When Anna was a child, she did not think of her father as a religious man. She does not think so now. Her mother says she saw him praying as the chemo drugs coursed through her veins. Anna thinks
saw
is the operative word. But her mother could not see into her father’s soul. She could not see whether in his soul he prayed.
“She has amassed a fortune in heaven,” her father says. “I am way behind her.”
After dinner, when she was a child in their house, she and her mother said the rosary together. They knelt at the side of the bed and each took turns leading the prayer. They would go through the ten decades, each one beginning with the Our Father, followed by ten Hail Marys. Each night another mystery: the Joyful, the Sorrowful, the Glorious. Her father would find something to do while they prayed: a chess game with Neil Lee Pak, work he had to finish in his office, a friend he needed to visit. But there were some nights too when he sat in the study. What was he thinking then? How did he distract himself? For Anna is certain their voices filtered through the slit below the door.
Lead us not into temptation.
Was this his prayer too?
He always accompanied them to church on Sundays. He stood in the back; they sat in the pews in front. He waited dutifully until the Mass was over and drove them home afterward. He never complained.
When he is exhausted, her father says, “O Father me!” He sighs and groans. “O Father me!” A sort of prayer, perhaps, until one day she decoded it.
O Father,
save me
.
O Father God, lead me not into temptation. O Father God,
forgive me.
These are his true intentions, the purpose of his prayer.
For a few years now, on her visits back home, Anna has noticed he no longer stands in the back of the church. He sits next to her mother in a pew in the front. When the priest sings “Alleluia!” he stretches his hands upward, his palms open wide. All that display of religious fervor embarrasses her Catholic mother, but her father’s Protestant childhood is fused in his bones. “Alleluia!” he sings with the priest.
He receives Communion now. But Anna is not fooled. He has not changed. This talk of the fortune her mother has amassed in heaven and the prayers he hopes she says for him is a camouflage. If he believes in heaven and hell—and she is not sure he does, for she has never heard him speak of an afterlife—this faith has not been enough to comfort him. Her mother is comforted by the hope of salvation. The inevitability of death still fills him with anger and resentment. Neither religion nor Anna’s attempts at reminding him of man’s part in the cycle of life seem to assuage his resentment. Anna accuses him of solipsism and he responds that the individual may not count
more
than the community, but without the individual there is no community.
No, Anna is not fooled when he follows her mother in the line for Communion, when he stands next to her at the altar and stretches out his tongue. She is convinced this change in him has not come because he is old, because he knows the time is drawing near when he shall meet his Maker. She thinks he has changed to impress her mother. He wants her to witness, to have proof of the condition of his soul. For the soul must be as white as snow before the sinner can receive Communion, before the Body of Christ can be placed on his tongue.
“I hope it will be a long time before your mother collects that reward,” her father says, and puts the orchid plants back down on the ground.
Anna hopes so too. Her father has made his peace with her mother but she needs time, for there is much left for her to resolve.
W
hy didn’t you come back?” her father asks. It is night. Her mother is still asleep. Anna and her father have just had their first full meal of the day, pelau Lydia had prepared the way her father likes it: the rice grainy in the casserole, not cloying in lumps to the pigeon peas and chicken. The pelau was already cooked when her mother and father returned from the doctor, but John Sinclair is a creature of habit. He had tea, biscuits, and jam in the afternoon and waited until six to have this meal.
Anna is in the kitchen washing the dishes when her father asks this question. Though Lydia would gladly wash the dishes in the morning, her mother will not go to bed if there are dirty dishes left in the sink. Her mother is scrupulously clean, in her person and in her home. She will not appear at the breakfast table unless she has showered, fixed her hair, and, unlike her husband, put on clean clothes that have been carefully pressed. By teatime she has changed again. She claims the heat of the day makes her damp and sticky. (She will not use the words
sweat
or
perspire
). This is the excuse she gives her husband for needing a woman to come to the house twice a week to iron her clothes. She will find the places Lydia has missed when she polishes the furniture and will follow her with disinfectant to check that the bathrooms have been cleaned to her satisfaction. Acknowledging her own practice on the night before her weekly cleaning woman comes to her apartment in New York, Anna once joked with her mother that she cleans up her bedroom to impress her cleaning woman.
