Paul Bishop laughs. “Dr. Ramdoolal is a Caribbean patriot.”
“Perhaps so, but he wouldn’t lie for the sake of patriotism.”
“Well, I can say I do surgery at one of the best hospitals in America. Oncology is my specialty.”
“A cancer doctor!” But John Sinclair knows that already.
Beatrice Sinclair sits up in her chair. “I suppose Dr. Ramdoolal asked you to check up on me.” Her eyes challenge Dr. Bishop to deny it.
Anna notices that her mother’s scarf is slipping off her forehead, exposing her scanty hairline. A few stray hairs, resistant to the chemo, peek out from the sides.
“Yes,” Paul Bishop says simply.
“And I suppose he’s sent you to try to convince me to have surgery in America.”
“I think that would be best,” Paul Bishop responds.
Lydia has returned from the bar with the pitcher and glasses. She serves Paul Bishop first and then Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair and Anna, but she does not leave. She stands in front of Beatrice Sinclair, blocking Paul Bishop’s line of vision to her employer. “Excuse me, Mrs. Sinclair,” she says. “Is there anything else you want me to get you from the kitchen?” She brushes her hand over her forehead and slides it to the back her head. She looks steadily at her employer. After a moment, Lydia repeats the movement of her hand and inclines her head. Finally Beatrice understands. She mouths
Thank you
to Lydia. Her fingers are trembling as she adjusts the scarf on her head.
When Lydia goes, Paul Bishop returns to the subject of Mrs. Sinclair’s surgery. He agrees with Dr. Ramdoolal, he says. Mrs. Sinclair should have her surgery in the States. “I will do it for you,” he says.
Beatrice shakes her head.
“You can trust me. My father trusted your husband. I will do my best for you.”
“Mummy thinks that black people don’t get treated fairly in America,” Anna says.
Paul Bishop puts his glass down on the cocktail table near to him and moves his chair closer to Beatrice. It makes a scraping sound against the terrazzo floor. “Is that what you are afraid of, Mrs. Sinclair?” He is speaking softly, gently
“I see it on TV. I see what is happening there,” Beatrice says.
“It’s not the whole picture, Mrs. Sinclair. Look at me. I am the head of the surgery unit in my hospital. Most of the doctors under me are white. They don’t treat me as a black doctor. They treat me as a doctor.”
“Mummy is afraid,” Anna says.
“Your tumor was bleeding, Mrs. Sinclair. If your cancerous breast is not removed, the cancer will spread and kill you.”
Beatrice looks up at him in alarm. “Kill me?”
“The chemo is making the tumor smaller. When it gets small enough, you can come to my hospital, Mrs. Sinclair. I will remove it.”
“Listen to Dr. Bishop, Beatrice,” John Sinclair urges his wife.
“You have age as an advantage, Mrs. Sinclair. Cancer like yours feeds on estrogen. Luckily, at your age you don’t have much estrogen left in your body to feed the cancer. I’ve seen women with worse tumors than yours. After they have had surgery, they continued to live for years. I have one patient who is ninety. I can tell you it won’t be breast cancer that takes her away from here.” “Then I’ll have one breast. Is that so? One breast?
“Hear that, Beatrice?” John Sinclair pats his wife’s knee. “Live to be ninety!”
“And afterward?” Beatrice asks, fear widening her eyes.
“There are prosthetic bras, Mrs. Sinclair,” Paul Bishop says patiently.
I’ll be deformed.” She swings her body toward her husband. “Deformed, John.”
“No one can tell when a woman is wearing a prosthetic,” Paul Bishop says.
“John.” Beatrice’s eyes are glued to her husband’s. He is her mate for life, the companion at her side through the best and worst of her days. “John.” She wants his advice, his support, his approval.
He reaches for her hand. “I want you with me, Beatrice.”
“And it won’t matter to you? It won’t matter that I am deformed?”
He folds her hand between both of his. “You are beautiful to me, Beatrice. You always will be.”
“With one breast?”
“I won’t know what to do if you are not with me.”
“I won’t look the same.”
John Sinclair shifts his body closer to his wife. Their daughter and the doctor who is offering to do the surgery are in the room but they seem unaware of their presence. Shoulders almost touching, breath upon breath, he whispers to his wife, “We’ll take showers together, Beatrice.”
