Anna In-Between (30 page)

“Maybe they like our company,” her father says.

“Maybe they smell the hunter in you.”

“Or they see the stick in my hand.”

They must sidestep dead frogs, flattened by cars and dried stiff in the sun. Their front and back legs, splayed out on the road, are fused into the hot asphalt.

Her father nods his head toward a sun-dried frog. “Looking for water. Too bad the canals are dry.”

At the end of the road is a small park, a memorial for a previous resident, a rich merchant, perhaps. There are three benches, one of them under a royal palm tree, the bottom half of its trunk a distinctive red. Red berries are clustered at the base of its fronds.

“Let’s sit here,” her father suggests.

The dogs have followed them. Two of them chase each other playfully around one of the benches. The other two settle down on the ground at the entrance of the park.

“They like us,” her father says. “We’ll be safe here. They’ll protect us.”

“The island was never like this before I left. We could feel safe anywhere.”

“Oil and drugs,” her father says and he gives her an opening. His purpose may have been to cool the tension that had flared up between them, but the walk they have taken has not lessened Anna’s anxiety. Must she stay on the island until her mother has had her last session of chemotherapy?

“You know, Daddy,” she begins, “I often wondered if the Europeans would not have left if they knew the oil was going to return.”

“In the first place, the oil never went anywhere, so you can’t exactly say it returned. The Europeans had poor equipment. When the Americans came they brought harder drills. They were able to reach untapped beds.”

“So the Europeans would have stayed if they knew there was more?”

“No one had a crystal ball. The oil was there and then it was not. Who knew it would be there in such quantities? Who knew the island would be oil rich today?”

“I remember the pumps. You remember, Daddy? When we first drove to the hill, we saw them. None of them were working. Remember?”

Her father fiddles with a button on his shirt. Anna senses his discomfort but gives no ground. She is focused on her purpose now. If her father could compromise what he ought to have done for what he needed to do, why can’t she? She needs to return to New York. The manuscript she wants to defend is not chick lit or urban lit, the types of books Windsor has assigned to Equiano, convinced that these are the only novels by black writers that are marketable. It is a serious literary work that demands her serious attention.

“I think when the company offered you that job,” she says to her father, “they believed the oil was drying up.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Well, don’t you?”

“They didn’t fool me.”

“You took the job.”

“Wasn’t life better for you when I took the job?”

They had more money, she had more things, but she cannot say life was better for her on the hill.

“Weren’t they sort of using you?” she asks.

“Maybe. I suppose I knew they never would have offered me a management job if they didn’t think the oil was drying up.”

“Then why did you take it?”

He shifts his gaze to the dogs. “In life,” he says, “we always have to decide what matters most.”

“And your job mattered more?”

“More than what?”

“Exposing them.” She dares to remind him of the reports in the newspapers when the European oilmen left.
Traitor,
one headline read, referring to her father who retired at the same time, five years before his retirement age.
Independence was coming and the British knew it,
a reporter wrote.
They skimmed what they could from the oil
wells, stuffed their pockets with our money, and ran. John Sinclair
colluded with them. The British weren’t stupid. They hired a black
man to do their dirty work. Sinclair has no conscience. He took
their blood money.

“You can’t have it all,” her father says.

“Then sometimes the ends justify the means? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Depends on the means. If the means you use hurt people, then I say no. That, to me, is the worst sin a man can commit: deliberately hurting someone for the sole purpose of benefiting himself.”

“If a man hurts someone but he does not do it to benefit himself, is that okay?”

“We humans are flawed creatures. I don’t think we ever do anything for purely altruistic motives.”

“What were yours?”

“I was able to get better severance pay for the oil field workers,” he says.

“And keep your job.”

“Yes. Keep my job. I liked the money I was making, but I think—I suppose I need to believe—I made life better for the workers.”

