by Albert Wendt
Muta wheels in their morning tea on a trolley, stops it beside her and waits. Morning and afternoon teas were one of the first Palagi rituals she’d insisted was central to their becoming an educated and civilised aiga, and New Zealanders. As a child, Daniel and his father had to be patient as she taught them that ritual, which, she claimed, had first become part of their aiga’s traditions when her father’s father’s father, the first in their illustrious aiga to be trained as a pastor, at Malua, adopted it from his Palagi missionary teachers. Daniel waits to see if she will ‘officiate’ – her term – this morning tea as she has always done in the past. He waits, hoping she will. Daniel glances up at Muta, then at Cheryl, who both look concerned.
Muta doesn’t wait any more: he takes the teapot and places it on the woven pandanus mat at the middle of the table. Daniel notices, with spiralling anxiety, that his mother is just staring blankly at the table. Muta arranges the teapot (which even has a woollen tea cosy around it) and the crockery and cutlery in the way Daniel recognises his mother has always insisted is ‘the correct Palagi way’.
‘Your mother has taught me well, sir,’ Muta says, apologising for her absence. ‘I’m just an ignorant Hamo when it comes to things like this.’
Cheryl reaches forward and starts pouring milk into her grandmother’s cup. ‘Yes, she taught me well too,’ she says. ‘A warm cup and then the milk first …’
‘And you let the teapot sit for four minutes before you pour it,’ Daniel hears himself saying.
As they pour and share out the tea, Muta and Cheryl continue, light-heartedly, to elaborate the ritual the way she has taught them. But Daniel admits to himself that the infectious spark that was always in his mother’s eyes when she served her teas is now absent, and his sorrow returns like the brown sparkling liquid filling the white cups. ‘Ah,’ Daniel hears himself sigh a short while later, when he sees her right hand grip her cup. ‘Ahhh,’ he sighs longer, when her thin knobbly fingers grip the cup handle firmly, and she lifts the cup to her mouth. ‘Ahhhh,’ he sighs even longer, in intense hope, when he sees her take her first sip, and her little finger stays erect and upright like a victorious flag, the way he’d always seen her grip the cup, so central to her life in New Zealand, the way ‘proper ladies hold their tea’.
‘Dad, do you remember us as kids trying to imitate Grandmother’s way of holding her cup?’ Cheryl interrupts him. ‘Why does she always have her little pinkie stuck out like that?’
‘Because, girl, it is the proper English way!’ He mimics his mother.
‘Yeah, just like my favourite actress, Grace Kelly in High Society.’ Muta mimics her too. Daniel tries not to laugh with the other two, realising that his attempt at saving the situation with light-hearted levity is only making it sadder.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Muta says, ‘but I think she’s very tired. She’s been up since six …’
‘And, Dad, Grandma’s memory swings wildly’, Cheryl says. ‘Great one minute and …’
‘… Gone the next,’ Daniel says.
Muta obviously knows his mother’s favourite biscuits: he picks up the plate of coconut crispies and extends it to her. She turns and gazes up at him, with a faint smile. She chooses a biscuit, and takes a small bite of it. Her smile widens as she chews.
After she has methodically chewed her smiling way through the biscuit and sipped half her cup of tea, she holds out her hands, palms upwards, and Muta wipes them clean, while Cheryl wipes her mouth gently with a clean serviette. ‘Right, Mrs Malaetau,’ Muta says. She rises to her feet and, without looking at anyone, shuffles to the large multi-coloured sofa across the room. She stops and looks back at Muta, who hurries over and, with his hands, brushes the top of the sofa, and then fluffs up a thick velvet cushion and places it at the head.
‘There you are, Grandma,’ Cheryl says softly, and helps her stretch out on the sofa. As Daniel observes all this, he is again snared in the bitter truth that in her present state he doesn’t exist. But it’s better to be misrecognised as Aaron than not to exist at all. Cheryl takes a fluffy white blanket from Muta and stretches it over his mother, up to her chin. Daniel starts regretting her long banishment from his life: years he could’ve used to be with her, wasted and irretrievable years. But even more unforgivable is his abandonment of her to other people, and ultimately to this incurable unforgiving loss of self (and the mother who knew him and could have now cursed or forgiven him.) ‘Have a good nap, Grandma,’ he hears Cheryl say.
