Claire of the Sea Light

by Edwidge Danticat

  “Do you have bodyguards now?” Max Junior asked Albert. “Security?”

  “Why would I?” Albert said. “If someone wants to kill me, they’ll just shoot the bodyguards first, then me. I’m saving the town money and the criminals bullets.”

  Albert then started across the room, heading for his wife. Max Junior watched his father’s friend place his arms around a woman who many believed had married him only for his money. She had even taken his children away from him, his father liked to say, locking them up in that boarding school, where they must spend their time mostly hating their country. Indeed, the twins didn’t like to return to Ville Rose, choosing winter excursions with their friends and summer camps in France over visiting their father, whose obligation it was always to visit them. One day they would return, Max Junior was certain, when it was time for them to cash in the funeral parlor or take it over.

  “Why didn’t you send the chauffeur for your girl?” Max Senior now asked his son.

  “I don’t know about chauffeurs and girlfriends,” Max Junior cracked. He imagined the punch line coming out of Oncle Albert’s mouth. “I’ve lost many good ones that way. Many good chauffeurs, that is.”

  Later in the evening, Max Junior was moved when his father stood at the top of the stairs in front of a room full of his friends and delivered a brief welcome.

  “I’m glad my son is back,” his father said while raising his Champagne glass clear above his head. “I don’t know how I have survived here so long without him.”

  He had run a school most of his life, but public speaking was not the old man’s forte, which made his gesture that much more meaningful to Max Junior. When it was his own turn to speak, he followed his father’s example and kept it brief. Standing stiffly at the old man’s side, he said, “It’s good to be home, if only for a while.”

  “Only awhile?” his father shouted, feigning surprise, as a room full of Champagne glasses clinked once more.

  But between all the talk and casual chatter with his father and his guests, all Max Junior could think of was the reason he’d had to leave Ville Rose and Haiti in the first place and whether or not he would ever see Jessamine again.

  That night, after everyone had left and his father had gone to bed, Max Junior kept calling Jessamine’s Miami cell phone, only to get a busy signal. No matter how late it was, he would have gone to look for her, except he had no idea where her aunt lived in Port-au-Prince. How stupid of him not to have asked her in advance!

  He’d been too nervous about this trip to think all the details through. But could his carelessness mean that he would not need Jessamine here as much as he’d thought? In Miami she was the only person to whom he could speak openly about everything. Too damaged herself to be judgmental, she listened to all his confessions with a blank face. She was the only girl he’d told, for example, that he’d fathered a child ten years ago, a child whose name he didn’t even know, a child whom he had never met.

  As he lay on his back in the same room he’d slept in since he was a boy, Max Junior hit the redial button for Jessamine’s cell phone number again and again. His bedroom felt unbearably hot, so he got up and opened the shuttered terrace door that overlooked the peanut-shaped pool and screened gazebo and the maid’s quarters for both his father’s house and the house next door. Looking up at the sky, he took in the glow of a cluster of stars, something he was never able to see in Miami.

  He should be driving all over Port-au-Prince looking for Jessamine, he thought. Isn’t that what he should be doing, instead of dialing her number every five minutes while watching the sky? He should be looking for her. Just as he should have been looking for Bernard Dorien a decade before. He should have at least come home for Bernard’s funeral. Bernard’s parents had probably taken his body to the mountains and buried him there. He felt burdened by the thought of Bernard being suspended somewhere in a hillside grave. To fight so much to live in town, then to return to a mountainside grave? What was the use of sacrificing so much to leave a place, only to end up exactly where you’d started? But wasn’t he doing the same thing now, in returning home, looking back when he should be moving forward?

  He thought of going for a late-night swim to calm himself, then nixed the idea. Instead, he went back to bed and called Jessamine’s number, only to get the same busy signal. The generator had already been shut down for the night. The ration of electricity allowed for their part of town had expired. So he had no choice but to lie in the dark, in his swimming trunks, his eyes seared open.

