Boundaries (2 page)
Then a stroke of good luck. Paul Bishop, an oncologist who was born and raised on the island but now lives and works in New Jersey, is home for the celebration of his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. He drops by to visit the Sinclairs, who are happy to see him. Paul Bishop is the son of Henry Bishop, a union organizer whom Anna’s father came to admire and respect when, as personnel manager of the major oil company on the island, he negotiated the end of the oil field workers’ strike that was crippling the company. Anna suspects that Paul Bishop’s visit is not accidental. She thinks Dr. Ramdoolal has sent him and she is relieved, for he arrives at a time when her mother has only one more treatment left to endure and the decision must be made soon as to where she will have surgery.
Dr. Bishop immediately allays Beatrice’s fears. He tells her that what she sees on American TV beamed to the Caribbean is grossly exaggerated. America has changed, he says. There are laws now since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. In his hospital she will be treated the same as any patient, black or white. He offers to do the surgery himself. It takes him a while but eventually he convinces Beatrice to trust him. She does because Paul Bishop is a son of the soil, a compatriot. John Sinclair trusts him too because Paul Bishop’s father is Henry Bishop. Anna is grateful to Paul since she can now return to her job in New York. She does not have to choose, to risk interrupting the life she loves in New York: work that is meaningful for her. Her mother has agreed: she will go to the States for her surgery.
But there is more than gratitude Anna feels for Paul Bishop. She likes him. He is not a particularly handsome man, but he has presence, she finds. There is something about him, something comforting and reassuring, which puts her immediately at ease. Though she cannot remember that they met when she was four or five, he seems familiar to her. It helps too that, like her, Paul Bishop is a hyphenated American, a Caribbean-American, with a foot in both worlds. He will be patient with her mother, for he understands the culture that shapes her views, her sometimes seemingly erratic behavior. The next day he calls and invites Anna to dinner.
“I thought you two would get along,” her mother says, barely hiding a triumphant smile.
Anna grimaces. She was mortified when her mother kept insisting that her father tell them whether Paul Bishop is single or not. “Does he have a wife?” her mother had asked. But later, Anna must admit, she was glad her mother forced her father to answer. Paul Bishop is divorced; he does not have a wife.
“It’s only dinner,” Anna says to her mother. “He leaves the next day.”
“And soon you’ll be in New York.”
“He lives in New Jersey.”
“My surgery will be in New Jersey where he practices,” her mother says.
They are in her mother’s bedroom. Her father is in the garden, feeding his fish in the pond that faces her mother’s prize orchids. At seventy-two, Beatrice Sinclair is still beautiful. Her husband reassures her almost daily that her head, almost totally bald now from the disastrous effects of chemo, makes her profile even more distinctive. He tells her she looks regal, like the image of an Egyptian queen on an ancient coin. He says he can see her beautiful brown eyes more clearly now, that he loves the way her high cheekbones contrast with the soft slope of her cheeks. He says he always thought her lips were perfect, and that without the distraction of hair, he can see how perfectly her fuller top lip balances the thinner lower lip. He says she has kissable lips. He says all of this within Anna’s hearing, for everything has changed now that John Sinclair has breached the code of privacy they share. Her secret is out. She will need a mastectomy. It is the only way to save her life. When Paul Bishop confirms that Beatrice Sinclair has no other option, her husband reaches for her hand. “We’ll take showers together, Beatrice.” Anna and Paul Bishop were sitting close to them in the veranda when her father said this, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. Now he speaks openly of his wife’s kissable lips. John Sinclair loves his wife. Anna has no doubt of that.
“You can never tell,” her mother says. “You may get lucky like I am.”
And her mother
is
lucky. For over forty years she has been married to a man who adores her, a man who has provided her with luxuries she could not have imagined when she lived in a tiny one-bedroom house in an impoverished part of the city, with a mother who was forced to work in the kitchen of the governor’s house because her husband, an inveterate gambler, had debts so huge there was little left to buy food or pay the rent. By contrast, at the end of his career with the oil company that had hired him when he was barely out of his thirties, John Sinclair was in charge of the company’s assets in the Lesser Antilles. Until he was eighty, he was given substantial retainers by the government and private companies for his skills as an arbitrator in labor disputes. He has not needed a pension. Only recently has he made use of the considerable interests his shares in the oil company have accumulated.
