All the Finest Girls (28 page)

At last, words seem insufficient. Thanks to you all.

All the Finest Girls

A NOVEL BY

A
LEXANDRA
S
TYRON

A READING GROUP GUIDE

“An ambitious, moving, even fearless novel. … Alexandra Styron has written an impressive, highly charged novel about a virtually taboo subject — nannying — all the while displaying keen insight into the burdens of inheritance in its many forms: money, love, creative temperament.” — Benjamin Anastas,
New York Observer

Mothers

An Essay by Alexandra Styron

Daphne wasn’t the first nanny. Mavis had come to work for my parents when I was born, staying on a year longer than a baby nurse usually does. After Mavis came Margie. I was crazy about Margie, but she left just as I began kindergarten. Since that loss, there had been lots of other people around: Nicky, who drove too fast; Sandy, from the dairy farm down the road; Katie, and Stacey and some other girls who picked me up at school, made me dinner, and put me to bed when my mother wasn’t home. But it wasn’t a very good system and Mum’s new career took her away more and more. Too often I was getting myself up in the morning and making my own haphazard way through the days in a big, old house with a novelist father whose daily schedule was exactly opposite to that of a schoolgirl. The promise of a new person, to be there full time and fill in the many holes, was a big relief for all of us. What Daphne Lewis brought when she came to stay not only changed the shape of my days but, ultimately, also altered the very contours of our family.

I’m the youngest of four children, with seven years between me and my closest sibling. In earliest memories, my two sisters are already away at boarding school, my brother gone not long after. The age gap meant that most of the time I was, in effect, an only child. And though I’ve been convinced I was not a “mistake,” my arrival coincided with my mother’s sudden and constant locomotion. An accomplished poet, Rose Styron had long put aside work in favor of life as a wife and mother. But in the early seventies, she chose at last to answer the call of her restless, educated mind and embarked on a passionate career as a human rights activist. Her work, on behalf of prisoners of conscience in Chile, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, would make her a leader in the global fight against government-sanctioned brutality. And it would take her away from our rural Connecticut home with such dizzying frequency that my chief memories of her during my girlhood all involve suitcases, rushed good-byes, and frantic dawn returns to see me in the half hour before schooltime. My father, meanwhile, kept his own counsel, writing until three or four in the morning, sleeping till noon, and then off and about his day in the solo arrangement most writers favor.

The first time I saw Daphne, I was seven years old and she was twenty-four. Seated on her friend Thermuda’s single bed, she was wearing a white cardigan and enormous pink-frame glasses. Thermuda lived with the Brusteins and took care of Danny, who was my playmate when our families spent Christmas vacations together. As I walked in the room, I pulled from my jeans pocket a tiny plastic rose planted in a pretend terra-cotta pot. I’d grabbed the flower from a drawer of junk in the TV room just before my mother and I set off on the long drive to New Haven from our home in the northern hills of Connecticut. The entire car ride, I’d quietly fretted about not having brought Thermuda’s friend something better, more persuasive. I wanted Daphne to come and live with us in the worst way, had decided so before we’d even met. When she replied to my measly offer with an expansive, toothy smile, I was in clover.

Daphne and I, left to the business of daily life, fell quickly into our own rhythm. Mornings, Daphne, in pink plastic curlers and a shower cap, would shoo the dog off my bed and roust me with her thick Jamaican brogue. “Up up, yah lickle devil! Yah cyaant sleep all de day, yah know.” My favorite blouse, or the argyle kneesocks I just
had
to wear, had inevitably been plucked from the laundry basket the night before and were waiting, freshly laundered, on the chair for me. Back home at day’s end, after a dinner prepared by Daphne just for me (even when my mother was home, my parents dined à deux past my bedtime), it was the two of us before the blue light of the TV screen. No amount of my shushing could stop Daphne from giving Mannix and Kojak and Steve McGarrett a piece of her mind. “Damn jackass, don’t go in dere! Bayaah!” And after dinner there were bedtime tales of an island childhood in a household rich with sisters and brothers, and a girl once my age who had wanted to be a nurse.

