TWELVE

She has nothing to fear. Later that night, steeling herself for her duty as a daughter, Anna knocks on the bedroom door. “Come in,” her father calls out. Anna opens the door and what she sees bolts her feet to the floor.

On the island her father has the reputation for being a man’s man, admired not only for his intellect, for his quick wit and laser-sharp ability to make heads of private companies, local and English, yield to his persuasive arguments on matters of labor negotiations; respected not only for the high lifestyle he has provided for his wife, who has never had reason to work, but also because he is a man who can sit with kings and yet is at home with peasants. For years he hunted and fished with people from the countryside who could neither read nor write. There are stories about how he led his fellow hunters through a dangerous rainstorm in the forest, how he narrowly escaped being swallowed by a macajuel snake. Fishermen tell how in the gulf connecting the South American continent to the island, where an oil belt runs under the water from shore to shore, he dared to fish close to the forbidden line where Venezuelans soldiers trained their guns on islanders trespassing on the side of the gulf they claim is theirs. It was rumored her father yelled out “ué pasa, amigos?” when the soldiers threatened to gun him down. With a broad grin plastered on his face, he held up a case of beer. “For you.” The soldiers pulled up alongside, and still unnerved, refusing to be intimidated, her father pointed to the bottles of whiskey and rum under a bench in the boat. “For you too,” he said, disarming the soldiers and forcing smiles across their stone faces. Few know why he stopped hunting and fishing. Few know that it was the pleading eyes of a deer within his shooting range that made him put down his rifle. Few know it was the death of his friend in his arms, in the pirogue where they had spent many happy hours on the sea, that had made him stop fishing. Anna knows these stories, yet she is still unprepared for what she sees when she steps into the bedroom.

Her father does not acknowledge her presence. He is standing in front of her mother, fully dressed, concentrating on what he is doing. Her mother is sitting on the edge of the bed, her back to the door. She is naked down to the place when the slit begins on her backside. Her husband towers over her, her head barely in line with his shoulders. She too does not utter a word; she too does not turn her head when Anna’s footsteps reverberate through the room. It is a tableau of a husband and wife in a scene so unbearably intimate that tears puncture Anna’s eyes. She stands there transfixed. Time freezes, stops still for the image to be indelibly imprinted in her mind.

She would not have believed her mother’s body so exquisite. It is not a young body. Her mother is seventy-two. Already time has destroyed much of the elasticity in her skin; it sags, but it does not crease. There are no wrinkles on her back. The skin is smooth, fluid, butterscotch-brown flowing from fleshy shoulders down to a certain defined, if thick, waistline, flaring out to voluptuous hips. It is not a body to be found in fashion magazines; it is the body of a mature woman who has not denied herself her passion for mangoes or coconut ice cream, a body softened by fat, a body that would arrest a painter’s eye.

Symmetry, Anna believes, defines beauty for many artists, the alignment of curves and planes and lines that cannot be altered without the risk of shattering its perfection. Her mother has no hair on her head, the follicles deadened by the toxins meant to halt the growth of the tumors. But even her bald head held erect as she faces her husband—regal, it appears to Anna—is essential to the symmetry of the curves, lines, and planes of her body, fixing the point from where the eye is compelled to descend, and rendering the viewer, like Anna, breathless.

What her father is doing is what Paul Bishop has instructed Anna to do. Although she cannot see her father’s hands, Anna is certain he is removing the blood-stained dressing from her mother’s wound, cleaning the drain attached to the last of the sutures.

A man’s man. She had thought her father squeamish as a man’s man is supposed to be. When they took Beatrice to the doctor on the island, her father’s friend Neil Lee Pak had warned him, “Woman’s business.” Neil Lee Pak advised him that Anna alone should be with her mother when the doctor examines her.

A man’s man remains outside, waiting for the results. A man’s man leaves matters of a woman’s bodily functions to the business of women. But it is her father who does this woman’s business; it is Anna who stands outside in the waiting room.

“If it should happen to me, if the gene passed down from my mother’s mother to my mother should be in me, waiting to erupt, I will know how to handle it,” Anna says to Paula when at last the emotions that tightened her throat loosen their grip and she is able to call her.

“Where are they now?”

