Anna In-Between (10 page)

“It’s Mummy who may not have long to live,” she snaps.

He stares at her, alarm glazing his eyes. “Your mother. Of course, your mother.”

A second later, her conscience would have warned her that she had judged him wrongly. A second later, she would have realized his talk of death was spurred on by his fears for her mother.

And even if it were not, even if just then he was bemoaning his own mortality, not thinking of her mother, didn’t he deserve her sympathy?

Once, his days were full. Once, he worked late into the night, his head bowed low over stacks of papers. Once, the phone rang constantly for him. Once, important people stopped by the house seeking his advice. Then it all stopped abruptly and saving frogs intent on eating his fish became the highlight of his day.

C
HAPTER 8

F
or more than twenty minutes now Anna and her father have been sitting in silence, she riddled with remorse for her harsh response to his innocent cry for her compassion. Surgery may save her mother, but nothing will add years to his life.
The moving finger once
writ moves on
. Her mother is eleven years younger, eleven years her father will never see again.

“Life!” Her father scratches the top of his head where his hair no longer grows and lets out a loud guffaw. His eyes light up, but with a desperation that makes her look away. “It’s so ironic.”

“What’s so ironic?” she asks, though she can guess his answer.

“Life.
My
life. It’s so ironic.”

Anna can pick out any number of stories he has told her about his life that would fit that description. Every time she comes home, he tells her the same ones. Sometimes within half an hour he has told her the same story twice. Always they are stories about his past. Always they begin this way: It’s so ironic.

Anna believes he repeats these stories to keep his memory from slipping. He has, after all, built a reputation on an unerring photographic memory. He gave up his last consulting job when he was eighty because he had to use his notes, he said. He was a man known to defend his client in the Industrial Court on the island by speaking more than an hour at a time without once glancing at his notes.

Her mother, a practical woman, said he was foolish. Why give up the big retainer the company was offering for his services?

I forget sometimes, her father said. I’m not as sharp.

Her mother quoted to him from the Bible. Pride cometh before the fall, she said. Everybody forgets sometimes, she said. Now, you have a memory like ordinary people. Use notes like ordinary people.

But it was a matter of integrity with him, an integrity ingrained in him by a Presbyterian father whose own father had come to the island on a boat from Madeira, fleeing discrimination from the Roman Catholic Church. He will not lie. He will speak the truth even if it condemns him. He will say he saw blood on the vest her mother wore at night and admit he never confronted her. He will not try to pretty up his words with language that will spare his daughter the stark bluntness of his reasoning. He will say: Your mother and I respect each other’s privacy.

He explained to her mother that he would not be as fast if he had to consult notes. Though he wasn’t a lawyer, companies hired him because he was quick, he said; because he could rebut an argument that would take lawyers for the other side hours, if not days, to respond to, sorting through mounds of papers. It is a matter of integrity, he said to her mother when he turned down the retainers.

He will not read the letters Anna addresses to her mother; he will not allow his wife to read the ones Anna addresses to him. Anna can write in confidence to him; she can write in confidence to her mother. She can be certain that unless she stipulates it, what she writes will not be shared.

Her friends in New York are shocked when she tells them this. “Is it because your parents fight? Is it because they are so different from each other?”

It is because of her father’s principles of integrity, honesty, and privacy, Anna tells them.

Anna’s memory of the first harsh words her father said to her is from the day she read the card that was stuck in a floral arrangement her aunt had sent to her mother. She was seven years old. She had taken the card out of the envelope and, brandishing it above her head, skipped into her parents’ room. “Look, Mummy. Auntie Alice sent a card from England.” Her father snatched the card out of her hand and slapped her fingers. He never had cause to slap her again.

“We can’t be prisoners in our own home. I won’t be your jailer. You have the right to privacy. You have the right to know that what is yours is yours and that your mother and I will not interfere; we will not pry.”

Letters lie open on the table and anywhere in their house. No one reads them unless they have been given permission.

