Chapter One
The Book of the Dead
My father is gone. I'm slouched in a cast-aluminum chair across from
two men, one the manager of the hotel where we're staying and the
other a policeman. They're both waiting for me to explain what's
become of him, my father.
The hotel manager-mr. flavio salinas, the plaque on his office door
reads-has the most striking pair of chartreuse eyes I've ever seen
on a man with an island Spanish lilt to his voice.
The police officer, Officer Bo, is a baby-faced, short, white
Floridian with a potbelly.
"Where are you and your daddy from, Ms. Bienaimé?" Officer Bo asks,
doing the best he can with my last name. He does such a lousy job
that, even though he and I and Salinas are the only people in
Salinas' office, at first I think he's talking to someone else.
I was born and raised in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and have never
even been to my parents' birthplace. Still, I answer "Haiti" because
it is one more thing I've always longed to have in common with my
parents.
Officer Bo plows forward with, "You all the way down here in
Lakeland from Haiti?"
"We live in New York," I say. "We were on our way to Tampa."
"To do what?" Officer Bo continues. "Visit?"
"To deliver a sculpture," I say. "I'm an artist, a sculptor."
I'm really not an artist, not in the way I'd like to be. I'm more of
an obsessive wood-carver with a single subject thus far-my father.
My creative eye finds Manager Salinas' office gaudy. The walls are
covered with orange-and-green wallpaper, briefly interrupted by a
giant gold leaf-bordered print of a Victorian cottage that resembles
the building we're in.
Patting his light green tie, which brings out even more the
hallucinatory shade of his eyes, Manager Salinas reassuringly tells
me, "Officer Bo and I will do our best."
We start out with a brief description of my father: "Sixty-five,
five feet eight inches, one hundred and eighty pounds, with a
widow's peak, thinning salt-and-pepper hair, and velvet-brown eyes-"
"Velvet?" Officer Bo interrupts.
"Deep brown, same color as his complexion," I explain.
My father has had partial frontal dentures since he fell off his and
my mother's bed and landed on his face ten years ago when he was
having one of his prison nightmares. I mention that too. Just the
dentures, not the nightmares. I also bring up the blunt, ropelike
scar that runs from my father's right cheek down to the corner of
his mouth, the only visible reminder of the year he spent in prison
in Haiti.
"Please don't be offended by what I'm about to ask," Officer Bo
says. "I deal with an older population here, and this is something
that comes up a lot when they go missing. Does your daddy have any
kind of mental illness, senility?"
I reply, "No, he's not senile."
"You have any pictures of your daddy?" Officer Bo asks.
My father has never liked having his picture taken. We have only a
few of him at home, some awkward shots at my different school
graduations, with him standing between my mother and me, his hand
covering his scar. I had hoped to take some pictures of him on this
trip, but he hadn't let me. At one of the rest stops I bought a
disposable camera and pointed it at him anyway. As usual, he
protested, covering his face with both hands like a little boy
protecting his cheeks from a slap. He didn't want any more pictures
taken of him for the rest of his life, he said, he was feeling too
ugly.
"That's too bad," Officer Bo offers at the end of my too lengthy
explanation. "He speaks English, your daddy? Can he ask for
directions, et cetera?"
"Yes," I say.
"Is there anything that might make your father run away from you,
particularly here in Lakeland?" Manager Salinas asks. "Did you two
have a fight?"
I had never tried to tell my father's story in words before now, but
my first completed sculpture of him was the reason for our trip: a
three-foot mahogany figure of my father naked, kneeling on a
half-foot-square base, his back arched like the curve of a crescent
moon, his downcast eyes fixed on his very long fingers and the large
palms of his hands. It was hardly revolutionary, rough and not too
detailed, minimalist at best, but it was my favorite of all my
attempted representations of my father. It was the way I had
imagined him in prison.
The last time I had seen my father? The previous night, before
falling asleep. When we pulled our rental car into the hotel's
hedge-bordered parking lot, it was almost midnight. All the
restaurants in the area were closed. There was nothing to do but
shower and go to bed.
"It's like paradise here," my father had said when he'd seen our
tiny room. It had the same orange-and-green wallpaper as Salinas'
office, and the plush emerald carpet matched the walls. "Look, Ka,"
he said, his deep, raspy voice muted with exhaustion, "the carpet is
like grass under our feet."
He'd picked the bed closest to the bathroom, removed the top of his
gray jogging suit, and unpacked his toiletries. Soon after, I heard
him humming loudly, as he always did, in the shower.
