The Brooklyn Rail

After decades of living in Brooklyn, Pearline, the protagonist of Donna Hemans’ The House of Plain Truth, returns to Jamaica to nurse her father through his final days and reclaim her childhood home. Instead, she finds herself at odds with her sisters who view her as an outsider. On his deathbed, her father tasks her with solving the mystery of what happened to the children he was forced to abandon in Cuba while working as a migrant laborer sixty years before. With lyrical, contemplative prose and subtle revelations, The House of Plain Truth deftly unravels the economic and political pressures that complicate a woman's conception of home.

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January 1993

Pearline knows well the uncertainty of an elder’s memory. Knows too well that Rupert is at the age where the past and the present come at him like windswept waves, churning and frothing, then settling into a lick against the sand. Pearline stands by her father’s makeshift bed on the veranda, uncertain what the morning will bring, whether he will remember her name or fall back into his memory of a long-ago time. Now that she is back in Mount Pleasant, she has made it her role to take him outside so he can look out at the small forest of fruit trees—breadfruit, pear, guava, soursop, naseberry, cherry, coconut—which he planted over the years. The abundant fruit has fed the family well. Beyond the trees are expansive green pastures dotted with cattle. Without her glasses, Pearline can barely make out the cows, and she guesses that if her father can see that far, the cows would be meaningless specks to him. The cattle are no longer his; her sisters sold his animals a while back and leased a portion of the land to a man who comes every few days to tend to the cows.

Pearline looks down at Rupert, her back to the rail, her palms flat against the wood. “Tell me the names of your children,” she says. Each morning now she makes the same request, eager to catch the moments when he does remember something of the present. She is never sure if he hears her and simply doesn’t care to answer or if his mind has wandered and he’s unable to give an immediate response. His mouth moves, but she doesn’t expect him to speak. She has learned through her years nursing elderly patients to fill the air with words, to let her voice spread like an oversized soap bubble enlarging with each breath, not louder but increasingly present, a voice that reminds her patients that they haven’t been forgotten.

As if on cue, her sisters Hermina and Aileen step out on the veranda, and Pearline looks up, her gaze sweeping and quick. Hermina has pulled her hair back. Her round face, fully exposed, looks younger and fresher, as if she just washed it. Pearline touches her own face, rubbing a hand over her cheeks and around her mouth, over the splotches of dry spots that have cropped up again the last few days, feeling her own full cheeks and chin.

“The first girl name Annie,” Rupert whispers and takes a deep breath. His voice is raspy.

Pearline, who thought the moment had passed, glances quickly at Aileen, who’s wiping her hands on an apron, imitating their mother’s age-old habit. Pearline arches her eyebrows, watching surprise bloom on both her sisters’ faces. Aileen mouths, “Oh my,” and turns back to face Rupert.

Slowly, Rupert lists his children, unaware, it seems, that the women who stand around him are them. “Aileen. Pearline. Hermina.” He can’t lift his hands to count. But at the very end he manages to name all his children, including four names he hasn’t uttered in nearly sixty years: Annie, Gerardo, Arturo, and David. “Arturo dead long time now. Just a boy.”

Pearline weeps and lifts first her right arm, then the left, to catch her tears with the collar of her dress. She turns to Aileen and Hermina. “Mama must be turning over in her grave now. Long time she wait to hear him say their names. Long time she wait for him to remember we aren’t his only children.”

Hermina wipes away a tear and, turning to face the veranda, says, “Is about time. Nobody should hold all that anger in their heart for so long.”

Rupert keeps his eyes on a coconut tree frond that dips and rises, each movement revealing the dull green husks of young coconuts, the brown husks of others that have already aged and dried, and a sliver of blue sky visible between the leaves. Or so it seems.

“Funny what we remember,” Aileen says. “Reach this big age and all you can remember are the things from the early, early part of your life. You live this long and all you achieve mean nothing to you. Not a damn thing.”

Aileen stresses the last, and Pearline thinks it’s meant for her—the sister who went to America, the sister who didn’t always come home for one work-related reason or another. She’s trying hard not to let the hints her sisters drop build up and settle too deeply inside her. She’s trying not to let her suspicious nature get in the way of this momentous moment that may never be repeated.

