From Harvey River

by Lorna Goodison

  “This is how you do it,” she instructed as she showed my mother how to make a bed with the wrong side of the top sheet turned out so that the smoother right side is what touched you and your husband’s skin when you lay down to rest. It is best to plan your meals in advance. You start the midday meal right after breakfast, so your husband never, ever has to wait on his food. Always make sure your husband’s clothes are in good order. A badly turned out husband reflects poorly on a wife. Always tidy yourself to greet your husband at the end of the day and make sure his supper is ready and that he has clean pyjamas to sleep in each night. And on and on, everything done perfectly, just so, right from morning till evening when the household was called to evening prayers, the lamps extinguished, and Rose Cottage put to bed.

  My mother had turned red when her sister said that a married woman’s life was not a bed of roses. Just the word bed made her embarrassed. Then her sister dropped her voice, as if she was sharing a terrible secret. “You cannot imagine what a terrible thing is going to happen to you,” Cleodine said, shaking her head from side to side and making clucking sounds in the back of her throat. “If you ever know what is before you,” she whispered. What was before her was of course her wedding night. Her sister continued, “If you ever know, the pain that a man puts a woman through, in order to get his pleasure!” My mother burst into tears sitting there in the dark on the burnished front verandah. Cleodine had left the “what was before you” discussion until last. For the seven days that my mother had spent at Rose Cottage, being groomed for her life as a “proper married woman,” Cleodine had made no mention of sex. She and her husband had separate bedrooms, and he was often “away” on business. Cleodine had shown her how to bake bread, how to spread a table for company, how to make perfect corners on a sheet, and how to iron a man’s clothes. The proper ironing of a man’s white shirt took an entire morning, with Cleodine sending my mother back to the ironing board three or four times until the perfectly ironed garment was produced. “No, the sleeves must not be seamed, the collar must have no creases, iron it first on the wrong side, open up the inside seams, then iron it on the right side.” The ironing of a starched, white drill suit–with no creases in the sleeves of the jacket and perfectly straight seams in the trousers, and no creases on the fly–took almost one entire day. But there was no mention of sex.

  Because the house was set in a valley, nightfall at Rose Cottage came early. Dusk then dark seemed to come to rest there before it reached Harvey River, and often, the Tilley lamps had to be lit from as early as 5 p.m. With dusk, an air of quiet melancholy often settled over Rose Cottage, with its shining floorboards, beautifully polished furniture, and everything in its right place. A heavy perfume of nightblooming jasmine, honeysuckle, and roses would waft in from the garden as Cleodine took her place at the pipe organ under the watchful eye of John Wesley, to play a selection of evensong hymns. It was after the organ recital that she would order all under her roof to take part in evening prayers before turning in for a long dark night.

  The mahogany table in the dining room was always set with a place for Cleodine’s husband, but often, when morning came, the place setting was undisturbed. “If it is too late, my husband sleeps in the room behind his businessplace,” explained Cleodine, although my mother had asked nothing about the undisturbed place setting. After a long pause, she said, “At this time of the year, business is brisk, he is probably not coming home again tonight.”

  Except for the servants sleeping in the two rooms behind the house, my mother and her eldest sister were alone in Rose Cottage. By the light of the lamp that sat on the polished verandah table between them, my mother could make out her sister’s profile that was growing to look more and more like Queen Victoria’s. But on these nights, Cleodine looked like a very sad queen. By day, her strong face was set like stone under her upswept hairdo, and no one, especially not her “subordinates,” dared to look directly into her amber brown eyes behind her gold-rimmed glasses. The tip of her middle finger, capped by a steel thimble, would drum steadily on the lid of her sewing machine as she issued brisk orders to the servants, “Go–tap tap–and fetch me–tap tap–a cup of tea.” “My husband is a hard-working man, I am proud that he will do whatever is necessary to succeed,” she said, then she was quiet for a moment, as if brooding upon exactly what her husband was doing in order to succeed. My mother knew enough about her sister to understand that this statement about her hard-working husband was one that was meant to stand by itself. One that did not invite any response from her, one that she was not welcome to comment upon.

