Red Jacket (28 page)

An Occasion of Sin?

Grace leaves for Geneva two weeks after she arrives. Monique and Ousmain drive her to the airport, where she collects the jacket they've been holding for her at the ticket counter. She and Jimmy decide that it is best. She can go to Benke for tests, and the care at MATE is excellent, but she won't be able to do what she's come for, and she'll be an extra responsibility.

Jimmy said that if she wasn't pregnant, he would make love to her, and he meant it, at that time and moment, although having said it, he knew he wouldn't do it. But he doesn't have to take it back, doesn't want to, because it was true, right then. He isn't in love with her and he hasn't known her long enough to love her, except as he loves all of humankind. He is confident the impulse that prompted his wish to be inside her has nothing to do with wanton desire, about which J.J. and he spoke. He wanted to empty everything inside of him into her body in a kind of purgation. What is desperate to come out is a force, a rage, a ferocious resentment at being his own prisoner.

Mapome warned him. “James, they can take everything else from you, but you will always have words to tell your stories.” Except he isn't looking for words. He wants to get past them, past thought, to where he can fix the thing that possesses him the way a lepidopterist pins an insect, so he can see it for what it is. But he can't get far enough away to trap it. It traps him, so he has to expel it. He doesn't fail to notice that the place where he wants to dump his wretchedness is a woman's body.

He sees Nila, wild, nappy-headed Nila whom the snow ate with his baby in her. He imagines the three of them searching for njamra in the stream by the farmhouse in Oubisi. On their wedding night, Nila didn't stop nagging until he told her what happened. She'd told him how his body stiffened and battered the bed, how his eyes rolled over, how he bit first his tongue and then her finger till both bled. She'd been afraid he might never return from his mummified condition, bound in sheets like Lazarus.

And now here is Grace. He knows about her work, but not much about her as a person. In some ways she appears distant, dispassionate. But for sure she is worried about the baby, and she's been open, vulnerable about it, and when she saw him at his worst, she didn't run. If she'd gone for someone, it would have opened a huge can of worms. He asked her.

“Why did you stay? You could've left me, fetched Ousmain or Monique.”

“I wondered if I should do that. But I'd seen seizures before. I decided, all things considered, I ought to stay.”

He said he'd always be grateful. She said she was glad she stayed and then asked if she could do anything for him. And he told her. Why did he, happy in his calling, find himself wanting her then? “Wanting blooms, like a yawn,” J.J. said, He'd wanted her as naturally as that.

For sure it can be argued that he should shun Grace as a likely occasion of sin. For sure he'll have to keep working with her if the project in the Sahel gets off the ground. For sure he'll pray about it. But he won't ask to be sent off anywhere. He lost a woman with a baby in her belly, and now he has one back. And he knows this child is his as surely as if he put it there.

Waiting

Vodka and passion fruit juice is Mark's end-of-day drink. He lies back on the bed having watched the first few minutes of the seven o'clock news, from which he has learned nothing new. No progress in finding Edwin Langdon's murderer. Disturbances continue in several coastal towns, and there is now unrest in Halcyon and Stanton, the two largest tourist centres. Extra detachments of police have been dispatched to both places. Speculation is rife about a state of emergency being declared in the next twenty-four hours.

Towards the end, a reporter addresses a question about HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean to a Grace Carpenter departing the day before, at which point Mark switches to a program about the migratory habits of whales. The sight of her, skin aglow and hair aflame, burns.
Cetacea
are easier on the soul.

What had transpired between them had happened five years before. He'd written and then waited and waited to hear from her. He'd left his home number with his personal assistant, to be given to her if she called — something he'd never done before, for, ironically, Mona and he had agreed to keep a distance between work and life.

