Beatrice was proud of this orchid garden, particularly of its location, for it faced the glass sliding doors to the living and dining rooms, providing a spectacular view for her guests. But she wanted back the husband she had married, so she asked Singh to dig up the orchid beds and replant the flowers.
It is at the edge of this pond that Anna is standing, watching her father put the frog he has fished out of the water into a watering can.
“Do you always take them to the river?”
“That’s where they belong,” he says. He picks up the block of wood near his feet and places it over the opening in the watering can. He secures the wood with the large stone that he puts on top of it. “They’ll try to scramble out of the can if I don’t stop them. And this frog is a big one.”
“You’re kinder to them than they are to your fish,” Anna says.
“Don’t know about that. I don’t think this frog appreciates me taking him away from his breakfast. Hear him?”
Anna can hear the frog scratching the sides of the can. It is desperate to get out. “But you’re going to set it free,” she says.
“Yep. That’s what I’m going to do now.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Her father wrinkles his forehead. “That’s a silly question.”
“I mean, isn’t this a lot of trouble for you? You pull him out and now you have the trouble of taking him to the river.”
He has his hand on the watering can. “No trouble at all,” he says. “You don’t want me to kill it, do you?”
“Oh, no. But perhaps you can get something, some sort of thing that they don’t like and put it in the pond. That way they won’t return.”
“Poison?” He is standing erect now.
“Not something to kill them,” she says, flustered. “Some kind of organic something. Not a chemical.”
“If the frogs won’t like it, the fish won’t like it.”
“But can’t you find something that only the frogs won’t like?”
“Oh, Anna,” he says, “you are the same little girl who always wanted everybody to be happy. You haven’t changed.”
A few minutes ago, her mother almost pushed her down that crevice that threatens to swallow her no matter how firmly she has planted her feet on either side of the yawning gap, each foot on solid ground, one in America, the other in the island of her birth. Now her father steadies her.
You are the same
. But much has changed in her life. She is not a little girl; she is a woman, a middle-aged woman who has learned the hard way that life is not always fair. She wants to remind her father that he knows this too.
“Lots of things have happened to me since I was a little girl, Daddy. I couldn’t always make people happy. Not even myself.”
A spasm of pain crosses his face and she regrets the memory she has dredged up.
“But I am still your daughter,” she says, hastening to make amends.
He is pleased. He taps the side of the watering can. “Well, my fish are happy I got the frog out of their pond and this frog will be happy when I put him in the river.”
“Do you still miss it?” she asks.
“What?”
“Fishing,” she says. They are walking toward the front of the house, she following closely behind him. “You stopped.”
“It’s out of my system.” He does not turn around.
“And hunting too?”
“I like watching the fish spawn and grow in the pond,” he says.
They have reached the covered path near the driveway. The rosebushes are thick on one side and a stray branch, heavy with pink flowers, brushes against them. Her father reaches out and cradles a cluster of the roses in his palm. “Your mother has a green thumb,” he says.
“Singh,” she counters. “
He
has the green thumb.”
He snorts. “Only under your mother’s instructions.”
How he supports her, she thinks. How he always takes her side! And because she has not been able to shake off the resentment that clouded her brain when her mother said,
You don’t live here. You don’t know
, she pushes him to return to the question she asked him. “Did Mummy make you give up hunting?”
“Why would you say that?” He releases the roses and they rock back to their place on the branch.
“I knew you stopped fishing when your friend died. But I never understood why you stopped hunting. I know Mummy didn’t like the dogs or your hunting friends.”
Outside, beyond the electric metal gate that encloses their house, beyond the paved street and the houses on the other side, the mountains loom in the distance. Against the blinding brilliance of the morning sky, they appear navy blue, as if all the green of all the trees climbing up their sides has been washed in dye.
Her father wanted to live on a hill. He wanted to look down on the green plains below, to see the silvered sea skirting the edges of the island, fanning out to the horizon where the sun sinks each night trailing embers, but he built his house here, on flat land, in a swamp. For the residential area where they live was a swamp before the land was cleared and filled with boulders and dirt.
