No Safeguards (17 page)

“‘Anna, why are you asking me such a question?' Jay, she turned her head away but I had already seen the guilt in her face.

“‘See, Mama, you can't even look at me. One time you said that if you didn't have me, you'd have gone overseas and studied and made something of your life.'

“‘That's all water under the bridge, Anna. Gone, never to return. The past is the past. Let's focus on the present and the future.' Know what happened next, Jay? She got up from the dining table where we were sitting, went into her bedroom — this same room — and closed the door. Jay, I'm certain, if I'd gone into the bedroom then, I would have met her crying.”

I said nothing, because I had nothing to say. I doubted about the crying. We were silent for a long while. I knew then I'd never let her see the journal entry I'd read three days earlier — the one where Grama lamented sacrificing her education to raise a fool.

“Jay,” Anna said, breaking the silence, “you think the way Mama spoiled Paul has anything to do with how he turned out?”

I knew where her thoughts were heading. The next stop would be her role in Paul's “failure.” I was tired and wished she'd stop talking. “Ma, some children who've had doting parents grow up to be successful and productive; some who've had doting parents grow up to be failures; some who've had abusive parents grow up to be healthy; and some who've had loving, disciplined parents grow up to be criminals. You never know ahead of time.”

“But look at you, Jay. I've never had to worry about you.”

“Paul will work something out. His head is stocked with knowledge. He'll do something with it.” I wasn't sure about this and I'm even less so now. (He's probably reverted to drug trafficking and cut his links with us.)

“Life's no laboratory,” I told her, “in which precise amounts of chemicals fired by precise amounts of energy produce precise results for precise functions. It's why we say: ‘All things being equal . . . in the best case scenario.' In psychological matters, who knows what the best-case scenario is?” I might have read her Yeats' “Among School Children.” It was in a collection on the bookshelf to my right. But Anna wasn't Grama. Anna functioned in the concrete — a fact Paul knew and used to humiliate her. Come to think of it, it would have been more Grama explaining the poem to me. She knew it well. We'd read it together and she'd repeat over and over some of its lines. Every August, as soon as she found out which Shakespeare play was on my literature course, she made me read it aloud to her to be sure I understood Shakespeare's language. When she found out there were videocassettes of Shakespeare's plays for sale, she ordered them from England, and all three of us would watch them. On one occasion — I think it was to watch
Othello
, I asked Millington to come watch it with us. It was a Saturday evening. Around 10:30, while we were watching the credits, we heard Millington's father calling to him from the road, telling him his mother was worried that he wouldn't be able to wake up for church in the morning. Grama went to the front door, invited him in, and persuaded him to stay for cake and ginger beer — fare we usually had before going to bed when we were up late on a Saturday night . . .

***

I look at Anna's rasping form on the bed and recall: “
Both nuns and mothers worship images
, /
But those the candles light are not as those / That animate a marble or a bronze repose . . . / And yet they too break hearts.
” I've certainly broken your heart, Ma. And I had hoped that we would explore why and move on. Ma, you believe that your departure from St. Vincent damaged us. You believed what Bulljow told you. I stand, lean over her, hold her hand, and say in a breaking voice: “Ma, you have been a wonderful mother and a good human being. I want you to know that. I want you to understand that, and when I find Paul, I'll tell him so.” For a couple of minutes I stand there silently hoping she has heard and understood me, then I sit back down.

***

The day after our return trip from St. Vincent, Paul announced that he wanted to have a talk with us.

“About what?” Anna asked.

“You'll find out soon enough.”

“Can't it wait?” It was a Saturday, and there were pressing things to be done after a two-week absence.

“No.”

“All right.”

Anna sat on the couch, Paul on the armchair, and I brought a chair from the dinette. If I'd sat beside Anna, Paul would have seen the seating arrangement as him versus Anna and me.

Paul cleared his throat, paused for a few seconds, then said: “I want to get through this without swearing.”

Anna bit her lower lip, her face taut — on tenterhooks.

Paul stayed silent for another 15 seconds before saying: “Are you happy about going back home to see Grama's corpse?”

“Paul, what are you getting at?” Anna said.

