Beatrice was mortified. She was in an unspoken, unacknowledged competition with her husband’s family, and the failure of her daughter was nothing less than a reflection of her own inadequacies. The Sinclairs fanned her guilt. Whenever Beatrice visited, Alice would play the piano and afterward John’s mother would draw her hand melodramatically across her forehead and sigh, “The last of the line of accomplished Sinclair women. Oh Alice.”
But Beatrice took comfort in her husband. He loved her. About that she had absolute confidence. If her hips were what attracted him at first, he soon became equally mesmerized by her deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, full upper lip, smooth brown skin, and firm, though tiny breasts. In the early years of their marriage, she would often catch him gazing at her with pure adoration in his eyes. When they went to parties, he danced only with her. Fishing and hunting took him away some weekends but he always came back more enthralled than before, wanting to make love to her every night, calling her from work and bringing her the sweets she loved: coconut ice cream and mangoes, especially Julie and Starch.
Of course, eating coconut ice cream and mangoes almost every day could have but one single effect on a woman’s figure. And so it did with Beatrice. Her breasts grew larger, her hips wider, but John never seemed to mind. More of you to love, he said to her. And, indeed, though Beatrice got fatter, she did not lose her figure. Miraculously, her waistline kept its shape. She was voluptuous, not fat, her figure the classical hourglass that turned men’s heads and made John proud he had such a wife.
The Sinclairs, however, were not impressed. They were rail-thin, Albert, John’s father, particularly so. His body cast a shadow no wider than a beam in their house. He was short and dark-skinned, with piercing black eyes and thick eyebrows planted on his prominent forehead like a dense bush at the edge of a smooth promontory. He got his skin color from his African mother, Ann Rose, and his long nose and thin lips from his Portuguese father who had married Ann Rose, though, in those days, such an arrangement was considered both unnecessary and unwise; unnecessary because a white man could easily bed any African woman he desired without need of sanction from either the law or the church; unwise because it threw into confusion the boundaries drawn between black and white, between the colonized and the colonizer. But the Portuguese man had not come to the island with the colonizers. His purpose was not to oppress; he himself had been oppressed by others. He had fled Madeira to escape the strangling strictures of Roman Catholicism. He would not oppress another. He would ask for Ann Rose’s hand in marriage. She would have to choose him.
Ann Rose was a free woman, born after Emancipation to a mother who had been dragged from the west coast of Africa, along with forty million others, for the sole purpose of making Europeans rich by their backbreaking, brow-sweating, free labor on plantations that stretched across the Caribbean. There are some who say forty million is too low an estimate. There are some who say that in the end, counting the Atlantic, Arabian, and trans-Saharan routes, close to one hundred million Africans were affected. Many died in transport, others from diseases or indirectly from the social trauma left behind in Africa.
Given this history of suffering, Ann Rose would not dishonor her mother. She demanded respect, legitimacy of her relationship with the Portuguese man. And they had much in common. They both loved books, music, and art.
Ann Rose had been educated by the wife of her mother’s former slave owner, who had committed herself to teaching her as a sort of penance, atonement for her brutal treatment of Ann Rose’s mother, who had been forced to serve her. If not total reprieve from damnation, which she was terrified she deserved, she hoped to gain entry to Purgatory by improving the lot of one of the Africans. Giving Ann Rose the education she had given her sons was, to her mind, her ticket out of hell.
When Ann Rose’s husband died just five short years after their marriage, she devoted herself to instilling in their two sons, Anthony, the older, and Albert, John’s father, the same love for learning she shared with her husband. Before they entered primary school, she had taught her sons how to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Later, both boys won scholarships to the prestigious Catholic secondary school established for the sons of the colonizers and the children of the French Creole planters. When he was alive, her husband distrusted Catholics, but Western religions did not matter to Ann Rose: one was the same as the other. The Catholic school was the best on the island; that was all that mattered to her.
Anthony immigrated to America and became a rich dentist in Harlem. Albert remained on the island. He married a French Creole, a white woman of indeterminate blood but whose ancestors no doubt had more than one encounter with the tar brush. He and this very fair-skinned woman had two children: John, who inherited his father’s brown skin, and Alice, who was so light-skinned she passed for white, convincing the people of a small country village in England so effectively that not a single one raised a peep of protest when their mayor married her.