It upset him when he had no response to the postcard, the one that told her thanks for the advice concerning prowling about. He'd sent it to her at WHO and put it into the postbox himself; he knew the day and time. And then he'd written the first letter, and then the next, both of which he was confident Mona had mailed. At that point, he discovered where she was. Newspapers in D.C. had been running features about impending baseline studies that were to be part of an initiative to retard the spread of HIV/AIDS in Sahelian Africa. One of the articles profiled a controversial Jesuit priest from Mabuli named James Atule. He knows about Mabuli, although he's never visited. It's a small, landlocked country, Mali to the west, Burkina Faso to the east, sharing a short border with Côte d'Ivoire in the south.

Once he'd read the
Post
profile and seen that WHO was setting up something in West Africa, he'd guessed. Thereupon he'd experienced some inner turmoil. He applauds himself for admitting that his reaction was sourness at being rejected and pique at things not going his way. Apart from whatever could be included under the large heading, “Grace,” he is not sure what he wants. At the beginning he'd been glad that, since she had her own life, no untidy repercussions were likely after their couplings in Cambridge. At the airport that ground had shifted, how radically he hadn't known till he'd written the first letter. By the time he'd written the second one, he'd passed through suspecting, then admitting that he wanted her to be, like some nineteenth-century New Orleans placée woman, not just his, but lodged in close proximity for anything that might strike his fancy, never mind his lawful wife.

The day he saw the article in the
Post
, he'd ordered a big bouquet of roses for Mona and arrived home carrying them, as well as wine and supper from the Table d'Hôte, a gourmet catering service with a select clientele of Washington subscribers. Mona opened the front door for him.

“What happen?” he asked, kissing her. “You send home the butler?”

“Wow! Thanks for these,” she'd said, ignoring the comment and taking the flowers. “They're lovely. All the same, you can hang up the jacket yourself, and if that's dinner, just rest it in the kitchen. I'll be there in a minute.”

“Body servants supposed to do everything for their masters you know. Where my slippers?”

She sucked her teeth. He hung up his jacket, found his slippers, and followed her to the kitchen.

“Want to open this?” She gave him the wine, a Merlot they both liked.

He set to work. “So how come you don't ask me what's the occasion?”

“I know what the occasion is.”

He kept on at the cork. “In that case, you better than me. I just thought,” he emphasized the next word, “whimsically, that it was a good way to start the weekend, so I got Elaine to ring the florist and the caterers, and they did the rest. Besides,” he pointed outside, “it looks like spring might be consenting to arrive ahead of schedule. You love that tree. Let's say we celebrating the blooming of your tree!”

In the courtyard of their townhouse a small pink magnolia was covered with very early buds. Mona hung on for it to flower every year. While he showered and changed, she had put dinner on the table — coq au vin, salad, warm-from-the-oven baguettes.

“So what you did all day?” En route to his chair, he bent to smell her hair. She kept it long because he liked it so.

“Mostly read. Took a couple of calls for you.”

“Would you pass the butter, please?” Aware of the number he'd left with Elaine, his hopes rose.

“So who called?” He loaded his bread with butter.

“Some person passing through named Frank Nuñez who said he'd been at UA with you. The number's on your desk.” Her elbow was on the table, thumb propping up her chin, fingers curled over her mouth.

“Who else?” He was hoping dangerously.

“A woman. Wouldn't say who. Said she'd try again.”

“American? Caribbean?”

“She sounded Latin. Maybe Cuban.”

Not Grace.

They'd tidied up afterwards and gone upstairs where he made love to her tenderly and at length. It had gone so well he'd thought to raise the idea of another baby, but he gave it up quick enough. She'd know something was up.

He thinks now that, never mind his circumspection, Mona guessed that day, if not who he was dallying with, certainly that he was dallying. There was nothing lacking in her response to the flowers, dinner, or his lovemaking. It was something in her expression, her eyes. He can't say she looked resigned for resignation is now written all over her, inscribed by Adam's death. This look was something else.

He's not always been faithful. After Adam died, she hadn't wanted to make love for ages, almost three years. No full-blooded Caribbean man went that long without sex, and not even the craziest woman would expect abstinence for such a period. As far as he's concerned, they'd reached an unspoken truce. They never spoke of infidelity, and she never noticed anything amiss. He wasn't careless, but small things had to show.

