A Wedding in Haiti Read Free Page B

story to his grown daughters years later. This was a ploy by the dictator trying to ingratiate himself with the Americans who were putting pressure on him to liberalize his rule.
    But Papi ended up caving in. My mother was homesick, overwhelmed with taking care of two babies, eleven months apart, with no servants to help out. Once back, my father discovered that nothing much had changed. Again, he reconnected with the underground. By the time I was ten, he was up to his ears in an imminent plot, which was cracked by the Secret Police. What saved us was a CIA contact who had promised to provide guns to the plotters. He managed to get my father, his wife, and four daughters out just in time. Four months after we left, the Mirabal sisters, who had founded the underground movement, were killed by the dictator’s henchmen.
    Those first years back in New York, our family scraped by on handouts from my grandparents. Eventually, my father was able to renew his license and open a practice in Brooklyn. He worked seven days a week, getting up at four thirty, leaving the house by five thirty, before the sun had come up, returning after nine at night. He scrimped and saved wherever he could. I recall how he’d take the Queensboro Bridge when he had to drive into the city to avoid paying the dollar toll through the Midtown Tunnel. Then, twice a year, he went down to his house in Santiago and lived for a week like a rich man.
    My mother was finally won over. By then, our once-lone house on the Cerros de Gurabo, the hills outside Santiago, was surrounded. The area had become an exclusive suburb of McMansions. Ours was now the oldest, and a poor relation to the others. After all, the things that had made the place so grand had been the imaginative accents: the waterfall; the sanctuary; the windmill where my father, dressed in a kind of monk’s robe, liked to climb to the little balcony on top to get inspired. He had started writing books on odd subjects: how to learn Chinese as a Dominican; how to be happy in old age (keep active, always have a project, write books, learn languages, play dominoes). He also wrote about his travels to an imaginary planet named Alfa Calendar, where all the problems that were now doing us in on earth had been resolved. (No wars, no poverty, plenty of windmills, nifty solar-powered belts to strap on and fly to your destination.)
    Now, forty years later, the house has become their refuge. Shabby genteel is how I’d describe its current condition. Without constant maintenance and the infusion of funds, the tropics can do a number on buildings and gardens. Ceilings have begun to crack; a retainer wall has crumbled; one corner of the second floor tilts slightly; the plumbing is iffy. The birds have all died. The waterfall no longer works. Inside the windmill, the rats have helped themselves to my father’s library. One small blessing of Papi’s condition is that he is no longer cognizant enough to understand what has happened to his dream house.
    Before I head for my bedroom, I peek in on them. They are fast asleep, holding hands as they always do across their joined hospital beds. Sometimes, Papi will wake up in the middle of the night calling out, “Pitou? Pitou?” I’ll hear Mami singing lullabies to him, as those seem to be the only songs she remembers anymore.
    I try to fall asleep but the weariness after a day of travel, the excitement and uncertainty about what lies ahead, compounded by my worries, keep me up for hours. (How will we know what gas station Pablo will be waiting at? How will all six of us fit in Bill’s new pickup? What if we can’t find Piti’s house in time for the wedding?) When the alarm rings, it’s still dark outside, and I’ve driven almost to Port-de-Paix so many times in my head that it seems unnecessary to have to get up after so little sleep and actually drive there again in person.

August 19, from Santiago to Moustique
The border crossing
    We wake up at quarter to five in