A Wedding in Haiti Read Free

Santiago the night before we’re to set out. All flights are on time, no cancellations or delays. A good thing because in order to be at the wedding two days from now, we have to get up at dawn tomorrow to make the journey to Piti’s in one day.
    Eli and Leonardo are already waiting for us when we get in from the airport. We’re all spending the night at my parents’ house; then at dawn, Homero will join us, and we’ll be off, picking up Pablo at his gas station, and on to Piti’s.
    Because we get in so late, I don’t bother waking my parents, already asleep in their bedroom. The night nurse slips out to give me her report: both had a good day, both ate well, both played a little dominoes—a compromised game with slippery rules, and a single objective: letting my mother win. Losing can throw a pall over the rest of her day, long after she has forgotten having played dominoes in the first place.
    She has also forgotten that she no longer lives in New York. In 2002, after forty-three years in the United States, my parents decided to move back “home,” and just in time. Within the year, my father’s erratic behavior and faltering memory were diagnosed as Alzheimer’s. My mother followed soon thereafter.
    Since the Dominican Republic is a country without institutionalized elder care, we four daughters have had to cobble together our own facility. My older sister has virtually moved down there to help run what amounts to a small business, with a social worker, Vicenta, to oversee a staff that includes a cook, a chauffeur, a person to clean the house, two gardeners, a night watchman, a night nurse, and a three-person replacement weekend crew. Good thing my parents have the resources to pay for what is not cheap care if you do it right: a decent hourly wage, an eight-hour workday, a five-day workweek, two week’s paid vacation, and health insurance for employees and their large families. All those enlightened concepts their daughters were taught in good schools their money also paid for.
    Good thing also that they had this house to come back to. Actually, the house was my father’s idea, built with his money. My mother was dead set against it. I imagine a vaudeville act not unlike Bill’s and mine over the coffee farm. It was the early seventies; we were living in the States with no plans to move back. We didn’t need another house, my mother argued. But my father went ahead with his dream house. And since my mother had washed her hands of it, he didn’t have to rein in any of his wild ideas. He ordered a windmill. (He loved the scene of Don Quixote tussling with one.) Inside, he housed his growing library on shelves you could access as you went up the winding stairwell. Since he also loved birds, he dug out a hollow on the hillside for a sanctuary, covered with a netted structure. Underneath, he planted trees and vines, special varieties that bore fruits the birds liked. A waterfall splashed down into the sanctuary, and the waters ran through it, then were pumped back up to the top of the falls by the windmill.
    My sisters and I had theories about the house. Built on a hillside for all to see, it was Papi’s way of showing off to Mami’s family that he had made it on his own. He had proved himself worthy of my mother’s hand, after all.
    Theirs had been a legendary love. As a young medical student in Santiago, my father had joined un underground group of classmates who were disaffected with the dictatorship. Unfortunately, the group’s revolutionary agenda never evolved beyond the level of a schoolboy prank: strewing nails on the dictator’s motorcade route from the capital to Santiago. It was a naïveté some members paid for dearly with their lives, but my father managed to flee. He arrived in New York City in 1939, thinking he could get a job. Of course, no hospital would recognize his Dominican medical degree.
    He decided to head for Canada, where he’d heard some Dominican doctors had found work. By