Grace by Elizabeth Nunez

was not simply a matter of a work permit; Sophie had been trained in Trinidad. To work in American hospitals, she needed an American diploma. So she took a sleep-away job with a rich family in Long Island who needed someone to look after a sickly grandfather. She came home on weekends, and then once a month, but James got lonely. He did not stop loving her, but in between he had an American girlfriend. What was a man to do?
    They never stopped making promises to Justin. Soon. In a matter of months. Sophie’s employers had agreed to sponsor her. The papers would be ready soon.
    “You don’t understand,” she wrote back to him. “Your father is famous. The movement needs him.”
    They returned to Trinidad nine years later, in 1972. Justin was sixteen, at the top of his class at his father’s alma mater, St. Mary’s College, the Catholic high school. He had just gottenthe results from his O level exams. He had made distinctions in the seven subjects he had taken. The hopes of St. Mary’s were pinned on him. If he took the A level exams in two years, he could win the Island Scholarship. St. Mary’s had never forgotten that the young V. S. Naipaul had won it in literature from the Protestant secondary school, Queens Royal College. Naipaul went on to Oxford and then fame as a writer. Justin Peters would make up for losing to Naipaul. But that was not the reason that Justin did not return to America when his parents came for him with the green card. With his seven O level distinctions, he could have been admitted to a university in America, perhaps even to Harvard, perhaps even with a scholarship.
    His father was in Trinidad four days when he had a massive heart attack. He died on the spot. Justin never forgave him.
    “It was the contradictions in his life that killed him,” he told his mother. “He was a poet, not a politician. He had allowed America to turn him into a politician. His poetry became narrow and limited. All he ever wrote when he went to America were protest poems about American racism, segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan. He came back to Trinidad, and when he saw how much he had given up, his heart burst open.”
    He had to explain himself more carefully to Sally after she told him how her father was murdered.
    “My father’s first job was to be a father to his son and a husband to my mother,” he said. “He failed at both.”
    Sally, too, had not forgiven her father for his recklessness.He had a young wife and two little children when he stormed out to the yard with a shotgun.
    No, they both agreed, being a good father and a good mother is a parent’s first duty. Which is why neither can countenance a life without their daughter under their roof.
    “I suppose staying in Trinidad did you some good.” His mother is anxious to end the silence that has settled on her son. “I suppose you would not have won that scholarship to Harvard.”
    She is right. No matter how he explains it, she will never understand. He was not thinking of becoming a hero for St. Mary’s when he refused to return to America with her. He was angry with her—with his father and with her, but especially with his father. His death was the ultimate abandonment. He would be all that his father was not, all that he truly wanted to be. He would become a writer, not a political writer, but an artist. He would embrace the literature his father eschewed. But Justin did not become a writer. In the end, he did not have the talent. In the end, he resented his father even more. His father had thrown away a gift neither money nor brains could secure.
    “At some point you’re going to have to accept that your father was a good man. He loved both of us.” His mother continues to try to end this impasse between them.
    He cannot tell her what everyone knows: James Peters had an American girlfriend. He cannot hurt her. She is his mother.
    “I know he was, Mother.” He squeezes her hand. “And you were a good mother. It was because of you I