10

My three doctor brothers say that our father does not have Alzheimer’s. If he had Alzheimer’s he would not recognize us. And there is no denying that ten years after I watched in increasing alarm as past and present got mangled in my father’s head, he has not entirely lost contact with reality. He knows who we are, all eleven of us. He addresses us by name. More amazingly, for it’s a feat that stumps me, my father recognizes our voices even when he cannot see us. It takes him just a heartbeat to know who I am when I call from New York. “Elizabeth! How are you, Elizabeth?” he warbles happily.

Gregory informs me that Alzheimer’s is one of the diseases associated with dementia, the most extreme, he says. Our father is on the low end of the dementia scale. He knows who he is, he knows where he lives, he can take care of his bodily functions without assistance. Skills of a four-year-old, I think when Gregory produces this evidence of our father’s mental acuity. I remain unconvinced. Impaired acuity, I say to myself. By any name, my father’s decline has been precipitous.

My uncle John says that my father has simply chosen to withdraw into himself, a position my mother often articulated, though I know now she did so out of fear. According to my uncle, the two most brilliant of my grandparents’ nine children were my uncle George and my father. When George was killed, my father inherited the mantle alone, without competition from his other siblings. “He is a genius,” my uncle concedes, and then adds with what I detect is a hint of bitterness in his voice, “or was.”

Uncle George was killed flying a British bomber over Germany. He was one of hundreds of young men from Trinidad and Tobago who volunteered to fight for the British in World War II. Loyalty to the Crown was not their primary motive. Ulric Cross, a mathematician, who later became a sought-after lawyer and respected judge, told me that he and his friends volunteered when Pope Pius XII gave his blessing to Mussolini to kill Africans in Ethiopia. The men from T&T were fighting with the British, Ulric explained, but their real reason for joining the war was to avenge the slaughter of Africans. Most of the men from our twin islands wanted to be in the Royal Air Force, either as pilots, navigators, or bombardiers, but only an elite few were chosen. They were the ones who excelled in mathematics and science. Uncle George was one of the 252 men who were chosen. On one of his missions, his plane was shot down.

“If you ask me,” my uncle John says, “pride is your father’s downfall. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, and when he was no longer as quick on his feet as he used to be, he decided to withdraw rather than have people see he was losing his memory and his prized cognitive skills. But age does that. We all lose some memory as we get older. We all are no longer as quick with answers as we used to be. But pride—pride got the better of your father.”

My youngest brother Roger once made the same observation to me: “Dad can’t stand that now he can’t come up with answers as fast as he once did. So he has the brain of a fifty-year-old! So what? He’s in his eighties, for God’s sake! But he’d rather pretend he can’t hear, or he’s disinterested, than for someone to find out he’s lost his edge.”

Perhaps that was so. But as my father slid deeper into his eighties, it became more and more apparent that something was radically wrong. He would enter a discussion energetically, his points lucid and coherent, but soon his mind would wander and he would lose the thread. One afternoon, two of my friends from the States, university scholars who had come with me to Trinidad to attend a conference at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, dropped by my parents’ home. They got very excited when they learned of my father’s history, particularly his involvement in the oil industry before and after colonialism. My father got very excited too. He was once again the center of attention, on that platform he had held for many years as a labor negotiator representing the colonial government, and, later, the oil industry, and then finally, when he retired from Shell, as a consultant for the labor unions and big business.

As the two academics crowded around him, my father began sensibly enough, arms swinging in the air as he emphasized this point and that, and then I heard the familiar guffaw. “Those boys from Venezuela . . . went fishing.” A memory of something from the distant past had found its way through a slit in his brain. His eyes danced mischievously, hoarse laughter rumbled up his throat. He snorted trying to hold it back. “Well, my friends and I taught those boys a thing or two,” he said, grinning wickedly.

“Which boys? Who was with you?” My friends had been taking notes and were earnestly trying to make sense of my father’s detour.

“Butler, he . . .” my father continued.

“Uriah Butler?”

“Yes, Uriah. He was on the pirogue too. Think we didn’t know where the border ends? Can’t see it under the water, but I know which part of the oil is theirs and which is ours.”

Uriah Butler was a trade unionist who led the 1937 oil field workers strike in Trinidad. In 1937, my father was twenty-three, working as an assistant to a chemist in the oil fields. He never went fishing with Butler, but he often went with his own friends.

I pulled my colleagues aside. “My father is tired,” I said.

My explanation may have satisfied them; it did not satisfy Jacqueline. As our father kept drifting further and further away from us she became angry with him. “I depended on him,” she later grumbled to me. “I used to be able to take all my problems at work to him and he’d help me out. Now he just pushes me away.”

