Black Cake: A Novel (29 page)

W
hat a strange feeling. Benny
is about to meet her long-lost sister for the first time. Marble Martin is coming to the United States and, after several weeks in New York, Benny is on her way back to California to join Byron. When Benny first heard the name
Marble
in her mother’s recording, it had seemed familiar to her, but it had taken a while for her to place it.

Back in the fall, a friend had told Benny about an expert she’d seen in the UK who was doing shows about indigenous foods. Benny had written down the name in her agenda, but she had never looked it up. She’d had a lot on her mind. Making a living, trying to get a business loan, going to therapy. Then Benny’s mother died and she had gone back to New York weighed down by everything that she had just learned about her family.

Marble Martin.

Benny has decided she doesn’t want to look her up at all. Byron says Marble Martin looks like their mother. Benny doesn’t want to see that. She’ll wait to meet her.

Benny is hunched over her sketch pad in an airport lounge when a woman in an emerald-green jacket stops next to her.

“That’s pretty,” the woman says. She must be as tall as Benny. And beautiful. “A hair comb?” she asks.

“Yes, a peineta,” Benny says, holding up her sketch pad so that the other woman can take a better look.

“Oh, yes, one of those things those Spanish ladies wore to hold up their mantillas,” the woman says, lifting her right arm into the air with a flourish that calls to mind the flamenco. The broad sleeve of her jacket falls back to reveal a wrist the color of copper and a bracelet with a stone like the iris of someone’s eye.

“Exactly,” Benny says, chuckling.

“This one looks really special.”

“It is. It’s my mother’s.
Was
my mother’s. Tortoiseshell.”

“Or an imitation. You’re not allowed to make things out of tortoiseshell anymore.”

“I know, but this one’s really old.”

“Is it?” the woman says, nodding. Lingering. Benny runs a finger along the side of the design.

“So, my idea is to do a cake decoration topped by something like this. My hairdresser in New York is getting married.”

“What a great idea! You make cakes?”

“I do.”

“And you’re an artist?”

“Well, I did go to art school,” Benny says, “but I also took pastry classes.”

“Do you take commissions?”

“For cakes? Or drawings?”

The other woman laughs. She hands Benny a business card. “I’d like to see the drawing of that comb when it’s finished.” She points at the business card. “Could you send that to me? We’re always on the lookout for a good illustrator. You never know.”

Benny looks at the business card. An art director at a home brand company. High-end. Is this woman really asking to see more of Benny’s artwork? As the woman walks away, Benny puts the card to her nose. Sandalwood with hints of vanilla and cacao. Benny smiles to herself.

S
omeone should have told Marble
about this long ago. Someone should have prepared her for this moment. They should have let her know about this single-family, bungalow-style home in Orange County, California, not far from the Pacific shore, with the smell of jasmine in its backyard, and a living room filled with photos of a brown-skinned woman who looks just like her.

It seems the emails and phone calls from the lawyer were not enough to prepare her. It seems the transatlantic flight was not enough, nor soaking in the hotel tub this morning. Marble tries to do now what she does when she is standing in front of a television camera, when she pays only minimal attention to all the signals around her, the director and crew moving and gesturing from the side and beyond the camera, and thinks only of one thing, thinks only of the person on the other side of the camera, just that one person, with whom she needs to communicate.

She tries to do that now, she tries to focus on these two strangers who have summoned her here and are watching her every move, she tries to mind her manners, tries to smile warmly but not too broadly, she follows them to the dining nook where they have laid a sunny-looking table with toast, jam, eggs, coffee, and an inferior brand of tea, but rather promising-looking scones. She tells herself to focus only on them, but this house is filled with distractions, with the sofa and drapes
and coffeepot that her birth mother must have been using until just weeks ago.

Someone could have warned Marble of this new mix of emotions she’s experiencing. Someone could have told her that having breakfast with her brother and sister would feel like being on a blind date, with everyone dressed to impress and making small talk and casting shy glances in one another’s directions. And with Marble wondering why in the world she’s agreed to do this, why she is allowing her sense of who she is to be stripped away. These people, this place, that coffeepot, all tell her that she is not who she thought she was.

She doesn’t have to be here, does she? She could just stand up right now and walk out of this house. She could dodge those noisy crows loitering at the end of the driveway and that silly cactus in the backyard and fly back to her mum and dad. It’s just that Byron and Benny are so tall and thick-boned, just like Marble, and there is something about their bulk that is difficult for her to resist. Plus, all those photographs of Eleanor Bennett, Marble’s own face, staring back at her.

She’ll feel better, perhaps, after she’s had a bit of a rest. Marble is tired from yesterday’s long flight over and annoyed at having to change rooms this morning. The first room they gave her at the hotel late last night was decorated in lilac
everything
and Marble just had to get out of there. Where in the world, Marble wonders, does one manage to find a lilac lamp?

