Claire of the Sea Light (11 page)

“Flore?” he asked, more as a request for confirmation than a greeting.

She bobbed her head in his direction but said nothing.

“How have you been?” he asked her, his eyes still taking in all that she had become. “What are you doing here?”

He didn’t mean it to sound like a rebuke. He was genuinely
curious, interested in how she had gotten there, back into his father’s house, in his father’s living room, in the middle of the day.

“Flore has a beauty shop in Port-au-Prince,” his father answered instead. “I asked her to come see us.”

Max Junior was trying to think of a way to ask about his son when he heard a child’s voice call out from behind the divan, where Flore had walked over to sit.

“Kounye ya? Now?” asked a boy’s voice.

“Wi,” said Flore.

Shy, as Flore had been before she’d so drastically changed in face and in body—but also in attitude, it seemed, for Flore’s eyes never wavered from his, her face never softened—the child kept his eyes on Max Junior as he pulled a massive grape-colored lollipop in and out of his mouth. The boy was wearing a plain white T-shirt and jeans, and though he was obviously aware that he was the focus of everyone’s attention, he took time to survey the room, examining the giant bamboo planters behind the ancient leather couches and the massive abstract paintings on the walls. The boy grimaced at the paintings, large fluorescent blots, which made no sense to Max Junior either. He looked stocky and strong, but Max Junior didn’t know many children his age, so he wasn’t sure. Neither he nor his father was a lean man. They were men of average height, paunchy and round, like this boy might one day be, when he grew up. As a matter of fact, the boy looked exactly like them, like he might fall perfectly in line with all the generations of men in his family.

“And what do you do with him for school in Port-au-Prince?” Max Senior asked from behind the banister, where he was now sitting. “Is he getting some good schooling? You know very well, Flore, that we have a school here, a good one.”

Shifting a small, woven straw purse from one shoulder to the other, Flore gazed around the room as though searching for an anchor for herself. “He’s well, as you can see,” she said.

Max Junior was now standing right in front of his son and his son was looking up at him and he was looking down at his son. He kneeled so that his face was at the level of his son’s and said, “Alo.”

“Alo,” the boy echoed, with the lollipop still lodged in one of his cheeks.

For a moment Max Junior worried that the child might leap at him and tackle him to the ground as his own father watched from behind the banister. “My name is Maxime Ardin, Jr.,” he said.

Max Junior thought the boy a handsome child, a stoop-shouldered little boy with an open face and generous smile. Max Junior himself had been a boy like that. He waited for the child to say his name. Thought for a moment that he might not. The boy looked over at his mother for some clue as to what he should do. She tilted her head and seemed as eager to hear what would come out of the boy’s mouth as Max Junior was.

“My name is Pamaxime Voltaire,” the child said.

Because Max Junior had not legally recognized the boy,
the child had been given Flore’s family name, Voltaire. But with “Pa,” a Creole prefix meaning both “his” and “not his,” the child’s first name could either mean “Maxime’s” or “Not Maxime’s.” Only the mother could know for sure.

“Pamaxime,” Max repeated, copying the child’s hesitant voice.

It surprised him that Flore had named the child this way.

“If he were a girl, we could at least call him Pam,” Max Senior said, drawing a stern, hateful look from Flore.

Looking back at Flore, who gave Pamaxime a small nod of approval for the perfect enunciation of his name, the child, still with the lollipop in his mouth and with a coy voice that sounded a bit rehearsed, asked, “Ou se papa m? Are you my papa?”

“Wi,” Max Junior said. He was amazed how quickly the word came out of his mouth. Though he had not offered Pamaxime the family name, now looking at his child’s face, he was even more certain that this boy was his, in spite of or because of the negation or affirmation of his own name.