  When he woke up midmorning the next day and got the first busy signal from Jessamine’s phone, he thought of borrowing his father’s Jeep and heading out to Port-au-Prince. But then he heard a knock on his bedroom door.

  Before he had a chance to collect himself, his father walked in, wearing the gunmetal-gray sweat suit in which he practiced his judo, alone, against a star fruit tree in his garden every morning.

  “You have a visitor,” his father said.

  “Jessamine?” he asked, grabbing a pair of khakis from the back of a nearby chair and throwing them on.

  “Who did you say?” his father asked, moving closer to help him into his pants.

  “Is it Jessamine?”

  “The one who didn’t come last night?”

  “Is she down there?”

  Max Junior then threw on a red T-shirt that Jessamine had given him long ago, as a gift for hiring her at the Little Haiti sandwich shop. He had promised her that he would wear the shirt when he returned to Haiti since it was half the color of the Haitian flag.

  Both the khakis and T-shirt were a bit wrinkled, but he didn’t care. He was about to run out the door when his father grabbed him by an elbow and held him back. Though the old man’s salt-and-pepper hair had grown grayer and he had become thicker and slower with each visit to see his son in Miami, and though the old man occasionally complained about his achy shoulders and back, he was still pretty strong. If they ever got into a tussle, Max Junior thought his father could easily throw him.

  “Listen to me,” his father said. “Hold still. Calm. Are you supposed to be in love with this one, what’s her name, this Dessalines woman?”

  “Jessamine.”

  “Anyway, are you in love with her?”

  “Papa,” he said, both plea and protest. “What are you asking me?”

  “You liked Flore too, didn’t you?” the old man asked.

  His father’s grip tightened on his biceps. He would have to shove the old man aside to get past him and out the door. He was not of the proper mind-set to think this through in any kind of detail. “Papa, this is no time,” he said, trying hard not to raise his voice.

  “Yes, actually it is a good time,” his father said, “because Flore is down there right now. And she’s with your son.”

  “Flore?”

  “In the flesh,” the old man said, releasing him. “En chair et en os, with your son.”

  Max didn’t remember climbing down the stairs. He simply felt his feet skipping over them two at a time until he was at the bottom. From where he was standing, on the other side of the room, he could first see the back of a woman in an off-the-shoulder mango-colored dress. The woman’s hair was short but meticulously curled, as though each strand had been separately attended to. When she finally turned around, he saw that she was wearing lipstick that made her lips look as red as cherries.

  It was Flore, but not really Flore. It was Flore, but no longer a skinny teenage girl who wore the same beige maid’s uniform that was sometimes stained from food and dirt she picked up in the kitchens and bathrooms of his father’s house. It was Flore, but not really Flore, who was now a fierce, older-looking sienna-brown woman. The whole series of incidents—his having had sex with her, her having gotten pregnant—were all in this woman who was standing a few feet from him now.

  “Flore?” he asked, more as a request for confirmation than a greeting.

  She bobbed her head in his direction but said nothing.

/>   “How have you been?” he asked her, his eyes still taking in all that she had become. “What are you doing here?”

  He didn’t mean it to sound like a rebuke. He was genuinely curious, interested in how she had gotten there, back into his father’s house, in his father’s living room, in the middle of the day.

  “Flore has a beauty shop in Port-au-Prince,” his father answered instead. “I asked her to come see us.”

  Max Junior was trying to think of a way to ask about his son when he heard a child’s voice call out from behind the divan, where Flore had walked over to sit.

  “Kounye ya? Now?” asked a boy’s voice.

  “Wi,” said Flore.

