Grace (6 page)

Justin tells himself he is fooling around, he is being melodramatic, but his heart lurches nonetheless. He laughs to prove to himself that he is not affected by what Mark is saying, but Mark is not finished.

“Professor,” he says, “I think Sethe wanted revenge, too,
when she killed her daughter. She wanted to make her husband pay.”

“Pay for what? Sethe kills Beloved because she does not want the slave catchers to take her daughter back to the slave plantation.”

“But Sethe’s husband let her down. He wasn’t there to help her when she was trying to escape to freedom with three children and another one on the way.”

“Because he was traumatized. He had seen when those boys raped her.”

“Yes,” Mark says. “That’s the point. He saw those boys raping his wife and he did not help her. Remember how the women in the class agreed with Sethe when you read that section in class: ‘He saw, He saw and he didn’t do nothing?’ They loved that. They’re always talking about how it is different for a man and woman when a woman has a child. They have to stay with the child to breast-feed it, but we can leave them and go wherever we want.”

I don’t want to go anywhere, Justin thinks. It is Sally who is unhappy.

“Sethe did not forgive Halle for not helping her. I think she killed Beloved for revenge.”

“Mark, aren’t you taking this a little too far? Sethe didn’t have time to think when she swung that ax. Halle was not on her mind.”

“Still, Professor, you have to admit it is a good theory.”

He has to admit no such thing, but he is pleased by how these books have engaged Mark. He tells Mark to think some
more about what he said. He warns him against supporting his theories with extraneous material.

“The evidence must be in the text,” he tells Mark. “When Sethe kills Beloved, she does not know that Halle saw those boys raping her. She finds that out eighteen years later.”

“But before Paul D tells her that, she says Paul D is the only good man she knows,” Mark says.

“Hmm,” Justin says. “Why don’t you write this up?”

“For extra credit?” Neither
Beloved nor Medea
is on Mark’s reading list for independent study. He has already taken the Great Books course.

“Yes. Convince me of your theories if you can.”

Mark’s face breaks out in a wide smile. “Bet you hadn’t thought of Sethe taking revenge on Halle.”

Justin sighs.

It is late afternoon when he returns home. Before he left the office, he had called Sally to ask if she wanted him to get Giselle, but she had picked her up already. He hears them chattering when he enters the corridor that leads to the living room. He hangs his bulky black parka on the coat rack. His students wear leather, he thinks. Mark gets financial aid but he has a leather coat. It’s a matter of priorities, he tells himself, looking around his living room: the rich Oriental rugs, the plush sofas, the mahogany table and crystal chandelier in the background.

Giselle has heard him and runs out of the kitchen where she has been playing near her mother. She throws her arms around him.
Yes, it is a matter of priorities.
He lifts her up. She wraps her
arms and legs around him and gives him a sloppy kiss on his cheek.

“Come.” Giselle points toward Sally. “Give Mommy a big kiss. Give her a big hug.”

He cannot deny his daughter. He brushes his lips against Sally’s cheek.

“On the mouth, Daddy. Give Mommy a kiss on the mouth.”

Does she suspect a coolness between them? She was not at home when they had their fight in the morning. Does she sense a difference now?

Sally rescues him. She takes Giselle from his arms and puts her to stand on the floor. “Show Daddy the drawing you made.”

Giselle runs to the table. Sally and Justin do not look at each other.

“Here, Daddy.”

She has drawn a picture of a house. In the house are a man and a woman. They are holding hands.

“It’s you and Mommy,” Giselle says.

“And where are you?”

“I am drawing the picture. I can’t be in the picture if I am drawing the picture, Daddy,” she says with affected patience, as if the logic of it should be obvious.

He laughs.

“When do you want to have dinner?” Sally directs the question to him but she is not looking at him.

“Whenever,” he says. He glances in her direction. Scattered across the table are ruled sheets of paper with the letters of the
alphabet written on them. Each letter is carefully drawn between the lines. “I’m not particularly hungry,” he tells her.

