THE OUIJA WAS RIGHT. My father did marry again. Her name was Barbara, and he first saw her in 1964 during the JBC strike. She was a public relations writer for a local advertising agency. She arrived at the broadcasting station to make a commercial, but refused to cross the picket line, returning quickly to her car. She wore a bright yellow sharkskin suit and, long after he discovered who she was, Michael could retrace her quiet, certain steps, her long legs which were a little too thin and the gentle disagreement between her jacket and skirt as she walked away from him. That was all, and yet, romantic that he was, he felt the unmistakable tug in the pit of his stomach.
It was not till later that summer that he actually met her. It must have been premeditated for, as Mardi pointed out, it was unlikely that he would go by himself to an event that was primarily social unless he had good reason.
Often in summer the grounds of some elegant home would fall under the spell of Shakespeare. This was “garden theatre,” and this production featured celebrities of the local dramatic world in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A who’s who of Kingston was there. But whereas no Anglophile should set off without the ponderings of Othello or Hamlet, Julius Caesar or Macbeth, Michael could have done without the social paraphernalia of an evening “at the arts” for the sake of Puck. Shakespeare’s comedies were not high on his list of cultural priorities.
Michael would travel far, and with huge curiosity, in pursuit of the areas in which he was interested, but he tended towards the untraditional in life. In dance he began with a brief childhood yearning to be a Nijinsky—one that his mother, ever kindly disposed towards the aspirations of youth, had tried to encourage by taking him to his first and only dance class. He stood at the bottom of a flight of stone steps where he had a view of little girls in pink slippers and white practice dresses, bobbing up and down in pliés and relevés at a barre to the tapping of the ballet mistress’s stick, as an unseen piano irritably stopped and started. He hid under the steps for an hour, until he was rescued by his mother’s return.
It was eventually modern dance that won his appreciation. In music his taste ripened to jazz, and in art he was drawn to the adventurous Post-Impressionists.
Yet, soon after he first saw the fleeting figure in the yellow suit, despite his cultural tastes and painful social shyness, and aching for a cigarette, Michael made his way alone across the floodlit lawn of the garden theatre and manoeuvred his frame into an iron seat to watch A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Barbara played Titania.
Barbara was the most amazing-looking woman I had ever seen, in magazines, movies, or real life. She used to say that the endless attention paid to her looks made her feel like an object and was quick to admit that, if you dismantled her she was very far from perfect. Her face was an absolute square, with a jaw like Dick Tracy’s, which made any expression seem too emphatic. Her forehead resembled the smooth contours of a calabash, and was as wide, she said, as Cable Hut Beach. Her nose was too small and pinched, her front teeth tipped out from an overbite, her eyebrows were intermittent and unruly and grew like thin scrub on a rock face, so she plucked them and pencilled on new ones. Yet all this together was, yes, beautiful.
“She certainly has a presence,” said Mardi guardedly one day when the family asked her opinion. Mardi found all the fuss over Barbara off-putting. It made her somewhat cautious.
“Mardi is used to other women being shorter,” surmised Douglas, for Mardi was five foot eight and Barbara, though five feet seven, was the same height for she wore higher heels. Mardi’s other daughters-in-law had been short women.
Barbara’s father was the town clerk, a gentle, old-fashioned man who loved and served his family, his God, and his country, in that order. Her mother looked out from the years gathered thickly around her body with the serenity of one who had once been beautiful, worked only in the home, and always knew herself to be righteous and respected, obeyed by a meek husband, well-trained staff, and disciplined children who, despite the tropical heat, wore their vests and their socks without question.
But as so often the case in my father’s life, there was a snag: Barbara was married to somebody else. She had abandoned university to wed an attractive Jamaican actor and they were thought by many to be the perfect couple.
Barbara was the eldest of three handsome sisters. She was an exemplary student who had once been chosen, because of her perfect diction and careful enunciation, to address the Queen and Prince Philip on a royal visit. Prince Philip had winked at her. Her affair with Michael was to be her only act of disobedience to her parents and to society.
She said her family always made her feel engulfed. As a child she used to have a recurring dream that she was in her big wooden house, the official residence of the town clerk, feeling surrounded by its light and shadows, its familiar features, the peculiarities that abound in old wooden houses. All of a sudden the house burst into flames and she was a helpless witness to the collapse of walls, bending, distorting, falling in on themselves as the house succumbed. She always felt guilt in the dream, as though she had been somehow dishonourable, but never knew how.
The dream became so frequent that sometimes, before the house started to burn, she would feel her body, her skin, begin to collapse instead.
Although she had separated from her husband, Barbara met Michael secretly for quite a while. He introduced her to his world, and she found it rich with ideas and art, philosophy and politics, music and sport. He took her to cricket. He explained the game, drew her a map of the field with tiny stick men and marked their positions. After five days of a test match with the British, she remarked to him, “I think cricket is really the Englishman’s method of meditation.”
Barbara’s parents were at first horrified, especially after her father was told by a mutual friend that Michael had so disappointed a woman they all knew that she had been driven to slit her wrists in a futile attempt at suicide. Michael had only met the woman once, and very formally, but the damage was done. He was made to collect Barbara outside her parent’s gate for a year.
Mardi worried for a while. Pardi made no judgement. Friends had their opinions, not all of them divisive. But when it was clear that the match was unshakable, and as the rumours and scandal settled, all who knew them found themselves mesmerized by the couple. They were superb together. They looked good; they sparked each other. They were happy.
“Barbara always says with two people the nubs have to fit,” he explained to me one day, and he made two fists facing each other and let the knuckles find the opposite spaces in which to slot themselves. “We are like this … the nubs fit!”
