Red Jacket

by Mordecai, Pamela;

  The day he saw the article in the Post, he’d ordered a big bouquet of roses for Mona and arrived home carrying them, as well as wine and supper from the Table d’Hôte, a gourmet catering service with a select clientele of Washington subscribers. Mona opened the front door for him.

  “What happen?” he asked, kissing her. “You send home the butler?”

  “Wow! Thanks for these,” she’d said, ignoring the comment and taking the flowers. “They’re lovely. All the same, you can hang up the jacket yourself, and if that’s dinner, just rest it in the kitchen. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Body servants supposed to do everything for their masters you know. Where my slippers?”

  She sucked her teeth. He hung up his jacket, found his slippers, and followed her to the kitchen.

  “Want to open this?” She gave him the wine, a Merlot they both liked.

  He set to work. “So how come you don’t ask me what’s the occasion?”

  “I know what the occasion is.”

  He kept on at the cork. “In that case, you better than me. I just thought,” he emphasized the next word, “whimsically, that it was a good way to start the weekend, so I got Elaine to ring the florist and the caterers, and they did the rest. Besides,” he pointed outside, “it looks like spring might be consenting to arrive ahead of schedule. You love that tree. Let’s say we celebrating the blooming of your tree!”

  In the courtyard of their townhouse a small pink magnolia was covered with very early buds. Mona hung on for it to flower every year. While he showered and changed, she had put dinner on the table — coq au vin, salad, warm-from-the-oven baguettes.

  “So what you did all day?” En route to his chair, he bent to smell her hair. She kept it long because he liked it so.

  “Mostly read. Took a couple of calls for you.”

  “Would you pass the butter, please?” Aware of the number he’d left with Elaine, his hopes rose.

  “So who called?” He loaded his bread with butter.

  “Some person passing through named Frank Nuñez who said he’d been at UA with you. The number’s on your desk.” Her elbow was on the table, thumb propping up her chin, fingers curled over her mouth.

  “Who else?” He was hoping dangerously.

  “A woman. Wouldn’t say who. Said she’d try again.”

  “American? Caribbean?”

  “She sounded Latin. Maybe Cuban.”

  Not Grace.

  They’d tidied up afterwards and gone upstairs where he made love to her tenderly and at length. It had gone so well he’d thought to raise the idea of another baby, but he gave it up quick enough. She’d know something was up.

  He thinks now that, never mind his circumspection, Mona guessed that day, if not who he was dallying with, certainly that he was dallying. There was nothing lacking in her response to the flowers, dinner, or his lovemaking. It was something in her expression, her eyes. He can’t say she looked resigned for resignation is now written all over her, inscribed by Adam’s death. This look was something else.

  He’s not always been faithful. After Adam died, she hadn’t wanted to make love for ages, almost three years. No full-blooded Caribbean man went that long without sex, and not even the craziest woman would expect abstinence for such a period. As far as he’s concerned, they’d reached an unspoken truce. They never spoke of infidelity, and she never noticed anything amiss. He wasn’t careless, but small things had to show.

  Still, she’s not a woman to come to terms. What he believes now is that she’s been biding her time — the inscrutable East in her, no doubt. He can’t blame her. Nor is there any sense in imagining their positions reversed. That situation is inconceivable. So it isn’t something to be tackled, just something to be waited out. He has a pass yet again at telling himself she couldn’t have known. The letters she’d mailed to Grace were like hundreds she’s always posting for him: his extensive personal correspondence includes people all over the world. She always dispatches it faithfully, a couple times a week, sticking on stamps, popping the envelopes into the mailbox. Nothing identified the letters he’d sent Grace as in any way different — unless the intensity of his feelings had somehow imparted vibrations to the paper.

  As for Grace, it hasn’t occurred to him that he might forgo his greedy need for her. He wants to consume her and still have her there, ready for eating again. It’s not that he doesn’t love Mona. He loves her, and making love to her, and taking care of her. How he feels about Mona has nothing to do with how he feels about Grace. With Grace, it’s like being caught in a powerful current: there’s no point in struggling. All you do is exhaust yourself, so you go with the flow and hope to be washed ashore safely at some point.

  The whales, getting smaller and smaller in the ocean blue, and then disappearing under credits for the program, remind him there are things to do before tomorrow. Gordon, who’d promised an update on developments and a run-through of the revised agenda, has been silent. He looks at his empty glass. “Bird can’t fly on one wing,” he thinks and fixes himself another drink.

  GRACE AND JIMMY

  45

  Landings

  “You see how your womb stay? You just going to have to take time! If you hold on, that baby will hold on. Mark my word, you get off light, for one time it would be full bed rest. I telling you straight: take it nice and easy.”

  Dr. Joyce Zaidie-Klein wears her lavish head of hair in thick locks. Each day she puts on her white medical coat over some new creation: a patchwork frock of Bob Marley T-shirts, a dramatic dress of mud cloth, a long skirt of batik, or bandana cloth. The outfits blaze against her skin, for she is pale as any Irish colleen, her veins a network of indigo streams and rivers under skin pervious as mist, the tight twists in her hair defying its pale blonde and the startling blue of her eyes.

