Alone in the veranda, Anna sighs, remembering. In the background she hears the shuffling of feet. Her father has returned. “Don’t forget to turn off the lights,” he says.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
“Your mother’s asleep,” he says.
She decides to take a chance and tell him about her mother’s restless nights. “Mummy wakes up in the night, you know.”
In the shadow cast by a pillar in the veranda, her father’s face is distorted, half illuminated by the electric light, half in darkness. “She burns candles,” he says.
“So you knew?”
“She’s my wife,” he says.
He is wearing an old pair of pajamas. They have faded with washings, but as he stands there, a sad-faced harlequin in patched-up clothes, Anna glimpses the man he was, the man he still is, a gentleman. A man of integrity, a man of uncompromising principles.
B
linding sunshine and it is just quarter to six. Birds sing, leaves swish back and forth with the breeze, fruit fall to the ground. Beyond the gate, the sounds of cars rumbling by. They slow down at the speed bump on the road her father had petitioned the Ministry of Works to install. A car slaps heavily onto the asphalt after the rise and fall of the speed bump and the driver guns the engine in defiance. Young people. Music blares from the car, fades, and leaves a trail, like smoke, that insinuates itself through her open window.
Even at this hour, so early in the morning. Life.
Inside, her mother stirs, footsteps padding on the carpeted floor. It must be so, her father says: the old must make way for the young. Frogs copulate, make tadpoles. Tadpoles grow up to be frogs. The parent frogs die. He too will die. Her mother too will die.
Thou were not born for death, immortal bird / No hungry generation
tread thee down
.
There is much to resolve, Anna thinks, much to finish. Her mother’s life cannot end now. There are new medicines, new procedures. Most survive beyond five years. But her mother’s tumor is large; it has broken through her skin. It bleeds.
The bedroom door opens and shuts. Along the corridor, more footsteps. Her father’s. He’s dressed, ready to leave. His footsteps advance and retreat, advance and retreat, advance. He is nervous, scared.
The bell at the front gate rings. It is Lydia. She is early. “I come just in case she need me.” Anna hears her say this to John Sinclair when he opens the gate.
Lydia is already in the kitchen, tying her apron around her waist, when Anna comes out of her bedroom. “What would Mummy do without you?” she says to Lydia.
Her father grunts. “Lydia likes working for us.”
Lydia grins. Perfect white teeth against polished black skin.
“Don’t you, Lydia?” John Sinclair presses her. “Don’t you like working for us?”
Lydia continues to smile. She does not answer him.
“I’m sure Mummy will appreciate your coming so early,” Anna says. “It’s really considerate of you.”
“I happy to do it,” Lydia replies.
“You can leave early,” John Sinclair tells her. “You don’t have to stay till five.”
Forever the labor negotiator. It is no longer his job, yet he still thinks in these terms: fair wages for fair labor.
“I make Mrs. Sinclair a good breakfast,” Lydia says. “They have ripe oranges on the tree. I make her fresh juice.”
When she is out of earshot, Anna chastises her father. “You could have been gracious. Lydia cares about Mummy. You could have thanked her for coming early.”
“We pay her for eight hours,” he says. “More than that is overtime.”
When Lydia rings the bell for breakfast, Beatrice Sinclair comes out of her room. Not a shadow of fear or worry mars the smile on her lips. She is wearing white pants and a pretty white top made out of gauzy material that drapes softly over a solid white lining. Tiny red roses are scattered across it and down the middle is a row of tiny buttons.
“Mummy!” Anna rushes out of the kitchen to greet her in the corridor. “How beautiful you look!” The words fall back on her ears, false, exaggerated, her gaiety forced. Her mother is dressed for the doctor, a doctor who will confirm—there is no doubt—that she has breast cancer, perhaps inoperable breast cancer.
“You think so?” Her mother glances from Anna to her husband. She smiles, a coquettish expression inappropriate for a woman her age. So Anna thinks. This is how the morning begins, her father officious, her mother coquettish, she throwing a bouquet of compliments, and all of them desperately trying to conceal an undeniable truth that they will soon have to face.
“Come, Beatrice,” John Sinclair says. He is already seated in his place, at the head of the table. “Sit.” He pats the back of the chair to the right of his own.
