“You exaggerate.”
“Exaggerate?
Badoom, badoom, badoom
.” Her father did his stripper’s stride and her mother collapsed with laughter.
“But how did you get her to speak to you?” Anna asked.
“I came right up to her, tipped my hat, and said, ‘Good afternoon, miss. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever set eyes on.’”
“And that was it?”
“Well, she didn’t speak to me right away. I had to revert to that old trick of pretending she had dropped something. A piece of paper, I think I told her. She had a folder in her hand.”
“In our day, a man didn’t just walk up to a woman he didn’t know and speak to her,” Anna’s mother says. “He had to be introduced.”
“I couldn’t wait that long,” John Sinclair said.
“You must have been flattered, Mummy.”
“Oh, I knew it was my hips he was after.”
“And the face too, when I saw it. Those eyes, those cheekbones.”
“Oh, John.” Her mother’s smile rippled across her face. Her eyes danced.
Anna was a teenager when they replayed their first meeting for her. She found them silly and sad then. Two middle-aged people approaching old age, the pleasures of youth behind them, reduced to finding compensation in memories. But now she is close to the age her mother was then and she knows that little ever changes in the heart, that the heart desires the same thing it desired when one was young, that the body, though aging, still wants to be held, comforted, appreciated, loved.
“Your mother is as beautiful to me today as she was on the first day I saw her,” her father said to her not long ago. “I see no difference in her.”
Their bodies have changed; the skin on her father’s arms and legs, once muscled and firm, has loosened and the laugh lines on the sides of her mother’s mouth have deepened. Time, that unrelenting chiseler, has carved ravines along her father’s forehead and down her mother’s neck, and yet her mother remains beautiful to her father, to him she is no different from the woman who dazzled him on that sunny April afternoon.
They must still make love, Anna is certain of it. But if they still make love, surely they have seen each other’s naked bodies. Surely, her father has seen the lump on her mother’s breast.
She waits on the veranda for her father to return from the river. When his car reaches the gate, she walks to the driveway despite the fact that he has a remote and doesn’t need her to release the lock on the gate.
“You should have seen that frog swim away.” He has turned off the car engine and opened the car door. “I bet he prefers it to my fishpond.” He swings his leg out onto the paved ground. He is full of energy, sprightly even. His thin lips plump up when he smiles, his dark eyes shine, the hook on his long nose spreads and softens. He looks younger now that his face is animated.
In the morning, just out of bed, he seemed a shuffling old man, clutching the loose top of his pajama pants in a knot at his waist. But her father is no shuffling old man. He has not lost his senses, his incisive wit, his formidable intelligence. When he retired from the oil company where he worked as an administrator, labor unions and private contractors rushed to hire him as a consultant. At seventy-nine, he was still in demand for his unmatchable skills in labor negotiations. At eighty, he turned down retainers from four of the largest corporations on the island that still vied for his services. He was known for the ability he displayed with his wife at breakfast. She had forgiven him without his having offered her a word of apology. So it was with his opponents. Before they realized what they lost, they had already signed a contract.
Anna says something about the frog, agreeing with him that it made sense the frog would prefer the freedom of the river.
“And a better chance to mate too,” her father says.
He takes out the watering can, the block of wood, and the stone from the floor of the backseat of the car. He crosses the veranda in the direction of the fishpond.
Anna walks behind him. “I talked to Mummy,” she says.
“Good.” He puts the watering can against the wall of the house, next to the faucet attached to the garden hose. “This should be Singh’s job,” he grumbles, bending down to open the faucet, “but he won’t water the lawn, only the flowers. And only if your mother tells him to.” He glances up at her. “Did you have a good chat with your mother?” But he does not wait for her answer. Before she can speak, he is back fussing about the brown grass. “The sun is really strong this morning. If I don’t wet the grass, it will burn up and die.” He unravels the hose.
Anna tries again. “Mummy isn’t well.”
He has opened the closure at the end of the hose.
The loud hiss from the water gushing out muffles her voice. “What?”
“Mummy’s sick,” she says.
He makes a half-turn toward her and crinkles his eyes.
“She’s in your bedroom,” Anna says.