Tammy Mohun, the South African Indian, cried in her office. “I
am so ashamed,” she said. “But how else would black South Africans
have got their groceries? Who else would have sold them milk
and bread?” If Tammy Mohun’s family got rich selling groceries to
black South Africans, why should they be made to feel ashamed?
Weren’t they doing a service for black South Africans?

“In the end,” her father says, “it turned out I made the right decision. I was in the right place at the right time.”

So in the end, would it be the right decision for her to return to New York to be in the right place at the right time and help a deserving writer? She has stayed at Equiano because she believes, because she had hopes that one day she will be able to persuade Tanya Foster to allow her to publish literary novels. One day she will convince her that the risk of poor returns from a literary novel will be more than offset by the profits the company makes from the growing demand for chick lit and urban lit.

“In my job,” she says, “I am also in a position of helping others, writers who would normally not get published.”

“Your mother told me about Equiano.”

She is not surprised. “I need to go back to New York in two weeks,” she says.

“Need?” His eyebrows contract.

“If I’m not there, chances are that my writer will be turned down.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Aren’t you sure that if you weren’t there, the oil field workers wouldn’t have got a decent severance pay?”

The two dogs lying at the entrance to the park sit up on their hind legs. Their ears perk up. Surely they have not sensed her insolence, for insolent she was to a father who has always been kind to her. Yet dogs have keen ears. Dogs that are sympathetic to her father have keener ears.

“Are you asking me if I was necessary?”

She does not answer him.

“Well, I’ll tell you. I believed I was necessary. I took the job the Englishman offered me because I believed I would be in the best position to help the workers. And, in fact, when the strike came, I was in the best position to get the best severance pay for the workers. In the end, Anna, what matters is your integrity, what you think of yourself, not what others say about you. I went to bed at night knowing I had done my best. I had hurt no one.”

Two of the dogs get up and trot away.

“Time for them to go home,” her father murmurs. They sit silently side by side, father and daughter, their eyes turned in the direction of the dogs. When the dogs are no longer in view, John Sinclair says to his daughter, “Can’t you stay longer? At least until your mother has her last chemo session? That’s not too long to wait, is it?”

“It would be irresponsible of me,” Anna says firmly.

“Your mother needs you.”

“She has you.”

Her father slaps his hand lightly on his thigh. “Ha!” he says. “You are just like your mother. Just as ambitious.”

His remark offends her. Her mother’s ambitions run no further than acquiring the latest style in dress and shoes. Her goals are no more than to impress her friends with the furniture in her house, the flowers in her garden, the dinners and tea parties she gives. No more than to dust off the trophy on her shelf, a daughter who she can claim works for the largest publishing company in America. No, her ambitions cannot be compared to her mother’s.

“Mummy has domestic ambitions,” she says. “I have more than domestic ambitions.”

The sun is descending. In minutes it will sink below the horizon. There are no lights in the park, few along the street. Soon darkness will fall and enshroud them.

The two dogs that remain, the ones near the bench, have stopped playing. One lifts its leg and urinates. There is a dead frog on the asphalt pathway. They sniff it and scamper away.

Her father stands up. “It’s time for us to go back.”

Anna will not let his comment about her ambitions remain unchallenged. “You can’t compare us in this way,” she says.

“Come. It’s late.” He is already walking toward the exit, out of the park, and leaves her no choice but to get up and follow him.

“You have to explain yourself,” she says.

He is walking briskly ahead of her, swinging the stick he brought for the dogs vigorously back and forth against his side. She has to struggle to catch up with him. Her lungs work hard to pump air in and out of her body. Indignation, more than exhaustion, makes her fight for breath.

“Mummy was a secretary. She filed papers, typed, and made tea for her boss.”

“The head of the Treasury Department,” he says. His eyes are focused on the road ahead.

“What?” She quickens her pace behind him.

“That was her boss. The head of the Treasury Department.”

“She was still a secretary.” She is breathing hard. For each step he takes, she has to take two.

“And you think that was all she was?” He stops and she reaches him. He is more than twice her age but he hasn’t broken a sweat. Perspiration is running down her back.

