Jacob had fixed up a small flat with its own entrance for Ernest and Nora in the basement of his home, so they had somewhere to stay when they came to Kingston. My pretext for visiting Ernest was trying to convince him to write a memoir, or allowing me to help him write one. I admit to also going round in the hope of a plate of good food. Living under reduced circumstances, they still hired an excellent cook. Ernest’s story, based on his great intellect and enormous experience, reflected his musings on the twentieth century from a Caribbean perspective, and the nascent independence movements across the British Empire since the First World War. He wasn’t disinterested, but he was a tired man, and though I knew he listened, he was far from making up his mind about a book.
When I arrived that day, Lethe was there. Ernest was at a small, round dinner table near the tiny kitchenette, and Lethe was gently and firmly brushing his hair. I had never thought of Ernest as a man who would sit to have his hair brushed, and it never occurred to me that Lethe was willing to nurture anyone. My entrance had interrupted the idyllic scene. Ernest thanked her and softly pushed her off. Nora was on the patio, talking to a potter whom she introduced to me enthusiastically, hoping I’d draw Ernest out to sit with them. I opted to sit inside with Ernest and talk. Lethe roved to and fro, mostly whispering on the phone — probably to Mr. Cortina — the long cord trailing, smoking her ever-present Matterhorn cigarettes and flicking ash into a different potted plant each time she turned, acknowledging Ernest with a small wave or passing sweetness. Lethe appeared to be one step away from the reality of what she intended, so now she seemed to be play-acting her phone call. This she’d got from Nora, a sense that life’s experiences should be conceived and carefully choreographed.
While totally a part of what we said to each other, Ernest’s eyes followed Lethe. I saw she was a source of happiness for him.
As the tableau settled into its own harmony, Jacob walked in. Jacob, father of my Lethe. In an instant Lethe stopped pacing and changed direction, so that she faced in upon his entry. What a transformation! Never before had I seen such utter love, such enchantment on that small face. It was lit from within. She was radiant, and for the first time beautiful. Her happiness was brighter, more remark-able than the thick black lines around her eyes; a face that must conspire with its angels and demons to locate its harmony. There it was. Utter joy. Only then did I turn and see her father.
Jacob, the man I knew to be my real competition. I had seen his picture in newspapers, but nothing prepared me for this man, at least six-foot-four, with charisma that I had never felt before. He was utterly charming, not in a crafted way, but a naturally polite and intuitively polished man whose presence rearranged the room like a magnet would shards. He too smoked. Nora fawned, Ernest withdrew, and Lethe was eager as I’d never seen her before. The potter literally disappeared, his departure receding beyond this intense circle of light.
Jacob hugged his mother and for a second I was reminded of an ex-wife holding on too long, he pulling just so slightly away. Lethe chucked the phone onto its cradle with a hasty “Call-you-back” and flew to Jacob as though she’d never hurt her back. He hugged her, gently disengaging her as he had his mother, first patting her gently to reassure her.
“Dad,” he said, as he looked at Ernest, but in that “Dad” was a bond, so much patience and time exchanged between them, so much teaching and learning, so many examples set and so many subtle expressions of sympathy and understanding, kept safe from Nora’s attention. I felt a fleeting moment of envy for their close relationship.
This meeting allowed me into the family circle. It was brief, as Jacob was just checking on Ernest and Nora, having to attend a meeting and then dinner. He and his father talked about a current national issue that I can’t remember. Lethe hovered, trying to find an opening to ask about school or was it money or shoes or time off from classes to go somewhere. She blew smoke above his head that he kept swiping at as it circled his face, somehow hers affected him more than his own; she flirted, she cajoled, using all her wiles in that short opening to win his attention, keep him there, keep him anywhere she could pin him down. But all she got was, “Darling, we’ll talk about it later,” as he got up to leave.
I saw the afternoon fade from her. She followed him out. I could hear her chatting up the path behind him.
“He never has time for her.” Nora shook her head sadly and looked at Ernest. Ernest seemed uncomfortable, as if he was expected to sigh and didn’t. It was a telling moment, and I sensed a rift between them concerning Lethe.
On her return she was dejected Lethe again. Limping, edgy, picking her fingers, restless, distracted, disenchanted, searching for her pack cigarettes or tamarind balls.
Whoever it had been on the phone with her, she didn’t call him back.
the black peacock
LETHE
I said, “I think Jacob killed himself.” We were in the water where the rocks formed a natural cove.
Daniel did his work for the morning while I read and brooded. I hadn’t the heart to tell him that was all I felt I could do, that taking this blind journey had been an act of desperate faith — my only one. I couldn’t think about another plan. Now the sun had come out and Daniel convinced me to swim. We climbed down the steep steps beyond the windmill, into a pool so endlessly blue, so darkly, sleekly opaque, its intake of light folded over and over, tumbling deep and eternally wet into its unfathomable belly, its womb and tomb. It was cut off from the sea except for a small opening, and the water was placid, shifted by the nudges of each exterior wave. It wasn’t as cold as I’d feared, and Daniel had lured me in by beckoning to me over and over, as Jacob had done from a wild sea when I was a child.
