I believe that was the only phrase that jarred me that afternoon; it was strange to hear such a stately, aristocratic woman swear like a sailor. I have found many women down the years who have difficulty with Hemingway, a man’s writer for sure, but none had ever articulated this sharp insight. I considered her comment. Hemingway was an alpha male, fascinated with blood sport, and for a woman this may be baffling. His was an otherness she could better come to terms with in bed.
“Isn’t it strange how he validated each place he lived: Spain, Cuba, even bloodless Florida,” said Nora.
“Why bloodless?” I asked, but I thought I sensed what she meant.
“A place where Americans go to be warm. They sit inside their calm air-conditioned homes and observe that the world beyond their windows is well. That was all Key West was till it became his home.”
The three of us continued, talking of land and sea, about life and men, each thought an item on a hugely important agenda of the world. Not a word was wasted, but weighed and measured in a conversation that mattered, whether broodingly and philosophically by Ernest, or seductively and symbolically by Nora. They drank gin and tonics and I sipped short rum and gingers. What an afternoon. It wasn’t till I sat down to macaroni pie on the long homemade table in a small but high-ceilinged dining room under a steep shingled roof crossed by sturdy beams of wood, that I tackled the reason for my mission. I had no sense that I had bided my time, but now I had a heightened sense of purpose. Before I could think of a way to mention my siren, Nora preempted me.
“Our daughter is at the university. First year.”
“Granddaughter,” Ernest corrected her softly.
“I know.” I felt the blood flush my cheeks. “The mysterious Lethe.”
They looked at each other in surprise.
“Mysterious? Why?” Ernest calmly replaced his fork and looked up at me while he chewed.
I told them I had met her, about her fall and my visits to the hospital.
“Oh yes, an awful fall …” Nora lowered her voice to a suitable hush of tragedy. “I’d no idea that was you! Ernest, this is the kind young man …”
So Lethe had mentioned me.
Nora described her granddaughter as under a lot of pressure, as if this was to explain the fall or perhaps whatever she thought I meant about her being mysterious.
“I never see her around. Is she feeling better?”
Nora looked at Ernest, but he continued eating.
“Her back’s giving her trouble, but she does go to classes.” I was sensing a defensiveness on Nora’s part.
“I’m third year and I don’t take her classes, but I haven’t seen her on campus recently.”
“She may look like a scatterbrain, but she is very talented. She writes poetry!”
“She told me,” I said
Nora left the table, crossed the verandah, and I heard her climb the stairs. I thought how profoundly near and comforting her steps must be for Ernest in the creaks of this lonely little wooden house. She returned with a letter removed from its envelope and unfolded. She sat and proceeded to read a poem, projecting it sentimentally, making it sound heartfelt with youthful anxiety.
I took the page from her when she finished reading, looked for the phrase that had caught my attention. “On the wall of my eternities your silhouette stands like clouds on twilight …”
I read it aloud, savouring something raw and original.
“That’s a hell of a line for a slip of a girl.” I was surprised.
Nora looked vindicated, drew back her shoulders and straightened in her chair.
I looked at Ernest.
“Not many adjectives or adverbs. That’s good,” I said.
Ernest leaned across, hand extended for the page. He took it, and read through his grimy glasses. He said, “Silhouette is spelled wrong.”
He placed the poem on the table in front of his wife. Artistic endeavours were rightly her domain. “She needs to edit.”
Nora looked offended. He turned to me, offering an explanation.
“Lethe is bright, but she needs to be disciplined about her work. About everything.” It was clear Nora would be the one to indulge her granddaughter, to let go the reins, to watch where she freely galloped.
And then I heard about him. The boyfriend.
“Her very nice young man,” Nora described, with her eyebrows raised rather sadly as she neatly folded her soft white napkin, offering an explanation. He was a local football star, son of a very fine tailor, that Lethe never took part in anything extracurricular on campus. Did Nora sense or already know I was completely compelled by her enigmatic granddaughter? Any sympathy was for the victim suitor, whoever he was, and not for me, though maybe that was my mistaken hubris? I sensed Nora was used to fending off Lethe’s suitors. Why was I not surprised? I knew she was a heartbreaker.
