Not for Everyday Use Page 3

  And indeed my father was strong, is strong, as I can see now. For after allowing Judith and me to wrap our arms around his shoulders and kiss him on the cheek—he stays stock still as we do this—he picks up my suitcase in one hand and Judith’s in the other.

  Inside the house, he puts down our suitcases in the breakfast nook. Judith takes hers and disappears into the bedroom, and I am left alone with him. He is standing so close behind me I can hear each time he takes a deep breath and air rushes through his nostrils. “I have something to ask you,” he says. I freeze. He wants to ask me what I cannot bear to say though I know he already knows. My sister Jacqueline, the second of my sisters, was in the doorway when Judith and I arrived. She whispered in my ear that our mother was alive when our brother Wally took my father home from the hospital. She has told my father that Mummy died soon afterward. He refuses to believe her.

  I bargain for time. I tell my father that I need to go to the bathroom. “It’s a long trip from New York to here,” I explain.

  He is unwilling to release me. “Wait,” he says. His hand encircles my wrist.

  Jacqueline comes out of the kitchen to rescue me. “Let Elizabeth go to the bathroom,” she says to my father.

  My father is still looking at me. “Did you hear me, Elizabeth?”

  “Let her go,” Jacqueline repeats, this time in a stern voice. My father steps away from me.

  When I come out of the bathroom my father is standing outside, by the door, waiting for me. His beady black eyes are glistening, the muscles on the sides of his mouth twitching. Jacqueline is nowhere around.

  “Daddy.” I put my hand gently on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry. So sorry.” He shrugs off my hand. The lift of his shoulder is swift, brusque. My hand drops to my side.

  “They say Una is dead,” he says without emotion.

  They say. It is the reasonable man speaking, the man who has no patience with magical thinking, the man who seeks objective truths.

  My father’s eyes pierce mine. They are intelligent eyes, not at all the eyes of the shuffling old man my mother said he had decided to be. The twitching that began at his mouth has traveled down to his arms; his fingers thrum involuntarily against the side of his pants. I want to hug him but I know he would interpret my embrace as acknowledgment of his vulnerability. He would think I would think he was not in compos mentis, in full possession of his mind.

  Not in compos mentis. When he was in the full vigor of his life, this was his patronizing dismissal of friends who disappointed him with the illogic of their arguments.

  “Mummy did die,” I say to my father as gently as I can. “She died last night.”

  “So they tell me,” he retorts dryly. His eyes have not wavered from mine. He is the Grand Inquisitor. I am a child again. He wants proof. I must give him evidence that I am not lying.

  “It’s true,” I say.

  “If you say so . . .”

  Jacqueline comes into the hallway just as I am muddling my way to an answer that I pray would deflect the pain from his eyes that is blinding me. “Come, Daddy.” She cups her hand over his elbow. “Petra has made your breakfast. It’s getting cold.”

  I am saved by the clock. My father is a stickler for punctuality. It is past nine, an hour after he should have had his breakfast. He is momentarily distracted. “Where is Petra?” he asks irritably, looking around for her. Jacqueline guides him away from the bathroom door.

  Petra is our parents’ housekeeper. She is in the kitchen standing by the stove. She seems disoriented. She is rubbing her hands up and down the sides of her dress, her fingers clawing her thighs, her eyes glazed. Every morning, at eight o’clock sharp, Petra puts my parents’ breakfast on the table. She has been told that my mother has died, but habit makes her set two places on the table: plates, cutlery, cups, and saucers.

  She comes toward me the moment she sees me. “I don’t know what to do, what to make for him,” she says.

  I put my arms around her and she leans her head against my shoulder. “Don’t worry, Petra,” I say. “Give him whatever you want.”

  She looks up at me red-eyed. “Every day Mrs. Nunez does tell me what to make for Mr. Nunez. Today I don’t know.” She is whimpering. No tears though.

  “It doesn’t matter, Petra. He’d like anything you make.”