“He must be hungry,” Pearline says.

Aileen and Hermina head back inside the house, one behind the other. Soon, one will bring him porridge, mint tea or hot chocolate, and a slice of bread that Pearline or her sisters will dip into the drink before feeding it to him soggy and dripping.

For the moment, Pearline looks out on what her father sees. Her mind churns around what she would have missed had she not come home to Jamaica and this little country house when she did. How close she had come to missing this moment when her father finally acknowledged his long-lost children. Her life had been full, kept busy with this and that. She had been too busy making a life in Brooklyn, too busy trying not to fulfill her family’s legacy of failure. Three night shifts here, five day shifts there. She had been a nurse who sometimes doubled as a home health aide. She was also a mother and grandmother and church sister, busying herself to someday return home with everything, with a fulfilled life. She had come home to give up busyness.

Rupert named his children, and now Pearline begins to think that some people refuse to be forgotten. They, these siblings of hers who have lived only in her family’s collective memory of a moment on a wharf in Santiago de Cuba, want to be heard. That moment, which marks the last time the living members of her family were together, is stamped in her memory. She replays it now as she has done over the years: Rupert wears his best suit and hat—he is never without his hat—and her mother, Irene, wears a starched white dress, her belly big with the baby she would name Hermina. Pearline is four and Aileen seven. Those are the two girls who return in 1933 to Jamaica. Their oldest sister, Annie, is already a married woman who chooses to stay behind in Cuba. And David and Gerardo, soon-to-be men, are staying behind too. Irene extracts a promise from Annie to take care of the boys. The goodbyes are loud and long and the voices like a cacophony of birds—English and Haitian creole, spoken by the people who are leaving, and Spanish from those overseeing the departures. Annie leans over, whispers, “On a clear day, you can see Cuba from there.” Pearline believes her, and she and Aileen look out at the blue sea for a glimpse of the distant island, Jamaica. And then they are gone, the last two baby girls in the family, repatriated at the government’s expense to an island they’d never known.

There isn’t room on the ship even for a song. A single whistle, maybe, but not a song. Rupert wants no disturbance, no outward signs of displeasure or anxiety or disappointment. From where they stand, there is no looking back. Even if they could have looked back, Rupert would have ordered them not to. From the moment he stepped onto the ship, he turned his back on Cuba and his children left behind on the wharf. . .until now—this moment when he calls the forbidden names.

Pearline wipes away fresh tears and turns again to her father and her older sister, returning to the veranda with a yellow plastic tray holding a bowl of porridge. The slice of hard dough bread sits in the porridge, already softening to mush.

He reaches for Pearline’s hand, but he is too weak to tug on it. His lips move as if to speak, and she leans in close, her ear against his mouth to catch his words. He struggles to find his voice, or perhaps he is simply swallowing the small spoonful of porridge she managed to slip into his mouth. Pearline pats his hand and leans toward the tray at her side to spoon more porridge. But he reaches for her hand again.

“Rest little bit,” Pearline says. “Look like you don’t want the porridge. I going to bring you little tea.”

Again, Rupert opens his mouth, and this time he utters one clear word after another. “Find them for me,” he whispers.

“What you say, Papa?” Pearline leans in even closer, her ear almost touching his lips.

“Find them for me.” Rupert’s words are low, barely audible.

“Who?”

“You know.” Rupert runs his tongue over his chapped lips and shifts his head again in Pearline’s direction. “You are my memory now.”

His voice is a ragged whisper, but the request is simple and clear. Her nursing instinct kicks in. Aphasia comes to mind, or some other condition linked to the functioning of his brain and his ability to combine words that make sense. She makes a note to ask Hermina and Aileen whether they observed any stroke symptoms but also keeps him talking to determine if his wandering mind has simply tricked him into thinking he is a young man living in a long-ago time. “Who you mean, Papa?”

Pearline watches his lips move, working to form another word. Spit collects in the corners of his mouth, and his lips are chapped. Pearline releases his fingers and stands up. “Ah going to get you some water.”