“I'm saying that
you
prevented us from seeing Grama while she was still alive. You prevented me from going to see her. You never made any effort to go home and see her. My schoolmates, their single-parent mothers, go back to the Caribbean every year. And they're domestic servants and hospital maids and factory workers. They earn less than you. Besides I know that Grama offered many times to pay our passage.”

“How do you know that?”

“I called her using phone cards so you won't know. She said that, in your headstrong way, you refused every offer of a vacation to all three of us.” He turned to look at me. “Did
you
have a hand in this?”

“Paul, I'm not interested in spending other people's money. But Ma never discussed any of this with me.”

“Thank you, Jay,” Anna replied. Staring Paul fully in the face, she said: “I want you to listen carefully. This is for your benefit. Jay already knows this. When I married your father, your grandmother paid for the wedding. Later, when she found out how small your father's income was, she gave me money to run the household. She paid the hospital bill when Jay was born. I came to Canada with money she gave me. She paid for your tickets to come to Canada. While you both lived with her, she got no money from me. She preferred for me to go to school. Every Christmas, no matter how much I protested, she sent me a money order for $1,000. At various times during the year, she would send me a couple hundred dollars. She knew I worked two days per week and that it wasn't enough to pay for all my expenses.” She paused, breathed audibly. “Paul, what year did you come to Canada?”

“1997.”

“How old was I then?”

“Forty . . . 41.”

She nodded. “Paul, do you think that a woman over 40 should still be financially dependent on her mother?”

He shrugged his shoulders and twisted his lips, treating the question as rhetorical.

“So, Paul, my decisions took into account my financial means. You and Jay are
my
children. I'm glad your grandmother supported me when I needed it, but I had to take up my responsibility. I made some unwise decisions in my youth, and I am glad Mama helped me turn my life around, but when we become adults, we are responsible for ourselves and the children we bring into the world. I couldn't live up to this all the time, but in the last few years I've tried. I couldn't let you spend your grandmother's money freely as if it was air you're breathing in and out. You work. You know how hard it is to earn money. It is even harder to save it. You have some sense of this. For a while you gave me some money from your job. By the way, I haven't spent it. It's in an account with your name.

“I am saying everything in one, but you should know this. For six years before I married your father, I helped Mama run her store. I never took any salary from her because I lived at home expense free, and when I needed money I took it from the till, always letting her know. But Mama paid me a salary — on principle. I never collected it. She put it in the bank. I came here with some of that money and I used the rest along with money she gave me to get landed immigrant status in Canada. Why am I telling you this? I want you to know that your grandmother lived a principled life. If she'd disagreed with me over sending you travel money, she would have sent it directly to you. She was no pushover when she felt she was right. She understood principles. Her life was based on principles. You'll do well to copy her example.”

Paul smiled sheepishly and hung his head. When he raised it, he was smiling broadly. With his eyes half-shut, squinting (one of the ways in which he resembles Anna), he nodded, then looked away as he said: “Still, I would have liked to see Grama alive. Principles and money shouldn't stand in the way of seeing my grandmother alive.”

“Money always stands in the way,” I said, “between what we want and what we can pay for. We all would have liked to see Grama alive, and I wish we had.”

“We better set a few other things straight while we are at this,” Anna said. “Jay pays for half of the food we eat in this house. I never asked him to. But he saw that rent, electricity, cable, insurance, and other bills eat up most of what I earn, and felt he should contribute. Understand one thing: I'm not asking you for money. I just want you to know that I did not have money to pay for the three of us to go home to see your grandmother, and I felt it was time for me to stop depending on her money. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but my conscience is clear.”

For the next few minutes we sat in silence. I held my breath expecting Paul to bring up her tithing. I was relieved when Paul got up, put his hands on Anna's shoulder, nodded, and pecked her on the cheek. He went into his bedroom and closed the door.

I was proud of the way she handled this.

Paul was already travelling — in Cuba, I think — when I read Grama's journal entry for January 20, 2004:

I don't understand what's going on. Paul should have finished high school by now. Junior college too. Anna says all the time: ‘Paul is doing all right.' Now he rarely calls me. ‘How are you doing in school?' I ask him. ‘Fine, Grama, fine.' Always the same answer: “Fine, Grama, fine.' When I ask him what that means he changes the subject. Three or four times he said he couldn't hear me: the connection was bad. I had no trouble hearing him. His last call was more than six months ago. They're hiding something from me. She is very specific about Jay: ‘Jay got his BA. Jay got his MA. Jay has begun a PhD.' Nothing about Paul. Nothing. They must think I was born big. Next week, I'll book a flight to Montreal for late May or early June.

