A different hurricane, p.7
A Different Hurricane, page 7
“Mother, please.”
“So which restaurant you’re taking me to?”
“One of those in Villa.”
“Villa! You’re out of your head! Why you want me to go to a restaurant in Villa? I’m not a tourist. Those people serve crapaud. Frogs’ legs, my foot! Just thinking about it make me want to retch. I bet their food taste like straw. On top o’ that, you know I don’t eat from any and anybody. I have to be sure the people handling my food clean. Many people don’t wash their hands after using the toilet.”
“Mother, I have to go. We’ll pick you up around noon. Wait for us outside the church. Take care.”
No one will believe that the first time I proposed celebrating her birthday here in this house, I had to threaten never to speak to her again if she didn’t come. I wonder if Mother knows why she so wants to celebrate her birthday in my house. Most of her church sisters — one of the two brothers who used to come is dead, and the other is in a nursing home — are single-parent mothers. Quite a few with children who’ve turned out be wastrels. A couple are in prison.
She called me back immediately. “Don’t you dare shut me up like that! I guess the change is because of this liver ailment of yours. How are you feeling?”
“I’m coming along. My doctor’s doing his best. Allan has looked at the drugs he’s giving me and thinks they’re appropriate.”
“Gordon helping you with the housework?”
“Yes. We’re getting a helper.”
“That’s good. Make sure she’s older and not very good-looking.”
“What do you mean, Mother?”
“You want competition? Don’t put temptation in a man’s way. He won’t refuse it.”
I laughed.
“You’re laughing. I hope you don’t find out when it’s too late.”
That’s my mother. Wisdom forged in the kiln of cynicism. Wonder what she would do if I invited Clem to the restaurant too. Gordon once threatened to bring him to one of Mother’s birthday celebrations. Of course, I knew Gordon wouldn’t. “How,” Gordon asks at times, “do you and your mother feel carrying around all this hatred?”
“Just like you do with your feelings about your father.”
“There’s a difference. Clem wants to reconcile. He needs your forgiveness. It’s not too much to give to a man who wants to die in peace.”
“Let him concoct his own peace. You will have to do that too. I don’t mean about your father.”
He took a loud breath. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. He’s a sensitive man. I know now that buried in the silence that has been there from the time we got married is the guilt he has been carrying since he married me. Those who talk too much, Mother used to say to me, betray their secrets. I admit my culpability in this mess that my life has become. If I had not got pregnant, he wouldn’t have felt forced to marry me. Mother was right. I should have discussed getting pregnant before I did. Of course, in having me as his girlfriend, he was using me to make Vincentians believe he was heterosexual. What’s done is done, Maureen, and can’t be undone.
Yet I could have done worse — been forced to raise Frida on my own. I will never tell Gordon that the way he has parented her made me think of the parenting I never got. What if Frida had disappointed him? I know enough children who, despite the best parenting, have disappointed their parents. Some were my students. Now Mother can brag not only about her daughter, the ex-deputy headmistress of Girls’ High School, but also about her granddaughter who’s about to receive a second master’s degree, this time in molecular biology. “Mom, all that remains now is for me to receive the diploma. That will be in June.” It makes sense that Maggie wants to parade Frida in front of her church friends. The only kind thing she’s ever said about Gordon is that he has been a good father. If the truth about our illness becomes known, the pedestal Mother has me on will be knocked out from under me. How would she handle it? She’d advise me to keep it secret. She’d be angry, but she’s no fool, but I won’t be able to trust her not to tell Frida. And the uneasy peace that now exists between Mother and Gordon will be shattered forever.
He scrolls down further, through passages describing Valencia’s antics, until he gets to what he’s looking for.
May 7, 2012
Yesterday, Mother’s birthday, I agonized over how I’d look. On Friday, Valencia, bless her heart, dyed my hair a very dark brown. Just before I left the house, she layered my face with something that felt like goo before applying face powder. “Mr. Wiley, he must keep car cool. You no want sweat. Restaurant cool. You no go sweat.” We gave Valencia the afternoon off and offered to drop her home on our way to pick Mother up directly from church. She told us to leave her at the market. She obviously doesn’t want us to know where she lives.
The restaurant was on the second floor. About fifteen tables. Three White men sat at one. All the others were empty. We sat at a table that gave us a direct view of Young Island. Just below us yachts and catamarans bobbed up and down on the water. Their occupants, weekend visitors from the nearby islands most likely, sat around on the downstairs patio drinking. Mother sat across from me and never lost her frown.
“What’s bothering you, Mother?”
“I don’t know why you brought me to this place.” Ten minutes had elapsed since the waitress came by, and Mother hadn’t opened the menu. The waitress — Afro-Indian, twentysomething, prim and proper, in a white blouse and black skirt — smiled. She had already brought us water and asked what we wanted to drink. Mother had pointed to her glass of water. “That is more than enough for me.”
Gordon and I, anticipating indigestion, had asked for Perrier. She’d brought it and noted that Mother hadn’t opened the menu. Now, from the far end of the restaurant, she was leaning against the bar counter, her arms crossed below the waist, and looking at us intently. “Mother, the waitress wants you to choose. Why you don’t open the menu? There are some lovely seafood dishes. There’s paella. You love pelau.”
