The next time I visited Erehwemos the calabash was still swinging its message.
Nora was staunch and wild-eyed, hanging on for dear life, consumed alternately by anger and sorrow.
Daniel, fellow traveller to Erehwemos, had pulled up anchor. He’d gone without a word to me. What few possessions he’d had he gave to Nora and Henny, taking with him only his special books and Ernest’s interviews and partial manuscript, as though shoring up the old man against total oblivion.
He’d left with his new wife for her native England.
Helen had left the mock-up of my manuscript — my poems opposite her drawings — each page dividing the text from the drawing with a sheet of ghostly tracing paper. For me, her drawings provided a welcome distraction from my poems. As if all that was left of an era was the diligent, patient, line-perfect spirit of Helen forgiving my sloppy literary attempts.
Bereft of mentor and editor, I printed the damn book anyway.
Now here we were, as though the decades had washed us up on an indifferent shore, and even the books we planned so seriously to write had lost their significance and been replaced. I had stolen Daniel’s theme, his hero and even his use of prose, while he had turned his awe, his fascination and fastidious mind to a sailor from a long-gone age.
Daniel didn’t say much. He sat, looking at Othello who, with Aesop gone, had wandered all the way along the cliff to where we sat, keeping a kind of vigil, walking out to the edge of the promontory to peruse the horizon like a worried parent at curfew. I kept reassuring him “Aesop will soon be back,” which he simply ignored coming from me. He didn’t settle down till he heard the zzzhhhuuuurrr of the ferry’s engine. And then he pretended to be unconcerned when Aesop disembarked and climbed the stairs. His was a practised indifference to Aesop’s homecoming.
“I still can’t think about it. She had tidied the house and arranged her belongings into piles each tagged with a name, her mother’s, her sister’s, mine. I got most of her clothes.”
“We are dangerous to love,” I added.
“No. We’re the strong ones. The strong have to do the grieving. You told me that.”
Daniel was cleaning his grimy glasses with the hem of his t-shirt. He held them up to the light, considering each lens one at a time.
“Maybe if she’d lived, she’d have married some mean-spirited European and had a miserable life.”
“Perhaps. But maybe she wouldn’t.”
DANIEL
I can’t remember the exact date of my return to Trinidad to visit my father and the aunts. It was shortly before I got married. I wanted to be there, for I had been deprived of the rich food of Carnival for too long. I had that nagging feeling that if I waited much longer I might not see them again.
Lethe began a restless pattern of travel that persisted. I saw little of her in her final year. She was always flying off with friends — Barbados, Bahamas. She graduated and took a job teaching English at a high school in Kingston, but would take off as soon as the school term ended. She was an “excellent teacher,” according to Nora, who saw her granddaughter only in superlatives. She’d got off to a good start as she loved her subject, and though not generally given to patience, she could be patient in the extreme when she wished to explain or persuade. Also an obsessive, especially about order, I knew first-hand she bossed around anyone she could. A classroom would be ideal for her. She was happiest when busy.
Out of touch with her, I was seeing Helen, whom Ernest and Nora had welcomed like family. Lethe had outgrown Mr. Cortina, but I knew she wasn’t interested in me as a partner. She had her own car and I believe she was sharing a flat with Blanca. From time to time I’d run into her at Nora’s with other versions of Mr. Cortina. She was still my friend in her tense, sometimes sustaining, sometimes draining way, turning to me when hurt or upset — usually with her father or Nora or both — though seldom taking my advice.
My project with Ernest had shifted subtly over time from my helping him to write his memoir to him helping me to write his biography. He thought both ideas self-serving. I had begun to tape my interviews with him. I collected his papers and writings. I began the preliminary research and notes necessary for the book. I never actually had his verbal blessing, but despite his reluctance I forged ahead, believing in the project. We had finally reached a stage where he felt it was inevitable. I think he was hoping it would get written without him. It was an ambitious task for a first book and I was constantly reminded by people with whom I spoke that I wasn’t a Jamaican, which personally I didn’t think had anything to do with writing a biography about a man whose qualities were human and whose contribution was both regional and universal. I was young and idealistic. He was an interesting Caribbean man and I wanted to tell his story.
