A Wedding in Haiti Read Free Page A

then, he had forty-five dollars left in his pocket. On the train, he met a Canadian who asked if my father wanted to see the country and earn some money while doing so. It turned out the man owned a logging camp, a remote operation of fifteen-hundred men up near Hudson Bay. He was looking for a resident doctor for the winter. The owner didn’t care where my father had gotten his degree, just as long as he could set a broken limb or tourniquet a slashed arm. My father accepted on the spot.
    How this was a way of seeing Canada, I don’t know. It still gives me a pang to think of him, a young man with no experience of northern winters, taking off to such a cold, desolate place. But my father always considered himself a fortunate man. “My friends in Canada call me McAlvarez, because they say I have the luck of the Irish,” he used to brag, laughing. Just counting the number of times he barely escaped death at the hands of the dictatorship, I’d have to agree with them.
    After the snows melted, my father collected his salary (less than he had been promised) and settled in Montreal, where he took night courses at the medical school, while also working full-time during the day. Over the next eight years, Papi managed to reearn his medical degree, at one point selling his blood to pay for his credits. (The stories were marched out whenever any of his daughters brought home a report card with a grade lower than an A.) Papi became fluent in French, and had girlfriends we sometimes heard about when Mami was out of earshot or he’d had too much to drink.
    During his time in Canada, Papi took a trip to New York City to attend to a dying nephew, who’d been brought to the States in a desperate attempt to save his life. While there, my father was invited to a party, thrown by a distant cousin who fixed him up with her best friend, my mother, who was then on a shopping trip with her parents. They happened upon each other at several subsequent gatherings. By the time she had to return home, and he to Canada, they were both smitten.
    During the ensuing separation, they wrote to each other every day, long letters, supplemented by cards, phone calls, telegrams. At some point, they began using a pet name for each other, pitou , which my father had picked up in Canada—from one of those girlfriends, I suppose.
    Initially, my mother’s parents did not approve of my father. They were from the oligarchy, people who could afford shopping trips to New York. Papi was a struggling doctor, his foreign degree considered second-rate, however subsequently beefed up by his Canadian credentials. He would not be able to give my mother the lifestyle she was used to. Furthermore, Mami was ten years younger, a beauty who turned heads wherever she went. The dictator’s son was said to be after her—perhaps that’s why she had been whisked away to the States on a shopping trip. “Are you Katharine Hepburn?” she was often asked on New York City streets. Not that Papi was any slouch in the looks department. Those Canadian girlfriends didn’t call him pitou for nothing.
    My grandparents had hoped that distance would snuff out the romance. But it just served to stoke the young couple’s determination and ardor. There was no keeping apart los pitouses , as they soon came to be known in the family. My grandfather finally relented and gave his approval, my grandmother reluctantly complying. My parents were married in New York City and set up housekeeping there. Soon after my sister and I were born, my grandmother began lobbying for the family to move back, where my mother’s parents and their money could help fill in the financial gaps.
    Although the dictatorship was still in place, my grandparents reported that the regime was loosening up. Elections were being scheduled, and a general amnesty was being extended to all exiles to return home and help build a new democracy. My father was not fooled; at least he claimed not to have been when he recounted the