Come Sunday: A Novel

by Isla Morley

  My mother was the first to greet him, having kept vigil at the living room window for much of the afternoon. When Rhiaan’s roommate’s car pulled into the driveway, she let out a yip and ran out while I followed close on her heels. He was different somehow, and although he hugged me just the same, I felt shy around this grown-up brother. “What’s the matter,” he asked me. “Cat got your tongue?”

  The All-Blacks, having ignored the Gleneagles Agreement, which preached an international sports sanction against South Africa, were giving the Springboks a thorough beating in the first test match. It could not have had a worse effect on my father if he had been the captain of the rugby team himself. When the three of us tumbled into the house, he was standing at attention in front of the tube, shouting directions at the referee, who had apparently just awarded another penalty to the New Zealand side.

  “Hello, Dad,” Rhiaan said.

  I had not noticed, until he raised his arm in our direction, that clasped in my father’s grip was the red book.

  “What the bloody hell do you call this?” he demanded, a scrum of one. Didn’t we need a referee?

  Rhiaan looked at the floor and rubbed the back of his head, but did not answer.

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” my father continued. “It’s Commie bullshit, that’s what! You think I’m stupid?”

  Rhiaan was quiet.

  “I said, do you think I’m fucking stupid?”

  “No, I never said—”

  “Don’t interrupt me! This is my house; I do the talking around here!” My mother came to get my hand and guided me into the hallway, where we still had a view of the muddy rugby field and the battlefield in front of it. For weeks I had been waiting for that duffel bag to come home, to be opened, to be handed from it a treasure my brother had picked out just for me. But now it sat zipped up like my mother’s mouth, ready to leave, at Rhiaan’s side.

  “It’s a poem, Dad. It’s just a poem.”

  “It’s a bloody disgrace—that’s what it is! Let me tell you something, boetie, I have put up with your attitude and your superior ways for years, but the thanks I get is this piece of shit! It mocks me and everything I stand for, do you hear me?”

  “It has nothing to do with you, it’s about—”

  “It has everything to do with me! You fuck with my country, my boy, you fuck with me.” I was beginning to wonder whether our neighbors could hear, whether they had turned down the volume on their TV sets for a better earful of the match going on in our house. My father opened the book to the page where Rhiaan’s poem was printed, ripped it out, and crumpled it. “That’s what I think of your poem and that’s what I think of you. Now clean out any other Commie bullshit from your room and get the hell out of my house! You aren’t any son of mine.” Wiping the spittle from his mouth with the back of his hand, my father sat down in his recliner and picked up his beer just as the Springbok running back scored a try.

  “Harry,” my mother gasped.

  “Don’t start, Louise, or by God you can leave with him.”

  My mother didn’t leave—not in any physical sense, at least. Instead, after Rhiaan had left, she picked up the page from the floor and taped it back in the book. Later that day she picked up something else—a very tall glass of gin. When Rhiaan left the country a year later along with a phalanx of political refugees just after his twenty-first birthday, it was a long season before I saw the glass empty.

  INSIDE, JENNY IS cleaning out uneaten food from the refrigerator while Greg paces in the kitchen with the phone to his ear.

  “Greg’s mother apparently can’t make it to the funeral,” Jenny warns. “Something about the old man.”

  Greg is chewing on his thumbnail, a dead giveaway that his mother is bulldozing her will through yet another conversation. On one of his about-turns, Greg sees me staring at him, waiting for him to stand up to her. This is the moment. You can do it! Tell her: tell her that her granddaughter is dead and if she had a kind bone in her body she’d get it on a plane and fly it over here.

  I wait.

  Greg turns from my scowl and mumbles, “I know, Mother. It’s okay.”

  I head upstairs, walk into Cleo’s room, reach up to the shelf for the teddy bear box, and throw it in the trash. In my bedroom I retrieve from my purse the envelope with Cleo’s curl. The lone curl in my hand, weightless as a dandelion tuft, is so unlike my dark, heavy hair. Hair that used to fall to my waist when it wasn’t tied up in a ponytail, hair that now lies in a Ziploc bag in the bottom of Greg’s sock drawer. From it, I get a strand and put it in the envelope with Cleo’s.