On weekends, we’d see a movie in Danbury or do the grocery shopping in Washington or get pizza from the parlor over in Woodbury. A serious shopaholic, Daphne could make going for a loaf of bread into a full-scale excursion replete with detours and lingering and suddenly necessary purchases from stores in entirely the other direction. The only hitch was that she couldn’t drive. Any outing meant first corralling Jimmy (a car mechanic) or Lloyd (the plumber) or Leo (moonlighting from Tommy’s Cleaners in New Milford) to take us where we needed to go. Not that we ever faced much of an obstacle. With a remarkable mixture of flirtation and force, Daphne could, and did, charm practical strangers into taking her thirty miles to the closest mall.

We must have made a peculiar sight up there in Litchfield County. The Jamaican woman and the little girl making our rounds in a postcard-pretty New England region where, to my knowledge, not a single other black person dwelt. I don’t know when I was first aware of how unusual we were. Maybe at a school field-hockey game, Daphne’s coffee-colored skin set off against the pale-hued mothers and fathers whom she sat with on the bench? Or down at the market when Daph, chatting with the checkout girl, erupted into her signature laugh and turned the heads of all the other customers? These days, live-in child-care workers of every ethnicity are reasonably commonplace, not just in cities but small towns as well. Twenty-five years ago, that was not the case. The vast implications of our arrangement have provoked many thoughts and feelings from me as an adult. Back then, I only knew that if we were strange, I would take strange over normal any day.

Sometime when I was a teenager, Daphne began calling herself my “black mother,” which made us laugh even as it raised the eyebrows of anyone who overheard us. At that point, entrenched in surly adolescence, I relished the politically incorrect flavor of the term. I suspect it gave me special satisfaction because it drew a deeper line between us and my real “white” mother, whom I was busy being very angry at. Not yet old enough to recognize the complexity and validity of the choices my mother made, I was bent on punishing her for her absence. The best gambit was usually to flaunt my affection for the woman who had served in her stead. I would sit in the kitchen and joke with Daphne, but when my mother was drawn into the room by the sounds of laughter, I’d immediately clam up. The enormous effort my mother made when she was home was no match for my quiet fury, indeed her solicitations incited an even greater resentment in me for being too little too late. The triangle — me and my two mothers — was at times as quietly explosive as any family members joined by blood, or lovers by passion.

Time can clear a lot of smoke. Now in my thirties, with a fiancé and a career, I am usually in awe of my mother. Her limitless energy, her compassion and intelligence, the relentless commitment she makes to aiding those in need, and her deep well of love for all who surround her — friends, animals, her ever-growing family — floor me. Mum has an outsized appetite for life lived on every level. And though I know those ambitions have caused her to make some difficult choices, ones I wasn’t always pleased by, I can’t imagine her or the world she has enriched any other way.

And I am no less moved reflecting on Daphne’s life. Like so many other Caribbean women, Daphne left home, going first to Canada and then the States, to provide not only for herself but her family back home. Her hopes of being a registered nurse were inevitably lost to the months and, finally, years. A comfortable and remunerative work situation is always hard to give up; plans and dreams are deferred. When I was twelve, my parents welcomed into our home six-year-old Richard Dixon, a nephew of Daphne’s for whom she had always provided. Richard was joined shortly thereafter by Eric, Daphne’s boyfriend, who drove a cab in Toronto. Richard entered first grade at my school and Eric was employed driving us there and back. For a time, Daphne had her own little nuclear family in Roxbury. But Eric got itchy and Richard missed his brothers. Somehow after they were gone the years went by, and at last, the opportunities for Daphne to become a mother of the natural kind, with kids of her own, slipped away.

These days, Daphne has her hands full. Though I eventually left for college and life in New York City, Daph has stayed on half-time with my parents. She spends winters in Toronto, where she is a home health care aide, and summers at my parents’ house in Massachusetts. Daphne is also there at every holiday and family celebration, cooking her famous fried chicken and keeping us all in line. She and my mother, old friends now, have developed their own peculiar relationship that is as interdependent as any long marriage. Together, they have a big brood. Close now to my siblings, Daphne has swooped in to lend a hand after the birth of every grandchild and calls me with blessed regularity “jes’ to see how my baby is doin’.”

