Claire of the Sea Light (19 page)

“The beauty parlor grew fast.” Flore was catching her stride now, stammering and hesitating less. “We made a lot of women beautiful,” she said.

“And you?” Louise asked. “How were you changed?”

This is what had kept
Di Mwen
on the air all these years. This is why people loved the show. She always looked for the pot of gold at the end of her guests’ rainbows.

“Well, I’m still here,” Flore said, relieved that the program seemed to be drawing to a close. “Nou la.”

Finally, the closing question, which Louise asked of every guest, in part to cover herself, to show that these people had sought her out and not the other way around. The question showed, or at least made it appear, that all she did was offer them a platform, to tell their stories themselves, that there was no ill intent on her part, nothing in it for her.

“Why did you come on
Di Mwen
?” she asked Flore. “Why did you want to get this off your chest?”

“With all their money, even after the way he came to be, they could take my son away from me,” Flore said in her most defiant voice yet. “As if they could say I am not worthy of him.”

“The Ardins. Father and son, you mean?”

“Yes, them.”

“They want to take your child from you?”

“I won’t let them.”

“So what do you do now?” Louise asked.

“I am going far away,” Flore said, pausing to further consider the possibility.

“I suppose you can’t tell me where.”

“Non.”

“You told me that Maxime Ardin, Sr., and his wife had given you money for the child.”

“Wi.”

“And you have put that money into your beauty business?”

“Yes.”

“Will it be hard to live without that money?”

“It will be harder to live without my son.”

“So, just to be clear, you are taking your son with you?”

“My mother and my son are coming with me, yes,” Flore said. “They will never see us again. I am here to tell them to never look for us again, because they will never find us. Even when I am dead and my son is a grown man, I will be sure they never find him. He will have a different name. He will be a different kind of man—”

This seemed a good place for Louise to close, without forcing her guest to compromise her plans and offer hints as to where she would end up. They had only a few seconds left anyway, so Louise had to interrupt her to have the final word.

“Thank you, Flore Voltaire, for sharing your story with us,” she said. Then, in a dramatically grave voice, she added, “I hope you achieve your goal and find the right place for you and your child.”

Soon after the recorder was turned off, Flore removed the headphones from her son’s ears, but it turned out that the boy had been—as nearly everyone in town would later be—glued to every word. He looked up at her and smiled a toothy smile of both confusion and pride at what he’d understood: that he was now going to meet his father, before going someplace far away.

Louise took the headphones from Flore, then held out her hand for the child to return the pad he’d been drawing on.

“Let’s see.” Louise looked at the stick figure on the pad.
It was obviously meant to be a person, possibly a man, since the boy had not drawn hair or a skirt. The man had no eyes, nose, or mouth, the outline of his face a simple
O
. Searching for some hint of what the boy meant by his drawing, Louise smiled at him and guessed out loud. “A goat?” she asked, teasing the boy.

He laughed, covering his mouth with his hands, then answered, “Non.”

“A cow?”

“Non.”

“Me?” Louise ventured.

“Papa mwen,” the boy said. “My father.”

“Write ‘Papa,’ ” Louise recommended.

The boy wrote the word
papa
, the tiny letters spread wide apart. Louise took the pad and tore out the page and handed the drawing back to the boy along with a large grape lollipop that seemed to appear in her hands like magic.

Turning to Flore, she said, “The child’s father should see this picture.”

Max Senior was sitting on his wooden bench on his front gallery with Jessamine when his cell phone began to ring and ring again.

“You won’t believe who’s on
Di Mwen
,” he kept hearing from each person who was calling him.

But he refused to turn on the radio. He didn’t want to hear it. Besides, he had never cared for that mawkish program,
even when he and Louise had been on speaking terms. Out of spite—or would it be to humiliate him?—the maid in the house next door turned her radio to the loudest possible volume so that the entire neighborhood could hear.

