Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  “You’ll just have to wait and see,” Uhuru said again, his smile a little less fulsome. He began to try to edge out and around Fat White Boy.

  “I was thinking I might try to sell a freelance piece to Lawyers’ Weekly.” Fat White Boy kept himself in front of Uhuru, shuffling sideways in step with him. “I think they’d be really interested. Can I give you a call, maybe stop by the office Monday? I’d like to talk to your client too, you know—” He stopped suddenly. “Shondelle! Shondelle! Over here,” he shouted, waving his arms in the direction of a black woman. Shondelle looked over, then looked as if she’d thought better of her too-hasty glance, but had, like Uhuru before her, been trapped by Fat White Boy’s riveting gaze.

  Uhuru didn’t know the woman but he knew her to see her. He knew too, without knowing her, that he wouldn’t like her. Shondelle Adams was a prof at the law school, one of that new breed of professors whose chief qualifications, Uhuru imagined, were that she was a she, and that she was black. Uhuru knew it was wrong, especially for him, but he couldn’t help himself; his first thought the first time he’d seen her interviewed on television was that she must be an affirmative-action hire. Perhaps it was because she was described as a specialist in “critical race theory.” What the hell was that? Worse, she favoured colourful, tent-like African dresses with matching head-dresses that made her seem, to Uhuru at least, like a walking cliché.

  Of course, then, what was he? A middle-aged black lawyer with a faux-menacing shaved head and an unseemly thing for young white girls. Talk about clichéd. A cliché who, truth be told, was willing to wear a dashiki himself if the right photo opportunity presented itself.

  “Hey, Shondelle, great to see you again,” Fat White Boy greeted her like a long-lost sister. Did he know this woman any better than he knew Uhuru? “You two must know each other,” he said, as if they were all part of some in-crowd. Why did white people always assume that just because two people were black they should know each other? Probably because, in Halifax at least, it was almost always true. But not this time. Uhuru smiled his best cocktail party smile.

  “We haven’t had the pleasure,” he said, extending a free hand in her direction. “My name’s Uhuru Melesse.”

  “I know who you are,” she said, letting his hand hang empty in the air between them. “Shondelle Adams. Saw you on the news tonight. Interesting case you’ve got.”

  Interesting? Had she said the word dismissively? Was she dismissing him as well? Uhuru appraised her again. She was probably in her mid-thirties, though perhaps younger. Her skin was caramel brown. Smooth, soft, inviting. Her hair was hidden beneath a turban-like green-and-gold headdress. If, that is, she had any hair; perhaps she had shaved it bald like so many black feminists. Uhuru didn’t like the way it made them look. He brought his hand back to his side, tried not to acknowledge the snub. Instead, he tried to imagine what lay beneath the billowing folds of the matching green-and-gold dress—Jamaican?—that gave away no secrets. She could be hiding 350 pounds beneath a dress like that. But he doubted it. Her face was all angles and high, hard cheekbones.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “Interesting.” Be noncommittal. Let her talk first.

  “Got any experience handling this kind of case?” It sounded less like a question than an accusation. Despite the fact that there were local black families named Adams, Uhuru knew this one must be from away. Local blacks, even ones who hadn’t been alive in the seventies, knew Uhuru Melesse by reputation, even if he had done precious little to live up to it for more than twenty-five years.

  “Experience? Oh, you know, a little. I’m not too worried.”

  “You should be,” she fired back. “This isn’t some commercial property case where the only important thing is whether you get paid. This is going to be a hard sell in the courtroom. It’s too important to have somebody screw it up.”

  “What makes you think I’m going to screw it up?” he bristled. Bitch. He looked away, saw a blonde in a red party-time cocktail dress coming in through the door.

  Shondelle followed his eyes, saw the blonde. She gave him a disgusted shrug. “Whatever,” she said, and pushed her way back toward a crowd heading deeper into the bar. She looked back. “If you ever decide you need some help, you know where to find me.”