  I wonder if there are other reasons why women cut their hair themselves. Reasons that are different from the one that compelled me that last morning of our summer vacation. Waking up to the great divide that had come to characterize our marriage, I felt an androgynous desperation that morning. Invisible and undesirable, I was far from the happily-ever-after ending into which bridal couples are supposed to step. While Greg and Cleo were peering into rock pools outside our hotel room, I peered at my aging face and wilting hairdo. I was beginning to look like my mother. Something had to be done. I found the craft scissors Cleo and I had used to make collages the day before and returned to my post in front of the mirror. Pulling my disheveled ponytail to one side for a clearer view, I hacked and hacked until the whole thing came off in one butchered bushel. Look at me now, I wanted to shout. You can’t ignore me now!

  There was a feeling of exhilaration the moment those two feet of matted hair fell to the floor, as though I had shed the deadweight of a decade. “Oh, babe,” Greg said sadly when he and Cleo returned from the beach. “What have you done?”

  I couldn’t help but grin. “I like it,” I said, insolent and panicky both.

  “What did you do that for?” His frown was mixed with concern.

  I could not remember my rehearsed answer. It had something to do with wanting to make a change, not just to myself but to us. My steady argument, the calm voice of reason, was suddenly mist on a cool morning, and all I could picture was a portrait of me and Greg with the faces of Louise and Harry Spenser. Greg wasn’t the vengeful, brutal Harry, to be sure, but I could not shake the sense that I was morphing into my mother, right down to her neglected fingernails and low expectations. I had cut my hair to put up a fight. It seemed silly to say I was fighting for my mother, that I was fighting from becoming her too. I just could not think, when my husband was asking me about hair, how I was supposed to answer him about marriage and how, without any intention on anyone’s behalf, it had become so disappointing.

  “I like it!” Cleo declared. “Cut mine, Mommy,” she said, reaching round for that tiny curl.

  “Darling,” I told her, “princesses have hair like yours; it’s too perfect to cut.”

  I set the envelope in my treasure chest where I stashed yesterday’s card so Greg would not inadvertently read it, thinking it a message of condolence only to find another man’s profession of love to the preacher’s wife. Instead of rereading it, I reach for my mother’s old airmail letters, bundled together with an elastic band. From the stack I pull the top one, her last one, and scan it for clues. There are twenty letters, one written every week from the time I left South Africa till the time she died, and ever since, I have always wondered if she knew she was dying, if she knew this was to be her last goodbye.

  She writes of the irises blooming, the apricot tree outside my bedroom window covered with silky buds, the neighborhood gleaming from spring cleaning. She mentions how her old friend Muriel came by to help her spruce up the house the week after my father’s funeral (It was good that you didn’t come). They rearranged furniture, hung new curtains in the kitchen, put up some new pictures. There is a wish for a happy Thanksgiving—what was to be my first (I never could get you to eat turkey at Christmas—maybe American turkeys taste better). And then two paragraphs—one of regret, the other of advice—with barely a space between them. I wish there had been more happy times in our family,
she penned. I wish more than anything that this last year had turned out different. However, things do all turn out for the best, my girl. I never used to believe that, but I do now. Don’t ever let life get the better of you. Sometimes it dishes out bitter stuff, but as they say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I hope you will remember that. She ends by writing she is proud of me and she loves me (with all my heart).

  Rhiaan knocks and enters my bedroom with two mugs of tea.

  “What’s all this?” he asks, sitting on the corner of the bed.

  “Oh, one of Mom’s old letters. I’ve often wondered if she knew she was going to die . . . What do you think?”

  “It’s possible, I suppose, but not likely.”

  I go on. “There’s this one line that puzzles me, like she had a total change of heart. She says things always turn out for the best. What were her letters to you about?”

  “She wrote mostly about Dad and how she pitied him because he had missed out on so much of my life, so many of the good things. I read them every now and then, when I need some inspiration. It was her greatest gift to me—that she could only ever see promise in me. Isn’t that how all mothers see?” he asks.

