Chapter 8 - Sweet Haven

THEY were killing time, Luth and Narita, over the remains of breakfast. The maid, Cecilia, puttered around the counter, washing plates, lighting a fire on the gas range to boil a pot of beans. Luth’s mug of tea had grown cold. She had phoned in sick for the day.

In the master bedroom, her husband talked to himself. Disjointed sentences boomed out through the half-open door as he tapped delicately away at his computer. From time to time Daniel read, with great brio, a sample of his own wit. He was working on a book. For the past twenty-five years he had been engaged in some book project or another. The most recent Luth knew of was a history of Sweethaven University in which the contributions of his father and grandfather were prominently catalogued. Once, there had been a six-hundred-page novel about philosophy students during the martial law years. He had written three different endings, postmodern style. If he hadn’t promised her its immediate success, respectability beyond the confines of the university, a spot on the bestseller list—but which list? And where? Who read books in this country?—she might have found room in her heart to be sorry for him. But he could never find a publisher. The ones he had approached, on his visits to Manila, praised his language but advised him to find a definitive conclusion to his characters’ agony. “Bunkum,” he said. After all those years spent in front of his wretched typewriter while she did his laundry and laboriously drew up the weekly budget and made sure his children were decent and clean—after all those years, he could not tell when enough was enough.

Sometimes he called her name out loud. He said, “Luth, Luzie, Leth, Lith,” as though praising a goddess—a youthful goddess with a ’60s beehive and a painted fan; a goddess he could keep in his shirt pocket and pat reassuringly from time to time. Her skin crawled with loathing; he had no awareness of what escaped his lips. He might as well have been a child crying out to its mother about some wonder wedged between the floorboards.

“Forty years I’ve known him, and all he ever speaks is nonsense,” she murmured. When she glanced over at her daughter, she saw with surprise that Narita’s face reflected the same raw disgust. She had never perceived her elder daughter as an ally. And then she grew sad—though the family had closed ranks, they remained divided along the old patterns of anger and blame: she, as distanced from her husband as possible; the children, in between.

From a practical perspective, his lectures were just that, nonsense. Educational philosophy, John Dewey, the morphology of the English language—she had heard enough over the years to deliver her own miniature lectures, so filled with high-sounding utterances that no one would discover for at least a minute that she hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about. Did any of his students care? Did his colleagues?

I do not want a new car, she thought. I have no need for a stylish new house from the ground up, or a Pierre Cardin bag, or a shopping trip to Hong Kong. But it would be good to live with a little bit more dignity than we do today.

It would have been good, for a change, to drop the fortnightly ordeal of drawing up a budget from their meager paychecks, and splurge as the wife of a doctor might splurge. She had often wondered at their lives, those former pupils of hers, now doctors and lawyers and engineers, who turned up at the elementary school on Parents’ Day—“Ma’am Pastor, you’re still here!”—to point out their robust offspring from the tangle in the playground. Men and women who were confident, affluent, impeccable, in the way she had never been—while her husband was scruffy and apologetic, his eyebrows untrimmed, hairs straggling out of his ears.

She had stopped hoping for the big career move that would change all their lives. She had come to terms, at long last, with the fact that her husband’s knowledge would never be marketable, that no university, in California or the American Corn Belt, would ever hire him, not even for a semester. His politics were all wrong, Antonia had pointed out once. He insisted on teaching Shakespeare, year upon year. He had never been a political detainee; never carried a gun in the hills; his entire career had been founded on Sweethaven’s neutrality, which Luth took to mean its imperviousness to fashionable schools of thought, such as Marxism or national democracy or whatever it was the foreigners wanted. Instead, he had maintained his total commitment to English language and literature, which he doggedly taught in its purest possible form. She did not see anything wrong with that, but Antonia claimed this had been the death of his career.

Luth sipped the last of her coffee and looked with some trepidation at Narita. Antonia had behaved like a typical younger child: a strong sense of entitlement, confident enough to chirp bits of cutting wisdom at the dinner table, but sweet, sweet. Narita was different, Narita had great reserves of venom, steeped in the resentment of a lifetime. Luth scarcely dared admit it to herself, but she feared her elder daughter.

This morning would be even worse than yesterday, as Naia’s door remained implacably shut. Narita had found it locked when she arrived from Manila yesterday afternoon, and throughout last night it had stayed barred, faint music seeping through the walls. At first it did not seem conceivable to Luth that several hours could go by without their seeing each other, without the girl emerging to greet her own mother as a simple expression of respect.

See, you big shot Manila career woman, now you reap the results of your neglect, she had crowed to herself, knowing she was being unfair. The night had worn on, and admitting defeat, Narita had finally gone to bed.

And earlier this morning—oh, the awful confrontation in the hall. Narita ambushing Luth as she stepped out of the bathroom.

