She called; Crystal answered. Terrified of the truth, she dropped the phone.
What would her mother have done? Her mother marched up the front steps of the house where her husband’s mistress lived. She demanded the return of her husband.
Was that what she should have done? Should she have said to Crystal:
The man you are screwing is my husband.
If you don’t give him up … ?
There’s the rub, the futility of an empty threat.
If
you don’t give him up …
Then what? Who in New York, in America, will take her side? She may get sympathy; she may get advice. Friends, colleagues who offer to help, will refer her to a therapist, but no one will chastise her husband, reprimand him, remind him of his fidelity to vows. What Tony did is not exceptional. One in three marriages in America ends in divorce. An affair is the most common of causes.
Her mother has tradition on her side. The community, the neighbors heap shame on the man who abandons his wife. A husband may have a mistress but even the mistress understands he can never leave his wife. Discretion is all that is demanded. A good husband guards the reputation of his wife in public. She is the one, the only. A good husband keeps his mistress out of sight.
Her mother pities her.
What would have happened to me if
I had left your father?
Her father is her mother’s sole support. Her mother was always a housewife; her father was always the breadwinner.
But Anna never needed Tony to support her. Anna was never a housewife; Tony was never the sole breadwinner.
A breeze rushes across the top of the mango tree and the branches part. Sunlight streams through the gap between the leaves and lays bare the tiniest of cracks along the wood slats on the bench. Anna raises her hand and shades her eyes.
Men always blame the women, her mother said, but she will not accept blame for Tony’s betrayal. She will not fall victim to the babblings of pseudo psychologists who fault black women with ambitions like hers for undermining the egos of black men. She will not yield to pseudo sociologists who claim the increase of women in colleges and the higher incomes they earn when they graduate are the cause of the absence of black men in colleges and the lower incomes they earn. In this sense, her mother is right: she is American; she will assert her right to pursue her own happiness. Tony had a choice; he chose himself, he chose his self-centered desires rather than their marriage.
She gets up and walks toward the house. The sun pours down on her. In an instant she is wrapped in a warm and glorious light.
T
he next day, early in the afternoon, Dr. Ram-doolal calls. He has good news. Dr. Paul Bishop will be coming to the island. It’s his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary and the Bishops are planning a huge celebration.
“I’m sure your parents will be invited,” he says. “They’ll get to meet Dr. Bishop and he’ll change your mother’s mind. Has your mother said anything more about her surgery?”
“Not a word,” Anna says.
“You already know what I think. Her chances are much better if she has the surgery in the States.”
Anna does not need convincing. “Mummy is stubborn,” she says.
“Her next chemo could be brutal. Chemo doesn’t only attack the cancer cells; it destroys the good cells too, the ones she needs to fight off infection; platelets that keep her from bleeding to death.”
Anna is silent. Her vacation ends in two weeks, one week after the session that could be brutal for her mother.
“There are drugs for this, of course. You’ll have to bring her to my office. I’ll start building up her blood count, and we’ll have to monitor her. Has her hair fallen out?”
Anna finds her voice. “There’s some still left,” she says. “She has tufts on the sides and back. Wisps in the front.”
Dr. Ramdoolal laughs. “Tufts and wisps! Tufts and wisps! That’s funny. Tufts and wisps!” But soon he is the professional again. “For many women, this is the most difficult part. Besides the mastectomy, of course,” he is quick to add. “Have you thought of getting your mother a wig?”
“I don’t know if Mummy will wear one,” Anna says.
Dr. Ramdoolal sighs. “I suppose you won’t be going back to the States until this is all over?”
She cannot tell him she has made no such plans. She cannot say that there are writers depending on her return, one writer in particular. They are speaking about her mother. She is her mother’s only child.
“Naturally,” she says, as if it is natural, as if the laws of nature demand it, demand that she abandon her work, abandon her responsibilities to her writers, to the publishing company.
Abandon her life!
Aujourd’hui, maman est morte
. So begins Albert Camus’s tale of man executed for his indifference, for the unnatural response of a son on learning of the death of his mother.
“This is a lucky coincidence,” Dr. Ramdoolal is saying.