  My mother wanted to say something like “poor you.” She always said “poor you,” but she meant it as a genuine expression of solidarity and sympathy. She would have loved to have said to her sister, “Poor you, I hope that you are not too lonely,” but she knew that her sister would have considered it an impertinent remark, so she just kept silent. She wanted to ask her, “Since you are the only one of us Harvey girls who is married, and since you have shown me everything about how to keep a good house, what can you tell me about what is before me?” and Cleodine must have read her mind, because she then said, “I think it best that you read this book to acquaint yourself with what is before you.” In the semi-darkness of the verandah, she handed her a book entitled Safe Counsel. My mother, who always preferred a teaching story to any dry, fact-laden book, later said that she was too embarrassed to read it.

  Marcus and Doris were married in the Lucea Parish Church on August 2, 1931. My mother frowned and wept during the entire wedding ceremony, because brides at that time were not supposed to look joyful. The worst thing a decent young woman could do was to look happy on her wedding day, for surely that meant that she was looking forward to the sensual pleasures of the honeymoon bed and only a bad woman would enjoy that. My mother wept copious tears. My father smiled broadly throughout. Albertha and Rose sent her a trousseau from Montreal. Included in this wardrobe for a new life were silk and satin nightdresses, some with matching bed jackets and nightcaps. Her flowing wedding gown of crepe de chine with silk godets and her chantilly lace train, fifteen yards long, was the talk of the parish for years.

  The couple went off to live in St. Elizabeth, attended by Doris’s personal helper, Ina, and laden down with trunks full of fabulous clothes and housewares. As was the custom then, my mother wore an elaborate hat and a long duster coat as she drove away with my father in his Model T Ford.

  Now that all her other children had left the house, Ann became the object of her mother Margaret’s homilies on how sorrow followed closely to joy as surely as the night followed the day, therefore one should not be so laughy-laughy, so quick to pop story and want to go to fairs and concerts and dances with unsuitable friends. She, Margaret Wilson Harvey, as everyone knew, always had a deep mistrust for anything resembling excess happiness, and just to prove herself right, look how she herself had gone and forgotten and been so happy over her son Howard, and had not God taken him from her? Had her other son Edmund not run away to Kingston, never to return to Harvey River? Had God not allowed a spark from the cane-boiling fire to cool into a cloud in her left eye? Had not George O’Brian Wilson’s legal family been allowed to cut her out of his will, rob her of the house and land in Lucea that he had specifically willed to her after she had cared for him in the last years of his life?

  Her daughter Ann needed to learn from her mother’s misfortunes; and if she did not want to learn from her mother’s misfortunes, she should at least learn from that cautionary tale about an own-way girl who had come to a bad end in a village near Harvey River. The girl, it was said, suffered from a powerful case of “don’t care.” She never listened to a word that her mother said, and she liked to laugh loudly and to “sit down bad” that is, she would not sit with her legs closed and crossed at the ankles, preferably slanted to the side, so that others would not be able to look up under her dress. This girl loved to dance and she ignored her school work and took to sneaking out of her parents�
�� house at night and going to dances in the company of some other no-good giggling Don’t-Care girls from neighbouring villages, loud-laughing common girls. Well, one night she slipped out, and there it was she met her fate. The girl danced till near morning to the titillating beat of the “Merry Wang” and the frowsy rub-up “Mento.” No doubt she danced to “Penny Reel O,” a very slack song with lyrics like, “Long time me never see you, and you owe me little money. I beg you turn your belly gimme, make me rub out me money, penny reel O.”