“I don’t know what all they have chop up in it. I don’t have to read the menu. I sure they have barbecue chicken.”
Gordon signalled to the waitress.
“Mother, you first.”
“I want barbecue chicken. A leg so I’m sure it’s chicken you serving me. That with a baked potato and salad. Don’t put any guck on my potato.”
The waitress picked up the menu and opened it.
“Honey, you don’t need to open that. You all have barbecue chicken?”
“Yes.”
“You all know how to bake potatoes?”
The waitress broke into a smile. Gordon was smiling too and shaking his head. My lower jaw was almost on my chest.
“I understand,” the waitress said and turned to me.
Gordon and I ordered broiled fish and rice — no salad, we have trouble digesting anything that’s uncooked — and asked them to put lots of lemon juice on it, but no pepper.
The waitress left and Mother continued to stare at me. “I want to ask you something. You changed professions?”
“Mother, what you mean?”
“Why you have all that putty on your face?”
“Mother, it’s just makeup. Does it look good? You haven’t said if it looks good.”
“Good! You look like a painted lady.”
When the waitress came with the cake — we’d ordered it with the reservation — Mother broke into a smile, her first for the afternoon. I held my breath until she took the first forkful and only released it when Mother nodded her approval. If I’m alive next year, I think I’ll return to celebrating her birthday in my home.
* * *
This morning the scale says I’ve gained three pounds. I’ve been eating more. Maybe it’s the effect of Prozac. One thing leads to another: I feel better, I eat more, I have more energy, and more energy makes me feel better. Of course, I know this feeling of well-being won’t last. How do I combat depression on my down days?
Will my life ever resume its routine? You never think that shopping for groceries, talking to neighbours across the fence, picking up the phone and calling someone, cleaning the house, cooking, going to church, meeting a colleague in town to chat — you never think that such banalities are what comprise a healthy life.
Last night, before sleep came, I thought of Allan’s threat to have me hospitalized. Was he telling me I’m mad? Yes, I’m mad. Mad as in angry. I am not insane. If he tells me so one more time, I’ll say, Go ahead and call me crazy, Allan, and I will show you what crazy is. I will call in Searchlight, the News, the Vincentian. I will tell them everything and show them the drugs I’m taking, and after that I will definitely go crazy. Maureen, you’re kidding. You’ll never do that. Make a spectacle of yourself! Maybe I can get something good out of it: denounce the laws and attitudes that brought us to this. But that part won’t interest journalists.
I hope those who read this understand that getting AIDS has nothing to do with being gay or straight.
Yes, I should be clear in my mind about what’s angering me. When Allan and I discussed Gordon’s homosexuality, he reminded me, as if I needed reminding, that he’d urged us all to see Brokeback Mountain. The Christian Council here had wanted it banned. Eight of us went in a party to see it: Allan and Beth, Claudia and Joel, Gloria and Brent (her boyfriend at the time), and Gordon and me. Afterward, we went to Bickles and joined two tables together. The intent was to discuss the film, but all four of us women were silent. I’m sure we were all wondering if any of the men with us was leading a double life; since then, that fear has prevented us from even discussing it among ourselves. Allan had wanted a discussion badly. In the end, because we were silent, he ended up giving a lecture. He said that studies show that as many as twenty percent of all human beings were bisexual; that in some cases, same-sex desire was weak and could be resisted. In other cases, no. He felt the shapers of public opinion were aware of this, and it was why shame, censure, and laws have been used to keep same-sex lust in check. He looked from me to Beth — we were sitting beside each other across from him — “You remember Sehon Goodridge, your Anglican bishop who died a few years ago, saying on the radio sometime back in the late nineties that if the church accepts homosexuality, husbands would leave their wives and wives would leave their husbands and their children would suffer? That argument isn’t as specious as it seems.”
I guess Gordon is what they call bisexual. Didn’t he have a responsibility to tell me before we got married? In Brokeback Mountain, Ennis and Jack didn’t tell their wives. When we got home after the film I asked Gordon how he thought Jack had died. I’d wanted to bring it up in the restaurant.
He said, “His in-laws killed him.”
“The film doesn’t show that.”
“Indirectly it does. Remember the look on the wife’s face when she met Ennis? Remember the scene that Ennis recalls about his father taking him to see what happens to homosexuals?”
“I get it. Jack leaves to go fishing with his brother-in-law, and after that we hear of his death. The rest is left to our imagination.”
They say that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. Nonsense. We don’t see the microbes in food or water but they’ll make us sick or kill us just the same. And we never know what diseases lurk in healthy-looking men and women. We never know.
Chapter 6
He remembers the conversations about Brokeback Mountain in the restaurant and later at home. He was tense while Allan spoke, so tense he couldn’t scan the faces of the others. Why had they all been so silent? Were the women wondering if their husbands were closeted gays? He would have never spoken to anyone about the film, let alone urge them to see it and discuss it. Allan should be renamed Mr. Confident.
