Grace (20 page)

There are three uncovered pots on unlit burners on the stove. Justin looks inside of them. They are empty. The covers are on the floor.

“Mommy says I can play with them,” Giselle says when Justin picks them up. “She turned off the stove. Mommy told me not to touch it,” she says.

“Mommy told you the right thing.”

A bag of rice, a box of frozen peas, the salt and pepper containers are on the counter next to pieces of raw chicken on the cutting board. Near to the chicken is a carving knife. Justin’s heart lurches. He grabs the knife quickly and puts it in the sink.

“You have to put away your toys,” he tells Giselle.

“When I am finished playing, Daddy.” Her toys are strewn under the table.

“And where’s your lunch box?” Justin looks around the room. Sally’s thermos is on the counter.

“Mommy didn’t have time to clean it,” she says and she runs to where her lunch box lies open, next to her backpack, in a corner of the room. The grapes Sally had packed for her that morning are squashed all over the top of the backpack.

“Tell you what, Giselle. Help Daddy clean up the kitchen and we’ll go to McDonald’s”

The little girl claps her hand. “Goody, goody.” She knows this is a special treat. “Can we take Mommy?”

“Let’s clean up first and then we’ll see if Mommy wants to come.”

Giselle puts her toys in the toy box, Justin removes the pots from the stove, he wraps up the raw chicken and puts it in the refrigerator. He cleans Giselle’s lunch box, wipes the grape stains off her backpack and washes the dishes in the sink.

Sally is still sleeping when they go upstairs.

“We’ll bring back something for her,” he says to Giselle.

But Sally is not awake when they return.

Later, when he is giving Giselle a bath, she asks him, “Why is Mommy so sad? Why was she crying? Doesn’t she like us?” She says this to him while she is combing her doll’s hair. She does not look him. Her eyes remain fixed on her doll.

“No. Mommy loves us. Especially you, Giselle. Mommy is not feeling well. She will be all right tomorrow, you’ll see.”

“Will you take her to the doctor?”

“Yes,” Justin promises. “I will make sure Mommy goes to
the doctor.” He does not say he will take her there. He will not lie to his daughter.

SALLY WAKES up at ten. She comes into the den.

“I’m sorry, Justin. Really I am. Is Giselle all right?” She is wearing a thick, pink bathrobe. Her face is pale; her lips are dry. She stands near the door pushing back her hair. Her hand moves back and forth slowly across her right temple. Her eyes are half-closed.

Justin leaves his desk and comes toward her. “Come.” He takes her hand. “Come sit with me, Sally.” She lets him lead her to the couch.

“I am feeling much better,” she says. “I was just so tired. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I was starting to make dinner. I thought Giselle would be okay. I turned off the stove. I knew you would be home soon.”

“It’s okay, Sally. Giselle was just fine.” He does not tell her about the knife.

“I was so tired,” she says again. “I needed a nap.”

“I took Giselle to McDonald’s,” he says.

“You?”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“Did I really leave things in that big a mess?”

“I was exaggerating,” he says. “I just took the easy way out. You know how much she likes McDonald’s.”

“I slept so long,” she says.

“You needed the rest.”

“Was Giselle worried?”

“I told her you would be better tomorrow. I gave her a bath. I read her a story. She even came in your room and kissed you good night.”

Sally removes her hand from under his. Justin is not surprised. It was a matter of time. He had felt the stiffening of her muscles under his hand.

“So, so, Sally,” he says. He folds his arms over his chest. He feels the emptiness there acutely, the space where he longs for her to be. His fingers clutch his armpits. “Things are not getting better for you, are they?”

“My therapist says it will take time.”

He is aware that he has not yet asked about her therapist. “Did he say I am making things worse for you?”

“He says he sees your point.”

“And you are still finding it hard to stay here with me, Sally?”

“He says he’s sees my point, too.”

“Does he think that your point is better than my point?”

“I don’t want to leave Giselle,” she says.

“Then don’t leave her, Sally.”

“You want to force me to leave her.”

“I want you to stay. Here. Stay with us here.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Get me to understand. I want to understand you, Sally.”

“I’ve told you everything already. There’s nothing more to tell. I’ve told you I feel useless. I feel there’s no meaning to my life.”

“And what will give meaning to your life, Sally? Will leaving this house give meaning to your life?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

“So if you don’t know, stay. Stay, Sally.”

“I only know I have to find myself. I have to find Sally.”

“I will give you space.” It is fear that leads him to these words he ridicules.

“I don’t know,” she says again.

He puts his arm around her. “Stay. Find yourself here.”

She lets him draw her closer to him but she still does not respond. She does not embrace him; she does not resist him.

“You can go out for as long as you like after work,” he murmurs in her hair.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“For a weekend.” His heart is pounding. “Go away for a weekend. That’s it, Sally. Take a break. A weekend in Bermuda.”

“Bermuda?” She sits up.

“A week if you want. Call in sick. Tell the therapist to write a letter for you.”

“And then everyone at work will think I’m mentally ill,” she whines, a childish whine, a make-believe whine. She does not mean this, he can tell.

“Ask him to have a doctor write the letter,” he says. “An internist. An internist will do it.” He is speaking quickly, excitedly now. He wants to infect her with his excitement.
Why hadn’t he thought of this before? A weekend in Bermuda will appeal to her.

“And Giselle?” she asks.

“Don’t worry about Giselle. I will take care of Giselle.” He kisses the top of her head.

“There is so much to do.”

“I can do it.”

“And what will you tell her?”