Still, she's not a woman to come to terms. What he believes now is that she's been biding her time — the inscrutable East in her, no doubt. He can't blame her. Nor is there any sense in imagining their positions reversed. That situation is inconceivable. So it isn't something to be tackled, just something to be waited out. He has a pass yet again at telling himself she couldn't have known. The letters she'd mailed to Grace were like hundreds she's always posting for him: his extensive personal correspondence includes people all over the world. She always dispatches it faithfully, a couple times a week, sticking on stamps, popping the envelopes into the mailbox. Nothing identified the letters he'd sent Grace as in any way different — unless the intensity of his feelings had somehow imparted vibrations to the paper.

As for Grace, it hasn't occurred to him that he might forgo his greedy need for her. He wants to consume her and still have her there, ready for eating again. It's not that he doesn't love Mona. He loves her, and making love to her, and taking care of her. How he feels about Mona has nothing to do with how he feels about Grace. With Grace, it's like being caught in a powerful current: there's no point in struggling. All you do is exhaust yourself, so you go with the flow and hope to be washed ashore safely at some point.

The whales, getting smaller and smaller in the ocean blue, and then disappearing under credits for the program, remind him there are things to do before tomorrow. Gordon, who'd promised an update on developments and a run-through of the revised agenda, has been silent. He looks at his empty glass. “Bird can't fly on one wing,” he thinks and fixes himself another drink.

Landings

“You see how your womb stay? You just going to have to take time! If you hold on, that baby will hold on. Mark my word, you get off light, for one time it would be full bed rest. I telling you straight: take it nice and easy.”

Dr. Joyce Zaidie-Klein wears her lavish head of hair in thick locks. Each day she puts on her white medical coat over some new creation: a patchwork frock of Bob Marley T-shirts, a dramatic dress of mud cloth, a long skirt of batik, or bandana cloth. The outfits blaze against her skin, for she is pale as any Irish colleen, her veins a network of indigo streams and rivers under skin pervious as mist, the tight twists in her hair defying its pale blonde and the startling blue of her eyes.

Grace stared when they first met and felt obliged to apologize.

“Yup. Them baby blues just stopped me short of being a dundus — you know, albino? My mama was a very white lady, and my papa black as the ace of spades. You grew up in St. Chris, don't that's right?”

Grace nods, too happy to meet her, and in Geneva of all places. When the doctor smirks, posing to show off the day's outfit, tie-dyed in green, gold, and red, Grace remembers Miss Carmen in her dashikis and matching trousers. Heritage, Miss Carmen used to say, was a legacy that you could draw down on whenever you were ready. These two mixed-blood women, her relative obviously a woman of colour, her doctor almost imperceptibly so, are happily drawing down on that inheritance. Unsure what she has inherited, Grace envies them.

“Brighten my day and wake up my patients. For colours, I praise Jah.”

Grace does as her doctor instructs: keeps herself shipshape and guides the tiller at work with the lightest touch, pretty much handing things over to Jimmy and project managers in Senegal, Mali, and Burkina Faso. Jimmy leads sessions with the managers every two months. Each country has its turn as host, and he reports to Geneva afterwards.

It is hard to let go. She loves her job, gives it all she'd got, for that is what Gramps had charged her to do, what he, Ma, and Pa taught her by example. And her siblings inspire her: Edgar looks over her shoulder when she writes, Stewie when she draws a plan. Pansy's willfulness she emulates when she advances an argument. Sam and Princess, whom she still thinks of as children, happy and healthy, embody the reason for her work. And she does her job every day in tribute to a man she doesn't dare remember, not the way she remembers, say, Gramps. Gramps she resurrects whenever she wishes, seeing him in the circumstances in which he had been most himself, like when he was making his ganja infusions or tending his provision ground. But Charlie, the man who gave her many of the skills she now uses, is enshrined in a place she never goes to. With him she breathed and smelled, walked and drank, ate and slept, made love and felt hurt with a scope and intensity she'd not felt before. Once he'd gone, she'd worked and functioned and responded at a remove, as if she was dead too, watching herself from below, through thick layers of earth under which she remained buried until she met Jimmy. She couldn't have him, but he at least makes her want to push her way up from underground.