It was her mother’s idea, building the house in a swamp. Like Rio’s favelas, the poor here live on the hills, five to a room, the poet says, the corrugated iron roofs of their shacks putting him in mind of that merciless ocean that swallowed thousands in the Middle Passage. The rich, needing space for the spread of their multiple rooms, chose flat land even if it meant clearing a swamp. But the mosquitoes have their revenge. In the wet season they return in hordes at night to reclaim their primordial territory.
“Those were the days,” her father says. “I haven’t seen those men I used to hunt with in a long time. I guess some of them may be dead by now.” His voice drifts. “Most of my friends are dead,” he adds, and his step falters.
This is not where she wants to take him. Unless she can do or say something soon, he will lapse into the morose mood that is becoming a habit with him since his eightieth birthday. Mention the past, mention friends from the past, and he will recount which ones have died. From there he will spiral downward.
“Everyone dies,” he says. “No way to stop that. Everyone dies.” He repeats the words like a mantra, as if suddenly discovering that humans are mortal.
She reaches for the watering can. “Let me take that for you, Daddy.”
He pushes away her hand. “This is too heavy for you.”
“Do you want me to come with you to the river?”
“I think you should stay with your mother,” he says.
“She’s in the back, in the garden with Singh.”
No, she tells him. Her mother is not in the back, in the garden with Singh. She has gone to her room.
His face does not register the least surprise when she tells him this.
“She gave me instructions for Singh.”
“Oh?”
“She seemed tired.”
“Hmmm.” This is the only sound that comes out of his mouth. He asks no questions, though less than an hour ago he accused her mother of needing to be in the garden with Singh. Of needing to have someone to boss around, he said.
They have reached the driveway. He puts the watering can, with the frog secured inside by the block of wood and the stone, on the floor in the back of the car. His palm is on the handle of the front door when he hesitates. “You know why I am saving this frog?” he asks. And without waiting for her response, he says, “Same reason why I stopped hunting. You’re too hard on your mother, Anna.
I
decided.
I
wanted to stop. Your mother had nothing to do with it.” Taking less than a minute, he tells her that he stopped hunting because one day, as he had his rifle poised to shoot a deer, the deer looked straight in his eyes. “I saw life,” he explains. “I saw that deer’s desire to live, and I thought he was not much different from me. I want to live, why should he not want to live? What right had I to take his life? I put down my gun and never took it up again.”
S
o her mother had nothing to do with it. Her father stopped hunting because a deer looked in his eyes. Because he saw in the deer’s eyes its raw, feral hunger for life. Because that hunger mirrored his own and he came face to face with the tenuousness of his life. A single bullet and the deer would be dead. But a single false move in the forest—stepping on a macajuel snake he mistook for a log—and he would be dead. Most of his friends are dead. He does not have much time left. At eighty-two, he has thirteen years left to reach the age his father was when he died, eighteen years the most, should he live to be a hundred.
This is why she is here, why she has decided that this time it will not be for a week or ten days, the usual length of her yearly visits. She will stay a month, thirty-one days. But she has counted her years too. Almost half
her
life is over. How many years are left for her?
She is not afraid of death …
death, a necessary end, /
Will come when it will come
. What follows afterward is beyond her knowledge, beyond her control. It is futile, she thinks, to ponder too long on the inevitability of death.
It angers her father that life should end. Why? Why? he mutters, circling the house, his hands clasped behind his back, his head bowed. What’s the point? Why work so hard? Why achieve so much?
And yet he has worked hard all his life, and yet he has achieved much. For what purpose? he asks Anna. He has been a museum curator, he says, collecting works of art to fill a building which has already been condemned to burn to the ground.
Anna offers him a more hopeful analogy. She points to nature, to the forest he loves so much. Plants grow and die in the forest and become food to nourish new plants, she says.