Marble looks at Byron and Benny.
My brother and sister,
she thinks. She calls on all her professional skills now, trying to convey curiosity and friendliness and none of this undercurrent of agitation that she is feeling. She talks around the elephant in the room. She talks about her mum and dad, she talks about her late husband and her son’s schooling, she talks about her plans to go back to the UK full time.

One thing Marble doesn’t say is how hard it will be to leave Italy, to leave the everyday memories of her husband behind, even after more than fifteen years. Even after the occasional lover. Even after a man like Coffee Man. She suspects he would fly to England to see her, if it came to that. And it will have to come to that. She knows it’s time to make
the move. She’s been feeling this for a while now, ever since she sent her son back to the UK for prep school.

How to begin again? Marble has clothes in the closets, food in the pantry, plants to think of. She has Bobby the dog. The thought of putting poor Bobby in a crate and carting him over to London, the thought of emptying out her husband’s home, is weighing on her. But this is too personal, this isn’t any of Byron and Benny’s business.

Looking at Byron and Benny, now, Marble is aware that she is feeling resentful. She knows these two have nothing to do with Marble being abandoned as a baby, but the fact is, Byron and Benny are the ones who grew up with Eleanor Bennett, while Marble is the one who was left behind. Byron and Benny might not have been born yet but their mother, in effect, chose them over Marble.

Marble knows that she should ask herself, what would a woman have to go through to make the kind of choice that Eleanor Bennett had? It was fifty years ago. A woman like Marble, a person with financial and social resources, cannot presume to judge a woman who came of age in another time, or under different circumstances.

And yet.

Marble will find out more tomorrow how all of this happened. Her birth mother’s lawyer says Eleanor Bennett left a letter and recording for her before she died. Maybe she should have gone to the lawyer’s office first, but the thought of it had made her throat unbearably dry. Ease into it, she’d thought, but now the questions are driving her mad. What will Eleanor Bennett have to say? Will it be enough to cancel out what Marble is thinking?

She didn’t want me enough.

All this thinking about her birth mother makes Marble miss her son terribly. Her Giovanni, her boy Giò. She wants to tell Byron and Benny that she, Marble, never had any doubts about wanting to be his mother, not even when she found herself widowed and pregnant at a young age and without warning, with all her visions of the future dashed. She wants someone to ask her, right now,
What is he like?
so that she can take out her mobile phone and show them the photos of her son.

Marble wants to say that she would trade being here with Byron and Benny, trade the chance to learn anything about her biological mother, for knowing that her son would be back in his own room when she returned home, and not tucked away in a boarding school. Giò is her real family, not these two people sitting at this table with her.

Byron is a funny sort. The man looks like a movie star but he is gaping at Marble as though she’s stolen his favorite teddy bear. She doesn’t think he likes her very much. Benny is sweet, but a bit needy. Marble notices that Benny is shifting her seat closer to her. Inching, inching. Marble is not sure what to make of this.

“About your son,” Benny says.

Marble takes a breath.

“So, he goes to school in England?”

Marble nods.

“But you live in Italy.”

“I go back and forth. I started Giò in the Italian schools but then I wanted him to get exposure to the UK system. After this, he’ll be able to live and work wherever he wishes.”

“So your son won’t really be Italian and he won’t really be British?”

“He’ll be both, I suppose. Like many people, he isn’t any one thing.” Though right now, Marble is feeling that she is indeed one thing, more than any other. She is Giovanni’s mum, and she has been letting her son grow up out of her sight. What in the world was she thinking?

Five years have passed and Marble has mourned every single month that her son has lived away from her, gone to school with kids she doesn’t know, rested his head at night in a room under a different roof, come back home for the holidays looking and sounding different from the child she sent away. She doesn’t understand how so many other parents like her have done the same thing, generation after generation, sent their eleven-year-olds away to school because they could afford to do it, because they’d convinced themselves that this was the way to guarantee their children the best future possible.

At one point, Marble thought of taking her son out of the boarding
school, but he seemed to have adjusted so well. Now it’s too late. Exams to finish, university to plan for. What Marble doesn’t understand is how all this time, not a single boarding school mum has ever taken her aside at a dinner, at the supermarket, in a doctor’s office, to say
I hate this, I want my child back home.
Surely she is not the only one who feels this way.

“Do you have pictures?” Benny asks. Marble feels her neck relax. She picks up her mobile phone and swipes through to the photo gallery and hands the phone to Benny.

“Oh, look at him, he’s gorgeous!”

Marble nods.

“And he’s doing well in school?”