Her mother responded indignantly, “I don’t wash the dishes to impress Lydia. I wash the dishes because I do not keep a dirty house.”
So while her father goes to the study to put on a CD, Anna washes the dishes from the dinner they have just eaten.
He has put on Vivaldi,
The Four Seasons
, and has turned down the volume, but the music seeps through the house, out of the study and into the kitchen, and, Anna has no doubt, along the corridor to the room where her mother is sleeping.
Is it for her mother that her father has put on Vivaldi? Does he hope that Vivaldi might penetrate the veil of sleep, calm her mother’s nerves even as she sleeps?
“Why not, Anna?” he asks. “Why didn’t you come back?”
The violins grow quiet; the pace slows down.
Spring.
When he first played
The Four Seasons
for her she knew only two on her tropical island, the wet and the dry. Now,
Spring
. In America it came alive for her. It was as she had imagined as a child: buds opening, breaking through the late winter’s frost.
The music soars. The allegro, a pastoral dance. Flowers bloom. Colors blaze across a landscape reawakened at last from a wintry slumber.
“Vivaldi,” she says.
Her father does not lose his focus. “After college,” he repeats his question. “Why did you stay?”
She puts the last of the dishes on the rack to drain. “There was graduate school,” she says.
“And after graduate school?”
“I came back,” she says.
“You stayed six months.”
“I couldn’t find a job.”
“So that was it? If you were able to find a job, you would have stayed?” He is standing in the rectangular archway, in the space between the kitchen and the family dining area, twirling the plastic CD container in his hands.
“I don’t know how to answer that question,” she says. “Getting a job was not a possibility open to me.”
“You didn’t give yourself time. I’m sure something would have turned up.”
“There were no decent jobs for women when I came back with my master’s degree,” she says. “If I wanted to be a secretary, yes, there would have been a job for me.”
“You’re not being fair, Anna.”
“Those were not fair times.”
“We had our independence from England when you came back.”
“Replaced by neocolonialism,” she says, and turns away from him.
“Frantz Fanon.” He tugs his ear.
They have had this argument before, once bitterly when she came for a visit after she had returned to America for good. She brought him Fanon’s
Black
Skin, White Masks
. “There. Read what Fanon says.” She handed him the book. “That’s the problem with the island now. We have been brainwashed to think like the colonizers.”
“It was a man’s world when I came back,” Anna says now. “Except for white women. They were given the status of honorary men.”
“Anna, Anna,” her father pleads, but she is not mollified.
“I just wanted to teach,” she says. “I didn’t care what level. I had a master’s degree, but I couldn’t find a teaching job anywhere in the city. Yet there were teaching positions for white women, English women, Canadian women, foreign women. I guess black women were not considered bright enough, smart enough.”
Her father cringes. In the background the mournful violins of the Largo begin.
“Things have changed,” he says softly. “It’s not the same now. Local women are in important positions today, in the government, in the private sector.”
“Things changed too late for me.”
Her father inclines his head toward her. “Come, sit with me in the veranda. It’s a beautiful night.”
He does not want to talk politics, and in truth neither does she. For it is a beautiful night. Not a cloud spoils the clarity of the midnight blue sky.
How many times a sky like this one was a reference for her when navy blue was not what she wanted but was the only blue the salesperson in the department store in New York understood when she asked for dark blue. “Midnight blue, like the sky,” she would say, and the salesperson would answer, “Like navy blue?”
But she left; she walked away from the tropics where the stars burn like bright fires out of a sky so deep she glimpsed infinity.
“Aren’t you tired?” she asks, drying her hands on the dish towel.
He is already walking toward the door. She puts down the towel and follows him outside. The intoxicating perfume of flowers, fruit, and earth rises to meet them. She inhales and her senses are awakened: smell, sight, touch, taste, the memory of pleasures past. This too she left behind.