Kneeling there next to his son, Max Junior remembered a story Jessamine had told him when he’d confessed to her that he was thinking of coming home for a visit. Jessamine’s parents had met in Miami while working at a hotel where her mother and father were both part of the cleaning staff. Soon after they got married, her father decided to return to Haiti to live. Her mother stayed behind in Miami, promising to join him in a few weeks. During that time, her mother discovered that she was pregnant with Jessamine and, no longer wanting
to move to Haiti, filed for divorce. Her father didn’t know about Jessamine until she was in her first year of high school and he, sick and dying from something or other, returned to Miami for treatment. In the meantime, Jessamine had been told by her mother that her father had abandoned her. Jessamine hadn’t seen her father live and wasn’t sure she wanted to see him die. She went with her mother to visit him in the hospital anyway. Right before they got there, he took his last breath. They were allowed to stay in the room with the body for only a few minutes before her father was wheeled out under a white sheet and taken down to the morgue.

Ever since Jessamine had told him about her own father, Max Junior had replayed that scene in the hospital over and over in his mind, casting his son in Jessamine’s role and himself as the dead father on the gurney being rolled out. The worst possible case of unrequited love, Jessamine had told him, was feeling abandoned by a parent.

Both he and his son were in a mild trance now, their eyes locked on each other’s, which he became aware of only when Flore snapped her fingers and whistled, motioning for the boy to walk to her. The Flore he knew before would have never made such crude gestures.

Pamaxime was still standing in front of him. He wanted to reach over and take his son in his arms now, but he was afraid of overwhelming the child. In her continued attempt to capture the boy’s attention, Flore clapped and clapped
again, yet the child did not move. Looking back and forth between him and Flore, he seemed torn. The boy looked at Max Senior, his grandfather, who motioned with his index finger for Pamaxime to go to Flore.

“Why such a hurry?” Max Senior then said. “Let the child stay here a day or two. Let’s see more of him. He can play, have a swim with us in the pool.”

The child turned to Max Senior, who was now standing with both his hands in the air as though pleading to the heavens for a special favor.

“He will not stay here,” Flore said, as though she were speaking from behind a grille locked inside her mouth.

And with those words, Flore rushed forward and grabbed Pamaxime’s hand, but he did not move. Max Junior tried to reach for the boy’s other hand, the one farther from Flore, not to stroke or kiss, but just to touch him to say a tactile goodbye. But before he could, the boy was led away by his mother. Reaching down, Flore motioned for the boy to hand her the remainder of the lollipop, then dropped it in her purse.

Max Junior was still kneeling there as his son walked off. The child did not turn around. He remained on his knees, hoping that the boy might run back, to hug or kiss him, to tell him his first good-bye after his first hello. But what had he done to deserve it?

He heard some voices coming from the next room, by the front door. It was Flore talking to an older woman, who, though she’d been working for his father now many years, he
could only think of as the new maid. It seemed that Pamaxime had something he wanted to give him, and Flore was asking the new maid to take it, so the child wouldn’t have to come back. Max Junior thought of running out to collect it, but stopped himself. Flore had every right to make all the decisions.

He heard the front door slam shut.

“From the child.” The new maid handed him a folded piece of white paper.

He could feel his father watching him. Back when he had his music show at Radio Zòrèy, he had gotten notes dropped off for him at the station and at home all the time. Many of the girls had handed the perfume-scented missives to Flore at his front door.

He opened the sheet of paper his son had brought for him. On it was the word “papa” in small slanted letters along with a sketch of a man with a blank
O
for a face. He yearned for an explanation that he knew he might never get. He folded the paper and placed it in his pants pocket, then he rose from the floor and rushed out the door. His father followed, as though both he and the old man had come to the same conclusion at once.

A tiled driveway parted the lush tropical garden that led from Max Senior’s porch to his front gate.

“Tann,” Max Junior called out after Flore. “Wait.”

Flore spun around and the child did the same, mimicking his mother. Max Junior caught up with them near where his father’s car was parked, by the low iron gates.

“Let me take you wherever you’re going,” Max Junior said.

He imagined they were going back to Flore’s mother’s house in Cité Pendue. While stroking his son’s closely cropped hair, he added, “Mwen la kounye a. I’m here now.”

The boy squirmed and craned his neck so he could see both his father and his mother at the same time. Max Junior felt as though he were in a public square as his father watched from a wooden bench on his front porch. But none of it mattered. He was no longer a nineteen-year-old boy. He was an adult now, a man who shared a child with this woman.

His father walked over from the bench and placed himself at the boy’s side.

