Black Cake: A Novel (30 page)

M
r. Mitch has made an
appointment with Marble for the next day, and Byron and Benny have agreed to meet up with Marble afterward for lunch. But when they show up at Mr. Mitch’s office to pick her up, she is no longer there and she doesn’t answer their phone calls or text messages.

“I think the meeting was a bit rough on her,” is all Mr. Mitch will say.

“What did the message from our mother say?”

“You know I’m not at liberty to give you details,” Mr. Mitch says, “but there wasn’t really anything that you don’t already know. Just give her a little time.”

Byron and Benny nod. They have privately agreed that they cannot bring themselves to call Mr. Mitch
Charles.
Maybe one day. Or maybe they’ll call him
Mitch
without the
Mister
but, for now, they prefer to think of him as their mother’s lawyer, not her boyfriend.

They agree to give Marble some space but after two days, they begin to worry. They go to the hotel and find that Marble has checked out. When they finally receive an email at the end of the week, Marble confirms that she is back in the UK.

“I believe I need some time to process this,” Marble writes. “Thank you for everything. All best.”

All best?
Byron and Benny go out to a restaurant and drink two
beers each but never get around to touching their food.
All best?
And what about the black cake their mother left them?

“Okay, enough of this, it’s time,” Byron says. “Ma wanted us to share the black cake with Marble? Well, she had her chance and she’s not here. Let’s just do it.”

“I don’t know,” Benny says.

Back at the house, they walk into the kitchen together, open the freezer door, and stare at the foil-covered cake. After about ten seconds, they look at each other, then close the door again. Benny leans against the counter, running her hand along the avocado green surface. It’s so seventies, so
Ma.

After a week, Benny goes back to New York and Byron goes to a conference. They plan to meet up again soon to start clearing out their mother’s house, but there’s still no word from Marble. Byron says they’ve lived their entire lives without Marble and they may just have to keep on doing so. But just in case, they’ll leave the cake where it is for now.

B
ack in New York, Benny
has made her best black cake yet. She has poured and folded and stirred and channeled the memories of being with Ma in the kitchen. She has worked out her frustration over Marble’s continued silence. She has told herself that for a couple of hours there, back in California, she and Marble really did make a connection. If they hadn’t, she wouldn’t be doing this right now.

Benny and Marble chuckled over their shared interest in food that day in Ma’s kitchen.
What a coincidence,
Marble said, and Benny said,
It’s no coincidence, it’s in our blood.
What if Benny had actually seen a video or photo of Marble before knowing about her mother’s hidden past? It would have been a shock. It was a shock as it was, to see a white woman with her mother’s face, with her mother’s voice, walking into her childhood home, standing in her mother’s kitchen.

As it turns out, Benny and Marble don’t really look at culinary tradition in the same way, but when they spent that hour or so chatting in Ma’s kitchen, Marble offered Benny some excellent advice for her next visit to the bank.

So here she is. Benny wraps the black cake now in wax paper, closes it in a tin, and takes it to the bank. Benny tells the bank guy that she knows the city doesn’t need another coffee shop, per se, but it needs a place like hers. She tells him that her concept café will highlight the diaspora of food, the migration of cultures to this country through recipes, the mix of traditions that feeds into contemporary America. It
will be a place to learn and reflect. It will be a place for people to be together.

Benny explains that she is working on a lesson plan for children with local educators. She won’t share the black cake with the children because of the alcohol content, but she will take a sample for them to see and smell and she will tell them about the flawed narratives that have always aimed to draw clear boundaries around cultures and people’s identities.

There are Italian restaurants and Chinese restaurants and Ethiopian restaurants and Polish delis and what-have-you, but her menu will feature recipes from different cultures that could only have come about through a mixing of traditions, a mixing of fates, a mixing of stories. Plus, her mother has left her enough money to help fund daily operations for two years, after which she expects to be able to make a profit, so, given her changed circumstances, would the bank reconsider her previous application for a business loan?

H
ow it begins: In a
parking lot at the shopping center in the suburbs.

“I don’t get it, what are you?” says a man, who is taking a pamphlet from Benny.

“I’m Manny the Meerkat,” says Benny, lowering her voice into character. Manny the Meerkat is one of her weekend gigs, one of the assortment of jobs she will continue to juggle until she has confirmation of financing for her café.

“Meerkat?”

“Meerkat.”

Benny straightens her back and head and lifts her chin, peering off into the distance through the tiny holes behind the eyes in her costume, her stance inspired by the calendar on her kitchen wall where a clan of meerkats stand in a cluster, scanning the horizon for threats. Each slender creature would be an easy mouthful for a predator but they know that their strength lies in banding together.