I showed the entry to Anna. She didn't comment. What would Paul have told Grama? Would she have blamed Anna for how he turned out?

I was impressed with the maturity Paul showed that Saturday and, to gauge the change, I promised to intervene the next time Paul was abusive. The opportunity came one Saturday about a month later. Anna had prepared coo-coo. Paul wrinkled his nose and sniffed at the scoop she'd put on his plate. “This stuff looks like yellow shit. You know I hate it.” He got up and began walking toward the sink with the plate.

“When you speak to Ma like that, I wish she'd slap you.”

He stopped, stiffened, and turned to look at me. His eyes narrowed but he said nothing. He continued to the sink, scraped the food into the bin under it, put the plate in the sink, turned and stared briefly at me, then at the floor, before walking to his bedroom, and closing the door. He ate no lunch and no supper that day.

I
DATE HIS
depression to this confrontation. As it stretched into months, Anna and I became alarmed. He continued to work at Subway, but it was all he did outside of his bedroom. He became affectless and went into seclusion and total silence. It lasted about five months. When we tried to talk to him, he replied with shrugs and blank stares. We'd see him heading to and from the bathroom, leaving to go to work or coming in from work, heading to the fridge for food to be reheated in the microwave (sometimes still holding open the book he was reading), or serving himself from the pots on the stove or the casseroles in the oven, always taking the food to his room, returning to the sink with the dirty utensils, which now he promptly washed and put on the drain board. Once, Anna deliberately did not refill the prescription for his drugs, to force him to speak to her. Our meds were covered by her work insurance. He went to the pharmacy and paid for them himself, and left the receipts on the dining table with a note: “Ma, thanks for withholding my meds.” She never did it again.

During this phase, when he needed to watch something on VHS, he used the television in the living room, but only when Anna and I weren't around; we'd occasionally catch him at the tail end of such viewings. Mostly he watched DVDs on his laptop. And he listened to music on his mp3 or used his earphones. With a cable splitter and cable extension cord, he linked the cable to a small television in his room. The TV noise was the only sound that came from his room, and it was infrequent for he was mostly a reader.

The smell of marijuana coming from his room was a different matter.

“I can't have him smoking in here.”

“Where do you want him to smoke?” The conversation took place about six weeks into Paul's reclusive phase, one evening while Paul was at work.

“I don't know, but I know I don't want him smoking marijuana here. If he doesn't stop, he'll have to leave.”

“And go where?”

“I don't know and I don't care.”

“Did you say you don't care?”

“You know I don't mean that.”

“Well, you better say what you mean when you are dealing with Paul. He is over 18, Ma! You understand?
18!
”

“Well, he should act like it.”

“How is an 18-year-old supposed to act, Ma?”

“Like you did when you were 18.”

I looked up at the ceiling and swallowed.

“He'll abide by my rules or find his own place.”

“When has Paul ever followed your rules? When have
you
been able to
make
Paul follow
your rules
?”

“Are you blaming me for his behaviour?”

I didn't answer.

“Answer me! Are you blaming me for his behaviour?”

“I don't know, Ma. Maybe in 20 years I will. What I know is that Paul never found in you the nurture Grama and others gave him. But I don't blame you.”

She was silent for several seconds. “I can't let him turn my home into a dope den. I can't have him smoking marijuana in here. This is my home too. I have the right to feel comfortable in here.”

“Ma, Paul has been smoking marijuana in his room since he was 13. You smell it now because he spends more time in his room.”

“And you've let him! You've let him! Jay, you disappoint me.”

“There are worse things in this world than smoking marijuana. I don't care whether or not he smokes. So long as he isn't addicted. He says it helps control his asthma.”

“I don't believe that.”

There was a long pause during which she seemed to be staring at the table top.