I checked on the sculpture, just felt it a little bit through the
bubble padding and carton wrapping to make sure it was still whole.
I'd used a piece of mahogany that was naturally flawed, with a few
superficial cracks along what was now the back. I'd thought these
cracks beautiful and had made no effort to sand or polish them away,
as they seemed like the wood's own scars, like the one my father had
on his face. But I was also a little worried about the cracks. Would
they seem amateurish and unintentional, like a mistake? Could the
wood come apart with simple movements or with age? Would the client
be satisfied?
I closed my eyes and tried to picture the client to whom I was
delivering the sculpture: Gabrielle Fonteneau, a Haitian American
woman about my age, the star of a popular television series and an
avid art collector. My friend Céline Benoit, a former colleague at
the junior high school where I'm a substitute art teacher, had grown
up with Gabrielle Fonteneau in Tampa and on a holiday visit home had
shown Gabrielle Fonteneau a snapshot of my Father piece and had
persuaded her to buy it.
Gabrielle Fonteneau was spending the week away from Hollywood at her
parents' house in Tampa. I took some time off, and both my mother
and I figured that my father, who watched a lot of television, both
at home and at his Nostrand Avenue barbershop, would enjoy meeting
Gabrielle Fonteneau too. But when I woke up, my father was gone and
so was the sculpture.
I stepped out of the room and onto the balcony overlooking the
parking lot. It was a hot and muggy morning, the humid air laden
with the smell of the freshly mowed tropical grass and
sprinkler-showered hibiscus bordering the parking lot. My rental car
too was gone. I hoped my father was driving around trying to find us
some breakfast and would explain when he got back why he'd taken the
sculpture with him, so I got dressed and waited. I watched a half
hour of local morning news, smoked five mentholated cigarettes even
though we were in a nonsmoking room, and waited some more.
All that waiting took two hours, and I felt guilty for having held
back so long before going to the front desk to ask, "Have you seen
my father?"
I feel Officer Bo's fingers gently stroking my wrist, perhaps to
tell me to stop talking. Up close Officer Bo smells like fried eggs
and gasoline, like breakfast at the Amoco.
"I'll put the word out with the other boys," he says. "Salinas here
will be in his office. Why don't you go on back to your hotel room
in case your daddy shows up there?"
Back in the room, I lie in my father's unmade bed. The sheets smell
like his cologne, an odd mix of lavender and lime that I've always
thought too pungent, but that he likes nonetheless.
I jump up when I hear the click from the electronic key in the door.
It's the maid. She's a young Cuban woman who is overly polite,
making up for her lack of English with deferential gestures: a great
big smile, a nod, even a bow as she backs out of the room. She
reminds me of my mother when she has to work on non-Haitian clients
at her beauty shop, how she pays much more attention to those
clients, forcing herself to laugh at jokes she barely understands
and smiling at insults she doesn't quite grasp, all to avoid being
forced into a conversation, knowing she couldn't hold up her end
very well.
It's almost noon when I pick up the phone and call my mother at the
salon. One of her employees tells me that she's not yet returned
from the Mass she attends every day. After the Mass, if she has
clients waiting, she'll walk the twenty blocks from the church to
the salon. If she has no appointments, then she'll let her workers
handle the walk-ins and go home for lunch. This was as close to
retirement as my mother would ever come. This routine was her dream
when she first started the shop. She had always wanted a life with
room for daily Mass and long walks and the option of sometimes not
going to work.
I call my parents' house. My mother isn't there either, so I leave
the hotel number on the machine.
"Please call as soon as you can, Manman," I say. "It's about Papa."
It's early afternoon when my mother calls back, her voice cracking
with worry. I had been sitting in that tiny hotel room, eating chips
and candy bars from the vending machines, chain-smoking and waiting
for something to happen, either for my father, Officer Bo, or
Manager Salinas to walk into the room with some terrible news or for
my mother or Gabrielle Fonteneau to call. I took turns imagining my
mother screaming hysterically, berating both herself and me for
thinking this trip with my father a good idea, then envisioning
Gabrielle Fonteneau calling to say that we shouldn't have come on
the trip. It had all been a joke. She wasn't going to buy a
sculpture from me after all, especially one I didn't have.
"Where Papa?" Just as I expected, my mother sounds as though she's
gasping for breath. I tell her to calm down, that nothing bad has
happened. Papa's okay. I've just lost sight of him for a little
while.
"How you lost him?" she asks.
"He got up before I did and disappeared," I say.
"How long he been gone?"
