From Harvey River (15 page)

 

The task of preparing Doris for life as a refined married woman had been given over to Cleodine at Rose Cottage, where white damask tablecloths, bone-handled knives and forks, and monogrammed sheets were in everyday use. My mother had approached her sister's house with a very heavy heart. Once before, she had been sent to Rose Cottage to undergo “finishing” by Cleodine. That earlier visit had ended with Doris packing her bags after one week, and walking back to Harvey River in tears. When she reached home, tired, miserable, and covered with dust, she had entered the Harvey house sobbing. “She want to kill me. She make me wake up at five o'clock every morning, she make me knead dough till my hand want to drop off, because she have to have fresh bread every day. She make me draw her a hot bath every evening, because cold water cannot touch her skin. She make me iron about a thousand crochet doily to put on her chair and tables. ‘Antimacassars, Doris, have you ironed the antimacassars?' Then she have to tell me again that an antimacassar is to keep hair oil from rubbing off on the chair upholstery, as if I care.

“Every time I try to sit down she say, ‘There is nothing worse than a slothful woman,' and she find something else for me to do. ‘Make me a cup of tea. The water must be boiling, and you must rinse the teapot in hot water before you put in
the tea leaves. Not more than three minutes, the tea must not steep for more than three minutes and then you are to pour it through a strainer, I am not a tea-leaf reader, so don't bring any cup full of tea leaves to me.' Stew guava and orange to make jam and marmalade. Learn to steam fish just the way she like it, because she don't eat meat. She read in some book that she have, how people who don't eat red meat live long, so every day all she cook is fresh fish, fresh fish and so-so fresh fish and stew peas without meat. She say that white bread is like poison. ‘Brown bread has roughage, Doris, roughage!' Every day she telling me how I must eat roughage, so she ordering me to cut up cabbage and eat it like rabbit. But is when she order me to iron one of her husband drill suits that I pack my bag and come back home. I tell her, ‘He is your husband, you should iron his clothes,' and she box me, so I leave, Mummah and Puppah, please, don't make me go back to Rose Cottage.”

But it was there that my mother was sent to stay before she married my father.

Rose Cottage was set on five acres of land in a rolling valley in the village of King's Vale. “Castle Rose Cottage,” as George O'Brian Wilson often referred to his granddaughter's house, could not be seen from the main road, and visitors had to make their way down a set of steps cut neatly into the hillside, until they came to the large white-painted, three-bedroom house built high on stilts. The house was called Rose Cottage because the entire garden was planted with fragrant pink, white, and cream rose bushes which bloomed in profusion from their neat, rectangular beds. Along the verandah, in special round clay pots made by a woman in the district called Congo Lou, Cleodine cultivated African violets. Indigo and purple and scarlet, brooding intense violets that were so strongly coloured you could stain your fingers by touching one
of the petals. Cleodine tended these herself, and all the brides-to-be were given strict orders by the yardman, as they sat there on the side verandah waiting to be shown into Cleodine's presence, never to “touch Miss Cleo's roses,” meaning the violets. Like many Jamaicans, he called all flowers roses.

By the time of my mother's marriage, Cleodine had become one of the most famous makers of brides in western Jamaica. Women came from as far as Montego Bay, Savanna la Mar, and Falmouth to be transformed into fabulous brides by Cleodine. The brides-to-be were rarely young. By the time they made their way to Rose Cottage they were usually “big women,” grown women who had lived for years with a man or with a series of men and had raised their children (who would then become attendants at the wedding) and worked and worked, and saved and made a life, all the time looking forward to their glorious wedding day. While they planted ground provisions and vegetables in a field, they would sometimes pause and look tenderly at bright potato flowers or garlands of yam vines and imagine their own bridal bouquets. As they slept on mats in the market, they imagined honeymoon beds, where all things would be made new again. When they put up with a man's wandering ways, wearing his hats and his shoes to show his other women who was the woman-a-yard, they heard themselves saying, “I have the talk, for I have the ring.” Every Sunday when they cooked rice and peas and chicken and watched family and friends gather round to eat and enjoy the taste of a good woman's hand, they visioned the day when friends and family, bearing presents, would come to raise a glass to “Mrs. Bride and Mr. Bridegroom.” And thereafter they would wave with their left hand to all, and watch their ring finger grow proud and stick out from the others on the left hand, for it was now weighted with gold. When the time finally came for the
women to make their way to Rose Cottage, they were ready to be born again into beautiful virginal brides, and there was nothing that Cleodine liked more than being completely in charge of a wedding.