She shrugs and gathers the papers on the table. “Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes,” she says.

He turns to go upstairs. Giselle follows him.

“Tell me what you did today, Daddy,” she says. It is Sally’s question. This is what on happier days Sally asks him when he comes home from the college.
Mark Sandler came by.
He does not say this to her; he would have said it to Sally. But now it all comes back, Mark’s preposterous statement. What a strange leap he had made! That Sethe would kill her daughter to make her husband pay for abandoning her! Halle had not abandoned her. No: A man ain’t a goddamn ax.
Things get to him.
The words flit through his head: Paul D’s defense of Halle. He purses his lips.

Giselle looks up at him. “Tired, Daddy?”

He reaches for her hand. “Never for my little girl.” But he cannot stop the tension rising along his spine.
Sally wakes up one morning feeling depressed. Is it his job to play therapist to her, to make her happy?

“So what did you do, Daddy?” Giselle has skipped one step ahead of him on the stairs. She is tugging his hand. “Tell me, Daddy.”

He forces a smile. “I worked in my office. I corrected papers and I read books.”

“Then read a book to me, Daddy, a big book.”

Yes, this is what should be important to Sally: Giselle, their
family. Mother, father, daughter as in the photograph, a happy family.

“A big book?” The tension recedes.

“One of your books.”

When she comes to his den, Giselle wants him to read to her from his books. He knows she cannot understand what he reads, but if he stops in mid-line when he reads poetry to her, she notices.
Go on. Finish it
, she says.

“This book.” She points to a thick, blue book.
The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

“This book?” He frowns, faking astonishment. “This book is too big for you.”

She laughs. It is their joke. He says this book is too big for you and she says, But I am a big girl, Daddy. She says so now and he replies, “So you are,” and pats her on her head. “Okay.” He reaches for the book and she curls up next to him on the couch. The stiffness in his back is gone. His troubles with Sally have eased away almost completely. He turns the page to his favorite passage, some of the most beautiful lines in all of Shakespeare’s plays, he tells Giselle. She smiles and locks her fingers together in anticipation.

“Ready?” He knows she will listen carefully. She has a natural ear for the rhythms of poetry. She has not learned the term but she hears the beat, she can recognize iambic pentameter. She’ll be the writer I am not, he thinks.

“Ready,” she says.

He reads:

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak’d, I cried to dream again.

Giselle is silent. Finally, in a soft voice she says, “I like it, Daddy. Read it again.”

His eyes are misty when he reads the lines a second time, and the child notices.

“You like it, too, don’t you, Daddy?”

He nods. He tells her that it is Caliban who speaks these lines. He is talking about a place that is very much like the island where her daddy used to live before he came to America.

She loves these stories about the time before her daddy came to America. “Was it nice, Daddy? Was it nice where you were when you were little like me?” she asks him.

“I wasn’t there only when I was little like you,” he tells her. “I grew up to be a big man in Trinidad. I lived there until I was nineteen.”

Nineteen makes no sense to her. She looks at him, waiting for more.

“I was older than Mark,” he says. She has met Mark. “Oh,” she says.

He repeats lines that he has just read to her. “‘Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments / Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices.’”

“Bangling, bangling.” The child picks one word and mispronounces it. “What’s bangling, Daddy?”

“Twangling,” he says. “A thousand twangling instruments.”

She twists her head to one side and asks, “Twangling?”

“Yes, twangling.”

“Twangling like steel band?” He has told her about steel band. When the Africans were brought as slaves to this country, they could not take their instruments with them, so they made music on their bodies. He slapped his thighs.
Drumming, see? In
Trinidad, when slavery ended, they used discarded oil drums.
It is the only musical instrument invented in the twentieth century
, he told her.

But she has changed her mind. “Not like steel band, Daddy. Twangling like birds!” She claps her hands in delight.

They have talked about the birds, too, about the kiskadee in the orange tree near his bedroom window in Trinidad. He has imitated the whistle many times for her.

