Boundaries (15 page)

For her father, the baby is the British system of laws, the British system of government, the British system of education. The British system of table manners. It would be futile, Anna knows, to engage him in an argument that there could be, and are, other ways better than the British ways.

“What’s the advice you wanted to give me?” she asks. “I interrupted you. You were saying something about working hard.”

“Life,” he says and sighs again, this time deeply. His shoulders collapse when he exhales. “It’s short. One minute you’re a boy in short pants, next minute your knees lock when you try to get up.”

“Oh, Daddy.”

“It’s true. I’m an old man and it seems that only yesterday I was climbing coconut trees.”

“You’re not an old man.”

“I’m eighty-two.”

She cannot deny that eighty-two is old, but she does not want to go down the road with him that starts with his age and leads to his mortality and inevitable death. “I enjoy my job,” she says.

“Yes, but you must take time to smell the roses.”

“
You
worked hard.”

“I also hunted and fished. Your mother and I traveled.”

“I don’t have a husband.”

She silences him with this swift retort and is immediately remorseful. He worries about her. He worries that without a husband she may end up a lonely old woman in a foreign land. He has told her he read somewhere that married women live longer than unmarried women; they are happier when they have a companion. But he is not as direct as her mother; he does not try to find a husband for her. It is of no concern to him whether or not the doctor who will operate on his wife is married. His interest is in the doctor’s surgical skills, his ability to save his wife’s life. Her mother wants to know.
Does he have a wife?
She presses her husband to give her the answer.

But now Anna detects the slight strain of anxiety that enters her father’s eyes and it makes her uncomfortable. She does not want to give him false hope, just enough hope to put the light back in his eyes. She tells him she had dinner with Paul Bishop the night before. She expects they will see more of each other.

“I like him,” her father says brightly, clearly relieved.

“Paul’s a good man. And a good surgeon.”

“Mummy couldn’t have been in better hands.”

“He’s a good friend for you too. It makes me happy to know you don’t spend all your time working.”

“I don’t.” She is aware she says this too quickly, too harshly. The clatter of dirty dishes and cutlery piled up on trays as people make their way out of the cafeteria fills the empty space that opens up between them. When her father speaks again, he has returned to the question he asked her when they sat down to eat. “Tell me about your job. Are you happy at Equiano?”

She does not want to tell him about Tim Greene. She does not want to give voice to suspicions that may yet be unfounded. She tells him about Tanya Foster. “She’s leaving the company,” she says.

“Is that anything you should be worried about?”

“No.”

“No?”

He is quizzing her. A man as brilliant as her father, who has spent years in the maze of labor relations, can easily detect the undercurrent of concern coursing through the single word she used. “Only that she’s the one who hired me,” she says, hoping to cover up her gaffe.

“Sometimes we make too much about the importance of our jobs in our lives. Have you read
The Iliad
?”

She is puzzled by this curious detour. “Yes,” she says cautiously.

“And what do you make of Achilles?”

“The best of the Greek warriors. He lived for the glory of war.”

“Most people think so. But he preferred life to the glory of war.” He sits back in his chair and closes his eyes. “
O
shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying. I would rather follow
the plow as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him
and not much to live on, than be a king over all the perished dead.
” He opens his eyes. “Enjoy your life, Anna. Don’t set too much stock on your job. Enjoy life while you are still young.”

ELEVEN

H
er father does not spend the night in the hospital. It is not by choice. He would have if his wife had allowed him. He would have stretched out on the armchair near her bed, his legs propped up on the footstool the nurses have given him, and declared he was as comfortable as if he were in his own bed. Indeed, this is what he tells his wife. “I like it here,” he claims.

“Don’t be silly, John,” his wife responds. “Your old legs must be cramped by now. You’re not a young man. And besides, you smell.”

Her husband does not take offense. He kisses her on her forehead. “And you smell like an angel,” he says.

Beatrice grimaces. It’s a pretense, Anna knows. She is pleased by the compliment, the reassurances her husband gives her of his undying love. “Take him away,” Beatrice says to Anna, who has come to fetch him for dinner. “And don’t bring him back until tomorrow morning. Make sure he takes a shower and changes his clothes. He’s worn the same pants for two days now.”

John Sinclair does not give up. “I’ll come back after dinner.”

His wife faces him. Anna is startled by what she sees. Her mother’s eyes are misty; the hand she raises trembles slightly. “I know, I know,” she whispers. Her father grasps her raised hand. No more words pass between them and yet everything they need to say is said. When her mother finally slips her hand out of his and waves toward the door, her father leaves with his shoulders slumped.

It is a moment of intimacy that is too raw for Anna. She walks quickly out of the room.

The next morning Dr. Bishop comes to check on Beatrice. She is sitting up, waiting for him. She is ready to go home, she says. “I feel fine.” The nurses cannot deny she is telling the truth. They are amazed by her rapid recovery. She was walking up and down the corridors of the hospital the day after her surgery, stopping to chat with the other patients.

Paul Bishop says he cannot make promises, but he’ll see what he can do. When he leaves, Beatrice grumbles that all the hospital wants is her money. There is no reason for her to take up a bed that someone else might need.

Anna is surprised to hear her speak of money. Her husband handles all her affairs. He denies her nothing. She asks and she receives. He keeps accounts for her in the best stores on the island. She simply goes there and orders what she wants or needs. He leaves the running of the house to her, and has set up an account for that purpose. Yet she makes him pay the salaries of their housekeeper, the gardener, the boys who mow and weed the lawn, the woman who washes and irons their clothes. On the matter of laundering clothes she is consistent with the philosophy she and her husband share. They believe a person’s privacy is inviolate, to be honored and respected. They will brook no intrusion into their private lives. So her mother will not allow the woman who comes twice a week to launder their intimate apparel. She herself washes the undergarments she and her husband wear. She washes their towels, washcloths, bed linens, any fabric that has touched their private parts.

