The Son of the House

by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe

I nursed guilt for only a little while before I settled in to enjoy a fling that I was sure had nowhere to go. I pushed away fears of what might happen should his wife find out, what my father would have thought about my lack of integrity, my mother’s cautions about how foolishness could be the downfall of any woman, and the teachings of the church. I soaked myself in the masculine attention that had long bypassed me, in cooking for a man and making love with him, albeit in near secrecy. It was not awful. Indeed, it felt very good for a time. Eugene was the type of man who could keep both a mistress and a wife happy, if they did not hold on too tight. I was a mistress who wanted to be a married woman, preferably the only wife of a man. Despite the occasional irritation, the subterfuge was protective for a woman who wanted to marry one day. It was the perfect affair.

  Until my mother, who knew nothing about my relationship with a married man, reminded me of my need to marry. Until I failed my father and let my brother die.

  I breathed deeply now and sat up to wait.

  The crackle of thunder, the smell and the coolness of coming rain, and the satisfaction of a good orgasm almost lulled me to sleep. But there was a task to be accomplished.

  I let him sleep. He could go home later than he usually did, even tomorrow morning. His wife and daughter had gone to visit her parents, he had said. A sign that they had fallen out yet again. In the nearly three years I had known him, they went through these cycles. They quarrelled, she went back to her parents, he would go and plead with her parents, and she would come back. Yet they had stayed together somehow, I reminded myself. I hoped now that I had not overlooked the strength of that relationship.

  He wants a boy, I reassured myself.

  It was a few hours before he stirred. He frowned when he saw me sitting in the chair across from the bed in the dark.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, groggily. He stood up and went to the bathroom before I could say anything. I heard his water flowing into the toilet and knew that this was what had woken him up. He plans to spend the night here, I thought.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked again. His voice was clear this time, his eyes alert.

  I smiled.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, still smiling. How did pregnant women tell their husbands that they were carrying within them heirs to their name? I looked down and rubbed my belly a little; then I smiled up at him.

  I saw the question in his face.

  ‘I am pregnant,’ I said.

  ‘You are?’ he asked.

  I felt a frisson of fear. Had I miscalculated?

  ‘Yes,’ I said softly.

  He ran to me. He picked me up; the many pounds of me that I had sometimes thought were keeping men away from me seemed only featherweight to him now. I felt the strength of his grip and thought it would be all right. I was relieved. And then I was afraid.

  ‘You are pregnant. I know it is a boy!’ he shouted. ‘I know it is a boy. I knew you would bring me luck. I knew it!’

  ‘Please keep your voice down,’ I begged, smiling. My neighbours, I thought.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ He said it over and over, as if this were something he had begged me to do. I pushed away my guilt at my deception; I was becoming an expert at it. Hopefully, the baby would come once we married.

  ‘We will have to do things fast,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  He had not been thinking that far ahead, I could see. I said a little prayer.

  ‘Well, in our place, they will claim the boy if the pregnancy becomes apparent before the marriage rites take place, before the bride price is paid,’ I said.

  It was a big presumption. But he was from an Igbo village too; the customs must be the same.

  ‘That is true,’ he said with a frown. He let go of me and went to stand by the bed. He did not speak for a while. It must have been a full minute, maybe even two. My heart did a dance of suspense while my head warned me that I had overreached.

  ‘We will have to do things fast,’ he said then, repeating my words.

  I smiled at him, a little weak with relief. I was going to be a married woman. For a minute, I put everything else out of my mind – the baby who was yet to reach my womb, his wife, what my mother would say when I told her he had a wife already – and focused on this. I was going to be a married woman.

  And then I returned to reality.

  ‘What about Onyemaechi?’ I did not want to say ‘your wife’.

  ‘Ehen, what about her?’ he returned harshly.

  I was silent. I was not sure what to think about this change in tone. Even though he had been unfaithful for years, I thought, he must have feelings for her. They had been married twelve – or was it thirteen? – years by now. I did not know if she had any inkling about her husband and me. This would come as a shock to her. I took a deep breath and ground my teeth together. I could not afford to be soft now, to think of her as a woman, perhaps even a little like me.

