch and no supper that day.
18
I DATE HIS depression to this confrontation. As it stretched into months, Anna and I became alarmed. He continued to work at Subway, but it was all he did outside of his bedroom. He became affectless and went into seclusion and total silence. It lasted about five months. When we tried to talk to him, he replied with shrugs and blank stares. We’d see him heading to and from the bathroom, leaving to go to work or coming in from work, heading to the fridge for food to be reheated in the microwave (sometimes still holding open the book he was reading), or serving himself from the pots on the stove or the casseroles in the oven, always taking the food to his room, returning to the sink with the dirty utensils, which now he promptly washed and put on the drain board. Once, Anna deliberately did not refill the prescription for his drugs, to force him to speak to her. Our meds were covered by her work insurance. He went to the pharmacy and paid for them himself, and left the receipts on the dining table with a note: “Ma, thanks for withholding my meds.” She never did it again.
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