“Can I borrow your car to take them home?” Max Junior asked his father.

Flore raised her eyebrows in surprise.

“Would you know the way?” Max Senior asked his son.

Max Junior nodded.

Max Senior walked back into the house and returned with the keys to his tèt bèf, everyone’s cow-horn nickname for this kind of Toyota Jeep. He handed the keys to his son, then walked to the front gates, sliding them open, for the car to pass through. He walked back to his front porch and, before he went into his house, called out, “Bye!” to his grandson.
But the boy didn’t even glance at him; he was too busy paying attention to his own father to hear.

First Max Junior helped the boy into the car. This gave him another opportunity to touch his son as he held the child’s hands, guiding him to settle in the backseat. He tried to pull the seat belt across the boy’s chest. The straps rose to the child’s neck, so he decided to forgo it. He shut the door, opened the passenger side for Flore, then finally climbed into the driver’s seat. The hem of Flore’s dress rose high above her knees as she settled into her seat and quickly she pulled it down. She could have sat in the back with the child, making him feel like their chauffeur, but she didn’t.

He had never been deep inside Cité Pendue. He had only driven with his parents, on their way farther south, by the main road that circled it, the road by the sea. Still he felt as though he had already been there. He’d been there in the way his friend Bernard Dorien had described his parents’ restaurant, which was, according to Bernard, practically attached to the Rue des Saints warehouse, once occupied by the men of Baz Benin. He’d been there through the music that the Baz Benin men had produced and recorded and brought to him on CDs and even cassettes, to play on his radio program, their praise of and laments about precarious life and certain death in the geto.

“What’s a good way?” he asked Flore as he turned the
Jeep toward a line of calabash trees in front of his father’s gate. Ten years before, it would have been best to use the road by the sea, but he wasn’t sure anymore and wanted to confirm this with her. And she agreed with a reluctant nod.

Even after ten years, the road along the sea was still tarred and mostly paved. There were more cars now, and the traffic crept along the two wide lanes going in opposite directions. Several young men and women tapped on the car window, offering to sell him fried foods and meats, plantain chips, and bottled water. Others followed, hawking cell phone chargers and batteries.

In the cars and camions in front and on the other side of him, he saw that many of his fellow drivers and their passengers passed the time by talking on cell phones, something which, a decade before, when he’d left the country, you wouldn’t have seen. On the opposite side, a funeral procession was stuck in the gridlock with a hearse leading a small caravan of cars that motto taxis snaked through.

When the traffic did move along, it reminded him how pretty Ville Rose still was. On one side of them were the same moss-blanketed marshes he remembered from years ago and in the distance some funnel-shaped mountains.

Soon, though, they passed a new line of low-grade brothels, where women sold sex in individual bungalows. A loud
bell sounded in Flore’s purse and she pulled out a cell phone, then switched off the ringer. She turned around and handed the phone to the boy, and occasionally when Max Junior looked in the rearview mirror, he would see the boy tapping the keys hard and fast while playing some kind of game. He realized that he had forgotten his own cell phone in his room at his father’s house.

Glancing now and then at Flore’s profile, which she kept nearly frozen, almost like a statue, he found it difficult to remember most of what they’d once talked about. It was never consequential, nothing ever too deep. Aside from the usual things about what he wanted her to cook on a particular day, he would try to make her laugh with him at the love-stricken girls who wrote him letters, for example, but she never did. He would make fun of some friend of his father’s who had come to dinner with his wife and met his mistress there—a dinner she had served them. She would never join in his teasing and criticism.

Back then, she’d seemed interested in magazines, especially the beauty magazines left behind by his father’s female friends. He would sometimes catch her staring at the women in those pages, her mouth open, her eyes widened in awe. He would try to bring home more of those magazines from the radio station, as many as he could, and he would leave them lying around the house for her to pick up and look through when he was out. She often straightened her own hair with a box of relaxer she’d buy from a vendor of hair extensions at the open market, but they never discussed any of that. They
never even discussed how she had come to his father’s house when she was barely sixteen, why she had been made to leave school to replace an aunt who’d worked there for years until the aunt was too old to work.