Beatrice Sinclair is indeed fortunate. Not only does her husband adore her, he can also afford to indulge her whims, which, to be fair, are not many. She likes to keep an attractive home, she enjoys entertaining friends, her garden is a source of pride for her, she loves beautiful clothes (her secret obsession is shoes), she expects, and is given, domestic help: a gardener, Singh, who has worked for her it seems forever; a housekeeper and cook, Lydia, who has been with her for fifteen years; the weekly laundress who comes to her home to wash and iron the linens and clothes; the boys who mow the lawn and trim the hedges and trees. John Sinclair wants his wife to have a comfortable life. He does not deny her the help she requires.
And they resemble each other. Perhaps they did not when they were young, but now their expressions, molded from years of seeing in each other’s faces a mirror of their thoughts, have chiseled places where the skin was soft and softened places where bone hardened their features, so that the nose on her mother no longer seems as short as it once was, her eyes no wider than her husband’s, and both their smiles curve upward the same way, the furrows on their foreheads gather in the same tiny waves between their eyebrows when they are angry. It helps that they have the same skin color, a rich butterscotch brown that tells the tale of the island’s history, the peaceful Arawaks almost decimated by the war-loving Carib Indians who in turn were almost decimated by smallpox and other diseases the Spanish conquistadors brought with them. Then came the Africans in chains to plant sugarcane and cocoa under the lash of French planters who had already established slave holdings in Martinique and Guadeloupe. By the time the English had won their wars with Spain and colonized the island, the range of skin color there was already on its way to varying from pitch black to mocha, chocolate, and coffee—noir and au lait. Anna herself is also the color of butterscotch brown. She looks more like her mother than she does her father. She has her mother’s high cheekbones and her deep-set eyes, but the shape of her nose is not the same; she has her father’s long nose that bends slightly at the tip. Her lips are neither as thin as her father’s nor as full as her mother’s. No one has yet said they are kissable. Her father has sometimes told her she is beautiful. Only once has her mother said so. Anna thought she was dreaming. Now her mother wants to be her matchmaker.
“I suppose I will see Paul when you get to the States,” Anna says to her.
“And not before?”
“Like I said, we’re having dinner tonight.”
“And many more dinners after that.”
“Enough,” Anna says and stops her. “Please.” She holds up her hand, her palm open wide.
Her mother surrenders. “But it will be nice, Anna. You, me, and your father in your apartment in New York.”
And Anna panics.
S
he has thought of everything else. She has given herself every reason why her mother should come to the States, why she needs to return to New York for her writers, for Bess Milford in particular, but until her mother says,
You, me, and your father in your apartment in New York
, she has not thought of them together. Now a cold liquid collects at the base of her stomach and makes its way up her throat. She swallows and the liquid spreads down her arms and thighs.
Her parents have been to New York on many occasions, each time staying at a hotel in Manhattan, never crossing the bridge to Brooklyn where Anna lives in Fort Greene, on the cusp of gentrification. Always there have been excuses. On both sides. Her mother never finding the time between the plays she wants to see on Broadway and the meetings her husband has come to attend, Anna conveniently not protesting. She works in Manhattan; it would be easier to meet in the hotel where her parents are staying. No one objects.
If this arrangement has raised suspicions, neither Anna nor her parents have voiced them. But now, after twenty years, her mother will see where her daughter lives; more than that, she will see
how
she lives. In all the permutations of her plans to convince her mother to have surgery in the States, why has she not thought of this? Why hasn’t she factored in the practical reality that her mother will need a place to stay before and after her surgery, and that this place will be her apartment?
There is tacit agreement between the immigrant and those who do not emigrate. Only good news is to be sent back home. The immigrant has a duty to spare her family and friends news of failure. The immigrant must not disappoint. This is the bargain the immigrant makes for the freedom of anonymity, for the chance to remake herself, to wipe the slate clean, to begin anew and write new history in the fantasy land that is America.