“Ma put aside all this anti-marijuana propaganda — from your church, George Bush, the Reform Party, or whatever they call themselves nowadays. Ma, listen to me, please, please. Paul” — I hesitated — “Paul's depressed. His withdrawal is too sudden. It's not normal. In a way, I prefer the abusive, abrasive Paul to this shadow that slinks in and out of his room. If you confront him now about his marijuana smoking, you'll push him over the edge, never mind threatening to put him out. Don't go there, Ma. Paul is still a child, still quite immature for an 18-year-old. He loves books and ideas but he doesn't know much else. I suspect he's afraid of the future.” I dismissed telling her that that was probably what his marijuana smoking was about. “Paul cannot survive on his own. Not at this point in his life. If you put him out, I'll be forced to rent an apartment and let him live with me.”

“What did you say?”

“You heard me, Ma.”

The conversation ended there that day.

A week later it resumed. “I'm sure the neighbours are smelling it. We'll be evicted again. I can see the end: the neighbours calling the cops, the cops at the door, Paul led out in handcuffs, television cameras recording the whole thing, then seeing it again on television. I won't be able to show my face at work. It will send me straight to the Douglas.”

“Cool your imagination, Ma. Douse it. Even if it ends that way, there are worse things in life: living in a refugee camp in Darfur, in the DRC, or being a surviving Rwandan Tutsi widow. Paul's depressed. Your first concern should be why. Not what the neighbours think. You should be offering him help; you should be assuring him that, whatever happens, you'll try to help him through it and would always be there for him.”

“And if he begins to abuse me or tell me I am the cause of his problems?”

“You take it like an adult should. You tell him you are ready to make amends.”

“
Amends! F
or what? What are you hinting at?” Her voice was shrill. “And if he threatens to kill me?”

“Tell him to stop being childish. You should try to have this conversation with him in his bedroom, in his space. I don't want to be here when it's taking place.”

She sighed deeply. “What a country this Canada is! Parents taking orders from their children.”

She sat on a dining chair and was silent for a long time. “How come at your age you know all this?”

“Forget that, Ma. See to Paul. He needs all the encouragement he can get to pull out of this slump.”

A couple weeks later, she told me she'd spoken with him, and that it had gone well. He told her he felt bad, real bad, inside. He'd refused to say about what, and refused her offer to let her insurance pay for psychological counselling.

It was another three months before Paul resumed verbal contact with us. And I bungled the one occasion when Paul might have volunteered information about his depression.

***

Paul, where are you? Why aren't you here? How have we failed you, Paul? Do you know that Ma ended her marriage and has led a loveless life here, because she didn't want you to grow up with a violent father?

***

Four months before Paul left on his travels, he came in one afternoon while I was watching
Making Sense of the Sixties.
He sat down beside me.

“This is like heavy stuff, man. Awesome! Where'd you get this?”

“In Concordia's library.”

“I should o' been an adolescent then. This looks like fun. Wow. Cool, man. Ma,” he called to Anna in her bedroom, “did you ‘turn on, turn off, and drop out?'” She hadn't long come in from the dayshift. “Ocean would dry up first, right. Woodstock! Far out. Look at what you missed, Ma! Ma, you missed
Jimi Hendrix
: God with a guitar!”

“Paul, Ma was only 13.”

“So, Jay, you guys are like
studying
this
? Cool, man! Wow!”

“It's an independent study course. The professor's interested in this sort of thing. He was part of the scene.”

“Your
professo
r! Really. Tell me more.”

I paused the VCR. “It's an interdisciplinary course. History and literature mostly. He calls it ‘The Other America.' We do the readings — three of us: Jonathan, a girl called Sarah, and myself. We meet every week at his flat, near Chomedey and Maisonneuve, and discuss the works. We've done your favourite author: Thoreau, along with Emerson. Walt Whitman too. Tomorrow we begin Allan Ginsberg and William Burroughs, and in two weeks we'll be looking at
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
and the Sixties Revolution, and after that three or four more authors.”

Anna came into the living room then. “Jay, what are you getting Paul into?”

“What are you talking about? I just celebrated my 19th birthday!”

“In years only.”

“I'll watch what I want, when I want. Who do you think you are?”

“But not where you want?”

“Jay, aren't you going to stand up for me?”