Pardi and Mardi finally met Barbara when she was invited to join the family at Nomdmi for New Year’s Eve. Mardi planned to have a few friends help her not so much drink in the new year, as drink out the old, which for one reason and another she had not considered a good one. Michael brought her up to the top of the hill bringing champagne and starlights. Barbara got them all to burn the small grey fire-sticks in the darkness, so the fiery, spitting star-bursts traced the circling of their hands in the mountain darkness. It was a joyous, uncomplicated evening. Michael and the wife of a writer fell into the hydrangeas when the veranda rail collapsed with them. They laughed a lot and no one was hurt. Pardi subsequently rebuilt it—that was how Nomdmi got the larger veranda.
Because he was flat broke, in 1965 Pardi, who Mardi always maintained was unpredictable, decided to rent out Regardless. They would pack up their things and go to live at Nomdmi.
“But my wild unconventional God lives somewhere up amongst the pine trees at Nomdmi!” Mardi protested.
What on earth did she mean? Pardi frowned.
“Don’t you see?” she implored, careful not to rant. “How can I live there permanently? It’s awfully hard to share a house with God!”
But nothing Mardi could do or say would change his mind. He planned to commute every day, continuing both his law and his politics. He would do his party work, fulfil his constituency obligations, and attend Parliament in the afternoons. It took workmen twenty days to carry jar pipes up the hill on mules and install a colossal cesspit which Pardi insisted was one of two additions they must have. The other was a small kerosene generator to which light outlets were connected in the dining-room, living-room, and kitchen. (The bedrooms, bathroom, and veranda remained dependent on Tilly gas or kerosene lamps, and there were candles and matches in every room.) And then they moved.
Zethilda was left behind as housekeeper to a large American lady who dressed her in Bermuda pink with a frilly white lace cap and apron, and introduced her to the joys of Betty Crocker. Batiste was retitled “landscaper” after attempts failed to transform him into a butler. He was provided with overalls which made him laugh heartily even after he put “de big baby drawers” out of sight in the kiln, which had become his cupboard.
And that was when a fence finally went up between the two properties on Washington Drive.
“They have closed the fence,” Mardi said one day, in a tone so foreboding that it seemed to Pardi, who was quietly crunching away at cabbage and carrots, to indicate something more profound than the simple convenience of a boundary. Pardi was now on a salad diet in which he ate mostly raw, shredded vegetables.
“Sorry, I don’t understand you.” He offered the words after he made room in his mouth for his tongue to move, but she thought he had failed to hear due to the crunching of the uncooked greens. Horses were like that when they ate oats, she remembered. Even cows were blamed for inattention, and she suspected that it was simply that they could not hear. Grass could be very noisy.
She checked to see if he was wearing his hearing aid. There it was, a beige plastic, miniature kidney dish in place behind his ear. She knew he hated it, and often turned it off, just leaving it there to appease the family.
To Mardi, the fence was definitive. She considered the years without a boundary between the houses as an era. I saw it more as a hiatus. It had been a very happy time for me, likely for the selfish reason that it was between my father’s marriages. Wives, I would discover, no matter how different, had a few things in common. They managed with deft fingers to extract the spirit of a home and the heart of my father for themselves. And they were afraid of lizards.
But the family era ended before the fence was built. Douglas was leaving for Africa. Kik and I had finished our exams and after our summer in Barbados we would be going to England to school. My father had decided to move into a small flat and rent Ebony Hill to help him financially, as he no longer needed such a big place.
The event that symbolized this for me was a family goodbye party that Douglas and Michael threw at Ebony Hill. We all invited our friends, each group unconnected to the others, only swept together by mutual friendships and a flow of brew from a contraption that spurted draft beer provided by my friend Lem’s parents.
Late in the evening Pardi found himself facing one of Douglas’ guests, who, arriving late, strode over to him draped in a black stole and, apropos of nothing, proceeded to let the fringed article slip down her shoulders to reveal the first topless dress worn in Jamaica.
What was memorable to most was not so much the lady’s ample proportions as the steadfast gaze which Pardi kept unblink-ingly at eye level, finishing the story he had been telling when she walked up to him.
For a time after the electoral defeats, the family’s political compulsions had lain fallow. But that period was soon over.
Despite the fact that in 1952 Pardi had expelled the infamous “Four H’s” for being communists, a new generation of the party’s members now felt that only a left-wing agenda would ever redress the economic imbalance. Soon after his electoral defeat, Pardi had opened the debate at the party’s annual conference with a speech stating flatly that the benefits from the island’s economic growth were not being fairly shared. After much contemplation in 1964, he had formed a policy advisory committee chaired by David Coore which included Michael. By November that year, the PNP emerged from its period of review and announced a socialist program. It proposed the nationalization of “the most commanding heights” (I loved the oratorical way my grandfather said this, as if a mountain had blown a trumpet for attention) of the economy, and a five-hundred-acre limit on land ownership. It dropped like a bombshell into the island’s consciousness. They would design a more socialist agenda. This was his radical new economic model.
Pardi had become revitalized by his “new platform.” I remember the word “socialism” being retrieved from its banishment and bandied about again. For a while Mardi felt he’d got his bite back. This audacious heave to the left, which was causing such a stir, seemed to amuse the devil in him. She felt a rush of optimism.
Tensions were even greater between the two parties and in Western Kingston, gangs had become politicized and their disputes were being settled by the use of guns and Molotov cocktails.
Mardi’s statue of Bogle was completed in 1965. The figure now stood in front of the courthouse in the Morant Bay square. At the dedication the crowded square and the public figures giving their speeches had seemed almost antlike beneath the towering figure of the hero. The government had decided to erect a second monument, a bust of Bogle’s torso at National Heroes Park, which was formerly George VI Memorial Park in Kingston, and the dedication of this smaller piece had been a stormy event. The minister of Development and Welfare did not invite Pardi to sit with Mardi on the platform. Mardi felt that etiquette and simple good manners required that her husband be there, and given that he was leader of the opposition it was a national insult to leave him in the crowd.
