20633: (Craig) NYT-Excerpt: "The Dew Breaker" (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig <hoosier@att.net>

Excerpt: The Dew Breaker
March 21, 2004
By EDWIDGE DANTICAT

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. Bienaim??" 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
C?line 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 C?line 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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/books/chapters/0321-1st-danticat.html?ex=1080862986&ei=1&en=80b2bc451eb7ef1f
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company