Tea by the Sea

by Donna Hemans

  Instead, he gave up that dream for the priesthood, a desperate bid at the time to save himself and his family from disgrace.

  He left the carnival atmosphere behind and walked past the historic parachute jump, and beyond to the quieter residential side, which the crowds largely avoided. He wasn’t sure exactly why he had come here then, whether he truly thought Opal would have come to a place that was his sanctuary. Yes, he had taken her there for birthday breakfasts—tea by the sea—but would she have come on her own? Was he simply stalling, holding off his inevitable demise?

  Indeed he was. There he didn’t have to pretend that Opal was missing, didn’t have to pretend that Plum hadn’t come back to claim what was rightfully hers, didn’t have to pretend that Opal wasn’t a permanent reminder of what he had done.

  Just off the ramp at West Twentieth Street, a film crew was setting up lights and moving police cars in random spots along the curb. The scene was set to reflect a hurried arrival, haphazard parking by officers running toward an emergency. And it occurred to him that what he was doing—strolling along the boardwalk just after reporting his daughter missing—was suspicious in itself. If the police asked, how would he account for his day without appearing to be a father nonchalant about his missing daughter? Which random stranger would recall seeing him, a priest in a black shirt and white clerical collar strolling along the boardwalk in the early afternoon? Not a hurried or anxious man, searching frantically for a missing girl. He couldn’t make himself look frantic, not when he knew that Opal was with Plum, not when he knew that Plum wouldn’t harm Opal, not after so many years of longing and waiting. Still, he returned to the car, two blocks away from the water, on Mermaid Avenue near a Catholic church.

  He didn’t want to return home and wait, with Pauline lurking in the shadows, her questions coming at him as sharp as a finger jabbing his chest. Who is Plum? What did she want with you? Is Opal with her? Is she Opal’s mother? Where was she all this time? What kind of lying, conniving priest are you?

  The thought slipped so quickly and quietly into place that he almost missed it. Plum was the one for whom he should be searching, whose life he should be turning inside out, whose secrets he should uproot. Not Opal’s. There was a chance he could salvage his life. He slowed the car and turned around, certain there was a library nearby or a community center, someplace where he could search for records or, at the very least, find a telephone directory.

  He didn’t have to drive for long, for there, near the Catholic Church, was the Coney Island library. In the library, he did what he should have done all these years. He opened a telephone directory and searched for Plum Valentine, a name so unique that he found it and her Flatbush address almost immediately. Why hadn’t he thought of looking for her first before involving the church committee? Contained a scandal before it bloomed into something bigger?

  He headed back the way he had come, at full speed now, zipping around vehicles, ready to press the horn at the slightest provocation. The wind whipped through the open window, tossing around exhaust fumes, the smell of gasoline, the odor of rotting garbage that came from a passing truck. But he left the windows down, letting the whoosh of wind break the silence in the car and stir up the thoughts in his head.

  16

  A nother house. Another time. Twelve years before he and Plum met in Discovery Bay. Twelve years before he fully understood how what happened then when he was still a teenager would play itself out when he was twenty-four, a young teacher facing a student with a broad smile that revealed her dimples, and an eye color that seemed too light for her dark skin.

  Lenworth was still a boy—fourteen years old—with a duffel bag too large for his meager belongings. He stood outside contemplating the crisp white paint, the red shingled roof, pink and white bougainvillea bushes on either side of the walkway leading up to the grand verandah, two large columns supporting the verandah roof, the intricately carved front door. One sweep of his eyes and he took in the grandeur of the house, which would have swallowed the house he’d just left. It was the kind of house he had admired from afar, a big house for a big man, a man of means, one who had either spent time abroad and returned to live out the remainder of his days in a house three, four times the size of his childhood home, or the educated one who had prospered on the island despite the country’s growing dependence on IMF and World Bank loans and remittances from relatives abroad, and the widely held belief that the country was sliding backward (morally, spiritually, financially) instead of forward. The big man, who stood beside Lenworth, waiting to usher him into the house, was a distant relative of his mother. He had indeed gone abroad and prospered and returned, not to the family land in Woodhall, Clarendon, but to this beauty of a house in the shadow of the Greenwood Great House. Lenworth knew nothing about architecture and design, Greek or Roman or colonial influences, Spanish-style homes with arched doorways, or plantation style homes with wooden shutters and sweeping stairways. He knew only that this was the house of someone with the kind of money his mother wouldn’t even dream of having.

  The distant relative, Warren Joseph, and his wife, Rosie, who also stood with them, were childless, that is if he believed some reports. And if he believed other reports, they were a mean and cantankerous couple whose children wanted nothing to do with them. The boy, who stood with them, not only didn’t know what to believe but had no choice in the matter of whether he returned to his mother and sister in their ramshackle house with the dirt yard, or followed the stoosh couple into the crisp white house in Greenwood to live as their child and houseboy, getting schooling in exchange for house and yard work. He went up the stairs. The checkered tile glistened beneath his feet. In the midst of those columns, he realized finally that he was no longer a boy, not a boy waiting here for his mother to come get him, and not yet a man. In limbo. Sent away. Dismissed. Bartered. Now fully responsible for bartering his own education in exchange for a bed and a roof and pseudo parents.