  After our affair began, I had seen her again. She and Eugene had come to shop at the Kingsway Stores. I almost walked right into them in the cosmetics aisle. Eugene looked away rather too quickly when he saw me. I walked past them, as if I had not smelt his sweat on me the evening before. But I took a good look at his wife, more than the passing glance I had given her when she had come to my school with Eugene that first day. She had kept her figure, her fairly pretty face, even after several pregnancies. Her voice when she spoke to him was soft, feminine. And yet he found me attractive? There was no accounting for the tastes of men.

  Seeing that his tone had upset me, he came to me, placed a hand tenderly on my belly. This frightened me. My womb was empty. And even if anything came into the belly, it might be a girl.

  I shook myself inwardly. It would happen soon enough, I thought. And then we would be a family – me, Eugene, and the baby. I already knew his name. His name would be Afam.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I was firmly set on my course. But first, I had to tell Mama Afam, my mother, the woman who had maintained integrity all her life, chastised errant women as part of her duties as the wife of a headmaster and catechist, and who, in her later life, began to propound the theory to her daughters that men had things too easy and it was no duty of women to make them even easier. As I prepared my speech to her, I deliberately removed the excuses: he did not love his wife any more; I did not know he was married; I was crazy about him and could not help myself. Obiageli and I had laughed over that last one. It was untrue, of course, but more importantly, it was one of those things that one read in books, even said to one’s girlfriend, but certainly not to one’s parents – not in our time or place. So I had prepared a bare-bones speech during which I would permit no interruption until the end.

  I delivered it one Saturday. ‘Mama,’ I inserted in the lull that reigned between the sharing of titbits of all that had happened in the village in the past couple of weeks. She looked up from the dry fish she was picking apart in preparation for soup, her expression only slightly quizzical.

  ‘I have met a man.’

  Mama Afam did not jump for joy immediately – not that that was her way of doing things. She waited, while my heart thumped.

  ‘He lives in Enugu,’ I said to break the silence.

  ‘Where is he from?’

  I told her, and then blurted out: ‘I am going to marry him.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said.

  Why was she not smiling, and jumping up and down?

  But in my heart I knew that she was thinking it was soon.

  And then I said it: ‘I am pregnant.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said again, as if she had run out of words.

  I waited.

  ‘Have you told him?’

  ‘Yes, Ma.’

  ‘And he is coming with his people?’

  ‘Yes, Ma.’

  And so my mother, whose reaction I had dreaded, accepted my decision with composure, if not jubilation. I watched her face, calm as always, break into wrinkled concentration. Her equanimi
ty remained constant through life’s struggles, through moves from one village to another following my father, through the financial hardships that accompanied a man whose profession was adequately compensated only in heaven, through raising children who grew up to disappoint her, through the death of a husband and a child. She had aged a lot since Afam died; her strength had wavered substantially. A weakness had come over her frame, and she lost weight, freshness, and the remainder of her youth. Her wrinkles were more pronounced, as if the town-crier had suddenly called them forth, her cheeks more sunken.

  ‘You say you are pregnant?’ she asked again.

  ‘Yes, Ma,’ I said, and looked down at my feet. I could feel the steady gaze of her tired eyes on me. Years ago, she would have screamed and pounded me wherever her hands could find. Today, she only stared at me. The weight of telling such an enormous lie bore down on my shoulders. I waited for her to ask how far along. She did not.

  ‘He has been married,’ I added, wanting to get all the awkward news out at once.

  I expected surprise, disappointment. But her face was thoughtful. Instead, she said, ‘Where is his first wife?’

  I said that he intended to give her a house in which she could live. I did not say Onyemaechi sometimes came to me in my dreams, warning me, her index finger reaching between my eyes, pulling out a cutlass that was not there, the type that people use to split firewood, raising it to split my head open, causing me to scream out loud in my sleep.