  Grace stared when they first met and felt obliged to apologize.

  “Yup. Them baby blues just stopped me short of being a dundus — you know, albino? My mama was a very white lady, and my papa black as the ace of spades. You grew up in St. Chris, don’t that’s right?”

  Grace nods, too happy to meet her, and in Geneva of all places. When the doctor smirks, posing to show off the day’s outfit, tie-dyed in green, gold, and red, Grace remembers Miss Carmen in her dashikis and matching trousers. Heritage, Miss Carmen used to say, was a legacy that you could draw down on whenever you were ready. These two mixed-blood women, her relative obviously a woman of colour, her doctor almost imperceptibly so, are happily drawing down on that inheritance. Unsure what she has inherited, Grace envies them.

  “Brighten my day and wake up my patients. For colours, I praise Jah.”

  Grace does as her doctor instructs: keeps herself shipshape and guides the tiller at work with the lightest touch, pretty much handing things over to Jimmy and project managers in Senegal, Mali, and Burkina Faso. Jimmy leads sessions with the managers every two months. Each country has its turn as host, and he reports to Geneva afterwards.

  It is hard to let go. She loves her job, gives it all she’d got, for that is what Gramps had charged her to do, what he, Ma, and Pa taught her by example. And her siblings inspire her: Edgar looks over her shoulder when she writes, Stewie when she draws a plan. Pansy’s willfulness she emulates when she advances an argument. Sam and Princess, whom she still thinks of as children, happy and healthy, embody the reason for her work. And she does her job every day in tribute to a man she doesn’t dare remember, not the way she remembers, say, Gramps. Gramps she resurrects whenever she wishes, seeing him in the circumstances in which he had been most himself, like when he was making his ganja infusions or tending his provision ground. But Charlie, the man who gave her many of the skills she now uses, is enshrined in a place she never goes to. With him she breathed and smelled, walked and drank, ate and slept, made love and felt hurt with a scope and intensity she’d not felt before. Once he’d gone, she’d worked and functioned and responded at a remove, as if she was dead too, watching herself f
rom below, through thick layers of earth under which she remained buried until she met Jimmy. She couldn’t have him, but he at least makes her want to push her way up from underground.

  As for Mark, she can’t account for Mark. But for the baby, he can as well not have happened. Maybe the now-and-then lunacy that prompted her attempt to seduce Lindsay and led to her rudeness to Phyllis had overcome her again. Perhaps one day she’ll figure it out.

  When she is about six months on, she gets up one morning, studies her belly, and thinks about her mothers. Ma is a perfect mother, but for myriad reasons Ma can’t come to Geneva. She understands then why so many parents from the Caribbean send their children home to their islands for grandmothers to raise; she remembers that Phyllis had said in one of her letters how happy she was that Grace had grown up in St. Chris. But she is never going to part with this baby. She phones New York.

  “Hi, Phyllis?”

  “Grace? Are you all right? How’s the baby?”

  “Baby fine, as far as we can tell, and me too.”

  “Good. I pray for that every day. So how things?”

  “Pretty good. I’ve just a couple months to go, so I’m taking it easy. No problems, knock wood. Except I look like a chopstick with a dumpling stuck on the front.”

  “Graphic.”

  “Mum, it make no sense for me to beat about the bush. I have a big-big favour to ask you.”

  “Okay, Grace.”

  “Is really big, you know.” Her tone kneads caution, hesitation, pleading.

  “Grace, I understand English. Just make your request.”

  Her mother is well named — Phyllis, Green Bough of Great Calm.

  “I need you to come and help me mind this baby.”

  Long pause. “So is now you decide to ask me that?”

  “Is long time I been debating about it, Mum, but is only now I make up my mind to just bite my lip and ask you.”

  “How much time I have to think about it?”

  “Whatever time you need.”

  “I could take till next year then.” Phyllis’s humour lurks in the pool of conversation like a turtle, elevating its head unpredictably.

  “Mum, you know this baby is coming long before next year.”

  “So you want me to come before the baby born then?”

  “Lord, take time with me, nuh?”

  “You just phone halfway round the world to say, ‘Phyllis, how you would like to give up your work, your life, your home, and come to a strange place where you don’t speak the language, don’t know nobody, and nobody know you, so you can look after my baby?’ And I must take time with you?”

  “My baby is your grandchild — very likely, the only one you’ll ever have.”

  “That is perfectly true, as is the fact that you are the mother of that child. Baby-minding responsibility thus falls to you. At least, that is how I know it.”

  “Mum, you know full well I can’t do this job and mind the baby at the same time. If we’re going to eat, I have to work. You want me to put your grandchild in a nursery for a set of white people to mind?”

  “So since when white people can’t mind pikni? Look, Grace. I best tell you right now. If I was to decide to come over there, I not going to be no surrogate mother, so make us be clear on that.”

  “Your mother left you. They forced you to give me up. You think I’m going do anything like that with this baby?”