“He was here alone last weekend. He complained she has given him an ulcer.” Nora laughed as though silently miming a laugh — throwing her head back with a toss, her light, mischievous eyes suddenly shining through their indeterminate light colour. “Now, really!”
“Sorry to hear that,” I said.
“What?” Ernest seemed slightly hard of hearing, but I suspected his sharp mind had already figured out it wasn’t the young man’s ulcer I regretted.
“I am sorry to hear she’s ‘taken.’”
Then I don’t know why I said it — I was only twenty-two and idealistic, this young girl had become my quest, and I was certain nothing would shake my determination to make Lethe mine, to be what she didn’t know she deserved but deserved, to be Ernest to her Nora — but I said it. Here he was, this ancient, proud and wounded lion who would leave the world at peace only if he knew his fidgety granddaughter, writer of a rather clumsy, odd but uniquely vivid image, this kernel of Ernest’s hope and Nora’s promise, would be taken care of. I showed my hand, albeit after four rum and gingers, many hours of high altitude, and the rarified conversation with these unusual people, embracing the hours of Nora’s fine example of high drama.
“I’m going to win her heart,” I promised, as though they’d asked me to.
the black peacock
LETHE
“Did Alex help with the book?”
I might have imagined it, a hint of jealousy. Daniel and I were in the library, and he was rifling through papers, trying to locate a crib sheet he’d made of the relevant dates of Ernest’s biography, dates he’d organized for his book, dates he wanted to check for the veracity of my references now. I was giving a therapeutic daily dusting of books, therapeutic for the books and for me, working my way from the left-hand bottom corner, a task that should take me another seventeen years at the rate I was going.
“Of course. He’s a journalist. He knocked it into shape.”
Daniel continued his rummage for dates, for notes, for anything he could find I might add or that could be of help.
I never thought about Daniel when I wrote the manuscript on Ernest.
I never thought about Alex.
I never thought about Jacob, who had just heard his diagnosis of cancer.
I worked day and night for a year, sitting for need of comfort in the white toweling housecoat Alex had given me after Nora died, and I wrote. I started as far back as the lap of youth when Ernest and Nora had stood like tall trees in my life at Erehwemos. Writing in Montreal, with the seasons passing outside my window, I grew up chapter by chapter in the changing light from autumn’s calming gaze, the black squirrels’ fleeting tails no more than a floater at the corner of my eye, till ambushed by winter and, against a grey wall of tethered light, I saw the neighbours’ windows alight through the empty trees. I was a teenager by spring, the irreverent sun wandering into my room, snooping curiously like a visiting grandchild, me some forty years earlier. By summer in light that warmed rather than brightened, ne
ver like the indignant sun of the Caribbean, I had come full circle.
Alex brought me food. He bought me music — music I remembered from childhood on the old gramophone, Bach and Beethoven, Chopin and Shostakovich, Mahler, Bartók. The sopranos Callas and Price. Marion Anderson. Paul Robeson. The records played through the rooms of my world again. On weekends Alex would read through my work and we’d fight when he suggested changes — knowing I’d make them — and I glowed when he’d admire a turn of phrase with an exclamation mark.
I worked. From three each morning, when there was no world at all beyond my room, drinking coffee grown cold, postponing trips to the bathroom, forgetting to clean my teeth, forgetting to bathe.