It was hard to pretend to the lovely young woman sitting next to him that the program did not concern them, since his name was being called out nearly as often as his son’s. The girl mercifully said nothing, following him into the house as he showed her his bookshelves and the abstract paintings on his living room walls, the rose garden and the swimming pool, the gazebo (the one, he realized with chagrin, that was just now being mentioned on the program). At least his cook and his gardener were not listening, he thought. Or they could be listening, like he was, catching the juicy snippets from the radio next door.

His son’s friend seemed strangely unaffected. She already knew everything, he realized. Otherwise how could she not be incensed, outraged?

She was a stunning girl with an African mask of a face, all high forehead and high cheekbones, giant loop earrings, and one gold stud on either side of her cheeks. She was obviously one of those modern girls, the kind of girl whom frankly he didn’t think he would be able to welcome with open arms into this family, with her cheek studs and hippie tunic and the word
POP
tattooed in red-ink calligraphy across the insides of both her wrists.

He escorted her to the kitchen, and they divided a half pitcher of lemonade between two glasses. Surprisingly, he
thought, unlike a lot of returning dyasporas, she was skinny and wasn’t reeking of bug spray. He asked her why she hadn’t come to the party the night before, and she said that her cousin’s car had broken down and she was unable to find a ride in time. Why hadn’t she called his son? he asked. She said her phone wasn’t working. Couldn’t she have borrowed someone else’s phone? he asked. Then she confessed that she thought it was better for his son to see everyone for the first time on his own.

He wasn’t sure why her explanations mattered so much to him, yet they did. He offered her some leftover codfish patties from the party. She declined. His cook was nowhere to be found and he was afraid to call out for her. He could accept neither pity nor further scorn from his employees.

He decided he wouldn’t stay inside the house and hide. He would eventually have to face all of this head-on, at the school, and in any number of places in town. The girl followed him back to the porch. If the whole town wanted to parade by his open gate and condemn him, they could. He and his ex-wife had done what most parents he knew would have done. They’d tried to protect their son. And by providing the money for what had become the beauty parlor, they’d tried to protect Flore’s child the best way they knew how. Should they have demanded a shotgun marriage? Should he have sent Flore off to Miami with their son? It was clear that something other than love had been made in that room that night. And perhaps that night was not the only time it had happened either. But what do you do when your misguided
child, in some stupid effort to distract you from who he really is, commits a horrible act? Do you have the police come over and arrest him? Do you have him paraded on the street and humiliated on the radio? Your child. This boy. This man, who had once been a good, simple, and innocent boy. Just like this boy he had violently made. So if Flore wanted to keep this boy for herself, let her. She might have a better chance of turning him into a decent man. Good luck to her, though. He hoped she would succeed. Let her try to raise a boy and help him become a man. Let her teach him how to tie his shoes, to shake hands properly. Let her show him how to swim, how to fly a kite. Let her show him how to sharpen a blade, to shave or otherwise, how to defend himself when attacked. Let her teach him to read and write and tell him all kinds of stories, the true meaning of which he never seemed to understand. Let her feel proud, then ashamed of him, then proud again. Let her long for him when he is gone and despise him when he’s in her presence. Let her wish for him to be another kind of son and for her to be another kind of mother. Let her see what it’s like to protect him from even his worst desires, to keep them from tainting his life forever. Let her try to show him the difference between right and wrong. Let her guide him to adulthood unscathed in a society where people are always looking for the next person to tear down. Let her school him on legacy, how one should honor and respect it and defend it at all cost. Let her learn one day how to forgive him and eventually to forgive herself.

Flore’s own mother had certainly tried to do her best for her. It must have felt like success when her daughter had landed in his house. A particular detail in Flore’s story wounded him even more than the rest. The morning after the hailstorm, he had picked up his son’s wet flashlight outside Flore’s door and had handed it back to him.

“I forgot it there,” Junior had said. He had not questioned him further.

