Of course, in a very short time, my sister and I learned Afrikaans and Xhosa, too, the Bantu language spoken by our servants. I found a defender at school, a much younger English boy named Nicky Hastie, so staunchly loyal that I later named my son after him. My sister and I adopted a pet frog, named him Sam, and carried him to school in a little cardboard suitcase. He lived under my desk, and I’d peek on him when Mrs. Duplessis had her back turned.
In other words, we adjusted. While my mother developed a close relationship with our cook, we learned that the maid had a vicious temper and hated children. When my mother was out, she would threaten us with a hot iron, chasing us down the long halls of the house. On more than one occasion, she burned a hole in my sister’s favorite blue dress.
One Saturday night, we paid her back. Left in her care, we disappeared into our bedroom wardrobe, leading her to believe we had run away. Screaming at the sight of our empty beds, she ran to the servants’ quarters to fetch the cook. By the time she showed up, we were safe and sound. The cook left, and we hopped back in the wardrobe. Later, the maid would get even: when we headed back to Canada, we knew she was planning to chop the heads off our favorite bantam chickens to cook them for dinner. But by then our little pack of three was well established: John and Cate and I were tight as tight could be, and that fact would never change.
On Thursdays, Cate and I would wander by the local jail on our way home from piano lessons, passing hard candies through the fence to the neighbor’s former cook. Rumor had it that she had killed a younger servant, whom she had caught sleeping with her boyfriend, the garden boy. Maybe it was the garden boy she killed. We weren’t concerned: we loved her for the corn bread she had cooked, and for the hugs she gave us when we first arrived in the village. We liked her smile (although I used to imagine her washing the blood off the knife, after she stabbed the person; I thought she must be very brave).
There was a political undercurrent in the village. We knew we were the last whites to live in Mount Ayliff, that soon this would be the first homeland given back to the blacks. One Saturday a group decided to speed up the process: they would burn the whites out of town. They warned two families to leave: ours and the doctor’s. My parents woke us in the middle of the night and told us to get our clothes on: we had to decide whether to evacuate or not. We ended up staying. The crisis was averted, but the anger was real.
At Christmas, my mother gave both Ivy and Evelina presents. And on Christmas night our family joined a handful of others, sitting in church with the black congregation. Soon after there was a visit from the police: presents, they said, were not a good idea. Nor were the mattresses in the servants’ quarters. My feisty mother was unfazed.
On vacations we would visit the Indian Ocean or a game park. Truth be told, I always thought those trips were risky business: I had been chased by a herd of warthogs and was certain it was only a matter of time before we were killed or maimed. While others enjoyed the view, watching monkeys try to pry open the car, I usually had my eyes trained out the back window, checking for a marauding rhino.
On weekends we would head off in our big boat of a Mercedes and end up at the Stanfords’ ranch, where my parents would ride horses into the mountains, coming back with stories of baboons and more. My mother always looked so gorgeous on a horse, her hair windswept, a girlish joy on her face. She loved the adventure, and I thought she was remarkable, going off as she did, facing baboons. Remarkable, and a little reckless.
While they were gone, we would play hide-and-seek with the Stanford girls, discuss what little we knew of the facts of life, and look after our baby brothers. I liked those weekends: it felt like the cottage, with my cousins. I finally felt at home.
And then it was over. Before we headed back to Canada, my father presented my mother with a beautiful double-diamond ring to celebrate their African honeymoon. For two solid months we meandered up through Africa, from Zanzibar to Kenya, on to Egypt and Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and more, traipsing hand in hand like the happy band that we were.
Years and years later, after we were all married, my parents moved back to Africa, spending six years in Botswana. They took a trip one Christmas, down through South Africa, to visit old friends, stopping in at Mount Ayliff on their way. Our house was now a magistrate’s office; the neighbor’s house was lined with broken beer bottles. The garden was long gone. My mother said she was sorry she ever saw our home that way: it broke her heart.
By then it was the 1980s, and everything had changed. My mother’s years of heavy drinking had cast a terrible pall over our entire family. While loneliness, depression, and anxiety would take me down, something took her far, far further. For years, she—like so many other women—added Valium to the mix, and it diminished her. The woman we knew in Africa had disappeared, and in her place was someone full of rage, bitterness, and despair. Most of all, she was completely unpredictable. One minute our mother was present; the next she had transformed into Medusa with a tinkling glass.
I often look at photos of all of us on the trip home from Africa—pictures in Florence and Athens and Cairo—and wonder if anything had started to go wrong. Dad slim and tanned in his Ray-Bans, Mum just steps ahead in linen and pearls, and those Jackie Kennedy shades. Both look inordinately happy. Did Dad know what was about to happen? Did she? Had the drinking turned dangerous already?
I think not. If anything, the time in South Africa was too good: my mother never quite readjusted to her loneliness again, and she never forgave my father for leaving her behind. It was decades before they would have another big shared adventure. And in the intervening years, life was very tough.
Or that’s how I see it. It’s one way I have been able to make sense of the story, to love her through the madness. It’s tough to parse addiction, even when you’ve succumbed to it yourself.
Most of all, I like to remember my parents the way they were in Rome. My father, scooping my mother in his arms, carrying her up the hotel stairs. Her head tossed back, laughing: “Oh, John!”
I never saw her laugh quite that way again. Once her parents died, both from cancer when they were barely into their seventies, and my father resumed his overseas travel, she took her comfort in hard liquor. For years she seemed to live in her nightgown, wandering the halls by night, cursing by day. “This isn’t living, it’s existing,” she would announce, over and over, her eyes belligerent. “I’ve had it up to here”—gesturing to her neck—“and the rest is toilet paper!”
At sixteen, I began my feeble attempts to leave home. If my father was around to hold the fort, I would pack a small bag and head off on foot, aiming for my cousins’ house. I would never make it very far before my father would retrieve me, slowing down beside me in the family car. “Get in, Ann. Your mother needs you.” And back I would go, in tears, to a house that felt like it was on fire, burning with rage.
Perhaps because he knew just how difficult my mother found his absences, and because he loved her, my father stood by her. We often wondered why, and how, he was able to do this.
Only once did he lose his temper in front of us, and the image is seared deeply in all our brains. He has lined us up in the kitchen—my mother, my sister, my brother, and me—making sure we are watching as he smashes all the bottles he has found in the house, breaking them, one by one, over the kitchen faucet. Bottle after bottle in his powerful hands, crashing on that slim bit of curved aluminum, until he punctures it and it begins to spout like a whale. Broken glass, spouting water. And we all stand, dumbfounded, tears of fury and despair rolling down my poor father’s face, tears of contrition pouring down my poor mother’s cheeks, all of us trapped in the hell of a family cursed by addiction, with no escape pending.
For years she was on the phone, drinking and dialing. Sober, she rarely picked up. Drinking? No