Chapter 12 - Sweet Haven

LUTH had divulged all she knew. Or so she said. It was plenty. Now she fell silent. Narita fetched her a glass of water from the refrigerator. She drank it down without thanks, without comment.

Narita felt nothing, not even surprise. It seemed nothing about her daughter could astonish her anymore.

What time was it? It seemed she had been listening for hours, here in this bedroom that had always been Antonia’s and, for several months after that disastrous lunch at the Hollands’, her mother’s haven, and now hers. Here they had retreated, to get away from the kitchen where Cecilia hovered, listening with huge ears and an expressionless face as the household groaned in various degrees of misery. Here, too, they were safe from Daniel, and his monologues and his mindless habit of calling out their names as though they were saints who might save him in his hour of need.

They looked at each other in what was almost understanding. Mother and daughter, and tentative friends.

“So she was raped,” Narita said.

“God,” Luth exploded. “Don’t you dare use that word. It was not rape. Nothing happened to her.”

LUTH had probed, fixing Naia in her glare, as Mother Martha had done.

“Did you know the boy?”

“No. No.”

“Had you seen him before?”

“Maybe?”

“Was he another senior? A classmate of yours?”

“I told you I don’t know his name.”

“Listen to me carefully, Naia. Did you see this boy at any time after that afternoon?”

“No.”

“Did you tell Emily and Rinky Holland about him?”

“No, no, no.” Sobbing softly now.

At that point, Luth’s mind became absolutely clear. Daniel would never find out. He did not deserve to know. And this would have to be kept secret. The scandal would destroy Naia’s chances of a good marriage. No boy in Sweethaven would deign to approach her. She would end up one of those awful young whores arched on a motorcycle behind some haciendero playboy, lazily sweeping up her hair as they rocketed over asphalt.

Gently she asked the girl if the boy had had his way with her. Naia did not seem to understand. “Did he take your maidenhood?” Luth said. “Did you bleed in some way?”

“No,” the girl said again. “But he made me hold his thing.”

With a shudder, Luth banished the image from her mind.

“MOTHER Martha!” Narita said in awe. “What a creature she must have been. And Emily Holland allowed her in. An old hag from the Bible Belt most probably.”

“Who thinks we are monkeys,” said Luth.

“Huh.”

Their eyes met and immediately lowered, for the label, the very sound of it, shamed them. Discomfiture made the corners of their mouths flutter in the beginnings of two smiles, though there was no one in the room they needed to defer to, no one to placate. A lifetime of fretting over the color of their skin, the shape of their noses, tempered their feelings of outrage.

“That is Sweethaven for you,” Luth said at last, in a low murmur. “This is a community of hypocrites.”

Narita sighed. For as long as she could remember, there had always seemed to be people like Mother Martha, if you lumped together the Evangelicals and the Pentecostals and the Mormons. Americans who dressed in dowdy clothes and always seemed on the brink of poverty—perhaps that was because of their willingness to associate with the poor and the riffraff, as though they saw no difference between social stations. They would set up chapels in little rooms above storefronts, or in rented houses in the subdivisions around the city. The Mormons, of course, had their pretty white church with the manicured lawn. A cloud of suspicion had hung around these proselytizers—Narita had heard they were CIA spies, endorsed by Ferdinand Marcos to keep people’s minds off the various failings of his administration. And of course they had been yet another pathetic group of people for her and Antonia to jeer at.

“Those missionaries can’t be Sweethaven, Mother,” she now said.

“Not Sweethaven when they’ve got the ear of Emily Holland!”

Narita shook her head slowly. “I majored in psychology in college. I had tons of friends. They took zoology, medical technology, chemistry. Zenon was studying to be an engineer.”

“What is your point?” snapped Luth.

The point formulated itself slowly as she groped for words—that the Sweethaven she had known, that had formed her, had been soundly grounded in the quest for knowledge, in scientific inquiry. It did not proselytize. It was not a seminary, not a theological institute, despite its origins. Something was amiss for it to be so easily breached by the fundamentalists—something had gone wrong down the line.

“Jesus, why are you so afraid of these people?” Narita said at last. “How can you take them seriously?”

“They would take over Sweethaven if they could. They already have.”

“I don’t believe you. Not Father. Not the faculty down at Humanities. Not the gay organizations. This is still a university, Ma. We’re educated, we’re not desperate. We’re not like Brother Mike Velarde’s followers, rallying by the millions in Manila every Saturday.”