His legs feel wooden. He thinks of ejecting the flash drive, but there’s more of the journal that he wants to read. He gets up and walks out to the side porch. He leans against the railing for a couple of minutes, then goes to sit at the patio table. There are things in the journal that Frida should know. How was Maggie able to read me so well? At least she feels that I’ve been a good father. Maureen never told me this. Now I wonder what will May tell Frida about me? The childhood squabbles with our father? Gordon never confided in May. It wasn’t cool for brothers to confide in sisters. Besides, people always repeat what they’d been told. May sometimes spoke to him about this boy or other — or man, usually married — who wanted to bed her, and ended the stories with a headshake and a guffaw. Lillian hounded her about marriage. “Don’t be foolish, girl. You must have a man in your life, otherwise people going walk all over you.”
“Mama, the women I see need protection from the men — them that you say should protect them.”
Lillian would reply, “You go on talking stupidness. One day you going wake up and find it too late. You want to die a lonely old maid?”
He knows now what loneliness is. Never suspected such loneliness existed. Not even in Montreal. There he was too busy studying to feel it. He’s sure May feels lonely. Shortly after Lillian died, May had considered adopting a child, but Gordon heard no more about it.
* * *
Frida, it was hard to return home after those three-plus years in Montreal; but each time I thought of remaining, I remembered the glow in your eyes — dreamed about it too — your stubby fingers tracing my lips, pulling my beard, tugging at the buttons of my shirt, your screams when we didn’t understand your requests or when you wanted me to hold you in my arms, your gurgles of joy as soon as I did. I wanted to be there so you would grow up loved and protected. Your mother and I grew up in homes where our parents held us only when they collared us to rain blows on our backs for some mistake that we — and sometimes they — had made, leaving our backs with welts that later turned to scars. Your mother taught elementary school — Kingstown Anglican School — before going away to university. When KA students met her — she mentions one, but I remember four — they reminded her of the beatings she’d given them, not about the quality of her teaching. Before you were born, I told her, “If you ever hit our child, I’ll divorce you and do everything to get custody.” Frida, your grandfather abused me physically, and I wasn’t going to let that happen to my child.
I wonder if you remember why for years Maggie hadn’t visited us. I’d come in one afternoon and met her spanking you. You were around five and she was babysitting you. It took all my willpower not to knock her cold. “You brute!” I screamed, my left hand grabbing the neck of her dress and spinning her around to face me, my right fist balled. I came to my senses and let her go with a shove. She tottered and fell, luckily into an armchair. “Don’t come back here. Don’t. And if you ever hit my daughter again, there’ll be hell to pay. Now get out!”
Three months earlier, I’d come home one afternoon and met you sitting on the living room floor play-acting with your dolls. I sat down on the floor and hugged you. You said, “Dad, what spare the rod and spoil the child means?”
“Who told you that?”
“Gran. She said I was out of place and she slapped me. Then she said that you must bend the tree when it’s young and you must never spare the rod and spoil the child.”
“Why did she say you were out of place?”
“She said that you are a f-f-del …”
“Infidel?”
“Yes. And she is praying to God to change you. And I said, ‘My dad told my mom God is a fairy tale.’ Then she slapped me and said I was out of place.”
“Your grandmother knows that she is not to hit you. The next time she raises her hand to hit you, tell her I said she has no right to. If she doesn’t stop, I will prevent her from seeing you.”
Maureen was sitting on the sofa, hemming a dress and listening. She gave me hateful looks. “Are you telling Frida to disrespect her grandmother?”
“No, but now I am telling you to tell your mother to keep her beliefs to herself and to keep her hands off my daughter. Your mother is full of venom. You heard what she said in this living room last week — that she would like to see all the bullermen lined up against a wall and shot. Let her go find Clem and shoot him.”
“My father isn’t a bullerman. You’re going to prevent Frida from spending time with her grandmother!” She shook her head in exasperation, dropped her sewing on the sofa, got up in a huff, went into the bedroom, and slammed the door. Later I overheard her telling Frida, “Don’t tell Gran what your dad said. He says stupid things when he’s angry.’”
* * *
Enough of this for now. Maureen of course defied him and took Frida to visit Maggie. Fortunately, Frida was the sort of child who never stoked Maureen’s ire. The spanking and slapping probably continued in secret, but all three conspired to hide it from him. Should he ask Frida? Maureen’s gone. There’s no possibility for friction. Maggie’s still around and wracked by diabetes and arthritis; the last person he would want to quarrel with.
Maureen became hot with hate whenever she spoke about her father. They hadn’t spoken for sixty-one years. When Clem ended up at the Lewis Punnett Care Home, the year before Maureen’s death, Gordon thought she would soften and reconcile with him. By then he was frail and unable to stand by himself, but his mind was sharp. “You can visit him,” she told Gordon. “If I visit him, I’ll end up cursing him out. Gordon, Daddy made his bed, now he must sleep in it. If you plant dumb cane, you shouldn’t expect to reap sugar cane.” Clem attended Maureen’s funeral mass. An employee from the nursing home brought him in a wheelchair to the Anglican Cathedral.