I can tell she's pacing back and forth in the kitchen, her slippers
flapping against the Mexican tiles. I can hear the faucet when she
turns it on, imagine her pushing a glass underneath it and filling
it up. I hear her sipping the water as I say, "He's been gone for
hours now. I don't even believe it myself."
"You call police?"
Now she's probably sitting at the kitchen table, her eyes closed,
her fingers sliding back and forth across her forehead. She clicks
her tongue and starts humming one of those mournful songs from the
Mass, songs that my father, who attends church only at Christmas,
picks up from her and also hums to himself in the shower.
My mother stops humming just long enough to ask, "What the police
say?"
"To wait, that he'll come back."
There's a loud tapping on the line, my mother thumping her fingers
against the phone's mouthpiece; it gives me a slight ache in my ear.
"He come back," she says with more certainty than either Officer Bo
or Manager Salinas. "He not leave you like that."
I promise to call my mother hourly with an update, but I know she'll
call me sooner than that, so I dial Gabrielle Fonteneau's cell
phone. Gabrielle Fonteneau's voice sounds just as it does on
television, but more silken, nuanced, and seductive without the
sitcom laugh track.
"To think," my father once said while watching her show, in which
she plays a smart-mouthed nurse in an inner-city hospital's
maternity ward. "A Haitian-born actress with her own American
television show. We have really come far."
"So nice of you to come all this way to personally deliver the
sculpture," Gabrielle Fonteneau says. She sounds like she's in a
place with cicadas, waterfalls, palm trees, and citronella candles
to keep the mosquitoes away. I realize that I too am in such a
place, but I'm not able to enjoy it.
"Were you told why I like this sculpture so much?" Gabrielle
Fonteneau asks. "It's regal and humble at the same time. It reminds
me of my own father."
I hadn't been trying to delve into the universal world of fathers,
but I'm glad my sculpture reminds Gabrielle Fonteneau of her father,
for I'm not beyond the spontaneous fanaticism inspired by famous
people, whose breezy declarations seem to carry so much more weight
than those of ordinary mortals. I still had trouble believing I had
Gabrielle Fonteneau's cell number, which Céline Benoit had made me
promise not to share with anyone else, not even my father.
My thoughts are drifting from Gabrielle Fonteneau's father to mine
when I hear her say, "So when will you get here? You have the
directions, right? Maybe you can join us for lunch tomorrow, at
around twelve."
"We'll be there," I say.
But I'm no longer so certain.
My father loves museums. When he's not working at his barbershop,
he's often at the Brooklyn Museum. The Ancient Egyptian rooms are
his favorites.
"The Egyptians, they was like us," he likes to say. The Egyptians
worshiped their gods in many forms, fought among themselves, and
were often ruled by foreigners. The pharaohs were like the dictators
he had fled, and their queens were as beautiful as Gabrielle
Fonteneau. But what he admires most about the Ancient Egyptians is
the way they mourn their dead.
"They know how to grieve," he'd say, marveling at the mummification
process that went on for weeks but resulted in corpses that
survived thousands of years.
My whole adult life, I have struggled to find the proper manner of
sculpting my father, a quiet and distant man who only came alive
while standing with me most of the Saturday mornings of my
childhood, mesmerized by the golden masks, the shawabtis, and the
schist tablets, Isis, Nefertiti, and Osiris, the jackal-headed ruler
of the underworld.
The sun is setting and my mother has called more than a dozen times
when my father finally appears in the hotel room doorway. He looks
like a much younger man and appears calm and rested, as if bronzed
after a long day at the beach.
"Too smoky in here," he says.
I point to my makeshift ashtray, a Dixie cup filled with
tobacco-dyed water and cigarette butts.
"Ka, let your father talk to you." He fans the smoky air with his
hands, walks over to the bed, and bends down to unlace his sneakers.
"Yon ti koze, a little chat."
"Where were you?" I feel my eyelids twitching, a nervous reaction I
inherited from my epileptic mother. "Why didn't you leave a note?
And Papa, where is the sculpture?"
"That is why we must chat," he says, pulling off his sand-filled
sneakers and rubbing the soles of his large, calloused feet each in
turn. "I have objections."
He's silent for a long time, concentrating on his foot massage, as
though he'd been looking forward to it all day.
"I'd prefer you not sell that statue," he says at last. Then he
turns away, picks up the phone, and calls my mother.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Dew Breaker
by Edwidge Danticat
Copyright © 2004 by Edwidge Danticat.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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The Dew Breaker
