Come Sunday: A Novel (8 page)

“Darling,” I tell her, “Mommy is going to cut a piece of your hair so I can keep it. Okay?” I cry, wipe my nose with Mrs. Avery’s lace handkerchief, and then steady my trembling hand. Snipping off a small whorl behind her left ear, I leave the long one that was the first to grow at the nape of her neck. It falls into the envelope, which I then fold and tuck in my purse before Greg knocks once and walks in.

WHEN WE GET HOME, Rhiaan is the one who opens the front door, and I step into his outstretched arms, the arms of a home long gone. “I miss her so much,” I cry.

“I know,” Rhiaan says.

“I would trade everything for one more day.”

“Yes,” he says, rubbing small circles on my back.

When I lift my face from Rhiaan’s shoulder, a wet spot as big as a map marks the place. From his shirt pocket he extracts a small notebook, its cover folded behind a page where words once were. Now they are inky flowers.

“Sorry, Rhiaan. I’ve ruined your writing.”

“Here.” He smiles, getting his handkerchief out. “Wipe your nose; the writing was ruined before it even hit the paper.” A closer look at my brother reveals a face much older than it was the last time we saw each
other—not quite a year ago at the Fourth of July reunion. Much older than his seven-year lead on me. A face that speaks of loss. Up till now we have all just thought it a phase, writer’s block—surely no one is immune—but now I wonder if Rhiaan has been mourning the loss of something dear himself. The very thing that gives him identity, purpose. Years ago, in an interview published in
The Literary Review
, Rhiaan was asked to name his greatest fear. “Running dry,” he had said. I would have guessed “Losing Cicely,” or at least “Losing one of my children.” But losing inspiration for Rhiaan, I learned, had to be a kind of hemorrhage where eventually all that would pass through his veins would be the whistling wind of the high desert. It is a terrible thing, then, that my spent tears have made blurry patches on what was an attempt.

Rhiaan’s burnt-orange hair, shaggy since boyhood, is now cut close to the scalp and looks like the veldt after a bushfire. He takes off his spectacles to rub his eyes and stretches up to embrace Greg. This brother of mine, famous around the world for his eloquent poems, his ability to capture in couplets the depths of a suffering nation, has no words for a suffering father. Instead, he shakes his head and then rubs the top of it as though to put out the last of the cinders.

“Cicely didn’t come?” Greg asks.

“Couldn’t get a plane out of Paris in time,” he explains, answering Greg, as he so often does, by looking at me. “I’m mad as hell at her for going in the first place, but that’s another story. But she does send all her love and her sympathies, of course. You know Cis—she’s never going to be able to forgive herself for missing the funeral.”

“And the kids?” Greg is asking all the questions I have forgotten to ask.

“They’re at some horse-riding camp in the Sierras this weekend. I left a message at the lodge where they are staying, but I’m going to try calling them again a little later.”

“We are really pleased you could make it,” Greg thanks him.

Looking at me, Rhiaan says, “I wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

After we have had tea and nibbled on the platter of cheese and biscuits Jenny prepared, Rhiaan goes outside to smoke his pipe and escape
Greg’s earnest attempts at conversation with him. Rhiaan has never said he doesn’t like Greg, nor has he ever, in the slightest way, done anything that might be construed as dislike for the man I married. It could well be that the aloofness that characterizes most of my brother’s social interactions applies to his dealings with Greg. I haven’t ever asked, in part because I have never wanted an answer, and Rhiaan has never volunteered.

The rain is coming down in vertical sheets and Rhiaan huddles under the awning and stares out at the storm hanging in the harbor.

“Your newscasters are calling it ‘a storm of biblical proportions,’ ” Rhiaan says.

“Don’t you just love the media? To them just about all the Bible is good for is its ‘proportions,’ ” I respond.

Rhiaan nods. “When it can be good for so many other reasons—doorstops, paperweights, dumbbells—”

“Oh, stop!” But it does elicit a smile, an arrangement of muscles that feels to my face as foreign as a mustache.

For a while we hear only the sound of rain pummeling the deck.

“I keep having the feeling that if I had had more time I would have become a good mother,” I wonder aloud.

“You
were
a good mother—even by biblical standards,” Rhiaan offers, taking a deep draw on his pipe.