  I nod. “Last week Cleo told me she wanted to be a mother when she grew up. She wanted to have babies, ‘possibly five,’ she said. And I was so looking forward to the day when I could watch her deliver them, and then love them one by one. And yes, as you say, see in them all their promise. I can’t bear it, that she’s gone and I’m left with nothing. Nothing. Just one little curl.” I retrieve from the coin envelope her golden tuft. “See this? It’s all I have of her. And to think it was dead long before she was.”

  “There,” he says, holding me. “There now.”

  “The worst part is that I didn’t get to say goodbye to her. I didn’t get to tell her how proud I was and how much I loved her and to say sorry for all the times I yelled at her for not packing up her toys.”

  After a while, he pulls from his pocket a pen.

  “Why don’t you write her a letter and tell her all that,” he suggests.

  When Rhiaan leaves, I get off the bed and move to the writing desk at the window. I pull out the drawer with my stationery and extract a crisp blank page. Dear Cleo, I begin, and the words begin to flow. When I am done, I retrace my words to my daughter, and notice that wedged between the lines of guilt and grief is my own brief admission of a broken vow. So I write a second letter, this time to the writer of the card.

  JENNY DRIVES RHIAAN and me to West Park Funeral Home a little before five o’clock in the middle of rush-hour traffic. If Mrs. Avery is surprised to see me return after a few short hours, she does not let on. She ushers us into the same room and exits as Jenny begins to wail. Rhiaan puts an arm around her shoulder without ever taking his eyes from Cleo’s face. She bends down and kisses Cleo’s forehead, lingering there as though she were inhaling that sweet baby smell one last time.

  After Rhiaan escorts her out, I pull from my purse the letter I have written for Cleo, folded into a square. I lift up her hands just enough to slide the note on her breast beneath them.

  “Goodbye, sweet girl,” I whisper. “I am going to miss you so much.” Mrs. Avery shakes my hand on the way out and I tell her that there will be no more visitors for Cleo, that they may close the casket. We step out of the catacombs, past the bustling weekend trade of painted flesh and stilettoed heels, and into an endless stretch of Good Fridays. On the way to the car, we pass a mailbox in which I deposit the second letter, the one to the man who imagines himself in love with me.

  FIVE

  It is the phone that wakes us, piercing the dark with its insistent shrill. When I push Pilgrim off my legs and turn over to look at the digital alarm, it reads 5:15. My heart pounds because I imagine it is someone calling to tell me my mother has died. But then awake, I remember that that nightmare is over and another is about to begin. Today is Saturday, the day of the funeral. Someone in another room answers. Somebody from the mainland calling, no doubt, someone who doesn’t know the time difference.

  Saturdays used to be for getting up late and having pancakes soggy with syrup, and then taking two hours to pack a picnic and get ready to go to the beach. Saturdays were for wading out in the shallows with all the other mothers and their toddlers, learning to share the sand bucket and leftover sand castles. Saturdays were for taking long naps, still salty from the seawater, and for waking up to sunburned shoulders and a sandy bottom.

  On those rare Saturdays when it rained all day over the hills of Honolulu, Cleo and I stayed inside and watched Sesame Street videos back-to-back and built tents out of stale-smelling patchwork quilts. Saturday dinners were leftovers or takeouts, whichever was easiest. And each Saturday rolled on by, one after the next, without special acknowledgment of their extraordinary power.

  Saturday. Sabbath. (When even the closest did not return to the tomb.) We were good at observing the Sabbath, Cleo and I. Not Greg. If he wasn’t conducting a wedding, he was holed up in his office, putting the last touches to his Sunday sermon. Occasionally I would remind my husband that for all his fervent commitment to Christ, he was violating the Fourth Commandment. Arguing that the Sabbath was a workday for him, he compromised by taking Fridays off. So he would, for a few weeks, clear his calendar of meetings and spend Fridays with Cleo, sometimes picking me up from work for a quick midday meal at Buster’s. “Good Fridays,” Cleo called them, delighting in having her father to herself. For her, Saturday would come all too soon, as it does for me now.

  Frank Tucker, the church’s lay leader and Greg’s closest ally in the church battles, has come to drive us to the church in his ugly brown Cadillac. It is the first time I have seen him in long pants and lace-up shoes, and with his sailor’s windswept gray hair neatly pressed into place. There had been talk of a limousine, but, thankfully, Greg had declined. A hideous idea.