“You're quite capable of defending yourself, Paul.” I got up and went to the Media Centre to continue watching the documentary.

A week later, as soon as I got in from school, Paul began to sing:

What did you learn in school today?

What did you learn, my brother Jay?

To rob the poor, turn all earth grey —

That's what you learned today?

What did you learn in school today?

What did you learn, my brother Jay?

To starve the poor, feed them hay —

That's what you learned today?

What did you learn in school today?

What did you learn, my brother Jay?

To pillage and lie, the capitalist way —

That's what you learned today?

What didn't you learn in school today?

What didn't you learn, my brother Jay?

To be a man, choose your own way?

You didn't learn that today.

“My dear brother,” he said, closing his eyes and rocking his head and shoulders — swagger meant for Anna, who was in the kitchen. “I have seen
Making Sense of the Sixties
. Momsy dear.” He went to where she was peeling vegetables at the sink and put his arm around her waist. “It taught me nothing I didn't already know about drugs. I'm glad to see that 35 years ago people agreed with me that education is slavery and brain death, and they did something about it. Gave the finger to the plantation and freed their minds with grass.”

He walked back to the living room and sat on the sofa beside me. “By the way, Bro, as a follow-up I read two of your books:
Do It
and
Die, Nigger, Die!
Pass me
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
as soon as you're done reading it. I leafed through it yesterday. You think your prof would let me sit in on the discussion, would let me
onto the bus
?”

“I don't know.” Professor William Samson (he insists that we call him Bill) is flamboyantly gay; according to Jonathan,
a queen without a
crown
. On the eastern wall of his living room, there's a massive painting of three life-size naked men: a European, an African, and an Asian, their interlaced bodies filling the canvas. On top of a long glassed-in mahogany bookcase that divides his living room from the dining room, he has a half-metre high carving in ebony of a penis and testicles mounted on marble. It's in your face as soon as you enter the living room.

I was tempted to lie, to say that Bill had said no. And I didn't want a confrontation with Anna. A year earlier, a Saturday evening, Jonathan had visited, and we had become engrossed in playing Chinese checkers, and Jonathan had missed the last metro and slept over. When Anna arrived from work next morning, Jonathan was still there. As soon as he left, Anna called me into her bedroom. “Why's he sleeping here? What's going on between you two?” She tried to keep her voice low. We'd thought Paul was still asleep.

I explained what had happened.

“You're sure there's nothing more going on between you two?”

“What do you mean, Ma?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No. You will have to say it.”

“Oh, Ma,” Paul shouted from his bedroom door, “Jay's old enough to screw with whom he wants. Don't get our lives mixed up with your religion.”

“Leave! Go!” She waved me away and began to cry.

***

Jonathan is gay, gay and visibly androgynous. Our friendship began banal enough my first year in CEGEP. The first full summer I spent here Jonathan found out that I didn't have a driver's licence and decided I should have one. On evenings, when the parking lot of the Versailles Shopping Centre was empty, he taught me the basics of driving in his father's 1990 Nissan Maxima — his sky-blue eyes glowing, his manner at its most earnest. At the end of every driving session, he took me home — the same duplex, now with more recent renovations — and reheated apple, blueberry or strawberry pie and served it to me with ice cream and orange or apple juice.

Sometimes his
Tante
Jeanne, an ex-nun, who lived upstairs, was there.

“You like it, the life with electricity?”
Tante
Jeanne asked me the first time we met.

I laughed and she blushed. I told her my grandmother had a washing machine and dryer, that we did our homework on a computer, and when we walked barefoot it wasn't because we didn't have shoes. She went on to talk about sending money to some nun in Haiti and then asked me: “Why you come to Canada,
donc
?”

“
Il faut poser cette question à ma mère.
”

Thereafter our conversation was reduced to a cool hello.

A year later, when I visited one Saturday, Cecile, Jonathan's mother, gave me a bumbleberry pie to take home. Those days Anna was too tired from working long hours to be even curious about where I went. Her eyes bulged when she saw the pie.

“What's this? From your future mother-in-law or what?”

“Maybe.”

“When are we meeting her?” Paul asked.

“My mother-in-law?”

“No. The daughter, smart aleck!”

“Not very soon. You'll try to steal her.”