  He found he was not alone. There was a girl too—Ava—a relative of Rosie’s, who like him one day found herself with a bag packed with her meager belongings and moving to a house whose sheer size mocked the inadequacies of her former life. That they were chosen out of all their siblings and cousins to have this chance at a greater life wasn’t lost on either. It wasn’t a question of whether they showed promise that merited an opportunity, but sheer luck that they were at the right age—not too young to be separated from their parents and yet, even as teenagers, young enough to still be molded, to recognize and appreciate the opportunity presented to them.

  In bed that night, in a bedroom on the lower level of the house—the part of the house built specifically for the domestic helpers or guests the hosts wanted to banish temporarily from the family’s more intimate life—he pressed his body against the wall, feeling the coolness of the concrete seep into his body. And eavesdropped on Ava’s private moment: she cried as he wished he could. By then, she had been there for two weeks but the grief that filtered through the wall still felt bitter and raw. She cried for them both and prayed.

  In the daylight hours, they lived like siblings, brother and sister walking away from home to board a bus to school, returning home in the evening to finish assigned tasks, he to pull weeds or mow the lawn, she to prepare the evening’s dinner or meals for the church’s hospitality committee under Rosie’s watch. At night, away from Warren and Rosie, the teens—confused by hormones and despair and their families’ rejection or dismissal and, in his case, his mother’s adept bartering skills—lived like lovers, each fumbling with the body’s curves and angles, hard and soft flesh, mistaking release for comfort and love.

  They didn’t think of the possible outcomes and consequences: a baby neither wanted or Warren and Rosie discovering their nocturnal habits. They avoided the first (somehow) but not the second.

  Who were they really, Warren and Rosie, this couple that had given him a new life? This couple with a house boy and house girl—whose parents had bartered their lives:
education and a (better) roof over their heads in exchange for light household duties—to serve them and their guests afternoon tea or ice-cold fruit drinks with triangle-shaped sandwiches, and bake the cakes that Rosie passed off as her own at church dinners and after-service events?

  They were a product of another time, children of a colonial and postcolonial era, a combination of confused history: dark-skinned descendants of slaves who both wanted and feared independence from the mother country, who had ingrained the concept that anything that originated from Britain was better than anything that originated from Africa, dismissing, for example, with great prejudice the African way of worshipping—the spirited sermon and the congregation’s equally spirited response, the swaying and the twirling that resembled a Pocomania session—and accepting without questions the Anglican way, the spiritless songs from a hymnal, quiet acceptance of their Lord and savior into their hearts. British and Jamaican, master and servant, servile and defiant. All these things at once. Confused result of history.

  Lenworth was a child of another era—a post-independence baby, who suckled on the heady Jamaican politics of the 1970s. It seeped into him like a plant pulling nutrients from the soil, and he learned that he could and should demand more. And so he did. He dared ask that he and Ava be paid in tangible currency for their labor.

  Rosie sucked in air, let it out and sucked again. “I give you a place to stay, pay for your education and feed you, and you asking for more? Ungrateful wretch. You know how many children out there dying for an opportunity like this? How many children out there can’t go to school because they have to work and help support their family? What you think would happen to you if I hadn’t worked out this arrangement with your mother? You think your mother could afford to pay for all these subjects you taking? You think she can afford to send you to university when you finish school? You not looking at the long term. Just the short term. Just the ready cash you want. Short-sighted and ungrateful. But, you know what, if you don’t like it here and you think we’re cheating you out of what is yours then leave. Go on back home. Don’t think you have to stay.”

  But he stayed: to finish the school year; to accept, as was promised, fees for a university education and launch, as he dreamed, a career as an engineer, building grand houses and elaborate bridges that were simultaneously functional and grandiose. Staying meant Rosie and Warren began to watch him ever so closely for a defect or a chink in his faÇade, a reason to return him to Woodhall. And they found it. His mistake, he displayed visible anger, clenching his fists, ready to demand payment for Ava, when a friend of Rosie’s came to borrow Ava (without payment, Lenworth was sure) to help the neighbor prepare for a party.

  “Borrow?” he asked. “Who in this day and age come to borrow a person?”

  Ava was halfway to the car, looking back at him, her eyes pleading for him to stop.

  “You take it too literal,” Rosie said.

  “Too literal? If she borrowing her, she not paying her for the day’s work. Nothing literal about that.”

  “So you come out here to embarrass me and put yourself in business that’s not yours?”

  There it was, the chink, the defect: his brazen disregard for how his words, once uttered, fluttered and filtered. In the end, Ava left, her eyes pleading with him, the look between them something Rosie couldn’t decipher, but suspected held an undercurrent of something else. Rosie’s suspicion was greater than her knowledge, and it fed her certainty that there was something between the two teens.

