Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  Angel made a face and began eating a large plate of ice cream. She said sullenly, ‘Always checking on me. Always calling to see whether I am doing my homework.’

  In Maria’s ever active imagination suddenly flashed the most bizarre picture of Maggie in the black sexy lingerie she had once seen her in a dream, wearing for a triumphant Bernard no longer burdened with cancer; the man in the picture was not her husband but the man with the dark glasses in the car, and Maggie was saying to him, right in the throes of lust, ‘Please excuse me, something very urgent, can’t wait,’ before jumping out of bed and going into another room to make a call to her sister, ‘Angel, good, so you at home. Are you doing your homework? When I come home, show me.’

  Then she saw Maggie, now divested of the lingerie, climbing back into bed. Maria had to suppress a smile for the situation had lost its lightness, and Maggie was looking at her with the old hardness and resentment. The girl opened her gleaming leather handbag to take out a name-card to give her.

  ‘Here’s my phone number, Miss Seetoh. If change mind, want to coach Angel, just call me. I can pay you double the normal tuition fees, no problem.’ She placed a hand on the table where Maria could see a sparkling diamond on her middle finger that she was sure had not been there before. A thought occurred to her and froze her: could it be the lost Tiffany ring that was not lost after all? Maggie was a liar, cheat, braggart and thief, all rolled into one. She had not seen the ring long enough to be able to identify it; in any case, she did not care, and as she rose to leave, insisting she would take a taxi back, she never disliked her former student more.

  Neither Maggie nor Angel would be allowed anywhere near her new world. She would remember to change her phone number so that she would not be bothered by Maggie’s calls again.

  Thirty-Eight

  The visit from Father Rozario was uncomfortable; she was sure it had to do with her mother and she was right. ‘Your mother asks you to forgive her,’ said the good priest, and before Maria could ask an astonished ‘Why?’ he said, ‘For not attending your grandmother’s funeral.’

  There was the dilatory explanation expected of her mother, which the good priest, on her behalf, must have memorised word by word, about needing to act in accordance with one’s conscience; Anna Seetoh’s conscience had told her it would be wrong to take part in a Taoist ceremony.

  ‘Is it wrong, Father?’ asked Maria, and Father Rozario replied, ‘I suppose in the end it depends on your conscience.’

  In her new life with Heng, Anna was in the midst of a novena of prayers to bring about the conversion of his wife, one more feather in her cap of evangelical zeal, and she did not want to spoil it by attending a pagan ceremony. She wanted priestly support of her stand, and Father Rozario had readily, good-naturedly obliged. ‘Pagan?’ Maria remonstrated. ‘Do you call Por Por ‘pagan’?’ Father patiently explained that Anna Seetoh had used the word in the purely technical sense of a non-Christian, with no derogatory meaning intended.

  ‘Father, my Por Por was a good, kind person. Do you think she is in heaven now?’ Maria’s willful streak, already manifested in childhood when she had asked impossible questions of the kindly Sister St Aidan (‘Sister, how come if the Garden of Eden was in a dry desert area it had an apple tree?’), was asserting itself now, not to discomfit the priest whom she actually liked for his generosity to all his parishioners, but to hear what God’s representatives in a multi-ethnic, mutli-religious society, had learnt to say in response to tricky questions.

  Father Rozario said, ‘God is our merciful father. He will never condemn a good person.’

  He winced slightly when Maria, her willfulness not at an end, asked, ‘Can animals go to heaven, Father?’

  ‘I could look it up in the Bible for you if you like,’ he said desultorily, and it was then that she administered a stern rebuke to herself: ‘Maria, for goodness’ sake, stop harassing the poor priest!’

  He stayed for coffee and cookies, prudently sticking to innocuous topics of a non-religious nature, such as the weather and the declining health of poor Mrs TPK whom many parishioners were praying for. Then he rose to take his leave, never mentioning once that in the list of people to be prayed for by the church prayer group, it was not Mrs TPK but Maria Seetoh, widow of the good, pious Bernard Tan, who headed the list.