So in dignified protest she made her way down off the platform and passed through the audience to join her husband. There were boos for the minister from the excited crowd, and two chairs were grabbed off the platform for Pardi and Mardi, but only she sat down—a portrait of hurt indignation under a wide-brimmed, white hat. The minister got so mad he ad-libbed an irresponsible speech threatening to “fight fire with fire, blood for blood.” Meanwhile Pardi leaned on a metal police barrier, watching with amusement as the plan of his political opponent backfired before him. But the incident had a profound effect on my father, who stated bluntly that he would never forget this insult to his father. The minister was Edward Seaga.
There were other repercussions to Mardi’s creation of Bogle. The new studio, built with a higher roof to accommodate the statue, was made of zinc sheets which Mardi always intended to replace with wood one day, for if the sun shone it was unbearably hot, and if it rained she said she could not hear herself think. She put in an air-conditioner, which was also noisy, and though it helped with the heat in the short term, it was almost the death of her. Soon after casting the fibreglass mould for Bogle, she started getting severe attacks of bronchial asthma which were said to be related to allergies. They filled her with terror, for she had a traumatic fear of weak lungs because of the death of her father due to pneumonia. It took many hospital visits and medical tests before it was discovered that the allergy was to the fibreglass, and many more years before her baffled doctors figured out that she was still breathing the residue, which continued to be circulated by the contaminated air-conditioner.
I spent two years in London, from September 1964 to the summer of 1966. I had been sent there to “see the world,” get to know my mother and “just settle,” Mardi would say with sibilant exasperation, so as to do well enough in my exams to get into university. I was seventeen when I went, and I needed to get away from the self I had become. I was very difficult, and knew I had a nasty streak. I craved attention and surrounded myself with people and gossip. The stronger the bonds of good example, the readier the strands of advice offered me by my family, the harder I fought against them. I wished to be the complete antithesis of what I knew them to be. In short, I pursued a shallow, vapid, frivolous life.
“As a child you had a sort of flame,” Mardi said to me before I left, in exasperation. I cringed with shame. “You could pick your way between what is true and what is false. It’s now covered over with all your own confusion …”
We were at the table, and Pardi was next to us, winding the clock on the sideboard. I hated Pardi hearing her criticisms, for I hoped he still thought well of me.
“… and by people who haven’t any real values. There, I’ve said it!” And with that little gem, she got up and left. Pardi just went on winding the clock.
I swung precariously over successive emotional crises of my own making. Like Chicken Little I had always expected the sky to fall on me, and I vaguely believed that it would happen when I met my mother—or that my mother might be the sky that fell. Our eventual meeting would therefore have less impact on me than I anticipated.
My father took me over to settle me in. When we arrived at the address in Clanricarde Gardens which had been given to us by the rental agency, my father looked astonished. He checked the piece of paper again before letting us through the black door with the number 23 in gold numerals. This was where we had lived fifteen years ago, when I was a baby. We stood there wondering what the coincidence augured.
Michael, who remained for six weeks, was unbearably irritable. He had recently given up smoking, after two heroes, Nat King Cole and Edward R. Murrow, both died of lung cancer. His mental image of these two men, one at a piano and one at a typewriter, had always included a cigarette languishing from their lips. They died within months of each other.
He must have been the only man in history to give up smoking, from between sixty and eighty a day to zero, cold turkey, irrevocably, twice in a weekend. Shortly before leaving for London, he arrived at Nomdmi to spend a weekend with his parents on the same day he quit smoking. He was accompanied by a crate of green-skinned apples to appease his craving.
“Oh, Michael,” his mother implored, “this is going to ruin the weekend!”
And Michael, always anxious to please Mother and Dad, decided to smoke again for just those two days and stop cold turkey again on Sunday night. He did it. And he became like an electrical appliance with a short, one that shocks you every time you touch it.
While in London he was often out, either working or meeting Barbara, who came over separately on a clandestine trip to be near him. She did not stay with us. One night when my father was out, I found letters from her in his room, and in a fit of jealousy I have since regretted, I burned them.
My mother, Jacqueline, lived in a quaint mews flat off the Por-tobello Road where her legendary fastidiousness was constantly challenged by a German shepherd called Beau Beau on whom she doted. I was in awe of the witty, unsentimental humour of both her and my sister Anita, the latter struggling to keep depression at bay after a recent personal tragedy. I used to visit them alternately on weekends, and distinguished myself at one dinner by announcing to the all-white table of guests, “I’m coloured you know.” To which my mother drily replied “I don’t care if you’re green, eat your supper!”
I thought my mother’s face very beautiful and, though there was only a mild resemblance, something in the way her expressions seemed to ignite reminded me of my grandmother. The resemblance ended there. I was amazed by the domestic efficiency of my mother, who also had a demanding job in the city. She cooked beautifully, and instead of terracottas, her oven produced her superb “puddings from Yorkshire.” She was smaller than I had imagined, and I felt I had discovered the source of aspects of me that were uncharacteristic of my paternal family, ranging from a too-ready gregariousness to a love of bread with butter and jam. I shared her compulsion to create an aura of busy unreality around myself to ward off the intrusion of any personal tenderness. In those days we failed to get nearer to each other than the interplay of our own, invented subsidiary characters. I am sure of one thing. If I had not been told, I would still have known she was my mother.
I found England both familiar and surprising, uplifting and depressing. So much of the landscape fitted the literature and art that had been imposed on us as a colony. But there were times when some small event jumped up and smacked me in the face. White waiters! My first visit to a Wimpy Bar amazed me. I suppose I had never really thought about it before, but why didn’t white people hold trays in Jamaica?
I spent a useless first year out of my depth at a private school in Holland Park, where I learned, more than I ever had at home, what it was like to feel British disdain. For the first time in my life I became self-conscious about my Jamaican accent, uncomfortable about my colourful taste in clothes, and even sheepish over the postal code of my address. My confidence was somewhat boosted by a gift from Barbara, a smart black coat with a fur collar which, although it must have been much too big for me, I was very proud to wear. And I was comforted by the fact that most English teenagers could not dance!
