All the Finest Girls (26 page)

In all, there were maybe seventy-five people. Nearly the whole village, I guessed, and some from elsewhere too. Holding beer bottles and plastic cups, they stood about in thick bunches, talking and laughing, enjoying themselves. A three-piece band, set up on the edge of the cliff, began to play again, and soon everyone seemed to catch a festive spirit. Over by the drum set, I could make out Clifton and Sebumbo, looking hopelessly awkward in crisp collared shirts, nodding their heads and tapping feet in near perfect unison.

Near the back door, I caught sight of Mr. Alfred seated in a slightly elevated spot, a blanket around his legs. Two women on either side kept him company. Cyril ran by the window in a flash, dressed in a suit with short pants that he’d already managed to rip at one pocket. Shaking up a bottle of soda, he was chasing a smaller boy in and out of people’s legs until someone grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him in close. Marva stood by a buffet table with Floria, filling plate after plate and robustly dismissing a couple of women who were trying to relieve her of her job.

I don’t know what I’d expected. A wake. A hushed household into which I would have to apologetically crash. But as with nearly every other assumption I’d made on this trip, I was mistaken. The Alfreds were throwing Lou a good-bye party. They were celebrating her life. As I leaned against the window, it began to come to me. Lou had
had
a life. Where was mine? Not here, I thought, aware suddenly of Lou’s rich smell still hanging in the room. Not here. I turned around and just for a moment, I could actually see her, remember her face, feel her right there before me. With hot tears again on my cheeks, I began to gather my belongings.

When I’d finished packing, I found a scrap of paper and scribbled a note to the family. It was a cowardly thing, full of dumb apology and thankful for their kindness. The paltriness of my sentiment left a bitter taste in my mouth, but at that point I was beyond a solution for myself.

I took one last look out the window. Among the hubbub of the party, I could see a half dozen young girls in pressed cotton dresses, standing together as space was cleared around them. Marva was hugging a new guest, drawing him into her big arms and the circle of her family. Sick with sadness, I grabbed my bag and headed back out into the hallway.

I didn’t get very far. My hand was not yet on the front doorknob when the same door swung open and I stood nearly toe to toe with Derek.

“Watch yah head, Papa,” he said, standing aside as Errol, so tall he had to stoop, made his way inside the Alfreds’ house.

Wearing a checkered sport coat now, his thinning hair groomed perfectly back, he looked far more like the elderly man he was than he had appeared to me at Foxy’s. His movements were halting, unsure, and he stared nervously down at his shoes while he waited for his son to direct him. Closing the door, Derek saw me in the shadows and, without betraying any reaction, led Errol my way.

“Papa, this is Adelaide Abraham. From the States.”

Errol looked up, distracted, and gave me his hand in a thoroughly automatic way. His face was lined heavily with sorrow, his eyes deep in their sockets. He clearly didn’t remember me. Something had changed; he’d come back from his state of shock, I suspect, and the hard facts of death had wrung the day right out of him. Derek and I said nothing to each other.

“Nice to meet you,” said Errol, his voice weak and reedy.

“And you,” I said, taking his outstretched hand. “I’m so very sorry.”

Errol nodded. And then, all at once as he was still shaking my hand, he began to cry. The tears coursed down his cheeks, and his lower lip curled, trembling.

“Oh God,” he said, barely getting the words out of his quivering mouth. He looked up to the ceiling. “Oh God. I just loved her.”

I stood holding the man’s hand as he kept trying to control his outburst. For a second, Derek and I locked eyes. Then I watched as his gaze traveled to my bag, slung over my shoulder. He looked back at his father, and it seemed to me as if he might break apart at any instant. Clearing his throat, eyes layered with tears, Derek put a gentle hand on his father’s back.

“Papa, I got to check on something, OK?” Derek’s voice broke. “Yah want to sit here for a minute?”

“Let’s get you a little tea,” I said, fishing a Kleenex from my jacket pocket.

Without looking at me again, Derek took his father’s elbow and transferred the man’s weight from his own hand to mine. Errol didn’t hesitate but, like a little boy, seemed ready to do what he was told. Breaking into a jog, Derek went down the hallway and closed the door to his room behind him.

“Come now,” I said, leading Errol into the living room. “It’s going to be OK. Let’s just have a seat.”

