Black Cake: A Novel (25 page)

E
leanor Bennett had just finished
replenishing her seven-day pill organizer and was sitting at her laptop looking up the nutritional values of various foods, having decided that the only way to slow the progress of her disease, if at all, was through diet. She could feel the medication leaching the
good
right out of her seventy-year-old bones. As she read through an online article, one of those annoying onscreen ads popped up with an image of a chayote. The sight of the chayote’s spiny, green skin took her back to her early years on the island.

In the years that followed her mother’s disappearance, Pearl’s maternal presence, with her daily, talcum-dusted hug, would be a source of great comfort to her. Except on Mondays, because Monday night was soup night. Not bouillabaisse night, not pepper-pot night, but beef-and-vegetable night, which involved the dreaded chocho.

In California, she had learned to call the vegetable
chayote.
She had discovered that
chocho,
the local word for the
Sechium edule,
sounded like the term some Spanish-speaking people used for a woman’s nether regions. It was an association that, after all those years of resistance to the bulbous, lizard-green, dishwater-flavored squash, had brought her a perverse sense of satisfaction. She liked to believe that the chocho, were it a person, might be made to feel a bit awkward. She could never have imagined that one day it might deliver the surprise of her life.

Just the sight of the chayote on her computer screen was enough to
make Eleanor’s mouth turn down at the sides, but she clicked on the video box anyway. A narrator explained that the chayote had been spotted at a rural market in Italy.

“Not in the Caribbean,” the speaker said, “not in Asia, but right here in southern Europe.” She knew this narrator. There was something familiar about the woman’s voice. Just then, the camera moved up from the chayote and past the presenter’s fleshy throat and Mrs. Bennett found herself looking into the eyes of a middle-aged woman who looked just like her, only with lighter skin and darker hair, and whose voice, Eleanor now realized, was a close variation of her own.

It was there, right in front of her eyes, but Eleanor kept telling herself that it wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible that Eleanor had searched for her daughter in vain, only to have her appear, just like that, on her computer screen. Her baby, Mathilda. It wasn’t possible. Or was it? There was a name written on the video. Eleanor opened a search window on the Internet and typed it in.
Marble Martin.
There was her photo. And there was her bio. She’d been born in London in 1969. This woman was Eleanor’s baby Mathilda, she knew it, now, from the way she felt her heart swell inside her to fill the hole that had always been there.

Despite her shock, Eleanor was able to register the irony of the moment. On the worst nights of the past fifty years, as she lay limp from the sorrow of having had her firstborn taken away, as she searched in vain for her daughter, as she closeted her anguish from her husband and other children, she would reach way back to the Monday evenings of her childhood, when shunning the chayote had been her chief concern, when she still believed that her mother would be coming back home, and before she learned that you could love a child even when it had been forced into your womb.

And it would be the memory of being pestered to eat that steaming bowl of soup, then being wrapped in the quilt of Pearl’s embrace, that would turn out to be her greatest source of comfort.

P
rognosis. Prognosis. Prognosis.

All these years, Eleanor had only wanted to find her firstborn daughter. Now that she knew who she was and how to contact her, she realized that she couldn’t do it. It was too late. It wouldn’t be right, not with this prognosis, for her, essentially a stranger, to walk unbidden into her daughter’s life, only to tell her that her birth mother was about to die.

“I think she’d want to hear from you, anyway,” Charles said. “I think she’d appreciate being given the chance to hear you say that you have always wanted to find her, that you never really wanted to give her up. Imagine what a gift that could be.”

Charles was good. He had this way of convincing a person. But by the next morning, Eleanor had already changed her mind.

“Things are moving too fast,” Eleanor told Charles. “My other children need to know first. Then we can call her.”

Eleanor took Charles’s hand. “I’m sorry things have turned out this way for us,” she said. “This stupid illness.” Charles leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, then on the cheek, then in the crook of her neck, pushing his nose into her skin until she laughed.

S
he called her once but
didn’t have the courage to speak.

Eleanor had a UK mobile number for Marble Martin. It didn’t seem possible, but that was what investigators were for, Charles had said. From what she’d read in the pile of papers that Charles had given her, Marble was a long-distance commuter, living between London and Rome. Eleanor read that Marble was a sort of stage name and that she’d actually been christened Mabel Mathilda. Her heart did a thump when she first read her daughter’s middle name. Mathilda, her own mother’s name. The people who’d adopted Eleanor’s baby had kept the name that she had given her.

Eleanor could call back another time, when she felt ready. She didn’t want to frighten the child, to shock her, to betray the people who had spent fifty years of their lives raising her and loving her. This needed to be handled with tact. Plus, her daughter might not want to talk to her. Eleanor had to be prepared for that, too.

For now, it was enough to have heard her daughter saying
Hello? Hello-o?
What a thing that was, to hear her own voice coming back at her. It was confirmation that after all these years of separation, Eleanor’s baby girl was still part of her, had taken something with her when she was pulled away from her mother’s nipple for the last time.

W
hen the phone rang, Marble
had been lying on her back watching an iguana. She was thinking that she’d been right all along to come to this beach so far away from everything. As much as she had tried, she hadn’t been able to make peace with her doubts about her parents and her origins. She needed to think. She needed to be in a place where no one had any expectations of her. And this was the place. She knew it the minute she saw that gleaming black eye fixed on her from above. As she watched, the iguana did its thing on the sand right near her face, but Marble didn’t mind the poop.

It was a work of art, the stillness of this creature, its spidery digits clinging to the tree limb, the fringy ridge along its back. Marble shifted her eyes to the turquoise waves crawling up shell-white sands, breathed in the nutty scent of her own skin warming in the sun, then checked the news headlines on her tablet.

