A Dual Inheritance (32 page)

Her father spent his days at a health clinic. Before leaving home in Dar almost a year ago and flying across the world—away from the comforting scent of dust and sand and burning trash, away from the school that she hated and her best friend, Emme Wu, whom she loved—her father had explained to Genevieve how, because of the evidently excellent job he’d done running the clinic in Kariakoo and because of Dr. Shannon’s success rates with malaria, he’d been asked to come to Haiti to assist one of the clinics here.

Her mother had joined her in crying, but Genevieve knew she was also relieved, because one of the conditions of their relocating was that they were going to have a much nicer home and have more help than her father had ever previously allowed. Genevieve’s most vivid experience of school was how her mother had spent each morning instructing Genevieve not to eat anyone else’s lunch, not to drink from anyone else’s cup. But her mother had also grown attached to the women in a nearby village, who credited her with personally lowering the infant mortality rate (“I did next to nothing,” her mother admitted to Genevieve, seeming more angry than proud. “I hydrated the babies, like any fool with a medical kit.”), and she often used this very example of getting too much credit for doing too little.

If her mother spoke passionately about what a sorry state of affairs both Tanzania and its foreign aid were in, she spoke just as passionately about how irresponsible it was to raise a child the way they were raising their daughter.
Plenty of children are raised here
, said her father;
And plenty of them die
, said her mother,
and plenty would leave if they had the choice, before it came to that. It’s not as if you have an embassy post, or even a stable position.… Shannon is kindhearted, but he drinks too much.…
And on and on—Genevieve heard them through the thatch screen that created the two bedrooms. These conversations usually ended with the obvious example of how Genevieve had, in fact, almost died from dysentery (and was medevaced to New York) at two and a half years old, after one of the many rainy seasons.
She doesn’t remember it
, said her father, more than once. And Genevieve wanted to say:
Yes, I do. I remember the iced oatmeal cookies and the television. I remember Grandmother’s freckled hands and Grandfather’s glasses of milk
. But Genevieve knew—even at age ten—that these were not the memories that her father wanted to hear.

Her mother seemed to love her father best when she greeted him at the end of the day. She kissed his lips in the doorway; her hand grazed his bearded cheek.

“Jesus,” her father said, shaking his head. “Like they really needed this on top of everything else.”

Genevieve wanted to wrap her arms around his waist, but something stopped her.

“Jesus,” her father repeated. “Hi, bunny,” he said sadly. “I mean, did anyone think about how bad it was going to look?” He started to laugh, and Genevieve realized he’d gone to the hotel before coming home, the one where, once in a while, the two of them had Papa Days and she swam and he drank and waded into the pool and pretended to be a monster.

He kicked off his boots now, into the corner, where a fake pug sat as a doorstop, and he was still laughing. Her father rarely laughed when he was happy. When her father was happy, he was quiet; he petted her head and gently held her neck as if she were a dog. Genevieve went to the drinks table and poured her father a whiskey. She did it like he’d taught her, measuring the amount carefully by the size of her own thumb. It had recently occurred to her (and she was sure it was not lost on her father) that as she grew so did his drink. “I mean,” he said, “did anyone think about the public-relations disaster of trying to sell this idea to the people? Forget about the actual folly of what is going on here. Forget about the enormity of this mistake. We’ll kill your black pigs and we’ll replace those black pigs with light-colored pigs and also mixed-race pigs—just like the Haitian elite?”

“You said the replacement pigs
thrive
in tropical countries. You had
me read pages and pages about
feed conversion efficiency
,” her mother said, before shaking her head. “You used this experiment as a way to convince me to move! You can’t come home like this every day.”

Her father walked over to the open window and took a breath, as if he was literally breathing in that particular air. “I know,” he said, clearing his throat. “And I know what I said.”

“Papa,” Genevieve said, handing him the glass, “are we moving again?”

“Do you want to?” he asked bitingly, accepting the drink. “Where d’ya want to go? The Congo? Oh, look—it even rhymed.”

“Stop,” said her mother, “just stop it.”

“I’m sorry,” said her father. “Thank you for the drink, bunny.” He looked at both of them for a moment as if he was dizzy, as if he’d forgotten what he was talking about. “I need to think.”

“Please do that,” her mother said. “But so you know, unless you can come up with a radically better plan, we are not leaving that clinic and this house before you said we would. There is constant change and then there’s plain instability, you know?”

“Maybe I should go to medical school,” he said, obviously not serious.

“Maybe you should.”

“Maybe we should just buy this goddamn clinic. Is that what you want?”

Every now and then her father made mention of a mysterious source of money; he talked about it as if it were poison, threatening to kill their family. This is how Genevieve learned they weren’t poor. In Dar, they lived in a house that could fit in this one’s kitchen, and her father regularly fretted over wasting energy and water and buying too much at the market. Once he had started crying because he found a crisper full of rotten, obviously forgotten vegetables. He’d acted like their lot was no different from that of most of their neighbors.

But then they’d left Dar es Salaam. They’d boarded a jet plane. They moved into a new house, a big one, in a new country, with Maude and Arvede and William to help take care of everything. Genevieve almost
asked how it was possible, before realizing the answer was already clear. It was also clear that her father had made these concessions to her mother and that he would have been happier to live the way they always had, the way her mother called pretending.

“Are you hungry?” her mother asked him now, more gently.

“I could eat,” her father said. “Bunny,” he said, sitting down at the table, “what did you do this afternoon? Get in a good swim?” No matter how he felt about their new living situation, about the big house and the help, no matter how he might have disapproved of the swimming pool, Genevieve also knew that her father loved how she loved to swim.