“But what about by Cleo standards?”

“Hers too.” Seeing how unconvinced I am, Rhiaan continues, “Remember last year when we all went down to the beach and Cleo wanted to get in the water?” She hadn’t turned three yet and the little waves frightened her even when I held her hand and tried talking her through them. How frustrated she became when the other children skipped over them and kicked at them till they were blue and shivery. “It was so hot and everyone else went in to cool off, and what did you do?” he asks.

“Well, I didn’t want to force her to go in . . .”

“You dug that great big hole and tried to make her a swimming pool, even though all those buckets of water you hauled kept getting
sucked up by sand. You must have done that for hours—I don’t think I have ever seen you that determined! And we all swam and sat in the beach chairs and drank beers and watched you.”

“It’s what any good mother would do.”

“My point exactly.”

Somewhere far-off there is the sound of a child crying. Automatically I stop, cock my head to the side, and listen to hear whether it is the cry of the child I love. “You think Mom was a good mother too, don’t you?” I ask, recognizing that it is not.

He nods. “She did her best.”

“With you I think she did. But I think her best left the day you left for college.” Rhiaan, who had matriculated a year ahead of his peers and was accepted at Rhodes University on a full scholarship, was seventeen when he left home. I was ten. Grahamstown might as well have been another country and not the nine hundred kilometers northeast of our doorstep, as far as my mother was concerned. Where before she interspersed her domestic responsibilities with outings for us, sometimes to my grandmother’s farm or to the library or even once or twice a year to the local theater, after Rhiaan left, an outing for the two of us was an ice cream from the vendor outside the grocery store before heading home. She went into hibernation during the long months Rhiaan was at school, spending her evenings either composing letters to her son or rereading one of his. If before my father treated us like rearranged furniture around which he had to navigate, after Rhiaan left he took up target practice with my mother in his sights. She was to blame, whether it was because he had misplaced his car keys, or because a check bounced, or because he was passed over for promotion (again). Most especially, though, she was to blame for her son’s bleeding-heart liberalism.

Although my father never went to the trouble of voting, he was a staunch supporter of the National Party. On the topic of politics, he had only one argument. “Take a look at the rest of Africa,” he would say, “and then try telling me it’s a good idea to give the
kaffirs
their way!” This logic, passed from father to son for several generations, had done a good job of carving out a rather nice life for white South
Africans. Sure, you had to put burglar bars on your windows and secure your property with walls and German shepherds—a small price to pay. But what kind of price was it when your own flesh and blood thumbed their noses at your beliefs, at the way of life they were expected to inherit? Rhiaan, like a lot of white teenagers of his generation, started questioning the government’s policies, and when they didn’t get the answers they were looking for they challenged its tactics. Fathers all over the country were taking it badly. “The army’ll sort them out” was often the general consensus.
“Kry all daardie civvy kak uit.”
And my father believed this would have worked for Rhiaan if our mother had not done a good job of filling his head with the notion of college. She encouraged Rhiaan’s creative pursuits and his growing objections to apartheid with all that listening!

It was anticipated that black boys would grow up to be troublemakers, recruits for the feared
Umkhonto we Sizwe
, but when white kids caused trouble with their college campus sit-ins, their threats of civil disobedience, the fathers of South Africa were quite at a loss. “This country is going to the dogs,” my dad would snarl, watching on TV as SADF troops fired tear gas into the college crowds, “and it doesn’t help a goddamn inch when
kaffir
-loving Commie buggers like your son encourage these terrorists! Think they know everything! Well, let me tell you something, when he goes into the army they’ll knock the bloody shit out of him. That’s what he needs, not some limp-wrist professor spoon-feeding him a pack o’ lies!” Did she ever argue with that? All I remember is her serving dinner, washing the dishes, and cleaning the counters, and the more he fumed the more she scrubbed. She would stop only when Rhiaan came home from varsity with a sackload of laundry and a fistful of poems for her to glue in a scrapbook.

“I don’t know that I would agree with that,” Rhiaan now argues.

“You weren’t there, Rhiaan. Things changed;
she
changed.”

“I was still around, just not to the same extent. But Mom and I talked on the phone. She told me things.”