I empathized with her frustration. Our parents’ bedroom was the center of our world. Even when we were in our forties and fifties, we would gather there, my siblings who were still on the island dropping by on their way home from work, the ones living abroad making my parents’ home their first and last stop on their way to and from the airport. No matter where we found our father, in the garden or doing some minor chore for our mother, we always managed to steer him to the bedroom he shared with her.

There, seated on the edge of his bed (for one of us would always take his bedside armchair), my father would listen attentively and patiently as we spilled out our problems. His advice was always sensible. He was quick to separate facts from the guises we used, intentionally or not, to avoid facing the truth. His yardstick was always a strict adherence to ethical principles and compassion for the underdog. “When I put my head down on my pillow at night,” he used to say to us, “I want to know I have not intentionally hurt anyone.” But when my sisters and I brought our difficulties with our spouses to him, he would shake his head and a pained expression would enter his eyes. He would do anything for us, he would say, but he could not help us with our marital problems. He had a standing position against interfering in his children’s marriages. “You can never tell what goes on between a husband and wife behind closed doors.” Still, he would offer us consolation: “The longest rope has an end.” Or he’d say, “You’ll sort it out. You’ll see.” Platitudes, but from him, words to live by.

My mother generally stayed silent during these talks, occasionally nodding her head in agreement or smiling encouragingly. She was in awe of her husband, and believed, as we did, that he was a genius. On every important matter, she deferred to him. Or at least this is how it seemed to us. We were adults, with our own families, before we realized that our father made no decision without our mother’s approval. But my mother belonged to a generation of women who wanted their men to seem manly, or perhaps it was that they needed their men to feel manly. The man, after all, was often the sole breadwinner. They depended on him for their survival and the survival of their children.

Strangely, though, as our father began to decline, our mother started to shine, and we found out, happily not too late, that she too was brilliant.

Quite accidentally I discovered that she read books. I didn’t think she did. I thought her only interests were domestic, all related to her children, her home, and her social circles. It turned out, however, that she had read my first novel, When Rocks Dance. I hadn’t expected her to. Years ago I had left the novel for my father. He never read it. As far as I know, he never read a single one of my eight books. When I found out my mother had read When Rocks Dance, I gave her my next two novels, Beyond the Limbo Silence and Bruised Hibiscus. She read them too and was full of praise for me. I was her favorite author, she said.

As the past and the present became more and more indistinguishable to my father, my mother continued to blossom. Soon I was sending her the manuscripts of novels I was working on. She became my most enthusiastic fan, offering me observations that ultimately found their way into my final drafts.

My older sister Yolande was not surprised when I told her that our mother read my novels. “Mummy used to be a voracious reader,” she said. She told me that Mummy would have her running back and forth to the library to get books for her. Within days after she borrowed one book for her, my mother would want another. “Eventually, I’d bring her stacks of books,” Yolande told me.

How had I missed this? How had I never seen my mother reading a book? What had happened? Had I simply taken for granted that men were intellectually superior to women and so it would not be surprising that my mother’s interests did not extend beyond the domestic affairs of her home and the activities of her circle of friends? And yet I had ambitions for myself. I wanted to be more than a mother and a wife; I wanted to be a writer. I had read Virginia Woolf. I wanted a room of my own and the means to be independent.

The women’s movement had not yet reached our shores when I was young, before I left for college in America, but I had a grandmother who entertained artists and intellectuals in her home. She was good friends with Beryl McBurnie, who would later be awarded the Order of the British Empire (the OBE) for the playhouse she founded, the Little Carib Theater, which survives today as a showcase for local playwrights, actors, visual artists, dancers, and musicians.

I must have been ten years old when I first met Ms. McBurnie. She strode into my grandmother’s drawing room wearing a shockingly bright multicolored cotton dress, shocking because I was accustomed to seeing women of Ms. McBurnie’s social class in the more muted colors of the English dresses we imitated. But splashed across Ms. McBurnie’s dress were the vivid colors of our tropical flora and fauna: reds, oranges, yellows, greens, purples, blues. Soon Ms. McBurnie began expostulating on the bold plans she had to form her own dance group and theater company. She was tired of all those English jigs and Scottish reels she had been taught at school, she declared. She wanted us to sing and play our own music and perform our own dances; she wanted to validate what she heard in the country from the people who were largely untouched by the British influence: the Africans, Caribs, French, Spaniards, Portuguese, many of them speaking a sort of patois, African words and rhythms laced with English. She talked about one of her concerts where her dancers performed a market scene shouting out the names of our local fruit: sapodilla, mango, pommerac, pomme cythère, chenet.

