The Worlds Within Her (53 page)

“They try to blame me. They say is me who set me eye on Mr. Vernon. Is me who bring him to my room, is me who …

“My father just start to swing the stick. Mr. Vernon calm him down and say, ‘Come have a drink, man, how 'bout a shot o' whisky.' And the two o' them go off together.

“As I done say, it have people for who money is everyt'ing, and if you t'row enough at them everyt'ing all right. My father catch everyt'ing Mr. Vernon t'row at him. He din't even come back to see me.

“So they keep me here, and when time come, take me off to the beach house to have the chil'. I never see the baby, they ain't even tell me if it was a boy-chil' or a girl-chil'. They jus' say they given' it to somebody to bring up.

“Beti, all that happen forty years ago and not a day does pass when I don' think 'bout that chil'. I still sleepin' in the same room downstairs. In the same bed. Never get married. What man goin' to want a use-up woman like me, eh?

“But you know, is a strange t'ing. For years afterwards, Mr. Vernon use to come to see me — not in my room, never again in my room. He did want to talk, like a little boy, in a small-small voice. He tell me what he was doin', what was happenin'. And I listen, I let him talk, never say nothing. But all the time thinkin', I want to kill you, I want to kill you. But never doin' it because, well, they does hang women here too, Beti.

“So is here I make my life, as a servant girl, t'rough every-t'ing. I never ask for nothing, and they give me everyt'ing I need. And t'rough everyt'ing they keep me on, because everybody, from your old dead grandmother on down, they know what they owe me. They know.

“A whole life.

“An' I suppose you have to say they good people. You have to say they does pay their debts.”

IT WAS A
bizarre time, Mrs. Livingston. The family knew, of course, but no one else. The mother was kept out of sight, in comfort, I might add, her silence purchased with a promise that her needs would always be seen to. There was some concern for my husband's reputation, although this was not seen as a problem of great magnitude. Where I come from, you see, many would simply have admired his virility … But still, the problem was best avoided.

The charade took some planning. Word was put out, discreetly, that I was with child. I forced myself to eat more than usual in an attempt to put on weight and, in the later months, took to padding my clothes. I kept mostly to myself, sequestered like the mother. The hacks were told that my condition was delicate, that I required bed-rest, and so this was floated about. Only once was the theatre challenged, some cousin commenting that I hardly looked pregnant. I was flustered but my husband leapt to the rescue. “You should see her with no clothes on,” he laughed, “she looks like she swallowed a little
football, nothing more.”

And this was how the charade was conducted for seven months, my dear — in silence saved by humour.

Humiliating for me, some might say. But you understand, don't you, that this served my own purposes admirably. The circumstance in which I found myself was not about to simply disappear. It had to be dealt with. I was in the position of having to weigh humiliations, and the greatest, had word of this got out, would have been mine. The pathetic, betrayed wife. I had no intention of suffering amused pity, my dear.

I stuck it through to the very end. I was even present for the birth, which took place in the seclusion of a beach house. A simple process with no complications, performed with surprising ease. The mother uttered hardly a whimper. When Yasmin emerged, she was passed immediately to me — living proof of my virtue and of my husband's.

Now listen closely, my dear, you must promise me that after you have woken up — if you wake up — you will breathe not a word of what I have told you, for I have offered you the truth about the lie that has seen me through years that would otherwise have been meaningless. Yasmin has given shape and sense to my life, and I fear so terribly the moment when I must — and I know that I must — alter the shape and possibly the sense of her own …

But of course I
shall
tell her. One day. So, at least, I have always promised myself. I owe her that truth. But time has gone along and the perfect moment has failed to materialize. Now I fear it will not come until I am on my deathbed — and even then …

I lack the courage, you see. For Yasmin is my daughter, and I fear losing her as I fear nothing else.

YASMIN PLACES HER
hands on Amie's shoulders, gently turns her around.

Amie's eyes are shut, a single tear glistening a path down her left cheek.

She takes Amie's hands, folds them between hers.

And so they sit together, worlds meeting in a dissolution of time.

Slowly the light of a luminous dawn shapes itself into the cracks and moulding of the window and, with imperceptible force, nudges out the night.

They sit until somewhere in the distance a cock crows.