  Shortly after, Anna Seetoh paid a visit to her daughter. ‘If it makes you happy,’ she said, ‘I will visit Por Por’s niche in the columbarium with you, and say my own prayers for her.’

  Maria said, ‘Mother, let’s sit down. There’s something we have to talk about seriously, if we don’t want to end up not talking to each other at all.’ It was the simplest of modus vivendis: agree to disagree on the matter of beliefs and thereafter steer absolutely clear of any topic that might break the agreement. ‘For one thing, Mother,’ said Maria, ‘I don’t want you to threaten me with hellfire. For another, I don’t want you, every time you say something to me, to add, ‘Praise the Lord’, or ‘God’s will be done’, or ‘Blessed Mother Mary knows.’

  For Maria, the invocations had reached a point of irritation equal to the infliction of tinnitus; each time her mother shared a piece of information, good or bad, made a complaint, issued a warning, paid a compliment, the sheer certainty that the invocations would follow in a precise second, made in exactly the same tone of voice, with exactly the same pious uplift of eyes, would drive her crazy.

  ‘Alright, Mother? And a third thing. No reference to what Heng is saying and doing now that he’s a devout Christian. I don’t want to hear a word more. Alright?’

  ‘Alright,’ said Anna Seetoh curtly. ‘You do all the talking. I’ll listen.’

  ‘No, Mother, that’s not the point,’ said the strong-willed daughter. ‘You can do as much talking as you like, minus those three irritations. Now, to be fair, I want you tell me what you want me to avoid saying or doing, so as not to irritate you.’

  Anna Seetoh said stiffly, ‘Nothing. You can do and say anything you like. You are the smart one. I’ll just keep quiet and listen.’

  It turned out that Anna had something to talk about after all. Maria had noted on previous occasions her mention of a certain Joseph Boey, the sacristan of her church, whom she described as an extremely kind and helpful man. He had gone out of his way several times to make her and Heng feel comfortable in their early attendance at the church services. When his name came up for mention a few more times, Maria decided to do a little investigation of her own. Over her mother’s favourite minced pork noodles in her favourite restaurant, she pounced on the name as soon as it came up again, watching eagle-eyed for tell-tale signs. Anna Seetoh’s mood was a big improvement over the sullen guardedness of the first few days, which made it easier for her to say with teasing gusto, ‘Aha, Mother! Who is this Joseph Boey? Don’t tell me you’ve found your heartthrob?’

  The sheer novelty of teasing her mother on a subject as alien as it was shocking, and watching the sudden flush on her cheeks and her little cries of protest, provided a special piquancy to a mischievous nature carried over from childhood. She remembered that as a little girl, she had one day put a grasshopper in her mother’s hair for the thrill of seeing this most prim and well-mannered parent break out into a frenzy of screaming and hair-searching. Every memory of her mother playing and laughing with her, telling her stories of ancient gods and goddesses, was precious, and its pleasure worth recapturing even in the sober years of their adult lives.

  Joseph Boey was one of those elderly, very pious retirees, mainly widows and widowers, who formed a reliable pool of volunteers found in any church, who could always be seen cleaning the altar, dusting or polishing statues and candlesticks, getting ready the prayer books for the next service, arranging the flowers, lighting the candles. As they went about their work in quiet devoted service, often working together, anything more than pious fellowship would be both a scandal and a sacrilege. Joseph Boey provided the perfect opportunity to steer her mother from her dreary, religion-dr
enched talk to something that might just expose another, unexpected, indeed, refreshing, side of her.

  ‘Ah, Mother, I see you’re blushing!’ said Maria pursuing the subject with relentless relish. ‘It’s alright, Mother. It’s alright to take a lover, if he makes you happy.’

  Anna Seetoh uttered a little cry of protest against the obscene word. ‘Maria, how can you say anything like that? You ought to be ashamed of yourself!’ She began a flurry of hand gestures of frantic dismissal accompanied by cries of ‘Choy! Choy! ’, exactly as she had done, years ago, when she wanted to dismiss the evil image of the man who had sat opposite them in a ferry and exposed himself.

