While I lay there on the lawn, curled up with my arms over my head, displaying my penitence, Lexi must have recovered her arrowhead and carried it back into her bedroom or wherever it was she took it. I never laid eyes on it again. Thankfully Feli wasn’t with us anymore when that happened and didn’t witness it. By then María Xum had succeeded her.
Feli had come to live with us right after Lexi was born. I’m meeting her for lunch the day after tomorrow. You really had two mothers, she always likes to say, meaning my mother and herself. Yet despite how close I’ve felt to Feli practically all my life, the last time I saw her was nearly two years ago, when I came through Boston promoting my little book on the bishop’s murder and she drove in to meet me for lunch in Coolidge Corner. From when I was three until I was about nine and from when she was fourteen until she was twenty, Feli lived with us. I made up the name Feli, though only my sister and I and sometimes my father called her that. Her real name is Concepción Balbuena. Abuelita, who’d found her in a nuns’ orphanage in Guatemala City, had sent her to help my mother but also to keep her company. All her life, my mother had only lived in cities where she’d always had lots of friends and a social life; now here she was isolated with a tubercular small boy and an infant in a little town outside Boston, in a two-road, mainly working-class neighborhood overlooked by a cemetery, amid rocky field and cold forest. The bedroom my father had built for Feli in the basement, with finished plywood-paneled walls and a smooth linoleum floor, was adjacent to our playroom, separated from it by a curtain of tiny metal rings hung from a brass rod. The first time I saw Feli she was wearing black-frame eyeglasses and a convent haircut, but a year later, she’d grown and fluffed her hair like Patty Duke’s, wore loose sweaters and skinny slacks and eyeglasses with pink frames, and was always playing Top 40 music on the radio. Down in her basement room, Feli twisted, chachacha’d, frugged, and sang along to the radio, to forty-fives on her record player or to Shindig! on TV. Frankycello-Frankycello! she liked to call to me, like I was Annette Funicello’s little brother. Swinging her hips side to side and holding out her hands for me to come and dance, she always smelled damply of detergent and Ajax. When I’d made up the name Feli, was I just mispronouncing feliz or making up a name only for her because she brought so much felicidad into our house? Feli was more fun than anybody I’d ever known. But when she’d get me to march around the basement with her loudly singing “estamos de fiesta hoy, la banda la banda,” I suspect now that was her way of cheering me up, that I was, at least sometimes, a sadder boy than I remember being.
Feli didn’t have parents. She had only one relative that she mentioned, her uncle Rodolfo Sprenger Balbuena, an army colonel fighting in the war against the Communists from Cuba and Russia. Feli and her uncle wrote to each other, his letters arriving in crisp airmail envelopes with red and blue stripes, and like all mail from Guatemala those envelopes had a distinct, stronger smell than American mail, something like a moldy raisin cake. Her uncle’s letters came right from the battlefield, Feli told me; she’d read them out loud. In the mountains and jungles the soldiers ate wild animals, including opossums, iguanas, armadillos, tepezcuintles, jabalís, crocodiles, snakes, and even monkeys roasted over campfires.