He jumps up and rushes out onto the veranda, into the blinding light of the sky and the slow wind that is heavy with damp and the unpleasant smell of iodine.
Everything before and above him is now united in a haze that the summer light has turned into the colour of burnished gold. Below, in the bay, he discerns the outlines of three ships ploughing barely visible troughs in the water towards the opening into the Straits and unknown destinations – and escape. Across the harbour the Eastbourne landscape and hills are merely a grey outline that sweeps and curves to his left and escapes outside his vision. All sounds are muffled, as if Cheryl has thrown his mother’s soft blanket over them too, to stop them from disturbing Tautasi’s sleep. Tautasi. Yes, that is his mother’s name: a name that she changed many times after they settled in New Zealand; a name she once admitted to Daniel didn’t suit ‘my new self in New Zealand’; a name that Daniel came to realise didn’t fit, either, her passionate love of Hollywood movies and actresses: Susan Hayward, Olivia De Havilland, Maureen O’Hara, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Esther Williams, Doris Day, Cyd Charisse, Marilyn Monroe, Betty Davis, Jane Russell, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Jayne Mansfield, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and others. What is her name now? It’s an unwelcomed question Daniel tries to reject.
‘She hasn’t forgotten you, Mr Malaetau,’ Muta’s consoling voice enters from over Daniel’s shoulder. ‘She talks about you often, and always with admiration and alofa.’
‘Yes, Dad, the last time I was here, she never stopped talking about “my poko son who top his class always,”’ Cheryl echoes. She hands Daniel his cup of tea. ‘I’ve refilled it.’
‘What is the name she now uses?’ Daniel forces himself to ask. There’s an awkward silence from the others. ‘Does she use her Samoan Christian name?’ Daniel takes a sip; the tea is correctly hot and sweet, the way he likes it.
Daniel senses Muta leaving the question to Cheryl, who clears her throat and says, ‘Yes, Dad, the name she’s always used, Tasi.’
‘Tautasi,’ he emphasises. ‘That was her full name. Tautasi: a family name on her father’s side.’
‘I always thought it was Tasi,’ Cheryl says, shifting over and standing against his left shoulder.
‘You know, of course, she’s always loved movies …’ Daniel remarks.
‘She still does!’ Muta exclaims. ‘Especially movies of the fifties and sixties …’
‘… and she has never considered her very Hamo name Tautasi worthy of her favourite Hollywood actresses.’ Daniel hears an admiring, ironical shift in his voice. ‘So during the time I knew her, she gave herself a series of very Hollywoodish first names: Emerald, Janine, Elizabeth, Susan, Joan …’
‘Wow, I never knew that, Dad,’ says Cheryl.
‘Movies were the constant, unchanging love of her life, and that shaped her.’ He pauses and then, with some pride, admits, ‘I inherited that love – and through her and the movies came my passion for stories and poetry and fiction, and telling and writing my own.’ With his next swallow of tea, he toasts his mother, as he used to see her rise to her feet and toast her favourite actresses on television, at home.
‘I never knew that either, Dad.’
Daniel notices that the haze is thinning and the harbour is turning into a silver-black plain of long ripples, swells and cloud reflections that are also caught in his cup of tea.
‘Over the years, when people asked me why I write, I’ve given some very ela
borate, fanciful reasons why – all bullshit to impress readers and critics and enhance my reputation. I was confidence tricking, like my mother used to do to get better jobs and enhance our aiga’s standing, I now realise.’ He laughs. ‘I used to condemn her for it, for being “dishonest”, but I learned from her how to do it, and I did it.’ He continues laughing. ‘For years now, I’ve known that writing fiction and poetry is a con game; that so-called truth is what you can make people believe is true. All so-called art is tricking. My mum used to see movies and then retell them to me and Dad, or anyone else who was willing to listen, in the most passionately persuasive and believable ways. She was – is – the best storyteller I’ve ever known.’
‘I’ve never met that side of my grandmother,’ Cheryl intrudes, wistfully.
‘I’ve been lucky, girl,’ Muta says. ‘Whenever Mrs Malaetau is with “her Daniel” she is that incredible storyteller.’