  This time, Uhuru didn’t bother to excuse himself from Fat White Boy. He simply snaked around him, wordless, his eyes fixed on the blonde.

  “I’ll call you, man,” Fat White Boy said. “Monday. Your office.”

  “Dessert, ma’am?” The waitress seemed to have materialized from nowhere, magically transforming their entree plates into dessert menus. “And for you, Judge? Coffee? With a liqueur?”

  This waitress was good, Ward thought, very good. He and Victoria had been dining at Valentino’s since it opened thirty years ago, but usually only once or twice a year, on special occasions such as this. And yet the maître d’ and servers inevitably addressed him by his title. Since judges were relatively anonymous, the fact that they always seemed to know what Ward did for a living impressed the former politician in him. So too did the fact that they remembered he preferred his dessert out of a bottle.

  “Coffee would be great, thanks,” he said, while Victoria gave Valentino’s never-changing dessert menu a quick, just-in-case perusal. “Decaf. With a little Kahlua on the side.” The decaf had been a recent addition to his post-prandial routine, another depressing sign that he had become one of those people he used to disparage. Can’t eat this. Can’t drink that. Keeps me awake. Makes me sleepy. Gives me bad dreams. Gives me gas. Now he was one of them.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Hmmm . . .” Victoria knew, had known all evening, what she would order for dessert. The anniversary special. “I’ve been saving myself for a little of your za-bag-lee-own-ah.” she said sweetly, looking directly at the waitress and deliberately mispronouncing the name of the Italian dessert.

  Ward smiled. There were times he could remember loving her. Did he still? The first time they’d come here—could it really have been to celebrate their first anniversary?—he’d mangled the pronunciation of zabaglione so badly he’d eventually had to resort to pointing dumbly at the menu to get the waitress to comprehend what he wanted. (Those were the days, he thought with a sudden wistfulness, when he could still order dessert and a liqueur.)

  Victoria, of course, knew how to pronounce zabaglione. She’d learned to say it—and plenty of other words and phrases that sounded impossibly exotic to Ward—during her family’s annual vacations in Europe. By contrast, Ward had lived the first fourteen years of his life in Eisners Head, a remote fishing village. No one in his family had ever had occasion to eat in a restaurant, let alone order zabaglione; Ward’s parents believed food that didn’t come at the end of a fishing line or out of a can wasn’t real food. Even after his parents moved to Halifax in 1962, their idea of fine dining was Claudie’s Fish and Chips, a neighbourhood greasy spoon owned by the brother-in-law of one of the trawlermen Ward’s father had crewed with back home.

  When Ward and Victoria first met, Victoria found Ward’s lack of sophistication exotic. She’d barely managed to suppress her giggle until the waitress left that night. “You’re such a Nova Scotian,” she’d said affectionately, squeezing his hand. “You’re my Nova Scotian. Za-bag-li-own-ah, za-bag-li-own-ah . . .” She’d repeated it like a mantra. “I’m going to call it that from now on too.”

  It was impossible for either of them to have known in the middle of that sweet memory-making moment so many years ago that, just two years later, everything about his career, his life, their life together, would shatter, altered forever in a single, still unacknowledged instant. “Za-bag-li-own-ah” was one of the few pleasant pre-apocalypse memories to survive.

  “Excellent choice, Mrs. Justice,” the waitress replied, affecting not to notice how badly Victoria had mutilated the word. “Some tea with that?”

  Over the years, W
ard was certain, Valentino’s staff had learned to straight-facedly translate the many and various eccentric local pronunciations of its Eye-talian cuisine until nothing fazed them any more. When Valentino’s opened its doors in 1972, there were only three or four restaurants in town worthy of the name, none more ethnic than meatballs-Italian-style or faux-French. Today, the city was full of chi-chi Thai, Greek, Vietnamese, Lebanese, even Ethiopian restaurants. Not that Ward ever ate in any of them, of course. He preferred to get Kathleen, his secretary, to buy him a bagel with cream cheese from the deli on her way back from lunch. Bagels! When Ward was first elected to the legislature, you still couldn’t buy a bagel that hadn’t been shipped in, frozen, from Montreal. Now you could buy them at Tim’s. In flavours.

