by Albert Wendt
She would have prefered to serve their Samoan breakfast the Samoan way, but when she hurried to the dining room to prepare, she found that Fa‘alua had already set the table the Palagi way, with cutlery and crockery and even serviettes.
Since arriving, Laura had felt uncomfortable being treated as a special guest, eating in the Palagi house’s dining room with only Lemu and Fa‘alua and Dan, while the rest of their aiga ate afterwards in the faleo‘o. There were some things in the Fa‘a-Samoa that she would never conform to, and one of them was the strict division between class and age groups, according to which the untitled men, women and children served the matai and elders and then ate separately, afterwards. Now, Laura set places for Teva and Ma‘amusa at the table. When her cousins refused the gesture, she gazed heatedly at Dan, who ordered them to sit down at the table.
In tense silence, the others took their places, with Lemu at the head of the table, as usual. For the first time, Laura experienced not one twitch of guilt about offending her hosts.
‘Good morning,’ Lemu greeted them, in English. ‘Laura, will you please say our grace for the breakfast which you have prepared?’ What? She stopped herself just in time from declining automatically. For a lost moment she didn’t know how to react to the request, and everyone – especially Dan – experienced a tense awkwardness. Finally, she banished her qualms about being an atheist, convincing herself that, from what she had observed of Samoan behaviour, religion was more a social custom than anything else.
‘In Samoan,’ Dan said, and she could feel him enjoying that.
She cleared her throat, softly, and then, hesitantly but deliberately, she prayed using the ‘k’: ‘Le Akua e, fa‘amolemole fa‘amaguia mai ia Lemu ma – ma lo makou aiga akoa.’ She paused; now more sure of herself, she continued, ‘Ku‘u mai ia Kanielu se loko fa’amaualalo aua e le iloa e ia oga fai se kuka magogi pei oga makou kukaiga ma Keva ma Ma‘amusa. Fa‘afekai mo mea ai ua e foa‘i mai mo makou kino. I le suafa o Iesu, Amege!’
Lemu thanked her, and added, ‘You speak better Samoan than your husband.’
‘Hear that, Kanielu in the lion’s den?’ Laura laughed.
‘That’ll be the day!’ Daniel countered.
26
Deny, deny, deny: that’s what Daniel had been doing for days, ever since Laura had found lipstick on a shirt he’d put in the laundry basket and smelled the perfume on it, and had wrapped the shirt round his neck and started twisting it, choking him. ‘One of your students who’s mesmerised with your eloquence and fictions, eh?’ she’d shouted. He’d burst away from her and had escaped to Aaron’s house, where he’d hidden, avoiding her and their children.
‘Sorry, bro, but you have to go home and face the music if you want to salvage your marriage,’ Aaron had said on Friday evening. ‘She rang this morning and ordered me to order you to do that.’ Aaron paused, and then added, ‘This time I think she really means it, mate.’ Daniel asked him if there was any liquor in the house. ‘This time, do it cold sober,’ Aaron advised.
But on his way home, he stopped at a bar and, within an hour, had anaesthetised himself against all pain and fears and dread, arming himself with a reckless courage which foolishly made him believe she’d never, ever, be able to do without him. Besides, she would never jeopardise their family, their beautiful children, their beautiful home. And in their past confrontations she had always turned back from the brink.
Only the standing lamp beside the large leather couch was on. Snared in that light she shone like burning steel, as she sat anchored to the middle of the couch, hands clasped in her lap, shoulders square, back straight, head erect; the perfect healthy posture she’d been trained, by her grandmother, to assume at all times. How beautiful and radiant she was in her splendid anger! And when her fiercely green-blue eyes, in which he’d lived for all their life together, focused on him and seared away his alcohol-induced courage and false expectations, the all-consuming love he’d first experienced in the early years of their marriage spread, like a baptismal fire, from his centre and filled all of him, and he scrambled towards her and knelt down on the carpet.
‘I love you, Laura!’ he pleaded. ‘I love you more than anyone else. I always have. It’s true; I can’t do without you and the kids.’ Now he was literally grovelling, his hands wrapped, like tentacles, around her ankles, refusing to let go when she tried to pull them away. ‘Please, Laura, I love you …’ There were tears gushing from his eyes.
