6

We left for Barbados the following weekend. Albert rented a car at the airport, intending to register at the hotel before going on to Peter Ducksworth’s house. Glynis said she would take a taxi from the airport; she wanted to make sure her father’s house was respectable when we arrived. “Daddy’s not the best housekeeper,” she said. Albert protested; he didn’t want her to go alone in a taxi.

She’d taken a taxi alone many times, Glynis countered. And she was sure the house was in a mess.

“We don’t mind,” Albert said. “Can’t be worse than the rooms at the university halls.” He tugged her ponytail playfully and Glynis brushed his arm away, more brusquely than I thought she intended, for when she saw Albert’s reaction—a frown creased his forehead though just as quickly disappeared—she stroked his cheek.

“It’s just that Daddy would be embarrassed. Truth is, he never did a thing when Mummy was alive. Never lifted a finger in the house, not even to boil water,” she scoffed. “Now he can’t keep up, even with the maid who comes every day. He tries, but you know what they say about teaching old dogs new tricks.”

“What about your sister, the one still at home with him? Surely she helps.” Albert said the words that were on my mind as well.

“You mean Corinne?” There was no mistaking the upward curl of Glynis’s top lip. I’ve seen sneers; hers was more feminine. What I mean is that it was so subtle it was possible to think she had not sneered at all. But there was no doubt that what I had seen was a wave of disgust cross her lips when she uttered her sister’s name. “Daddy thinks Corinne’s too pretty to do housework.”

Albert put his arm around her. “None of your sisters can be prettier than you,” he cooed.

But Glynis would not to be swayed. We should relax when we got to the hotel, she said. There’s a swimming pool there and a bar. She’ll be safe in a taxi. Barbados is not like Trinidad. No one is going to kidnap her here.

I chuckled but Albert was not amused. Trinidad was oil-rich but the money had not filtered down to the poor. Kidnappings, robberies, drug wars had become a way of fighting back. But it was in Trinidad he and Glynis would live when they got married.

Undeterred by Albert’s continued protestations, Glynis gave us directions to her father’s house and told us to come in a couple of hours.

“How many?” I asked, my instinctive distrust of her rising before I could suppress it.

“A couple. Like I said.”

“What’s a couple?” I insisted.

“Two, you idiot.” Albert knocked me with his elbow.

“Well, not to the dot. After lunch would be great.” Glynis swiped her hand over her hair. A habit, a practiced reflex. Her hair, every time I saw her, was always smooth and shining, brushed back off her face. She looked at her watch. “I’d say at about two or three o’clock.”

For my friend’s sake I tried to make myself believe that two or three o’clock was reasonable. This would be the first time Albert would be seeing where she lived. She wanted to make an impression, to show off the beautiful house her father had bought in Barbados. She was understandably anxious. But the more I thought about her insistence that we arrive after lunch—we arrived at the airport at nine o’clock, and it would be five or six hours from then to the time she said we should come to her father’s house—the less I was convinced that she was worried about Albert’s reaction to the state of her house. No, more likely it was her father’s reaction to Albert that had her stumbling to explain why—when she had claimed her father would love Albert, that he was anxious to meet him—she was stalling.

Albert wanted to unpack immediately. It was hot; I wanted to cool off by the pool with a frosted bottle of beer. But I could tell Albert was nervous, as I suppose I would be if I were meeting my future father-in-law for the first time, so I opened up my suitcase where I had dropped it carelessly on the floor, and pulled out my shaving kit and toothbrush, which were in a transparent plastic food bag stuffed next to my other things that I had packed willy-nilly: T-shirts on top of shorts in no discernible order, bathing trunks, underwear, and socks balled up, a pair of sneakers and sandals on top of them.