But Luth was shaking her head. “No, no, no, no, you do not see. You have been away for so long, and you come back with all these superior notions of yours, diagnosing the way we live.”

Narita flushed. A retort rose to her lips, as of old, but she bit it back.

“It doesn’t matter what a university is supposed to be,” said Luth. “The important thing is what it is. ‘Quest for knowledge.’ What are you talking about? Sweethaven is a glamorized nursing institute. Even doctors are studying nursing now. The peso has been worthless for decades. Everyone dreams of going to America.”

Narita was silent. She wanted to see if her mother would leave the room. She couldn’t move from where she sat, awaiting the next words. She was certain Luth knew more than she was letting on, that revelations were forthcoming.

“Monkeys. I was your father’s monkey for a long time,” the older woman said at last, in a tone that was beyond bitter. “Worked so hard because he felt he had to entertain the whole university at home. Get-togethers every fortnight—all his colleagues and his graduate students and those foreigners that had to be impressed with local food, kare-kare and escabeche and chop suey, and what went into each dish, and what was the reason for each pest of a name. Cleaning and cooking, no maid, keeping track of the conversations, making sure everyone had a Coke refill and cashew nuts at hand. I loved cashews, did you know that? But I never got much of a chance to taste them.”

“At least we helped you,” Narita volunteered.

“You would serve the peanuts, give them all away before the party had even begun. Then the two of you would vanish to your room, carrying all the chips.”

Narita pondered this. This was not the childhood she remembered. She had thought they had done their part. And she had loved those Jack n Jill corn chips. She had assumed no adult would ever want them. She’d had no idea of her mother’s misery. What would Luth say next? Without the figure of Antonia to complicate matters, some connection with Luth seemed wholly possible.

SHE could not share Luth’s suspicion of foreigners. The Pastor kids were not like ordinary Filipinos—growing up in Sweethaven, they had not been ignorant of the world. Foreigners were fixtures in the landscape of the living rooms and front lawns of their childhood. At least for a few years in the 1970s and early ’80s, the family could look forward to an outing, piling into a vehicle driven by some thrilling, knowledgeable white man, down into the hinterlands or to some desolate beach. They telescoped their great bodies down to her height and, looking pleasantly at her out of odd pale eyes, taught her a song or made her a very special sketch of carabaos and trees. They informed her that Manila was the capital and that José Rizal was the national hero and told Antonia that the name of the red flower was hibiscus, though the girls knew about Manila and Rizal, and hibiscus flowers, which were really gumamelas, were everywhere in the landscape.

The foreigners’ lawns were always trimmed, and they served strange stuff the children never knew existed: mouthfuls of oily pink fish and little round things called olives and once a little sip of a sour, burning colorless liquid out of a stemmed glass. They drank from plastic tumblers of canary yellow and hot pink; ate off superb little plates of fire engine red with a border of flowers. They had separate rooms in their sprawling, low homes for laundry, and in these laundry rooms sat machines especially for doing the wash. They owned vans, off-road jeeps, entire boats, even. The girls tread gingerly in their lovely homes, to which being invited was a privilege for which they wore their Sunday clothes.

No one ever said to Narita, “Look out, that creature coming at you is a foreigner; be very careful and keep answers to a minimum; you can never be sure what he wants.” Stunted village urchins goggled at her as, at seven or eight, she tramped self-importantly over a rutted road, alongside a tall, lumbering fellow in shorts and sandals—a coral reef expert spending a term at the university, or a translator or student of hill tribe languages.

They still kept photos from those years, faded to a cold, reddish hue. In these images, Rinky Holland played a prominent role. There he was, an arm around her father’s shoulders, mouth stretched in a devilish grin. His long hair was feathered back Shaun Cassidy style. In another shot, he was off to one side, his head half-turned to address someone outside the frame. In his hand was a small glass of some dark liquid; it could well have been one of those exotic European potions, though it was probably just Coke. He was always laughing, talking, posing, flirting with the camera, exhorting others to loosen up. Daniel, who owned the camera, appeared in these photos only occasionally, and if he did, his smile was always sheepish, his head dipped. He always seemed abashed.