Anna is stunned.
“Go,” her father says. “For my sake. For our sake, Beatrice. Have the surgery in the States.”
Her mother leans closer to her husband. She breathes in deeply. She nods her head.
Anna turns away.
Privacy matters,
her father said, but privacy does not seem to matter to them now. What matters to them now is intimacy. In front of her, in front of a stranger, her father has talked of sex with his wife. They will be naked together. They will take showers together, he says.
Paul Bishop stands up; he is ready to leave. He hands John Sinclair his card. Have Dr. Ramdoolal call me, he says.
Anna walks Paul Bishop to his car. Her parents have already gone to their room when she returns.
I
t’s very clear, our love is here to stay
Not for a year, but ever and a day
Music pulls Anna out of a deep sleep. She stretches out her legs, turns her head on her pillow, unable, in the immediate return to consciousness, to sort out whether the music she hears is part of a dream or whether the sounds and words are real, taking place in real time.
The radio and the telephone and the movies that we know
May just be passing fancies and in time may go
Nat King Cole. Her brain registers the voice and the words. Her eyes shoot open. Nat King Cole, and not in a dream, but here, outside her bedroom door. She looks over to the clock on her bedside table. Two o’clock. The room is dark. In the garden, beyond the heavily draped windows, nothing moves, nothing makes a sound. The birds are sleeping. The frogs have settled down. No lizards scamper between the blades of grass.
But oh, my dear …
Violins soar. Two o’clock, the hour when her mother, no longer able to contain the terror that squeezes breath from her body, makes jelly of her limbs and a drum of her heart, places trembling fingers on the edge of the blanket she shares with her husband, and cautiously, so as not to awaken him, so as not to inconvenience him, lifts up the blanket and slides one leg and then the other across the mattress and onto the carpeted floor. Tiptoeing, she feels her way in the dark to the bathroom. There, she stretches her hand to the back of the linen closet, searching for the box of matches and the two candles she has hidden under the towels. In a drawer, she has tucked a flat-shaped saucer between the folds of her underwear. She takes it out and puts it on the dressing room table. She places the candles on the saucer, one next to the other. Her fingers shaking, she strikes a match and lights the wicks of the candles, blackened from use over many nights like this one. The room glows, but she has closed the bathroom door so the light will not awaken her husband.
There is a stool in the bathroom under the dressing room table. She pulls it out and sits in front of her dressing table. Shadows flicker on the wall. Though she does her best to avoid the mirror, her eyes, perversely, are drawn to it and she sees what she does not want to see or want to believe she sees: the bloodied vest, the lump protruding under the thin fabric. She prays. Ten rosaries if she must, ten rosaries if she can, before dawn streams through the diaphanous curtains that hang over the bathroom window. Ten rosaries so the Blessed Mother will intercede for her with her Son. Ten rosaries so the Blessed Mother will have pity on her. Her husband will be still asleep when she crawls back to bed. The mattress will shift under the weight of her body but he will not wake up. Or he will pretend not to wake up.
… our love is here to stay
Together we’re going a long, long way
Two o’clock. Nat King Cole on the CD player. The music streams out of the den. Is this where her mother has gone this time, now that she has consented, now that she has agreed to travel to the States for surgery? Now that she has accepted that the lump in her breast will not disappear? Now that prayers have not changed that reality?
This is the song her father played when he began courting her mother again, when the passion for the other woman that had flared up in him like a bush fire extinguished itself in the embers left behind.
Anna slips out of her bed. Quietly, she turns the knob on the bedroom door. She does not make a sound. Her slippered feet slide silently across the tiled corridor, down the three steps into the breakfast room, through the breakfast room and into the den.
But her mother is not in the den where the CD player turns the disk, Nat King Cole singing:
They’re only made of clay
But our love is here to stay.
An open passageway separates the den from the drawing room. Anna hides behind the wall and peeps through the side of the passageway. Two bodies are glued together as one. Moonlight streaming from the un-curtained window at the top of the stone wall at the far end of the drawing room encircles the bodies in an aura of blue. The man, her father, is holding the woman, her mother, close to his chest, folded in his arms. He presses her head into the well of his shoulder. Light bounces off her mother’s bare scalp, the skin stretched taut across hard bone. Her head glitters; it shines.