Ann Rose was still living when John married Beatrice. She told John she was glad she had lived long enough to see a Sinclair marry a dark-skinned woman.
Education and color gave the Sinclairs class, which did not necessarily mean they had money. They had some money, but only enough to acquire middle-class essentials: a house in a decent part of the island, a car when few had one, and the means to provide their children with the finest education the island had to offer.
Beatrice’s brown-skinned family had neither the requisite color nor money. Beatrice’s father, Joseph Collier, was a brilliant man but he was addicted to dice and squandered most of his weekly paycheck in obsessive dreams of a windfall. Forced to find employment to support the family, Beatrice’s mother first found work in a bakery whose middle-class customers measured sophistication against the styles and habits of the English colonizers. When she began substituting mangoes and guavas for apples and peaches in the pies and tarts, they complained vociferously to the manager. If they wanted poor people food, they said, they would have gone to the poor people shop. Beatrice’s mother would have been fired had not the chef at Governor’s House rescued her. As it happened, he was in a pickle. The Governor’s European guests were demanding exotic food, though nothing so exotic as to irritate the delicate linings of their stomachs. When the chef tasted the custard tarts Beatrice’s mother had topped with succulent slices of Julie mango, he knew he had found a solution. He returned to the bakery and hired her on the spot.
Beatrice’s mother could never count on her husband to take care of their daughter, so after school Beatrice joined her mother in the kitchen at Governor’s House. It was there, peeping through a crack in the kitchen door, that Beatrice learned about fashion and etiquette and the English way of pronouncing words. Ultimately, the Sinclairs were forced to admit that what Beatrice lacked in education and in acceptable skin color, she more than made up for with what they assumed was instinctive good taste. She was reserved in dress, preferring muted colors, beiges, taupes, earth tones that balanced the occasional yellows and pinks she wore. She insisted on breathable fabric, linens, the finest cotton, and refused to succumb to polyester when synthetics became the rage. She was equally reserved in speech, rarely raising her voice and taking care to position her tongue between the teeth so that she did not fall into the habit so common among the citizens of the island, even, unfortunately, among the middle class, of pronouncing her
th
s as
d
s. She was always careful to say
that, they, there
, never
dat, dey, dere
.
Of course, Beatrice’s conservative taste was cultivated rather than instinctive, as John cannily detected when he beat a rhythm to her stride down the pavement in the middle of the city.
Badoom, badoom, badoom
. She was not easily approachable, as many a man who made the mistake of associating her seductive figure with an openness to sexual adventure quickly discovered. Her hips swayed, but she carried her head high, and with a single withering glance could deflate the hopes of the most audacious of men. It was a quality that endeared her to John, who had followed her for blocks, unable to charm her into a single response until he fooled her into thinking a page had loosened from the sheaf of papers in the folder in her hand.
Had Beatrice been a shade lighter than the color of tamarind, her beauty, good taste, and reserve would have been enough to gain her entry to the island’s social circles. In time, after she moved with John to the hill, she lost her fat and achieved a weight that would have been acceptable to her in-laws were they alive. In time, she had a daughter who was at university in America. In time, her daughter became a senior editor at a major publishing house in New York. Her daughter cannot play the piano, but she has inherited her father’s taste in music. They listen to Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, and Vivaldi. They are listening to Vivaldi now.
T
wo weeks later, Beatrice has her second round of chemotherapy. Her husband, who has stayed with her, does not wait for the clinician’s report. When the session ends, they leave immediately and he drives his wife home.
Lydia is in the kitchen when they arrive. John Sinclair blows the car horn, but she does not press the button on the kitchen wall that releases the lock on the electric gate quickly enough for him. He blows the horn again, three times more before Lydia finally reaches the button, presses it, and the gate grinds open.
Anna, alarmed by the many times her father has honked, fears the worst. She rushes out with Lydia to the driveway to meet him. The car is still rolling to a stop when she grasps the door handle. Her mother’s head is thrown back on the car seat; her eyes are closed. Her father brakes and Anna opens the door. “Mummy, Mummy.” She has to shake her mother before her eyes flutter open. “John,” her mother murmurs. Anna reaches for her elbow. “John.” Her mother raises a limp hand and waves Anna away. “Let me.” Her father is already at his wife’s side. Her mother braces herself against his outstretched arm and pulls herself up. She leans her full weight against his body and he tightens his grasp around her waist to prevent her from slipping. Arms around each other, they make their way along, three steps, stop, three steps, stop, until they reach the bedroom door. Anna opens the door for them and stands aside. Carefully, gently, her father guides his wife to their bed.
