Father Eden was certain that if he stood up, everyone would be able to see his underwear through his sweat-soaked white cotton trousers. The tropical uniform may have seemed like a carefully thought-out package back at the Vatican, but he doubted that the designer had ever actually worn one for an entire day in the tropics. Shorts and short-sleeved shirts would have been a nice touch, although he didn’t have any ideas to improve the backwards clerical collar. Perhaps a perforated one. Still, he had to admit that it was a big improvement over basic black.
He had been sitting in the plastic wrap-around chair for the better part of an hour, wedged between two giggling children in the chair on his left and Isaac La Croix in the chair on his right. La Croix was a dapper young African-European gentleman in a tailored white linen suit, with barely a bead of sweat on his brow. How he did it, Eden had no idea. Perhaps it was in the genes. La Croix’s white G550 was parked out front, under the only shade tree in the entire village.
They were visiting with a large Haitian family, sitting around the plank table in the front room of their brick shack under a tin roof that radiated heat. Eden’s French was getting a workout. They were taking care to speak slowly to him, although when the children got to jabbering they would lapse into Creole, and he couldn’t follow without La Croix’s whispered on-the-fly translations.
Jeanine Lacombe was the family disciplinarian, and with a simple glance her children would apologize and return to the straight and narrow. Her husband Antoine sat at the other end of the table and sucked on his pipe, happy that his wife had brought such honor to his household. Most of the village was lingering around his little shack and peeking in through the windows.
None of them ever had a priest pay them a social call before. This would be good for him and his entire family, the husband thought. His enemies and rivals would think twice, and the boys would honor his daughters now. Catholic priests weren’t as powerful as voodoo priests, but they were better than no priests at all.
His wife was telling her high school stories to Eden, one after the other, weaving them into a long, drawn-out narrative. Their children were as thoroughly entertained as Eden was. They had never been privy to so many details about their mother’s youth. Some of the stories bordered on the scandalous. Her teenage daughters filed it all away for future negotiations.
She had the family photo album laid out. With some of her younger ones pressed in around her, she was flipping through the pages, showing old snapshots to Eden to illustrate her narrative. She turned the page and pointed to her favorite photo, a group portrait of herself and her classmates. The woman was in her fifties now, but her features were clearly defined at a young age and it was easy for him to spot her among the gaggle of teenage girls, mugging for the camera in their crisp Catholic school uniforms. She was the one in the middle, perhaps sixteen at the time, and she was hugging her classmate, the only Caucasian girl in the group.
She spoke slowly to Eden, enunciating with particular care so that he could follow her French. He was eager to learn whatever she could tell him. Jeanine Lacombe, his natural mother’s friend and his grandmother’s servant, was the lure that brought him to Haiti.
“We were the best of friends!” she said with a soft, wistful smile. “We shared all of our secrets.”
Across the table from Eden and La Croix, her teenage daughters grinned and whispered to each other, and two of their little brothers teased them. Their mother glanced at them, and they settled down. Her husband just grinned. Women amused him.
“Then one day,” his wife told Eden, “the nuns told us she went to America. They wouldn’t tell us why, but I knew the truth – she was pregnant with you.”
“Did you know my father?” Eden asked hopefully, but the light in her eyes diminished and he knew the answer before she even shook her head.
“No,” she told him quietly, “no one ever knew who he was.”
Eden was deeply disappointed, but he managed to maintain his composure and looked back at the photo. Even the little boys in the chair beside him could see he was sad. They looked to their big sisters for a clue, and then to their father. He just kept his eyes on the priest, so they looked back to the holy man as well. They weren’t sure what happened, but adults had a way of suddenly turning sad, and then they were quiet. Not like children. Children cried so that everybody would know how they felt, and then maybe someone would make them feel better. They waited to see what would happen to the priest. Maybe he would cry, too.
Their mother touched the back of Eden’s hand and gently patted it. He looked at her and propped up a brave smile, and then his eyes drifted back to the photo again.
The entire family glanced at Jeanine, waiting for her to make it better. She was the mother; that was her job. She slipped her fingernail under the edge of the photo, and carefully dislodged its corners from the four slots in the yellowed album page.
Eden looked up and saw that she was smiling at him. She handed him the photo without a word. He silently thanked her and gazed back down at the faded image of his young mother.
Outside the shack, the family quietly gathered around as Eden and La Croix climbed into the Mercedes. Everyone waved goodbye, but it was a subdued farewell. Eden watched the family recede in the large mirror on his passenger door, and spent the rest of the afternoon peeking at the photograph, trying to imagine the sound of his mother’s voice.