Errol bent his long frame into one of the low chairs, knees nearly level with his shoulders. He continued to weep, and I dabbed his eyes once before handing him the packet of tissues.

“I am a fool,” he said, his mouth full of teary saliva.

“It’s all right,” I said, smoothing his brow and then slipping out for the tea.

The kitchen was empty. I rinsed a pot, putting water on to boil. Hearing the sound of rhythmic clapping, I moved over to the back door and leaned out. Marva turned and smiled, touching a cheek out of sympathy for my sunburn before turning her attention back to the entertainment. The mourners stood off to the sides of the yard while the little girls fanned out to form a broad circle.

Clapping in unison, the children began to move, to the left a turn and then the right. All the grown-ups, following the girls’ lead, clapped along. After a couple of turns, the girls began to sing. Their voices, precise and high, were easy to follow, though I couldn’t grasp the meaning of their words. One by one, the girls jumped into the center, singing a solo verse. They sang:

Nou ka mouté anro-che lapé

Eliza Congo!

Mouin ka mouté anro~a ché lapé

Eliza Congo!

Ay jou-joup, jou-joup, jou-joup

Nou ka mandé

Eliza Congo!

On and on went the song, to the left and to the right went the circle of girls, their bright faces fixed in concentration. Many of the older women nodded and sang along. Cyril, who had plopped himself down on the ground, followed the girls’ movements, mesmerized. When the song was done, the mourners burst into applause, and then one girl moved to the center of the stage. It was the girl in the saffron dress I’d seen with Cyril that morning. In a tremulous soprano, she delivered a mournful solo.

Green gravel, green gravel, a bow

Shall be,

And a bow shall be and a kiss to you.

Will you get up and look at your hands and face,

And a bow to me, and a kiss to you?

The song subdued the mourners and though they applauded, most seemed given over to their loss. I brought the tea to Errol, who had managed to compose himself a bit and offered me a shy but handsome grin.

“Where’s that party at?” he asked, looking up at me.

We walked outside under the twinkling lights. Every head had turned when the back door opened, but among all the faces, I saw not one that betrayed any displeasure. A couple people lifted their hands to Errol in silent greeting, others looked politely away from his evident sorrow. Marva, her body loose with relief, marched forward from the crowd and embraced him.

“I knew it,” she said, grinning as she rocked him from side to side, “I always knew it.”

Errol allowed himself to be held, by Marva, then by Philip, and finally by Floria, each one drawing him further into the net of people waiting to greet him. As he was taken into the crowd, I retreated to an empty spot near the buffet table and soon found a job for myself dishing out food. The simple activity made me weirdly weepy with happiness, if such a thing as happiness could be had that night. My sunburn became a bearable pain. Soon enough, the band started up again and the yard began to buzz. I hadn’t forgotten about the taxi driver; I spied him with a group of other men, sharing a joke and swaying to the music.

I was still near the kitchen door, filling plates, when Derek came out, holding a small piece of paper in his hand. He kept his head down and moved straight for the ice bucket, not looking up when Philip came over and wrapped an arm around him. I heard Derek say, gruffly, as he cracked open a beer, “I just didn’t think he should be by himself is all.”

“Well, thanks,” replied Philip, and without commotion, he backed away. Derek got under the fluorescent light and cleared his throat.

“Excuse me, people! I just wanted to say —” he called out loudly.

A whistle from the back of the crowd stilled the group.

“Excuse me, people! Thank you. I just wanted to say. I just wanted to say that we’re glad to have you all here with us.” Derek’s voice quivered slightly, but he was dry-eyed now, graceful in his manner, and spoke carefully. Once or twice he consulted the piece of paper in his hands, but I don’t think he needed prompting. His thoughts seemed to flow from his heart in an even wave.