Her mother has her own interpretation of her father’s rule. “Don’t be an eye servant,” she used to say to her daughter when Anna disobeyed her in her absence.

To be called a servant of her mother’s eye was the worst insult her mother could give her.

Privacy matters, her father said. Privacy matters so much he will guard his wife’s secret even from herself.

“Yes, funny thing,” her father is saying to her now. “Ironic. It was a lie that gave me my first job with the oil company, and it was a lie … No.” His fingers brush the back of his other hand. “No. It was
a lot
of lies that got me to leave the government and work again for the oil company.”

He is staring straight ahead into the darkness of the night. A frog croaks. A bird flutters its feathers. Two lizards scamper out of the bushes.
Swish, swish
. They race around the pond and disappear again in the grass. Lizards making love. The wind rises and sweeps past the tops of the orange tree. An orange drops on the ground.
Bup!
A cicada shrieks. Night sounds. Her father’s voice drones on, mingling seamlessly into the nocturnal thrumming.

Anna leans back in her chair, closes her eyes, and listens. She can tell her father these stories herself, but it comforts her to hear them again, in his voice, to pretend that nothing has changed. That all is well. If she concentrates, she can delude herself into forgetting, even if only for an hour, that while her mother is sleeping in the bedroom not far from where they sit, a tumor is devouring cells in her breast.

Her father tells her that after he was accused of cheating on his Cambridge A-level chemistry exam, he lost faith in the promises of the colonial government. He packed his bags, intending to leave the city for good and try his luck in the oil fields.

Of course, the oil fields in the south of the island were owned by the British colonial government, he tells her, but the drilling was done by private companies from England, Europe, and America. He had learned that one of the companies was looking for an assistant to the chemist whose job it was to test the crude oil. Both his parents and the friend who told him about the job vacancy warned him it was highly unlikely the company would hire a local brown-skinned boy, but he was not dissuaded. “The foolish optimism of youth,” he says to Anna.

Only one bus traveled to the village on the outskirts of the oil fields. It would drop him there around three in the afternoon and he would have to walk five miles into the fields to get to the building where the chemists worked. If he got the job, he would be given a place to sleep. If he did not get the job, he would have to walk back to the village and spend the night at the bus stop waiting for the morning bus. He was not worried. He was sure, given his knowledge of chemistry, he would get the job.

By the time he arrived at the weather-beaten wooden building that was the chemistry laboratory, he was hot, damp, and sweaty. His shirt was plastered to his back and rivulets of perspiration ran down the sides of his face. He knocked on the door. The Englishman who opened it took one look at him and shook his head. “The oil fields are further down the road, old fellow,” he said.

John Sinclair explained he had not come to work in the fields; he had come for the job as assistant to the chemist. The Englishman lost no time informing him that the position had been filled. But perhaps because it was late (the bus had broken down and it was five o’clock by the time it was repaired, and past six and dark when her father arrived at the chemist’s office, the sun having already descended below the horizon), or perhaps because the Englishman took pity on the crestfallen face before him, he decided to be generous.

“Tell you what, old fellow,” he said, “there’s a cot in the back room. You can spend the night. Leave tomorrow first thing and catch the bus back home.”

It was all the opportunity he needed, her father says.

The Englishman took him through a long room where there were three large desks. The top of the desk in the front of the room was bare and it didn’t take much for John Sinclair to conclude that the empty one and vacant chair behind it were to be occupied by the new hire. He knew the Englishman had lied, but accusing such a man of lying was dangerous in those colonial days, so he said nothing. The other two desks were crowded with all sorts of bottles, beakers, and tubes filled with foul-smelling thick, black oil. Sitting behind one of these desks was a young man, his skin tanned bronze.

“A French Creole,” her father says. He does not hide his bitterness when he says this to Anna.