Rupert drinks a few spoonfuls of the tepid water, and Pearline wipes away what dribbles down his chin. A lizard darts across the rail, and the movement catches Rupert’s eye. He shifts his head, the motion deliberate and jerky, and settles his eyes on the little girl in the distance shaking guavas from a tree. Rupert lifts his right hand, his index finger shaking, but never quite points directly at the girl, who is simply a flash of red and yellow in a dress.

“Arturo.” The word is barely audible, and Pearline isn’t convinced that’s what he says. He lowers his hand slow and steady, lifts it, and points again at the child. “Arturo. Ven acá.”

“That’s Claudia,” Pearline says. “You know Yvonne. She was here taking care of you. That’s her daughter. Long time now Arturo dead.” Pearline catches herself. She knows she’s rambling on about distant family relations Rupert won’t remember. Besides, will it matter whether he thinks the figure in the distance is his long-dead son or her cousin Yvonne’s little girl? “Take another sip,” she says instead.

Rupert clamps his mouth, and Pearline sees no need to force him. She puts the cup on the floor and stands to watch Claudia collecting guavas in the skirt of her dress. When her skirt is full, Claudia runs around the side of the house to the kitchen with the weight of the guavas pulling her dress tight against her neck. A button pops. Pearline steps down on the gravel driveway, peering closely for the button, hoping it’s a bright color distinct from the gray and white stones. Having delivered the fruit to Hermina and Aileen, Claudia comes back out, her steps slow and deliberate now, her lips pressed around the yellow skin of a guava, and climbs the stairs. At the top of the stairs, she turns left toward the old man, circles the makeshift bed, and leans forward to see if he is awake.

Pearline walks back and forth on the gravel, wearing out a short path the length of the veranda. She hears Claudia say her own name, imitating what the adults in her life do when they stand before the old man. “My name is Claudia.”

Again, Claudia leans toward Rupert. “What you say?”

From the far end of the veranda, Pearline sees her father try to lift his hand. She can’t tell exactly, but it appears he’s again trying to say something. Always a nurse, she hurries back toward him. His breath is shallow, coming in quick spurts. He reaches out, grabs at the air. It seems he’s trying to touch Claudia, to pull her close. His fingers brush her skin, and Claudia, holding the guava close to his mouth, bends toward him.

“No.” Pearline’s voice is harsher than she wants.

Rupert’s lips move. “Arturo,” he says and reaches for Claudia’s hand. Something about the girl aggravates him or reminds him of his son, the one who never became a man. Rupert is alert, more alert than he has been in the week Pearline has been home, and she is torn between letting his memory unfold and sending Claudia away. She wants to hear what he has to say, why Arturo’s name is the one he utters now.

“Arturo, go inside now.” His voice is still ragged and weak, not as commanding as he seems to want it to be.

“Claudia,” the girl says again, tapping her chest and biting into the guava.

Pearline sees that her father is becoming agitated by the girl’s presence—too much so. His breath comes faster. The artery in his neck pulses strong. As Pearline turns to send Claudia away, Rupert opens his mouth, hiccups, and takes a big gasping breath.

“No, Papa.” Pearline leans in, grabbing his wrist to feel his pulse. She shifts to Claudia. “Go call your aunties. Go. Go.” Without meaning to, Pearline’s voice is harsh again. She’s clinical. She searches Rupert’s wrist and ankles for veins thrumming with blood, presses her hand against his chest to feel for his beating heart. Pearline knows what this is. Just as quickly, she is the dutiful daughter, emotional rather than clinical, just a daughter trying to remember her father’s last words and chiding herself for waiting so long to come back home. He had spoken just now, and she thinks his heart gave out in response to whatever had aggravated him so.

“Sister Pearl say to come.” Claudia’s little voice is loud, filling up the house, blowing back to the veranda.

Pearline blocks out the patter of footsteps on the floor, the birds cawing in the trees, and Hermina asking, “What happen?” Pearline banks the last thing Rupert said: Arturo. Go inside now. She catalogs his effort, the urgency he tried but failed to convey. Even at the very end, Rupert was shielding his son, perhaps making amends for something he had failed to do at an earlier time. And she sears in her memory the words Rupert whispered before his last command: Find them for me. You are my memory now.