‘No, you don’t,’ she said, with what he felt was irrefutable conviction, sending him into deeper despair. ‘How can you love me and love your latest woman? And don’t give me your bullshit about being able to love more than one person.’
‘But it’s true, darling …’
‘I’m afraid you’ve been living too long in your cynical world of realist fiction, in which there is no such creature as love, and if there is, you can spread it round to other lovers. And everything is physical desire and genital lust. Me, I’m just a simple-minded lawyer who has always loved you, or should I say, did love you – but who is now fed up with your lies and abuse and infidelities.’ She pulled away her legs and stood up. In the half-light, she loomed above him, glowing with a terrible finality. ‘I’m shifting with my son, who tells me he doesn’t ever want to see you again. I’m going to stay at Mere’s while you pack your things and leave.’ She stepped round him and headed for the door.
‘I’m sorry, Laura; really sorry!’ He was weeping profusely, and meaning it.
‘Please don’t make it difficult for me and the kids to have the house,’ she instructed. ‘We’ve paid fairly for it through our suffering your unbelievable egotism and betrayal.’ At the door, she paused, and then delivered the final blow. ‘I’ve drawn up the draft of a final settlement, which my lawyer, who is Mere, will discuss with your lawyer. I hope you won’t oppose what is in it, mate. I’m not the best family lawyer in Auckland for nothing.’ He could almost hear her laughing.‘By the way, Mere, Keith and Paul agree with what I’m doing. I didn’t consult Aaron, who I know has always supported you in this, because that’s the way he treats women too.’
He deserved it; he truly deserved her unforgiving and majestic anger and vengeance.
Next day he called his lawyer and instructed him to contact Mere, and agree to everything she wanted.
27
It is nearly 8 a.m., and your whole body, especially your lower back, is deeply veined with pain from having been cramped into an economy seat for over ten hours, unable to sleep or read or watch the films. There is a parched pain behind your eyeballs too.
You clear Agriculture and customs, reload your two suitcases onto your trolley, and head for the exit. Ever since her birth, you and your daughter Cheryl have been able to sense out each other wherever you may be, using a kind of inbuilt extra-sensory location beam. There is nothing like that between you and your son Phillip, or anyone else. As you walk up the corridor towards the arrival area, pushing your trolley, you recall how you rushed into the hospital room for her birth to see her being lifted up into the air by the nursing sister, her wet umbilical cord still intact, her body bloody and covered with amniotic fluid which, as it dripped down the nurses’ gloved hands and sleeves, glittered in the white light, and you stopped dead still, amazed, at the window. For a moment, the baby turned her shrivelled face towards you and, opening her eyes – the right one first, then the left – winked her right eye. One definite, unbelievable acknowledgment that she knew who you were. Then the smile – yes, definitely a smile; slow, barely noticeable, but a smile for her dad. You decided right then you were never going to tell Laura or anyone else. No, it was just for you, that special wink and smile. You agreed with Laura that she would be called Cheryl, after Laura’s mother, and Hinavaiana, after Miss Baystall: the combination of a really kiwi name and a Polynesian one.
After your mother left, you kept her out of your life successfully, but with
Cheryl’s birth she returned with a vengeance. Within a few weeks you began noticing – and you tried to deny it to yourself – that your beloved daughter was starting to look like your mother. Laura said, one Saturday afternoon while she was breastfeeding Cheryl and you were watching the television news, ‘She has a delicate chin and face just like your mother’s.’
You rolled off the sofa and, heading for the fridge to get a beer, said, ‘No, she doesn’t, and never will.’ A stupid remark, you’d admit later.
Within a few months everyone who knew your mother was pointing out how much Cheryl resembled her. When you denied it to Mere, Aaron and the other members of your Tribe, Mere laughed and said, ‘Daniel, are you blind? Stop being silly. You may hate your mother but Cheryl isn’t her.’
The resemblance increased over the years. Uncanny and, for you, absolutely unwelcomed.