Technically, one had to have French blood to earn the title of French Creole. Technically, one had to be the progeny of the generation of French who brought their slaves from Martinique and Guadeloupe to the island when the king of Spain, distracted by the allure of gold in the Guianas, agreed that if the French cleared the bush, they could expand their plantations on his colony. But people had fallen into the habit of calling anyone who looked like a French Creole, a French Creole. Which is to say, someone with white skin, or, rather, someone with light brown skin that he could pretend was the result of generations of exposure to the sun. But everyone knew there were hardly any of these French Creoles left whose ancestors had not had relations with the Africans they had enslaved, relations not simply confined to the field, but extended to the bedroom, or, more often than not, to some dark corner between sugarcane stalks.

The man sitting behind the third desk was indeed a French Creole—his grandfather, an overseer on a slave plantation, being the only one who could claim pure French blood. When John Sinclair entered the room, the man did not say a word, but he swiveled his chair and followed John with his eyes as the Englishman led him to another room in the back of the office. There were two cots there. “You can sleep here with Anatole,” the Englishman said.

It was not an arrangement that was acceptable to Anatole. When the Englishman left, Anatole made his position clear to John. “You don’t expect we’d sleep in the same room, do you, old chap?” He pointed to the empty chair. “Make yourself comfortable.”

“That French Creole thought he was hurting me,” her father says, “but he did me a favor.”

It turned out that later that night, unable to fall asleep on the uncomfortable desk chair, Anna’s father began tinkering with the tubes of crude oil on the Englishman’s desk. Soon he found himself completing the tests that the Englishman had left undone. In the morning, just before dawn, careful not to wake up Anatole, he left the building and began the long walk to the bus stop. The sun was beating down on his head when the Englishman tooted his horn and sped past him, sending a cloud of dust that settled on his clothes. Less than an hour later, as he was nearing the bus stop, he heard the horn again. This time the Englishman stopped his car. “I say, old fellow, still interested in the job?”

The Englishman had seen the test results. They were completed with such accuracy and with such detail he knew immediately that the work had been done by John and not by Anatole. He had hired Anatole as a favor to the head of the company who was married to one of his relatives. He soon realized his mistake: not only did Anatole lack the credentials, he also had no aptitude for chemistry.

“Strange, eh?” Her father chuckles in his peculiar way between laughter and astonishment. “I wouldn’t have met your mother if I didn’t leave the oil fields. And I wouldn’t have been able to give her the comfortable life she has grown accustomed to if I had not taken the job in the first place and gone back years later to work for that very same oil company again.”

They are quiet, he musing on his past, she drinking in the night air. A sudden loud noise startles them.

Plop!
It is followed by another.
Plop!

“Frogs!” Her father jumps up and walks swiftly over to the light switch on the wall of the veranda and turns it on. “Now they’ll go after my fish.”

“There are two in there,” Anna says. The frogs are splayed out in the water, their moist dark green skin glistening in the electric light, their back feet scissoring, their front feet pushing them forward through the water.

“The male frog probably followed the female frog,” her father explains. He grins. “Just like me and your mother.”

“How romantic!” Anna says.

One of the frogs has stretched his front limbs over the back of the other frog and is mounting her. “Look!” her father says. “See that!” Anna peers down in the pond but the frogs, as if sensing an audience, disappear under the water.

“I’ll take them to the river tomorrow.” Her father makes a half step to turn away and then changes his mind. He glances down at the pond again. The frogs have resurfaced, one on top the other. “Life.” He shakes his head. “It goes on and on and the old like your mother and me must make room for the young.” He rubs his hand across his brow. “Poor Beatrice.”

Life
. Two frogs copulating remind him of how little time he has left, how even less time perhaps remains for his wife.

“I think Mummy always suspected it could happen to her,” Anna says. “It happened to Granny. But Mummy will be all right. I know it. I feel it in my bones.”

“It’s just so strange. Don’t you see?”

There is something in his voice that signals to Anna that they are not speaking about the same thing.