Krik? Krak!: Caroline's Wedding

It was a cool September day when I walked out of a Brooklyn courtroom holding my naturalization certificate.

She clutched her rosary and recited her Hail Marys with her eyes tightly shut.

One woman near the front began to convulse after a man’s name was called.

Papa, and all the other dead men who might desire us, would stay away because the sanguine color of blood was something that daunted and terrified the nonliving.

Papa, and all the other dead men who might desire us, would stay away because the sanguine color of blood was something that daunted and terrified the nonliving.

We began carrying our loss like a medal on our chests, answering every time someone asked why such young attractive girls wore such a somber color, “Our mother makes us do it because our father is dead.”

“He was at a party,” she said, “with all these beautiful people around him, having a good time. I saw him in this really lavish room. I’m standing in the doorway and he’s inside and I’m watching him, and it’s like watching someone through a glass window. He doesn’t even know I’m there. I call him, but he doesn’t answer. I just stand there and watch what he’s doing because I realize that he can’t see me.”

In the photograph, he is wearing a dark suit and tie and has a solemn expression on his face.

We could barely hear each other over the crisp staccato pounding of the conga drums and the shrill brass sections blaring from their stereo.

I ran my pinkie over the vein and felt it, pulsating against my skin.

That night I dreamt that I was at a costume ball in an eighteenth-century French chateau, with huge crystal chandeliers above my head.

He remembered hearing his illiterate mother reciting poetry and speaking in a tongue that sounded like Latin when she was very ill with typhoid fever.

It was my father’s job to look for the falling star that would signal his mother’s impending death, and when he saw it crash in a flash behind the hills above his house, he screamed and howled like a hurt dog.

“God,” said the representative, “you have been so cordial to all the other presidents. You have gotten up from your throne to greet them at the gates of Heaven as soon as they have entered. Why do you not get up for Papa Doc Duvalier? Is it because he is a black president? You have always told us to overlook the color of men. Why have you chosen to treat the black president, Papa Doc Duvalier, in this fashion?”

He was dangling precariously and I was terrified.

Pink streamers and balloons draped down from the ceiling with the words Happy Shower emblazoned on them.

“On the eve of your wedding day, you denounce him, but you wanted to marry him, the Brazilian soccer player; you always said when you were young that you wanted to marry him.”

When she woke up on her wedding day, Caroline looked drowsy and frazzled, as if she had aged several years since the last time we saw her.

“I was the same on the morning of my wedding. I fell into a stupor, frightened of all the possibilities. We will give you a bath and then you lay down for a bit and you will rise as promised and get married.”

“I don’t understand it, honey,” Caroline said, already sounding more lucid.

Eric gave a coy smile.

Caroline’s lips were trembling with a mixture of fear and bashfulness.

Eric and Caroline posed stiffly for their photos, surrounded by well-cropped foliage.

“They do so many tricks with photography now, for posterity.”

I felt like an indentured servant who had finally been allowed to join the family.