My Brother (2 page)

But this too is a true picture of my mother: When he was ill, each morning she would get up very early and make for her sick son a bowl of porridge and a drink of a fortified liquid food supplement and pack them in a little bag and go to the hospital, which is about a mile away and involves climbing up a rather steep hill. When she set out at about half past six, the sun was not yet in the middle of the sky so it was not very hot. Sometimes someone would give her a lift in a car, but most often no one did. When she got to the hospital, she would give my brother a bath, and when she was doing that she wouldn't let him know that she saw that the sore on his penis was still there and that she was worried about it. She first saw this sore by accident when he was in the hospital the first time, and when she asked him how he got such a thing, he said that from sitting on a toilet seat he had picked up something. She did not believe or disbelieve him when he told her that. After she bathed him, she dressed him in the clean pajamas she brought for him, and if his sheets had not been changed, she changed them and then while he sat in bed, she helped him to eat his food, the food she had prepared and brought to him.

When I first saw him, his entire mouth and tongue, all the way to the back of the inside of his mouth, down his gullet, was paved with a white coat of thrush. He had a small sore near his tonsil, I could see it when he opened his mouth wide, something he did with great effort. This made it difficult for him to swallow anything, but especially solid food. When he ate the porridge and drank the fortified liquid food supplement that my mother had brought for him, he had to make such an effort, it was as if he were lifting tons upon tons of cargo. A look of agony would come into his eyes. He would eat and drink slowly. Our mother, who loves to cook and see people eat the food she has cooked, especially since she knows she is an extremely good cook, would urge him to eat whenever she saw him pause (“Come on, man, yam up you food”) and he would look at her helplessly. Ordinarily he would have made his own sharp reply, but at those moments I do not think one crossed his mind. After she saw him eat his breakfast, she would tidy up his room, put his dirty clothes and bath towel in a bag to be taken home and washed; she would empty the pan that contained his urine, she would rub cream into the parched skin on his arms and legs, she would comb his hair as best she could. My mother loves her children, I want to say, in her way! And that is very true, she loves us in her way. It is
her way.
It never has occurred to her that her way of loving us might not be the best thing for us. It has never occurred to her that her way of loving us might have served her better than it served us. And why should it? Perhaps all love is self-serving. I do not know, I do not know. She loves and understands us when we are weak and helpless and need her. My own powerful memories of her revolve around her bathing and feeding me. When I was a very small child and my nose would become clogged up with mucus, the result of a cold, she would place her mouth over my nose and draw the mucus into her own mouth and then spit it out; when I was a very small child and did not like to eat food, complaining that chewing was tiring, she would chew my food in her own mouth and, after it was properly softened, place it in mine. Her love for her children when they are children is spectacular, unequaled I am sure in the history of a mother's love. It is when her children are trying to be grown-up people—adults—that her mechanism for loving them falls apart; it is when they are living in a cold apartment in New York, hungry and penniless because they have decided to be a writer, writing to her, seeking sympathy, a word of encouragement, love, that her mechanism for loving falls apart. Her reply to one of her children who found herself in such a predicament was “It serves you right, you are always trying to do things you know you can't do.” Those were her words exactly. All the same, her love, if we are dying, or if we are in jail, is so wonderful, a great fortune, and we are lucky to have it. My brother was dying; he needed her just then.

In his overbearingly charming reminiscence of how he became a gardener, Russell Page writes:

When I was a child there was a market each Friday in the old Palladian butter market near the Stonebow in Lincoln. The farmers' wives would drive in early in the morning, dressed in their best, with baskets of fresh butter, chickens, ducks and bunches of freshly picked mint and sage. I used often to be taken there by my grandfather's housekeeper while she made her purchases, and I remember that always, in the spring, there would be bunches of double mauve primroses and of the heavenly scented
Daphne mezereum.
Later when my passion for gardening developed I wanted these plants but could never find them in our friends' gardens. They seemed to grow only in cottage gardens in hamlets lost among the fields and woods. I gradually came to know the cottagers and their gardens for miles around, for these country folk had a knack with plants. Kitchen windows were full of pots with cascades of
Campanula isophylla,
geraniums, fuchsias and begonias all grown from slips. I would be given cuttings from old-fashioned pinks and roses which were not to be found in any catalogue, and seedlings from plants brought home perhaps by a sailor cousin—here was a whole world of modest flower addicts.