When my fiancé, Ed, and I got engaged last summer, we called my parents’ house late that night to tell them the good news. My mother was practically speechless with joy. Daphne was asleep. I told my mother not to wake her, but I could pretty well guess what her reaction would be. The first day she met Ed, Daphne shook his hand, then immediately turned on her heels and dragged me by the ear into the next room. “Arright. Good,” she said loudly, smacking her hands together. “Yah done now. Jes’ marry him.” By sundown the day we told her of our engagement, Daphne was already making plans for her dress. Custom-made, for the mother of the bride.

Heading toward marriage has made me particularly mindful. More and more, I turn my back to the landscape of childhood and look ahead. I wonder how it will be if I’m blessed to have children of my own. Will I disappoint those who count on me? Will I disappoint myself? There are hard truths in the questions, and in the answers, too. It does not always go gently. But with love and a little luck, go it does. This summer, when my father walks me down the aisle, I want a moment to look across the front row at the two women who taught me that. So they know that I
see
them, before it comes time to turn away.

Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. Why does Adelaide go to St. Clair? Whom is she trying to help?

2. What parallels exist between Addy’s and Louise’s journeys away from home, if any?

3. How do Addy’s childhood feelings of neglect and isolation affect her adult life?

4. Is Cat real? What does Cat symbolize?

5. Is Addy crazy? Was she ever?

6. Did Lou love Addy as she would her own child, or, as Derek says, was she merely caring for Addy to get paid?

7. Did Louise commit suicide, or, as Marva says, did she just “lose her head and fall in the ocean”? Either way, can Errol be considered responsible for her death? What does Derek think?

8. Can Derek’s, Philip’s, or even Errol’s professional shortcomings be attributed to Lou’s absence from their lives?

9. Does Addy feel responsible for Errol’s not marrying Lou? If Lou had stayed in St. Clair, would Errol have married her? Or is it Errol who drove Lou away in the first place?

10. Is it possible that Addy truly considers Lou her equal, a part of her family, or is she denying her own racist tendencies?

11. Is Addy responsible for inspiring Derek’s anger? Or, as Philip tells Addy, is it just that “Derek would have been pissed if he’d been born the Duke of Windsor”?

12. Do Derek and Philip ever see Addy the way she comes to see them, as a “true sibling”? Is there any sexual tension between Addy and either of Lou’s sons?

13. Why is there no evidence of Addy, or even the United States, in Lou’s St. Clair bedroom?

14. Addy contemplates leaving St. Clair several times. At one point, she even hires a taxi and packs her bags. Is this desire to flee unique to St. Clair, or an extension of her lifelong instinct to run away, to “get out of herself”? How does she overcome her fear and sense of alienation? Why does she even try?

15. When Addy is introduced to Errol at the funeral party, he acts as though they had never met. Did they meet in the restaurant, or was it one of Addy’s blackouts, or perhaps a heatstroke-induced fantasy?

16. How do Lou’s death and her funeral change Addy? Does she get over her sense of being an outsider, her feeling of “otherness,” her feeling of being “invisible”?

17. Neither of Addy’s parents gave her the kind of love she sought as a child. What kind of mother is Baby? What kind of father is Hank? Is either of them ever exonerated in Addy’s eyes?

18. Has Addy been mourning an unhappy childhood, or has she been grieving the loss of her youth? Why?

19. What does Addy learn about the comfort of being loved versus the joy of loving others?

Alexandra Styron’s suggestions for reading and viewing

Brown Girl in the Ring: An Anthology of Song Games from the Eastern Caribbean

   Alan Lomax, J. D. Elder, Bess Lomax Hawes

The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English

   Edited by Paula Burnett

A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny

   by Mark Kurlansky

The Modern Caribbean

   Edited by Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer

Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage

   Edited by Richard Allsop

Art Restoration: The Culture, the Business, and the Scandal

   by James Beck with Michael Daley