Miss Seetoh in the World (40 page)

‘What on earth –’ cried Maria angrily. ‘How
dare he talk of claiming his share, Mother, while you are still alive?’

Anna Seetoh said, looking so wretched that
Maria’s anger against her brother rose to match the pity for her mother, ‘It’s
okay, since I can continue living here with you. It makes no difference to me.’

Maria got up and walked straight into her
bedroom, rubbing the sides of her head to reduce the turbulence of the thoughts
screaming inside.

‘Well, what shall I tell Heng?’ said her
mother, standing at the doorway.

‘Tell him to come and see me tomorrow,’ said
Maria wearily. ‘I want to hear exactly what is in his mind.’ She threw the
letter into the wastebasket.

It was the same each time – her mother’s
pleading on his behalf, her remonstrances, then the buckling on account of the
poor wife and son. When Heng sat in a chair before her, looking up only
occasionally, she realised, with a little shudder of horror, that the standard
image of the addict she had only seen on TV programmes, with the haunted eyes,
the look of desperation mixed with a burning intensity of excited expectation
of the next fix, was right before her eyes. She had meant, on behalf of the
rest of the family who seemed helpless before him, to give him a sound lecture
about his unconscionable neglect of his family and to extract a promise to do
something about his addiction. But the sheer thought of its futility drained
her of all purpose and energy; she knew that of all persons, she would be the
last from whom he would accept advice, much less rebuke.

In the end, a single thought prevailed: she
wanted nothing more to do with him, and the disbursement of the sum would be a
final severance. She might even come to see it as a disguised blessing. It
would deplete her savings alarmingly; she had always meant to save steadily
towards some vague dream of buying a small studio apartment in a new
condominium and living entirely on her own – no mother, no Por Por, no maid.
Solitary, single, alone – the word, whatever its connotations for women like
Meeta or Winnie, had, for her, its own special meanings of peace, freedom and
self-fulfilment.

‘Thanks,’ her brother said briefly, both to
her agreement to his proposal and a gift of some clothes for his wife and toys
for his son, which she were in two large paper bags. She could never have
trusted him to take back any cash gift for them; he would have made straight
for the 4-D betting booth or the jackpot machine in the Manis Club. Anna Seetoh
had watched him once at the machine, completely mesmerised by its flashing
lights, its idiotic pictures of rows of fruit, lightning zigzags, clown’s faces
and the seductive ringing sounds of coins pouring out on to a waiting metal
furrow. He would not leave, said Anna Seetoh shaking her head, because he was bent
on hitting the jackpot which had snowballed to ten thousand dollars. In the
end, she had to forcibly drag him out of the gambling room.

Out of Maria’s hearing, in the kitchen with
his mother, Heng’s posture of defeat vanished in a new flare of outraged pride.
‘Who does she think she is, talking to me like that?’ His dream of winning the
million-dollar first prize in the national lottery fired him with the savage
triumph of the ultimate revenge, ‘As soon as I collect my prize, I will say to
her, ‘Tell me how much I owe you, plus interest, down to the last cent,’ and
then I will throw the money upon the floor for her to pick up. But not before
wiping my backside with it!’ He let out a sharp, hysterical laugh.

His mother said, ‘Please, not so loud.’ In
her early morning visits to the Church of Eternal Mercy, she would double her
prayers for him and make a special petition to St Anthony, the saint for
hopeless cases.

‘My turn to write a note,’ Maria thought
grimly and she sat down and wrote her brother a note, or rather a warning that
he could expect no more financial help from her. The ending words should be
seared into his brain if he had any pride at all: ‘You are an irresponsible
husband and father and should be ashamed of yourself.’

Only he, she thought with a return of tender
feelings as she prepared for bed that night, would be able to restore her trust
in notes. He had never written her one. Even an unsigned one, making oblique
reference to a happy moment shared, a joke laughed over together in the parked
car outside the Botanic Gardens, or over lunch in the Bon Vivant Café would
have brought her so much joy. In a week’s time, he would be leaving for Europe;
in a week’s time, they would be meeting for that climactic moment, even if
there were no silken bed in their hotel room. While he had waited with cheerful
patience, she had been deliberating about it for more than a year, before
succumbing to that irresistible ‘Well?’ The perfect, one-word proposition.