“Well, what do you think, John?” Beatrice is still standing. She twirls around. “How do I look?”
“You look as you always look to me,” he says. “Beautiful.”
“Chaa!” Her mother snaps her lips and waves him away but she is clearly pleased. “Your father gives me the same answer no matter what I wear,” she says to Anna and sits down.
“That blouse really suits you,” Anna says.
“I thought it would be suitable.” Her mother fingers the tiny buttons that run down the front of the blouse.
Anna feels a knot rise in her throat. The buttons will make it easier for the doctor. Her mother will only have to slide them out of their openings. No wrestling with zippers, no tugging over her head, no mussing up her hair.
John Sinclair too is affected. He cannot miss what she means. But Beatrice has left him no room for pity. She has spoken in practical terms. Suitable, she said. And all John can offer is a weak smile in response and something about Lydia coming early to pick oranges.
“Is that true, Lydia?” Beatrice calls out to Lydia, who is about to leave the kitchen to have her breakfast in her room.
“Oh, Mrs. Sinclair,” Lydia says, her voice tremulous.
“What’s the matter with you, Lydia?” Beatrice’s eyebrows merge. Anna cannot tell if she is irritated or pretending to be so.
“Oh, Mrs. Sinclair.” Lydia turns away from her and faces the sink.
“What’s the matter with Lydia?” Beatrice asks her daughter.
“She came early because she wanted to make fresh orange juice for you.”
“Oh!” Beatrice says, almost in a whisper, as she takes in the full significance of Lydia’s gesture.
“Here, I’ll pour some for you,” Anna says.
Beatrice takes the glass of juice from her daughter’s hands. She looks across the room toward the kitchen. “Thank you, Lydia.”
Lydia, still with her back turned, murmurs, “I did want to do it for you, Mrs. Sinclair.”
Anna’s father reaches for the bread. It is crusty, and when he cuts it with the serrated bread knife, it makes a wholesome grating sound that breaks the somber tension at the table.
“So,” Beatrice says, buttering the slice her husband has passed to her on the breadboard, “what about Neil? Is he meeting us here or has he given you directions to the doctor? What’s his name, the doctor Neil recommended?”
John Sinclair clears his throat. “Dr. Ramdoolal. Neil says he will meet us at Dr. Ramdoolal’s office.”
“What about you, Anna?” Beatrice turns to her daughter. “Will you come?”
“Of course, Mummy.”
Her mother smiles wryly. “You didn’t expect this on your vacation, did you?”
Anna swallows the knot that clogs her throat.
Neil Lee Pak arrives before they do. Anna’s father is speaking to the receptionist when he emerges from a back room, clearly Dr. Ramdoolal’s office. He has a grim expression on his face. He strides across the room and immediately starts a quarrel with her mother. “Beatrice, Beatrice. What can I do with you, Beatrice? All that nonsense about not wanting me to examine you.”
“Not now, Neil.” Her mother takes the chair her husband offers her.
“God knows I tried.”
“Please, Neil.” Her mother brushes him away.
“How many times have I asked you to come in for a proper examination?”
“You gave me a proper examination, Neil.”
“Only what you’d let me do.”
“Enough, Neil,” her mother says firmly.
Neil Lee Pak turns to John Sinclair. “A stubborn woman,” he says.
“Stubborn as a mule,” he replies.
Her mother stands up. “Anna, come with me to the bathroom.”
Anna has had three glasses of orange juice at breakfast, so she is happy to accompany her mother to the bathroom. It took them almost an hour to get to Dr. Ramdoolal’s office, driving bumper to bumper through traffic that snarled around the bends in the highway. Anna knows that it is for her mother’s sake that her father has not gloated. When he insisted they leave directly after breakfast, her mother protested. “What if Dr. Ramdoolal’s office is closed? What shall we do then? Just sit in the car?”
Normally, the drive to the city takes twenty minutes, but John Sinclair correctly estimated that it would take longer in the morning when people were on their way to work.
“Then let’s go later when the traffic dies down,” her mother proposed reasonably. But John Sinclair, ever punctual, didn’t want to take that chance.
“Come, Anna,” her mother beckons her. She leads Anna across the room with the same calm selfassurance with which she entered Dr. Ramdoolal’s office, her back erect, a smile plastered on her face. But no sooner does the bathroom door close behind her than her face crumples, her knees buckle. Anna grasps her shoulders and steadies her.