He turns back to the hose. In this position, facing the garden, she cannot see the expression on his face.
“Did you hear what I said, Daddy?” She is standing close behind him.
“Your mother is tired. She’s been tired lately.” He directs the hose to a brown spot on the lawn.
“Do you know why Mummy is so tired?”
“We’re getting older, Anna. Both of us get tired. She gets tired quickly. I get tired quickly.”
She blamed her mother’s tiredness on the heat in the morning,
but Singh was quick to expose her. “Is hot every morning, Miss Anna,
and she does still come out,” he said.
“Singh is here probably puttering around in the nursery, but he won’t water the lawn.” Her father is grumbling again.
“Daddy,” she pleads, but he is adjusting the spigot on the hose and the water gushes out with fuller force.
“
I
must water the lawn.
Me
, not Singh,” he complains. “Of course, we have to pay him just as usual. No difference in his pay when this used to be his job. That’s your mother for you. She’ll have her way.”
“Daddy!” Anna raises her voice. The sharpness of her tone startles him. He swings around and the hose follows him. Water sprays all over her legs. “Look what you have done.” Anna brushes away the water dripping down her legs.
He is immediately contrite. He turns off the spigot. “I’ll get you a towel,” he says.
“Wait!” She tries to stop him, but he is already on his way toward the bar in the veranda. “I don’t need a towel.”
He does not break his stride.
“Have you heard a word I’ve said to you?” She is walking behind him. “For God’s sake, stop!”
But when he stops and looks at her, she softens. Intelligent eyes beg her to say no more. Yet her mother needs help. Her mother needs a doctor.
“Come.” She puts her hand lightly on his arm. “Sit with me in the veranda.”
“Your legs are wet,” he says and moves away. “Let me help. I keep dry towels under the bar.”
“No. I’m fine. I’m okay. The water will dry off in the sun.” She takes his arm firmly now. “I have to tell you something about Mummy.” She leads him to an armchair.
“Did you and your mother quarrel?”
“No. We did not quarrel.”
“You always quarrel.”
“Sit, Daddy.” She is standing over him. “Sit.”
He surrenders and does as she asks.
“We did not quarrel,” Anna says again.
“Because I had hoped this time … I know your mother …” He is not looking at her as he says this. He presses his right leg hard into the knee of his left leg. He seems agitated, nervous.
Anna sits in the armchair next to him. She leans over and touches his hand lightly with the tips of her fingers. “Why didn’t you take her to the doctor?”
He does not ask her to explain. He merely slides his fingers up his thigh. His fingernails leave an ashy trail on his skin.
“Why didn’t you, Daddy?”
He looks down on his lap. “I saw blood on my vest,” he says.
“And why didn’t you say something?”
“She likes to sleep in my vest.”
“Why didn’t you ask, Daddy?”
“Last week, I saw it. My vest was in her hamper.”
They have two hampers in their bathroom, one for him and one for her. They do not mix their dirty laundry.
“I took out the vest. That’s when I saw the bloody spots.”
“And what did you do?”
“The blood was on one side of the vest,” he says.
“Where the tumor is.” Anna will no longer dissemble.
“Where the tumor is.” He echoes her words.
“So you knew?”
“I sleep with your mother every night,” he says.
“And you said nothing to her?” She wants to keep her anger from vibrating through her vocal chords, but she feels herself losing control.
“Your mother is a very private woman.” His legs are still crossed. He bends forward. With one hand he clutches his right ankle, with the other he rubs his left knee. His body is twisted into a tight ball.
“Private?” She flings the word at him.
“Your mother and I respect each other’s privacy. That is the way we have always lived our lives.”
“You saw blood on a vest she wore. Blood, Daddy.”
“I knew she would tell me when she was ready.”
“But you must have known … ?”
“Yes.” It is a simple acknowledgment of information he has kept to himself.
“Her mother died of it.”
“Cancer,” he says. “I knew it was cancer.”
“Why didn’t you … ?”
He raises his head. His eyes have lost their shine; they are infinitely sad. “She was afraid,” he says. “I knew it was cancer but I also knew she was afraid.”