When the manager at Manny’s Electronics first saw her, he said he’d never hired her type to do the job before, meaning, presumably, female or
of color
or both, but he said that Benny was getting the job because of her height and heft, and she has tried to make that work for her. No matter that she is cloaked in twenty-five pounds of velvet-covered foam rubber for the precise purpose of hawking electronics, even after the fuss over the printer at the call center. Anyway, it’s not
that Benny doesn’t appreciate electronics, it’s just that she feels they should last much longer.

“On the lookout for bargain prices, you know?” Benny-as-Manny says to the man who has taken a pamphlet.

“Uh, okay,” the man says, and walks away, leaving a slightly woody scent in his wake. Then he stops and turns back and Benny is hopeful that he will ask more about the forty-percent-off electronics sale. She wants him to put off heading for his car, put off pressing the little button on his key that will make his car blink and chirp like a small animal, put off going home with the one small plastic bag that he is holding in his other hand. A small bag, not sacks full of groceries. Probably not a family man, Benny thinks. Possibly single.

Benny hopes the man will end up inside the store, waving the discount-price flyer, evidence that Benny, as Manny the Meerkat, has been doing a good job of luring shoppers, even though there’s talk of another recession on the way. Instead, the man frowns and says, “Shouldn’t there be, like, a bunch of you? Don’t meerkats do that thing where they all kinda huddle together?” He flexes the meat of his arms and shoulders in a way that calls to mind the curved backs of a football team, rather than the straight-necked crowding together of small, shiny-eyed animals.

Benny is beginning to feel sweaty inside the meerkat costume and she can feel her period coming on, that slight achy-flu-ey feeling. And still two hours to go. She reminds herself that each hour brings her closer to paying the month’s expenses. The money her mother left Benny in her will must go toward her business plan and nothing else.

“Oh, look, it’s Sid from
Ice Age,
” Benny hears a little boy say. She can feel a small hand pulling on the flank of her costume.

“That’s not Sid,” the child’s mother says. “Sid is a sloth, not a chipmunk.” The child backs away now where Benny can see him. Benny sees that the woman is more likely to be the child’s nanny than his mother. The child’s hair is so blond it’s almost white and the nanny has Byron’s complexion. Benny notices the woman has a Caribbean accent of some kind, and she is dressed flawlessly, like a plainclothes cop or
one of those religious people who stand on street corners handing out booklets.

There’s a good likelihood this woman is the employee of a well-heeled television executive or lawyer or financial analyst, something like that. Someone who wires part of her earnings back to the island. After which, she still might have more money left over at the end of the month than the extra bit of cash Benny earns by doing things like dressing up like a meerkat, taking other people’s dogs for walks, and making the occasional one-of-a-kind, decorated cakes for clients who are wealthy enough and busy enough to appreciate that sort of thing.

One of Benny’s sketches might earn her more than some people get in a month, but art does not guarantee an income, while taking someone else’s dog out to pee does.

“He’s not a chipmunk,” says the man. Benny is surprised to see he’s still hanging around. “He’s a meerkat.” Benny notes the man has a lot of hair on his forearms. Practically a carpet of the stuff. Blondish-reddish. It isn’t so common these days to see that, what with everyone running off to get waxed here and there. He is as tall as she is, this red bear of a man.

“You saw meerkats at the zoo, remember?” the nanny says, touching the boy lightly on his shoulder.

“Oh, I know those,” the kid says. “They stand around in little gangs and look like this,” the boy says, doing an impressive imitation of a meerkat on the lookout. That child should have Benny’s job. The woman smiles and tousles his hair. Benny as Manny continues to extend her arm here and there, handing flyers to people who pass by and take them without looking at her.

The man steps closer to Benny now, and she feels a buzz run up both sides of her face. His cologne is a smoky kind of thing that triggers a slight churning below her navel. Benny has never understood what draws her to a person. She only knows it when an individual who crosses her radar sets off a ping.

Ping.

“You
are
a girl, right?” the man asks.

“Woman.”

“Oh, right, sorry.”

Inside her costume, Benny smiles.

“Did you know,” Benny says, “that a gang of meerkats is led by an alpha pair, and that the dominant member of that pair is the female?”

He is peering at her through the costume’s eye holes. A smile crinkles the skin around his eyes.

“Do meerkats drink coffee?” he says.

The head of Benny’s costume tips to the side. This man has never seen Benny. He does not even know the shape of her. And yet he is interested.

Ping.

How it will end: Benny doesn’t know yet, but already this is a gift, this openness to try love again.

T
he sound of metal clicking
over metal pulls Marble out of her stupor. She is sitting alone in the half light, holding a cold cup of tea in her lap. She hasn’t told her parents she’s back in the UK, that she’s been sitting alone in the apartment here for two days. They’ve already had that long, painful conversation with her about her adoption, their voices muddied with tears, and they have been largely silent since then, getting in touch only to be sure that she’d arrived safely in California, and that she’d flown back to Italy all right. They didn’t ask how things went. She knew they wouldn’t. They would be waiting for her to say something first.