Hesitantly Daniel enters the arrival lounge, and stops. Feeling profoundly self-conscious that row after row of people are watching him, he forces himself to look up at them, and immediately senses Cheryl’s general direction—down the centre aisle to the left, near the back. She steps out from behind the last pillar, as usual wearing black, and the Tiger Woods cap her Uncle Aaron gave her for her sixteenth birthday. She half waves her left hand, and starts hurrying towards him with that easy, effortless stride of hers, and that smile she greeted him with at her birth. He realises, with a belly-deep emptiness, how much he has missed her, and hurries towards her. How beautiful she is. So grown up. In that short space before she comes into his embrace, he recalls all the magnificent times she has been there to welcome him with her unreserved alofa, and without judgment – even at those times when he had hurt her mother and jeopardised the unity of their family.
‘Kalofa, Dad!’ she whispers as she folds her arms around him and he draws her in. ‘I’ve missed you, Dad.’ He buries his face in her shoulder, in her familiar scent of Reina perfume.
‘I’ve missed you too, darling,’ he replies, tears in his eyes.
‘Like you wanted, I came on my own,’ she says. ‘And I haven’t told any of the others about you coming.’
‘Thank you,’ he whispers, wiping away the tears. From each other, they never hide the way they are feeling.
‘I’m sorry about Uncle Aaron,’ she says.
‘It’s not that,’ you reply. ‘I’m crying because I’m so happy to see you.’
‘I’m happy to see you too, Dad. It’s been over two years, eh? And I haven’t been a regular emailer.’
‘No, you haven’t been, but I forgive you.’
It rained all night, she tells him. The motorway is still slickly wet, and though it is mid-summer, the air feels crisply cold against his face and hands, as Cheryl drives him into the city in her black Jeep. ‘I’m so acclimatised to the tropics, I’m feeling cold,’ he tells her.
‘Yeah, Dad, you’ve gone really black in the Hawaiian sun!’ She chortles, and he slaps her playfully on the shoulder. ‘By the way, this is my car, bought with my own money, without the help of Uncle Aaron or any one else. Do you like it? It’s five years old.’
‘I like it – but can’t you get away from black?’ Outlined against the car window and the morning light, she again reminds him starkly of his mother – he doesn’t want to think of her; not now, not ever.
‘Financially I’m in the black too, Dad. And before everyone else tells you, I left uni a year ago. I was fed up with being a poor student. I also didn’t really want to continue with law and take after Mum and Aunt Mere.’ She pauses, expecting him to challenge her, but he doesn’t. ‘Okay, then, so I’m not going to get shot?’ He shakes his head, smiling. ‘Hell, Dad, Hawai‘i has been good for you.’ She stops, remembering. ‘I got a job as a barman in the Hotel Sturm, and within a year I became the manager of the beverages section of the hotel.’
‘Congratulations, darling!’
‘And Uncle Aaron had nothing to do with my getting the job and my quick promotion.’
‘Why should he have had anything to do with it?’ Offence, concern, hurt?
‘Dad, wake up! Uncle Aaron is – was – the Fixer in our Tribe. He made sure everyone he loved was okay.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ He continues pretending.
‘Dad, stop bullshitting me.’ He knows she isn’t going to go any further with it. ‘We all loved and admired him. But he was scary, Dad. Bloody scary – because he needed to help every one he loved, even if they didn’t want him to.’
‘And sometimes he went beyond the law eh,’ he says quietly. She nods, her eyes fixed on the busy motorway ahead. For a while, he remains silent, trying to avoid Aaron, who has once again come between them.
‘Phillip is fine.’ She pulls her brother into the conversation. ‘He’s staying with Mum, and he’s told her that he isn’t going to university because he wants to play league professionally. He’s in the Auckland under-nineteen rep team now.’
He is upset by that news, but isn’t going to show it. ‘Is he any good at the game?’
‘Everyone says he is. Uncle Paul in particular thinks Phil’ll make it into the Warriors, eventually.’
‘What does your mother think?’ He attempts to sound casual about it.
‘Just like you, Dad.’
‘And what is that?’
‘“Get a good degree first to fall back on if ya don’t make it”.’ She starts laughing, and he finds himself joining in.
