What You Call Winter Page 5
Roddy still saw the ghost from time to time: his father tall and stiff on the small-sized bicycle or standing legs apart, hands linked at the back, to stare out at the sea. When the ghost finally did turn to stare back at him one day, just three weeks before he was to go to the States, Roddy found that the weight of his father’s gaze was not what he’d remembered as a twelve-year-old. Not at all, and he was not afraid.
The Bold, the Beautiful
The procedure to remove Grace’s cataract was originally scheduled for the week before her elder daughter, Colleen, came to visit. But Grace developed a chest cold, and although the doctor felt perfectly confident that he could move forward, Grace herself was not convinced. She allowed her younger daughter, Bianca, to keep the appointment, she let Bianca drive her to the doctor’s clinic in neighboring Santa Cruz, she waited until she had been admitted to the examination room. But once there, Bianca reported to Colleen, their mother refused to remove her sweater.
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” Grace looked up at the doctor’s assistant helplessly. In her hands was the thin cotton garment that she had been instructed to wear. “I have a cold, you see. Will this be enough?”
The assistant, not equal to the task of persuading her, had called Bianca in from the waiting room.
“Mummy doesn’t want to change,” she said.
“And that was it?” asked Colleen. It was after eleven, the hour when Colleen knew she could reach her sister at home. Bianca lived with her husband and children in a flat just above her mother’s.
“No, no. She waited to see the doctor. Embarrassing, actually. His waiting room was full of people, and there’s Mum calling him in to have a chat.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, you know how she is, doctor this, doctor that. I think she only wanted sympathy. She went on and on about her cold …”
“She’s been nervous about the procedure,” Colleen said. “Every time I call, she tells me how anxious she is.”
Bianca snorted. “She’d have no reason to be anxious if she’d let us take her to the doctor a year ago. When you come I’ll give you the whole story—but she’s known for months she’s had a problem. Now the doctor says she’s left this so long that the cataract has hardened.”
“You like this doctor, Biddy? He’s good?” She used the old family name for her sister.
“He’s fantastic with her. He listened to all her questions, and finally he said there was no point going forward until she feels comfortable. So we’ve rescheduled for the end of next week. Such a nuisance, Colls. I wanted it finished before you came—”
“It’s just as well this way. Now I can help. You can’t be running back and forth with her all day. You can’t miss that much work.”
“And can you believe — I have to go to Bangalore for two days at least. I can’t put it off.” Biddy ran her own business out of an office in the ground-floor flat. She exported silks.
“Why put it off? I’ll be there; I can look after her.”
Biddy seemed unconvinced. “There’s a whole regimen of drops. Six times a day, and you know she won’t put them in herself. I’ve got the instructions, but there’s all sorts of bother, one has to be refrigerated —”
“I can do it,” Colleen said. “Just leave everything until I come.” Her sister didn’t answer, she noticed. Instead she turned the subject to flight times. It would take Colleen an hour to get through immigration and customs, she guessed. Biddy’s husband, Lionel, would be at the airport to meet her.
The trouble with Grace’s vision was discovered by accident.
“God knows she didn’t breathe a word of it — not to me, at any rate.” They were sitting on Biddy’s terrace. Colleen was to stay with her mother, but she’d arrived so late that the sisters decided not to wake her; she could move down in the morning. Colleen had shed her thick sweater and was having a beer. Biddy looked elegant even in the small hours of the morning: rings and bangles, a silk scarf knotted perfectly, long legs stretching to the railing. She had kicked her heels carelessly to the floor, and Colleen saw that her toes were painted vivid red. “I should have figured it out. She’s been squinting at the television. But I thought that was the onions. She’s taken to doing kitchen work while she watches — from her chair, mind you.”
Every afternoon at three, the hour of Christ’s Crucifixion, Grace sat in the armchair that had once been her husband’s favorite and said the prayers of the rosary. At three thirty, her prayers completed, she took careful aim with the remote control and tuned the television to her favorite program, the daily broadcast of an American soap opera.