  Lust, concupiscence, carnal desire. Even married couples could be guilty of these sins. After her conversion to Catholicism, with the presence of a daughter to attest to her fulfillment of holy matrimony’s purpose, Anna Seetoh had rejected all her husband’s attempts at sex.

  Maria watched her mother closely. There was the unmistakable blush, as of a young girl caught unawares. ‘You must introduce me to this Joseph Boey one of these days, Mother.’ Anna Seetoh, secure in her faith, terrified about what fellow parishioners would think of her, would never have a romance, or even remotely approach one. There would be none of the torturous quandaries that her daughter had experienced, there would be no line to cross, no perilous edge overlooking a chasm to peep into and withdraw from. When Anna Seetoh went down on her knees to pray, it was for others, never for herself, for in her simple, ardent soul there were no inner demons to vanquish. But the blush, the frantically denying hand gestures, the stern prohibition against the subject ever occurring again, her own guardedness in future conversations – all proved that even the thick encrustations of nun-like piety that Anna Seetoh had, over so many years, laid over her consciousness, could be penetrated by every woman’s need to be loved, touched, or at the least, singled out for attention by a man.

  She had done her mother a disservice. Now poor Anna Seetoh, confused by the new light in which her perverse daughter had made her see her friendship with Joseph Boey, would very likely avoid him like poison. If he as much as tried to hold her hand, she would recoil in horror and flee the occasion for temptation. If she had a dream of them together, she would run to the cleansing power of the confessional the next morning and sob out her guilt: ‘Father forgive me, for I have sinned. I had impure thoughts…’

  Maria said again, ‘Mother, it’s okay! You are a widow, Joseph a widower; there can be no sin.’ She reminded her mother of the example of two similarly circumstanced parishioners of the Church of Eternal Mercy, both in their sixties, who fell in love and got married.

  Anna Seetoh pressed her hands to her ears and said, ‘Stop. Stop this instant. You are saying disgusting things. Never talk like that in my presence again.’

  She was unusually quiet during a shopping trip after lunch, when Maria, feeling closer to her mother than she had been for a long time, bought gifts, including books and toys for the autistic nephew, to take back to her new home in Malaysia.

  Back home by herself, she thought with an amused smile, ‘If I write about the love lives of the women in my family, poor Mother’s innocence, would lie in the middle, a pure bright pool in stark contrast to the dark, churning waves at each end.’ Was any family as strange as hers, where the woman in each generation could truly say, ‘My mother and I were so different – like night and day,’ and the outside observer could ask, with much astonishment: ‘How could someone like you have produced a daughter like her?’

  She thought of herself in old age; in her chosen life of solitude would she, even then, find love? Would she be like that lonely elderly widow who sought and found love, whose story was well-known in Singapore? The widow of a fairly successful businessman, she had found a lover eighteen years younger and was happy for the remaining years of her life, baffling all predictions about a faithless fortune-hunting husband.

  When she died, he said proudly to his relatives and friends, ‘It was not what people thought. It was love of her, not her money. I gave her seven years of happiness,’ and made clear it was not just the happiness of gentle companionship during her extensive travels round the world, but the special happiness enjoyed only on the silken bed.

  She met the jogger one more time in the Botanic Gardens, and once again, there was the proposition, a bold direct one without the usual preliminaries for testing the water. He had persuaded her, since it was getting dark, to take a lift home in his car; when he reached the car park of her block, he turned to her and said with a smile, ‘Won’t you ask me in for a cup of tea?’

  They were sitting very close together in the growing darkness. She was suddenly gripped by one image that could sum up the amatory quandaries in her life: a parked car, herself and a man in the parked car, the enveloping darkness of evening to assure privacy and intimacy. Each time, it had ended either with a proposal or a proposition. The stark difference between the two would determine a woman’s response; she was likely to rejoice at the first and react with anger or embarrassment to the second. She had recoiled at Bernard’s proposal and demurred at Benjamin Phang’s proposition, finally rejecting it. There was no hesitation at all in the case of the third supplicant. She simply said to the jogger, ‘No. Goodnight and thank you for the lift,’ and was gone in a second.