Television promises there are fortunes to be made. Even in America’s congested cities, the poor drive their own cars. The family and friends of the immigrant do not want this dream shattered. Their hopes, the hopes of the community, rest on the immigrant’s success. Like children believing in Santa Claus, they do not want to be told the dream is a lie.
They will not pry. No one will ask the question that could lead to the answer that the price may be too high for this exchange of the familiar for life in a strange land among people whose culture the immigrant does not understand. All want to believe in the lie beamed through the television into their living rooms: in America the streets are paved with gold. Suffering and deprivation happen in other lands, in drought-stricken Ethiopia, in war-ravaged Bosnia. Not in America.
They are enablers, all of them, the immigrant and the ones who remain at home. In Brooklyn, Anna passes stores that cater to them, shops that advertise barrels the immigrant will fill with goods and food she will ship back home, proof of her success, proof to family and friends that the fantasy exists. The immigrant holds her tongue. She does not tell of the long hours she must work. She does not say that night falls before she returns to her oneroom apartment where for months the view outside her window is desolate, a concrete jungle sprouting leafless trees in patches of dirt carved out on pavements. She does not admit to loneliness. She does not say no singing birds wake her in the morning; she does not hear the soft patter of rain on a galvanized roof in the early dawn. She does not say she cannot afford to buy for herself many of the things she puts in the barrel. The illusion is to be maintained. There were celebrations back home when the U.S. embassy granted her a visa. How can you be unhappy when you have won the lottery? Impossible! they say.
Anna’s situation is not as dire. She does not have to fill barrels with food and goods for her parents back home. Her parents do not need her money, her financial support. But for Anna the early days were not easy. Alice, her friend in high school who had immigrated to New York years before, invited Anna to share her apartment. She should have paid more attention to the advice Machiavelli gave to would-be princes on the loyalty of friends!
So long as you benefit them they are all yours; … they offer you their blood, their property, their lives, their children, when the need for such things is remote. But when need comes upon you, they turn around. So if a prince has relied wholly on their words …
In less than two months, Alice made it clear that Anna had worn out her welcome.
Why had she left her grassy island? There was a time she had staked her hopes in the promises of independence, the end of colonial rule, but she returned home from college in the Midwest to find nothing substantial had changed. The island was still in thrall to British dominance, though the skin color of the rulers was not the same. No longer were white men visibly in charge. The prime minister was a man of color and so were the ministers in his cabinet. Within a mere few years, funded in part by scholarships the British gave to locals to study at the extension of the University of London that the British had established in Jamaica, there were many more dark-skinned doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, journalists, entrepreneurs than there had been when she was in high school. Yet attitudes remained the same. And why not? They had been groomed to serve the Mother Country; they had been taught to venerate her history, her accomplishments, her beauty, her art. They judged each other by the way they spoke. The more British the accent, the more polished the person was assumed to be. At tea parties and cocktail parties they served bland hors d’oeuvres, careful not to contaminate them with spicy seasonings. The music was muted, the help required to wear the white uniforms that in colonial times had humiliated the parents of the nouveau riche. One was judged by the yardstick of British approval, every accomplishment requiring validation from the Mother Country or else deemed inferior. High school students still had to pass exams approved by the British, conflicts in law adjudicated by British courts; medical procedures needed British consultation. For Anna, the last straw was the difficulty she had finding employment.
She had received an honors degree from an established university in the Midwest and assumed she was qualified to teach high school literature and composition. Arrogantly, or so it seemed in hindsight one year later, she refused her father’s offer of help. Now she knows that business gets done through an old boys’ network. Her father was an important man with many influential friends. He had only to speak to one of them. But Anna had returned from a country where water jetting out firemen’s hoses blasted the skin of young men and women; where snarling dogs, straining against leashes held by officers sworn to uphold the law, fangs bared and dripping with phlegm, were set loose on children. She had come back from a country where thousands marched, risking life and imprisonment for civil rights for those long denied them. She would not take advantage of the privileges of her parents’ social class. She went to the Ministry of Education without references, without the list of connections that would pave her way.