  “Don’t judge about things concerning which you know nothing!” Phyllis snaps, something Grace can hardly ever remember her doing. More turtle behaviour! “There’s no comparison between your present circumstances and mine when you were born, or yours and Daphne’s when she left to work in foreign and send back money to support me and Ralston. You think if I’d stayed in St. Chris and brought you up, you’d be where you are now?”

  Grace knows better than to answer. “Mum, we’ll discuss it down to the smallest details, work out how it’s going to go day to day, hour to hour, if you want. But you and I both know that I didn’t have to keep this child. Having decided to, I’m not likely to behave as though it belongs to somebody else.”

  “If I come, Grace, I am holding you to that.”

  “Agreed, Mum.”

  “One more thing. You haven’t seen fit to speak about the baby-father. I’ve asked no questions, but if I come to mind that baby, I must know who his pa is.”

  Transatlantic burbles. “I really don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Listen, Miss. I am not ecstatic about giving up a perfectly good life here, which is what you’ve asked me to do. I’m not going to do it, only to have some man knock on the door one day, come to collect his child.”

  “This is 1994, Phyllis. Those things don’t happen anymore.”

  “They most certainly do, Grace. Not to say you’d let the baby go just so, but don’t fool yourself. Parents do snatch children. If there’s a chance of my finding myself in the middle of such an abduction, I must know.”

  “Suppose I tell you every last thing about him: age, profession, height, weight, shape of nose, skin, and eye colour, education, earning power, political persuasion — all except name and address. That will suffice?”

  “What about marital status?”

  “He’s married, Phyllis.”

  “Fine barrel of brine water you land yourself into!”

  “That’s very helpful.”

  “Have to think about this, Grace. Take it to the Lord in prayer.”

  “That’s more than fair, Mum. I know you’ll need time.”

  “I’ll speak to Reverend Mother tomorrow. You’re lucky. Is only forty-seven I am on my next birthday, but I been working here thirty years now, so I have my pension, plus I have some leave saved up.”

  “Right. I will call you in another couple days. Take care, Mum. And thanks for even thinking about it.”

  Being pregnant has been no cakewalk, seven months of whether the baby would miscarry, morning sickness, World Cup football in her belly, and the belly in the end so heavy that there is no good position to sleep in. Ironically, all that has been to the good, immediate discomfort overriding neurotic doubts about whether the baby has AIDS, never mind all the tests she’s done say she is fine.

  She’s enjoyed preparing for the baby, though the most important preparation is the one she’s that day hopefully put in place. Someone has to mind the child because she has to work. She’d considered, and then had the brainwave, and then the misgivings, so she’d talked to Jimmy.

  “Do you think it would be fair to Phyllis?”

  “Ask and you shall receive. Can’t hurt to ask.”

  There was a bit of a tug-o-war between herself and her Rasta doctor about where the baby should be born. She started asking around for a good doula, for she wanted a home delivery, so that the child could be born into the smells, sights, and sounds that would surround him or her in the first years of life. These are to introduce the baby not just to home but to Wentley Park and his or her extended family as well. To that end, the nursery is painted the blue of the sky in St. Chris. There is a wall with a mural depicting a small shop, like Pansy and Mortimer’s Ital Cookshop; she paid one of the children from the high school nearby to paint it from a postcard of St. Chris. The shop is on a roadside prettified with oleander and allamanda bushes and blooming poinciana and acacia trees, with the road running past a swathe of cane fields backed by a stand of tall coconut palms, the whole set against the glow of a perfect St. Chris sunset. It is tourist stuff, to be sure, but if she gathers two or three places in Wentley and puts them together in her imagination, the picture is not too far off.

  There is another wall devoted to the Carpenter and Patterson branches of her baby’s family tree, which she has drawn and then painted herself, and to which she has affixed photographs of Gramps, Ma, Pa, all her siblings, Daphne, Granny Vads, grandpa Malachi, and of course Phyllis and herself. Even Pansy and Mortimer’s children are there, for they are first cousins, after all.

  Joyce Zaidie-Klein
discourages the doula and the home birth. She reminds Grace that she is older than the average woman giving birth for the first time, and she needs to bear in mind that there may be complications with the delivery.

  “Hospital is the best place for old lady who just starting to make babies!” her doctor declares, ready to pick a pretend fight with Grace. Grace doesn’t given her the satisfaction: she capitulates straight off.

  “But of course – you’re absolutely right!”

  So Jeremiah arrives in the hospital, though, thank God, there are no complications. She does not debate about naming the child. She has little to give Jimmy, or that he allows her to give him, but she knows how much he mourns John Kelly, and she’s told him if the baby is a boy, she is going to name him Jeremiah.

  Phyllis was to have come a week before the baby was due, to be part of the warm and welcoming Christophian cocoon in which Grace is determined the child will find himself when she brings him home. But he was in a hurry, which is why at this moment, three months after her phone call to her mother, she is all alone, shushing a two-day-old small person who can’t even lend a hand with shelling peas!

  As she pats his back, she checks the wall clock. Phyllis’s plane should be touching down any minute.