Albert had placed his suitcase on the luggage stand, and when he opened it, I was ashamed of the way I had packed. His pants were on hangers attached to a hook at the top of his suitcase, two pairs sharply creased. His polo shirts were neatly folded, the collars pressed down, one placed on top of the other, and though I don’t believe this was true, it seemed to me at the time that the polo shirts were layered according to color from light to dark—white, then pale yellow, then deep blue. Next to rolls of underwear and socks were a dark brown leather cosmetic case and two stuffed camel-colored shoe bags.

Albert had told me that his great-grandfather attributed his success to the importance he put on presentation. When I asked him to explain what he meant by presentation, he said that though his Lebanese great-grandfather carried his merchandise in a crocus bag on his back as he hawked his goods from one village to another in the countryside in Trinidad, he always made sure that the fabrics he sold and the clothing his wife and her friends sewed (their first tentative steps to eventual mass production of ready-made clothing they would sell in their stores) were not rumpled. Every morning before he left his house, he was careful to have his wife iron and fold the dresses, the pants, and the underwear, so they looked like new to his customers. “Presentation makes the sale,” Albert told me. His father had drummed that advice in his ear. “People will buy most anything from you if you present it well. The same dress they rejected when it was rumpled, they’ll buy from you at a handsome price if it’s nicely pressed and folded.”

Albert stacked his neatly folded shirts in one of the bureau drawers and pointed to the drawer next to his. “You can take that one,” he said.

I had not thought of putting my clothes in the drawers. We were here only for the weekend; it was easier to leave my stuff in my suitcase, but I did as Albert instructed me.

He was bending down behind the closet door to place a pair of loafers and white tennis shoes side by side on the bottom rack when I heard him mumble something about Glynis. Not sure I had heard him clearly, I asked him to repeat what he had said. “Glynis,” he said. “She’s right. We can’t just barge in on her father.”

We weren’t barging in, of course; her father was expecting us. Glynis had told him we were coming.

Albert straightened up and shut the closet door. “I wouldn’t like someone to barge in on me either,” he grumbled.

“Listen.” I put both my hands on his shoulders and shook him slightly. “He’s going to like you. He is.”

“But—”

“No buts. You’re a good guy. You come from a good family.”

“Maybe he’ll think it’s too soon.”

The bold confidence he had displayed in the restaurant seemed to be eking out of him. I had thought three weeks was too soon, but I could read in his eyes he wanted me to tell him it was okay. Love is or it isn’t. Hadn’t I said to him that many people fall in love at first sight? Henrietta told me that within minutes after she first set eyes on Trevor she knew she would spend the rest of her life with him. “That’s the way it was for him too,” she’d said, “and now it’s twenty years. That man love me too bad and I love him just the same.” So who was I to say to Albert it was too soon, too soon to propose to Glynis, too soon to plan a wedding?

My father fell in love with my mother at first sight, and if I had not fatally intervened, they would still be together, in love, happy, my father not brooding through the dark rooms of his heavily draped house.

Yet there was a couple I knew, colleagues of my father, who had known each other for years, since they were children. Both came from the same neighborhood, went to the same medical school, shared the same interests in music and art. They got married after they graduated, certain a relationship built on a solid foundation, on years of friendship and love, would last. It didn’t. One child later, they divorced.

I told myself I should stop worrying: Marriage is sometimes a crapshoot. Albert’s chances were as good as anyone else’s. “If Peter Ducksworth wants his daughter’s happiness, he won’t think it’s too soon,” I said.

“I’ll make her happy.”

“I know you will. Any girl would be lucky to get you. A nice guy and handsome too?”

“Liar.” But I had forced a smile on his lips.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s take a dip in the pool. We have some hours to burn.”

Too many hours, it seemed. He was still nervous, worried, restless. We swam some laps in the hotel pool, I ordered beer (he’d only have lemonade; he wanted to have his full wits about him when he met Glynis’s father, he said), and we killed more time talking cricket with a group of guys boasting about Sobers. Sir Garfield Sobers, the pride of Barbados, knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1975 for his prowess on the cricket mound.