  “I don’t know if this morning he want hard-boil eggs or scrambled eggs.” She twists her head back and forth. “I take a chance and make scrambled eggs, but he don’t come. Now the eggs get cold.”

  “It’s okay, Petra,” I say, rubbing her back. “It’s okay.”

  Petra is a jewel. She has the patience of Job, tolerating my father’s demands without complaint. My father expects her to arrive at the house at seven o’clock sharp but will allow her to stay in her room until seven thirty. It is a room next to the kitchen, fitted with a bed, a chair, a bureau, and a cabinet for her clothes. It has its own bathroom and a door that opens to the back lawn. At seven thirty my father expects Petra to be at the stove preparing breakfast for his wife and him. If she is not out of her room by seven thirty, my father knocks on her door. “Mrs. Nunez and I can’t be waiting for breakfast just because you want to primp up yourself, or because you went to a party last night,” he says.

  Petra is close to sixty; her hair has already grayed in the front and sides. She does not dye it. Yet she does not look old; she does not need to primp herself up. She is naturally attractive. Her polished black skin has retained its youthful glow; nothing sags on her body, not in her face or her neck or anywhere else where the flesh ordinarily loosens after fifty. Her waist has thickened and her hips have spread. Her figure cannot be said to be alluring, but more than once I have caught my father ogling her. My father—let it be said now—has an eye for beautiful women.

  Petra does not have a boyfriend, at least I don’t think so. Contrary to my father’s accusation, it is unlikely Petra would be out partying late into the night. She has a son who is in his early forties. If she still has a relationship with her son’s father, none of us know. Petra has never made reference to a man in her life. Whenever I have reason to go in her room—the ironing board and iron are kept there—I notice religious pamphlets on her bureau, but I do not think she belongs to any specific religion. Often while she cooks or cleans, she sings the old-time Anglican hymns that my grandmother loved: “A Mighty Fortress is Our God”; “Amazing Grace.” A quiet comes over the house when she sings. My parents are Catholic, my mother Catholic at birth, my father a convert, but they both love the old Anglican hymns, our legacy I suppose from the colonial days when the English ruled our island. The English are gone now, but they had taught us these hymns in primary school, when we were children, impressionable, still young enough to love them without question and believe the stories they told us.

  It bothers me that my father is so strict with Petra, so demanding. Petra dismisses my concerns for her. She loves my parents, she tells me. “They do things the old-time way. The world would be better if people did things the old-time way.” She says young people today don’t have respect for old people. “Everybody want to be in charge. Not everybody can be in charge. Some people know things better than other people. Your father knows things,” she says. “I happy to listen to him.”

  It’s hard to tell how much of Petra’s attitude is owed to retentions of an African past when elders were revered, and how much to the legacy of colonialism with its strict enforcement of place on the rungs of the social ladder. Perhaps for Petra both hold true. She has held on to the traditions of her African ancestors, but she is also shaped by our island’s history of centuries of forced obeisance and indoctrination. My father is not English, but he is her boss.

  Now, before she greets my father, Petra swallows the tears that have begun to well in her eyes. “Morning, Mr. Nunez. You ready for your tea?”

  My father pulls out his chair from under the table and sits down at his usual place, at the head. My mother’s place is to his right. My father’s cha
ir has arms. The one at the other end of the table has arms too, but it is rarely used. There are no arms on the other chairs, none on the chair where my mother sits.

  Petra serves my father his tea. She turns up his cup from the saucer, places two tea bags in it, and pours hot water from a steaming teapot. My father swivels his head to his right. My heart clenches. He is looking for my mother. He will not touch his tea until his wife has been served. He opens his mouth to speak, but no sound comes out. His bottom jaw hangs loose. “I forgot,” he mumbles. His eyes lose their intensity. They turn dull as if a light switch has suddenly been shut off. He shakes his head and closes his mouth. He sighs, a deep intake of breath he seems reluctant to release.