My mood was a bit like the water and the trees, endlessly bent on a journey that no longer had anything to do with anything but here in my head, its own sentence of memory and imagining. It was an interminable loneliness that over the years I had learned to distance myself from, but with which I was now irrevocably reunited. Perhaps that’s where we all begin. And funny thing — losing Jacob was new, but I could still remember the sorrow from somewhere, as if it had always been happening, I could see it coming and see it leaving to return. It was like some dreaded relative one hopes won’t come to visit.
Daniel was the part of my life that had survived. As he held me in the water I wanted to cry but was able to fight it. Tears are like a payment we make when we expect comfort or sympathy, some relief in return. What I felt had no currency of tears. We crouched there, stroking the water and treading, my arms wrapped around Daniel’s huge soft shoulders, my wet hair sticking to me and him like seaweed each time we swayed, till I no longer felt solid, no longer felt responsible, and the automatic treading of water was a simple thing to do.
“Life’s really all about death,” he said.
“You mean it’s all an allegory?”
Othello was standing guard above on the rocks, his neck jerking back and forth, looking as though he wasn’t sure what to do next.
“A peahen died this morning. Aesop found it under the Samaans. I saw him dig a small grave, wrap the bird in a towel, and cradle it gently in his arms as he laid it to rest.” Daniel pulled a strand of hair back from my face.
Were we all like the peacocks sleeping on a limb of the tree of life, waiting to fall and wake?
“Maybe Jacob took the highest limb that night knowing the fall would be too great for him to survive.”
It was the first time I had admitted that thought out loud.
The last night when Jacob fell asleep he had been as okay as he was on any other night that month. I’d turned off the light, and sometime later I noticed the light was on again, shining under my door from across the hall. I waited and saw it turn off shortly after. It would later occur to me that from the small bedside table drawer with its pharmacy of prescriptions he could have taken anything. Perhaps he planned this all along.
&nb
sp; “Would that be so terrible?” Daniel spoke with such sudden passion I knew I’d touched a nerve. “We mustn’t be martyrs. The obscenity is pain. I have always felt it’s medieval, this hanging on to be what, brave? Holy? It’s gruesome vanity.”
I had wanted him to live forever.
“Would you turn out the light if you knew you were waiting to die?”
“Probably not,” he said, then went silent, allowing me to sort out my thoughts, holding me in the water as I reconnoitered, steer-ing us to make sure we didn’t drift to the mouth of our cave.
Jacob. I lost Jacob. He gave up. He abandoned life; abandoned me. The last slow rasps of such a life counted down in six months to a gentle pneumonia nobody noticed, not even Jacob. Walking pneu-monia, like a jogging partner. When it refused to get better after several antibiotics, more X-rays were done and there it was, all those years of smoking. Six months they said. They were right.
There is a rage in grief. Nothing is appropriate because death is not appropriate. Jacob’s death was not appropriate, not as far as I was concerned. Nothing prepared me for what happened to him or what would happen to me. I had never considered a time without our relentless engagement, me pursuing and he resisting, me yearning and him detaching, charming but always escaping my expectations, my longings and hopes. I’d wake every morning wondering if he’d call, wondering why he hadn’t, wondering what it meant if he did. This endless calculation on all but the one day of the year, my birthday, when he’d phone wherever I was and sing happy birthday in his swing low sweet chariot rumbly-tumbly baritone — so enigmatic and unclear, so baffling and elusive — but always so dear.
Until Jacob read my manuscript.
For the first time in his adult life he was virtually alone. I was staying with him, and had made up my mind I would see him through the illness. He had a girlfriend, but she kept as far away as possible from what she saw as drama. Although Jacob was hurt, he understood. Loving a man the way a man wants to be loved would be spoiled by the unattractive intimacies of illness. He could not have maintained his passion for a woman in similar circumstances. This was the rubbish I had learned not to listen to, part of a litany of excuses the romantic use for the rare coinage of being romantic. The romantic had given her his car and use of Erehwemos. I gathered she was there most of the time, often with her grown children and friends, getting on with her life.
But his comment opened up a question that had always gnawed at me.
“Why did my mother die?”
“In those days …” His voice trailed off.
“I know. In those days mothers died in childbirth.”
“No. She didn’t die in childbirth, Lethe. She died a month after that.”
“Died of what?”
“We never really knew. She never seemed to recover. A sort of septicemia I think.”
“So why did everyone lie?”
“No one lied. No one really said anything and you never asked before.”
It was true. I had always thought she died at my birth.
“Did you abandon Mummy?”
It felt so strange to say the word, as though borrowing some-thing that didn’t belong to me.
“No one abandoned anyone, nor have I ever abandoned you. But I found it hard to cope. I was young and she wasn’t rallying. But you made everything worthwhile — for both of us.”
“What did she call me? Lethe?”
He looked toward the ceiling as though there were prompting notes above his bed.
“Leah.” He smiled at the memory. “We talked about naming you Leah. In all the confusion she hadn’t christened you, and I changed it … just a little. I love the name Lethe.”
“Did she love me? Play with me?”
“Of course. She adored you.”