  The dawn was rising over Hanover when she finally returned to her parents’ house, but they had locked and bolted the doors and windows. So she sat outside in the yard on a stone, shivering in her long satin dance dress, with the back plunged low. As she sat there, it came to her that she should go and have an early morning bath in the river. She went down to the cool river, which in the dawn hours was a light jade green, the colour of young jimbelins. The water was deliciously cold and surprisingly warm in some spots, and she swam and swam until the sun came up fully over the village. She had no towel, so she rose out of the water and put on her dance dress over her wet skin, and to the eternal disgrace of her family, she walked home with her wet satin dress clinging to her voluptuous form, her hair long and dripping wet across her shoulders in thick ringlets. Cool and relaxed, she walked towards her parents’ home and met them coming down the one street in the village, dressed in their church clothes. They passed each other in the square and never exchanged a word. But the entire village witnessed this shocking scene and by the time her parents reached the church, the parson had put together a fiery impromptu sermon about harlots and loose women. This incident was in fact a blessing for him, because he had planned to preach one of his old stale standbys about the prodigal son. Well, you know that terrible Don’t-Care girl died soon thereafter, probably from pneumonia or TB which, according to Hanover people, she had contracted by wearing low-cut dresses which exposed her lungs.

  But some other people claimed that the Don’t-Care girl had met a mermaid when she went for her early morning swim in the river. They said that she had made friends with this “River Mummah,” who had combed the girl’s hair with her golden comb and taken her down to the deepest parts of the river. Down there, River Mummah had shown her where her golden table was spread with delicious things to eat, delicacies rescued from the holds of sunken galleons which had come from faraway lands, laden with spices like saffron and coriander. She had fed her on cured saddles of mutton and haunches of venison and special breads and light cakes which never went stale and never grew soggy underwater. She had introduced her to many water souls, some of whom had met aqueous deaths for love. Some had run away and chosen to drown themselves and live as restless water spirits rather than as wretched slaves. People said that the Don’t-Care girl had not died from pneumonia or TB but that the mermaid had come for her and that she was living under the river, forever dancing now in its restless currents. Some people even claimed that on some Sunday mornings she could be seen walking through the village, dressed in her wet satin dance dress.

  And do you know that even after Ann was told this story the girl still clung stubbornly to her joy, to her sense of humour and her dreams? She announced that she wanted to go to Rusea’s High School to study, maybe to become a lawyer. Her mother pointed out that this was impossible because David had succeeded in giving away almost everything they ever had to people in need. Besides, she knew David did not believe that girls should be educated. Like many men of his time, he thought that it was a waste of money to educate girls, who anyway would just end up getting married and having children. All that they had left was some land which Margaret was not going to sell to finance Ann’s dreams, so she had better do what her sisters Cleodine and Doris had done and find herself a husband.

  For the rest of her life, my mother would compare any woman who was inclined to be stingy and controlling to my father’s grandmother Dorcas, with whom they lived during the first few weeks of their marriage. Those early weeks of marriage had proven to be difficult for Doris and Marcus. The one-bedroom cottage in which he had lived his bachelor life was being made into a house fit for a married couple who expected to have children, and that is why they were staying with Dorcas. A tall, brooding, silent woman on whose land flourished a variety of fruit trees, she forbade anyone to ever pick so much as one lime without her permission. The sweet-sops, soursops, naseberries, starapples, oranges, and mangoes sometimes rotted under the trees because she did not feel like giving her permission for anyone to pick them. Sometimes she would gather baskets of fruit and hang them from the ceiling in her kitchen, where they would over-ripen, dripping their sour nectar down. Bees would buzz around these laden baskets of spite-fruit, mice would nibble on them, and fruit bats would slap their leathery wings against them, but she would not give them away if she didn’t feel like it. My mother, who loved nothing more than feeding people, was stunned and appalled by Dorcas’s miserliness. “Nobody in Hanover would ever do something like that,” she would say, “these St. Elizabeth people are very peculiar.”