As for Mark, she can't account for Mark. But for the baby, he can as well not have happened. Maybe the now-and-then lunacy that prompted her attempt to seduce Lindsay and led to her rudeness to Phyllis had overcome her again. Perhaps one day she'll figure it out.

When she is about six months on, she gets up one morning, studies her belly, and thinks about her mothers. Ma is a perfect mother, but for myriad reasons Ma can't come to Geneva. She understands then why so many parents from the Caribbean send their children home to their islands for grandmothers to raise; she remembers that Phyllis had said in one of her letters how happy she was that Grace had grown up in St. Chris. But she is never going to part with this baby. She phones New York.

“Hi, Phyllis?”

“Grace? Are you all right? How's the baby?”

“Baby fine, as far as we can tell, and me too.”

“Good. I pray for that every day. So how things?”

“Pretty good. I've just a couple months to go, so I'm taking it easy. No problems, knock wood. Except I look like a chopstick with a dumpling stuck on the front.”

“Graphic.”

“Mum, it make no sense for me to beat about the bush. I have a big-big favour to ask you.”

“Okay, Grace.”

“Is really big, you know.” Her tone kneads caution, hesitation, pleading.

“Grace, I understand English. Just make your request.”

Her mother is well named — Phyllis, Green Bough of Great Calm.

“I need you to come and help me mind this baby.”

Long pause. “So is now you decide to ask me that?”

“Is long time I been debating about it, Mum, but is only now I make up my mind to just bite my lip and ask you.”

“How much time I have to think about it?”

“Whatever time you need.”

“I could take till next year then.” Phyllis's humour lurks in the pool of conversation like a turtle, elevating its head unpredictably.

“Mum, you know this baby is coming long before next year.”

“So you want me to come before the baby born then?”

“Lord, take time with me, nuh?”

“You just phone halfway round the world to say, ‘Phyllis, how you would like to give up your work, your life, your home, and come to a strange place where you don't speak the language, don't know nobody, and nobody know you, so you can look after my baby?' And
I
must take time with
you
?”

“My baby is your grandchild — very likely, the only one you'll ever have.”

“That is perfectly true, as is the fact that you are the mother of that child. Baby-minding responsibility thus falls to you. At least, that is how I know it.”

“Mum, you know full well I can't do this job and mind the baby at the same time. If we're going to eat, I have to work. You want me to put your grandchild in a nursery for a set of white people to mind?”

“So since when white people can't mind pikni? Look, Grace. I best tell you right now. If I was to decide to come over there, I not going to be no surrogate mother, so make us be clear on that.”

“Your mother left you. They forced you to give me up. You think I'm going do anything like that with this baby?”

“Don't judge about things concerning which you know nothing!” Phyllis snaps, something Grace can hardly ever remember her doing. More turtle behaviour! “There's no comparison between your present circumstances and mine when you were born, or yours and Daphne's when she left to work in foreign and send back money to support me and Ralston. You think if I'd stayed in St. Chris and brought you up, you'd be where you are now?”

Grace knows better than to answer. “Mum, we'll discuss it down to the smallest details, work out how it's going to go day to day, hour to hour, if you want. But you and I both know that I didn't have to keep this child. Having decided to, I'm not likely to behave as though it belongs to somebody else.”

“If I come, Grace, I am holding you to that.”

“Agreed, Mum.”

“One more thing. You haven't seen fit to speak about the baby-father. I've asked no questions, but if I come to mind that baby, I must know who his pa is.”

Transatlantic burbles. “I really don't want to talk about that.”

“Listen, Miss. I am not ecstatic about giving up a perfectly good life here, which is what you've asked me to do. I'm not going to do it, only to have some man knock on the door one day, come to collect his child.”