She was tempted to send him a note that was
sure to make him laugh, summarising his romantic quest and its success in a
cartoon depiction of a large question mark of hope suddenly straightened out
into the exclamation mark of triumph. She had actually done the drawing, in
bright red, but thrown it away, because he encouraged neither letters nor calls
from her, never once mentioning Olivia’s powers of detection which ranged far
and wide. Olivia Phang had befriended one of the clerks in her husband’s
office, a very friendly, talkative girl, who, while thanking Mrs Phang for the
occasional presents of perfume and costume jewellery, had no idea she was
divulging much valuable information about her husband.

If not a meeting, then a note, if not a note
then a call: a yearning woman sadly whittled down her hopes. If, in the midst
of his hectic programmes, he had managed to give her a brief call, a very brief
one lasting no more than a minute, how happy that would have made her! A woman
in love grew hungry for small assurances, and if deprived of them, would pine
and wilt.

Meeta and Winnie were far from wilting; both
had suddenly found themselves in circumstances that, like a shower after a long
drought, revived parched flowers and made them bloom and smile again. Byron was
meeting Meeta for lunches and drinks at the Polo Club because he happened to be
experiencing his own romantic dry season when one female companion had left
with no replacement in sight, and the ever available Meeta Nair, large,
overbearing, loud, might do for temporary companionship. He had never initiated
any of their meetings, so it was with special delight that Meeta accepted his
invitation to be his partner at the coming gala ball in the Polo Club. She
understood that his insistence on her finding another couple or two to join
them to form a large table at the ball was born of a general unease at being
alone with her, a fact she was not too embarrassed to mention to Winnie or
Maria before satisfying herself with the sneering proclamation, ‘The bastard
should realise I’m playing the same game too! One of these days, when I find my
Mr Right, I’m going to chuck my for-the-time-being beau!’

Winnie was in the happy position of being
free from all doubts and misgivings; in fact she hinted that she would soon be
engaged to a man she had met through a friend’s introduction, a
Chinese-American who did secret work all over the world for the US navy.

Meeta had whispered to Maria, ‘Introduction,
my foot! She found his name in some dating column in some newspaper,’ and
again, ‘Secret work in the US navy, my other foot! He’s another of those
sweet-talking con men that our poor Winnie’s always picking up, who will run
away as soon as he’s fleeced her enough.’

Winnie seemed to have an interminable source
of old money from parents and grandparents who were among the most established
families in the historical state of Malacca in Malaysia. Endless rubber,
coconut and oil plantations from the time of British colonisation continued to
feed Winnie’s bottomless bank account which, like the magic purse in fairy tales,
was refilled with gold coins, as soon as the last one was spent. Meeta said
that men could smell Winnie’s money from countries far away, which was why a
Frenchman and now a Chinese-American had come a-wooing.

Maria said, ‘Why, Winnie, you look years younger!’
Indeed, Winnie looked prettier, her normally sallow skin suddenly irradiated by
love’s glow.

She said simpering, ‘Wilbur makes me feel so
happy.’ Like a child eager to share happy secrets, she told Maria about her
many happy dates. ‘We’re planning a short holiday to Langkawi,’ she confided
with the unmistakable coyness about a holiday, at last, with a man. ‘I bought
some suitable nightwear from Robinson’s,’ she confided further, blushing
deeply.

Maria thought, ‘Poor Meeta.’ As Winnie’s
housemate, she must have heard about the planned Langkawi holiday and the
bought lingerie a dozen times.

Wilbur, a very happy-looking individual who
talked and laughed endlessly, was all for making others happy too. ‘My
philosophy?’ he said. ‘Nobody comes to Wilbur for a favour and goes away
disappointed! You can back me up on this, eh, Winnie girl?’ He put his arm
around her shoulder and she giggled. ‘Not exactly a useful quality for my kind
of work, eh, Winnie sweetheart?’ And he winked at her.

Maria had never seen Winnie look so happy.
‘What, your friend Maria has no partner for the ball?’ he said to Meeta. ‘Why
didn’t you tell me earlier? I’ll call Freddie at once. His wife’s away, and
won’t mind him going out and having a good time now and then. Freddie’s a great
guy!’