Until sunshine grows bright on the window.

Until time hardens.

Amie takes her hands away, gets to her feet. She looks long at Yasmin through softened eyes. The she reaches out a hand and briefly presses her fingertips to her forehead.

HER SLEEP, UNINTENDED
, has been that of exhaustion: deep and uneasy, with a mote of restlessness fluttering at the edges.

When she awakes — the room airless, daylight hard and demanding at the window — it is with the sensation of emerging from some faraway place, a region so remote it defies memory.

It is not long, however, before the heaviness in her head clears to a sense of peacefulness, a serenity she has not known in a very long time.

This is her last morning. Today she will fulfill the obligation that has brought her here, into her mother's world. Then she will take her things and depart, back to the world that is hers.

And it
is
hers. She has opened her eyes with this certainty, with a knowledge that bypasses the details of place and passport, an understanding beyond language, that feels embedded in the flesh itself.

A river takes shape in her mind. A river of countless tributaries with no source and no issue. A river unchannelled by banks, its water limpid, flowing unimpeded. A river that is all movement made manifest, suggestive of secrets submerged and unknowable.

She thinks of her family known and unknown. If the journey begun so long ago, from a land that yet pulsed in her mother, a stranger to it; a land now gone inert in herself; a land extending still its mythic hold on Ash.

She thinks of movement and migration, of beginnings that are
not beginnings and ends that are not ends.

She thinks in her mother's voice: Every destination is unknown, but the journey must carry on.

The urn is oval-shaped, lacquered black, and indented in red and gold with a leafy pattern that is vaguely Chinese. Even in the warmth of the room, it is cool to her touch.

She taps at it with her nail. Plastic. Over Jim's objections, she had paid for wood. But there's nothing to be done about that now.

She tries to open the urn but the lid will not budge. At the joint, nearly invisible, a drop of dried glue reveals that it has been sealed. She takes a nail file from her suitcase and pries at the joint, working the curved point into it. The plastic is hard and smooth, shell-like. Minuscule bits splinter off.

Her hands grow moist. Perspiration trickles down her temple. The urn, she thinks, is made to last for eternity; the plastic, which will not even degrade over time, resisting her attempts to force it open.

She wipes her palms on her thighs and resumes the work with renewed determination.

More plastic chips off, larger pieces now. But still the joint does not give. She presses hard, and the file slips, rasping a lengthy scratch into the surface of the bowl. Her back stiffens in a sudden rage, her fist trembling, teeth clenched so tight the pressure rises to her forehead.

Her face falls into her hands, breath hot and fast against the palms.

After a few minutes she calms herself, fingertips pressing circles into her temples, soothing the throbbing pulse.

Then she picks up the nail file and probes once more at the joint, trying to force the tip of the file past it and into the urn.

And suddenly the urn cracks open.

LOOK AT THAT
. Look at that …

So stellar from afar, like those photos of distant nebulae one sees in magazines, yet so ambiguous closer up. The buildings, I mean, my dear. So many shapes and sizes. Some so high, some so squat. And these colours. Black. Brown. Cream. The greys of brick and glass. A reddish tinge here, gold there. Fishbowl green and sea blue. Some reflective, some as matte as velveteen.

A lack of harmony. Not your kind of landscape, is it, my dear? Nor mine. Yet it is here we have chosen to make our lives. It appeals to Yasmin, you know. Where I see a lack of harmony she sees the possibility of the unexpected. She sees a unity in all this glass. It offers, she once said to me, the shock of juxtaposition.

But what do you suppose has happened to the greenery?

I imagine there are still vantage points from which the city appears to have emerged organically from the natural state — a suggestion, or perhaps an illusion, of oneness. This view suggests that the greenery has been overwhelmed …

Pity. Remember how proud we were of that?

Look at that. Look at that …

Even in the sunlight, or perhaps because of it, there are signs of the New World growing old. I remember when so many of these buildings were being built — my son-in-law had a hand in several of them: he had an obsession, you know, with glass and light, transparency — and now, to look at them is to remark on their blemishes. The buildings acquiring streaks of grime as we have acquired wrinkles. Or perhaps, more accurately, like grout darkening on a bathroom wall, suddenly detected one day. We are, do you not think, growing tarnished together?