  Rosie didn’t wait for Ava to return, to catch them in the (suspected) act. His life once bartered could be bartered again. He could be and was returned because of the small defect in his character, Rosie’s suspicion of something she couldn’t quite name. His future, so bright, was pulled away from him, whipped back behind a magician’s curtain with a single flick of the hand.

  There was no easy way for Lenworth to compare the grandiosity of one house with the simple, functional rooms of another. No way to gauge beforehand the letdown or the things he’d miss: cold tile beneath his feet in the morning, a shower instead of a splash in a bath pan, soft grass underfoot instead of packed dirt, a bedroom to himself instead of four to a room, a proper kitchen, a stove that lit with the turn of a knob. Or the things that once removed he would come to hate: a makeshift stove that he got going with sticks, paper and kerosene, the smell of clothes hung to dry near a smoky stove, his mother and sister waiting for life to come to them, his mother’s learned habit of deifying the wealthy. How easy it was to look down on a mother who grew up under the same circumstances as Warren but hadn’t managed to move forward at all. No way really for him to understand then what it meant to have agency—the ability to exert power and control over his situation.

  So years later when he met Plum, when he was tutoring high school students to make money because the promise of a university education had been taken back, he understood precisely why Plum felt disposable, easily cast away when she made a teen’s mistake. Except when he met Plum, he wasn’t confused by a teen’s hormones and despair, and he didn’t confuse release with love and comfort. With Plum, they were one and the same.

  Another house. Another time. Plum’s belly delicately pressed against a white T-shirt. Plum had changed from a summer dress with a billowing body to the close T-shirt and returned to sit with him outside. A lizard chased another through the potted ferns. She swatted at mosquitoes. He sat rigidly waiting for her aunt to come, barely waving a hand when he felt the mosquitoes settling in and biting. He had sat there many a time, on the verandah, helping Plum understand Pythagoras’s theorem, square root and cube root, the equations that baffled her but thrilled him. There was no thrill now, just a gnawing burn in his stomach and a heart cartwheeling in his chest.

  He stood when her aunt arrived, stretched out his hand. But she ignored it, dismissing him for the second time in his life. Plum stood, showing the unmistakable belly, her breasts so much fuller now.

  “This is what you come to tell me?” she asked. “Child, how far along are you? Four, five months?” Plum’s answer wasn’t what she wanted. She flopped in a chair and peppered Plum with questions about what she had told her parents.

  He stumbled, drawing a breath, which had the unintended consequence of stifling his words. He wanted to tell her aunt that he loved Plum, that he would indeed take care of the baby and her. But Plum’s aunt took that opportunity away just as quickly as she had given him leave to speak.

  “You know what, you better leave. Just leave. Go. You can deal with her father when he comes.”

  For the third time she dismissed him, batted him away as if he were a nuisance fly.

  But Plum’s father and mother didn’t come at all for Plum’s graduation, simply cancelled their tickets and Plum’s return ticket, leaving her to make her way with him. He couldn’t talk of his plans for his new family. As it turned out, his intentions didn’t matter in the end.

  Yet another house. Yet another time. A month before the baby, his baby, their baby was due, he went home to his mother’s house in Woodhall to tell her about the grandchild to come. He thought it was a boy. Plum was adamant it was a girl, and she had a name he had forgotten already. He went by bus, up through the hills of Alexandria, up and over the Dry Harbour Mountains, past a funeral procession and pallbearers hefting the casket up a hill too steep for the hearse. At last the bus wound its way downhill into the parish of Clarendon, turned left and on through river town after river town, through Chapelton, which was prepping for market day, and on until he got to the outskirts of Woodhall. He went by taxi down a road too rutted to truly be called a road, the asphalt long washed away by rain. The gullies on either side of the road were lush, a testament of the constant rain that washed away the asphalt or the rivers that had gone underground.

  His mother, hanging the morning’s wash, looked back as if he had only just left. “Oh, you come?” She pinned the clothes, shooed a chicken, sprinkled the wash water at the root of a tangerine tre
e and turned away to the kitchen expecting him to follow her there. The kitchen was an outdoor shelter, stick walls and zinc sheeting enclosing a waist-high coal stove. She kneaded flour for dumplings, dropped them in hot coconut oil and waited for them to brown and crisp. He wandered out in the yard, past the chickens that scattered as he moved, the baby chicks that were still a fuzz of yellow, the lazy dogs that didn’t bother to bark or question his presence, past the pig pens and on to the star apple and mango trees. He picked what he could—purple-skinned star apples and grapefruit and tangerines—plopping them into a bag for Plum.

  When at last they sat down to eat the dumplings and cornmeal porridge, she said, “Read this for me. It come yesterday.” It was a letter from his father written on blue airmail paper that was both envelope and letter with flaps that sealed the contents in.

  Nearly twenty years she had waited for his father to return, to divorce the woman he had married in England so he could get his permanent papers and return for her. His sister, thirty-two years old then, also waited for her man to return, supplementing the support payments he sent with day’s work cleaning houses and washing. Nearly all the women he knew were waiting for something or someone to come along.