“Sleeping. They were so …” Anna breathes in, exhales, and tries again. “I wanted to serve her tea in bed this afternoon, but she was out of her room before I could get there. I knew she was in pain, though she never said a word. She acts as though nothing really major has happened to her, as if losing her breast is no big thing. I don’t think I’d be able to do that. I don’t think I’d be able to suffer in silence.”

“She’s not suffering in silence,” Paula says.

“She hasn’t complained.”

“To you.”

“I don’t think to my father, either,” Anna says.

“It’s her faith.”

Anna does not understand.

“The faith that had her praying for the tumors to go away is the same faith that consoles her now. She doesn’t need to tell you or your father about her pain. She speaks to the Virgin Mary. She puts her suffering in Mary’s hands and so her burden is lightened.”

Paula’s response surprises Anna. “Since when have you become religious?”

“Oh, I didn’t have a conversion, if that’s what you mean. I’m a believer, but I don’t have your mother’s faith. I admire it, that’s all.”

“She spent months locked up in her bathroom praying to the Virgin and all that happened was that the tumors got bigger,” Anna says. “They didn’t go away.”

“Your mother believes her prayers were answered.”

“And exactly how were they answered? She had to have chemo to reduce the tumors before a doctor could operate. They had grown so big.”

“Her prayers were answered when your boyfriend came to visit her,” Paula says.

Anna brushes her comment away. “He’s not my boyfriend.” Paula chuckles. “I stand corrected. When your lover came to visit her.”

Anna does her best to ignore her. “So tell me, Miss Soothsayer,” she says, “how were her prayers answered?”

“You need to have faith like your mother that things will turn out well for you with your Dr. Bishop,” Paula chides her.

“Things didn’t exactly turn out well for my mother,” Anna responds.

“Your Dr. Bishop persuaded her to come to the States. She had surgery here. It was successful. Your mother believes her prayers were answered and she is cured. She acts the way she does because she believes she has nothing to worry about now. The cancer has been removed— not the way she wanted at first, but the tumors are not there anymore. She has faith that her prayers have made it possible, that the Virgin Mary acted in her own way and in her own time. The universe is unfolding as it should.”

The Desiderata. Her mother quoted these same lines on the morning of her surgery.

“Your mother’s religion may have saved her,” Paula says.

“Most of the sins in the world are committed in the name of religion,” Anna replies defiantly.

“And most of the good too,” Paula counters, silencing Anna. She has been critical of her mother’s attitude toward the people who work for her. She has accused her mother of neocolonialism, of bossing Lydia and Singh with the same high-handed, superior manner that the white colonial bosses used to humiliate the people they colonized in the days when the island was a colony. She seethed at the hypocrisy of her mother’s devotion to religion while she continued to belittle those she considered her social inferiors. Then Anna discovered that all she thought was real was not real, that she had used the eyes of an outsider to judge her mother. For she had seen her mother scamper across the lawn with Singh. She had caught Lydia sprawled on the floor in the den watching the soaps. As the World Turns. “Madam and I does talk about it,” Lydia had said.

“You may want to deny it,” Paula says now, “but you’re just like your mother.” Anna begins to object, but Paula cuts across her stammerings. “She’s probably in pain as you say, but your mother wants to protect you. She doesn’t want you to suffer because of her. And look at you. You spent your entire vacation with her. You drained her sutures and changed her dressing though you didn’t want to. You sucked it up.”

She could have told Paula right then that it was her father who drained her mother’s sutures and changed her dressing. She could have admitted that before she knocked on the bedroom door, she had stood there, minutes passing by as she tried to build a wall around herself, a barrier that would shield her from longing, or perhaps rejection, and would not leave her exposed, vulnerable. It is shame now that seals her lips, shame for the relief she felt. For it is her mother who has had the generosity of spirit to deny herself for the sake of her daughter. Her mother exercises restraint. She withholds her suffering from her daughter. Is this the lesson she has to learn? Like a wall, is restraint a barrier that protects while it excludes?

“Don’t you have to get back to work soon?” Paula asks, changing the subject.

“Yes,” Anna says. “Tomorrow.”

“Be prepared.”

They are not in the same room, but Anna is sure if they were, if she could see Paula, her friend would be wagging her finger in warning. Be prepared.