“I’ve unpacked my bag. Here it is, mother.”

It was one of those video DVD things, wrapped in a brown envelope; Luth drew it out—Sweet Heaven something or other—and recoiled immediately from the images on the cover.

“What is that thing doing in this house?”

“I want you to look at it.”

She thrust the plastic case back at her daughter, her face averted. “I do not believe any of their lies. How many people have actually seen that thing? Rumors spread because people are evil; they will take hold of any means to bring a good, hardworking family down. That is not Naia in there. It’s just someone who resembles her. People will say anything.”

Narita looked stunned.

“Have you viewed it?” Luth challenged her.

Narita could not lie. “Only the beginning.”

“There, you see!” Luth stormed. “What is your proof? So stop talking about it.” She cocked her head in the direction of the kitchen, where Daniel was stringing a series of unrelated syllables to form one of his happy breakfast tunes. “And I wish he would bear that in mind and stop shooting his mouth off in front of his colleagues.”

AND yet, here they were, mother and daughter, at the breakfast table, sitting companionably, each waiting for the other to speak. Now Daniel joined them, fresh, it seemed, from a literary victory at the keyboard, and smiling as if they were both strangers.

“Do we have anything to eat in this poor house?”

Luth’s gut churned at this dramatic affectation.

“Only that chocolate thing your friends brought around,” she snapped. “You know we have no money.”

“Cecilia,” he called grandly. “Bring in the cake.”

The maid took three steps to the refrigerator, hauled out the confectioner’s box, and placed it, still covered, on the table in front of them.

“Spoons,” said Daniel, and added to Cecilia, his tone lowering intimately like a minister’s, “Please take a slice. Take as much as you want.” He took a teaspoon and a dish and began to cut Narita a piece, over her protests. For Luth, he proffered a black sopping chun topped with two candied cherries.

“Our hearts are with you in this your time of trial,” Narita read out from the card.

Luth picked out a cherry, crushed it against the roof of her mouth. More, her salivating mouth ordered; her stomach rumbled audibly, and Daniel beamed, as though he had personally provided them with this bounty.

“These must be the hearts,” Narita said, eating a cherry.

Yes, thought Luth, eight of them. Topping each slice. Delivered up in their bleeding glory. One from Emily, one from Rinky, a couple more from the boys, this hard little one from stuck-up Tabby, that awful middle girl of theirs. Three more from, oh, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; but we’ve scarfed them down already, we’re such pigs.

“The Hollands must be trying to kill us,” Narita said. “This has seven hundred calories to the slice.”

“It’s lethal only if you eat all of it,” Daniel chuckled.

“I can’t fight on those terms,” Luth growled. “We can’t afford a cake like this, and she knows that, and she rubs our face in it. I hate the way women fight.”

Daniel kept his face to his plate. He cared a great deal for the Hollands. He and Rinky had much in common, he pondered, married to the same type of woman, though one might never have guessed this from looking at Emily, that sweet thing. Besides, Rinky had been his friend for more than half his life. Even when Rink began taking his religion a bit too seriously for comfort, breaking away from the Sweethaven church for a few years, their bond had remained firm. When Rink had left for the States on a generous two-year study grant, taking his wife and their three kids with him, he had felt no envy. As students, they had both sung in the Sweethaven men’s glee club; he in graduate school, Rinky as a charming young college freshman. That choir was the closest he would ever get to a fraternity. They had reunion parties every few years, and on these occasions he and Rinky would call each other “brod,” short for “brother.” Unlike in regular fraternities, upperclassmen did not beat up neophytes over the course of a clandestine weekend. No, the initiation, conducted with utmost civility, lasted a lifetime—members fell away over the years, and the social ordeals, the hoops to be leapt through, extended to the wives.

In Luth’s case, Daniel thought, church had been that hoop. She’d been raised a Catholic, and he had certainly never forced her to convert. He told himself she had been happy with her choice.

Luth, too, was thinking of religion, which was where her mind invariably swung, prompted by mention of the Hollands. When their marriage was new, she had embraced Daniel’s faith, for it went with her status as the wife of a rising professor at the university. The church building had impressed her, emerging clean and white from the sheltering acacias. And such simplicity within, so few people, so unlike the Catholic church of her childhood, packed with peasants and the flagrantly devout. The latest of Sweethaven’s American missionary families sat with their fascinating pale-haired offspring in the rows closest to the altar. They reminded her of the drawings in the Norman Rockwell book in the elementary school library, the lovely color plate book only teachers could take out. If she had known, in those early years, that the Americans would vanish one by one, child after child entering their teens and packed off to proper high schools in Virginia or Kentucky, the missionary couples themselves growing faded and arthritic and then flying home for good, if someone had told her that the church and the university that had sprung up about it would someday be replaced by the missionaries’ ambitious Filipino pupils, who squabbled incessantly among themselves, she would not have wasted her time. She was sure of that. But deluded, she had followed her husband dutifully, like a carabao with a ring in its nose.