“Still boasting after all these years?” I couldn’t help teasing them. “We’re in the twenty-first century, not the old ages.”

Albert perked up. He was an avid cricket fan. Never missed a test match, especially when the West Indies team played England. “The last time Sobers played cricket, you guys were in the womb,” he said. “Can’t beat our Brian Lara from Trinidad. Highest world record. Four hundred not out against England and then a double hundred, a triple hundred.”

“A quintuple hundred!” I shouted out, happy to see Albert’s gloomy mood broken.

“And a champion runner too,” Albert added. “Twenty-eight runs off an over in South Africa.”

Beer and rum had made the guys—all Barbadians—light-headed. They laughed with us too, but they came back with one of their own. Yearwood. “Bowled 153 from 118 balls,” a burly chested man said. Barrington Bjorn Beckenbauer Yearwood. Where did his mother drum up a name like that for a black boy? “She was psychic,” the man continued. “She knew he was going to play not just nationally, but internationally, and beat out all those white fellas.”

We joked some more with the guys. I would have had the rum they offered us, but Albert looked at me sternly and shook his head. He wanted me to make an impression on Glynis’s father too. I was his friend. I’d already had a couple of beers; he didn’t want me tipsy.

We left for lunch but Albert barely touched his food. At two o’clock he was fully dressed, in a dark blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt, the man on the white horse appliquéd to the top right-hand corner, pressed khakis, polished brown loafers. Was it the briefness of his courtship with Glynis that had him so nervous? Or was it something else? Like being Syrian, Lebanese, his family of Arab descent.

I had intended to wear my knee-length shorts, but I changed my mind, seeing Albert in khakis, and put on my long pants.

“Glynis said two or three. I guess two thirty would be just right.” Albert was doing his best to get me out of the hotel, but I didn’t think we should arrive too early. I had calculated it would take us only fifteen minutes to get to Ducksworth’s house. Albert was not persuaded. “If we leave now,” he said, “it’ll give us ten minutes or so in case we get lost.”

And it was good I had not objected. The directions Glynis gave us took us off the main road to a narrow paved road that ended in two diverging tracks muddied and full of loose stones. Glynis had not told us about the dirt roads, or that the paved one ended. She had just said to keep driving up the narrow road until we came to a big house on the top of the hill. From where we were, we couldn’t see a big house. All we saw was a dense cluster of tall trees, and in between, climbing up an incline, were some prettily painted tiny wood houses—some blue, some pink, some orange—all with white wood railings around their tiny verandas.

“We took the wrong turn,” Albert said nervously. “Now we’re going to be late.”

I had offered to drive when I saw Albert fumbling with the keys and he did not resist. I stopped the car to consult the drawing Glynis made for us. Mango Trace. That was the name of the road she had written on the drawing. A man came out of one of the houses holding a toddler on his hip. He was in his underwear: a loose white cotton vest that hung low on his chest, and faded navy plaid boxers, which on closer view I could see were shorts made out of a lightweight material. The toddler was naked, a chubby boy about three years old. He looked a lot like his father: Both had wide brows, dancing eyes, and nostrils that widened at the end. Both had skin that glowed like fresh asphalt after the rain.

“We’re looking for Mr. Ducksworth’s house,” I said to the man.

“No Ducksworth live here,” he replied matter-of-factly.

The toddler giggled. “Ducks, ducks, ducky,” he chanted. The man tightened his hold and kissed him on the cheek.

“Peter Ducksworth,” I said.

Albert slid over me, almost crushing my ribs. “A white man,” he called through the open car window. “You know where a white man lives around here?” He handed him Glynis’s scribbling.

“Ah!” The man grinned and flung back his head, exposing two gleaming rows of even white teeth. “You make a mistake.” He handed the paper back to Albert. “This here is Mango Trace, true, but no white people live here. What you looking for is Mango Road up yonder.”

“And does Mr. Ducksworth live there?”

“The white man with the big belly and the yellowish hair like sand?”