I was back in Erehwemos and discovered that the dead don’t die till we who must carry them die too. When I couldn’t go further, I’d put my characters to bed. At night I’d believe I’d swallowed them. I had carried those mountains through many years, a small cast of characters, their stories now rushing back to me. Small things like the black bristles with their white tips on the blue Addis I’d use to brush Ernest’s hair; the smell of the kerosene lamps; the brump-brump on clean linen and clothes, of small black irons wiped clean of stove ash; or the great black dog, Woe, thumping his tail on the wooden verandah as we’d pass; the tree tomatoes like oval Christmas baubles, the small, tart green apples and the bilberries; the furry roseapples, fine lace handkerchief of the fruit family. I could hear Ernest’s music through the pines, and Nora at the side of the hill bellowing her lines to the phantoms of mist, her audience in the valleys below, checking the script in her hand on an intake of breath.
“If I come home and see you one more time in that damn housecoat I’m leaving.”
I had just about finished my first draft when Alex said this. He was worn out with waiting. Other than his feedback on my work, I don’t think I’d noticed him once for the entire year until he issued that ultimatum. He had nothing to do with the world in my mind or the world on my page. I am a child when I write, as if in creating I am owed all and owe nothing. I demand nurturing. If abandoned I will find a way to get by. I found the compulsion as binding as I did the long months of carrying my children; they were non-negotiable and unstoppable.
I was exhausted and appreciated no point of view but those of my characters and my own.
Alex and I decided to part. It was angry and awkward. I felt I had grown up and he hadn’t noticed. In reliving my childhood, I had tenderly reconstructed Ernest and Nora, and settled the motherless child in me that wouldn’t sleep all those years. If Alex couldn’t understand that, then he couldn’t understand anything.
I was impetuous and short-sighted. Maybe I hadn’t grown up at all.
I called my book Erehwemos, packed the manuscript, cut three inches off my hair, threw away my housecoat, and returned to Jacob who was dying in Jamaica.
DANIEL
There would be no easy road for me with Lethe. I tried everything in my power. When I invited her to campus fetes, she’d promise “I’ll try,” and I’d sit there all night nursing a single Red Stripe beer so I’d have enough money to buy her a drink or two, but she wouldn’t show up. I even resorted to inviting Blanca, asking her to bring Lethe along. The omnipresent Blanca was Lethe’s indomitable shadow round the Ring Road. She escorted her everywhere — the pool, the soda fountain — striding beside her like a governess, firm, lecturing, precise. She’d find a table for two, fetch Lethe her milkshake as Lethe sat nervously picking at the cuticles of her thin, pretty fingers.
Blanca turned up alone that night, mouthing regret, but I could see the ill-concealed smirk on her thin, resilient peasant mouth. She enjoyed my disappointment and was determined to receive whatever was owed her by my invitation. I couldn’t understand their relationship; why on earth were they friends? How could a granddaughter of Ernest and Nora Strong be best friends with someone who proudly declared her favourite book was Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged?
“She’s brilliant. She’s scientific,” Lethe declared in awe.
“The difference between art and science is you don’t have to know everything. Their quest is to know all, ours is to interpret the unknown.” I was still young enough for these certainties.
But everything about Lethe seemed contrary and inexplicable. She was indeed the unknowable.
I invited her to movies. I’d borrow Timmy’s car, clean it myself, and when I’d go to pick her up she would have invariably left campus, a note of excuse left for me at the porter’s lodge. Sometimes not even that. I grew to hate that guy in his silly white uniform! She stood me up so many times it stopped hurting after a while. Lethe was Lethe. If I had told her that she wounded me, she would have wounded me more. Her excuse was usually her back. But it’s not as though she was ailing up there in her Seacole bed; she was gone with her lover in his white Cortina.
I tried to get her to swim with me at the pool, saying it was good exercise for her back, but she didn’t care for water, she didn’t like to get her hair wet. When I suggested she wear a cap she yelled at me so loudly a couple of students turned around in the soda fountain to see if she was being attacked.
But she would walk with me on campus. We must have walked enough to cross a continent. It was my only opportunity to talk with her, to have her to myself, to sit with her when she’d sit beneath some tree to rest her back, curling up like a child against me as I sat there, pinned and uncomfortable, legs outstretched and cramping, to provide a hammock of support for my love. I think by then she’d moved on to tamarind balls, which she’d produced from a pocket. I never saw her sit and finish a meal; she preferred to carry a snack.
