The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q (17 page)

M
eanwhile
, more mundane matters had to be taken care of, things like visits to doctors and the outfitting of the room she would share with Freddy, and, of course, the buying of a wig. There was no way, Ma Quint said, she could allow Dorothea to leave the house with her head shaved.

‘But it’s important!’ Dorothea pleaded. ‘A symbol of my love for him!’ But Ma Quint was adamant, and that very first afternoon, the wig-outfitter arrived with a selection of styles.

None of the wigs were anything like Dorothea’s original hair. It was as if girls of African descent, should they ever be in need of a wig, snatched at the chance to outwit nature and flaunt a head of
good
hair, European hair, straight, curly, long, short, brown or even blonde, it didn’t matter as long as it was European. Dorothea chose a wig of black, curly hair that fell heavy to her shoulders and swung as she moved. Mums would have loved it; but there was no Mums to admire her. There was only Ma Quint, mother-in-law and mother of her heart.

D
orothea continued in school
, where rumours of her immoral situation (it was a shotgun marriage, everyone whispered; Dorothea has
done it!
) soon trickled through and the girls snickered behind her back. The rumours trickled upwards and reached the headmistress, Miss Moody, who summoned her for ‘a little talk’.

Dorothea told her story.

Miss Moody nodded. She had had dealings with Pastor Van Dan in the past, unpleasant dealings. She took Dorothea’s side.

‘Very well, Dorothea,’ she said. ‘Usually, when a girl marries she leaves school and stays home until she has babies. What a waste of brains, I always say. A girl should finish her education before she even thinks of marriage. And in your case, it would be a crying shame; you know you’re among the candidates for the British Guiana Scholarship.’

Tears in her eyes, Dorothea nodded. ‘And if I win?’

‘Then you can go to England and study whatever you want. Under normal circumstances. But with this war on … The scholarships have been suspended, Dorothea. Who knows how long this war will last? If you win, maybe you can go later. But who knows. Who knows.’

T
he brothers were called
in for their medicals and Humphrey failed his. It was his bad eyesight, and the fact that one leg was slightly shorter than the other that let him down. Ma Quint grasped that failure – Humphrey’s shame – as her single comfort in this dreadful time. Humphrey would be staying; one of her sons was spared the ordeal of war. Dorothea wished with all her heart that Freddy, too had failed. But it was not to be.

Two weeks later, seven Quint brothers boarded the ship that would take them to the war, and Dorothea’s heart broke a final time.

D
orothea tucked
her pain into a pocket of her being and returned to work. The day Freddy set sail for the war she plunged into schoolwork with all the passion she could no longer give to him, and passed her final exams with flying colours, top of her year.

She allowed herself not a second’s mourning, not a moment’s self-pity. The indulgence of missing Freddy was not for Dorothea. She looked for a job, and found one right away at the
Argosy
. She worked for half a year as a cub reporter, specialising in stories on women and children; as the only female reporter it was she they sent out to interview the mothers and the daughters and the wives of the men who made the news. Because, of course, only men made the news. Very soon, Dorothea had her own little column. The first one had been about the lowering of the age of consent for marriage to eighteen.

Encouraged by those articles, women wrote letters to Dorothea. From all over the country, the letters poured in, heartfelt, often desperate letters in which women told of their troubles and confided in her stories of sometimes horrific circumstances. She replied to each one privately, sometimes through the girl’s aunt or cousin. Word spread. More letters came.

She kept her column free of controversy; the time had not yet come. Dorothea found she had a wit of her own, and with that wit tackled serious subjects with a light and breezy tone. And yet, for those who had ears to hear, a coded message was there between the lines. Her knife was yet sheathed. She knew she had to tread carefully. After all, there were men’s toes all around the office. She avoided stepping on them. For the time being.

After six months of this, the Sunday Editor, Mr Braithwaite, called her into his office. They were starting up a Woman’s Page, he told her, and how would she like to be in charge of that page, as Women’s Editor?

She would, indeed. He smirked.

And how would she like to sit on his lap? And did she know how pretty she was?

If she was pretty, Dorothea certainly did not care. Her hair had grown back, of course, but she kept it short, like a man’s, never longer than an inch, moulded to the finely chiselled contours of her head in a tight black cap. With her high forehead and squared chin it gave her a regal aura, that of an Ethiopian queen. The last thing she was interested was sitting on some man’s lap; certainly not her boss’s.

Now, Dorothea slapped Mr Braithwaite’s cheek, right and left, and walked out. She reported the incident to the newspaper’s owner, sent in her resignation, and that very day applied to the
Graphic
. Would they like a Women’s Page?

Yes, they would. The editor there had been following Dorothea’s stories and liked her style. They’d be delighted to have her.

Of course, she had to wait out her notice at the
Argosy
. She let it be known that her very first article at the
Graphic
would be on the subject of Sexual Harassment of Women in the Workplace. She had a stack of letters, she said, to illustrate her case and now her very own first-hand experience.