“Twangling like birds!” she says again.

He is overwhelmed with affection for her, this daughter, this one child he has had in middle age. His spitting image.

She has his gray-green eyes and his dark brown complexion.

Her hair, like his, is dark and thick. Her mother divides it into four sections and plaits the front plait into the back plait on either side of her head. She puts ribbons on the end. Giselle likes the ribbons, especially the red ones she has on today. She is a girlish girl. She prefers dresses to pants, and even on this cold day, she is wearing a jumper, dark navy blue, with a white turtleneck jersey. She has on navy tights, which she calls her pantyhose. “Just like Mommy’s,” she says. She will be taller than her mother, close to his height. At four years old, she is already three feet tall.

“Exactly,” he says to her. “The birds, and the rustle of the trees, the rain on the galvanized roof of our house, the surf on the beach …”

But Sally is calling them to dinner and Giselle turns her attention abruptly away from him. “Coming!” She blows him a kiss and runs down the steps toward Sally.

Justin does not follow her. He sits quietly facing the window looking down on the mounds of snow piled around the foot of the oak tree. How had he been able to leave his grassy green for this? To stay, even after what ostensibly appeared to be his only reason for coming—Harvard and then graduate study to the Ph.D.—had been achieved? The question is more than twenty years old and he has yet to find an answer that will not wring him wet with nostalgia.

But the truth is that memories of Trinidad did not trouble him at Harvard. There were papers to write, books to read. Deadlines. The lie that protects the heart of new immigrants:
This is temporary. I will return.
After that, there was the busyness
of teaching: lectures to prepare, papers to grade, exams, conferences. Time passed.

The cracks in his lie did not appear until he was close to forty. Then living in the present and remembering the past became more than he could bear. A familiar scent, a photograph, a fragment of a conversation, suddenly recalled, would reproach him:
You left this for that.
You left turquoise waters, sandy beaches, a sun that is always warm, people who do not stare because you find yourself in a place where the color of your skin arrests them. He wants to say
offends
them, for that is what he thinks when he catches the eye that returns a forced smile— say, at the Metropolitan Opera, the symphony at Carnegie Hall, at a Tom Stoppard play, the beach in the Hamptons—and he unmasks the unspoken questions:
How? Why? What is he doing here?

To remember this loss is a kind of torture: he has left a place where he belonged—home—for this, an exile he has imposed on himself. But to bury the memories is to bury a part of himself. To die a little. He pulls himself away from the window and shuts the book. No, this death comes too early for him. He will remember:
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments / Will hum about mine ears; and sometime / voices.

Giselle is calling him. “Daddy, we’re waiting for you.”

He stands, puts the book back in the bookcase. He readies himself.

AT DINNER THE SILENCE between Sally and him deepens. If the child notices, she makes no mention of it. She talks
nonstop, volleying questions to her mother and father which they answer with forced animation.

“How does snow come?” Justin takes that one.

“When will it end?” Sally answers this, segueing into her plans for the garden in the spring. Aunt Anna will show them how to root seeds.

How will Aunt Anna root the seeds, Mommy?

Aunt Anna will put them in glass jars in the kitchen.

Why will Aunt Anna put them in glass jars, Mommy?

Aunt Anna says so we can watch the seeds grow into plants.

And what will Aunt Anna do next?

In April Aunt Anna will help us plant the young shoots in the garden.

Aunt Anna. Aunt Anna.
The name bounces from one to the other, sliding merrily off their tongues. One would think all is well around the table, but he and Sally have spoken only polite words to each other: Will you pass the bread? Do you want more salad?

“Will Aunt Anna come tomorrow?” Giselle’s face lights up with the prospect.

Sally’s special friend, her best friend, Giselle’s godmother. Aunt Anna to Giselle. It is a friendship that predates him. It was forged in that foundry where life and death hung in the balance. Sally saved Anna. Not her life, not anything as dramatic, as melodramatic, as that, though to hear Anna speak of it one would think that that was what she had done.