“I will tell her that her mother has gone to visit the place where we went on our honeymoon before she was born. We were happy there, weren’t we, Sally?”

“Yes,” she says. “We were happy there.”

He takes a chance. “Do you love me, Sally?”

“Yes,” she says.

“So stay, Sally. Stay.”

Let be
, says Hamlet.

Let be. No more accusations. No more questions. In the end, did Hamlet not achieve his goal? Did he not set things right again? Claudius dies. The king’s murder is avenged. He will not think of the other consequences: that Hamlet, too, dies—that in the end blood is everywhere. He thinks,
Let be and Sally will stay.

In the morning he remembers that in two weeks he has to present a paper at a national conference in Atlanta. He said Bermuda on impulse, without forethought. He presented it as an offering to staunch her uncertainty, the steady repetition of
I don’t know
that frightened him. But he knows now, impulse or not, it is a good idea. He wants her to go. The separation will give her time to think—him time for her to cool down, to reconsider. To find herself. But he also knows that it is possible, if she takes his advice, she could leave the week he is expected in Atlanta.

The chance that he could find himself in such a predicament does not disturb him, as it should. He will not be able to go to Atlanta, of course. He will have to stay home with Giselle. He will have to let the conference director know. But it does not bother him that he may not be able to present his paper. Literacy rates in the inner city is not his area of expertise. His area of
expertise, if he can still call it that, is British Renaissance literature. But for all his high-mindedness about the laxity of tenured professors, the lack of respect they show for their students by not keeping up with the research in their field, he has not written a single paper on a single Renaissance writer since his arrival at the college.

More and more what he finds himself doing in his den at night is grading papers. He could not have imagined that this would have been such a daunting and demanding task. Before he can get to the substance of what his students are trying to say, before he can unravel the logic of their arguments, he has to wade through a morass of comma faults, run-on sentences, fragments, tense inconsistencies, subject-verb agreement errors, pronoun reference errors, dangling and misplaced modifiers, faulty parallelism—a plethora of syntactical challenges. It takes him at least half an hour to correct one paper, many times more than that, and there are at least thirty students in each of the classes he teaches, four classes in the fall and three in the spring.

He insists that his students write an essay a week. It is no less than what his teachers in Trinidad had required of him. Writing leads to better writing is his mantra. He believes, regardless of the fancy theories—the current pedagogical approaches to teaching composition making the rounds in colleges like his— that writing, his careful correction of what his students have written, and rewriting, is the only way his students will learn. It is a conviction that has cost him a career.

Anna has been forthright about her disinterest in writing
academic papers. “They have no relevance to what I do,” she said. “Professors write those academic articles just to make themselves feel important. Nobody reads them but graduate students who are obliged to. No, I don’t pretend that my students come from middle-class homes, that they went to the best high schools, that they have great SAT scores. I meet them where they are.”

“And take them where, Anna?”

“Where I know they can be.”

“And is that the same as where they are capable of going?”

But he is the one who has been the hypocrite with his arguments about the need for research when he himself has done no serious study since he left his previous job. No, apart from the problem of finding time after he has graded his students’ papers, there is the problem of finding like-minded scholars. You need such a community to sustain your enthusiasm for work which you know beforehand may never be read except, as Anna has said, by a handful of scholars. No one here, where he is, is interested in what he has to say. The one other Renaissance scholar at the college, a historian, has caved in. He saw the writing on the wall, he said. He retrained himself and became an expert in computers. Now he lectures on search engines and Web sites. Now he is in demand.

Justin acknowledges that he has come to be thought of as an expert on literacy in the inner city by a series of accidents that began with his guilt for misunderstanding his father, for not appreciating the importance of his work to those who needed him.

“What does it matter if the whole world loves you when your son does not?” he asked his father when he returned to Trinidad.

He loved him, his father insisted. He was proud of him. Seven distinctions? No one in his family had made seven distinctions in the O level Cambridge exams. None of the children of his friends.

“Love is not words,” he told his father. “Love is doing, showing. Being there for the ones you love. Words are cheap. You were not here. You do not know me. You have no rights.”

“I am your father.”

“You have no right to call yourself my father. My aunt is my father. She was there for me. She woke up early to make me breakfast. She spoke to my teachers. You have no right to be proud of me.”

When his father’s heart burst open—a massive heart attack, the doctor said—Justin told himself that it was the contradictions in his father’s life that had killed him. But he had killed him, too. If he had forgiven him, his father would have found the peace that would have permitted his heart to slow down, that would have allowed it to beat for a few more years.

A son cannot take responsibility for his father’s death and go on. Justin was no exception. He continued to blame his father through graduate school and in the years he taught in New England. He would be all his father was not. He disassociated himself from the Africana Studies department that courted him at Harvard. He chose the Classics. He was not unaware that the
Classics were his father’s first love, but his father had betrayed the poets who had taught him. He had allowed his poetry to serve a single, political purpose, as if it had no relevance except to those who found it useful. His father had allowed himself to be defined.

Now, Justin wonders if he himself is not allowing the same to happen to him. He has stopped going to conferences on Renaissance literature. It embarrasses him that he has not kept up with the research. When he goes to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, his name is listed under headings for either college composition or the core curriculum. Because his college is in Central Brooklyn and his students are black, he is expected to deliver treatises on the peculiar learning styles of black students. It is a topic he finds revolting and racist. Poverty and racism, he contends, are the culprits, not the student’s race. But there are many who have carved thriving careers for themselves with their theories about learning styles based on race. In Trinidad, at the time he was there, black students competed in O level and A level Cambridge exams and many times scored higher grades than Asians and whites.