Grace (11 page)

She cried for days when his father left, unable to eat, unable to drink.
Unable to take care of him.
Then a letter arrived with passage to New York, and she left him with her unmarried sister, gave him hugs and kisses and promised to come back soon. She never did. Not soon. It was the early 1960s. A revolution was brewing in America. They had sent for James Peters because
James Peters was writing the poetry they needed: poems about resistance, poems about defiance.

Sophie stayed because Sophie loved James Peters. Six months went by and then a year. Their visas expired. One thing led to another. They became illegal immigrants.

“It took a long time for us to get a green card,” his mother is saying to him. “You know we couldn’t come to Trinidad until we got it. The Americans wouldn’t let us back in.”

He remembers the letter he wrote to her. “So what does it matter? Come home. You will not be illegal here.”

They needed money. Poetry did not bring them money. It brought fame, notoriety, but not money. Sophie was a nurse. She could not work in the hospitals, of course. It was not simply a matter of a work permit; Sophie had been trained in Trinidad. To work in American hospitals, she needed an American diploma. So she took a sleep-away job with a rich family in Long Island who needed someone to look after a sickly grandfather. She came home on weekends, and then once a month, but James got lonely. He did not stop loving her, but in between he had an American girlfriend. What was a man to do?

They never stopped making promises to Justin. Soon. In a matter of months. Sophie’s employers had agreed to sponsor her. The papers would be ready soon.

“You don’t understand,” she wrote back to him. “Your father is famous. The movement needs him.”

They returned to Trinidad nine years later, in 1972. Justin was sixteen, at the top of his class at his father’s alma mater, St. Mary’s College, the Catholic high school. He had just gotten
the results from his O level exams. He had made distinctions in the seven subjects he had taken. The hopes of St. Mary’s were pinned on him. If he took the A level exams in two years, he could win the Island Scholarship. St. Mary’s had never forgotten that the young V. S. Naipaul had won it in literature from the Protestant secondary school, Queens Royal College. Naipaul went on to Oxford and then fame as a writer. Justin Peters would make up for losing to Naipaul. But that was not the reason that Justin did not return to America when his parents came for him with the green card. With his seven O level distinctions, he could have been admitted to a university in America, perhaps even to Harvard, perhaps even with a scholarship.

His father was in Trinidad four days when he had a massive heart attack. He died on the spot. Justin never forgave him.

“It was the contradictions in his life that killed him,” he told his mother. “He was a poet, not a politician. He had allowed America to turn him into a politician. His poetry became narrow and limited. All he ever wrote when he went to America were protest poems about American racism, segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan. He came back to Trinidad, and when he saw how much he had given up, his heart burst open.”

He had to explain himself more carefully to Sally after she told him how her father was murdered.

“My father’s first job was to be a father to his son and a husband to my mother,” he said. “He failed at both.”

Sally, too, had not forgiven her father for his recklessness.
He had a young wife and two little children when he stormed out to the yard with a shotgun.

No, they both agreed, being a good father and a good mother is a parent’s first duty. Which is why neither can countenance a life without their daughter under their roof.

“I suppose staying in Trinidad did you some good.” His mother is anxious to end the silence that has settled on her son. “I suppose you would not have won that scholarship to Harvard.”

She is right. No matter how he explains it, she will never understand. He was not thinking of becoming a hero for St. Mary’s when he refused to return to America with her. He was angry with her—with his father and with her, but especially with his father. His death was the ultimate abandonment. He would be all that his father was not, all that he truly wanted to be. He would become a writer, not a political writer, but an artist. He would embrace the literature his father eschewed. But Justin did not become a writer. In the end, he did not have the talent. In the end, he resented his father even more. His father had thrown away a gift neither money nor brains could secure.

“At some point you’re going to have to accept that your father was a good man. He loved both of us.” His mother continues to try to end this impasse between them.

He cannot tell her what everyone knows: James Peters had an American girlfriend. He cannot hurt her. She is his mother.

“I know he was, Mother.” He squeezes her hand. “And you were a good mother. It was because of you I didn’t go to Oxford.”

She lets her hand linger in his. “Remember that priest?” A wide smile breaks across her face. “Your headmaster at St. Mary’s?”

“Father Higginsmith.”

“Lord, was he fit to be tied when you said Harvard! Almost had a heart attack.”

“He was an Englishman. No university in the world was better than Oxford. That’s the way he thought.”

“I used to tell those uppity people at the hospital that my son could have gotten in anywhere: Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, MIT. I don’t think they truly believed me until I brought that photograph of you at your graduation. I kept it at my station at the hospital until the day I retired.”

He wants to tell her that he loves her, but the words do not come easily. They are not demonstrative. Not with each other. It is not only her Victorian self-consciousness that puts this barrier between them. It is the difficulty he has in closing the chasm that had yawned between them nine long years. He was a boy when she left him, a man when she returned.

“You were here, Mother,” he says. “How could I go to England?”

She makes tiny circles with her fingers on his hand. “I know, Son. I know.”

They find other things to talk about at breakfast, the weather, Giselle’s latest expressions, her likes and dislikes, which his mother compares to his. “She is your daughter truly, Justin.” And they talk about his peeves with the curriculum committee at the college. She agrees with him that his students need to
know more than just the literature of their cultural heritage, but she brushes aside his arguments. All that stuff about common humanity is for you intellectuals in the Ivory Tower to figure out, she says. Her reasons are practical: His students need to have the keys to get in the door. You can’t change anything if you are outside the room, she says. You have to get in. You have to speak their language. You have to know how the enemy thinks.