What would my brother say were he to be asked how he became interested in growing things? He saw our mother doing it. What else? This is what my family, the people I grew up with, hate about me. I always say, Do you remember? There are twelve banana plants in the back of his little house now, but years ago, when I first noticed his interest in growing things, there was only one. I asked my mother how there came to be twelve, because I am not familiar with the habits of this plant. She said, “Well…” and then something else happened, a dog she had adopted was about to do something she did not like a dog to do, she called to the dog sharply, and when the dog did not respond, she threw some stones at him. We turned our attention to something else. But a banana plant bears one bunch of fruit, and after that, it dies; before it dies it will send up small shoots. Some of my brother's plants had borne fruit and were dying and were sending up new shoots. The plantsman in my brother will never be, and all the other things that he might have been in his life have died; but inside his body a death lives, flowering upon flowering, with a voraciousness that nothing seems able to satisfy and stop.

I am so vulnerable to my family's needs and influence that from time to time I remove myself from them. I do not write to them. I do not pay visits to them. I do not lie, I do not deny, I only remove myself. When I heard that my brother was sick and dying, the usual deliberation I allow myself whenever my family's needs come up—should I let this affect me or not?—vanished. I felt I was falling into a deep hole, but I did not try to stop myself from falling. I felt myself being swallowed up in a large vapor of sadness, but I did not try to escape it. I became afraid that he would die before I saw him again; then I became obsessed with the fear that he would die before I saw him again. It surprised me that I loved him; I could see that was what I was feeling, love for him, and it surprised me because I did not know him at all. I was thirteen years old when he was born. When I left our home at sixteen years of age, he was three years of age. I do not remember having particular feelings of affection or special feelings of dislike for him. Our mother tells me that I liked my middle brother best of the three of them, but that seems an invention on her part. I think of my brothers as my mother's children.

When he was a baby, I used to change his diapers, I would give him a bath. I am sure I fed him his food. At the end of one day, when he was in the hospital and I had been sitting with him for most of the time, watching his body adjust to the AZT, medicine I had brought to him because I had been told that it was not available in Antigua, I said to him that nothing good could ever come of his being so ill, but all the same I wanted to thank him for making me realize that I loved him, and he asked if I meant that (“But fo' true?”) and I said yes, I did mean that. And then when I was leaving for the day and I said good night to him and closed the door behind me, my figure passed the louvered window of his room and from his bed, lying on his back, he could see me, and he called out, “I love you.” That is something only my husband and my children say to me, and the reply I always make to them is the reply I made to him: “I love you, too.”

He was lying in a small room with a very high ceiling, all by himself. In the hospital they place patients suffering from this disease in rooms by themselves. The room had two windows, but they both opened onto hallways so there was proper ventilation. There was a long fluorescent light hanging from the high ceiling. There was no table lamp, but why should there be, I only noticed because I have become used to such a thing, a table lamp; he did not complain about that. There was a broken television set in a corner, and when there were more than two visitors in the room it was useful as something on which to sit. It was a dirty room. The linoleum floor was stained with rust marks; it needed scrubbing; once he spilled the pan that contained his urine and so the floor had to be mopped up and it was done with undiluted Clorox. He had two metal tables and a chair made of metal and plastic. The metal was rusty and the underside of this furniture was thick with dirt. The walls of the room were dirty, the slats of the louvered windows were dirty, the blades of the ceiling fan were dirty, and when it was turned on, sometimes pieces of dust would become dislodged. This was not a good thing for someone who had trouble breathing. He had trouble breathing.