Management at the
Argosy
promised to sack Mr Braithwaite if only Dorothea would stay, and offered her a higher salary than the
Graphic
. The sacking of Mr Braithwaite being what she wanted, Dorothea decided to stay on.

The new Sunday Editor had not yet quite
grasped
Dorothea. He wanted her to concentrate on ‘Women’s Issues’: fashion, weddings and children. Dorothea played along, for the time being. The country was in the first throes of its fight for independence, and unless they were directly concerned, readers were more interested in the PPP’s attacks against the British Establishment than in some poor women beaten half to death in a village up the East Coast.

But privately, Dorothea got busy. She now had her own rickety old car, a green Ford Prefect, in which she drove all around town and up and down the coast and to the villages along the Demerara River, visiting women in their homes and intervening where she could.

Through her Women’s Page she built up her connections. She attended functions and made herself known among the Ladies of High Society. And the men. She found out secrets, for people confided in Dorothea. Behind the scenes, she pulled strings and connected wires. She found advocates for her causes in the highest echelons of society.

And when the background work was done, Dorothea opened her writer’s mouth and the truth poured out. Women’s Rights, Dorothea wrote, were every bit as important as the struggle for Independence. A country could never be free as long as its women were not; women were the backbone of society and if they were kept down, society could never learn to walk, much less run. And with Dorothea there to champion them publicly, with her literary tongue ready to lash anyone who dared doubt, a host of ready-formed groups crawled out into the light. Women on the Move, for equal pay for equal work. Women Against Violence, seeking justice for the perpetrators of domestic abuse, and help for the victims. Women Against Repression, consisting of East Indian women rebelling against forced marriage. It was a revolution within a revolution, and Dorothea was in the vanguard. She was the patron saint of WOM, WAV and WAR.

‘
M
issing in Action
, Presumed Killed.’
There were the words, in black and white. Ma Quint’s fingers crushed the telegram into her palm and an anguished cry escaped her lips as she collapsed … into Dorothea’s arms. Dorothea let her gently down to the floor and held the older woman’s head in her lap as she, too, cross-legged on the carpet, read the telegram. Just to make sure.

But in a way she had
known
something was wrong. There had been that empty, gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach. Freddy’s letters had always been sporadic, but never more than three months apart. The last came over six months ago. But it was not just that. Dorothea felt a sense of dread. As if she knew, just knew, that Freddie was… but no, she couldn’t even think the word. It couldn’t be. Even to think it was to lose faith. As she as she had faith, as long as she hoped, as long as she didn’t give him up …

These last five years Dorothea had lived from letter to letter and news story to news story. Working as she did for the
Daily Argosy
she got the war reports as they came in, before the general public. She had followed the action and the death toll, the victories and the defeats, as avidly as any man. Her heart, linked to Freddy through the mystery of prayer, had been with him throughout. And then – silence. No word from him, no flutter in her heart to tell her that he was alive and awake and listening for her. Just echoes of her own hopes.

The Quint house had turned eerily silent after the boys had left; it seemed so empty, though there were still five of them: the parents, Pa, Humphrey, and Dorothea. Leo’s wife and one other hastily-married daughter-in-law both lived with their own parents, and as none of them had ever been as close to Ma Quint as Dorothea she, in fact, became a de facto daughter, and a sister to Humphrey.

Poor Humphrey. Left behind as unfit for the rigours of war, he was in danger of being the object of pity and even derision, and Dorothea felt protective towards him. And so she showered him with attention and small kindnesses. She learned that it was just as well he had not been called up, for his was a tender and sensitive soul, and as he opened towards her, sharing the poetry and prose he so loved with her, she learned that within him was a different quality of strength, one that was directed inward instead of outward, less obvious to the eye but there nevertheless. It was Humphrey, more so even that Ma Quint, who had taught her how to cling to a tender yet indestructible thread of faith within, when everything she held dear in life was taken from her.

Both she and Ma Quint had taken refuge in their faith. Dorothea had prayed and prayed until her heart seemed to bleed. Had it all been for nothing? Had God not heard her prayers? Had He abandoned Freddy, left him to … she could not even think the word. She felt deserted, lost. For Ma Quint, of course, it was worse, much worse. She had seven sons over there, seven loves to pray for. For Ma Quint, there would be no reprieve until all her boys returned from war safe and sound. Or not. Now, grief and dread flung a garland around them both and drew them closer to each other.

Ma Quint stirred now, moaned, and sat up. They looked into each other’s empty-but-full eyes, laid their arms around each other and, there on the floor, sobbed out their heartbreak.