Lethe wasn’t updated about the progress of the book at that stage, but not because I meant to keep it from her. I seldom saw her and assumed Nora or Ernest would have kept her apprised of all developments. Nor did I tell her about Helen or my intention to marry. Again, it was easier for me if I simply assumed Nora would take care of this matter. I only found out about Blanca years later when I returned to Jamaica. It’s impossible to imagine what that experience must have done to Lethe. Her attachment to Blanca was so very strong. It’s funny how we cherry-pick the information we share, by deliberately, conveniently, or inadvertently leaving each of us with a different and incomplete picture.
Even Nora’s recounting could not have conveyed what horror the break-in must have been for them both. But Lethe has an acute instinct for survival. No heroics, just get through, and, in this case, get out. I have often wondered whether this experience triggered her peripatetic wanderings beyond Jamaica, Lethe a little boat tossing about in a very rough sea, the storms largely, though not always, of her own making.
I’m not sure why Nora and Ernest kept us in the dark about each other. I have to think that keeping their silence reflected a deliberate wish not to upset or unsettle either of us. The fact was, we were apart and we’d have to make our way separately. They’d not make this harder or easier for us.
Nora spoke about Lethe’s various trips as if she were a child running away from home. She viewed Lethe’s first journey, after the death of her mother, as her middle passage: a dark voyage divorcing her granddaughter from her motherland and mother. I often wondered if Lethe’s mother may have committed suicide and that Lethe did not know. The details always seemed murky. Father and fatherland didn’t seem to add up in Nora’s calculations. Whether she interpreted Lethe’s meandering as an instinctive yearning for a past or escape from reality she’d not adapted to, I don’t know, it’s unclear. Possibly a bit of both? But it became clear to me over the years that Lethe lived in countries I considered the dullest on earth, choosing places she could never love. She always seemed half in the place where she was, and half in the move beyond, home being where she could never quite say.
Now it was Barbados. She was living there the Easter of my return. Easter in Trinidad meant Carnival. I sent her a letter inviting her to visit me next door, in Trinidad to meet the family. I didn’t hear back, and was surprised when I came in and my gentle aunt Gilda told me that my more verbose aunt, Verity, the letter-writer, telephone-and-doorbell-answerer, had a message for me.
She did indeed. With amused curiosity, she told me that a Lethe Strong had rung from Barbados and left a number. Was she any relation to Ernest Strong in Jamaica? She’d once heard him give a lecture on the radio.
I was surprised that Aunt Verity knew of Ernest Strong. Perhaps imagining my aunts too insular, though I knew Aunt Verrie read the papers and listened to the Rediffusion news. She would hand Aunt Gilly articles she felt worthy of her time, time normally filled with practical things — the sewing, the laundry, the grocery lists, the supervision of the cook and the cleaner, the laundress and the gardener — Gilly nudged while Verrie gave instructions.
With my father as
leep in his chair, I took the opportunity to make the forbidden long-distance call to Barbados, promising Verrie I would repay the expense if she would just hide the bill from my father. I was still a child in that house. When I heard her voice so small, so high and light, with what I knew was a jump of pleasure when she heard me, so out-of-breath and needy, it came flooding over me how much and how futilely I still yearned for Lethe. She was planning to come. Just two days. Could I pick her up at the airport?
But darling, come for Carnival.
Never. She was unequivocal. I knew there was no use arguing. We’d been through this over and over. She hated calypso music. As a Trinidadian, calypso was in my blood. In Jamaica traditional calypsos hadn’t evolved much since “Matilda” and “Brown Skin Gal.” Ska had blown away the cobwebs of mento and calypso for her Jamaican generation.
“Calypso is our Greek chorus!” I’d tell her.
“Ours is Toots and the Maytals!”
I had no answer for that.