“Yes.” She repeats his words. “A lucky coincidence.”
“You being here and Dr. Bishop coming. Not the best of circumstances, but given the situation, we couldn’t hope for better, could we?”
“Yes,” she says again.
“Do you want me to speak to your mother now?”
“This minute?”
“Yes, ask her to come to the phone. I want to tell her what a great opportunity she will have to speak to Dr. Bishop directly.”
Anna says her parents are not at home, they have gone shopping.
“Shopping?”
“For groceries.”
“Ah,” Dr. Ramdoolal says approvingly. “Good. It’s good your father has gone with her. There will be days she will not be able to go. It’s good that he learns now.”
But her father has always gone with her mother to the grocery. He does not need to learn now. In the early days he sat in the car and waited for her, leaping to her side the minute she made her grand entrance into the street, followed by a retinue of one, sometimes two, schoolboys she had engaged to push her cart loaded with groceries. Now her father is the schoolboy. Now he is the one who pushes the cart through the store a few steps behind her while she points to this or that item on the shelf. Like a well-behaved child, he obeys, he reaches, he plucks this or that from its place, he puts this or that in the cart for her.
Resentment like the rising tide once again floods her being. Why is she so resentful? Why is she so full of anger toward her mother for this, for this that her father of his free will chooses to do, that he wants to do for the wife he loves?
Does she wish Tony had done the same for her?
Just
once!
Just once, that he had gone shopping with her, gone to the grocery store with her, to the clothing store? But shopping is woman’s work and Tony did not do woman’s work.
Her father does more. She could say to Dr. Ram-doolal that shopping for groceries is not all her father does for her mother. After the grocery, later in the week, he goes to the market for her. It is an open market, an enormous shed protected from the elements only by a corrugated galvanized roof. Farmers from the country, butchers and fishermen, all bring their produce there. In this place, there is not a hint of the sanitized order of the supermarket. Women sit on stools or crosslegged on the ground beside huge round baskets of ground provisions, vegetables, and fruit. Some cradle new babies in the sinks of their laps. Snotty-nosed toddlers clutch their mothers’ skirts. The men sell the fish and meat in open stalls, their aprons bloodied with the entrails of carcasses. The unwashed and the poor slither by, hands outstretched, begging for alms. This is no place for Mr. Sinclair’s wife. Mr. Sinclair has declared so himself. But he wants his fish fresh, his fruits and vegetables still smelling of the earth.
“Daddy knows about shopping for groceries. He knows the market,” she says to Dr. Ramdoolal. “If the time comes, Daddy will be prepared.”
At three thirty her parents arrive. Her father has timed their return precisely. Lydia’s after-lunch siesta ends at three. At three, she is in the kitchen preparing pastries for their four o’clock tea and making the sandwiches and salads they will have for dinner later.
Lydia!” Her mother is at the kitchen door. “Lydia! How many times must I call you? Come, help Mr. Sin-clair with the bags.”
Her mother leans against the door, her hands clasped below her stomach. She is ill. She cannot be expected to help Mr. Sinclair lift the grocery bags out of the car. But even when she was not ill she could not be expected to help.
Lydia wipes off the dough that has adhered to her fingers and hurries out to the driveway. Beatrice enters the house and collapses on a chair at the breakfast table. She is wearing a straw hat. In the back, at the nape of her neck, hair protrudes, gray curls that are almost white now. But Anna knows that under her hat, at the top of her head, she is completely bald.
“Anna, bring me a glass of water, will you?” Her mother rubs the back of her neck. She is breathing hard.
Anna opens the refrigerator and takes out the jug of ice water. Her mother removes her hat. In the absence of hair, the structure of her mother’s face is more pronounced and Anna is struck again by how beautiful she is, how stunning she must have been when she was young.
“Anna, you make me self-conscious,” her mother admonishes her.
Anna blinks. She has been staring. Embarrassed, she busies herself looking through the cabinet for a water glass.
“Any glass will do,” her mother says.
Anna fills a tall glass with ice water and hands it to her mother. “I told you you’d look more beautiful with short hair.”