  On the day of Doris and Marcus’s arrival in Malvern, the trustees of the Munro and Dickinson Trust were holding their monthly meeting, and the square was alive with horse-drawn carriages and several brand new Ford Motor cars. Doris did not fail to take note of the fine store that sold beautiful imported fabrics, and another dry goods store run by Cleve Tomlinson, who was Marcus’s friend, and the fine courthouse building which, if anything, was even more impressive than the one in Lucea.

  Marcus had many friends in the town of Malvern. Among them were teachers from the Bethlehem Teachers’ College, and some were like the lively Gertie Holness, who ran the shop and bar situated on the main road and who was to become one of my mother’s best friends. These friendships proved invaluable to her as she spent the first few weeks of her marriage enduring the tight-fisted ways of Dorcas, who considered Doris at twenty-three to be a mere girl.

  The newlyweds attended church in Malvern on the first Sunday after their wedding to “turn thanks.” It was and remains the custom in rural Jamaica that the bride and groom should always go back to church on the Sunday after their wedding to show themselves to God and the community and give thanks for the blessings of their new life. Doris took great care with her “turn thanks” outfit. She always described it in exactly the same words, the outfit she wore on this important occasion.

  “I wore a dress of smoke-coloured Brussels lace with matching leather shoes that my grandfather George O’Brian Wilson made from my own last and a dusty pink cloche hat festooned with one blush pink rose.”

  All the marriageable women of Malvern had come out to see the stranger woman whom Marcus had chosen as his wife, the woman he had gone to Hanover and picked out over all of them. “They came to see a show that day,” said Doris, “and they did see one.” They returned to their homes defeated. Marcus had married a princess. Which woman in St. Elizabeth could dress like that? And her walk, that straight-backed upright walk which she had learned from her sister Cleodine, who had learned it by wearing a backboard. Many of the women who came prepared to hate her for stealing their most eligible bachelor now wanted to befriend her so that she could help them to look fabulous, sophisticated, and uncountrified.

  All the women except for Patsy and Ramona O’Riley, sisters who had both had their eyes on Marcus as a prospective husband. “If I don’t get him, then it must be Ramona,” Patsy would often say. Marcus was easily one of the most attractive men in Malvern. He owned his own house and had a good job, and he could make anyone, even the dour Dorcas, laugh with his outrageous jokes. Marcus was the friend you needed to have if you were ever in a jam. He was the friend you could tell a secret to and you would never, ever, in a million years, hear it back. He would lend you money and forget it. He would overlook your worst faults. “We are all human,” he would always say. “If Patsy don’t get him then it must be me,” Ramona said.

  In those first weeks of living with Dorcas, Do
ris suffered greatly from homesickness. She missed her mother and her father, her sisters and brothers, more than words could say. Sometimes at the dinner table, sitting down to one of Dorcas’s frugal repasts, she would cry softly and lament out loud something like, “I wonder, oh I wonder what they are having for dinner today.”

  Marcus became anxious, but he was doing everything to make sure his bride was happy. They were putting the final touches on their house, which was now redesigned with the rooms situated one behind the other like the boxcars of a train, a house with high ceilings, separate living and dining rooms in the centre, and four bedrooms, two joined to the living room, two to the dining room, and the kitchen and bathroom behind. A big well-fruited yard with flowerbeds and its own water tank. Everything was being put into place in their new home. He so wanted Doris to be happy.

  “How is Mrs. Goodison?” asks Marcus’s best friend, Stanley Parsons.

  “She not so bright today, I think she a little low. Miss her people, you know.”

  Stanley was secretly relieved that Marcus had not married Patsy or Ramona. He was hoping to land one of the sisters himself and he did not stand a chance if Marcus was around. He had a good reason to call upon them.

  “Patsy gal, it look like that stranger woman that Marcus go and find clear a Hanover, head not so right you know. I hear the big woman just bawling like a child night and day for her mother and father.”

  The next week Doris and Marcus go to church, and after the service people come up to ask her if she was feeling any better.

  “I am fine,” says Doris.

  “Oh, I thought I hear that you are suffering from melancholy.”