Sometimes when I was sitting with him, in the first few days of my seeing him for the first time after such a long time, seeing him just lying there, dying faster than most people, I wanted to run away, I would scream inside my head, What am I doing here, I want to go home. I missed my children and my husband. I missed the life that I had come to know. When I was sitting with my brother, the life I had come to know was my past, a past that does not make me feel I am falling into a hole, a vapor of sadness swallowing me up. In that dirty room, other people before him had died of that same disease. It is where they put people who are suffering from the virus that causes AIDS. When he was first told that he had tested positive for the virus, he did not tell our mother the truth, he told her he had lung cancer, he told someone else he had bronchial asthma, but he knew and my mother knew and anyone else who was interested would know that only people who tested positive for the AIDS virus were placed in that room in isolation.

I left him that first night and got into a car. I left him lying on his back, his eyes closed, the fluorescent light on. I rode in a hired car and it took me past the Magdalene maternity ward, where I was born, past the place where the Dead House used to be (a small cottage-like structure where the bodies of the dead were stored until their families came to claim them), but it is not there anymore; it was torn down when it grew rotten and could no longer contain the smells of the dead. And then I came to a major crossing where there was a stoplight, but it was broken and had been broken for a long time; it could not be fixed because the parts for it are no longer made anywhere in the world—and that did not surprise me, because Antigua is a place like that: parts for everything are no longer being made anywhere in the world; in Antigua itself nothing is made. I passed the prison, and right next to it the school my brother attended when he was a small boy and where he took an exam to go to the Princess Margaret School, and in the exam, which was an islandwide exam, he took third place of all the children taking this exam. I passed the Princess Margaret School. It was when he got to this school that he started to get into trouble. My mother says, about the friends he made there, that he fell into bad company, and I am sure the mothers of the other boys, his friends, thought of him in the same way—as bad company. It was while attending this school that he became involved in a crime, something to do with robbing a gas station, in which someone was killed. It was agreed that he did not pull the trigger; it is not clear that he did not witness the actual murder. At some point, years ago, my mother told me that he had spent a short time in jail for this crime and she got him out through political connections she then had but does not have any longer. Now she will not mention the murder or his time in jail. If I should bring it up, she says it is an old story (“e' a' ole time 'tory; you lub ole-time 'tory, me a warn you”), and for my mother an old story is a bad story, a story with an ending she does not like.

The car then turned onto Fort Road and passed Straffee's funeral establishment. I did not know then whether Mr. Straffee was dead or alive; when I was a small child and saw him, I thought he looked like the dead, even though at the time I thought that, I had never seen a dead person. I passed a house where my godmother used to live; she was a seamstress, she had been very nice to me. I do not know what has become of her. And I passed the road where an Englishman, Mr. Moore, who used to sell my mother beefsteak tomatoes, lived. This man also had cows, and one day when I was going to visit my godmother, they were returning from pasture and I saw them coming toward me, and I was so afraid of those cows that I threw myself into a ditch facedown and waited until I knew they had gone by. The road has been widened and the ditch is no more. I passed the place where the Happy Acres Hotel used to be. It, too, is no more. On a road that led from this hotel a friend of our family used to live, a friend whom my brothers would not have known because by the time they were born my mother no longer spoke to this person. The friend reared pigs and guinea hens and chickens and also cultivated an acre or so of cotton. At the height of their friendship my mother had bought shares in a sow this friend of hers owned, and also, since it was at the height of their friendship, I was sent one year to spend August holidays with her. This part of Antigua was considered the country then, and I was terrified of the darkness, it was so unrelieved by light even from other houses; also from the house where I lived I could see the St. John's city graveyard, and it seemed to me that almost every day I could see people attending a funeral. It was then I decided that only people in Antigua died, that people living in other places did not die and as soon as I could, I would move somewhere else, to those places where the people living there did not die. After another minute or so of driving, the car arrived at the inn where I was staying and I went into my room alone, my own isolation.