“This one was not as easy on her as the first one,” her father says. He places a pillow under her mother’s head. Her mother has shut her eyes again. Her breathing is shallow.
“Was she sick?”
“See how pale she is?” her father says.
“Did she throw up?”
“She’s a strong woman. No, nothing like that. She didn’t throw up.”
“She looks so weak.”
“She’s tired,” her father says. “She needs to sleep.”
“Shall I leave?”
“Ugh.” Both Anna and her father turn in unison toward her mother, surprised by the sound that came from lips that had seemed to lack the strength to open on their own. “No,” her mother says clearly.
“What, Beatrice?” Her father leans over her.
“No. Don’t leave,” she says.
“I don’t plan to leave. I am going to stay right here with you, Beatrice,” her father says.
Her mother looks past him to where Anna is standing at the foot of the bed. “Don’t leave. Stay with me.”
Her gaze lingers on Anna.
“Of course I’ll stay, Beatrice,” her father says.
Anna lowers her eyes.
“No. You go,” her mother says. This time there can be no question to whom her words are addressed. She has turned her head toward her husband. “I mean you.”
“Are you sure?” John Sinclair asks.
“Anna. I want Anna to stay.” It has taken all her mother’s strength to say this. Her face folds, the muscles around her mouth and eyes slacken.
“Anna?”
Her mother nods. She cannot, or will not, say more.
“I guess she wants me to leave,” her father says.
“I don’t think she means that,” Anna replies.
Her father adjusts the blanket around his wife’s neck, gazes lovingly at her, and then with effort turns away. “I’ll have to change my clothes first,” he says to Anna. He opens the door to his closet. “It’ll just take me a minute.”
“Daddy, I don’t think Mummy—”
He does not allow her to finish. “Anna, I know my wife. She may be tired, but she knows what she wants. Anyhow, my fish are hungry. I need to feed them.”
Thinking, mistakenly, her father is hurt by her mother’s dismissal of him, Anna tries to reassure him. “Mummy needs you,” she says.
Her father pulls out a pair of old khaki shorts from the closet. With his back to Anna, he responds matter-of-factly, “Of course I know your mother needs me.”
Anna feels foolish. Like a little girl who has been chastised. She has made too much of her mother’s demand. For demand it was.
You go. I want Anna to stay.
“But for now,” her father is saying, “it’s you your mother needs. Give me a chance to change my clothes. I’ll come and get you in your room when I’m done.”
Outside her parents’ bedroom, Anna nearly collides with Lydia, who is balancing a tray between her hands loaded with a steaming bowl, empty dishes, and a covered basket.
“I made soup and biscuits,” Lydia says. “I was coming to ask if Mrs. Sinclair want some now.”
Anna tells her that she does not think her mother’s stomach can handle soup, but her father may appreciate some.
“I leave it for him then,” Lydia says. “But you know Mr. Sinclair. He have his dinner at the same time only. I give him his tea now and leave the soup for him to have later.”
Anna is touched by her solicitude. “You are too kind to my parents,” she says. “You’re too good to Mummy.”
Lydia lowers her head. “Your mother good to me too, even though she don’t show it.”
Her father says her mother has forbidden Lydia to reveal what she has done for her granddaughter, so Anna thinks this is as far as Lydia will go, as much as she will say. But Lydia does not stop there. With her eyes still fixed on the tray, she tells Anna more. “From the time I was a girl and leave my mother house to go live with my son father, I never safe till I come to work for Mrs. Sinclair. My son, he fraid for me. He get a job in America but he fraid to leave me alone with his father. But his father fraid Mr. Sinclair.” She shakes her head. “He fraid him bad. Mrs. Sinclair tell Mr. Sinclair he must get his big-shot friends in the police station to protect me. So my son father don’t touch me after Mr. Sinclair talk to his big-shot friends. He don’t follow me where I live. Now my son could go and make money in America.” Her chin is trembling when she faces Anna again. “Mrs. Sinclair foolishness is a little ting for me to take, Miss Anna. Is a little, little ting.”