  “Una is still in the hospital,” he says. He looks up at me. He wants me to confirm that it is true. I turn away. I do not have the heart to repeat that she has died in the hospital.

  “Tea, Mr. Nunez?” Petra pushes the steaming teacup toward him.

  He waves his hand over it. He does not want it. “I’m going to rest now,” he says. He places his hands on the arms of the chair and rises slowly. He is the old man again, knees locked, joints cracking. Petra helps him up and he shuffles to his room.

  * * *

  Jacqueline tells me what happened the night before. Along with my sister Karen and my brother Wally, Jacqueline is one of only three of my siblings who still live in Trinidad. As she relates the details of my mother’s last days and hours, the muscles in my chest tighten. I can hardly breathe. There were nights too when my chest constricted and I could barely breathe, but I was in America; I knew no one. I had to be strong.

  My mother had been suffering with pains in her legs for some days, Jacqueline explains. “We gave her aspirins, but they didn’t seem to help.” She tells me she consulted with my doctor brothers. “Have her get off her feet,” they said. “Have her rest.” But my mother, bound by tradition and upper-middle-class conventions, continued to join my father at the table for breakfast, lunch, and dinner until on that fateful day, one week later, her legs still paining her, she got up abruptly from breakfast and went to her room.

  My teenage niece was visiting. She was at the table with my nephew who was living at the time with my parents. Neither they nor my father seemed to think there was reason for alarm. What they probably thought was that my mother was finally following my brothers’ advice and had gone to her bed. Almost half an hour later my niece found her sprawled on the floor. I cannot bear to describe her condition. How long had she lain there, paralyzed on one side, speechless? Suffice it to say, she had suffered a stroke, yet her remarkable brain was fully alert. When my nephew rushed to her side, she locked eyes with him. “What?” he asked, and her eyes rolled toward her night table. There she kept her prayer book and a crucifix, and next to them a round metal ring with raised beads welded into its circumference. Her rosary. My nephew knew immediately that this was what she wanted. When she was in bed, my mother was seldom without that ring hooked on her finger. I want to believe she was at peace then when my nephew placed the ring on her finger. I want to believe that she was consoled that the Virgin Mary, to whom she was devoted, was with her at that moment. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

  My sister provides more details: how she, Wally, and Karen gathered around my mother’s bed; how two of my parents’ grandchildren were also there; how they sang hymns; how they recited my mother’s favorite prayers; how they managed to reach Father Joseph, my parents’ parish priest and their friend, who administered the sacrament of Extreme Unction to my mother.

  “What about Daddy?” I ask. “What did he do? What did he say?”

  “My God, how he loved her! Every woman should have a husband to love her like that.” My sister, a widow, had gone through rough patches with her husband. She tells me now that my father stood close to my mother’s bed, his hand resting on her paralyzed arm. From time to time he bent over her, his breath upon hers. “I love you, Una.” His voice was clear, distinct, the old man’s warbling he had recently adopted all vanished. “I love you more than I have ever loved anyone. I will go in your place. Tell God I am ready to go in your place. Do you want me to go in your place, Una?”

  A question. My mother had neither the strength nor the voice to respond. My father loves life. He would never give it up willingly. My mother knew that. But it matters only that he said those words; it matters not that what he asked was impossible, nor that it was unlikely that if it were possible, he would have followed through.

  4

  How I envied my parents’ marriage! Their marriage had lasted for sixty-five years, my paternal grandparents’ marriage even longer. When my grandmother died, she had been married to my grandfather for seventy years. My marriage fizzled after two years, but I stayed for eighteen more, twenty in all by the time I filed for divorce.

