Grace (10 page)

Sally walks away from him without a word.

He follows her into the bedroom. “And she would have brought her back home as soon as she saw the snow.”

“I meant what I said, Justin.” Sally stops him cold. “I’m moving in with Anna.”

He feels he has no other choice but to save his dignity. “And I meant what I said. Giselle is not leaving this house.” That night he sleeps on the couch in his den.

THEY ARE CORDIAL to each other in the morning. Each does the usual chores so breakfast is finished at the usual time. They are cleaning up when Sally announces she is taking Giselle to Manhattan. There is an animated movie Giselle wants to see. It is Saturday.

“Are you coming, too?” Giselle asks him.

Sally does not give him time to answer. “Remember, Giselle? We ’re going with Aunt Anna.”

“Goody,” says the child and then abruptly her face darkens. “We’re going with Aunt Anna because she has a car,” she explains to Justin.

It begins at an early age, Justin thinks. We are making her feel guilty.

“And Mommy says you need to use your car today,” Giselle adds, smiling brightly at Justin, happy she has something to offer him, too.

He shoots an angry look at Sally. “I think you should take the subway,” he says. “The roads are dangerous.”

She seems about to disagree but changes her mind. “I’ll tell Anna,” she says.

“Fine.”

They are gone fifteen minutes when he decides to go out himself. She’ll come back home tonight, he thinks. She’ll not
take Giselle without telling him and she will not leave without Giselle. He knows his wife. She adores her daughter.

IT IS NOT snowing this morning. He looks out the window, and, as he suspects, his car is buried. It is a light blue Volvo, a car he has driven for more than ten years. A matter of priorities, he reminds himself again. He pulls on his waterproof boots, puts on his bulky parka, and takes the red shovel from the vestibule. His neighbor, Jim Grant, is already outside, shoveling himself out.

This is how old men get heart attacks, Justin thinks. He calls out to him.

“Let me get that for you, Jim.”

“Think I’m gonna drop down dead, young pup.” They laugh.

“Have it your way,” he says.

“’Preciate the thought, but I’m almost done. Next time.”

And this is all it takes, this simple light banter between Jim Grant and himself, to spark thoughts of mortality that press upon Justin as he drives down Eastern Parkway on his way to his mother’s.
Think I’m gonna drop down dead, young pup.
Suppose it is
he
who’s gonna drop down dead with a heart attack?

He turns on Rochester Avenue and makes a right on Atlantic. He is forty-five, only a mere fifteen years younger than Jim Grant. He has read the reports. Cholesterol builds, the arteries harden after forty. He should have had Giselle when he was younger. He’ll be fifty when she is in fourth grade, sixtythree
when she graduates from college. Other thoughts begin to fill his head and he struggles hard to block them.

He works out, he goes to the gym, he eats sensibly, he reminds himself. It is not enough. It does not work, this effort he makes to stay in the present. He is on the Belt Parkway. He is heading toward Long Island.

Maybe he won’t be alive to dance at Giselle’s wedding.

And then there it is. The memory surfaces: His father was not alive to dance at his wedding. His father had a heart attack at fifty. But is not fear Justin feels (in only five more years he will be the age his father was) or sadness. It is resentment. He resents his father for dying. He resents his father for dying before his father was a father to him.

Not until he exits off the Southern State Parkway does this feeling dissipate, and then only because it is replaced by a deeper resentment, a greater anger. For he is now in a black residential area, an American kinder, gentler, more compassionate segregated residential area, the kind of area one finds everywhere on Long Island, where those who fought to free the world from oppression, to stop the likes of Hitler in his tracks, to put a halt to racist policies that had taken the lives of so many, bought homes with funds from the GI bill and boasted of family values.

His mother said that when his father bought here, they set off a stampede of whites to the shore. But everything has remained the same: the houses with aprons of green lawns, the park, the school on Grand Avenue, except now garbage men throw half empty garbage cans on sidewalks, flowers don’t seem able to
grow in the park, and overnight teachers have forgotten how to teach children to read.