Though her husband provides her with a sizable account for the domestic affairs of her house, Beatrice Sinclair keeps a private account inaccessible to her husband. Every week she takes a little something from the house account and puts it in this private one. A woman would be foolish not to keep a little something for herself, she tells Anna. John Sinclair is a very generous man, but it’s important for a woman to have money of her own. Just in case, she says.

Just in case what? Anna has never been able to get an answer from her. But perhaps now is such a case, such a
just in case
. They do not have insurance. On their island, the government pays for the medical treatment of its citizens. The downside, of course, is high taxes. Another downside is that without the motive for profit, hospitals are poorly supervised. Equipment is not properly maintained or disappears outright. Doctors make little more than university professors and, envious of their counterparts in America, they either emigrate or supplement their salaries by collecting fees from patients they see separately in offices they own or in the private hospitals managed by businessmen. The affluent are willing to pay the fees and the cost of a private hospital. Beatrice and John Sinclair are among the affluent, but Dr. Ramdoolal has little confidence in the private hospitals,
nursing homes
they are called, no irony intended. “Go to the States,” he urged them.

So perhaps Beatrice has discovered the cost of medical treatment in America. Perhaps on one of her walks down the corridor, she has inquired and has been told of the enormous fees the hospital charges for each day she remains in her room. John Sinclair can pay these fees, Anna is certain, but her mother will not put this burden on him. She feels well, she says. It’s time for her to leave the hospital. She wants to go home.

When he makes his rounds later in the afternoon, Dr. Bishop agrees to discharge her. “But you’ll have to stay in the country a little longer, until I can be sure your sutures have healed.”

He has misunderstood her. Beatrice Sinclair does not mean her home on the island where she lives with her husband. “I want to go home,” she says. “To Anna’s.”

So the day has come, the day Anna fears. In the morning her mother will come home to her Brooklyn apartment.

She should be pleased. Her mother’s decision should relieve her. She has spent two days with her parents in New Jersey, and now she needs to return to work. Tim Greene has made her wait a full day before he answers her e-mail and when he does, he ignores the one she sent him. He does not forward the edits he recommends for Raine’s new novel. He writes not one word about his meeting with the author. His e-mail is brief. It begins with the usual deference he extends to her as the head of Equiano. He is sympathetic, concerned for her mother’s health, upbeat about the future of the company.

Her blood boiling, Anna clicks the delete icon on the computer and then rethinks her spontaneous impulse. She should keep a record of this e-mail Tim Greene has sent to her. It reeks of insincerity, not even measuring up to sycophancy. She needs to keep Paula’s warning in mind: Tim Greene is not to be trusted. She recovers the e-mail from the trash folder and reads it again. He is toying with her. In the office he addresses her as boss—
Good morning, boss. Have
a nice evening, boss
—but he uses her first name in the salutation of his e-mail, ready to apologize if she objects. Tanya Foster, however, is plain Tanya to him. He knows she is leaving the company, though Tanya claimed she has not yet made the announcement of her departure official. They are friends, Anna is certain.

Already anxious about her mother’s arrival in her apartment, Anna busies herself packing her things and her parents’ things for their trip back to Brooklyn in an attempt to keep her mind off Tim Greene’s e-mail. Perhaps she is wrong. Perhaps Tim Greene does not even intend to stay with the company. She doesn’t think of herself as a person inclined to paranoid thoughts or conspiracy theories, yet she finds herself unable to dismiss the possibility that Tanya intends to take Tim Greene with her when she moves to the new company. Perhaps Tim Greene has not responded to her queries about Raine’s new novel because he plans to poach Raine for the new company. Let him do that! Anna is suddenly elated. Her body shudders with a perverse feeling of satisfaction. Let them both do that, she says to herself, finding relief at last from the thoughts swirling in her head. Let them take Raine, and Benton too. Raine will have to honor the contract she has with Equiano for her next novel, but then Raine will owe them nothing except the right of first refusal. And Anna will make sure Raine will not have to wait long. If her suppositions are correct, she will refuse the author’s next book. She does not want to publish books like Raine’s. She will take advantage of Tanya’s departure. She will turn Equiano into a company she can be proud of, a company that will publish the kinds of books by black writers who do not play into the stereotype of black people as oversexed, grossly materialistic, money-grabbing, greedy individuals who might seek violent ways to get what they want. She will shepherd the company toward fulfilling the promise of its namesake, Olaudah Equiano, an African who survived the brutality of slavery in America and went on to write an inspiring autobiography that at once exposed the cruelty of the slave owners and revealed his own extraordinary fortitude and brilliant mind.

Her anxiety now greatly reduced, Anna picks out a change of clothing for her father. Her mother has packed her own clothes in the valise she brought to the hospital. She will not leave in the same clothes she wore when she arrived. She is a woman who is fanatical about cleanliness, particularly regarding her person. On the island, she changes her clothes at least twice a day. She will not have four o’clock tea with her husband in the same clothes she wore to breakfast. She would have been in the garden all morning supervising Singh, and her clothes would be damp with perspiration from the broiling sun. For hours she would have trailed behind Singh instructing him on how to pot the seedlings, how to trim the orchids, how to replant the impatiens that are wilting in the sun. There is nothing she says that Singh would not have already known—he has a magnificent garden of his own—but between them there is an understanding that continues to baffle Anna. When her mother issues orders, Singh complies. It is as if nothing has changed for them since colonial times except for the skin color of the colonizer. Then Anna is thrown into confusion when she sees them laughing together, playing games in the sunlight with the garden hose, her mother spouting water on Singh, Singh running across the lawn, her mother right behind him giggling like a schoolgirl.