‘Now, Maria, you can’t say no to joining
us,’ said Meeta severely, ‘because Winnie’s Wilbur has gone to all the trouble
of finding you a partner. We’re all going to have a ball!’

Winnie said sympathetically, ‘What a pity
your Dr Phang is married. Otherwise, he can come as your partner. I’m sure he
and Wilbur will get along fine. Both of them are so handsome and
distinguished-looking!’

‘Mother, for goodness’ sake, what are you
doing?’ cried Maria and wrested the cane from her mother’s hand.

‘I was only threatening her,’ said Anna
Seetoh. She complained that Por Por was behaving like a naughty child and had
to be treated like one. Rosiah, the maid, whispered to Maria that her mother
had three canes in different parts of the house, for instant punishment of an
old parent irremediably cast back into an unmanageable second childhood. The
extreme state of poor Por Por’s dementia, while it provided relief in making
her too timid to venture out on her own, pushed her back into a hopelessly
infantile state, making her throw her food about, soil herself, sit in her own
puddle, break things. The much harassed Rosiah said she could not manage the old
woman single-handed and hinted about going back home to Indonesia.

Por Por looked with frightened eyes at Anna
Seetoh with the raised cane, as the latter, so long ago, must have looked at
her, in the cruel role reversals of old age.

Maria thought, as she put away the cane and
bent to comfort the old woman, ‘God, if you’re still there and not averse to
doing favours even for prodigal daughters, could you take me away before I
reach Por Por’s pathetic stage?’ At the back of her mind was one thought, not fully
articulated: ‘She will have to go to a home. If Rosiah leaves, I have no
choice.’ Her world could not bear to include the stench and stains of old age
left on the floor, the furniture, in the very air itself.

A feeling of guilt tugged at her, and she
dismissed it, thinking, ‘No, I must be fair to myself. I couldn’t take on the
burden of caring for Por Por for the rest of her life.’ Her mother was already
talking about going to live with Heng’s family in Malaysia, to save them from
ruin, as God had made clear to her. Her school work was demanding, and when she
returned home from school, she wanted to lock herself in her room, away from
her mother’s querulous complaints about her brother, Rosiah’s complaints about
her grandmother, her grandmother’s helplessness against the devastations of old
age.

She said to her grandmother, adopting the
firmness of voice one used for a particularly difficult child, ‘If you don’t
behave, Por Por, and do as you’re told, no more this,’ she held up a cheap
imitation jade ring, ‘nor this,’ she held up an ang pow opened to show part of
a dollar note. The old woman, probably remembering a biscuit tin filled with
her ang pow money, had accused Rosiah of stealing it, and could only be
pacified with another biscuit tin containing a generous scattering of the red
gift packets. In a moment her restiveness vanished, as she decked herself with
trinkets and counted the money in the biscuit tin. Her childish regressions
were far less perturbing than her occasional recollection of an action
involving Bernard. One morning she had suddenly gone into the kitchen scolding
Rosiah for not helping her get ready the rice porridge and pickled vegetables
for Ah Siong’s breakfast. On another occasion, she had suddenly stopped in the
middle of a shopping trip in a mall and begun to insist on going back into a
shop to get something which Ah Siong had requested her to get for him. It would
always reflect well on her dead husband and badly on her, thought Maria sadly,
that while he had gone from her thoughts, he remained affectionately lodged in
an old woman’s memory.

A heaviness of heart, of the unfocussed kind
related to the overall sadness of the human condition, descended on Maria as
she went into Por Por’s room that evening to see if she was well covered
against the chill of a coming storm; like a petulant child, Por Por sometimes
kicked off her blanket or threw her pillows on the floor. The room smelt of the
stale smells of sad decrepitude. The old woman was sleeping peacefully. Every
woman on the face of this earth, thought Maria, no matter how wretched her
life, should have at least a single day, even a part of a day, of joy and
triumph, when she could look into the mirror and say, ‘I’m so happy! I’ll never
be that happy again.’ What was that supreme moment for her mother? Perhaps
having nothing to do with men, it had everything to do with love of the
non-carnal, religious kind, and lay not in her past but somewhere in her future
with the conversion of her errant children through her prayers and sacrifices,
when she could at last rise from her knees in church and celebrate God’s love
with her arms lifted high in an ecstatic hallelujah.