‘How does she use language then?’ Daniel asks him.
‘In her inimitable way,’ Muta replies.
‘How, Dad? C’mon, how?’ Cheryl encourages him.
Daniel places his now almost empty cup on the veranda railing. For an instant he catches his shimmering reflection in the brown liquid. ‘From her I learned that when she and Dad first came here, she could read a lot of English – she’d completed Samoa College and had her School Certificate, and had worked as a clerk in the Treasury Department – but she didn’t speak much of it because of lack of practice. As soon as they shifted to Freemans Bay and their flat and her job at the hospital laundry, though, she “took to it like a shark to human flesh” – in huge ravenous hunks – and she didn’t care what people, including her beloved son, thought of the way she spoke it. And did she murder the poor language! She ate it up, and then ate it while she was speaking it. I was so ashamed of her unashamed spoken English, I avoided being seen with her at public places. “Daniel, I know you are ma of me ’cause of the way I kaukala the English, but I still speak better English than the kiwi do. You wait and see, I gonna speak better and better, like Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man. Fa‘akali a, the more movies and books I learn from the better I get.” And lo and behold, she did improve – not just grammatically but in developing her own unique way with language and storying. I think I stopped being ashamed of her way when I started high school, when I became aware that whenever she held the floor, as it were, her audience was held spellbound by her way. It wasn’t just in the way she used language but in the manner she storied and paced her narrations. And, while she told her stories, she exuded charisma, a term that was a buzz word at that time.’
‘Would mana be a more apt term, sir?’ Muta suggests.
‘That’s it, Muta. That’s it, she had mana. You’re a genius, mate!’
‘When she is well, she still has it,’ Muta says.
While his mother sleeps, Daniel asks Muta to show him round her apartment, believing the surroundings she has created for herself will hold revelations, clues and evidence about who and what she is.
He can’t believe the expensive neatness, the spick-and-spanness of it. No sign of anything Samoan or Pacific. No family photographs anywhere – she used to cover their family walls with those photographs, circled lovingly with lei. But then he hasn’t seen her for a long time so he is in the second skin of someone he doesn’t know.
‘So was your mother always this neat?’ Muta asks, as he shows him the apartment.
‘Is the tidiness you or her?’ Daniel replies.
Muta grins. ‘Mainly her. I merely carry out what she wants me to do.’
‘Ever since I’ve known her, she’s been a stickler for neatness,’ Cheryl confirms. ‘Whenever Phil and I stayed with her, man, it was always: “Yeah, we Hamo people got to show these smelly Palagi how to be clean and healthy and godly.”’
‘Well, it was my father who maintained and kept our house; he did most of the housework and cooking,’ Daniel informs them. ‘Very un-Hamo, eh. Very unmanly! And I hid that from my friends. During the weekends she tried, really tried, to do the housework, because she, being a woman, was supposed to like that work. Poor Mum didn’t; her heart wasn’t in it, and she wasn’t good at it. Dad usually ended up redoing the housework. Eventually, because she had the full-time job and enjoyed it, she became the breadwinner, and Dad did the housework and looked after me. One good thing I suppose about Mum was she never hid that from others. That of course didn’t stop me from feeling ashamed that my father was doing woman’s work.’
He goes a few paces into her bedroom, and it is almost as if a loving upraised hand – his mother’s, because it smells of lemon and coconut? – is pushing into his chest, unexpectedly, stopping him. He finds himself looking at what is standing on her bedside table, under the blue lamp: a framed photo of him, in his full PhD graduation regalia, on the town hall stage, smiling and shaking hands with the Chancellor. He hurries to it; it is not one of those taken by the official university photographer. This one was taken by someone who was sitting in the audience, halfway up on the next tier. His hands trembling, he picks it up and scrutinises it.
‘Dad, she took it,’ Cheryl admits. ‘At first I loved it, but over the years I’ve grown bored with her very detailed stories about being at your graduation, and how she was so proud of her son being one of the first Hamo to get a doctorate, and how Phil and I should get doctorates too.’
‘Yes: degreed, bewigged. That’s what she always wanted me to be, just to show the “whole ignorant Hamo community how educated our family is”.’