I’m not sure why knowing this made a difference but it did. It made me feel more defined, the product of conscious purpose. They must both have seen what was coming like a train approaching. They were both so young. Maybe for the first time I was conscious of how hard it must have been for him to lose her.
Jacob asked me to go up to Erehwemos to get some of his papers. Avoiding the house with the girlfriend, I went straight into Ernest’s simple mountain study, its empty glass doors staring out over the range that had inconceivably survived without him, pinewoods sighing, eucalyptus shuffling, bamboo still swaying, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. There sat Ernest’s desk painted in what I can only describe as a facile, silly colour, what as children we called “titty pink,” one of two colours used to define the difference between a girl and a boy, as though anything so subtle yet powerful, connectedly separate, could be defined by anything so rigidly simple. The sheer tragedy of Ernest’s whole life fell upon me like a pile of books from a toppled shelf. This great mind whose papers were all that was left, his ideas he had painstakingly written year after year on the simple, austere mahogany surface seemed desecrated. This icon, this symbol of care and wisdom and worth that attempted to create a vision for future generations, painted pink. I was staggered. Not just at the misunderstanding underlying this sacrilege, but that as his family we had not protected his memory.
Jacob had looked at me helplessly. “But Ernest’s dead, darling. What does he care?”
Daniel didn’t sympathize.
Jacob and I didn’t speak for a few days, and his health declined even further.
I had been told kindly but firmly by his oncologist that he wouldn’t and couldn’t pull through. It was a transformative six months as this elusive figure, this man who’d haunted my life was suddenly there with me in an absolute way. I planned his meals without interference. I saw to his medicines. I nursed him as time got shorter. As selfish as it seems, I was glad to have him at last to myself.
But it wasn’t the illness that brought us home. It was the book.
Each morning he would lift his eyes to greet me as if seeing me for the first time. We’d discuss what he’d read. He didn’t always agree, but was open to my interpretation of a life in which he too had grown up. In a way he’d found a sister and I’d found my father. It’s funny the things you can read and understand on the page that somehow never get said. In the evenings we’d eat supper together, and I’d organize friends to come by for a game of bridge.
“You really loved Ernest,” he said one night, lifting off the oxygen mask after a coughing fit. He’d grown thin, down to some basic minimum needed to survive, and each frail, unsteady, trembling movement took his complete concentration.
“Yes. I understood Ernest.” He’d let me understand him. I love you too I wanted to say, but we were grownups.
His shrunken arms beckoned me to hug him.
“I love you, Lethe. I’m getting to understand you too.” His emaciated fingers felt like feathers.
It was said for both of us.
And the following morning the great enigma that had always compelled my psyche was gone. I had no answers. This was the handsome, proud figure to whom I belonged, my surviving parent whose life I had watched, whose interest I had envied for taking his time from me, whose squabbles with his mother over fatherly involvement I’d navigated all my life, any minute with whom had always washed away the sand prints of any previous wave on any given day, and now he was gone.
I lost some basic movement that had become my accustomed rotation; his pull had been my gravity, my axis tilted toward this distant, inspiring sun responsible for my every season. As it stopped, surely I would spin off into oblivion.
But I didn’t. I just moved like a cat over ruins.
In the strange way life provides rescue and we confuse it for coincidence, Daniel called. Ten days later, after the funeral where Jacob’s girlfriend had dressed for the part looking brave and long-suffering, receiving sympathy and accolades like a noble widow, I left. Numb, disbelieving, incoherent, I was on a plane out of Kingston on my way to the only safe
harbour left to me — Daniel.
“He liked my book,” I said.
Scaring me, Daniel lifted me out of the water and threw me out at arm’s length, till he could see me without his glasses.
“But Lethe, this is not a catastrophe. It’s reason to rejoice!” He was smiling, showing his teeth in a rare moment, his pleasure usually appearing very private.
“I didn’t know he’d had a chance to read it. What a thing!”
His happiness now sent a ripple widening its circle across the pool.
The sun went out again, and the sky darkened pewter. Nature was there at every turn.
I left Daniel to have his swim, then climbed the bank to my towel, which I shook to toss around my shoulders, causing Othello to reverse and flap his wings, storming off in a huff.
Though cold, I felt clearer, like a window clean. Then the rain came down like a narrative our dialogue had only temporarily man-aged to interrupt. It wasn’t fanciful, playful, or torrential. It was like everything else in that strange place, sort of endlessly itself, soaking its way through even the thickest trees, as Daniel joined me to make our way back, I knew this was part of a rite of passage, stages of purging and dousing till I’d hardly see my own steps, till they would no longer matter.
“Have we ever walked together in the rain?”
No. I was sure we never had. I would never have chanced the rain and got my hair wet. And I couldn’t help wondering how strangely things had come to pass that I should find myself orphaned on an island with only extremities of nature, a windmill, peacocks, and Daniel for company.
“Like lovers,” he said embracing me under the towel as, yes, we walked back in the rain.
DANIEL
Then something glorious happened. Lethe kept a date with me. We went to the movies. Dr. Zhivago.
The Black Peacock Page 7