Justin makes two right turns onto Jones Street and pulls up at number 25. He is in front of his mother’s house, a small Cape Cod with a neat garden, a white picket fence, and a sidewalk that is spotless, because each time the garbage truck leaves his mother comes out to sweep. Five summers ago Justin took off the wooden shingles he hated to paint and put up light blue aluminum ones on the bottom half of the house, white ones on the top and on the dormers. His gift to his mother, though she jokingly said to him it was also a gift to himself. He grins now remembering. A sharp lady, his mother. Perceptive.

He rings the bell. She answers.

“Good Lord Almighty, what has brought you out on a day like today?” Her thin arms encircle his neck. She is a tall woman and her hand reaches easily to the back of his head. She presses his face into her shoulder and Justin breathes in the light scent of eau de cologne on her neck. It is a quick embrace. It is over in seconds; then she is standing apart from him, momentarily embarrassed. For she is a middle-class West Indian woman who has been taught the English ways. Stiff upper lip. Air kisses, not hugs.

“Haven’t seen this much snow in years,” she says, looking tenderly at him, one hand across her chest clutching her waist, the other stroking her neck.

“That’s March for you,” he says, unzipping his coat.

She practically leaps to help him, and he slips out his arm while she holds up his coat. “Must be that global warming
they’re talking about so much. Or is it the Nina and the Pinta?”

He knows she knows better, but she likes to play this game. “El Niño,” he says.

“Niño, Niña, what difference does it make?”

Even when there are just the two of them to witness, she wants to be reminded: her son, flesh of her flesh, went to the best of the best with the best. He is a genius. He knows everything. It doesn’t matter that he tells her his major was literature, British literature.

“And where’s Sally? Giselle?”

He rarely visits her without Sally and Giselle, at first for Sally’s sake, when Sally worried that his mom did not like her. She is not demonstrative, he explained. But she had told him that of all his girlfriends, she liked Sally best. “Not as a wife for you,” Sally said. It was not true. His mother said it was time he married, which, admittedly, was not the same as saying, “You should marry Sally.” So he made a point of taking Sally with him on his visits to her. He wanted her to know he was not only a son; he was a husband, too. And then there was the birthday card she sent Sally one year after they were married. She signed it
Mother
and put in parenthesis,
I want to be one to you.

“A son can’t come to visit his mother without his wife and daughter?” he asks her.

“A son usually doesn’t,” she says, but she does not pry. She does not ask for more.

Her hair has turned completely white. She has it cut close to her scalp, but it is thick and covers her head completely. In
winter it is straight, but it curls in the humidity of summer. Giselle has inherited her thick hair. He hopes not its whiteness. He cannot remember when her hair was black. It began turning, she said, when she was thirty-four.

When she told him that—the age she was when her hair began to gray—he did not think: That was the year she left for America. For she was thirty-four when she left their island. He thought: That was the year she left
me
to come to America.

She has a fine nose and thin lips. With her coloring, she could pass for an Indian from India. She has told him the stories of the Indian men who wanted to court her, not believing she had not one drop of Indian blood. A mélange of African, French, and Carib Indian, she was fond of saying. Columbus made that mistake, but I don’t have to. It’s Carib Indian, not East Indian.

She is an elegant woman. Justin is proud to be her son.

“Tea?” she asks him when they are settled around the table in her kitchen. She will not drink coffee. She calls it the American tea. She drinks British tea. And yet she has no real love for England. They brought us as slaves to plant cocoa and sugar cane for them, she said, and when they found oil in Point à Pierre, they didn’t want to leave.

She drops a tea bag in his mug. “I don’t know how Americans can drink this without milk,” she says. “They put lemon in it and they drink it cold, too.” She pours hot water from the kettle. “I like my tea strong, with evaporated milk. Habits die hard, I guess. What you learn to do as a child, you still do when you get old like me. As the tree is bent, so will it grow.”

As the tree is bent …
It is the very reason he will not let Sally
take Giselle from him. He is Giselle’s father. She is his daughter. He wants to be her teacher.