D
orothea was not
one for useless self-indulgence. She turned her back on grieving now, just as back then when Freddy had gone off to war. She had to keep her mind off Freddy. She had not cried since the day she’d waved goodbye to him from Georgetown’s wharf, watching his ship grow smaller and smaller till it was but a dot on the horizon, and finally gone. Then she had dried her tears, walked away and plunged into her work. But now:

‘Missing in Action, Presumed Killed.’

The tears, she found, had not dried up at all. They had gathered in an ocean deep under the surface of her soul. The telegram was a swift arrow, piercing the membrane that held that ocean in. Now it burst open. And yet ... somewhere inside her a voice cried out:
he’s not dead! He can’t be! I’d know it if he were!

Dorothea flung herself even deeper into her work. It was her way of forgetting, her way of distraction. No cause was too small for her to champion. Dorothea Quint was a name known even in the deepest pockets of British Guiana’s rainforest. It was known in the Savannahs along the Brazilian border, cut away from the capital by a million acres of jungle. It was known in the Amerindian settlements up and down the mangrove-lined creeks where no newspaper, not even a radio signal, ever arrived. The name was carried by word of mouth, whispered among the women as they grated cassava and padded barefoot along soft black paths through the Bush, bent low with their loads of coconuts and plantains strapped to their backs. It was known by the East Indian women in the villages in the flooded rice fields on the East Coast, by the African women in the shantytowns of the capital. ‘Dorothea Q’, they called her now.

In a society strictly segregated by class and colour, Dorothea Q was not like any other woman of her rank. A British Guianese woman’s main goal was to find a husband higher-ranking and lighter-skinned than herself; Dorothea was not looking for a husband. Women’s minds revolved around beautifying themselves to make them prey for such eligible bachelors; if they were touched by the tarbrush, by lightening their skin and straightening their hair through the magic of a fledgling beauty industry, and highlighting the curves of their bodies through fashionable clothes. Dorothea cared neither for her face, nor her hair, nor her clothes. She wore a series of simple cotton dresses all of the same cut, faded by the sun and frequent washings, their gathered skirts hanging limp around her hips. For Dorothea, the body was merely a vehicle needing no more than basic upkeep and fuel to keep it going, necessary for her work.

One of the biggest changes from the well-brought up English pastor’s daughter was her speech. No more the clipped, enunciated English drummed into her by her father and strictly watched over by her would-be-white mother, such that not a single ‘h’ slipped through the net and not one syllable was lost; the English that had won her the reputation of being a snob back in the days. Now, Dorothea spoke like the natives, a sing-song Creolese that revelled in the bastardization of suffixes and the misplacement of pronouns and the maltreatment of verbs. ‘I’m not going anywhere’ became ‘Me in’t goin’ nowhere’; ‘What are you thinking?’ would be ‘Is wha yuh t’inkin’?’ She was one of them, ‘them’ being the low-born, the blighted, the descendants of slaves and indentured servants, the black and the mahogany and the crinkle-haired. Dorothea made a point of it.

In fact, Dorothea could put on any accent she wanted. She could ‘talk white’ as well as her father, and ‘talk pretentious white’ like her mother. She could ‘talk Coolie’ like an East Indian, peppering her speech with ‘ow, beti!’, and talk ‘Indian English’, spicing her speech with gerunds. The first time she mimicked an Indian – mocking the pompous Minister of Trade and Industry with whom she had locked horns that morning – Ma Quint and the rest of the family doubled up in laughter. So she continued to mock. ‘I am not agreeing with this ridiculous notion of Indian ladies entering the male workplace,’ she mimicked, bobbing her head from side to side. ‘An Indian lady’s place is in the service of her husband. In the kitchen among the pots and pans. The pots and pans are her best friends. Ladies are of a very fragile disposition and their greatest joy is in being Mother. Mother is God.’

‘You should go on stage!’ Ma Quint laughed, wiping the tears from her eyes, and that is exactly what Dorothea did. She joined an amateur theatre group at the Playhouse and now and then they put on a play; and always Dorothea got the comic roles, whether male or female. Invariably, she brought down the house. She delivered deadpan lines that had her audience roaring with laughter, without so much as a twitching lip. Acting was her only hobby, her only form of relaxation. Everything else was work. She never smiled. Certainly never at her own comic turns.

Women worshipped her; men feared her, for her tongue was as sharp as a razor; yet she wrapped them around her little finger with her caustic charm and disarmed them with feminine wit.

People called her beautiful; but hers was not the soft, graceful beauty of the minx, curling itself around men’s hearts and loins in order to melt and seduce. Hers was the beauty of a queen or even a goddess, fearless and indifferent to the affections it might win, or lose. She held her chin high, which combined with a gaze that met its mark straight on, and the swift, confident swing of her stride, made her look arrogant. And arrogant she may have been, but only on the surface. And as life continued after that terrible telegram, arrogance became the mask behind which she hid a crumbling heart; the scaffolding with which she held herself upright in the knowledge that Freddy was gone.