In my second year I moved to a quiet country school that catered to foreign students. There I was haunted by the English countryside, which made Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, and Wordsworth’s lonely summer cloud, come alive for me. The dense moisture of the place, the mists and worldly weepings, the unused envelopes whose flaps stuck themselves closed like brown rotting leaves, my shoulders always too cold at night, the search for a fireplace as compelling as yesterday’s search for mountain sun, were like a thousand Februaries at Nomdmi. In a state of chronic homesickness that thrived in the gloomy landscape of such poignant beauty, I resorted to corresponding with my old friend Pardi, writing gullible, romantic poetry and tackling the necessary work.
“How goes the world?” wrote Pardi. “Be sober, but not all that sober. Knowledge can always take sparkle—sparkling ignorance is another thing!”
Two students at the school started me thinking about Africa. Douglas was still there. We had only discovered about Roy’s traumatic operation when Douglas brought his younger son back to Carmen in Jamaica. The operation had been a success. Douglas had then collected his elder son, Norman, who accompanied him to Rhodesia. There my cousin had to enter the country through a separate line set aside for blacks. Douglas was of fairer complexion and was shown to the line for whites “for they said he was a bore,” Norman wrote me, perplexed. This inauspicious gateway led to a time of confusion, pain, and anger for Norman, until UNESCO moved them on to Zambia, then Ethiopia, where Norman looked so like an Ethiopian he was quite at home. Pardi wrote that in Jamaica the PNP threatened to boycott the Queen’s visit if England did nothing about racial segregation in Rhodesia.
“This multiracial Commonwealth is now pure hypocrisy,” Pardi noted, “so why have a queen?”
Pardi had visited Ghana in the glorious days of Nkrumah for its independence celebrations in 1960. A federalist at heart, he was fascinated by the Pan-African dream. But the high point of his trip had been meeting a man he sat beside on the long journey from London to Ghana. He said talking to him had been an inspiration. The man’s name was Martin Luther King, Jr.
They met Jomo Kenyatta, whom Mardi described as the most conservative man in all of Africa. She said he wore false teeth, and when he wanted to impress his chiefs he clacked them and rolled his eyes.
Douglas had added a fresh insight on a trip through London when he told me, “Julius Nyerere is the only one with the right idea: the extended family in Africa. One has to recognize the concept of the tribe as inevitable.”
And then one night a shattering thing happened at school. We were together after supper watching the BBC news, and there before our eyes was the coup-d’état in Nigeria: “He was found shot dead at the side of the road in a ditch.” The minister of Finance had apparently lain where the crowds now gawked. Eboh’s daughter was one of the two African students in my school. She got up like an ancient queen and walked slowly, regally from the crowded room.
The other student was a daughter of Krobo Edusie, memorably called Lucy, whose mother had reputedly received from her father, a Ghanean minister, a bed of solid gold.
“How tragic about Nigeria,” Pardi wrote. “Who are the rest of the world looking back in its own history to judge these new nations whose very traditions sometimes pass over into modernity with all the appearances of misfitting. Golden beds sound crude, but ostentation was in the tradition of African chiefs, and Indian princes make golden beds sound trivial, and even the Queen wears a tiara etcetera.”
I returned to Jamaica with an inkling of Africa, a knowledge of op-art, a cockney accent, and a place in Sussex University which I never took up, opting for the Jamaican university campus. I convinced my nationalistic family that this would display faith in our own system and, at a time of cash-flow crisis, would also cost less. My real reason was simply a wish to return home to my friends, and to avoid the English climate, which I detested.
I had never seen my father so happy before. Mardi said that she had, and so recognized his condition.
“Michael’s batting those imaginary cricket balls in the air again,” she explained. This is what she said he always did when he was in love.
Mardi would look at her younger son quizzically, the way one might approach a mirror with the suspicion of finding something embarrassing. She recognized so much of herself in him. Oh dear, she thought, here we go again! She hadn’t seen him act like this in a long, long time.
Michael’s whole being reflected the mood of his heart. He exuded a joy, a kind of shining, a radiance that was catching. Before this, as far as I knew, he had never been happy in his relationships. It seemed to me that initially, in his need to satisfy the object of his fascination, he would develop an irritable compulsion to please her. This would later be replaced by a restlessness, perhaps a reflection on the neediness of those with whom he became involved.
Mardi would despair, “But no one can ever live up to Michael’s evaluations … no person could ever be quite as intelligent or quite as talented as Michael’s heart designates her to be!”
But this time he was indeed happy. Barbara became his world.
She got her divorce, and they decided to marry. I arrived in time for the wedding. A large party of friends witnessed the ceremony at Barbara’s father’s smart town home. Her dress was aqua, her hat and veil were aqua, her shoes were dyed to match, even the flowers in her bouquet and around the house were sprayed aqua—a fact that mortified Aunt Muriel and entranced me, for I had a fond memory of such coloration on Easter chicks. Strangest of all for Pardi was the sight of the aqua cake. He referred to the occasion as the “blue ceremony”; Barbara said, “Well, let’s face it, it can’t be white—and blue is better than scarlet, Pardi!”
I was requested to match. I ended up wearing an aqua A-line dress with sleeves of embroidered cutwork, and raised eyebrows when I shortened the hemline to the bold and fashionable mini length I favoured.
“At least she’s just showing her knees this time … at her father’s last wedding she produced a tooth!” Aunt Muriel observed.
I vaguely remember the honeymoon, at a gracious north coast hotel, for my brother Joseph and I were there. In my mind I have an incongruous picture of Barbara in a diaphanous, full-length beach coat over a white two-piece bathing-suit with a white fishnet midriff, and a huge white straw hat over her large dark glasses, walking elegantly over the sand in high white sandals.
“Come and swim,” Michael called from the water, where Joseph was practising diving between our father’s sprawled legs under the water. I could see how much weight Michael had gained. He was almost two hundred and twenty pounds, a statistic he blamed on giving up smoking.
Barbara stopped and double-shaded her eyes. “Oh, I’m not going into the water.” She shivered and clutched her crossed arms as if she was cold, and shied away from the swiftly disappearing frill of a wave, then gingerly, uselessly, lifted the coat as some sort of explanation.
