Black Cake(83)

Marble’s attitude toward her parents has already softened since then. She has learned from Eleanor Bennett’s message that her parents kept the name that had been chosen by her birth mother. Baby Mathilda became Mabel Mathilda and, even when she changed her first name to Marble, her longtime nickname, she unwittingly held on to the name of her biological grandmother. Her parents may not have wanted to admit that she was adopted but they hadn’t erased every trace of her birth mother, either.

When Marble hears the key turning in the lock, she worries about a break-in, but then she remembers the orchids. Her mother always comes to water the plants, which Marble insists on keeping, despite the fact that she spends most of her time elsewhere. Her mum is perennially worried about opening the door and finding the orchids dead, but Marble reminds her that orchids are hardy creatures, that orchids grow naturally on every continent, that there is an orchid in someone’s garden in Singapore that has been blooming for well over a century.

“Marble!” her mother says.

Marble doesn’t get up, doesn’t feel she can. She looks at this petite woman standing before her. Her mum’s hair, originally a dark blond, has taken on brilliant streaks in recent years, the hairdresser’s artistry mixing in with her natural white. She gives Marble one long look, walks over to the sofa, takes the cup and saucer from her, and places it on the coffee table. Then she sits down next to her and takes one of Marble’s hands in hers.

Marble plays the recording for her mother. She waits until her mother has finished shedding tears. Later, they will share it with Marble’s father. They will let him listen to the voice of this woman who sounds so much like his own daughter. They will let him hear the part where Eleanor Bennett says what a beautiful, accomplished woman Baby Mathilda has turned out to be and that it is all to their credit.

They will let Marble’s father read the letter where Eleanor says she is forever grateful to him and his wife for giving her baby a safe and loving home and, if they have felt for Marble even a fraction of what she felt the first time she nursed her baby, then she knows that they must love her more than anything in the world, they must love her more than life itself.





Reunion





A cool vapor rises from the aluminum foil as Benny pulls the black cake out of the freezer. This is what Eleanor Bennett wanted, all three of her children together. Marble has come back. It took her a full month since her last message to get in touch but here they are again, in the kitchen where Benny used to spend entire days baking with her mother, at the table where Benny and Byron ate most of their meals growing up. In the house where their mother nursed a yearning for her firstborn daughter who was lost but who finally has been found.

Byron and Benny take some solace in knowing that their mother didn’t die before learning where her eldest daughter was and who she had become. Their mother left this world believing that one day all three of her children would be here in this room together to fulfill her dying request. When Marble ran back to England after hearing their mother’s private message for her, Byron thought they might never see her again, but Benny never doubted that they would. Nor did Mr. Mitch, who continued to make arrangements according to their mother’s wishes. There are trips to be made, he tells them, people their mother wanted them to see.

But first, this.

Their mother wanted her children to sit down together and share the black cake she’d made for them. You will know when, she wrote in her note to Byron and Benny. And this is the when. Benny picks up a knife and gestures to Marble.

“You’re the firstborn,” Benny says.

“No, you do it,” Marble says.

Benny looks at Byron. They hold the knife together, as their parents used to do, and they sink it into the cake. We never did have a wedding cake is what their mother told them toward the end of her recording. There wasn’t time. And who would have been there to celebrate with us? But once her parents had moved from London to New York to California, once they felt they were settling into their new lives, Ma filled a jar with fruits and made the first in a series of anniversary cakes.

“Oh!” Benny says. The knife hits something hard. They cut open the cake to find a small glass jar inside, wide and squat. Their mother had cut the cake on the horizontal and dug out the middle to fit the jar in there.

Benny wipes off the jar and taps the side of the lid on the table to unseal it. The first thing they fish out is a piece of paper, folded and cracked. It is a black-and-white photograph of three young swimmers standing on the sand, the sea at their backs. Byron and Benny recognize the teenaged faces of their parents. The third person still has her swim cap on and is clasping Covey’s hand in a kind of silent cheer. They’ve never met her but she’s easy to recognize because she is famous, the only black woman in the world to have done exactly what she has done. The distance swimmer Etta Pringle.

Byron turns the photo over and on the back, they find three names written out in their father’s handwriting.

“Gilbert Grant,” he reads, “Coventina Lyncook, Benedetta Pringle.” He looks at Benny.

“Benedetta?” he says.

“Etta was short for Benedetta!” Benny says. Benny must have been named after her mother’s childhood friend. The one who helped their mother escape from the beach on the night that she was believed drowned. The three of them sit there silently for a moment, thinking of small but profound inheritances. Of how untold stories shape people’s lives, both when they are withheld and when they are revealed.