“This is 1994, Phyllis. Those things don't happen anymore.”

“They most certainly do, Grace. Not to say you'd let the baby go just so, but don't fool yourself. Parents do snatch children. If there's a chance of my finding myself in the middle of such an abduction, I must know.”

“Suppose I tell you every last thing about him: age, profession, height, weight, shape of nose, skin, and eye colour, education, earning power, political persuasion — all except name and address. That will suffice?”

“What about marital status?”

“He's married, Phyllis.”

“Fine barrel of brine water you land yourself into!”

“That's very helpful.”

“Have to think about this, Grace. Take it to the Lord in prayer.”

“That's more than fair, Mum. I know you'll need time.”

“I'll speak to Reverend Mother tomorrow. You're lucky. Is only forty-seven I am on my next birthday, but I been working here thirty years now, so I have my pension, plus I have some leave saved up.”

“Right. I will call you in another couple days. Take care, Mum. And thanks for even thinking about it.”

Being pregnant has been no cakewalk, seven months of whether the baby would miscarry, morning sickness, World Cup football in her belly, and the belly in the end so heavy that there is no good position to sleep in. Ironically, all that has been to the good, immediate discomfort overriding neurotic doubts about whether the baby has AIDS, never mind all the tests she's done say she is fine.

She's enjoyed preparing for the baby, though the most important preparation is the one she's that day hopefully put in place. Someone has to mind the child because she has to work. She'd considered, and then had the brainwave, and then the misgivings, so she'd talked to Jimmy.

“Do you think it would be fair to Phyllis?”

“Ask and you shall receive. Can't hurt to ask.”

There was a bit of a tug-o-war between herself and her Rasta doctor about where the baby should be born. She started asking around for a good doula, for she wanted a home delivery, so that the child could be born into the smells, sights, and sounds that would surround him or her in the first years of life. These are to introduce the baby not just to home but to Wentley Park and his or her extended family as well. To that end, the nursery is painted the blue of the sky in St. Chris. There is a wall with a mural depicting a small shop, like Pansy and Mortimer's Ital Cookshop; she paid one of the children from the high school nearby to paint it from a postcard of St. Chris. The shop is on a roadside prettified with oleander and allamanda bushes and blooming poinciana and acacia trees, with the road running past a swathe of cane fields backed by a stand of tall coconut palms, the whole set against the glow of a perfect St. Chris sunset. It is tourist stuff, to be sure, but if she gathers two or three places in Wentley and puts them together in her imagination, the picture is not too far off.

There is another wall devoted to the Carpenter and Patterson branches of her baby's family tree, which she has drawn and then painted herself, and to which she has affixed photographs of Gramps, Ma, Pa, all her siblings, Daphne, Granny Vads, grandpa Malachi, and of course Phyllis and herself. Even Pansy and Mortimer's children are there, for they are first cousins, after all.

Joyce Zaidie-Klein discourages the doula and the home birth. She reminds Grace that she is older than the average woman giving birth for the first time, and she needs to bear in mind that there may be complications with the delivery.

“Hospital is the best place for old lady who just starting to make babies!” her doctor declares, ready to pick a pretend fight with Grace. Grace doesn't given her the satisfaction: she capitulates straight off.

“But of course – you're absolutely right!”

So Jeremiah arrives in the hospital, though, thank God, there are no complications. She does not debate about naming the child. She has little to give Jimmy, or that he allows her to give him, but she knows how much he mourns John Kelly, and she's told him if the baby is a boy, she is going to name him Jeremiah.

Phyllis was to have come a week before the baby was due, to be part of the warm and welcoming Christophian cocoon in which Grace is determined the child will find himself when she brings him home. But he was in a hurry, which is why at this moment, three months after her phone call to her mother, she is all alone, shushing a two-day-old small person who can't even lend a hand with shelling peas!

As she pats his back, she checks the wall clock. Phyllis's plane should be touching down any minute.