Grandma’s house was on Central Avenue, a few gates up from the intersection with Constant Spring Road, and a mile or so north of Half Way Tree, the geographical centre of the sprawling city of Kingston, where my little brother and I went to prep school. My mother used to take us there after school on some weekdays. She would buy a tin of Vienna sausages, some soft white rolls and butter from the supermarket across the road, and we would sit on the broad cool wraparound verandah of Grandma’s house, eating our meal washed down with sour orange lemonade or cold Milo sweetened with condensed milk served in purple or blue or green aluminum tumblers, while Grandma busied herself inside the dark house sewing or cooking or directing the ancient maid, skinny and hunched over and shrivelled up and miserable, Grandma towering over her portly and tall, though she was probably just as ancient, and while my grandfather, small and diminutive, sat far away in the shadows on the side section of the verandah, in his rocking chair reading quietly.
Grandma scared me, while my grandfather was a nonentity. My grandfather, whom my father called Dada, never said anything to us, he just sat there reading or looking dreamily at the garden. Grandma, on the other hand, always greeted me sharply with “Cat got your tongue?” because I was shy and mumbled hello hiding behind my mother’s skirt. She was always sharp and hard and no-nonsense. As I grew older I figured it must have been because she had to raise seven sons (and a daughter, but I figured the daughter didn’t really count, at least in terms of giving worries); controlling them and disciplining them while my grandfather was at his drugstore downtown during the days before he retired, concocting liquid potions which he sold in bottles with cork stoppers, like a frothy pink emulsion for stomach disorders, and ointments which he put in cardboard tubs with handwritten labels, like the naseberry-green one for liver spots that he named “Skin-O”. And raise them she did, in her sharp no-nonsense way, steering each and every one of them on career courses that led to success and distinction in this small island of ours—the first a barrister who became attorney general, the second an army man who became brigadier, the third a prominent dentist, the fourth a prominent administrator, the fifth a prominent architect, the sixth another prominent army man, the seventh a prominent lawyer. (The sole daughter also achieved distinction as a preservationist, but I suspect that, given the times, less energy would have been put into directing her career path.) Maybe Grandma chose the bar for her first son because he loved elocution and the stage. I heard she selected architecture for son number five because he was good at art. I got the impression from my mother that my grandmother was the one who had done all the steering, which was easy to believe, because my grandfather was always just sitting quietly in the background, reading his newspapers, reading his books, sitting by himself on the side verandah.
Grandma’s garden that we looked out on from our verandah perch had the lushest, greenest crab grass I have ever seen, lush and green even in the dry summers, on the front lawn fringed by the thick myrtle hedge that all Jamaican gardens seemed to have in those days, and in her backyard, the best fruit trees ever. She had coolie plum and hog-plum and red-coat plum and yellow-coat plum, and the yellow-coat plums were huge and juicy; she had Otaheite apple and she had star-apple, she had sweet-sop, and she had soursop which she used for soursop drink with condensed milk and nutmeg and wonderful soursop ice cream made in a wooden tub sitting in dry ice with a handle that had to be turned and turned; and she had East Indian mango and Julie-mango and the best Bombay mangoes, firm and deep yellow-orange and fragrant, that I have ever tasted. When the fruit were in season they were too plentiful for her or her ancient maid, or her children or her scores of grandchildren, to handle, and they rotted on the ground, filling the air with a thick sickly-sweet smell and encouraging flies and bees. A gutter ran beside the house carrying blue-grey waste water from the kitchen into the garden, and that arrangement of my grandmother’s, my mother told me, was what made Grandma’s garden so lush and so bountiful.
Inside Grandma’s house was dark and cool. The bedrooms had huge mahogany four-poster beds with enamel chimmies under them, and enamel jugs and basins on side tables for hand and face washing, and intricately carved mahogany bureaus with multiple drawers, and a mahogany wardrobe which my father later told me held a secret compartment. In one room was the sewing machine that Grandma had used, my mother told me, to sew and darn and alter clothes for her eight children, taking in the waist or taking up the hem or patching a tear so that clothes could be passed on from son Number One to son Number Two to son Number Three and all the way to son Number Seven or as far along as they could go before they disintegrated. The bathroom had a huge deep white bath with legs, and black and white tiles on the floor, and Pears soap in the soap dish. I would timidly venture down the passageway to look at these wonders, hoping not to encounter my intimidating grandmother on the way.