The boy and the yelling still rang in her ears—
tifi, tifi
. Maude’s stick. She wanted her father to know about it, yet she realized she was not only afraid but also ashamed to tell him.

“Show us the drawing, why don’t you?” said her mother, bringing out a tray. She poured drinks and lit a candle as if she were sleepwalking, and they all sat in their usual seats. Her mother always lit candles for a dinner table and set out cloth napkins, even if they were having only bowls of rice and scrambled eggs, which was often the case, especially in Dar es Salaam, where she’d had some bad experience with meat early on and was always reluctant to buy it. And because Genevieve was a notoriously particular eater, it was even more important to her mother that—no matter if Genevieve’s tastes were baffling and even disgusting—she sit down to a civilized dinner. If her mother was going to give in and allow Genevieve her shredded cheese mixed with shredded coconut or her beloved ketchup on rice and spaghetti, if Genevieve was going to hoard her best friend Emme’s salty-sweet dried squid for special treats (dried squid for which Genevieve traded her cheese sandwich at school, despite all of her mother’s warnings), well, then Genevieve was going to learn impeccable table manners; she was going to learn the art of conversation.

Genevieve watched her own glass; a drop of wine spread through water, and she thought of cleaning watercolor brushes, how fast the glass went gray.

“The drawing?” asked her father.

“Oh, it didn’t come out good,” said Genevieve.

“Well,”
said her mother.

“It didn’t come out
well
,” said Genevieve.

“What did you draw?” asked her father.

“Nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing. It was the five-gourdes note. The palms.”

“What a good idea, bunny.”

She shrugged.

“What’s the matter?” her father asked, and she could hear that some part of him was annoyed.

Her mother bowed her head in her customary moment of silence before offering any food. She’d started to meditate with Madame Richelieu and Madame’s two friends, and sometimes Genevieve found her mother sitting on the living room floor with her legs crossed, the way Genevieve had learned to sit in kindergarten.

“Why don’t you have some tomato salad, bunny?” her mother asked, upon opening her eyes. “Maybe some fruit?” In addition to the table manners, her mother believed in a daily salad, but she always offered it casually, as if she didn’t care what Genevieve did or didn’t eat.

Genevieve’s face burned the way it had earlier, when the boy was yelling through the iron gate and she’d thrust the money through. She hadn’t yelled,
Come back, come back, I’ll go get more—I can
. “I hate the swimming pool,” said Genevieve.

“You do?” they both said. She couldn’t remember when they’d ever responded in unison.

“I want to go back,” said Genevieve. She pictured the oil drums in the field abutting her father’s clinic in Kariakoo, how nearly every evening one of the neighbors would throw garbage or paper scraps into those drums and set the pile on fire. Genevieve remembered the dogs barking at the curls of smoke, how the burning created a shimmery haze, and how—on these evenings—even if she was at the clinic, where there were plenty of other upsetting distractions, the sunset was always like magic.

“We can’t,” said her father. “You know that.” He put down his fork. “What happened today?”

“Nothing,” said Genevieve. But she knew she’d cry if she didn’t tell him, and this she didn’t want to do. “It was just those kids.”

“What kids.”

“Oh, Genevieve,” said her mother, “you didn’t give them the five gourdes?”

“What kids?” said her father, more agitated.

She let her mother explain.

“Hugh, please, you already know about the kids. They walk to the well in the forest. I wish we could simply open the doors here and not worry about—”

“Christ,” said her father. And then to her mother: “Would it have killed you to tell me earlier?”

“Tell you what exactly? Look around, why don’t you.”

“Stop,” Genevieve suddenly shouted, “don’t blame Mommy. It was me. I was afraid. I thought if I gave them money—”

“This is what you should do,” he said calmly. “The next time they come, you should tell Maude to open the gate.”

“But Maude said—”

“
Open the gate, Maude
, that’s what you say. And of course you say please. Say please. Make sure Maude is with you. Ask them if they’d like to eat something.”

Her mother pushed her chair away from the table. She stood up, smoothed her pink shirt and white pants, and went out on the veranda. Genevieve knew she was lighting a cigarette, even though she’d recently vowed to quit.

“They’re kids?” he asked Genevieve.

She nodded.

“Any older than you?”

She shrugged.

“I’d try that first,” he said softly. “Call me crazy,” he said, in a raised tone that was obviously meant for her mother, “but I’d try that.”

Her father told bedtime stories. He spun tales about a king whose house was so big that he couldn’t find the bathroom, who was so used to servants that he didn’t know how to make himself two slices of buttered toast. “I can’t find the bathroom,” her father would say in a high, sort-of-British voice. “I believe I have taken a wrong turn. Dear Jeeves, can you please point me in the right direction?” And Genevieve would laugh and laugh and her father would lie beside her, his big feet hanging off the end of the bed.

Her mother told stories, too.

“Tell me about when you and Papa got married,” said Genevieve. She wanted that one tonight.

“Well,” said her mother, lying on her side, “I was in New York.”

“Paris hadn’t worked out,” Genevieve said.

“No,” said her mother. “Once you take a job typing, you never stop typing. Remember that.”

“I will.” A gust of wind slammed the broken window frame at the foot of her wicker bed. “I hope Papa fixes that soon.”

“I wish he’d let Arvede do it.”

“But Papa likes to fix things.”

“And how long has the window been broken?”

“Since we moved in.”

“That’s right,” said her mother. “That’s right.” Her mother turned onto her back so they were side by side, staring up at the ceiling. “Anyway, I was in New York.”

“And you were supposed to meet Papa in Nairobi, but you missed your flight because you’d been out the previous night with Aunt Kitty, who was visiting.”