“Yes, that man,” Albert said.

“He have three daughters?”

“Yes, yes. Where does he live?” Albert was getting more agitated.

“One of the daughters done gone and married,” he announced.

The man’s wife popped her head out of the window. She was a pretty woman, with the same glowing dark skin, her hair cut short in an Afro, smooth round cheeks, black eyes evenly spaced, a wide mouth, plump lips. She was holding both ends of the neck of her flowered housedress close to her chin as if she feared releasing them would expose her breasts. “Who you talking to, Jimmy?”

The man turned around to answer her. “Some two fellas asking about the white man who live on Mango Road.”

“Ducksworth with the big belly?”

“Yes,” Albert said. “We’re looking for Mr. Peter Ducksworth.”

“You tell them about how the daughter just ups and marry, Jimmy? No wedding or anything.”

“I was just telling them where—”

“I never hear something like that,” his wife interrupted. “She couldn’t wait for her big sister?”

I leaned back in my seat. There would be more back-and-forth between the man and his wife. We were on a Caribbean island. Time moved slowly here, inching its way with the sun. In the countryside you woke up before dawn, had breakfast, and began work in the fields when the sun was still behind the horizon. By midday you were home again, beaten down by the sun blazing overhead. Then it was time for a long nap while the sun made its way across the sky. It was a little past two. Jimmy and his family had just woken up.

Albert closed his eyes in frustration. Counting, I thought. He’d have to reach five hundred before he’d get Jimmy’s attention again.

“Must have had some row with her big sister,” Jimmy’s wife was saying.

“You could be right.”

“But what row she could have that wouldn’t let her wait?”

More back-and-forth. Then the wife said, “Is not right for the younger sister to marry before the old one.”

The old one. That got Albert’s attention. His eyes flew open. “She’s not old!” he shouted. “And if you want to know, there was no row.”

“Even so, you have to say it funny how is the plain one get the pretty man,” she said, undeterred by Albert’s flashing eyes or the veins bulging on his neck.

Good-looking, Glynis had said. Pretty man, Jimmy’s wife declared. But if these descriptions of Rebecca’s husband bothered Albert, he hid his feelings. “Are you going to tell us?” he asked, speaking directly to Jimmy.

The man glanced back at his wife. “Ernestine, don’t go making gossip,” he scolded. Then he turned to Albert. “So what was it you wanted again, young man?”

“Directions to Mr. Ducksworth’s house,” Albert said, doing his best to keep his voice even.

“Back-back your car here and turn around and go back to the main road. Then take the first left turn and go straight-straight up the hill till you see a big house.”

And there it was.

It was a huge old colonial-style house, the kind being demolished in certain parts of Trinidad to put up sleek glass-and-metal high-rises, now that money flowed to the island from oil and liquefied gas. (It was reported that over 70 percent of the liquefied gas the US imported came from Trinidad). The house was imposing, standing there on the top of the hill, glistening in the brilliant sunshine. We had driven just about halfway up the narrow road when we saw it. Had we taken the right path we could not have missed it. It rose high above a clearing, a white, two-story rectangular structure with verandas on each floor, white railings wrapped around the front and sides. The charcoal-gray slate roof on top sloped down over it like an enormous hat. Or beach umbrella, Albert said. The house itself was framed on each floor with a long line of tall French windows bordered by olive-green shutters. These were not the sort of shutters one found in the country, meant to be opened to let in the breeze and then shut again to keep out the rain or the sun at noon. Or if they were, they no longer had this function; the sleek windows behind them let in the breeze and kept out the rain, and drapes protected the rooms from the sun. These were decorative shutters, spread open wide like the wings of a giant bird in flight. Tall leafy trees seemed to hug the house on both sides, but in the back there was nothing but blue sky.

As we got closer I could see a white hammock strung between two Julie mango trees on the far right side of the front yard. There was a big-bellied white man stretched out in it.