  ‘Does she have children?’

  ‘Yes, Ma. Two girls.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she sighed, ‘he will provide for her and the children?’

  I said yes.

  She nodded.

  ‘You say he has no son.’

  I said yes.

  ‘Eheennn,’ she nodded again. She could see how that might make sense: a man, an Igbo man, needed a son. She closed her eyes briefly and I knew that she was thinking about our own family, our compound that might be taken over by extended family if Chielotam went the way of Afam.

  ‘And you are satisfied with this man?’

  I knew now that the tricky part was over.

  ‘Yes, Ma,’ I assured her.

  She sighed in resignation. This, a polygamous marriage, would not have been her preference. Unspoken went the worry about the parish priest’s opinion of her, of me. I knew she understood that I could do this only because my father was no more. And that this last factor was the most significant. But any marriage was better than singleness in her eyes, and so she quietly acceded once she saw my unshakeable resolve. Besides, I was pregnant. The choice was clear between bringing a child into the world with no name and bringing a child into the world with a father. So, instead of launching into a lecture – her style only in the direst of circumstances – she gave me a few chosen words of advice.

  ‘Men don’t like to be told that they are stupid. They can be foolish, but put a guard on your lips when it does not involve something major. I have never seen a man who does not like domestic peace.’

  I pushed for quick marriage rites. I did not want to show, I told Eugene, echoing my mother’s sentiment. Besides, my people might make greater demands, seeing as they would be selling the cow with the calf in its belly.

  ‘Do not worry,’ he said, his smile as wide as the Niger and Benue rivers. He did not care if I showed – what could be better evidence of his masculinity? As for demands and long marriage lists, ‘Am I not Ozukaome?’ was his laughing response. ‘Am I not well able to marry ten of you?’ I felt a mild irritation at this, but I did not turn back; common sense was my middle name. But he did acquiesce and was quick to inform his people. His kinsmen supported his decision, he told me. He did not add that it was unthinkable to die without a son to take over the family name – especially for an illustrious man whose business was booming – even if hapless Christian fanatics were beginning to say otherwise.

  A date was chosen, marriage lists – goats, fowls, kegs of palm wine, wraps of tobacco for the umuada, umunna, and other groups – were provided. His people’s joy was clear on their faces when they came to my village to pay the bride price. It was obvious in the way they took care to address me, the way a woman came forward to help me kneel when it was time to present the cup of palm wine to my husband-to-be, in the way they asked how I was feeling, in the way they rushed to take the tray of kola from my hands like I was carrying a four-gallon container of water up a hill. They met and exceeded the expectations and requirements for taking a bride. They drank good palm wine, nkwu enu, ate ugba and abacha, and danced to their akwunechenyi into the night before taking me home with them. I wondered briefly if they had done the same for Onyemaechi, and then I put the thought away. The day was for joy.

  A church wedding had been out of the question since there would be no annulment. There would be no white wedding gowns, no flower girls throwing confetti at the bride and groom, no bridesmaids in awkward colours and styles, no church photographs that we could display on the wall. This was painful for my mother, who had given away both her other daughters in marriage in the Church. But she said nothing, not even when her parish priest said that she might be denied communion because I was in sin.

  A marriage under statutory law, a marriage at the marriage registry, was also impossible, as there would be no divorce. I did not seek it. It was enough that everybody recognised that this man was mine. Once the traditional marriage rites were done, I went to Asata to my goldsmith and made myself a gold ring. My ring was a little fatter than the regular-sized wedding band, the type my friend Obiageli wore. It was broad enough for anyone whose glance touched my hand to notice. I put it on my finger with satisfaction. I did not make one for Eugene; he was not interested. Having worn one and ceased to once before, I supposed, he was over the thrill. But secretly I wished he would wear one for me, for us.