  In later years she could not even recall his name or appearance, only the startling boast, the first time he had sat down and talked to her in the gardens, that he had bedded an American lady jogger the very first time he met her.

  Alone by herself in those first weeks of retirement from her job at St Peter’s Secondary School, she surrendered to the luxury of lying in bed for hours and letting her thoughts wander on their own. Like a flock of butterflies, they settled on the sweet allurements of love, lust, romance, sex, each a bright, enticing, fragrant bloom, gloriously indistinguishable from the other.

  Maybe they were all one and the same, just different aspects of Nature’s single, supreme strategy to propagate life on the face of the earth, so that the mountain goat in musth chasing the coy female across steep rocks was no different from her parents on their wedding night, her father eagerly lifting up her mother’s chaste white cotton nightdress, no different from Por Por’s and her lover’s tentative explorations of each other’s nakedness as they lay on some improvised bed of old sacks on the floor of a dark corner in a temple, no different from herself in the parked car where she lay against the warmth of Benjamin Phang’s body.

  This need of woman for man, of man for woman, must have received Nature’s fiat to transcend even the restraining forces of culture, even the sternest strictures of religion and morality. Thou shalt not commit adultery. If you lust after a woman in your mind, you have already committed adultery. In every church there must be men and women, quietly sitting in the pews and listening to sermons about the sanctity of the marriage vows who had already broken them, in thought, word or deed. The conscience in the end would be the most accommodating organ of the human self, reduced to a tiny voice that said, ‘So what. Everyone does it.’

  Nature probably never intended for this most primordial of needs to transcend death as well. The mountain goat, the prairie mole, the moth – they went their separate ways to die eventually of old age or as food for others; indeed, after the act of sex, they lost all interest in the partner. But the human being could pay no less homage to love than ascribe to it an eternal existence. In the Christian heaven there was no marriage and no sex, only pure love, but in the myths and legends that had endured from time immemorial across cultures, gods fell in love with goddesses and competed for their sexual favours; gods fell in love with earthly maidens, came down to earth or took them up into heavenly abodes; mortal lovers achieved immortality when they met at long last on an eternal shore; mortal lovers who were cruelly separated on earth could still be united in death by a marriage of their effigies.

  Nature probably never intended for this need for love and sex to turn defiant and separate itself
from the primary goal of propagation. As soon as they were able, men and women must have learnt to enjoy the pleasure without having to pay its price, delighting in the marvellous workings of Nature’s love chemicals, and profiting from Nature’s thoughtful provision of ambient moonlight, starlight, flowers in bloom. Nature’s gift had become a free for all, satisfying the entire range of needs of the complex human being who liked to think of complexity only in terms of head and heart, forgetting a multitude of other entities, mostly nameless and unnameable, often vaguely referred to as the subconscious, the unconscious, the subliminal, each with its own pressing needs and demands. Thus, in catering to human complexity, love had become an obfuscation, defying definition, eluding scholarly efforts to pin it down to something comprehensible. It had the largest possible clientele – the young, the not-so-young, the brazen old, the poorest and the richest, the most powerful and the humblest, the most beautiful and the ugliest, the most saintly and the most sinful.

  Moreover, it allowed a generous bursting of all boundaries, so that all could come together in a gloriously crazy mix: marriages and love affairs galore between young, winsome May and old, hoary December, waitress and multimillionaire banker, king and commoner, president and stripper, Esmeralda and Quasimodo, Lancelot and Guinevere, Lolita and her ageing professor, Abelard and Heloise. Love too claimed its martyrs, for, as frequently reported in newspapers all over the world, a girl from a high caste or a conservative, punitive religion, would run away to get married to her secret lover, and risk being murdered by her own family in a brutality called an honour killing.

  Love had become marvellously, exasperatingly multiform, multifaceted, multidimensional, a vast fluid term to accommodate any variant of human need and emotion, so that even Anna Seetoh, experiencing the small girlish stirrings of pleasure in the presence of Joseph Boey, and Maria Seetoh, experiencing an inchoate, vague but still very real pleasure in the recollection of her days in St Peter’s Secondary School with Brother Philip, could inhabit its vast hospitable mansions.