“Such nonsense, The Bold and the Beautiful. Mum’s totally devoted—we get an earful if she has to miss a day. And while she watches, she’s chopping.” Biddy’s voice rose in complaint. “She keeps the cutting board out on her lap and in the middle of her program, she’s sawing away at a tomato. She takes half an hour at least for each onion — every slice has to be absolutely perfect — she won’t even let the girl do it. ‘They must be even, babe,’ she says, ‘or the smaller pieces will burn.’”
Colleen laughed.
“So she sits there crying away, from the TV or the onion, God only knows, with her fingers wet and slippery, and this cutting board perched on her lap — I tell you, she’ll cut herself to the bone one of these days — and nobody noticed that she could hardly see the screen.” Biddy mimicked her mother, leaning forward and peering across the street at the dark form of another flat building. “But you know, every day you’re in and out, you don’t notice these things that happen gradually. I only realized when I came down one evening and found her sobbing. And there was Uncle Frank standing beside her chair, looking positively miserable to find himself in the midst of all this waterworks, telling me, ‘Mummy’s upset.’”
Colleen had to put down her beer; her sister could make her laugh as no one else could. She felt instantly, entirely at home again, as though all the hours of the flight had wisped away.
“When Mum realized she was having trouble with her vision, she didn’t say a word to me. What was she thinking — I’m right upstairs! How many times a day do I see her? But she decided she’d better confide in Uncle Frank.”
Uncle Frank was their mother’s eldest brother. Decades ago, before Uncle Frank had married, their father had bought three plots on St. Hilary Road: the biggest for himself, to be inherited by Frank; a second for his youngest son (the middle boy, a priest, would not be in need of property); and a third as a dowry for Colleen’s mother, Grace. Ten years ago Uncle Peter had torn down his house to make way for a flat building, and three years ago Grace had done the same. But the family still lived all in a row.
“So Uncle Frank says not to worry, he knows just what to do. Now. You remember Abdul?”
“Of course.” Abdul ran a medical stand among the street vendors on one of Santa Clara’s main shopping roads. For years she had seen it as she passed: its three flimsy walls, the size of a refrigerator crate; the stained and yellowed eye chart hanging from a tack; the sign proclaiming, WELL VERSED IN MEDICAL SCIENCES in English and Hindi. It stood between the mochi’s stall, where she used to have her slippers resoled, and the sugarcane cart, where she bought glasses of sweet cloudy juice when her throat was dry from the bus ride home. She had been gone only ten years; the streets were caught in her memory as in a shaft of clear, hot light.
“He died a few weeks ago actually—a pity we can’t go over and shake him. Uncle Frank took Mum to see him.”
“Oh, Biddy!” Colleen could see it all: Uncle Frank, ushering her mother to see his old friend and standing by, determined to hide his concern in a series of gruff instructions that the eye is to be fixed, no matter what the cost—he only is paying. Her mother standing before the doctor stand, rubbing her eye furiously, as if she might yet dislodge a telltale bit of dirt, perhaps prompted by Uncle Frank to describe the way the people on television seem to move behind a cloud, no matter how close she brings her chair.
“It is a dead eye,” Abdul announced after the examination. And then to Uncle Frank, “What can I do, my friend? What can be done? Some die suddenly, some die a piece at a time. The eye is gone.”
“Oh, no!” Colleen laughed.
“Poor thing. And I think Uncle Frank felt as bad as she did. So he brought her home with this death sentence, and that’s how I found the pair of them. That jackass Abdul! And even after they broke down and confessed, I had the whole song and dance from Mum—’No, no, I don’t want to be trouble, I don’t know this doctor, let me see if there’s someone who so-and-so-who’s-ninety-three knows, I can’t go during my program, maybe next week is better, he’s looking too young, babe’ — I’ve had a hell of a time getting her in there.” Biddy turned suddenly; the door to the flat had opened.
“Lionel?” But he had poured the beers and gone to make up Colleen’s bed. “Who’s there?”
“I heard the lift.” Their mother’s voice was more quavering than Colleen remembered. And then she came into view, peeping through the doorway, her face hopeful.