At nine years old my reading had been largely confined to the young adult novels by the English mystery writer Enid Blyton. I was consumed with the adventures of English boys and girls my age who picnicked on beaches without coconut trees, eating cucumber sandwiches and all sorts of exotic fruit—apples, peaches, pears, grapes—as they solved mysteries that eluded adult detectives. I used to do my best to emulate them, but try as I did, I never seemed able to develop a taste for cucumber sandwiches and always found the beaches where I had my picnics too hot to wear a cardigan. After I heard Ms. McBurnie, my imagination expanded. Cucumber sandwiches, apples, peaches, pears, and grapes didn’t seem so special anymore, and I found myself being given permission to dream up picnics at the beach with pelau, coconut water, tamarind balls, pomme cythère, and mangoes.

I knew about other women, my aunts’ contemporaries, who were challenging the roles traditionally assigned to females. Audrey Layne Jeffers, another of my grandmother’s friends, founded the Coterie of Social Workers, and together with other women, established homes for the elderly, for the blind, for “women in distress,” and nurseries for babies. Leonora Pujadas McShine—Leo, as she was familiarly known—organized the first League of Women Voters in Trinidad. My aunt Pearl, while still in her thirties, founded the Negro Theatre Workshop in London and was an agent there for artists of color.

So my ignorance of my mother’s interest in books cannot be blamed on prejudices I inherited about the inferiority of women. Perhaps I was so brainwashed by the myth of Nunez intellectual superiority that I chose to be blind to much of what my mother did and said.

My mother told me the story about the first time she felt belittled by my father. I was in my fifties when she told me this, old enough to know better, and yet I was alarmed that my father would have dared to give voice to suspicions I had harbored, when I was a child, about her limited intellectual capacities.

It was true, my mother said: she had not been a reader. In fact, before she was married, she had never read a book from cover to cover. Then, one day, as she was talking idly about some social event that had taken place, my father snapped at her: “For God’s sake, Una, is that all you can talk about? Educate yourself! Broaden your interests. At least read the newspaper!”

The irony, though, was that the newspaper was the most my father ever read, with one exception. He got a kick out of the novels of P.G. Wodehouse. After a day at work having to endure the arrogance of his British colonial bosses, little gave him as much pleasure as laughing at the buffoonish Bertie Wooster. But he never progressed beyond Wodehouse, or the newspapers (the cartoons were his favorite). My mother, on the other hand, took his admonishment to heart. When I discovered she had read my first novel, I gave her not only my other novels, but also novels by my favorite authors, novels that before my father began to withdraw from the world I could not imagine she was capable of appreciating or understanding. Within weeks she devoured Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. (I would not count Naipaul among my favorite authors but A House for Mr. Biswas is as close to a masterpiece as a novel can get.) She read Naipaul’s A Way in the World too, a novel I found difficult to digest, but she was intrigued by it and had lots of questions for me.

I dared to introduce her to my love of opera. I took her to see Master Class on Broadway, that backhanded homage to Maria Callas. Callas is at the end of her operatic career. She has lost her voice, her lover has abandoned her, and now she teaches opera hopefuls at Juilliard. She is angry, her voice shrill and strident, her young students cowering under her criticism of their slightest mistakes, and yet in the background we hear that miraculous voice that awed the world and made millions worship her.

My mother sat forward in her seat, her eyes glued to the stage. Was it the savagery of time marching indiscriminately onward, reducing us to shadows of our former selves, that had moved her, or regret for the person she could have been had her life not been circumscribed by eleven needy children and fourteen pregnancies? She wanted me to play arias by Callas when we got home, and as Callas’s voice swelled throughout my house—“Casta Diva,” “La Mamma Morta,” my favorites—my mother and I bonded in a way we never had when I was young and living in her home. She returned to New York for the Christmas holidays, and I had no trouble persuading her to come along with me to Carnegie Hall to hear Handel’s Messiah, though I warned her it was hours long. She sat transfixed through the entire program while my father, who comes from a musical family and played the violin as a boy, paced the corridors long after the first intermission had ended.

I want to think my father recognized this change in his wife and that their conversations had deepened beyond the mundane as they grew older together. If this was true, my mother, too, must have missed our father’s searing intelligence that had made our world less chaotic, more ordered, safe. How frightened she must have been when he swirled butter in his tea, or when he insisted on going alone for the long walks he loved to take through the maze of streets in their neighborhood, wielding a stick to keep the stray dogs at bay. He always returned, but it must have been harrowing for my mother, waiting, as the minutes ticked away. She reacted in the only way she could. She buried her fear so deep that she was able pretend it did not exist. She chastised my father when he returned; she blamed him for making her miserable; she called him a selfish old man who cared only for himself.

If only she could see him now when I tell him that the funeral director has agreed to allow us come to the funeral parlor later in the morning. He is sitting up on the bed, eyes alert, the old intelligence shining out of them. In a voice crisp, clear, strong, he thanks me. “I can’t wait to see her,” he says.

If my mother were here now she would know that she was right: she had not lost him. Behind that jumble of memories in his brain, he has kept a clear space for her. He has never forgotten that he loves her.