Every day?
The nun explains to Anna: “The children count on your father. When mangoes are in season, he brings the best for them every day.”
“Goodbye, Godfather! Goodbye, the bestest godfather in the whole wide world!”
The children wave to them as they leave.
And yet he betrayed her mother. And yet this man, de bestest of all de best men, the bestest godfather in the whole wide world, the man who paid the school fees for the children of his impoverished friend, the man who brought mangoes for the children in the orphanage, who goes to the police station to demand protection for his domestiCHelper, who gives her money for her grand- daughter, who, as far as Anna can tell, loves his wife, has always loved her, had confessed to her, his daughter, that he had met a woman. He had fallen in love. Her name, he said, is Thelma.
What had gone wrong? What had made him break the vow he had made to her mother before the priest and the law? He had sworn to cherish her, to love her, until death do we part.
He is a man who prides himself in his integrity, his honesty, his principles. Character is all, he tells his daughter. A man without character is no more than a talking animal. A man who lets his whims, his desires, his passions, his greed, dictate the decisions he makes in his life is one who, though born a human being, has never learned to be human.
“Your mother has changed,” he said to Anna that night she returned home from New York for her mother’s birthday and could not deny the scaffolding on her mother’s face, could not pretend when the bracelet—a traitor’s gift, she knows that now—rolled off her mother’s hand.
He expected his daughter to empathize with him. For wasn’t she a woman by then who knew the ways of the world, the fragility of the human heart? “Your mother is not the same woman I married,” he said.
If his eyes were not so shadowed with pain, if the muscles in his face were not so taut and strained, Anna would have laughed at him. Even a schoolboy knows that people change, that the girl he met at the corner store is not exactly the same girl he is dating.
He expected her to feel sorry for him because she would understand that the heart needs what the heart wants. But surely he must have realized that she was no longer the fourteen-year-old who made no demands, who did not ask to see any more than what she saw on the surface. She was not that young, inexperienced girl who looked up at him in wide-eyed awe as the children in the orphanage chanted, “The bestest godfather in the whole wide world.”
“Your mother was fun to be with. She used to laugh at my silliest jokes. You’d think I’d given her jewels when I brought her mangoes. I loved the way one bowl of ice cream was never enough to satisfy her. She would have to have two. Even more.”
Anna lashed out at him. “And you cheated on her for this? For ice cream and mangoes? Because she didn’t laugh at your jokes?”
“I fell in love,” he said.
“In lust. That is what you mean.”
“I was lonely. Your mother became a different person when we moved to the hill.”
She
was lonely. People laughed at her. Your own “family called her Boo Booloops.”
“I loved her the way she was. But she began all that dieting, all that exercising. She lost her figure.”
“You cannot be so shallow, Daddy. You cannot want me to believe you stopped loving Mummy because she lost her figure.”
“All that seemed to matter to her was what those European women on the hill thought of her.”
“She had to live with them. It was hard for her to live with their scorn.”
“I tried to tell her that it didn’t matter to me what they said or thought. But she stopped eating.” He looked away. “She stopped doing more than that … She wasn’t fun anymore.”
“Fun? Is that what you called it?”
“Your mother and I …” He hesitated, waiting for a signal from her that he had said enough, that she understood, but Anna would not give him the reprieve. She wanted a full confession, an admission of his guilt. “It’s been over a year now,” he murmured.
A year because her mother suspected he had a lover. Women can tell, they know when their men have taken a lover. Suddenly, out of the blue, a kiss too passionate or not passionate enough, a change in the usual rhythm in bed.
“And does this woman do
that
? Is she fun?”
“I want to be happy. I deserve to be happy, Anna.”
“Does it matter if your happiness costs Mummy her happiness?”
“We’re all responsible for our own happiness, Anna. I’m not responsible for your mother’s happiness.”
“You promised her for better or worse.”
“I can’t be a good husband if I am unhappy.”
“Is that the excuse you gave Mummy? A mid-life crisis! Is that what you told her? I thought you’d be more sensible than that.”
“Sensible?”