“Why won’t you swim?” I asked her, finding her apparent coyness tedious.
“I can’t swim. You know,” she confided, “I have an uncle who always says he has never seen a fish walking down King Street, so he doesn’t see why he should be swimming in the sea.” She laughed. “Maybe I didn’t learn because I fear being engulfed … oh, that’s just a grand excuse for being a total coward!”
I suspected that, like me, she didn’t want to get her hair wet.
I was initially ambivalent about her. Part of me welcomed the style she brought into our lives, for I was very impressed by her good looks and tasteful clothes. My father moved back with his new wife to Ebony Hill. Now everything in the house matched. The living-room appeared overdressed in floor-length curtains and a complete living-room set with aqua sofa and matching aqua chairs, a shiny oblong dining-table to replace the unsteady, gnarled one, and new dishes and glasses and cutlery and linen.
“I think I make a house look too much like a wood carving,” Mardi remarked regretfully when she first saw the refurbished room.
I envied Barbara’s poise and composure, and sometimes tried in my own circle to imitate her, but my nervy, neurotic nature would get in the way of the façade. On a more personal level, I was deeply jealous of her, and resented her closeness to my father.
I am not sure whether she breathed new energy into the family or whether her arrival simply coincided with a resurgence of our own, but by 1966 there we were: Pardi and Mardi at Nomdmi inventing a new way of life, she sculpting in Mini, he up and down the hill as he faced yet another general election; my father, to a large extent encouraged by Barbara and his certainty of his strength with her at his side, looming ever larger in public life, and I settling into my first year at university, living on campus.
Michael and Barbara transformed the study below their bedroom into a studio flat for Pardi and Mardi whenever they came into town. Having no kitchen, they were given a standing invitation to eat upstairs, but they usually had their meals next door with Aunt Muriel. Mae the cook was now fairly stable after receiving electric shock treatment at the mental hospital, except for one occasion when she turned up at the table to serve dinner in one of Aunt Muriel’s finest cocktail dresses; Aunt Muriel signalled her brother and Mardi to pay no attention.
Pardi installed a two-burner gas stove to boil water for his coffee, having discovered the wonder of Nescafé Instant. He saw this phenomenon as invaluable to modernity as sliced bread. Mardi invested a great deal of time trying to master the boiling of a perfect three-minute egg. She finally insisted the process could not be done in three minutes but only in five, which Miss Boyd explained was due to her not boiling the water first.
“But I can’t, dear,” Mardi explained, “for the eggs simply burst!”
“If you put salt in the water they shouldn’t ooze,” Miss Boyd suggested, but Mardi liked to crack open her eggs herself, so she persisted in placing the eggs in cold water. Now she claimed to be able to cook, a boast which the family saw as further proof of the power of her imagination over reality.
It was on one of Pardi and Mardi’s short trips to Ebony Hill that they found Barbara overjoyed with the news that she was expecting a baby, a discovery that astonished the mother-to-be; she had been told by three different doctors, with as many reasons, that she was infertile. The last one had suggested she keep a pet.
In 1967, only five days before nomination day, Michael decided to run in the next general election to be held that February. He took the plunge in Central Kingston, a newly created constituency that had been so gerrymandered by the JLP that it was now considered to be far from a safe seat for the PNP.
The decision came after a talk with Barbara that lasted most of the night. It was really the dénouement of a conversation Michael had been having with himself all his adult life. Mardi described it as “the agonizing search through his own self-doubts.” He saw it as his struggle with the long shadow cast by his father.
The doubts about himself were never about what he could or could not do. He knew only too well his own capabilities. They were about what he wanted to do and, ultimately, what terms he was prepared to live on.
“I suppose when other boys were purchasing their heroes for a shilling in a comic book, I had my hero alive beside me right there in my home,” he explained to Barbara that evening. “Comics you outgrow; the characters fade as they become diminished by one’s own growth in proportion to them. Now you try doing that with a living hero!”
Barbara’s perspective always seemed to come from the other end of the shadow. As though she were looking back from fifty years later.
“I think it’s your destiny. I think, when it’s fulfilled, you will find your father’s shadow is beside you.”
Sometimes he could feel his mother’s spirit in him fighting to be free—free of the expectations of others, of his expectations of himself, of that great yoke of his conscience; most of all, free of the example, heavy with its share of triumph and disappointment, of that shadow.
“And at the end of it all, one is likely to get kicked in the teeth … like Dad.”
“Then we’ll just have to get a nice new set of teeth,” Barbara concluded, unperturbed.
He made the decision not really because he was convinced, though her conviction was comforting. More because he felt drawn by a tide. Maybe that was what happened with destiny. Maybe it didn’t have to be right or wrong, it was just ordained to be.
“Central Kingston” was to become as familiar as the house names. It was a campaign of violence, guns having made their way into the hands of political thugs in the ghetto areas.
During the last weeks of the campaign, Pardi and Mardi stayed in town. Mardi was in a state of quiet desperation. It troubled her to witness the parade of pomp and glory as the JLP ministers displayed their trappings of power—official cars and titles and functions and circumstance—dispensing their favours, or not, throughout a somewhat perplexed little island. Although she liked her husband’s left-wing agenda, which seemed like the shake of a fist at the powers that be, she was not optimistic about the result. She knew they were fighting the inevitable two-term tide, and the JLP were due to win.
Barbara’s enthusiasm was clearly a source of inspiration to Michael, but the flesh seemed weaker than the spirit; Mardi noticed that Barbara was often alone upstairs resting in bed.
One afternoon Mardi found Barbara in her bedroom dressed in a simple red sleeveless shift that hung over her melon-shaped stomach. Mardi suddenly saw the outline of every bone in her daughter-in-law’s body, as though the wind had sucked her skin tight over her skeleton. For a moment she saw Barbara’s figure as though it were leaning to one side—not bending or inclining, more as though it were broken, the snapped stem of a plant. And her eyes looked sunken, too—but when Barbara smiled at her they seemed to resurface, and became so alive that Mardi wondered if she had imagined it all, and looked away.