She was the only person on earth whom I’d excuse so easily, but strangely I believed her. I could imagine her, in all the bright turmoil of carnival sound and pageantry fading away like a ghost.
Where could she stay? Yes, she would love to stay with us in the guest room. Did I think my aunts would like her? Would my father approve?
My father would be fine, although in truth I wasn’t entirely sure. Don’t be upset if he doesn’t make a fuss, I warned. He is old. He had always been old. He was old from the day my mother died. Still, I promised her my silent father, a complete mystery to me, would love her as I did.
With that she gave me her flight number — there was only one flight a day — and I assured her I’d be there to meet the plane and bring her home.
She called back twice after that. Once she asked what she should bring to wear, would she need a sweater? A sweater, for God’s sake! To Trinidad! Bring a bathing suit instead, woman! Would we have to go to parties? Would she need formal wear? She warned me she didn’t like going places where she didn’t know anyone. I told her I knew that — anonymity seemed to bewilder her — and I would take her only to see a few special people who were anxious to meet her. Then the day before she arrived she called, anxious to know if I would remember to pick her up. What should she bring as a gift? She could be bewilderingly middle-class.
She emerged out of customs, listing slowly across the arrivals hall, her heavy shoulder bag dragging her blouse unattractively sideways above a very tiny skirt. She was breathless with a story about a man in the seat beside her calling the stewardess because he was bothered by her smoke, and her surprise that the immigration officer recognized her surname. As always, she seemed a stranger in the world as she dumped the bag at my feet — a hideous carving of what appeared to be a green parrot sticking out. I gathered her up and hugged her tightly, wanting this nervous woman negotiating a lit cigarette as she embraced me, to be mine to keep. For just two days Lethe was back in my life.
We arrived home in time for tea. She handed the ghastly parrot to the aunts who generously admired it, placing it on the buffet. Auntie Gilly liked to bake. She’d made a jam roll. Lethe fell upon it with enthusiasm I’d never seen from her for any food. She rewarded the astonished Gilly over and over with lavish compliments and tried to tempt me with mouthfuls of cake. I’d never much liked sweets, enjoying more savoury taste. That was significant to Lethe. She had Nora’s tendency to find Freudian meaning that became phobia. My indifference to desserts, Nora once told me was the result of being orphaned. She had a friend whose mother, like mine, had died at his birth. His father blamed the unloved child, who did not have a sweet tooth. Nora’s interpretation was that the child felt he didn’t deserve the sweets. It had touched a nerve for though I never thought my father blamed me for our loss, his distance and silence made him an enigma that any doubt would fill.
Lethe snapped at me, sounding very Nora. “Oh! Stop being a foundling and eat your cake.” I watched my aunts’ reaction for fear they’d take offense. They’d been minding me for twenty-three years! But Gilly smiled through the compliments on her baking, so different from my disinterest in her greatest talent. And Verrie, who was ambivalent about the rightful place of people or their opinions, beamed at Lethe. Her eyes literally danced with amusement and she gave her tickled, tinkling, genteel laugh.
“Stop being a foundling!” She chirped the phrase with delight, and I knew at that moment, not understanding the mechanics of it, that Lethe had won a friend. Verity led the social agenda in our family, so that was that.
That was a risky thing you said to my aunts, I said to Lethe later.
She asked me why. All aunts like to feed their nieces and nephews sweet things. It’s how they navigate the difficult terrain of indirect bloodlines in the geography of love.
She was with us for two days, in and out of the rooms of the home I had grown up in, making comments on things I had taken for granted. The small round marble of my youth, found in the corner of an old sash window in the room that had been my nursery. Her delight at finding the overhead toilet flushed like the end of the world in a giant sneeze that she remembered shaking the timbers of her childhood home. Sitting beside her Aunt Gilly on her small neatly made bed, showing the ancient lady who was losing her sight how she could embroider a flower in a neat chain stitch, then demand-ing the little doily be hers one day. The way she graced her Aunt Verrie’s desk like a small apostrophe to write them a thank-you letter before she left.