“Take a seat on the side verandah” the brides-to-be were told by Cleodine or by one of her maids. Never the front, for only specially invited guests were ever allowed in through her front door. “No, I will not be making that dress for you, that style is utterly unsuitable for you,” she would say to some woman who had the temerity to come to her bearing a picture of a dress she had torn from a magazine. “All right Miss Cleo, anything you say, mam.” “You are not trying on this dress until you go and take a bath,” she was known to say to women come hot from the market to try on their wedding dress. “Here is a piece of soap and a towel, go and take a bath in the river before you try on this bridal gown,” she would say. And surprisingly, big, independent women who were older than Cleodine, who ran their own households like tyrants, would go meekly to the river and cleanse themselves just as Cleodine had ordered them to do. Once or twice she was heard to say, “I don't cast my pearls before swine” or “I will not waste powder on a blackbird,” as some rejected and dejected woman made her way from Rose Cottage, never to know the magic of being transformed by one of Cleodine's creations, for Cleodine on occasion would flatly refuse to take the custom of someone and she never would give any further explanation other than the one about the swine and blackbirds.

The centre of Rose Cottage was a large, high-ceilinged drawing room furnished with the elaborate furniture Cleodine had designed herself, and in pride of place, a pipe organ that she had ordered and had had shipped from England. Above the organ, just where she could raise her eyes to it as she pumped
away, was a large gilt-framed photograph of John Wesley. Cleodine, in a gesture of modernity and independence, had upon her marriage formally embraced the Wesleyan Church, forsaking the Anglican religion of her forefathers.

“Well, Doris, I hope you realize that a married woman's life is not just a bed of roses,” said Cleodine. They were sitting together in the gathering dusk on the front verandah of Rose Cottage. This time around, Cleodine had not ordered my mother about as she did on that disastrous first visit. She instead invited Doris to observe what she, the perfect example of a married woman, did with her days. “Everything must be done decently and in good order,” Cleodine lived by these words. She rose early, because the Bible said that is what good women did. She washed herself in warm water which was brought to her by the maid, applied cold cream to her face and neck in upward strokes, dressed herself in garments that were demoted church dresses, and put on her high-heeled pumps. She was always the tallest person in her house, always. Thus prepared, she would emerge from her room and order everyone under her roof to participate in morning prayers and the singing of hymns before partaking of a healthy breakfast. None of those oily saltfish and hard food, morning-dinner type breakfasts were ever served in her house, ever. Only fresh brown bread baked the day before, new-laid brown eggs, New Zealand butter, wholewheat or oats porridge, homemade preserves and tea, lots of good black tea brewed in a warmed pot and served with milk and brown sugar.

“This is how you do it,” she instructed as she showed my mother how to make a bed with the wrong side of the top sheet turned out so that the smoother right side is what touched you and your husband's skin when you lay down to rest. It is best to plan your meals in advance. You start the midday meal right
after breakfast, so your husband never, ever has to wait on his food. Always make sure your husband's clothes are in good order. A badly turned out husband reflects poorly on a wife. Always tidy yourself to greet your husband at the end of the day and make sure his supper is ready and that he has clean pyjamas to sleep in each night. And on and on, everything done perfectly, just so, right from morning till evening when the household was called to evening prayers, the lamps extinguished, and Rose Cottage put to bed.