“My God, Mum, what are you wearing?” Biddy had begun to laugh. Grace had pulled a pair of elastic-waisted trousers on top of her nightgown and wrapped a shawl over her head. “You look like a Russian peasant!”
“This night air, babe, and with my cold!” She laughed at herself then and even did a little pirouette, one hand above her head and the other on her hip, before hugging Colleen. “Hi, darling, hi, hi! I was waiting for you to come and then I must have dropped off.”
They sat up laughing and talking for nearly an hour, Grace holding Colleen’s hand in her own lap and patting it occasionally, until Lionel cleared away the glasses and told them hush, they would wake the children.
Colleen stayed with her mother and got up early, her hours reversed. There was a kitchen girl who came in the mornings, Colleen knew, but she hadn’t yet arrived. Colleen made herself a cup of tea and surveyed the kitchen. The bottom of the frying pan had burnt black, she saw, scraping at the carbon with a spoon. There was a new tea set, but the chipped mismatched cups she recognized from years past were still on the shelf. She chose one and went to sit on the terrace.
The yard had been landscaped. A row of spindly young trees lined the wall, and a tiled path led to the concrete drive, neatly creating two small squares of grass. A clump of bougainvillea mounded the pistachio-colored wall. Colleen had left India before her mother decided to sell to contractors. It was a sensible decision, Colleen knew. Her mother had been sharing the house with Biddy and Lionel, who had two children by then and were expecting their third. Flats would mean a place of their own. Lionel did all he could, but the house was in need of repair and updating at prohibitive costs. And even if such improvements were possible, the house itself had become a liability, susceptible to a recent batch of heritage laws. The family would have been obliged to maintain it in pristine condition while paying exorbitant taxes for the privilege of living in what had become a piece of history. The old bungalows, their roofs slanting low over the verandas like sharp-knit brows, gave way to blank-faced flat buildings with lifts and the promise of new pipes. The cement mosaic floors were easy to clean, Grace had told Colleen, who mourned the lost tile. Her mother found Colleen’s nostalgia amusing and puzzling and of course, Colleen knew, yet another proof that her daughter was bright enough but lacking common sense. Colleen and her brothers had been given flats as well; they tumbled down toward her mother’s in birth order. Her brothers had rented theirs to tenants, but Colleen had promptly sold her rights to Biddy and Lionel, who took over the ground floor for Biddy’s silk business. The title to the land had gone, and the flat below Grace’s served as payment to the contractor, who made a nice profit selling to a Hindu family. “Actually they’re very quiet,” Grace reported with a note of surprise that irritated Colleen. But Grace insisted on the right to name the building and to choose its pale green color. She called it Shamrock Lodge: a tribute, she told Colleen, to the Irish priests who had come through Santa Clara on tours of Catholic India, or stayed for longer stints to study or serve in the schools and parishes, and in whose honor Colleen herself had been named. It was a Father Joe from County Kerry, with whom her mother still corresponded—“such a gentle man but with a mischievous look”—who had given Biddy her nickname. Colleen wondered how Father Joe had received the news that his two years in Santa Clara had inspired this remarkable new address and perhaps the even more remarkable sign that Grace had commissioned, its lettering encased in a three-leaved border of wrought iron. “I wanted Leprechaun’s Lair, but the signmaker says the word is too long. He could split it with a hyphen—but that would not be very pretty, do you think? He says something shorter is better.” Colleen, given the circumstances, had agreed with the signmaker.
When Colleen came in again, her mother was at the table with a cardigan buttoned over her nightgown and shabby bedroom slippers on. She was squinting slightly and smelled of Vicks. “Hi, darling,” she murmured, putting a hand to Colleen’s cheek. Her hands were plump, the wrinkles soft.
Her mother had been slender as a young woman, with hollows beneath her cheekbones and a delicate jawline, but she had not aged the way Colleen expected. Her father had been tall and fair, with the broad face Colleen had inherited and the same wide-set eyes and thick bridge of the nose, the same cheeks, flat and even. When he grew older, his hair had gone the color of iron, his skin yellowed, as though a page of old newspaper, and his large hands seemed larger, more flapping, as he slowly lost his strength. He was nearly twenty years older than her mother and had died eighteen years ago after several years of heart complaints. But her mother had gone spongy, like something left too long to soak. Her hands reminded Colleen of overripe fruit.