Her mother’s eyes are welled with tears; her lips are trembling. “I … I …” she begins. She cannot continue. What follows is a bleating moan.
There is a stool beneath the sink in the bathroom. Anna pulls it out and lowers her mother gently onto it. “Tell me, Mummy. What?”
“I’m scared, so scared, so afraid.” Anna has to bend down to hear her.
She wants to hug her mother, put her arms around her shoulders and comfort her. But they do not hug in her house. Stiff upper lip. Self-control. Discipline over the emotions. These are the values they believe in. Yet the trembling has increased on her mother’s lips. No tears flow, but tremors course down the sides of her face. Her hands are shaking. Anna takes them and cups them between her own.
“I’m so afraid,” her mother says again.
Anna knows what terrible shadows dance before her mother’s eyes. “It won’t happen to you like it happened to your mother,” she says. “I won’t let it.”
I
, she says, as if she has the power to control her mother’s fate.
I, Anna, will
make certain that you will not suffer the way your mother suffered.
“I don’t want him to see,” her mother is saying.
“Who, Mummy? What don’t you want him to see?”
“The doctor. I don’t want him to see it.”
When the doctor removed the raw meat from her grandmother’s
breast, she howled like a wild animal caught in an iron vise. And the
stench! “It was horrible, Anna,” her aunt said.
Her mother begins to sway. The tremors on her hands and face increase. Anna stretches her arms across her mother’s shoulders and presses her fingers into her flesh. It is the extent of an embrace she allows herself. “Shhh. Don’t be afraid, Mummy. I’m here,” she croons.
“He can’t, Anna,” her mother whispers. “I won’t let him.”
“It’s not the same. Dr. Ramdoolal will help you.”
“I won’t let him touch me.”
In the morning, her mother was in control, smiles all around at breakfast, a kind word to Lydia. She had prettied up herself, color on her cheeks and lips, red roses on a diaphanous white blouse with buttons down the front for the convenience of the doctor.
Stiff upper lip. Some say the people on the island have inherited this from the British colonial masters. Stiff upper lip that turned a tiny island into an empire, master of most of the world. Stiff upper lip that defeated despair when the Blitz almost destroyed their capital. But John Sinclair disagrees. The British left behind systems for a democratic government, for laws, for education, but he will not credit them for the discipline with which he has conducted his life. He has inherited this from his father, and his father from his enslaved African mother, and she from hers. His theories are Darwinian: “Do you think my African grandmother and the other Africans would have survived if they were not the strongest? Do you think they would have lived to bear children and their children to bear other children if they didn’t have discipline, if they didn’t know how to control their emotions, to keep them in check? If they didn’t know how to take the lash, the iron bit in their mouths, and keep their pain bound and gagged, hidden from those who waited for their fall, their collusion in the slaver’s demonic intent to turn man into animal? If they didn’t have the fortitude to will themselves to live another day?”
Anna was a child when he began telling her this.
“We were the seasoning station,” he said. “They brought the Africans here, to our islands, to be broken in, to be tamed before they were taken to the American continent. If the Africans they captured did not die in the blistering heat of the sugarcane fields, the slave owners knew the ones that remained were among the best, the strongest, the most resilient; they would survive the cotton fields in Georgia. We are the ones they could not break. We are the progeny of the ones they had to leave behind on the islands, the ones they could not tame for Georgia, the ones who refused to die. We know discipline, restraint, we know order. Discipline is in our blood.”
Discipline is in her mother’s blood too. She puts on a face to meet the faces she must see at breakfast: her husband, her daughter; Lydia, her helper. To them she signals no fear. Optimism in fact. All will be well when she sees the doctor. At the doctor’s office, she brushes away the simpering Neil, softening his guilt by passing it on to her, chastising her for what he should have insisted she do. He is a medical doctor after all. Enough! she says. Only in the bathroom does she let slip that face she has so carefully prepared. Tears well, tremors snake up her arms.
“You have to show it to him,” Anna says. “You can’t hide it anymore.”
Beatrice Sinclair bites her lower lip. “Silly me,” she says. Stiff upper lip. “Silly old me.” She emerges from the bathroom, her face restored.