Marble’s attitude toward her parents has already softened since then. She has learned from Eleanor Bennett’s message that her parents kept the name that had been chosen by her birth mother. Baby Mathilda became Mabel Mathilda and, even when she changed her first name to Marble, her longtime nickname, she unwittingly held on to the name of her biological grandmother. Her parents may not have wanted to admit that she was adopted but they hadn’t erased every trace of her birth mother, either.

When Marble hears the key turning in the lock, she worries about a break-in, but then she remembers the orchids. Her mother always comes to water the plants, which Marble insists on keeping, despite the fact that she spends most of her time elsewhere. Her mum is perennially worried about opening the door and finding the orchids dead, but
Marble reminds her that orchids are hardy creatures, that orchids grow naturally on every continent, that there is an orchid in someone’s garden in Singapore that has been blooming for well over a century.

“Marble!” her mother says.

Marble doesn’t get up, doesn’t feel she can. She looks at this petite woman standing before her. Her mum’s hair, originally a dark blond, has taken on brilliant streaks in recent years, the hairdresser’s artistry mixing in with her natural white. She gives Marble one long look, walks over to the sofa, takes the cup and saucer from her, and places it on the coffee table. Then she sits down next to her and takes one of Marble’s hands in hers.

Marble plays the recording for her mother. She waits until her mother has finished shedding tears. Later, they will share it with Marble’s father. They will let him listen to the voice of this woman who sounds so much like his own daughter. They will let him hear the part where Eleanor Bennett says what a beautiful, accomplished woman Baby Mathilda has turned out to be and that it is all to their credit.

They will let Marble’s father read the letter where Eleanor says she is forever grateful to him and his wife for giving her baby a safe and loving home and, if they have felt for Marble even a fraction of what she felt the first time she nursed her baby, then she knows that they must love her more than anything in the world, they must love her more than life itself.

A
cool vapor rises from the
aluminum foil as Benny pulls the black cake out of the freezer. This is what Eleanor Bennett wanted, all three of her children together. Marble has come back. It took her a full month since her last message to get in touch but here they are again, in the kitchen where Benny used to spend entire days baking with her mother, at the table where Benny and Byron ate most of their meals growing up. In the house where their mother nursed a yearning for her firstborn daughter who was lost but who finally has been found.

Byron and Benny take some solace in knowing that their mother didn’t die before learning where her eldest daughter was and who she had become. Their mother left this world believing that one day all three of her children would be here in this room together to fulfill her dying request. When Marble ran back to England after hearing their mother’s private message for her, Byron thought they might never see her again, but Benny never doubted that they would. Nor did Mr. Mitch, who continued to make arrangements according to their mother’s wishes. There are trips to be made, he tells them, people their mother wanted them to see.

But first, this.

Their mother wanted her children to sit down together and share the black cake she’d made for them.
You will know when,
she wrote in
her note to Byron and Benny. And this is the
when.
Benny picks up a knife and gestures to Marble.

“You’re the firstborn,” Benny says.

“No, you do it,” Marble says.

Benny looks at Byron. They hold the knife together, as their parents used to do, and they sink it into the cake.
We never did have a wedding cake
is what their mother told them toward the end of her recording.
There wasn’t time. And who would have been there to celebrate with us?
But once her parents had moved from London to New York to California, once they felt they were settling into their new lives, Ma filled a jar with fruits and made the first in a series of anniversary cakes.

“Oh!” Benny says. The knife hits something hard. They cut open the cake to find a small glass jar inside, wide and squat. Their mother had cut the cake on the horizontal and dug out the middle to fit the jar in there.

Benny wipes off the jar and taps the side of the lid on the table to unseal it. The first thing they fish out is a piece of paper, folded and cracked. It is a black-and-white photograph of three young swimmers standing on the sand, the sea at their backs. Byron and Benny recognize the teenaged faces of their parents. The third person still has her swim cap on and is clasping Covey’s hand in a kind of silent cheer. They’ve never met her but she’s easy to recognize because she is famous, the only black woman in the world to have done exactly what she has done. The distance swimmer Etta Pringle.

Byron turns the photo over and on the back, they find three names written out in their father’s handwriting.

“Gilbert Grant,” he reads, “Coventina Lyncook, Benedetta Pringle.” He looks at Benny.

“Benedetta?” he says.

“Etta was short for Benedetta!” Benny says. Benny must have been named after her mother’s childhood friend. The one who helped their mother escape from the beach on the night that she was believed drowned. The three of them sit there silently for a moment, thinking of
small but profound inheritances. Of how untold stories shape people’s lives, both when they are withheld and when they are revealed.