  It is overcast again today but not raining, as if the sky were holding its breath. The peaks of the Ko’olau Range are blanketed with dark clouds, and I am reminded of Cape Town’s Table Mountain and its foggy tablecloth that frequently drapes over it. There is no pretense in the streets of Honolulu today—even the plumeria trees do little to draw attention from the mounds of trash stacked along the sidewalks. Bits and pieces of people’s living rooms, bedrooms, basements, sit out on the curb rusting or rotting away, on display. High-density living has taught us there are no secrets; there is no use putting on airs. It’s okay, then, to put out the corduroy recliner Uncle Kimo died in or the baby’s metal crib, the cheap toys bought from someone else’s garage sale. You jam people in tight enough and soon it’s even okay to hang wet underwear from balconies as though they were Christmas garlands.

  With its blazing poinciana trees, the old church seems almost regal until a closer look reveals the peeling plaster, the rusty sign, the gum-pocked sidewalk. The car pulls up in front of the church and Frank opens my door, gives me a quick, crushing hug when I step out, and then drives to the basement parking lot. Greg finds my hand and leads me up the stairs and into the cavernous, nauseatingly fragrant space that is Makiki United Methodist Church.

  Jenny enters from the side door with a Tupperware box and heads to the reception table to set up the display. Someone has already erected a framed picture of Cleo and draped around it a purple orchid lei. It was my idea to arrive this early—before the casket, before the crowd—but when I see the big floral arrangements and the center table at the chancel, I know it is a mistake.

  “Greg,” I say, feeling my stomach turn itself inside out, “let’s go wait in your office.”

  The church offices are located adjacent to the sanctuary, above the fellowship hall on the second floor. Greg opens the door and flicks a switch so that the air conditioner starts to hum. He leaves the lights off and opens the blinds enough to cast long, horizontal shadows on the carpet. I lie down on the couch, and he sits in the small chair next to me. On the table is his grandfather’s Bible, which he picks
up, flipping through its skin-thin pages. He begins to read aloud, sputtering as though something were lodged in his throat, and I do not have the will to stop him:

  “Hear my prayer, O Lord; let my cry come to thee!

  Do not hide thy face from me in the day of my distress!

  Incline thy ear to me;

  Answer me speedily in the day when I call!

  For my days pass away like smoke,

  And my bones burn like a furnace.

  My heart is smitten like grass, and withered;

  I forget to eat my bread.

  Because of my loud groaning my bones cleave to my flesh.

  I am like a vulture of the wilderness, like an owl of the waste places;

  I lie awake, I am a lonely bird on the housetop.

  My days are like an evening shadow; I wither away like grass.”

  The moment he reads the “But,” I know what is coming, and I lift my hand to cut him off. He does not see it. “But thou, O Lord,” he reads, “art enthroned forever.”

  I say abruptly, “Stop. Please.” Greg glances at me briefly, then reads on silently to himself while I picture myself, wings tucked tight, perched high up on a rooftop overlooking a smoggy city. The dry wind screeches over the chimney pots and threatens to topple me over. The nest and the baby bird have long since been blown away. I am a lonely bird; I am a lonely bird.

  AND NOW the warm trade winds blow through the church, stirring not feathers but flyaway hairdos. One woman has the gall to wear a hat, her fingers becoming clothespins. Does she think she is attending a tea party, perhaps? I see when she tilts her head against the breeze that it is Buella Baxter from the magazine. Buella, whose rebellion against her southern upbringing brought her to the islands two decades ago, will relinquish neither her accent nor her knack for making everyone else feel underdressed, even in a church that, I would be willing to bet, she has not stepped in since her last wedding. Buella, married three times, is mother to none. “Can’t stand the little urchins!” she is fond of announcing. “Can’t see what all the fuss is about,” she said when our boss, after a decade of trying to conceive, got pregnant. Without an ounce of humor, Buella sent the poor woman a condolence card and boycotted the baby shower the editorial staff threw for her. Most days we laughed off Buella’s outrageousness, and when it became unbearably insensitive one of us would tell her and she’d spit a cuss and be done with it.