Her father draws her mother closer to his heart. They move, though they hardly move. Feet do not move; bodies move, torsos sway to the rhythm of King Cole.
Anna is a voyeur, an intruder. She has invaded their privacy; she has trespassed on their intimacy. Chastened, she creeps back to her room
Paul Bishop telephones the next morning. He is worried he has offended her mother, pushed her too hard. “I sometimes sound more like a doctor than a doctor who is also a man. All that stuff I said about prosthetic bras.”
“You were trying to help,” Anna reassures him.
“I must have scared her when I told her the cancer would spread if she didn’t have her breast removed.”
“You helped Mummy come to a decision.”
“I should know better. A breast is not just a body part. My patients tell me that every day.”
“Daddy is there for her.”
“He’s a good man, your father.”
“He knows what a good woman my mother is too.”
The line goes still. Anna thinks it is the usual interruption of telephone service on the island. Still, she tries. She says, “Hello, hello,” into the phone. The third time she speaks, Paul Bishop coughs. “Are you okay? I thought it was the phone line.”
“Just my throat. It itches sometimes. I’m fine.”
Anna takes a deep breath. “I want to thank you for what you did for my mother, Dr. Bishop. Taking the time to come to see her.”
“Paul,” he says.
“I don’t think she would have agreed—”
“Paul,” he repeats. “Call me Paul.”
“I don’t think she would have agreed to go to the States if you had not persuaded her, Paul.”
“I can’t take all the credit. My father insisted. He and Mr. Sinclair go back a long way.”
“But to come the day before you’re going to leave, that was most kind.”
“I’ve decided to stay a couple days longer.”
“You’re not leaving tomorrow?”
“I thought I would spend more time with my parents.”
“How nice,” Anna says calmly, but she is aware of a sudden quickening of her pulse. “I’m sure that would make them happy.”
“I was thinking too that we should get to know each other better. It’s been a long time. I was just ten or eleven.
You were a little girl.”
“Four or five. That’s what you said.”
The line goes still again. Paul Bishop coughs again. “I miss being on the island. I miss the sea, the land, the rain, the sun. I even miss the suffocating humidity at midday.” There is a quiet longing in his voice, a nostalgia Anna recognizes. She nods. Paul Bishop cannot see her nod, he cannot see the empathy filling her eyes. Two emigrants, two immigrants, neither one fully at home on the island of their birth, neither fully at home in America where they live.
“Yes, I know,” she says.
“I didn’t realize how much. I miss the people. I miss not having to explain myself to people who don’t share my background.”
“Yes,” she says again, nodding again.
“Over there, in America, I’m Caribbean-American, but that hyphen always bothers me. It’s a bridge, but somehow I think there is a gap on either end of the hyphen. Sometimes I think if I am not careful, I can fall between those spaces and drown.”
Exactly, exactly how she feels
.
“Would you like to have dinner tonight? Talk about our hyphens and the gaps in between?”
Her pulse races again. “Yes. I’m free tonight. Tonight would be fine.”
“Hyphens and gaps.” He laughs, a dry laugh. “What a thing!”
And when Anna puts down the phone, she finds herself thinking that perhaps her mother knows more about life and about what her daughter needs than she has given her credit for.
Later that morning, her mother apologizes. She made a fool of herself, she said. It was so old-fashioned of her to ask her grownup daughter to open the pastel for Paul Bishop. As if the function of women is to serve men! Can Anna forgive her? And Anna thinks: perhaps her mother loves her more than she had thought possible. Perhaps this is so.
I am grateful to Patricia Ramdeen Anderson and Norman Loftis, who read early drafts of this novel and were unstinting in their encouragement and invaluable for their critical advice. My friend and colleague Linda Susan Jackson cast her poetic eye over the manuscript and asked incisive questions. I am grateful as well to my agent Carolyn French, whose literary instincts I trust completely. Johnny Temple at Akashic Books is in a class by himself: a courageous and intelligent editor who works tirelessly for his writers. My gratitude to my sister Mary Nunez for her love and support. My son, Jason Harrell, continues to be a bright light in my life.