“The enemy?” Justin asks.

“I mean the ones who are trying to keep black people out of the room, from their share of the American pie.”

No doubt his father’s words.

They finish breakfast and Justin helps her clear the table and wash the dishes. Later, when he is ready to leave, one arm already in his jacket, she returns to their earlier conversation. “So what will you do about Giselle?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Can a mother give her son a piece of advice?” she asks him.

“Always, Mother.”

“Give it time. Don’t rush into anything. Don’t say words you will regret. Don’t poison the air. Talk to Sally. She loves you. Hear what she has to say. Work it out.”

He kisses her.

Giselle comes home with a cold. She is sniffling when she greets him. Sally, too, is red-eyed. He wants to be on his best behavior. He wants to follow his mother’s advice. He does not want to lose his family. He does not say to Sally he was right when he chastised Anna for keeping Giselle out so late at night. He does not tell her that if Giselle had lost her hat, Anna should have put her scarf over her head, and if Anna had done that, Giselle would not have the cold she has now. He hugs Giselle. He says, “Poor child, you need to go to bed right away.” He pats her head when it drops to his shoulder.

Sally makes hot chocolate. Justin changes Giselle’s clothes. They drink the hot chocolate together at the table in the kitchen. A family. Sally says Anna had invited them to dinner, but she thought it best to come home straight away. Justin says she did the right thing. They are having a conversation.

Giselle asks him if he wants her to tell him about the movie.
He says, later. Tell me tomorrow. Tomorrow is Sunday. If you feel better, Mommy and I will take you out to eat tomorrow.

“At McDonald’s?” Giselle’s face brightens up. “Aunt Anna was going to take us to McDonald’s.”

Sally interjects. “Not McDonald’s,” she says quickly. “You know Daddy and I don’t like you to go to McDonald’s.”

“But Aunt Anna said …”

“I wasn’t going to let Anna take her to McDonald’s.” Sally is speaking directly to Justin.

He senses a truce in the offing. “Did you get a chance to have anything to eat?” he asks her.

“Giselle had a sandwich at lunchtime.”

“I’m not hungry,” Giselle says.

“Then it’s off to bed with you, young lady,” says Justin. “When you wake up, I’ll fix us all a huge breakfast.”

Giselle falls asleep before Justin can read her a bedtime story. He comes downstairs and finds Sally still sitting at the table. She is intently tracing stencils on colored sheets of oak board.

“Aren’t you tired?” he asks.

“Yes, but I have to finish this for my class on Monday.”

“Don’t you want something to eat?” he asks her again. “You said Giselle ate, but what about you?”

“I’m too tired to make anything. Have you eaten?”

“I was at Mother’s,” he says.

“Ahh.”

“She made me a huge brunch. Pancakes, bacon, scrambled eggs.”

“How is she?”

“She asked about you.”

Sally is bent over the oak board, coloring the spaces in the pattern she has stenciled. It is a basket of fruit. She is coloring carefully, the apples red, the pears green, the grapes purple. No color runs into the other. “And you said?” she asks.

He takes a deep breath. “Sally, I want us to work out whatever it is that is bothering you,” he says. “I don’t want to lose my family. I don’t want Giselle to come from a broken home, her mother one place, her father another.”

She does not look up from the pattern she is coloring. “Neither do I,” she says.

He turns and walks toward the cupboard. “I’ll open a can of soup,” he says.

“That would be good. I think I may be getting the same cold Giselle has.”

He is opening a can of soup when he tries again. “I think we said things to each other last night that we should not have said.”

“Things happen for a reason,” she says. She has stopped coloring and is facing him.

He does not understand.

“I mean the snow. Giselle’s cold,” she says.

He is trying hard to be patient. “Things don’t always happen for a reason, Sally.”

“Well, last night we weren’t talking to each other,” she says, “and now we are. If Giselle didn’t have a cold, and I didn’t catch it from her, you wouldn’t be feeling sorry for me and you wouldn’t be making me soup right now.”

His effort to exercise restraint comes to naught. He loses his temper. “For God’s sake, Sally, what is the matter with you? Do you think everything in life can be reduced to some simple formula, some mindless cliché? Read Auden. You used to. Suffering happens willy nilly. It has no rhyme or reason. It happens. Shit happens.” He is unaware of the irony in his choice of these last two words. For him, too, the terseness of subway graffiti expresses precisely what he wants to say. “You used to read books, complex books, dammit. Giselle has a cold. Her cold has nothing to do with what’s going on between you and me.”

Later, as he is brushing his teeth, she comes into the bathroom to explain.

“I know I’m losing it, Justin,” she says. “You are right. I used to be able to handle complexities, but now I can’t. I need things to be simple. I can’t deal with grays anymore.”

She is crying, but her face is unchanged. Her brow is not furrowed, her mouth is not upturned. Only tears roll down her cheeks in sad little rivers. The sadness penetrates his heart. He reaches out to her and wipes away the tears. She presses her head against his chest and he folds her into his arms.

He does not sleep in the den this night.