He notices they are now in Greenlane, heading down towards Newmarket and the heart of the city he knows so well – and loves? Two years away from it, and it now feels smaller, more cramped, more judgmental.
‘Dad, promise you won’t get angry about what I’m going to tell you,’ she demands. ‘There is absolutely no way I can’t tell you. I’ve been dreading it ever since you rang to tell me you were coming. Okay?’ She avoids looking at him, her hands gripping the steering wheel tightly. ‘As you know, I’ve always been close to Grandmother.’ Pauses. His heart is pumping, his ears ringing. ‘Well, after you left I continued to see her …’
‘Don’t tell me the details,’ he hears himself demanding. ‘Just tell me frankly whatever it is about her that you have to tell me.’
‘Okay, then.’ Firmly. ‘She is not well. She is in an old people’s home – and they think she has Alzheimer’s. Is that frank enough, Dad?’
‘Yes!’ Once, finally. ‘Yes, and I don’t care.’
‘But I care, Dad. I care!’
For the rest of their trip into the city, to her apartment near Albert Park and the University, she refuses to talk, and he huddles into himself, unable to avoid his mother.
It has been over twenty years since she left. For the first few years, while she was still in Auckland, she tried maintaining her connections to him and their aiga, but he (and all their relatives, at his insistence) simply refused to let her back in. He didn’t reply to any of her phone messages, even. Whenever he saw her at community functions, he left. Eventually he heard she and her new husband had shifted up to Kaitaia, where they ran a dairy and a taxi, and he was relieved she wasn’t near him any more and he didn’t have to be careful he’d run into her. His father, after his highly successful resettling in Samoa, never once mentioned her when he visited, or wrote or rang. It was as if their whole life together had never happened. And then just when Daniel was relaxing into never having to remember his mother, Cheryl had been born, and his mother was back – it was like watching her being reborn and then growing up right in the centre of his home and immediate family. And then Laura was informing him that his mother – ‘and our daughter’s grandmother’ – had rung to congratulate her on having her first grandchild, and that she wanted to come down and see her. No, no, no! He was adamant his mother would not return. ‘But she’s not returning because of you, darling,’ Laura insisted. ‘She wants to see her granddaughter – and Cheryl needs a grandmother.’ When his T
ribe learned about his reaction, they supported Laura. Mere said, ‘Daniel, our niece needs all her grandmothers.’
‘It’s time, bro, that you forgave her!’ Aaron, of all people, said.
Eventually he came to a sullen agreement with Laura that he was to be told of his mother’s visits when they were being planned, and he’d make sure he wasn’t there for them. That way, any unpleasantness would be avoided. He demanded that his mother not be allowed to attend any of Cheryl’s and later Phillip’s birthdays – she was to come the day before or after. When Laura tried reasoning with him, he walked out.
When Cheryl and then Phillip started talking, however, he couldn’t get them to stop discussing their grandmother and their time with her. Later, when they realised he didn’t want to hear any of that, and they learned how to lie, their grandmother became a topic they knew never to discuss with Dad. Cheryl in particular was her grandmother’s favourite, and they spent more and more time together. However, when Cheryl, through Laura, once asked if she could spend the school holidays with Grandma, Daniel blatantly refused.
Over the years his children’s relationship with their grandmother became a real strand in their family life; a strand everyone knew about but knew they couldn’t bring to his attention. He pretended – and everyone knew he was pretending – that she wasn’t there. Pretending is one thing; reality is another.
Cheryl was in the fourth form when he came home from work one evening to find her, Laura, Mere and Aaron in the sitting room. Cheryl handed him a cold beer – the bottle was frosted with condensation – and glanced at her Aunt Mere. ‘We know you don’t want to hear anything about your mother, Daniel, but this is an aiga matter,’ Mere started.
‘Yeah, Dan – your mother is an elder in our aiga, whether you like it or not,’ Aaron said. They waited while Daniel swigged back half his bottle of beer.
‘Aaron’s right, darling,’ Laura chorused. He continued to focus on Mere, the acknowledged head of the conspirators.