“Is Giselle still bright like you were?” she asks him.

It is a double-edged question. She is asking about Giselle, but she wants to reminisce.

“Was I a bright child, Mother?” He stirs milk in his tea.

“The brightest of the bright.”

“I read Shakespeare to Giselle. She likes it.”

His mother laughs. “A prodigy,” she says.

“She doesn’t understand a word, but she knows how it’s supposed to sound,” he says. “Except
twangling.
She understands
twangling.
I read from
The Tempest
the other night. Caliban’s soliloquy.”

She knows it. “‘Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises.’ I miss it sometimes, you know, Justin.”

“You could go back.”

“It’s too late to go back.”

“It’s never too late.”

“I’m seventy. It’s been thirty-six years.”

“You still have friends there.”

“People I know, not friends. People change. I’ve been away too long.”

It is true for him, too. He had put one foot in front of the other, and when he looked back he discovered he had covered a forest. The trees had thickened: new leaves, new branches spread out in places where they hadn’t. Undergrowth hid the path he had trodden.

He changes the subject. He does not like to hear this sadness
in his mother’s voice. “Sally does not drink black tea, you know,” he says. He sips his tea.

“I thought she likes tea.”

“She drinks Celestial Awakenings.”

His mother gets up. “Have you had breakfast?”

“Or Glorious Mornings. Something like that.”

“What do you want? Pancakes or toast?”

“Or Heavenly Paradise.”

She takes the frying pan from out of the drawer under the stove. “Did you and Sally have a fight?” she asks.

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Pancakes,” he says.

“No, about you and Sally.”

“I know that is what you meant. She wants more. She wants to move out.”

His mother stands by the sink holding the frying pan. She looks out through the window. “It never stops, does it?” she says. “These modern women.”

“She says she’s unhappy.”

She does not ask him why. She does not ask what Sally means by more. She says, “What does happiness have to do with anything? You don’t break up a home because you’re unhappy.”

She is still standing by the window, her eyes fixed on the leafless trees. He knows she is not thinking of Sally. There is a deep hurt between them that has not healed.

“She wants to take Giselle with her. I will not let her do that.”

She looks straight at him. Her eyes are watery. She blinks and the water is gone. “You can’t do that, Justin. You can’t be so cruel. A child needs its mother.”

She has said words that are better left unsaid between them. They have come out of her mouth without her thinking. She walks away from the window and turns on the tap. She rinses the frying pan. It does not need rinsing.

“A child needs its father, too,” he says.

“It needs its mother more.”

“So you knew, Mother, that I needed you?” It is she who has opened this door.

“Oh Justin,” she says.

“I was older than Giselle, but I still needed a mother.”

She puts down the frying pan and comes to sit next to him. “Is this why you have come here this morning, Justin? You have come to beat me with that same old song.”

“It’s not a song.”

“I know, I know.” She touches his hand lightly. “I know. But what is past is past and cannot be undone.”

“I came to tell you about Sally. I thought you’d understand my position.”

“Your position?”

“That I can’t let Sally take Giselle.”

“A mother is different from a father,” she says. “A child needs a father, but a child needs a mother more.”

“I needed both of you,” he says. “And both of you left me.”

“We did not leave you, Justin. We came to America to make a better life for you. We didn’t think it would take so long to get a green card, and then when we did … Well, you know what you did. You know better than me why you did it. But no matter how many times you explain it, I will never understand. I accept it. That’s all. I accepted your decision a long time ago. I have come to terms with it.”

It is old ground. He does not want to cover it again. He has come to her, however without premeditation, because he believes that of all the people in the world, she will understand why he cannot give up Giselle.

Yes, they came back to Trinidad nine years later when the INS agreed to give them green cards. And, yes, he refused to go back with them. But the story is not that simple and she knows it.

He was seven when she went to New York, but not, as she said, to make a better life for him. She went to be with her husband, the man she loved. Even today, there are people in Trinidad who still say dreamily of the marriage between Sophie Anderson, nurse, and James Peters, poet: Ah, there was a marriage made in heaven.