He is not consoled. Plants do not think, he says. They do not have consciousness. They are not aware of their death. They do not know what it is to have life and then to lose it.
Her mother has no patience with her father’s anger. She wants to live, but she believes there is eternal joy and happiness waiting for her on the other side.
“Then if heaven is so wonderful, why do you want to live?” Anna had just returned from college when she asked her mother this question. She was bursting with the overconfidence and arrogance that knowledge without experience bequeaths to untried youth. “I would want to die right away if I believed, as you believe, there is so much happiness waiting for me in the afterlife.”
“So you don’t believe in God?” her mother asked.
“The god I believe in cannot be quantified, cannot be so easily described.” She quoted Dylan Thomas:
“The
force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green
age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer.”
Her mother did not understand.
“God is the creator and the destroyer,” Anna said. “He is the force.”
“The force?” Her mother stared at her, shocked.
“People make God in their own image. We give Him human attributes, ideal attributes to be sure, but human nonetheless, for this is all we know. We say God is a loving father because we have experienced, or we know someone who has experienced, a loving father. We say God will forgive us our sins because we hope our human loving father will forgive us our wrongdoings. God will protect us, we say, as our loving father will protect us. But God is not human. He’s a …”
“A force? How could you believe that is all He is?”
“A supernatural force we should worship.”
The taut lines on her mother’s face relaxed. She breathed in deeply. “Yes, worship. That is what I tried to teach you.”
“But not as you think I should worship Him. I don’t believe in any of that, those chants and endless prayers.
I believe in silence.”
“Silence?”
“God is greater than us. We can only wait for Him to come to us.”
“I believe in the power of prayer,” her mother said.
Her mother is probably praying now. Twice a day she says the rosary, often directly after breakfast and then again after dinner in the evening. Anna planned a quiet morning reading, but her father has fanned the guilt that propels her now to her mother’s room
.
She
should
be with her mother.
Should
was the word her father used. His response was an admonition, not simply a mild refusal of her offer to join him on his way to the river.
She knocks on the bedroom door. Three times she knocks but there is no answer. If her mother has been praying, surely she has finished now. Anna calls out to her. Still there is silence. She turns the doorknob. The door is unlocked. She opens it and enters. Her mother is not there, but the bathroom door is shut. She looks around the room. The bed has been made. A muted flower-print bedspread is stretched evenly across the mattress; two pillows in beige cases are plumped up against the mahogany headboard.
Lydia will clean the room later, dust the furniture, vacuum the carpet, but her mother makes up the bed.
Anna thinks this covering up, this haste to fix the bed, to smooth the bedspread over the sheets before Lydia comes, has more to do with sex than with her mother’s obsession with neatness. Lydia cannot be privy to the intimacies of her mistress’s life. Lydia may not be witness to evidence of the couplings of the mistress and the master of the house where she is employed.
Hamlet chastises his mother for marrying Claudius. What drives him to the brink of madness is the picture of their lovemaking that has blossomed in his head.
Nay,
he spits out at his mother,
but to live / In the rank sweat of an
enseamed bed.
Lydia cannot be witness to the enseamed bed. When she comes to clean the room, the rumpled sheets must have been flattened, the crooked seams straightened out.
Her father sleeps to the left of her mother, where he has slept for forty years. On his bedside table is a telephone and next to it, a small tray with loose note paper and a holder with the Parker pen and pencil set Anna gave him two Christmases ago. It bears a brass plaque with an inscription:
To the best Father in the World.
Love, Anna
The bedside table has one drawer. In the drawer are letters compiled neatly in stacks by the dates her father received them, a bundle of pencils tied with a rubber band, a leather-bound appointment book, her father’s personal address book, a small glass dish with silver paperclips, a jar of white peppermints, each individually wrapped in red and white–striped transparent paper. There is also a calendar: a stack of thin papers, a sheet for each month, stapled to a cardboard backing. At night, on the calendar, her father crosses off the day that has ended—his obsession with mortality.