  “. . . that researcher from the Archives, that weaselly-looking fellow with the thick horn-rims and the bad breath?” Victoria was addressing him. What had he missed? How long had he been adrift in his tangential culinary ramble? He tried to focus. Researcher. Archives. Horn-rims. Bad breath. Oh, right. Oh no!

  Ward couldn’t help it if his father couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell Victoria what she wanted to know. “I can’t make the old man do anything he doesn’t want to do,” he’d explained when she’d tried to talk him into pressing his father for answers. “He’s a stubborn old cuss.”

  “Just like you,” she’d replied. Touché.

  “Anyway, he called today,” Victoria said now. “He thinks he might have found something about your family.”

  Tracing her own and Ward’s family trees had been Victoria’s most recent how-can-I-fill-up-my-days project. It wasn’t the first. At one point, she was going to go into business as a high-end renovator, buying, fixing up and then selling dilapidated south-end mansions. At another, she was going to start her own high-fashion boutique for women of her age. And then there was the time she was going to go back to art school and open a ceramics gallery. And before that . . .

  Ward had learned it was best not to take any of her schemes too seriously. Most never got beyond the talking stage. Their main purpose seemed to be to divert his wife’s attention from the reality that she was middle-aged with two grown children, nothing to occupy her time and no marketable skills to offer the world.

  Victoria was curiously both a woman of her times and also a woman out of time. Perhaps because she’d been the pampered daughter of a politician-businessman and his socialite wife, Victoria had grown up never imagining herself as more than an appendage—the daughter of a premier, the wife of a politician who would someday be premier and, then, the wife of a judge who could never be anything but a judge. But at the same time, she’d come of age in the sixties and had briefly fancied herself the rebellious, free-spirited flower child who smoked dope, tried acid and had sex with strangers in stranger places—which is the role she was living when she first met Ward.

  When she got bored with living that fantasy, she married Ward on the rocks at Peggys Cove in a sunset ceremony she wrote herself and became the urban, pseudo-back-to-the-lander who baked her own bread, made her own yogurt and ground her own coffee. Then a mother, having their two children, Meghan and Sarah, one after the other, eighteen months apart. There might have been more, but then . . . what happened happened. So she got her tubes tied and assumed her next role as the overprotective earth mother who enrolled her fine and gifted daughters in all manner of self-improving music and dance lessons, soccer schools and summer camps. When the children got to be teenagers and stopped believing Mother Knew Best, she transformed herself into the new new Victoria, a perfect Martha-Stewart-dinner-party hostess who knew not only where to find—and how to use—fresh fennel and star anise but who could also set an elegant table for twelve every second Saturday evening. When had that phase ended? When she had the brief affair with the doctor-husband of her childhood best friend? She got more bored and then was diagnosed—by the doctor-husband—as clinically depressed. He prescribed Paxil; she gained weight, stopped taking Paxil, suffered withdrawal, joined a book club, drank too much, gave up alcohol, suffered hot flashes, married off one daughter and watched the other leave home for a job in Toronto.

  Somewhere between the time she whacked up against menopause and Meghan announced last spring that she was going to marry Brad the architect, Victoria became obsessed with tracing their families’ genealogies. The goal was supposed to be a personal, personalized wedding gift for Meghan and Brad, but this universe, like most, had not unfolded quite as Victoria intended.

  The problem was not with Victoria’s side of the family. There were two fawning biographies of her father, both written by self-publishing former aides. Victoria’s grandfather had been a ship’s chandler and prominent anti-Confederate member of the Nova Scotia Legislative Assembly; her great-grandfather was a wealthy sea captain. Her ancestors on both sides were United Empire Loyalists, but Victoria had also discovered—with the help of the horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing, weasel-faced archivist with halitosis—a branch of her mother’s family that had remained in the Carolinas after the American Revolution. The “patriot” strain of Cullinghams produced both a state governor and a bank president, which Victoria duly noted in her genealogical charts. She did omit, of course, that the bank president went to prison for fraud.