  Shy, as Flore had been before she’d so drastically changed in face and in body—but also in attitude, it seemed, for Flore’s eyes never wavered from his, her face never softened—the child kept his eyes on Max Junior as he pulled a massive grape-colored lollipop in and out of his mouth. The boy was wearing a plain white T-shirt and jeans, and though he was obviously aware that he was the focus of everyone’s attention, he took time to survey the room, examining the giant bamboo planters behind the ancient leather couches and the massive abstract paintings on the walls. The boy grimaced at the paintings, large fluorescent blots, which made no sense to Max Junior either. He looked stocky and strong, but Max Junior didn’t know many children his age, so he wasn’t sure. Neither he nor his father was a lean man. They were men of average height, paunchy and round, like this boy might one day be, when he grew up. As a matter of fact, the boy looked exactly like them, like he might fall perfectly in line with all the generations of men in his family.

  “And what do you do with him for school in Port-au-Prince?” Max Senior asked from behind the banister, where he was now sitting. “Is he getting some good schooling? You know very well, Flore, that we have a school here, a good one.”

  Shifting a small, woven straw purse from one shoulder to the other, Flore gazed around the room as though searching for an anchor for herself. “He’s well, as you can see,” she said.

  Max Junior was now standing right in front of his son and his son was looking up at him and he was looking down at his son. He kneeled so that his face was at the level of his son’s and said, “Alo.”

  “Alo,” the boy echoed, with the lollipop still lodged in one of his cheeks.

  For a moment Max Junior worried that the child might leap at him and tackle him to the ground as his own father watched from behind the banister. “My name is Maxime Ardin, Jr.,” he said.

  Max Junior thought the boy a handsome child, a stoop-shouldered little boy with an open face and generous smile. Max Junior himself had been a boy like that. He waited for the child to say his name. Thought for a moment that he might not. The boy looked over at his mother for some clue as to what he should do. She tilted her head and seemed as eager to hear what would come out of the boy’s mouth as Max Junior was.

  “My name is Pamaxime Voltaire,” the child said.

  Because Max Junior had not legally recognized the boy, the child had been given Flore’s family name, Voltaire. But with “Pa,” a Creole prefix meaning both “his” and “not his,” the child’s first name could either mean “Maxime’s” or “Not Maxime’s.” Only the mother could know for sure.

  “Pamaxime,” Max repeated, copying the child’s hesitant voice.

  It surprised him that Flore had named the child this way.

  “If he were a girl, we could at least call him Pam,” Max Senior said, drawing a stern, hateful look from Flore.

  Looking back at Flore, who gave Pamaxime a small nod of approval for the perfect enunciation of his name, the child, still with the lollipop in his mouth and with a coy voice that sounded a bit rehearsed, asked, “Ou se papa m? Are you my papa?”

  “Wi,” Max Junior said. He was amazed how quickly the word came out of his mouth. Though he had not offered Pamaxime the family name, now looking at his child’s face, he was even more certain that this boy was his, in spite of or because of the negation or affirmation of his own name.

  Kneeling there next to his son, Max Junior remembered a story Jessamine had told him when he’d confessed to her that he was thinking of coming home for a visit. Jessamine’s parents had met in Miami while working at a hotel where her mother and father were both part of the cleaning staff. Soon after they got married, her father decided to return to Haiti to live. Her mother stayed behind in Miami, promising to join him in a few weeks. During that time, her mother discovered that she was pregnant with Jessamine and, no longer wanting to move to Haiti, filed for divorce. Her father didn’t know about Jessamine until she was in her first year of high school and he, sick and dying from something or other, returned to Miami for treatment. In the meantime, Jessamine had been told by her mother that her father had abandoned her. Jessamine hadn’t seen her father live and wasn’t sure she wanted to see him die. She went with her mother to visit him in the hospital anyway. Right before they got there, he took his last breath. They were allowed to stay in the room with the body for only a few minutes before her father was wheeled out under a white sheet and taken down to the morgue.

  Ever since Jessamine had told him about her own father, Max Junior had replayed that scene in the hospital over and over in his mind, casting his son in Jessamine’s role and himself as the dead father on the gurney being rolled out. The worst possible case of unrequited love, Jessamine had told him, was feeling abandoned by a parent.