She was full of her stories — animals in her life — one who’d become sick and had been taken away to be put down, but miraculously found his way back home. The cow that chased her up the plum tree and stood, waiting below for a whole day. The horse who threw her when she went to ride on an obsolete race track, remembering its glory days. Her illnesses — the single kidney she said was born with, the chicken pox scar in her head that gave her fits, the appendectomy she faked. Her horoscopes. Her magic. The Ouija board that warned her each time Jacob fell in love. The straight flushes her dead mother dealt her. The calabash that hung from the wall and spun by itself when someone was going to die.
Who knew what was truth and what was imagination? I listened to them all, suspending skepticism, relishing her sense of wonder at the mystery of it all.
But not for a minute did Lethe consider me her love. I only had to introduce the word and she would back away like a cow from a gate, rise as I tried to stroke her hair, find her balance, brace her waist, and march away.
Nora saw herself in her granddaughter. She sensed the artist in Lethe. Beneath a brittle surface, I saw in Lethe a more tender, more vulnerable person — though she showed me neither tenderness nor vulnerability. Nora was a force. I had to keep her in my peripheral view so I could focus on Ernest. She was a gorgeous shrew behind a vivacious, yet enigmatically changing mask. She had the power of the accomplished, yet the yearning that reflects the endless ambition of any artist — the sense of quest. Beside her I could feel Ernest shrinking, drawing away from her limelight, from a world she would never stop conquering. This philosopher, all his thought, all he had imagined and conceived for a better world, planned, lost and grieved, cried out to be written in a book. Whatever slim essays he’d once written were left like a cryptic recipe, a ribbon of dna imprinting only the essence of his universe of thoughts. Hopefully his wisdom was buried in the mind of some of his students. But his power had been frittered away through teaching, extemporaneous lectures and ad-libbed speeches, the notes for each a confetti of squandered moments and thoughts. He needed the universe of his mind brought back to life.
Just by the expression on her face Nora would say, “Oh dear — my poor Ernest.”
“There is something unhealthy in how Nora makes a wounded thing of those she lov
es,” I once said to Lethe on one of our many walks.
She cooed her response, “We too are her birds with broken wings.”
Lethe, usually a contrarian, seemed to imbibe Nora’s caricatures without question, mostly the one she created of Jacob.
I discovered there’s no way of telling the story of Lethe without the reality of her father Jacob. At first I was not fully aware of him, as she seldom spoke of him and she always “went home” to Ernest and Nora, but I would discover father and daughter were stars sparking off the same source of light in the family universe, as surely connected as siblings.
Nora told me that Lethe had a difficult relationship with Jacob. Somehow I have always suspected Nora was mixed in with that. She acted as if Lethe was her daughter. She once regretfully told me she’d often suggested to Jacob that if he married and had a daughter he should “then divorce his wife and give the child to me. And look what I brought on him!”
For this was the outcome when Lethe’s mother died in England. Lethe was only a few months old when Jacob returned with her to Jamaica. Nora described her granddaughter as traumatized on arrival and clinging desperately to her father, but the story doesn’t make a lot of sense. Surely a baby is hardly conscious, just tired or hungry. But in life things happen, and they become the norm. The loss of a mother is a cosmic loss, but at two days or two months old the baby doesn’t really know, does she? She is left at the mercy of the caregivers who make her life their work, which doesn’t explain a lifetime of pain. Nora had pegged Lethe and me as damaged motherless survivors. I hoped it would work to my advantage, that she would see us as possibilities for each other’s salvation.
But these were just disembodied conversations, with Nora probably feeling sorry for me. She’d fill me with small nuggets I would tuck away, until one day around at Jacob’s house I saw the Strongs as a family, all together for the first time.
The Black Peacock Page 6