‘It’s about the only photograph in her house,’ Muta says. He places the photo down, and hurries back past Cheryl and Muta into the sitting room.
Muta and Cheryl tell him they are going to cook some fa‘alifu talo and a sapasui for lunch, and disappear into the kitchen, leaving him again exposed to his mother. She is breathing easily, her face suffused with serenity, arms folded across her chest, and Daniel retreats to the only bookcase in the house, against the far wall.
Most of the shelves are empty, but in the middle shelf, huddled at the centre, are all the books he has written. He hesitates from touching them, afraid of what he may find, but he is encouraged – the books are further proof that his mother still holds him in value (a pompous, dishonest way of describing it). He notes the titles quickly: all his published books, all published after she’d left. Fearfully, he pulls out the first one – his first book, the novel The Final Return. He opens it, flicks to the title page and there, in her ornate handwriting, he reads, his heart filling with sadness and love: ‘For me, this is the most wonderful (and saddest) day of my life, to get a copy of my beloved son’s first book’. Further down, there is a message from a Robert Hummont: ‘To my beloved Elizabeth, Happy birthday, Darling.’ Her first Palagi husband? Daniel flicks through the book, thinking, with intensifying self-pity, about how she may have considered his novel. Pity books she didn’t like. He notes as he flicks through the other books that she’s written messages to him in their title pages, messages that add up to: ‘I la‘u tama o Daniel, I’m leaving these copies of your books to you, hoping you read what I’ve written in them. (I’ll be dead by the time you find them.) Firstly I need and want your forgiveness for what I did to you and your father …’
‘I’ve never told you, Dad.’ Cheryl breaks into his thoughts, the strong smell of sautéing garlic following her from the kitchen. He doesn’t look at her. ‘But most holidays Phil and I spent with her, she got us to read her your poems and stories, aloud. And when she thought we weren’t reading it well, she showed us how to. Grandma should have been an actor …’
‘She was, Cheryl,’ he murmurs. ‘Her whole life was a series of large roles. She was into Meryl Streep when … when she left.’
‘That explains the way she reads most of your poetry,’ Cheryl laughs. ‘Like Meryl Streep!’ It is uncanny and gratifying how Cheryl then recites one of his latest poems – in her grandmo
ther’s voice and in Meryl Streep style.
‘Dad, why do writers always need reassurances about the value of their writing – why?’ Cheryl asks.
‘Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that that is probably why I and other writers do what we do?’ He tries joking. ‘The writing, especially the publication, is visible proof we may be good at something.’
‘Pathetic, Dad. Anyway, do you want me to tell you what your mum thinks of your writing?’
‘How much?’
‘For free, Dad. And it’s going to be good for your miserable ego.’ She pauses, sighs deeply and declares, ‘She has always loved your work, and tells that to anyone who comes into her view – and, as you well know, her view includes the whole planet. But of course that can’t be the so-called objective praise you so badly need. After all, she’s your mother, and biased.’
Almost an hour later, Daniel helps Muta and Cheryl set out their lunch on the dining table. The delicious sight and smell of the taro and sapasui make Daniel’s mouth salivate. Within a few minutes of Muta’s prediction, his mother wakes, slips off the sofa, straightens her clothes, carefully folds her blanket and, smiling at everyone, shuffles over to the table. ‘Ese le magaia o le magogi o le kakou meai, Muta,’ she congratulates Muta.
Muta grins shyly. He pulls back the chair at the head of the table and invites her: ‘Madam.’ She slips into the chair, thanks him as he pushes the chair under her, waits for them to sit down, bows her head and then, in the way Daniel has always remembered, says grace in Samoan. Then she shakes open her serviette and, spreading it across her lap, gazes across at him, her eyes again sparkling with the enjoyment of having company.
‘Ia, Aaron, o ā au mea sa fai i legei aso?’ she asks him. An intense surge of healing relief immediately radiates through Daniel, knowing she is alive again, and he no longer minds being mistaken for Aaron – if being Aaron kept her alive. So for the whole meal and the rest of the afternoon, while the haze clears and summer sings on, she and Daniel as Aaron and Cheryl and Muta, who hadn’t existed in that period, are back in Daniel’s Freemans Bay high school days, with Daniel, her son, in the third person, at the centre of that world.