  In my kitchen, next to my stove, where I cannot miss it, I keep a framed photograph of my grandparents on the day of their seventieth wedding anniversary. They are standing next to each other, arm in arm, a proud man and his equally proud wife. They have accomplished much and they know it. My grandfather leans slightly toward my grandmother. It is obvious that he loves her, but my grandfather’s love for my grandmother was not the same as my father’s love for my mother. My father’s love for my mother remained suffused with sexual passion. My grandfather’s love for my grandmother was the love for a partner who had travelled with him through life and worked side by side with him to raise nine successful children. In the photograph, my grandmother is holding a bouquet of flowers that trail down the diaphanous dress she is wearing. She is smiling, a deceptively winsome smile, I think. Deceptive, for in spite of the flowers, the dress, the coquettish smile, she is standing erect, her head held high, the strong and determined woman I knew her to be.

  I do not have a photograph of my great-grandparents together, but I have seen a photograph of my great-grandfather. It was dated sometime in the second half of the 1800s. My great-grandfather, Antonio Nunes, was Portuguese, from the Madeiras. He was ten years old when his father brought him to Trinidad with a group of Portuguese who were seeking their fortunes in the British West Indian colonies.

  My older brother Richard claims, however, that our great-great-grandfather had not left Madeira voluntarily. He says that Antonio Nunes belonged to a family of Jewish mathematicians who lived on the islands of Ibiza, which, in the time of the Christian Inquisition, were a sanctuary for Jews fleeing persecution and torture. In the fifteenth century, when European kingdoms were competing with each other for land in the New World, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal recalled Peter Nunes (Petrus Nonius was his Latin name) from Ibiza. Prince Henry had ambitions for conquering the coast of Africa and needed the skills of mathematicians to develop instruments that would allow his navigators to see land far beyond the seas. In those days mathematicians were, and perhaps are still today, the best geographers, and Peter Nunes was the most famous of the Portuguese mathematicians.

  Among the first lands the Portuguese found with the help of Peter Nunes were the Madeiras, and as a reward for his invaluable assistance, Prince Henry allowed him to settle his Jewish family there. The family converted to Roman Catholicism and continued to serve the Portuguese kings, but eventually not even their superior skills in mathematics, or their willingness to join the Catholic Church, were enough to spare them from the Portuguese persecution of the Jews. Years later, my great-great-grandfather’s family was among the Catholic Jews, who, tormented by the accusation that the Jews were to blame for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, converted to the Presbyterian Church, attracted to the charismatic Scottish Protestant missionary Dr. Kalley, who preached a more tolerant gospel. Then, in the 1840s, the Catholic majority in Portugal revolted against the heretical Presbyterians. The Presbyterian Jews fled in terror to the West Indies where they were promised religious freedom.

  There may be some validity to this history. My great-grandfather was Presbyterian, not Ca
tholic, as were most Portuguese, and the story of my family’s lineage may account for our inclination toward the mathematical and natural sciences, though that gene bypassed me. I was more than an average student in mathematics but it held no interest in me. Literature was, and still is, my love, my passion. Stories well written, well told, fill my life with joy. My father, however, loved the sciences. He was an excellent student in chemistry, physics, and biology, and when he sat for his A-level Cambridge exam his score in his physics exam was almost perfect. The adjudicators, however, questioned the validity of his results. It was impossible that one could have such a perfect score! But my father had a photographic memory. Even into his late seventies he was capable of recalling almost to the letter something he had read. To the day she died, my grandmother never forgave the British colonial office for doubting her son.

  The mathematical and science genes (if my brother’s theory is correct) were also passed on to most of my siblings. Three of my brothers—David, Gregory, and Roger—are physicians. Roger was an engineer before he switched to medicine. A brother and a sister—Richard and Judith—are actuaries. Three sisters—Jacqueline, Mary, and Karen—hold MBA degrees. (Karen is also a lawyer). Another sister, Yolande, is a nurse.

  The old Jewish dentist I used to go to when I first settled in New York in the late ’60s also had a theory about my possible Jewish lineage. He was curious about my surname. He could not understand why I should have a Hispanic name though I am not Hispanic. I told him that my family’s original name was Nunes. My grandfather had changed it to Nunez after an argument over the John Keats poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” which all elementary school children on our island were required to memorize.