Eventually she had understood. Only a handful of Filipino families could play tennis with the Americans, and chat with them on the lawn after the service. In this preposterously small academic community, there was a hierarchy. There was an elite, just as in the dusty towns strung out on the highway that ringed the island, where all the top dogs could trace their ancestry to Spain. Sweethaven University was Donostia in miniature, though attending a separate church, observing slightly different customs, looking to a different country for inspiration.

Presbyterians had built Sweethaven shortly after the revolution against Spain. So Luth would proclaim to a fresh batch of pupils every year, though she had always known that, in actuality, Spain had never left. This was something she would never teach those wide-eyed, trusting little brats. Faithfully she read out from the textbooks—the Spaniards were overthrown in the revolution of 1898 and soon afterward the American administrators came, with democracy and education for all. She had memorized the appropriate words. She had even read Daniel’s manuscript, the history he had been laboring on for years.

But the dream of Spain—or rather, of mestizo life in the white mansions at the end of long driveways set into sugarcane fields—this was something no revolution could ever pry away. As her daughters had sought to be American, so Luth’s mother had sought to be mestiza. Luth herself had been caught in the middle—that is to say, in the worst of both worlds. She could still recall the parties thrown in the gracious homes by the town plaza, sitting silently with her friends in the shadow of the bougainvillea so old they had sculpted themselves into trees, watching the long black cars drawing up by the grilled gates. At the time, she knew that a girl’s worth in the classroom or at a party was determined by how much Spanish blood she could claim. She herself had none.

In the beginning, the city of Donostia had had nothing to boast of but the sugarcane fields hacked out of the strip of land between the chain of mountains and the long coast. Sweethaven changed all that—put the hot, dusty agricultural outpost on the map. The earliest Holland, from Ohio, had been a teacher here, and when his wife died childless, he had married a local girl. Daniel Pastor’s grandfather had been among his first students, a distinction the Pastors could never forget.

When Luth had married Daniel, a man four years her junior, she knew she was entering Sweethaven’s upper crust. Not a bad move, she had thought, for the daughter of a handsome, promising but very dead municipal judge and his struggling schoolteacher wife.

What she realized only later was that Daniel’s grandfather had been a barefoot pupil when the school was but a collection of rude huts beside the sea. The disenfranchised must have been among the first to convert—those without land to their name, the lame and ugly, the bastards. They quickly became Sweethaven’s chosen, an inner circle of quiet, hardworking young men with an aptitude for the Americans’ language and a talent for humility. Even now, she groused, three generations down the line, the Pastors still deferred to the Hollands—though, if you compared the two men, grant by grant, doctoral program by doctoral program, her husband had had the better education.

What was it, in fact, that I married? she thought, frowning. A British accent? But that had come later, after the years on scholarship. The friendly, energetic charm of the perpetual schoolboy? That, maybe. Her husband had kept his youthful looks, losing some hair, gaining little if any weight. Girls and boys both sent him meaningful letters at the end of each term. They claimed that he had changed their lives. Luth kept careful track of the missives from his graduate students that purred with cryptic sexuality; every few years she’d locate a note slipped casually where he presumed she would not look—beneath a box of cough drops atop a bureau, maybe, or between the pages of a Penguin classic. This she might jeeringly read out loud while he stammered his apologies: none of these courtships had ever amounted to anything, he swore, and the poor creatures had certainly not received any encouragement from him.

At mealtimes, jaws moving in a rhythm as easy as breathing, she watched him. He kept his head bowed as though in shame. He had been a handsome man; he had needs. For years he would reach for her one night a week. Had she less respect for her body, he might have gotten away with more.

His daughters, he could hardly touch. A few times a year he might kiss them—when they won ribbons at school or saw him off on a long trip—and they would stiffen and pull away. They sensed his pathetic need for contact, in the grasping fingers, the soft grunt of delight when he caught them. They struggled to distance themselves.

She hated it when he tried to caress her in front of them. She had never once seen her father kiss her mother. That man, he died of a heart attack the very year he was appointed a municipal trial court judge, leaving his wife not a legacy of ease and respect, but the task of fending for five school-age children. Luth had been in high school. She could remember staying up long before her siblings had gone to bed, helping to steam small parcels of sweetened rice to be peddled to her mother’s colleagues. Mother and daughter had worked doggedly, in silent annoyance with one another. No words of love, no touching. Boyfriends led to early pregnancy. Even the shyest admirer was off-limits. No one ever kissed. Kissing was what the Technicolor artistas did, to the strains of orchestral music, in the single cinema in town—“lips-to-lips” it was called, with a fillip of discomfiture: it was a luxury, an affectation, a pleasure reserved for those whose foreign blood ran hot in their veins.