“Pssh!” her mother says. “My hair is not short. I’m bald.”
“Then bald suits you,” Anna says.
Her mother gulps down the water greedily. “I didn’t realize how thirsty I was. It was hot and crowded in the supermarket. The manager needs to lower the temperature on the air conditioner.”
“Couldn’t Daddy get the groceries by himself?”
“If I could trust those girls.”
“What girls?”
“The girls in the supermarket. They won’t leave him alone.”
“Daddy?”
“Switching their hips around him. Mr. Sinclair this, Mr. Sinclair that. We just got a new shipment of chocolates from Switzerland, Mr. Sinclair. You want to get those, Mr. Sinclair? If I let your father go in the supermarket without me, we’ll pay twice as much for our groceries. The minute those girls see me, they scatter. Not another word about chocolates from Switzerland.”
Could she be jealous?
As ridiculous as that thought seems to Anna, she finds herself entertaining the possibility. “Daddy has eyes only for you,” she says.
“Oh, it’s not me I’m concerned about. Did you think I was worried about your father’s affection for me? Not at all. I hate to see your father make a fool of himself. Those girls take him for an idiot. Your father is not an idiot. He’s just too polite. He doesn’t know how to tell them to go away. Scat! It’s the manager who sends those girls to him.”
Still, Anna thinks, she has not made a mistake.
“Switching their hips,” her mother says again. “Your father is a married man!”
After all these years! Jealous, after all these years!
She was not jealous of Tony. She felt rejected, spurned, hurt, angry when he took a lover, but not jealous, not enough to fight for him, not enough to confront his mistress, to demand she stop the affair with her husband.
After all these years!
Must one be in love to feel jealous? Was that what Tony wanted: accusations flung across the room like missiles? Tears? A confrontation with the other woman?
Tell my husband to come home! Now!
They have their tea in the veranda. Lydia serves. She opens folding tables in front of the wicker armchairs where each of them is sitting. She brings the pot of tea and the cups and saucers and she leaves. After a few moments she returns with the pastries, tiny fruit pies she made in the afternoon. Beatrice’s mood is much improved. She compliments Lydia on the fruit pies. Lydia smiles broadly.
It is a good time to tell her about Dr. Bishop, Anna thinks. She begins with Dr. Ramdoolal’s telephone call.
The announcement unnerves her mother. “Dr. Ram-doolal called?” The cup in her hand rattles against the saucer. “Is something wrong?”
“Is it about your mother’s condition?” Her father will not use the word
cancer
in her mother’s presence. Her mother has given him this directive. He says
condition
, but the word comes out of his mouth tense, strained.
“Oh no,” Anna says quickly. “Nothing like that. He had good news. Dr. Bishop will be coming here soon.”
Her initial fears eased, her mother sips her tea and adjusts her body comfortably in her chair. “And why is that good news, Anna?”
“His parents’ wedding anniversary is in two weeks. Dr. Ramdoolal says he’s sure the Bishops have invited you.”
“Yes,” her father says. “We’ve received an invitation.”
“Is he coming alone?” Beatrice glances at her daughter.
“Who?” Anna is momentarily put off by the oddity of the question.
“Dr. Bishop. Is he coming alone?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Does he have a wife?” her mother asks.
“What difference does it make?” Anna replies irritably.
“I like to have all the facts.”
“He’s divorced,” John Sinclair explains. “I saw his father some time ago. He told me so.”
“There, Anna,” Beatrice says. “Now we have all the facts.” She reaches for another of Lydia’s fruit pies.
“And now you have that fact, are you going to their wedding anniversary party?” Anna asks.
“No. We’re not going,” Beatrice says emphatically.
“Not going?”
“Not with my hair like this. For everybody to laugh at me? No.”
“Why would they laugh?”
“Oh, they wouldn’t laugh in my face, but they will feel superior. They will know I am on my way out.”
“In the first place, Mummy, you are not on your way out. In the second place, we are all on our way out.”
“But I am getting there faster.”
“Sailing to Byzantium,”
her father murmurs.
Her mother twists her head angrily toward him. “What are you talking about, John?”