In the bottom of the jar they find their parents’ wedding rings, both with the same inscription inside,
C and G.
Benny remembers seeing the inscription once and asking her mother about it. Her mother told her the letters stood for
comprehension
and
generosity,
two qualities that she said were essential in a good marriage. Now she knows that they are the initials of her parents’ original names. Coventina and Gilbert, Covey and Gibbs. All this time, their parents’ true identities have been hidden right here in this house, in these rings, in this photograph.

Finally, they turn the jar over and let the rest of its contents fall onto the kitchen table. Three cockle shells, whitish on the outside, pinkish beige on the inside. Their mother must have found these in the purse that belonged to Elly, the original Eleanor Douglas, the girl who befriended their mother and who, unwittingly, gave her a chance at a whole new life.

Byron feels a hum of excitement. He’s past some of the shock now, he’s ready to learn more. He wants to go to the island. He wants to see where his parents grew up. He wants to see the part of himself that he never knew. He has to. How will he manage this, otherwise? This disappearing of the life he once thought he had.

There is one more thing, jammed against the curve of the jar. A narrow slip of paper that says
THE BOX.
Byron and Benny look at each other and nod. They have already found the wooden box, the hinged ebony container that once belonged to their mother’s mother, Mathilda. Their ma kept it on a shelf in her closet. Inside are four medallions, yellow-gold disks stamped with crosses that they both used to play with, and the old hair comb that their mother let Benny wear one Halloween, wedged into her braids and covered with an old veil like a Spanish lady.

They know these items by heart. As children, they both ran their hands over the fine curves etched into the surface of the comb, over the browns and golds and grays of the tortoiseshell, over the cross on the
face of each coin. Benny goes to her parents’ bedroom and comes back with the wooden box, hugging it to her middle.

Benny and Byron have already talked about the box. Their mother wanted them to give it to Marble, to give her a chance to fiddle with its contents, just as they had in their younger years. They will give Baby Mathilda a piece of the childhood that she might have experienced had she grown up in their family. They will give Marble the only objects left from their mother’s former life.

“Our ma’s box of trinkets,” Benny says. “She always said the box belonged to her own mother but that she’d found the comb and medallions in the backyard at the orphanage. We think they must have belonged to Elly, the original Eleanor.” Benny hands the box to Marble.

“We used to play with these all the time, Marble. Now it’s your turn.”

Marble smiles at the box and smooths her hand along its silky surface, puts it up to her face and sniffs at the wood, then lifts the lid. Her mouth drops open when she sees what’s inside. She puts on her glasses.

“Oh, my,” Marble says, smoothing her finger over one of the disks. “These aren’t trinkets. This is gold. From a very long time ago. These probably belong in a museum.” Marble sits up straighter and reminds them that before she wrote about food, she studied art history. She pulls her tablet out of her purse and searches the Internet for a news story about divers who recently salvaged gold coins from the site of an ancient shipwreck. She shows Byron and Benny a closeup of the coins. They are identical to her mother’s medallions.

“This comb, too, has to be about three hundred years old. Could be from the same ship.”

“Dude, you’re kidding me,” Byron says.

At the word
dude,
Marble gives Byron a look that he can only think of as being extremely British.

“But if we go public with these,” Benny says, “won’t we have to explain where they came from? We might have to say something about our parents. Our parents invented a narrative for a reason, to hide their true identities.”

“But they’re not around anymore,” Byron says.

“No, they’re not,” Benny says. “But some of the people they knew are still around. Where does that leave us? What happens if we alter even one part of that story? What about the murder?”

“What about the murder?” Byron says.

“We still don’t know who killed Little Man, do we?”

“Exactly,” Marble says. “Do you think it was your mother? I mean, you know. Our…”

Byron and Benny cast her the same, big-eyed look. Marble has to get used to saying
our mother.
Or does she? She’s glad she finally knows about her birth mother, but her mum, Wanda, will always be her mum.

“I’ve thought about it and thought about it, but I really don’t know,” Byron says. “A year ago I would have said there’s no way my mother would have killed a man, but there’s a lot we didn’t know then. In her recording, our mother never actually denies killing Little Man.”

“I wouldn’t blame her if she had,” Benny says. “The point is, our parents told us a lot of lies over the years. We might never know how much of the truth our ma has told us.”

“Maybe when we go to the island, we’ll find out.”

“We can’t go to the island, Byron. We don’t really know what we’re getting into. There are people who helped our mother escape. We don’t want to cause them any trouble, do we? Not after everything they did for her. What do you think, Marble?”

Marble says nothing. She picks up the coins and comb from the table, puts them back into the wooden box, and closes the lid.