By the time Michael came into the room to collect her, Barbara was intact, tall and slim in her red smock, smiling with concerted valiance. But Mardi could not get the outline of bone out of her head. It reminded her of moments in her work when the truth of a piece replaced whatever she had envisioned before. It reminded her of anatomy classes, and the hard, white indifference of bone.
“It’s all so very strange,” she said to Pardi that night as they lay head to head on a pair of single beds along two adjoining walls of their son’s studio flat. The crickets were shrieking outside, and the noise seemed to echo in the room.
“How so?” he asked. He could see sharp stars between the louvers above his head, where a wind passed like someone friendly and freshly bathed, leaving the generously sweet smell of the tuberoses his wife planted beneath the window—her only intrusion on her son’s garden, for she said cows didn’t like their smell and would leave them alone.
“I think Barbara is ill.”
Pardi too had noticed a new fragility in his daughter-in-law. Whenever he came to Ebony Hill alone, he would go up to see her. He loved his visits to Barbara. He could always hear every word she said. She was often in her room, just lying there, dressed as though she had originally intended to face the day. She would brighten as he came round the door. He would sit at her dressing-table, on the little frilly stool, swivelling this way and that. He had the warmest twinkle she had ever seen from a man, the deepest reservoir of thought and concern and, except for her own father, the fewest complications of ego.
Michael, though it was his room too, would come formally to “visit,” and favoured an upholstered chair that he always had to clear of her clothes before he sat down.
Douglas, dropping in on his holiday returns from Africa, would sprawl flat on his back on the bed beside her, his eyes fixed forward, his hands clasped on top of his paunch, and proceed to gossip. Barbara liked being alone with him; he reminded her of a pot that was slow to boil. You had to let him warm up. His mother, she felt, was always finishing his sentences for him.
“She sees the doctor,” Pardi now said to the bundle of grey waves that was all he could see of his wife. He found the nearness of her head reassuring, their proximity like a dormitory coziness. He never had dreams when she was with him in this room.
“She makes Michael so happy,” she said softly.
“Yes, I know.”
“This afternoon she struggled out of bed to go with Michael to Central Kingston … apparently the constituency named her president of its women’s group. Under that baby she’s shockingly thin, you know … she came in from that meeting and just collapsed into bed. Michael had to get her clothes off for her. He’s so worried …”
“Yes. But once she has the baby …”
“The doctor’s a bit worried about her too. So they may decide to pop the baby out with a Caesar, and have a look-see, Michael says.” She said this in her “let’s jolly things along and they’ll work out okay” voice. She shortened the term “Caesarean,” as if she thought this would make the news seem less threatening to him. His concern seemed to make his breath come slow and heavy, and he sighed.
“I didn’t know that. When is the baby due?”
“In April.”
Pardi thought for a minute. He had planned to lay out a grape arbour up the hill, but had postponed it because of the election. He wanted to try the fruit up there despite the warnings of his agriculturist friend, Lecky, who said it was too high and too moist for grapes. They couldn’t fare worse than they had in town. But that would have to wait.
“I think we’d better stay put, then,” he suggested gently. “Michael may need support.”
Sometimes at night in that room, Pardi could imagine from the sounds beyond the gully that he was still at Drumblair. The dogs barking, some preacher railing at God or a Four Roads congregation, or was it a politician? The boom of surly, defiant sounds from the rum shops, the drone of night trucks stealing sand from the gully bed. His own heart loyally pounding in his ear.
Mardi gave a little cry that was neither despair nor woe. It sounded to Pardi more like one of those times a memory surprised her, like when a mule suddenly stopped in the path, and Ivan said it had seen a duppy.
He put his arm over and held her upside down shoulder. “I wonder why the tuberoses smell stronger at night?” He didn’t expect an answer, and was surprised when she said very precisely:
“Because that’s the only time the world listens.”
And Pardi, who could find no logic to her answer, stood at the familiar edge of that other life, the way he lingered after each chapter of a D.H. Lawrence novel, enriched but damned to his own sure world.
After five years in opposition the PNP lost again in the general election in February 1967. It was a campaign that took place against the backdrop of the Western Kingston Wars, which began in 1965 and resulted in a state of emergency being called in 1966; it was characterized by political tribalism. Each side blamed the other.
Michael narrowly won his seat; out of ten thousand votes, the margin was in his favour by only forty-three, after several recounts. Pardi, in a safe seat, also won his, so now they were both members of parliament.
Seven weeks after the election we were gathered at a hospital, where we awaited the birth of Barbara’s baby by Caesarean delivery.
The maternity wing of the Nuttall was a new structure at the back of the hospital. The rooms were arranged around a courtyard, which made the atmosphere breezier, brighter, and somehow more frivolous than that of the solid original building, whose solemnity cowed visitors into whispers.
“This is where I will die, isn’t it, Norman? With a dry martini in my hand, listening to the love stories of silly young nurses!” Mardi always said this when we went to the Nuttall.
“It’s hardly likely you’ll be in this wing, dear.”
Barbara had been wheeled out of the new wing on a gurney, all covered in a green sheet, with a lopsided green cap on her head. She was giggly by the time she left, for they had given her a dose of something “to dry out her secretions,” said the matron, whom we all knew only too well. The corners of Barbara’s mouth had tell-tale traces of white where the drug was already doing its job. My father held her hand as he walked beside the gurney, and the little group of orderlies and family followed the wheels with their gathub, gathub each time they crossed a seam in the concrete, down the darkening corridors of the older building, which housed the operating theatres.
Barbara’s family went back to her room to wait. Pardi and I left Mardi sitting in the car in the parking lot and went in search of something to eat. By the time we returned from the visitor’s canteen with a pack of potato chips and some weary patties, my father was pacing up and down the parking lot, looking up on each turn towards the surgical area.