“That, that …” Anna shook her head in frustration searching for the right word. “That pabulum excuse men claim when they reach forty.”
“Reason has nothing to do with the fact that we die, Anna. Intelligence can’t prevent our freefall into the grave. When you reach forty, you’ll realize you’ve lived more than half your four score and ten. Talk to me then about pabulum excuses.”
“So that’s it? All this is about your fear of dying.”
“Don’t let anyone determine your happiness, Anna. Take control of your future. Do what you know will make you happy.”
“You want me to understand that some tawdry affair is what makes you happy?”
“It’s not a tawdry affair.”
“Yes, I suppose in your estimation nothing you do can ever be tawdry.”
“Anna, Anna,” he pleaded. “Don’t speak to your father this way.”
But at that moment he was not her father. She had lost all respect for him as a father.
“We are talking about your wife, my mother. Can’t you see how much weight she has lost? She is skin and bones. Can’t you see how much she is suffering?”
“I was suffering too.”
“So what should Mummy do? Get a lover, like you did? It is you who has changed. You are not the same man I knew as my father.”
“Anna, Anna.” Furrows moved vertically in tiny waves across his cheeks, outward from his mouth. A grayish pallor spread over his brown skin.
He was begging for her understanding, but even now, when she is almost forty, the age when he claimed she would understand, feel empathy for him, she does not empathize. She forgives, but she cannot forget.
She does not remember choosing the words she said to him that night when in the darkness of the veranda he told her his tawdry story. She does not remember deliberately selecting this phrase over that, this order of sentences over that. She does not remember thinking at all, but she remembers what she said, her exact words to him. “I will tell you this,” she said. “I will make this clear to you. If you leave my mother, you will not have a daughter. Make your choice now: your family, a wife who has been at your side for twenty-one years, a daughter who has respected and loved you for twenty years. Choose us or choose the woman you claim to have fallen in love with. You cannot have us both.”
She does not know what made her say those words. As far as she was aware, she felt no special attachment to her mother. Then, in those days, her greater loyalty was to her father.
Four days passed and each night her father disappeared after dinner, the sound of his car accelerating up the road bringing tears to her mother’s eyes. Each morning at breakfast her mother’s eyes were black pools ringed with purple. Anna wanted to help. Her mother pushed her away. “This is between your father and me,” she said, as she was to say again to her daughter years later on the first day of her chemo treatment.
Another day passed, and on the sixth day her mother came to the breakfast table dry-eyed. As usual her husband pulled out her chair for her. Not as usual, she did not sit down. “I want the keys to the car.” She held out her hand. Her husband stared at her in disbelief.
“I want the keys, John,” she repeated.
“But you don’t drive.”
“Anna drives.”
She does not need Anna. When he comes home from work, he will take her wherever she wants to go, her husband said.
“Give me the keys, John.” The muscles around her mother’s lips were tight, her darkened eyes hard.
Her father tried again to reason with her. “And how will I get to work, Beatrice?”
“Walk,” she said.
They faced each other, two warriors, their swords drawn. In the end her father surrendered. Mumbling something about unreasonable women who let their feelings take control of them, he slapped the keys on the table.
After he was gone, Anna waited for her mother’s instructions.
“Give me a moment to get dressed,” her mother said. “Then we’ll go.”
But go where?
“You’ll see.” It was all the information Anna could pry from her.
When her mother finally emerged from her room she seemed different. Her complexion was brighter, no doubt because of the makeup she had applied to her face—lipstick on her mouth, rouge on her cheeks, con-cealer under her eyes that masked the purple circles. But she had lost the calm self-assurance she displayed earlier that morning. She seemed nervous. In the car, she crossed and uncrossed her hands. From time to time, she bit her lower lip. When Anna reached to switch on the car radio, she clamped her hand over her wrist and stopped her. She needed to think, she said. She didn’t want to be distracted.
But distracted from what? Where did she want to go? She would not give Anna an answer.
At the end of the highway, at the roundabout, the road split in two.
“Turn here.” Her mother pointed to the left.
Anna did as she was told.
“Go ten blocks.”
Anna did as she was directed.