“Up so early, babe?”
Colleen saw the dark pouches beneath her mother’s eyes. “Go and rest a bit longer, Mum. I heard you coughing.”
“I’m always up at this hour. So I can see the girl when she comes.” She refused the cup Colleen offered her, one of the new set. “Only the two of us—we can use the old and save these nice ones. Babe? Should I just show you where my papers are? We don’t know what will happen with this surgery …”
“Mum, it’s a common procedure. You should be in and out in a few hours.”
“No, babe, you don’t know what doctor’s told me. The cataract has—what’s the word he used—advanced. It’s very serious.”
“But not dangerous, Mum.”
“I’m telling you what he said! Biddy was there, she knows. Doctor says this is very rare.”
“That’s because you left it so long. You should go for regular checkups, Mum. You shouldn’t wait for one of us to have to push you.”
“What pushing have you done? I didn’t ask you to come and push! I’m happy to look after myself. You don’t have to do a thing.”
Her mother had raised her head indignantly; now she dropped her gaze and concentrated on her teacup, her hand quivering.
“That’s not what I mean. Of course I want to help.” Colleen paused. “But let’s finish this off and then we can enjoy the rest of my visit.”
Grace smiled slightly.
“I’ve got some things for you, too,” Colleen said. “A good pan, nonstick.”
“I have a pan.” Grace looked up.
“You can use a new one—that one’s covered in black. It’s not safe to cook like that, Mum.”
“It’s perfectly safe. A little stained, that’s all.” Grace frowned as she put a hand toward the kettle, then allowed Colleen to pour her a cup. “So …” She stirred a careful spoon and a half of sugar into her cup. “You’ve heard Toby Fernandez is engaged?”
“Biddy told me. To Violet Rebello, is it? I went to school with her sister.”
“Yes,” her mother said, in a tone that suggested all was not necessarily certain. “She’s an older girl, of course.”
“Younger than Toby.”
“Older than you, I mean. And not so pretty. Her face
is too lean. And the mouth is big. A wolfish face.”
“Mum! You’re terrible!” She laughed. “I’m only saying what I see!”
Colleen resisted the temptation to point out that her mother’s vision was impaired. “I don’t remember anything like that.”
“Well, you see only what you want to see.” Grace sipped her tea and put it down with a certain smug pleasure at having answered her daughter so neatly, and with the stylized innocence that was her usual guise when masking some deeper anger or worry.
“I’ll have to try to come for the wedding.” Colleen made a point of speaking lightly. “It’ll be this Christmas?”
“Yes,” Grace said tightly. Then, unable to restrain herself even when she had decided to be cool: “Of course they’ll be in a rush. This Violet must be nearing forty.”
Colleen said nothing. Her mother’s mood at such moments could be tipped in too many directions — fury, despair, relief, triumph—to make conversation safe terrain.
“Even if they married tomorrow, he might very well be cutting off his chance for children.”
“He must know that. Perhaps they don’t want children.”
“Tcha!”
Colleen made her voice as gentle as she could. “I’m very pleased for them, Mum.” Grace sniffed.
“I am. We’re friends, but not that kind of friend. I’ve told you.”
She had not told her mother everything, naturally; she had not told her mother that before she left India, Toby had made her an offer. But perhaps her mother guessed as much. And Colleen could guess, too, how much her answer had cost her mother. She could be living right down the road. There might have been grandchildren.
“You were so well suited, babe,” Grace said, and Colleen saw that this time — as was perhaps the case too many times in her company—her mother had tipped toward sadness.
Colleen had bathed and dressed when she heard footsteps on the stairs. The door of the flat was open; Biddy’s children sometimes came down to greet their grandmother in the mornings. Grace had dressed but returned to the table and her teacup. “It may be Sachi — she doesn’t like the lift,” she said to Colleen, then called into the corridor: “Who’s there, who’s come?”