A whiff of scandal hovered about Rinky Holland in those early days. His youthful exuberance, his movie star grin, filled Narita with a shy excitement she was too young to recognize as sexual. Her childhood had been laced with grown-up gossip about his numerous girlfriends, but as if that hadn’t been enough, there came one day the horrendously delicious tale of how he had seduced one of his students—an heiress, it was reputed, from a neighboring province. There were tears, tragedy, furious parents, an inheritance embargoed. One day in church, Luth had pinched Narita’s arm, and then just as quickly followed it up with a loaded glare. Narita understood there was something of deep interest in the vicinity, but she would have to be subtle if she wanted a glimpse. Thus she was introduced to Rinky Holland’s new wife, sitting in the pew across the aisle: tiny, perfect, and pale with the embarrassment of a first pregnancy. Narita, at age eleven, did not understand pregnancy. All she saw was a young lady who bore all the trappings of glamor, wealth, and Hollywood. At once she devised a name for this new being: Elizabeth, after Elizabeth McGovern. All the pretty mothers were named after movie stars.

One day Mr. Holland showed up on their doorstep. He spoke quietly and frowned a lot, as though he had come on a matter of utmost urgency, and in his hand was a toolbox made of real wood. In his checkered shirt he looked like a lumberjack; he even had pale-ish hair and the right shape nose. The girls were delighted with that tool chest, from which emerged a metal device like a gun, which he plugged into the wall. It made a horrific whining heard all over the house. “Black and Decker,” he said, in a tone of satisfaction, and Daniel repeated, “Black and Decker,” in exactly the same manner. And then Mr. Holland bored a pair of holes in the wall of the kitchen. Antonia gaped at him. He had violated the wood—what would their mother say?

Pretty soon the reason for this performance became apparent, as he fixed a hard plastic stump to the wall. The girls had never seen anything like it. It was a metal arm equipped with saw teeth. Mr. Holland plugged the device into a black box that must have been heavy, for he, the lumberjack, actually grunted as he hefted it onto the counter. This box he plugged into the wall socket. The teeth whirred merrily. “You even get a free transformer,” he said, and the two men laughed. The girls didn’t understand; it was an inside joke. The procedure took a whole hour, for Mr. Holland had a glamorous, unhurried way of doing things, taking care to explain the process to their father every step of the way.

But when their mother came home she demanded to know how much Rinky Holland had asked for the thing, and when Daniel told her, she blew her top. “Who pays their entire salary for an automatic can opener?” she screamed.

The children were mortified—this would be like the other time they had come home from an outing with their mother to find a thermometer clinging to the wall, some newfangled contraption that showed the temperature inside the house as well as out.

“Is this how our life will be from now on, a life of receiving your best friend’s cast-offs?” Luth raged.

He wept: “It was a gift on their wedding! It took so much out of him to part with it. They need our help badly, it’s the least we can do!”

“Come on, Antonia,” Narita said, to distract herself from their father’s shame. The girls went to the cupboard and collected all the cans they could find—Alaska Evaporada, Ma-Ling luncheon meat, Del Monte fruit cocktail, Gita peas. Antonia lined them up on the counter, and Narita fed them all to Mr. Holland’s wonderful apparatus, so that in minutes, disks of metal glinted on the countertop like giant fish scales, and Antonia was sucking a mix of milk and sardine sauce off her fingers. The sad thing was that can-opening would be over so quickly from then on—no more moans and groans from their father as he pretended to have lost a thumb, no more theatrics with tomato juice.

“Worthless secondhand toys,” said their mother, and Narita saw that she was weeping as well: two adults in tears; the day had turned upside down. “Made in Germany!” The phrase sounded like a curse. “They must be desperate, penniless; she must be selling her jewels, too.”

AROUND that time, Mr. and Mrs. Holland got religion, simultaneously and with much drama, from the fundamentalists who came to infect Sweethaven every few years. That was how Daniel put it, “got,” and “infect”—their faith being an affliction, like the measles. Emily, recently converted, was volunteering to teach Sunday school; Rinky was testifying, vigorously, about how his acts of contrition had led him straight back into the fold. Perhaps, in time, they might lead his wife back to her money.

“Well, that gives the campus something new to talk about,” Luth said. The Hollands remained a hot topic at the Pastor family dinner table, the mood shifting from amusement to concern to dislike. There was a perverse single-mindedness in the way Emily and Rinky went about their faith.