“Turn here to the right.”
Anna turned to the right.
“Go three traffic lights.”
Anna counted one, two, then three traffic lights.
“Now to the left.”
Anna drove to the left.
“Now to the right.”
Anna drove to the right.
“Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three.” Her mother counted the houses. “Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six.” She was sitting on the edge of her seat, her head straining forward. “Stop!” She grasped Anna’s shoulder. The car swerved. Her mother’s head bounced back.
“This is it!” Her mother was at the edge of her seat again. “Twenty-six. Stop!”
They were in an old part of the city where the roads were narrow and the houses tiny, built close to each other. All had peaked alcoves on the front trimmed with fanciful white fretwork in the style of tropical mansions of the Victorian era. Clusters of tall flowering plants— bougainvillea and hibiscus especially—bloomed over fences and along the short walkways that separated the houses.
Number twenty-six was a pretty blue one. Bougainvillea blossomed in a carnival of pinks and oranges.
Her mother got out of the car and unlatched the wrought iron gate on the fence that enclosed the house. She walked up the pathway to the front door, a woman on a mission, her head erect, her shoulders thrown back. She knocked on the door. There was no answer. She knocked again, three quick raps with her knuckles. The curtain at the window fluttered.
“Thelma!”
Anna sucked in her breath.
Her mother called out again. “Thelma!”
Anna’s heart raced.
“If you don’t want a scene in front of your neighbors, open the door, Thelma.” Her mother tugged the black handbag hanging in the crook of her right arm and pulled the straps over her shoulder.
The curtain moved again and then went still. The door opened. A woman appeared, a full-figured woman of no particular distinction except for wide hips that strained against the tight fabric of her skirt, a woman with a figure like her mother’s used to be.
They spoke in hushed tones. Her mother said something. The woman shook her head. Her mother said something again. The woman shrugged and turned away. Her mother raised her voice. “You’re lying, Thelma.”
Thelma put her finger to her lips.
“I know you’re lying.” Her mother drew her handbag close to her chest. A shield to protect her.
Thelma whispered something again.
“He’s in there!” Her mother was shouting now. “Tell my husband to come home!”
Thelma backed into the doorway.
“Now, Thelma!” her mother said.
The door at the side of the house cracked open. Anna saw a foot, a hand, and then the whole body.
Her father!
He was dressed as he had been when he left that morning, in a gray suit, white shirt, and striped blue tie. He looked as he looked when he had left that morning: his face serious, his mouth determined, a man on his way to work.
Her father stepped through the doorway. Her mother turned her head when she heard his shoes crunch on the graveled pathway. Thelma whimpered.
At the gate, John Sinclair waited for his wife. He opened the car door and his wife slid inside. She barely glanced at him.
The rain that had threatened that morning poured down from the sky.
“My car will get a good cleaning,” John Sinclair said to his wife.
“And so will your soul,” his wife replied.
Always promising, her mother said, when for years her father promised to replace the rusty galvanize over the fishpond with the fancy wire netting she wanted.
Always
promising. That’s your father
. But he kept the promise he must have made to her mother that afternoon. At Mass the next Sunday he walked behind her on the Communion line. At the altar, he clasped his hands in prayer below his chin, he closed his eyes.
Lord, I am not worthy
… He thrust out his tongue.
The soul, every parishioner knows, must be free of sin to receive Communion. That Sunday her father made his contrition public for those who had suspicions.
E
very Wednesday at three, her mother’s bridge friends come to play a game and drink tea. This Wednesday is no exception. Lydia sets up the card table and chairs in the veranda. On a separate table, close to a circle of cushioned wicker armchairs, Lydia puts out the meat pies and sweet pastries she baked that morning. She lays out the best china, the Wedgwood with the blue rim Beatrice’s mother-in-law gave her when she married her son. It is part of a set that for two generations has stayed in the Sinclair family. Beatrice inherited six cups and saucers, six dessert plates, the teapot, and the matching sugar and creamer bowls. Lydia puts four cups and saucers on the table with the teapot, the sugar and creamer, and four dessert plates.