There’d been a fire at a nuclear power plant in France, another massive earthquake in Italy, more refugees drowning in the Mediterranean. And fighting, just about everywhere else. People had troubles, big troubles, but for these few days, Marble wanted to focus only on her own, far from the photo shoots and microphones and meeting rooms, where she could let her feelings float up and hover, unabashed, above her body, and do nothing but gaze up at a mottled lizard as big as her dog. She thought of her dog at home and hoped the neighbor boy wasn’t giving him too much to eat.

How are you, Puppy-Man?
the boy always asked her dog, and Bobby always answered the boy with a little leap. That boy, now almost a man, used to go to school with her son, used to clamber up trees with her son, kept coming back to see her son when he was home on holiday from school. When Giò first left for boarding school, the neighbor boy would sit on the front steps of Marble’s building, running a stick along the ground until Marble would open the door. Over the years, she struggled to look at his broadening shoulders, at his downy, new mustache, at this child who kept on growing right before her eyes while her son was so far away. But this kid had known her son since the two of them were in diapers, so finally one day she said to him,
Want to watch the dog for me?

The iguana shifted its neck, then settled back into its gray-and-white stillness. Marble closed her eyes and imagined herself as the lizard, morphing into a lichen-covered mass of stone, sleeping through the long, chilly hours of the night and coming to life only in the warmth of the sun. She was holding on to this thought when her mobile phone started to vibrate.

An unlisted number.

“Hello?” Marble answered. No one spoke but she heard an intake of breath.

“Hello-o?”

Nothing. The signal was gone.

She waited for a while before putting her phone away. She knew that if it was important, whoever had called her would call again.

But they didn’t.

B
enny is in the bathroom,
washing her hands and looking at herself in the mirror. She has only ever seen her father’s features in her face, plus her mother’s lopsided smile. Now she knows what else she’s inherited from her mother’s side of the family. Her skin, for one. Benny is so pale in comparison to her brother and parents that if she didn’t look so much like her brother, she might have doubted her origins. This must have come from her mother’s father.

It has never really bothered her before, not knowing everything about her family. Benny and Byron were raised to believe that their parents were both orphans. Unanswered questions came with the territory. This is who they have always been, an African American family of Caribbean origin, a clan of untold stories and half-charted cultures.

Now Benny finds herself wondering more specifically about the generations that came before her parents, the arrivals from distant regions, the lives they lived, the different cultural influences. Benny is thinking, too, about another kind of inheritance, a spirit of defiance that she sees, now, comes from her mother. Her mother, too, struggled to find her way despite other people’s expectations, other people’s definitions of the kind of woman she was supposed to be. Her mother, too, kept closing doors and moving on.

If only she had said something sooner.

In her recording, Eleanor says that Benny’s dad really did lose both of his parents, though by then he was already a young adult. After Gibbs Grant moved to Britain to study and then dropped off the radar, folks back home must have assumed that Gibbs, like others before him, had simply drifted away on the current of his new, immigrant life. His mother’s relatives might have tried to find him, but surely they could not have imagined that he would be hiding in plain sight under an altered name with a woman who was believed to be dead.

Benny’s mother talks about feeling like a ghost after the death of Benny’s father, feeling like there was no one around anymore to recognize her for who she really was. The reality of her mother’s situation is beginning to sink in. Over time, Eleanor Bennett had given up parts of herself until most of who she had been was gone. Family, country, name, even a child. And she hadn’t felt free to name her losses. Benny and Byron would never have been enough to fill the gaps that remained, would they?

Benny and Byron had never been enough.

Benny pulls a towel off a rack, sits down on the toilet lid, and buries her face in the mound of terry cloth, taking care not to let her brother and Mr. Mitch hear her crying.

Down the hall, Byron is in the kitchen grinding more coffee, looking down at his hands. He and Benny look so much alike, they could be twins, were it not for the nine years and several shades of color between them. Apparently, Benny takes after their mother’s father, that Lyncook guy, the man whose mistakes drove their mother away from the island.

Being the children of people from the Caribbean, Byron and Benny have always taken for granted that they might have ancestors from various backgrounds. But in his heart, Byron is a California kid and a black man first. This is his identity. Of course, in the minds of others,
he is a black man, first, second, and always, which would be fine if it weren’t to the exclusion of everything else.

If Byron ever has any doubt about the weight of color in his world, he only has to look at Benny. His sister was always a sloppy driver, capable of putting the fear of God in you on the freeway, but Benedetta Bennett, with her sand-colored skin, has never been pulled over by the police, while Byron averages three or four times a year.

It’s getting to the point where Byron is afraid to drive at night. It’s getting to the point where he’s declined to visit certain friends in certain neighborhoods after a certain hour, not out of a fear of crime but out of fear of being stopped by police. It has gotten to the point where the last time he needed a new car, he bought a less sleek model, one that wouldn’t catch the eye of someone who didn’t think a black man should own a certain kind of vehicle. Because there’s that, too. But he would never admit this to anyone, except Cable.

What does his British sister look like? he wonders. How does she navigate her world? Byron can’t resist. He gets online and searches Marble Martin on his phone. Apparently, she has a huge following in the UK. He swipes and clicks until he finds a photo. He is stunned. Does this Marble person know, Byron wonders, how much she looks like their mother? The woman is as pale as Benny is, but there is no mistaking those eyes and that nose and that mouth. Those are his mother’s eyes and nose and mouth, the sight of which fills Byron with a longing that he can only describe as a kind of homesickness.

Byron opens the freezer to put the remaining coffee beans inside and sees a disk-like form wrapped in tin foil. There it is. The black cake. He reaches out and touches it.
I want you to sit down together and share the cake when the time is right,
his mother wrote in her note.
You’ll know when,
she said. Now he understands the
when.