S
chubert’s G-Flat Impromptu. The music drifts into the veranda where Anna has been sitting for more than two hours now. The grief and pain the music expresses seem to her interminable, unending. It rises slowly, mournfully, and then soars upward to a crescendo, bursting in her heart. This is the music John Sinclair puts on the CD player when he comes out briefly from the bedroom where he has been with his wife since he left Anna on the veranda, dazed by his admission that he had seen the lump on his wife’s breast, the blood on his vest, and has said nothing, has done nothing.
Two more times he comes out of his room. Two more concertos by Schubert. Did her mother ask for Schubert? Her mother loves the music her father loves, but she does not know the pieces by name. Did she hum a bar for him? Or does her father know which music she means when she says, “Play the music I love, John.”
Does her father have access to her mother’s private thoughts?
And yet her father says he respects her mother’s privacy. She wears his vest to bed, for Chrissake! The bed is enseamed! She flattens the creases, straightens the crooked seams, but before Lydia comes to her room, the sheets are in disarray.
What price are they both willing to pay for privacy sold so cheaply in the country where she now lives? On national TV in America, Anna has seen grown men and women bare their souls, tell their darkest secrets, before audiences of millions.
She shuts her eyes and leans back in her chair. She has chosen this spot for the sweet citrus scent of oranges that permeates the air, she sits here to be soothed by the melodious whistles of the pretty-feathered birds in the trees, but neither the scent of oranges nor the joyful songs of the birds cool the anger that continues to simmers inside her. How can her father—how can
they
—listen to music at a time like this? How can he so calmly tell her that he knew her mother has cancer and yet has done nothing? Why has her mother waited this long to say something?
She senses a presence hovering close to her. It is Lydia. She has served Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair lunch in their room, Anna in the veranda. She has washed the dishes in the kitchen. “Can I get you something, Miss Anna?” Her hands are still wet from the dishes. She slides them over each other. “Something to drink? A glass of lemonade?”
“Oh, Lydia, no,” Anna says. “I can get myself something to drink.” She means this kindly, to spare Lydia the chore of serving her again, but Lydia’s face drops and Anna realizes too late her mistake. She has offended Lydia. It may feel un-American to accept this kind of service in her own home when Lydia has work to do and she has none, but she is here on an island fresh with the memory of British colonial strictures; she is not in America. She is not even American. Isn’t this what she has tried to force her mother to admit? Her absence over the years has not lessened her right to belong, her claim to the island, to her roots. She corrects her mistake. “If you don’t mind,” she says to Lydia, and Lydia’s face brightens.
“Anything for you, Miss Anna.”
Loyalty and affection keep Lydia here. “How can I leave your parents now when they need me?” she has said to Anna. “Your father getting old. Your mother not the same like she use to be. She not as sprightly.”
Anna asks for ice water and Lydia’s face is wreathed in smiles when she returns carrying a glass with a white paper napkin wrapped around the bottom. In the warm air, the ice in the glass condenses and beads of water soak the napkin. “I boil the water for you and put it in the fridge,” Lydia says. “This not water from the pipe.”
Much has improved on the island. Lydia does not need to boil the water, but she wants to please, she wants to be of service. Tourists spread those false tales about the water. They make no distinction between one tropical country and the next, one place and the next that is not Europe or America. Don’t drink the water there, they say. You’ll get diarrhea, or worse, you’ll die. Corporations smell money. Now even in Europe and America tap water is suspect and one has to pay dollars for a few ounces of it packaged in neat bottles.
“You’re so good to us,” Anna says. The napkin has slid across the damp surface of the glass and the paper separates. When Anna takes the glass from Lydia, pieces of it remain stuck to Lydia’s fingers. She is embarrassed. She blushes, though the only way Anna can tell is by the shy cast of her eyes downward and the self-conscious smile that plays across her lips. Her dark skin conceals the sudden flood of blood to her face. “Sorry,” she says and rolls the damp paper along her fingers.
“That’s okay, Lydia.” Anna extends her hand and takes the pieces of paper from the ends of Lydia’s fingers. She squeezes the paper into a ball and gives it to her. Lydia puts it in the pocket of her apron.