Again, Marble nods. She cannot speak. She has a lump in her throat.

Benny places a hand on Marble’s arm.

B
yron’s hands are still shaking.
He is still trying to get used to this ghost of a woman who is walking through the rooms of the house where he grew up, this British-talking, beechwood-colored version of his mother. When she walked into the arrivals area, Mitch and Byron shook Marble Martin’s hand but Benny embraced her. On the way to the airport, Benny looked happy.

Byron is opening and closing kitchen cupboards when he sees a large glass jar tucked into a back corner of a lower cupboard behind the rice and sugar. The fruits. He’d forgotten about the fruits for the black cake. What to do? Before hearing his mother’s recording, he might have gotten up the courage to wash the mixture down the garbage disposal, perhaps once his ma’s clothes and books and furniture had been cleared out and the stake of the
For Sale
sign had been driven into the front lawn of their childhood home.

He puts the jar on the counter and keeps a hand on either side, as if steadying an infant.
This is your heritage,
his mother had told him many times, but he’d never appreciated that. Now he sees. When she fled the island, his mother lost everything but she carried this recipe in her head wherever she went. That, and the stories she’d spent a lifetime concealing from her children, the untold narrative of their family. Every time his mother made a black cake, it must have been like reciting an incantation, calling up a line from her true past, taking herself back to the island.

Five years ago, Byron was staying over with his mother while she recovered from a routine operation that nevertheless had left her in some pain. Byron had just finished washing the supper dishes when he heard it, that certain kind of creak in the house frame, then a rattling of something brittle, probably the glass in his mother’s small china cabinet, the one she’d received as a belated wedding gift from their father four decades earlier, and which had signaled the arrival of every earthquake since.

Most of the tremors in Southern California were just that, tremors, followed by speculation among neighbors, office mates, and shoppers at the supermarket checkout about
when
and
how
the Big One would hit, followed by discussion of the efficacy of building codes or the threat of dormant spores released by the shaking of dry hillsides.

These conversations typically led down a slippery slope toward accounts of other natural threats, of soil erosion, winter flooding, and the relationship between these happenings and human activity. The stripping of land for housing, for agriculture, for oil and gas drilling. A psychotherapist with a pallet of bottled water in her shopping cart once told him her clients, all children, were starting to display anxiety over the environment. She was writing an article about it. She said it was becoming a thing, though Byron wondered if it was a real thing or just a marketing thing.

But this tremor felt different. Ended with a good jolt. Could be a sign of a biggie on the way. Byron opened the front door wide and left it open, pulling the emergency bag out of the hallway closet, the wheeled suitcase already stuffed with a change of clothes and medicines and water and copies of documents. He could hear voices down the road, neighbors trying to decide what to do next. He turned back to get his ma but she was already coming down the hallway, though slowly. She had managed to put on her street shoes.

By the time the next quake arrived and hit the house with a
huh
sound, Byron and his ma had already gone back indoors and started settling into bed. A couple of car alarms went off.

“Here we go again,” Byron called. Down the hallway, his mother
was hoisting herself off the mattress. He grabbed the handle of the emergency bag and took his mother’s hand as they walked down the driveway toward the street. He raised his hand in salute to a couple of the neighbors, then ran back inside the house, grabbed his mother’s purse and an extra blanket for sleeping in the car, and pulled hard at the front door, which was sticking more than usual.

“No, Byron, no!” his mother called. She was leaning against the side of the car, her hand pressed over her wound.

Byron stopped and frowned at his mother. “What? What’s wrong?”

“The fruits, Byron, the fruits!”

The fruits?
She wasn’t serious, was she? Byron looked at his mother for a good long second. Oh, she was serious, all right. Goddamned fruits, a reminder to Byron that he was not only a California man but also a Caribbean American and would be plagued for the rest of his life by his mother’s inordinate attachment to black cake. But this was going too far. Now his mother was expecting her only son to risk his life by going back into their kitchen to pull a two-liter glass jar, sixty-eight ounces of ebony-colored slosh, out from behind the dried beans and rice and sugar and peppercorns, while a seismic event was in process, no less. Surely no good could come of this.

Byron is smiling now at the memory. He is still standing there with the jar of fruit and rum when Benny and Marble walk into the kitchen. One sister looks like their father, the other is the spitting image of their mother, but the expressions on their faces are identical as their eyes rest on the jar. The two half sisters turn their heads toward each other and when they turn back to look at Byron, their mouths are open in twin smiles. And he starts to talk about Ma.

Later, Byron will find the women with the jar open and a tablespoon of the mixture poured into a saucer. They will be taking turns scribbling on the same piece of paper. When Byron walks over to them, they will not look up at him, they will not seem to notice him standing there until he puts an arm around Benny’s shoulders.