But she had enjoyed the warmth and smoothness of her little daughters. They were her reward, after those lonely years. She left wet lipstick stains on their foreheads and in their hair. Narita would struggle, embarrassed, out of her grip, echoing Luth as a girl—no time for extravagant hypocrisy. Antonia had been different—sweet, pliant, surrendering herself to Luth’s embrace, rubbing her nose into the cool plumpness of her mother’s arm. Luth knew that from the very start she favored the younger one, the pale, sensitive one who seemed to need so much more care. Early on, she had quietly admitted the truth to herself, and justified it—Narita had simply been too difficult. She had not been a pretty child. Her hair was too wild, her skin too dark. Her scent, a deep and oily musk, had always discomfited Luth, collecting in her palms and the folds of her clothes, hinting at a certain carnal precocity. Narita had bullied her sister mercilessly, to compensate, and Antonia had fought back with appalling violence. Still, there was a space in her younger daughter’s soul where Luth could never go. Narita’s power over Antonia saddened her.

If she had any regrets, it was that she’d given them too much freedom. Her work as a teacher went beyond the 5:00 p.m. dismissal bell, and there were the chores and the marketing besides, which she had sought to spare the girls. In the evenings, Dan would insist on a movie, something easy and stirring like Cleopatra Jones or Walking Tall, and they would bring the children to one of Donostia’s movie theaters—there were five or six when the girls were small. The children were admitted without fuss, to Shaft and Disney alike. In the darkness that smelled of old steamer trunk and bedbug-ridden mattresses, Antonia would nod off uncomprehending in her lap, while Narita sat unblinking through lynchings and car chases, Luth too exhausted to care. Dan always wanted to make a little love afterward, his imagination fired by what they had seen.

In the days that followed each film, the girls dealt with the mysteries they had witnessed in whatever way they could. “Let’s discuss!” Narita would start, and they would choose a bedroom and lock themselves in. It seemed harmless enough at the beginning. It was that period in her life when no maid could please her, and it was a relief to note her daughters babysitting each other while she ran the house. Simply inseparable, those two. From early childhood to adolescence, thick as thieves, giggling, shrieking, playing their father’s records on an old turntable, poring over movie star magazines, emerging hours later flushed with delight, exchanging glances at the dinner table. She knew they had created a world somehow, in which a go-go dancer from one movie might start a new life with a bionic athlete from another, but when she begged admission, mentioned a name, pretended to be in on the game, they clammed up and stared. Parodied her words. Made her look like a fool.

When they were about ten and eight, they started speaking in American accents. Was it a favorite teacher, a balikbayan classmate, their wholehearted immersion in rented Betamax movies? Luth never figured it out.

Suspicious, left out, she raided their rooms every few days, searching Narita’s in particular—under her sour pillow, the places between bed and the wall. She dredged up stained Harold Robbins paperbacks borrowed from God knows where, and once, when the girl was in high school, a whole copy of Penthouse.

“Do you think boys will respect you, reading this trash?”

Silence. Those flinty eyes, those flaring granite nostrils, nostrils that she recognized to be a smaller, more delicate version of her father’s and brothers’ and her own.

Once she found a fragment of a comic strip, in ballpoint, on the remaining pages of an old school notebook. She recognized the confident strokes to be Narita’s, but felt no pride in the almost-proportional human figures, only a bitter dread that she was drawing like a boy, about war, and men in webbed helmets toting ArmaLites. The snippets of story she discovered a few pages farther on plagued her even more, because Narita did not write poems for peace, as she supposed a fourteen-year-old in the honors section of her class ought to write, but tough, manly passages about recon patrols and grenades lobbed into machine-gun nests. Was this the fundamental flaw in her daughter, then? Was Luth unknowingly raising a tomboy, a war freak, a (God forbid) lesbian?

“You are living in a fantasy!”

Narita had neglected her Social Studies exam and spent three hours with her sister, plotting adventures for some person called Sergeant Rock.

Silence. An exchange of amused glances, one girl slouching toward the kitchen, the other contemptuously flipping open a Tagalog textbook.

Barely breathing, ear pressed to the wall, she followed the crests and troughs of their laughter. It alarmed her that they could speak so casually of men, for it was certainly men they were discussing, judging by the names.

“I get to molest Gunner. You can have Captain Turner,” Antonia said.

“We tie them up by the north gate, and see to a small matter of discipline—”

“And then we switch.”

As lightly as that, as though speaking of puppies. They discussed men, in fact, with the same sense of entitlement that men could speak of loose girls. Their precocity infuriated her. Who were their friends? Who else from Sweethaven knew what violent, perverse nonsense filled their minds?