“What will you call the baby, Michael?” Mardi asked as I divided the snacks. My father wasn’t hungry.
“David … if it’s a boy.” He was kicking up dust.
“Suppose it’s a girl …”
Michael looked irritated, but Mardi was determined to distract him.
“… have you got her a name …”
“Well … I suppose … Ruth, or Sarah. We like both. Barbara said if it was a girl, she’d wait to see which one she looked like.” He paced off and took a cantankerous turn at a dusty bed of pink ram-goat roses that circled the roots of an old tree.
Pardi and I began a game of Twenty Questions … animal, vegetable, or mineral—to pass the time, and every now and then Michael would join in to ask a brief question and come hurtling down with an answer, sometimes right, sometimes wrong, before setting off, tight-jawed, on his marking of time.
An orderly, recognizing Michael, came rushing across to him, taking one of his hands in both of his.
“Joshua, we proud of you, man. Congratulations on winning your seat!”
Then he saw my father look self-consciously towards the car and, seeing Pardi there, he released one hand to wave, and called, “Sorry about the election, sir.” Turning back to Michael, he said, “In my heart he will always be the Father of the Nation.”
Sitting in the car, Pardi reflected on the recent election with mixed feelings. He felt that Michael had become more relevant to Jamaica than he was. The country had a new profile of protest. Black power had brought with it a new breed of “angry young men” with whom Michael seemed better able to communicate. Pardi had never been a patient man, and his intolerance of what he considered foolishness was legendary. He thought reducing the country’s problems to the issue of race was taking too simplistic a view of the complicated consequences of colonialism. It was Jamaica’s tragedy that the equation of white with wealth and black with poverty provided such a facile but essentially useless interpretation of history.
But it wouldn’t be his responsibility much longer. That had been his last election. He had made one final, energetic effort, and he had no further force left to spend. It was time for the next generation. He had made up his mind to retire, but he had told no one yet, for fear the party might feel he was setting a hand for his son.
He saw a steadiness and strength developing in Michael now, as though Barbara were the metronome he needed to pace his life, the magnet that pulled his restlessness to base, the comfort zone needed to calm the splashing of his soul and allow deeper philosophical tides to guide him. For the first time since adolescence, Michael seemed comfortable with just being alive. He hoped to God Barbara was all right.
Michael suddenly broke away from his prowl and walked towards a figure crossing from the theatre to the maternity wing. We all looked over to see a nurse holding a small bundle of green hospital sheet. My father intercepted the nurse at the steps. In the few seconds it took us to join him, his face had become embattled.
“But to do what?” he was demanding of the gentle nurse, who held what could only be a baby, though we couldn’t see its face.
“Do what?” Mardi echoed, looking first at my father and then at the nurse.
“They’ve found something,” Michael said in angry confusion.
“Mrs. Manley,” the nurse said, looking imploringly at her, “I can’t really say, you will have to talk to Doctor. It seems they have called another surgeon … Doctor will be out.”
Pardi missed this interchange. He walked straight to the nurse and gently pulled the folds of green cloth to reveal the face of the new child, who seemed peaceful enough beneath. “My, my,” he said softly.
“She’s a baby girl,” said the nurse.
Michael looked down at his baby daughter, and his face softened.
“You are a Sarah,” he said.
Mardi, though distracted by worry, slipped a sleuthing hand behind the small neck, looking for the familiar sink just beneath the back of the head which she considered authentication of the Shearer line. She gently fondled the infant’s “cubbage hole.” “A Swithenbank,” she acknowledged, as if it were a roulette number she had always expected to turn up.
“What is the baby?” asked Barbara’s mother, who emerged eagerly from the maternity wing with Barbara’s two sisters in tow and settled proprietorially over the bundle.
“A baby girl,” repeated the nurse, who was relieved that the attention now centred on her small charge.
It seemed that we waited a long time for more news, two families drawn together through circumstance; Barbara’s hovered near the nursery wing, ours prowled uncertainly where Barbara had disappeared.
But in fact it wasn’t very long till the orderlies wheeled her out, and the doctor explained that they had found a growth, and that a fine surgeon from the university had come in to see and he would operate in a week. In the meantime they hadn’t attempted to take anything out. There would be tests, and they would know more.
Barbara’s mother and sisters came in and out of the room. Mardi was amazed at how few questions the mother asked; she appeared to cope on autopilot, her stalwart faith having kicked in. Barbara’s father looked devastated.
Michael sat outside the room, on a low wall edging the walkway of an open quadrangle, waiting for Barbara to wake.
Barbara may have had an inkling before Sarah’s birth that there was trouble ahead, but Michael felt it was when she was breaking the surface of sleep, lapsing in and out after the anaesthetic, that she realized something was seriously wrong. She must have sensed the worry in the faces coming and going around her. When she realized she was holding Michael’s hand, she turned for reassurance to his eyes, which he tried to keep steady and truthful.
They had always maintained that truth was to be the basis of their relationship, whatever happened. It was to define the terms of their life together. “This is the only way,” she had said, and he had tried earnestly to meet that challenge. They both felt that in their other relationships it was unreality that had finally undone them. There was a side to Caribbean life that set men and women in a ritualistic dance, changing steps, changing costumes, changing masks. They did not want this.
The baby was fine, he assured her, and I think she is a Sarah. Yes; the doctors had seen something, there was a growth, they would remove it and do tests. A second operation was due a week later. Keep steady, he told her, we’ll get through.
Over the next week Barbara braced herself for the upcoming ordeal, trying to engross herself in the immediate joy of their daughter. When she first saw her, Barbara said she had the sensation that the whole room contracted, and all she could see was her face. She was relieved, she said, to discover that the baby was an extrovert, for it would have been difficult if she had been a loner like Barbara herself.
“Oh Lord, how can you know that already?” asked her mother, who felt labelling the baby somehow diminished her innocence.
Barbara told Michael to expect a long operation, and reminded him that, whatever the eventuality, he must never break faith with her. Whether the outcome of the surgery was good or bad, they would face it together.