I think my mother may have been scared of Grandma, too. Maybe that was why when we visited on those afternoons after school we sat out on the verandah, just like my grandfather did. As I got older I gathered that my mother thought that Grandma did not approve of her as a daughter-in-law, because she had a job as a teacher rather than staying home and keeping our house spic and span and making mango jam or baking shepherd’s pie like two of her other daughters-in-law did, or making homemade ice cream like she did. I think my mother suspected that Grandma blamed my mother for my father’s wandering eye.
It wasn’t just my father who had a wandering eye, though. Even as a child I understood that some of my uncles also had wandering eyes; and one uncle’s wandering eye had led to a scandalous denouement and unpleasant divorce that took my favourite aunt, a no-nonsense woman like Grandma but with a soft smile for her niece and a soft lap for me to sit on, out of my life, and out of all of our lives. Come to think of it, she was a woman with a profession, too. But Grandma loved her, and according to my mother she was heartbroken when my aunt left the family.
My grandfather died before Grandma. Eventually, Grandma had to sell the house. She took her mahogany four-poster bed and two mahogany bureaus and mahogany wardrobe to the newly built home of son Number Seven designed by son Number Five, where a bedroom had been assigned to her. I was older then, and less afraid of her. She no longer seemed a martinet, more a spirited woman with a keen sense of humour. We exchanged letters while I was away at university, and I visited her when I was home in the holidays. When she was moved in to a residence for the elderly, her unhappiness distressed me. I imagined her missing her mahogany four-poster bed, and remembering her mango trees and that lush green grass in the front garden of her Central Avenue house. That house had long been demolished, to make way for a dreary shopping plaza, but her furniture and belongings with their attached memories were now in her new home, her son’s home. She wants to go back home, I said to my father. They can’t manage her, he said. Well, how about your house? She wouldn’t be able to manage the two sets of stairs, he said. Well, how about one of her other children? There were good reasons why it could not work for any of them.
Years later, after Grandma had died, I said to my father how difficult it must have been for Grandma to raise him and his six brothers and his one sister, to exert all that discipline, and what an achievement to have seen such success with all her children. Well, yes, he said after a while. He supposed so. It was Grandma’s achievement more than your father’s, wasn’t it? I asked. He seemed surprised. I always got the impression that it was Grandma who was the forceful one, the one who raised you all and ran the house and organised that lush beautiful garden, I said. I never got the impression that your father was very involved in the household, I said.
My father was terse in his response. It was Dada’s garden, not my mother’s, he said. He planted all the fruit trees. He was the one who organised that ingenious way of irrigating the garden with the waste water so that the garden was always watered, even in the long summer droughts. It was Dada’s money that built and ran the house, remember, he said. He worked long hours in his drugstore to feed his eight children.
He was silent for a while, then he added: Dada was a poet, you know. He was a poet and a songwriter.
I was visiting my father at his home at the time, and he got up and went into his study. A few minutes later he returned with a yellowed music sheet. This was one of his songs, he said. He sold a few songs to American music publishing houses, he told me.
My father was obviously proud of his father.
Music was his love, he said. That was what he had wanted to do with his life. He taught us all to play the piano, he added. Dada would always sit at the piano after a long day at work and play his ballads and jazz to unwind, he said. Like father, like son, I realised: my own father had done that very same thing throughout my childhood, fixing himself a gin and tonic then sitting at the piano and playing his favourite jazz pieces every night when he came home, trying to relax after a hard day of building an architectural practice that may never have been where his heart lay.
I thought of my grandfather sitting on the side verandah, looking out at his lush irrigated garden, staring at his fallen dreams, while inside Grandma disciplined her eight children, forced them to get professions, bullied the maid, ran the house.
“My husband was a good man,” Grandma had once said to me. At the time I had stared at her blankly, murmured politely.
Now, my understanding of my grandfather’s goodness lit up my memory of him sitting quietly in the background, gentle guardian of his family and his house.