  Victoria was finding it much harder to trace Ward’s family tree. It had no roots and only one branch—Ward. That wasn’t quite true. There were church records in Eisners Head documenting his mother’s side of the family for more than a hundred and fifty years, but nothing at all about his father’s family.

  The archivist had tried. He’d taken it first as a personal challenge, and a personal affront, that he could find no sign of Justice forbears before Desmond justice’s sudden, unexplained appearance in Eisners Head in 1932. He’d found Ward’s parents’ 1938 marriage certificate, but there were only blank spaces where Desmond’s place of birth and the names of his parents were supposed to have been listed. The archivist had trolled through property and poll tax records in Eisners Head and other nearby communities, examined census documents, looked through family histories and come up empty.

  “He’s very excited,” Victoria told Ward as the waitress set the snifter of liqueur in front of him.

  “Coffee’s coming right up,” she said.

  “He’s such a strange little man,” Victoria continued. “He’s being very mysterious about whatever it is he’s found. Says it could be nothing at all, but then, in the next breath, makes it sound like he’s solved Rubik’s cube.”

  She stopped talking while the waitress poured her husband’s coffee. “Your dessert,” she said, careful not to embarrass Victoria by pronouncing the name correctly, “will be along presently, ma’am.”

  “Anyway, we’re going to meet at the archives Tuesday morning,” she continued when the woman left. “You’re welcome to join us if you like.”

  “Uh, I’d love to,” he lied, “but we have our scheduling conference Tuesday morning.”

  “Here we are then, ma’am,” the waitress said, placing a dish of zabaglione in front of Victoria. “You take milk with your tea, not cream, right?” Victoria nodded. “Coming right up.”

  They sat in silence then, Victoria picking at the edges of her zabaglione, Ward sipping his Kahlua. Occasionally, Victoria would look up, eye him intensely, appear about to say something, then look back down at her dessert, escaping into it. Finally, she found her courage, spoke, but without looking up.

  “Ward, I think we need to talk—not now, not tonight. But soon.” She looked at him finally. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this for weeks. And I know this is the wrong place and the wrong time. But I feel like I have to say it sometime. And there’s never a right time.” She took a breath, then another. “Ward, we need to talk about us. About what we’re doing. About the future. The kids are gone. You’ll be fifty-three, I’ll be fifty-two. We’ve been married for thirty years, but it hasn’t really been a marriage for most o
f that. We’ve done good things. We have two wonderful children. But they don’t need us any more. And we both deserve to be happier than we are. We deserve the chance to find happiness, to find love—”

  “More coffee, Judge?”

  Ward shook his head, no. The waitress, who had seemed to materialize from nowhere to add tension to the moment, dissolved back into the shadows. Ward waited for Victoria to pick up her monologue, to drive this non-conversation down the road toward the cliff where he knew now it was headed.

  “This is hard. It’s very hard,” Victoria tried again. She was looking into his eyes now. She put her hand on his. “But I think we have to be honest with ourselves. Face the truth. We haven’t been happy together for a long time.” Was this a royal ‘we’? “We deserve better.” She stopped again, let her words worm into his consciousness, allowing him to understand without her having to say anything more. But then she did. Say more. No misunderstanding her meaning now. “I want a divorce.”

  Ward wanted to reply, tell her he hadn’t really been unhappy, but, even if he had, he understood he deserved his unhappiness. He wanted to tell her about his prostate, about how he was dying and she would be free soon enough. Why couldn’t she just wait? That chance for happiness, for love, would be hers anyway. He wanted to tell her these things, but he couldn’t. He had to pee.

  “Drizzled! Smothered! Nestled! Coddled! Cuddled! Christ Almighty!” Patrick Donovan spat out each word like a swallow of sour milk. “Why don’t they just call the goddamn food by its name instead of trying to make it sound like a whore at a fancy ball?”