Her small, bright room was inundated with flowers. The thin curtains competed with flouncing mauve and aqua blooms. Michael brought a large table fan that paused with its head tilted at an odd angle at each end of the rotation.
“It gives me a crick neck watching it; I want to move its neck the other way,” observed Barbara.
We all visited in relays. Pardi and Mardi stayed in town and brought gin and tonics each afternoon at six. We arrived with cards and played rummy on the side of the bed, and when Sarah came to be bottle-fed by her mother, Pardi would pick up one of the “penny dreadfuls” that Aunt Muriel had lent the patient, and Mardi would set up her grand demon patience with two packs of cards. One day we even brought an orange-meringue pudding that Zethilda had made for her and handed us surreptitiously over the fence, though without Zethilda’s accompanying admonishment: “Lawd Gad, missus, no mek dem open her up … if you let in fresh air, growt’ wi’ eat you up!”
When the day came, we replayed the waiting game during the operation. It started at two in the afternoon. We loitered at the back, between the old building and the new wing, and twice we went over to the nursery to visit Sarah.
“Kenny is there,” my father said to no one in particular.
Kenny was a friend of my father. He was also a fine doctor who had turned to politics when he got bored with medicine. He was one of the newcomers who had worked fervently to shape a more radical party, to save Jamaica from what he called “me too” politics, in which both parties mimicked each other and offered the same things.
“Oh, he’s such a dear. Now I feel better, knowing that,” said Mardi uselessly. We were all nervous of Michael when he was worried. He was not a person one comforted. He was too proud and impatient, and his pragmatic nature made sympathetic gestures profoundly irritating to him. Mardi, who had made an art of providing the sympathetic gesture and was now trying to curb the instinct, was attempting to appear practical.
“I thought Kenny was ear, nose, and throat,” noted Pardi.
“Well, dear, he’s turned to plastic surgery now,” Mardi explained. “He does wonderful noses, I’m told.”
Pardi looked bewildered.
“He changed his specialty,” she said with finality.
“He’s there as an observer,” said Michael, who shared his father’s need for straightforward answers in life. “He’s my great friend … I asked him, Dad.”
It was six hours before Kenny came out. I remember the afternoon in stages of light moving towards evening, when the parking area seemed to pull yellow strands from the building to alleviate its grey. I felt the time in heavy intimacy: I noticed the lengthening of the shadows of branches, or a roof, as a shape reached and passed a stone or a piece of paper on the ground. But by six o’clock there were only the beams of electric lights. Friends came and went, but the families stayed on.
When he finally emerged, Kenny was still wearing his operating gown and cap, which were splattered with blood. He was a small but commanding figure with a limp which, if anything, made him seem more decisive. He gave his accustomed smile, heartening and vivid, but his eyes looked steadily into Michael’s fierce, questioning stare. He motioned to him, and Michael followed him a few feet away.
“It’s bad, Michael,” I heard him say, and then I could barely hear his soft talking—“spread like wildfire …”
And then my father shouted so hard we all jumped, “No!”
“It must be cancer,” I whispered to Mardi and Pardi.
“Dear God,” muttered Pardi, looking down as though to find some unused area of earth to start his own prowl.
After long years of practising medicine, Kenny must have been accustomed to this. He spoke calmly through it all, as though he were the surgeon working on the minutiae of tissue, sure that the surgical clamps were in place and would do their job to stem the flow.
It was cancer and it had spread, no question about it. The surgeon had done a fine job. They had had to remove part of her colon. They hoped they had caught it all, but they would have to wait for the tests. They would do all they could. There were specialists he knew abroad. They would try to buy time; Barbara could try various treatments. But his opinion was clear from what he did not say, the way he refused to reassure us. These measures were appeals that might stave off the final judgment, but ultimately they would not carry the day.
Soon afterwards Barbara herself came out, still and grey on the clattering gurney, with tubes and a drip, and was transferred to her bed in the maternity wing. A pump was attached to something, and every now and then it made a horrible mechanical sound that I could not believe related to anything human.
I sat on the low wall outside Barbara’s window. I found myself thinking of the strange way things fell off a shelf during an earthquake, how the walls shook and you could hear the earth rumble, and you could see trees lifting and falling if you stayed calm and watched, and yet something quite heavy would just seem to bow itself over the edge and fall, as though the fall were the only gentle, silent thing left in the world. And sometimes it would do it when the shelf didn’t seem to move anymore, but as though it had thought about it, and decided just to tip over as an afterthought; or maybe it imagined that was what was expected of it.
This time, Michael sat dead still in the deep visitor’s chair. His elbows rested on the wooden arms, and his index fingers pressed his pursed lips as he stared at the frosted window slats, probably composing a way to deliver the truth to his wife.
There seemed to be movement in her mind long before Michael considered her back from sleep. When she did wake, she seemed uncertain whether she had, and kept asking if this was a dream.
“Someone was talking to me … about humility … must have been God …”
She fell asleep again for a bit, and then struggled back again and this time seemed quite clear-headed.
“It is cancer,” Michael said, feeling brutal. “It has spread, and they have had to remove some of your colon, but the surgeon hopes he’s caught it all.”
She looked as if she’d been hit in the jaw by a heavyweight boxer. Her face shuddered, and then her eyes searched the ceiling as though for comprehension or escape. She still had a grey pallor, and her face looked bare and frank without the splashes of eyebrows and the usual deep black pencil outlines.
He told her that he had decided to take her to New York, to the Pack Institute … one of the best in the world for cancer, Kenny had assured him. In fact, Kenny had already gone to make the arrangements.
“We’ll lick this thing together,” he told her.
“We will?” She said it vaguely, and then closed her eyes again. He wondered if she meant it as a question, or if what sounded like disbelief was just her voice succumbing to drowsiness.
“Now I’m a semi-colon,” she said and went back to sleep.
He was ashamed of his own cowardice. This was the only time he had ever felt reluctant to be alone with her.