“My aunt, my grandfather, my son, Cyril, Philip and me — we’re grateful to all of yah for being wit us through this. We don’t really know how Mumma died. And I guess we’ll never know. But I was tinking this afternoon and I figured out how it doesn’t really matter. Dat’s not what matters. I took a long, long walk and me feeling angry at a bunch of tings.” Derek looked down and scuffed his shoe in the dirt. Then he looked back out at the crowd again. “And me tinking why. Why dis? Why dat? And den I remembered dat saying about how ours is not to wonder why. When I was a boy I had a chance to tink about did my mumma love me enough. I troubled myself a lot about dat. But it’s now I realize it doesn’t matter if yah are loved. It’s enough to love. Whether yah loved back or not. Yah don’t ask why, yah just
do.
I tink dat’s de way my mumma always lived. She loved all of yah here tonight. So. Anyway. I just wanted to say that, and thank you all for being here with us. Stay and we’ll celebrate her.”

Derek raised his beer to the crowd of mourners, and they lifted their glasses back, tears flowing freely down each and every face. Then they came forward and opened up, drawing him into their collective embrace.

I stayed. We all stayed, late into the night till the moon was high and children fell asleep on the grass. The music played on, and Lou’s friends danced until they couldn’t anymore, trickling home to bed in the early hours. Inside, Floria made a poultice of something that did wonders for my burn, and after sleeping for an hour or so in a chair, I woke feeling a good deal better. Then just past dawn, as the bells rang for Lou, I followed her family as they made a procession down the steep slope to the church. Small boats charted their solo courses on the flat sea, cutting thin wakes that rippled and finally disappeared. We walked oceanward to say good-bye.

P
ICASSO ONCE SAID
, “It takes a very long time to become young.” I don’t know if my suggestible state was what he had in mind, but I thought of that aphorism when I visited my mother the summer after Lou’s death. Suddenly the simple words made sense to me. I rode the Bay Shoals ferry feeling as if I really ought to have had an ID tag around my neck and a chaperone to hold my hand. I couldn’t remember ever before feeling like such a child. I walked down the gangway with my eyes trained on my mother’s windmilling arms.

“Addy lady, you made it!” she shouted with glee, compounding my sensation that I wasn’t old enough for such a feat. “Bravo!”

She was wearing a tennis dress under a strange little sky blue windbreaker and a big-brimmed hat tilted at an extreme angle against the August sun.
She looks a little crazy
, I thought. My analysis brought me up short, broadsiding me with disappointment. I’d imagined it all different. Better. Fixed. I’d imagined
myself
better. There was still so far to travel.

My hopes cinched in a notch, I held on as my mother rushed forward, pressing herself against me in a big, awkward hug. There was a strangeness, I thought, a particular difference to our physical arrangement, and when I figured out what it was — Mom was shorter than I was, she was shrinking — I pulled back in distress. She did a convincing job of pretending not to notice.

“Oh gosh, you look terrif, Snooks!” she exclaimed, breathless with excitement. “Your hair! Wow!
Very
Jean Seberg. I love it!” And with a mad sort of abandon, she clutched me in another embrace, held just a moment too long. I breathed in lavender and the polite, perspirey top note of ladies’ tennis.
Whoopsy daisy
, was all I could think as I staggered under her soft weight.

“How
are
you?” she asked, ear to my chest.

“Fine,” I replied, my voice weak. “How are you?”

My mother stepped back and threw out her arms, smiling heroically.

“Hotsy-totsy, now that you’re here. Hotsy-totsy!”

Whoopsy daisy.

Back at Further Moor, I took my bags straight up to my old bedroom, closing in on the familiar scent of mothballs and rose water.

“You have to decide what you want in here,” Mom said, following me up the back stairs. “I’m going to redo the whole place this fall.”

For four years, Further Moor had belonged to my mother. Her siblings, older than she and still married, had their own summer houses in and around Bay Shoals. When Edith died, everyone agreed that the Baby (at sixty-one, Mom was still called the Baby by her two sisters and brother) ought to get the house. It was nice of them. Mom had not only lost her mother, but her second husband, Bruce, that year. Grateful for the offer, my mother took over the old house and quickly made it her year-round residence. The place had continued its leisurely decline but hadn’t been fundamentally altered one whit.

My room, with its pine furniture and water-stained alphabet wallpaper, was frozen in time. Ribbons I’d won in the Agricultural Fair junior art competition still hung in faded strips over the lampshades, and jars of sea glass on the windowsills made dappled light across the white painted floors. I sat on my old bed and looked around. A flock of downy pillows sighed behind me. There was no museum, no garden, no place in the world lovelier to me than that room. I didn’t even want to imagine it rehabilitated.