My mother had turned red when her sister said that a married woman's life was not a bed of roses. Just the word
bed
made her embarrassed. Then her sister dropped her voice, as if she was sharing a terrible secret. “You cannot imagine what a terrible thing is going to happen to you,” Cleodine said, shaking her head from side to side and making clucking sounds in the back of her throat. “If you ever know what is before you,” she whispered. What was before her was of course her wedding night. Her sister continued, “If you ever know, the pain that a man puts a woman through, in order to get his pleasure!” My mother burst into tears sitting there in the dark on the burnished front verandah. Cleodine had left the “what was before you” discussion until last. For the seven days that my mother had spent at Rose Cottage, being groomed for her life as a “proper married woman,” Cleodine had made no mention of sex. She and her husband had separate bedrooms, and he was often “away” on business. Cleodine had shown her how to bake bread, how to spread a table for company, how to make perfect corners on a sheet, and how to iron a man's clothes. The proper ironing of a man's white shirt took an entire morning, with Cleodine sending my mother back to the ironing board three or four times until the perfectly ironed garment was produced. “No, the sleeves must not be seamed, the collar must
have no creases, iron it first on the wrong side, open up the inside seams, then iron it on the right side.” The ironing of a starched, white drill suit–with no creases in the sleeves of the jacket and perfectly straight seams in the trousers, and no creases on the fly–took almost one entire day. But there was no mention of sex.

Because the house was set in a valley, nightfall at Rose Cottage came early. Dusk then dark seemed to come to rest there before it reached Harvey River, and often, the Tilley lamps had to be lit from as early as 5 p.m. With dusk, an air of quiet melancholy often settled over Rose Cottage, with its shining floorboards, beautifully polished furniture, and everything in its right place. A heavy perfume of nightblooming jasmine, honeysuckle, and roses would waft in from the garden as Cleodine took her place at the pipe organ under the watchful eye of John Wesley, to play a selection of evensong hymns. It was after the organ recital that she would order all under her roof to take part in evening prayers before turning in for a long dark night.

The mahogany table in the dining room was always set with a place for Cleodine's husband, but often, when morning came, the place setting was undisturbed. “If it is too late, my husband sleeps in the room behind his businessplace,” explained Cleodine, although my mother had asked nothing about the undisturbed place setting. After a long pause, she said, “At this time of the year, business is brisk, he is probably not coming home again tonight.”

Except for the servants sleeping in the two rooms behind the house, my mother and her eldest sister were alone in Rose Cottage. By the light of the lamp that sat on the polished verandah table between them, my mother could make out her sister's profile that was growing to look more and more like Queen Victoria's. But on these nights, Cleodine looked like a
very sad queen. By day, her strong face was set like stone under her upswept hairdo, and no one, especially not her “subordinates,” dared to look directly into her amber brown eyes behind her gold-rimmed glasses. The tip of her middle finger, capped by a steel thimble, would drum steadily on the lid of her sewing machine as she issued brisk orders to the servants, “Go–tap tap–and fetch me–tap tap–a cup of tea.” “My husband is a hard-working man, I am proud that he will do whatever is necessary to succeed,” she said, then she was quiet for a moment, as if brooding upon exactly what her husband was doing in order to succeed. My mother knew enough about her sister to understand that this statement about her hard-working husband was one that was meant to stand by itself. One that did not invite any response from her, one that she was not welcome to comment upon.

My mother wanted to say something like “poor you.” She always said “poor you,” but she meant it as a genuine expression of solidarity and sympathy. She would have loved to have said to her sister, “Poor you, I hope that you are not too lonely,” but she knew that her sister would have considered it an impertinent remark, so she just kept silent. She wanted to ask her, “Since you are the only one of us Harvey girls who is married, and since you have shown me everything about how to keep a good house, what can you tell me about what is before me?” and Cleodine must have read her mind, because she then said, “I think it best that you read this book to acquaint yourself with what is before you.” In the semi-darkness of the verandah, she handed her a book entitled
Safe Counsel
. My mother, who always preferred a teaching story to any dry, fact-laden book, later said that she was too embarrassed to read it.