  Both he and his son were in a mild trance now, their eyes locked on each other’s, which he became aware of only when Flore snapped her fingers and whistled, motioning for the boy to walk to her. The Flore he knew before would have never made such crude gestures.

  Pamaxime was still standing in front of him. He wanted to reach over and take his son in his arms now, but he was afraid of overwhelming the child. In her continued attempt to capture the boy’s attention, Flore clapped and clapped again, yet the child did not move. Looking back and forth between him and Flore, he seemed torn. The boy looked at Max Senior, his grandfather, who motioned with his index finger for Pamaxime to go to Flore.

  “Why such a hurry?” Max Senior then said. “Let the child stay here a day or two. Let’s see more of him. He can play, have a swim with us in the pool.”

  The child turned to Max Senior, who was now standing with both his hands in the air as though pleading to the heavens for a special favor.

  “He will not stay here,” Flore said, as though she were speaking from behind a grille locked inside her mouth.

  And with those words, Flore rushed forward and grabbed Pamaxime’s hand, but he did not move. Max Junior tried to reach for the boy’s other hand, the one farther from Flore, not to stroke or kiss, but just to touch him to say a tactile goodbye. But before he could, the boy was led away by his mother. Reaching down, Flore motioned for the boy to hand her the remainder of the lollipop, then dropped it in her purse.

  Max Junior was still kneeling there as his son walked off. The child did not turn around. He remained on his knees, hoping that the boy might run back, to hug or kiss him, to tell him his first good-bye after his first hello. But what had he done to deserve it?

  He heard some voices coming from the next room, by the front door. It was Flore talking to an older woman, who, though she’d been working for his father now many years, he could only think of as the new maid. It seemed that Pamaxime had something he wanted to give him, and Flore was asking the new maid to take it, so the child wouldn’t have to come back. Max Junior thought of running out to collect it, but stopped himself. Flore had every right to make all the decisions.

  He heard the front door slam shut.

  “From the child.” The new maid handed him a folded piece of white paper.

  He could feel his father watching him. Back when he had his music show at Radio Zòrèy, he had gotten notes dropped off for him at the station and at home all the time. Many of the girls had handed the perfume-scented missives to Flore at his front do
or.

  He opened the sheet of paper his son had brought for him. On it was the word “papa” in small slanted letters along with a sketch of a man with a blank O for a face. He yearned for an explanation that he knew he might never get. He folded the paper and placed it in his pants pocket, then he rose from the floor and rushed out the door. His father followed, as though both he and the old man had come to the same conclusion at once.

  A tiled driveway parted the lush tropical garden that led from Max Senior’s porch to his front gate.

  “Tann,” Max Junior called out after Flore. “Wait.”

  Flore spun around and the child did the same, mimicking his mother. Max Junior caught up with them near where his father’s car was parked, by the low iron gates.

  “Let me take you wherever you’re going,” Max Junior said.

  He imagined they were going back to Flore’s mother’s house in Cité Pendue. While stroking his son’s closely cropped hair, he added, “Mwen la kounye a. I’m here now.”

  The boy squirmed and craned his neck so he could see both his father and his mother at the same time. Max Junior felt as though he were in a public square as his father watched from a wooden bench on his front porch. But none of it mattered. He was no longer a nineteen-year-old boy. He was an adult now, a man who shared a child with this woman.

  His father walked over from the bench and placed himself at the boy’s side.

  “Can I borrow your car to take them home?” Max Junior asked his father.

  Flore raised her eyebrows in surprise.

  “Would you know the way?” Max Senior asked his son.

  Max Junior nodded.

  Max Senior walked back into the house and returned with the keys to his tèt bèf, everyone’s cow-horn nickname for this kind of Toyota Jeep. He handed the keys to his son, then walked to the front gates, sliding them open, for the car to pass through. He walked back to his front porch and, before he went into his house, called out, “Bye!” to his grandson. But the boy didn’t even glance at him; he was too busy paying attention to his own father to hear.