“What else?” She presses her hand against her chest hoping to slow the rapid beating of her heart.

“How do you know she didn’t want more?” He faces her. “Have you ever asked her?”

She avoids his eyes. “I have never heard her voice any ambition to work outside of the house.”

“Ha!” he says. “Ha!” Abruptly, he resumes his pace, this time not so fast that she cannot match his stride.

“What? Do you know something more?” Anna is next to him, shoulder to shoulder. “Tell me,” she says when he does not reply.

“Your mother was not an ordinary secretary. She was an executive secretary.
Executive
.” He stabs his stick on the asphalt road. “Nothing left the Treasurer’s desk unless she had checked it. She was meticulous.”

Anna knows this quality in her mother. Her instructions to Lydia are always precise: one-eighth of a teaspoon of nutmeg, a quarter cup of sugar. She will not allow estimates. No guessing in her kitchen. She provides the measuring spoons and the measuring cups. She has scales to weigh ingredients. Singh knows better than to rearrange the potted plants in her garden. Her mother will inspect the garden after he has gone. Yes, her mother is meticulous. She does not doubt that the head of the Treasury valued this quality in her. But her father says more.

“Oh, she was not good at maths, but she could find the smallest error in grammar or spelling on a report. The Treasurer depended on her to check his sentences. That’s what your mother did, Anna. She was an editor before you were an editor.”

A car approaches and several more behind it. Her father stretches his leg over the open gutter and extends his hand to her. She grabs it and he helps her onto the grassy sidewalk. Forever the gentleman, she thinks. Forever making up stories that paint a perfect picture of his wife.

“I know you love Mummy,” she says when she is safely on the grassy sidewalk.

“So you don’t believe me?” He has not missed the condescension in her voice. “Is that it?”

He is her father. She cannot say she does not believe him. “You’ve known Mummy before I was born,” she says.

“It was frustrating for her.”

She waits.

“It wasn’t easy for a woman in the colonial days. Not easy for a man, either, but harder for a woman. When a woman got married she had to leave her job. The assumption was that she wouldn’t need the money since she now had someone to take care of her. Your mother’s boss had to sack her, but he kept her in an acting position and she was able to work a little longer. She was
that
important to him. All that ended, of course, when she got pregnant and began to show.”

Anna resists the implication of this history he is drawing for her. “Mummy must have been glad to stop working.”

“No,” he says, “it was hard for her.”

He leaves her no choice but to say out loud what he has implied. “I must have been inconvenient then.”

“Oh, Anna,” he says. “Why must you jump to negative conclusions about your mother?”

But he knows why. She does not have to tell him. He knows he can depend on her silence. He can depend on her silence now.

“She stopped because of me,” he says. “Not you.
I
wanted her to stop. She stopped because she loved me. But you, you inherited her editing talent.”

Her mother is in the veranda when they get back. She is speaking to someone on the cordless phone. She has changed from the tailored pants and linen shirt she wore to the supermarket and is now in something more casual, a shapeless flower-print dress that falls loosely from her shoulders. Her hair is brushed back and the bald space on her scalp is clearly visible. “John won’t mind picking it up,” they hear her say. “No. I’m sure of it.”

They walk toward her. “What is it that John won’t mind picking up?” her father asks in that pretend irritated tone he sometimes uses with her mother. Nothing on his face gives the slightest hint of anger.

“Oh, you’re back.” Her mother glances swiftly at him and then returns to her call. “Good,” she says. “Yes, yes, I am sure he’ll be glad to.”

John Sinclair makes snorting noises. His wife puts her finger to her lips and warns him with her eyes to be quiet, and she quickly ends her conversation on the phone.

“Did you have a good walk?” She directs the question to Anna.

“Daddy kept the dogs from jumping on me.”

“Those dogs know your father. They’ll never bother you if you’re with him. Did they follow you? They follow him, you know. They know his smell.”