“She told you things you wanted to hear.”

“That’s not so. Mom told me things she couldn’t tell anyone else. Not Dad, not you.” And it is always like this when we speak of the past:
Rhiaan rewriting our family history from my mother’s letters. If I so much as hint that she might have been less than honest with him, he gets very quiet and looks as if I have jabbed him with a hatpin. The most we have been able to do is concede that each owns a piece of our mother, a piece that, try as we might to make it otherwise, does not line up snugly with the other.

“All I am saying is she didn’t have to tell me anything; I was living with it,” I say.

“I think part of being a good mother—a good parent—is choosing between which things you tell your children and which you don’t. You are not going to blurt out things to your child, even if you think she is old enough to understand, when there’s a damn good chance it is going to pull the rug out from under her.”

“It’s just better to have secrets then, is it?”

“Would you tell Cleo all your secrets?” Sometimes people mistake my openness for transparency, but not my brother. Rhiaan knows there are places I tuck things away, and behind labels like “openness” is as good a place as any.

It is an unfair answer to his winning question, but I give it anyway: “Well, we will never know, will we?”

“Come here,” he says, and I feel my brother’s arms close around me, concluding the first conversation I have had in days. Maybe it is because Rhiaan is threaded through my past that I can talk to him, or maybe it is because I know he is not going to respond with any religious platitudes.

Jenny walks out. “Don’t hate me for this, but I have lunch ready—if you’d rather wait, that’s fine with me. It will keep.” Rhiaan rubs his stomach. “And I think your husband might need some reinforcement.”

“Oh?”

“He’s on the phone to your mother-in-law and it doesn’t sound good.”

It never does. “Give us a few minutes,” I tell her.

“You’re lucky to have a friend like Jenny,” Rhiaan says when she has gone back inside. “Wouldn’t Dad be pleased to see you finally have a
black woman in your kitchen fixing your meals?” He means it as a joke, as a dig at our father’s racist ways, but it just resurrects all the old feelings.

My father, an impatient man even at the front end of a twelve-hour day, became unrestrained after Rhiaan left for college. There were brooding silences that lasted for weeks, interspersed only by the rat-a-tat-tat of his curt insults. If my mother made the mistake of speaking during the eight o’clock news broadcast, if the chicken curry wasn’t hot enough, if she started to doze off in front of her plate at the kitchen counter, my father would deliver an insult as though he wished, rather, it were a well-aimed kick in the gut. “For chrissake, Pet, I shouldn’t have to eat leftovers when you have been home all day!” That was his nickname for her: Pet.

Sometimes the silences parted for a season of unpredictable patterns. Rages that could go on all night just because someone had left a glass to sweat on the dining room table. My mother would slip into my room late at night, sometimes waking me, just to tell me my father wasn’t angry at me; he had a lot on his mind, that’s all. Her reassurances never once worked. Fathers should tidy the world for their daughters; they should stack the good and bad into neat piles. But Harry was a Karoo tornado, perpetually rearranging things so that cars hurtled down U-shaped bends, mothers got wrapped around gin bottles, and brothers got blasted into kingdom come.

When East Coast people move to the islands they often say, “Oh, I miss the seasons.” They do. Even the blizzards that can cause fifteen-car pileups, or hurricanes that can whip up waves big enough to drown a city. I know what they mean. My father’s raw, unceasing seasons don’t touch me here, and even though I have filed away those remembrances that can make a heart tip out, I have to admit the sheer force of his windy moods made our hair stand up, made us feel glad to be alive when the storms abated.

“Grandma used to say that it always rains on the day a good person dies. I bet not one cloud passed through the skies the day Dad died.”

“You still mad at him?” Rhiaan squints over his smoke at me.

“You aren’t?”

“It is seldom a productive thing to be angry,” he replies.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

Rhiaan stares out at the harbor. The navy has brought all its vessels into port except one, which cuddles the coastline like an orphan. He taps out his tobacco and finally speaks. “For a long time I felt responsible for what happened to Mom. As you said, I was the one who left, but her misery was apparent even long-distance. He was a mean bugger, I’ll give you that, but I always blamed myself for being such a disappointment to him. So, to answer your question, if I was mad at anyone, I was mad at myself.”