  Seemingly, Onyemaechi had given up much easier than I thought, and my nightmares had not come to pass. She had not fought, at least not with vigour. Perhaps she had cried and begged, or perhaps she had remonstrated and threatened to pluck out my eyes and pour hot water on me – things that a scorned wife would wish to do. If she did any of these, Eugene did not mention them to me. She had not, as I had feared most, come to my school to shame me, to ask why I had chosen to dig my greedy, chubby fingers into her husband.

  What she had done was go back to her parents’ home, as she often did when they quarrelled. According to Eugene, this time they had simply begged him to take her away. Even if he chose to marry a new wife, that was not reason enough to send the first away. They must have understood her fragile position – a woman without a son, after more than ten years of marriage. If she did not understand, her parents and relatives must have explained it to her in detail. ‘Your hold over a man is a son,’ I imagined them saying. ‘Without that, your place in his house is not secure.’

  Still, I did not want to run into Onyemaechi at the store or elsewhere. It was uncomfortable even to think about. One night, after I had met his needs, I told Eugene I did not want to share. I could not stand to share him; I loved him too much. More importantly, his son could not be expected to share. But I did not want his daughters by Onyemaechi to suffer by not attending a good school in a city. Perhaps, I suggested, kindness coating every word, perhaps they could move to another town – Onitsha, Owerri, even Port Harcourt. With little reluctance, praising my sensitivity and kindness, he moved Onyemaechi and their daughters to Owerri, leaving us – him, me, and our coming baby – in Enugu.

  I stood back and let him make arrangements. I had not really cared about Eugene’s money at the beginning of the affair, but now I clambered into the lap of luxury. We moved into a lovely flat in Tinker’s Corner, while he started to make plans to build us a house, for I had told him that I could not abide living in the home in which he once had lived with Onyemaechi. We were one of the first families to purchase a colour television. I was soon gifted with a brand-new Peugeot 504; its grey leather seats were the definition of luxury. I went to
London for the first time with Eugene and became a ‘been-to’. I watched the quiet envy in fellow teachers’ eyes, and heard their loud congratulations. If they gossiped behind my back, I paid no heed.

  Eugene spent more time at home, and I discovered that my fears of sharing my space were for nothing. There was something pleasant, rather enjoyable, about having a happy man around. He pampered me the best he could, but this was not what brought me pleasure, for he tired easily of taking care of me, and before long reverted to demanding to be looked after. I did not mind. I liked the smell, the sight and sound of a man in the house, even the take-charge attitude he wore like an invisible cloak. Marriage, I learnt, could be good.

  A crib imported from England soon arrived, along with a rug for the child’s room. Eugene was going all out. This child would have nothing that could not be called the best. He took me to the village and showed me an ite-otu, its roundness reaching up into a small snout through which good palm wine, nkwu ocha, was poured for brief storage. It had been his grandfather’s. The round ceramic pot must have been at least a hundred years old. His grandfather had passed it on to his father, who had given it to him. And now, he would have a son to give it to when the time came.

  I marvelled at his excitement at this baby who had not even shown himself, not even in a bigger swell of belly. Some children took their time, I assured him when he mentioned this. My mother said it was the same with her, I lied; Women in my family showed very late. I told myself that time was on my side, three months at least. Sometimes, Obiageli had assured me, first-time pregnancies did not show for seven months. Seven months, by which time I should be well and truly pregnant. I soaked in Eugene’s attentions and deliberately, consciously, folded my guilt away deep in a metal box, into which I also packed my father’s words about integrity. And I tried to get in as much lovemaking as possible, even against my husband’s wishes, for he was afraid we would hurt the baby.

  Yet, by the fifth month, when even a one-month-old foetus had not found its way into the folds of my belly, it was clear to me that a baby was not coming as I had hoped. With difficulty, but knowing that it soon would be impossible to keep up the pretence, I summoned the courage to inform him that I had had a miscarriage. It had not been difficult to manufacture the tears and the hysteria. I was truly disappointed. I stayed in bed. I accepted his pampering and pretended not to see his own disappointment in his eyes. For two months, he travelled to Owerri on business. But I knew that he went to visit Onyemaechi and her daughters.