Lethe brought new life to the house. She conquered my aunts, who fell in love with her in minutes.
My father didn’t emerge from his room that first afternoon. Aunt Gilly said he wasn’t feeling well, though I suspect he was uncomfortable with a stranger in the house. I’d never invited anyone home to stay. Strangely it never occurred to me to give a moment’s pause with Lethe’s arrival. It just felt right. Clearly in the grand scheme of things we were not meant to share those early years shaping a home or family together. It was also clear that for me Lethe was inevitable, part of some long road that we would travel in parallel, in a direction that might not be nearby but remained spiritually close, searching for the same North Star. She told my aunts she was the sister I never had. In my virile early twenties the thought of this girl I so desired being my sister was the furthest thing from my mind. Perchance this was the only way to follow the map of Lethe’s geography of love.
The following morning Lethe emerged from my old bedroom at nine o’clock in a pair of well-slept-in pajamas, the pale material as tousled as her hair and the sleepy frown on her face. My father was sitting in his customary leather chair, his newspapers read and folded beside him. I will always remember Lethe rubbing her eyes as she gave a theatrical yawn when she sighted him like a cat seeing a mouse. There he was. A tired but upright valiant old judge who’d walked the halls of justice where few brown men had trod with authority before. Who, like Ernest Strong, had gone to Oxford and endured the entrenched and very polite racial prejudice of the faculty, his fellow students, and even the staff. He too had survived the great unthinkable war to end all wars, a brown colonial islander in a white man’s argument, whose horror only seemed to live nowadays in old men’s eyes. And here he was exhausted, sunning himself in a now-independent Trinidad. In that chair was sitting so much history. My lovely Lethe marched over to my father with the stun-ning confidence of a favoured child displaying her maverick capacity for unexpected love and magic that she managed to pull from the depths of a usually unsentimental heart.
“Uncle Freddie,” she said, approaching his chair like an actress on stage, having waited for her cue. Uncle Freddie! No one had ever called the sphinx-like presence of my father Frederick, Fred, much less Freddie. The nerve of this girl! “I knew I’d meet you one day. Daniel’s very own Ernest,” and there, before my eyes, this stern man, this stillness that counterbalanced my youth, this quietude that caused me to hold my words reluctant inside me, es
caped himself. To my complete astonishment they reached out to one another and hugged gently and politely. This was the man who had forced me to steal into the world in silence, on paper; his stern presence made me stop my run at the door. This was the man I only glanced at when he wasn’t looking. This was the quiet man whose eyes seemed to peruse a landscape that he alone could see.
“You smell like my Ernest!”
I swear he blushed.
She pulled away, joyous, sitting down on his newspapers set on the small table beside him. The thought of anyone sitting irreverently on his newspapers was unthinkable to me and I watched in awe as in easy intimacy he warmed to her. She tapped her feet and swung her shoulders unrhythmically to the ever-present rippling chimes of the steel pans tuning and phrasing as they warmed up in the distance. He smiled and rubbed his hands as she prattled on about herself, about me, about heaven knew what else, till Gilly offered her breakfast. Lethe requested a boiled egg, but asked if Uncle Freddie had had his? When Gilly said he had, Lethe asked if she could eat on a tray beside him?
I left to do some chores, returning in time for lunch. We sat at the table, my two aunts, my father, Lethe, and I discussing the differences between the islands, Lethe going on forever about her pet peeve, “the now defunct Caribbean federation.” She apologized for Jamaica seceding but was unapologetic about her dislike of Carnival — to the delight of my aunts who considered its inevitable advance disruptive to the orderly continuity of national routine that was their scaffolding. They currently feared it as a ganja-smoking wellspring of modern, youthful evil.
The rest of the visit has faded from my memory. I did take Lethe to meet a friend who was working on costumes he’d designed in a large room at the Hilton. She was spellbound by their artistry and could not believe they were made with so much care only to be worn once and then dismantled or thrown away.
The Black Peacock Page 11