He had even seen Flore leave the house while he and his son were in the garden.

He had known none of the details until now, hearing what she was telling the world through the radio. He regretted not hearing anything but the storm that night. In the end, he was Max Junior’s father and not hers. If he had to choose between anyone and his son, his son would always come first.

Better Louise’s kind of talk, he’d thought, than others. Better that kind of shame than an even worse kind. Sleeping with the house servant was not an uncommon rite of passage for young men in houses like his. “Droit du seigneur,” his own father had called it. Though Max Senior himself had never taken part. But wasn’t even the girl expecting it? The faultiness of his logic seemed obvious now in being exposed. Could he go on Louise’s show next week and use that dreadful explanation to absolve his son?

Jessamine was still respectfully silent, watching the calabash trees on the street along with him until his son pulled up in front of the house in the car he had lent him to take Flore
and the boy home. When had Flore found the time to record this monstrosity of an hour? Max Senior wondered. But now his attention was on his son. His son, his brilliant scholar son, who was now cowering inside his car, hiding from him and this girl. His son, the lover of stories as a boy. Quick, he wanted to think of a story to tell him now, a story of dangerous mistakes made by both fathers and sons. Jessamine was looking at the Jeep, at his son, her eyes dancing between them and Max Senior’s face. He was now seeing her in full, carving out of her dark face another impossible grandchild for himself. Even though he was with a school full of children all day long, what did he even know of young people these days? At the school and elsewhere in town, he had seen several groups go from matènèl, prekindergarten, to close to his son’s age. Not many lived out their early promise. Some of this you could blame, as his ex-wife often did, on the town, its lack of opportunities, its rigid social hierarchies. But his son, with all his opportunities and contacts, had done no better.

There was something tragic about a generation whose hopes had been raised, then dashed over and over again. Had they been poisoned by disappointment? Their leaders and elders—including himself—had made them so many promises that they’d been, for whatever reason, unable to keep. Idealists had been killed to make room for gangsters. Life had become so cheap that you could give anyone a few dollars to snuff it out. When had they entered, he wondered, what Rimbaud, in his time, had called “le temps des assassins,” the age
of assassins? Maybe his generation was the problem. They’d built a society that was useless to their children. Still, these children seemed to lack the will to sacrifice and build their own. He had been willing to at least try to make this right. He had been looking forward to turning his school over to his son, to the next generation, to see if he—they—could or would do any better. But now he might never get the chance.

He was surprised that Jessamine did not rush into his son’s arms when she saw him. His son, in turn, was looking down the road, then looking back at them. Maybe the radio was on in the car and his son too was listening to the program or he was overhearing snippets from the street. Maybe he didn’t even realize the program was on. Being a subject of Louise’s so-called show was like getting a scarlet letter. One that at times was only temporary. You were hounded by murmurs and whispers, but only until the following week, when it was someone else’s turn.

Max Senior wanted to rush to explain that to his son, to reassure him, but he hoped that Jessamine would make a move before him. Jessamine did not. Was she shell-shocked? He didn’t know, but he could see in his son’s face that he felt he had no choice but to quickly drive away.

Where would he go but to the beach? Aside from the lighthouse, it was his favorite place. Weighted down by more important concerns, the people at the beach might not even be listening to the show.

“Shouldn’t we go after him?’ the girl was asking him
now. And it seemed the kind of simple question that might be asked by someone who did not fully understand that there was nothing simple about a situation.

“Yes, we could go after him,” he replied. “But I suspect if he wanted to be with us, he would have stayed.”

“Then what are we supposed to do?” she asked. Both of them were staring out at the front gate, at the calabash trees on the road, their branches stagnant in the heat.

“We wait,” Max Senior said, which was the usual course when it came to his son. He was always waiting for him: waiting for him to come to his senses, waiting for him to understand his duties, waiting for him to take up his responsibilities, waiting for him to return home.

“Do you think he’ll come back?” asked the girl.