“It wasn’t because of me, was it?” Her father motions to two chairs, close to his fishpond. He will drop the politics, but his original question remains on his mind. “You didn’t stay away because of me, did you?”
“Because of you?” She sits next to him.
“Because I moved you to the hill.”
He surprises her, for they rarely speak of those days when she lived with them in the gated compound up the hill from the oil fields.
“When we moved to the hill, we had more than we ever had,” she says cautiously. “We had a bigger house, a new car.”
“I was always at work.”
“But you always had breakfast with Mummy and me, and you always came home for dinner.”
The family who prayed together, stayed together,
her mother said.
The family who ate together, stayed together,
her father rejoined. He always found a way to return home for an hour to have dinner with them, even when he had appointments late at night. And there were many times he came home for lunch.
“I know you didn’t have many friends on the hill,” her father says, and crosses his legs. “But when you came back from graduate school we were living here, close to the city. You had friends in the city.”
“School friends,” she replies. “We had grown up and we had changed. They were planning babies. I was thinking of a career.”
Is it Neil Lee Pak’s innocent question as they were leaving the house that has stirred him so? she wonders.
Isn’t Anna coming too?
Neil Lee Pak asked.
No,
her mother answered with a forcefulness that brought both men to an awkward silence.
“But later on, when things got better on the island, why didn’t you return? There were jobs for you then.”
“Tony,” she says. “I was already dating Tony. We were planning to get married. Tony wouldn’t live here. He didn’t want to leave America.”
Her father avoids her eyes. “Ah, that man didn’t know the prize he had.”
Prize? Did Tony know what a prize he had? Does her mother?
Her mother did not want her by her side when they went to the
doctor in the morning.
But her father will not pry; he will not ask her about Tony. He has a respect for privacy. He will not ask her, either, what she and her mother talked about when her mother asked him to leave the room. He will not scratch the wound that has never completely healed between her mother and her. And perhaps this is what husbands must do. This is what the Bible instructs them to do. They must choose their wives first, above everyone else, even above their children.
The CD pauses between movements. Without the violins, a thick silence grows between them. She is the first to break it. She wants to change her father’s mood. She wants him to think of other things, other times.
She
needs to think of other things, other times.
“Did your father like Vivaldi?”
“To listen to, not play. Father was good at the violin, but he was not that fast.” He breaks into a loud chuckle. “Father used to say Vivaldi found one melody and he wrote seven hundred variations of it. Imagine! Seven hundred variations of the same theme. That was a clever priest!”
M
usic is in the Sinclairs’ blood,” Mrs. Sinclair, John Sinclair’s mother, informed Beatrice when Anna was born. Everyone in their family played a musical instrument, she said. Both she and her only daughter Alice, John’s sister, were gifted pianists. They gave concerts in Town Hall and once Alice performed at Governor’s House when a distant cousin of Queen Elizabeth was visiting the island.
The men played the violin, Anna’s paternal grandfather, who was good but not fast, and Anna’s father John, who was neither fast nor good. But John more than made up for his lackluster performance on the violin with his knowledge of classical music and his scholarship at school. The family forgave him, pinning their hopes instead on his children. He didn’t have a boy. That was their second disappointment, but they nevertheless consoled themselves that his daughter, Anna, would fulfill their dream of having a Sinclair play in England’s famous Albert Hall. So when Anna was five, Beatrice arranged for her to take piano lessons. The piano teacher was patient. Surely those stubby fingers would lengthen and their reach widen, and though they did, though by the time Anna was ten her hands in every way resembled her Aunt Alice’s tapered spread, they failed to make music. Week after week the piano teacher tried, placing her faith in the power of genes to transmit talent, but after one particularly disastrous performance, she’d had enough. She drew down the lid over the piano keys and explained as gently as she could to Beatrice that she would not be returning. Her daughter did not have the talent. The Sinclair musical gene had apparently skipped a generation.