About six years after she’d come to live with us, Feli left to marry Oscar, a handsome, languid, arrogant Cuban. We went to eat cake with them in Allston on their wedding day; their small apartment reminded me of the one in The Honeymooners. Oscar eventually became mixed up in small-time gangster dealings; their marriage only lasted a few years. After Feli left, our home was never a happy one again, not even in a fleeting or illusory way, I really think that’s true. María Xum came next. Abuelita had sent her to do housework so that most days my mother could go into Boston, where now she was studying at Lesley College to become a Spanish teacher. She was probably about the same age as Feli. But neither Lexi nor I ever played with María Xum. Watching television she’d laugh uncontrollably at parts that weren’t funny or stare in bewilderment or fright at the funniest parts. All that used to make me feel sorry for her and sometimes hostile. Her feet, coming out of her black slipper shoes to rub against each other, were rough and calloused, her face dark and flat, wide cheeks, a large fleshy mouth with something fishlike about it, and her black eyes shone with a disconcerting intensity. María never took me with her into Boston on her day off like Feli used to. Soon she left to get married, too—even María Xum could find a husband!—the way every girl Abuelita sent to us left to get married. She occasionally phoned my mother to say hello, but we eventually lost track of her. María Xum was replaced by the mysterious Hortensia. After only two weeks of being our housekeeper and living in that basement room, Hortensia left to get married. I have no idea to whom or how it happened so fast. What I do remember about Hortensia is her tight sweaters and voluptuous bust, her prominent Roman-looking nose. Yolandita from Nicaragua came next, so demure and pretty, always singing along like a happy novice nun to the radio while she ironed. She had her own room downstairs in the new house on Wooded Hollow Road and was my mother’s favorite, though Mamita’s relationship to Feli was emotionally deeper. Carlota Sánchez Motta, who was my age, was the last to come, but she wasn’t a housekeeper. She was a foreign student who in exchange for living with us was supposed to help with the housework. During my senior year, Carlota went to high school with me.
More than forty years after Feli landed at Logan Airport with her little suitcase, the small settlement of Central American women founded by Abuelita in Greater Boston is in its third generation, Feli being a grandmother now, and maybe one or two of the others are too.
Mamita had married Bert because of his resemblance to her big brother, Guillermo, or Memo. That’s what used to be said, though I don’t remember by whom. Was it Feli or Abuelita who said that, or maybe Aunt Milly? They both had big noses, Bert’s classically Jewish, Memo’s a bit smaller, more triangular, classically Maya-mestizo. They both had black hair, Bert’s wavy, Memo’s tightly curly; they both wore eyeglasses and were forceful speakers. That was about it for what they had in common. Few things made my mother happier than my managing to impress Tío Memo the way I already had that day my father drove us to Fort Ticonderoga, with my energetic recounting of how on the night of May 9, 1775, Vermont’s own Ethan Allen and a feisty rabble of his Green Mountain Boys, including the future traitor Benedict Arnold, had snuck into the fort and fought their way into the British soldiers’ sleeping barracks, which used to be right over there, Tío. The redcoat commander jumped out of his bed just as the Green Mountain Boys burst in, and that’s why, Tío, when he surrendered the fort to Ethan Allen, he was holding his breeches over his private parts like this. Jajaja went my uncle’s booming laughter. I really was thrilled to be at Fort Ticonderoga, which I’d read about in Francis Parkman’s Montcalm and Wolfe, checked out from the library, the actual place instead of just a historical re-creation like boring Plimoth Plantation, still-standing ramparts, cold redolent stones, even the same dirt the Green Mountain Boys had left their boot prints in. And Tío Memo was impressed by his nephew’s knowledge and improbably extroverted outburst. He exclaimed, You’ll be a professor someday, Frankie! Ay no, Memo, murmured my mother, crinkling her nose, because coming from her brother, a manly successful international businessman, she didn’t consider that a great compliment. But from how she looked at me and smiled, fur coat hugged around her, rouged cheeks even more brightly fragrant in the cold, I could tell she was proud of me.
Tío Memo, during a business trip to New York from Guatemala, had come to Massachusetts by Greyhound to visit, and so Bert had taken us all on that weekend road trip up to Fort Ticonderoga, then across Lake Champlain on the car ferry and into Vermont, a state my uncle had never visited before. I sat in the back seat between Tío Memo and Feli, my mother and sister were up front, and Bert at the wheel, driving us to our motel through winter twilight and long rows of gray, white, and evergreen trees, past the occasional roadside farm stand sell
ing maple syrup and cheddar cheese. Some of the souvenir shops we passed had teepees or big statues of moose out front that made my father shout, Look at that, a moose! the same way he shouted, Look at that, cows! whenever we passed milk cows grazing in a mountainside pasture. Meanwhile my uncle and Feli cheerfully bantered with Mamita, who sat partly turned around with her arm hooked around my sister, their jokes and laughter, ala que alegre, and púchica, and ala gran chucha, vos, Tío Memo regularly remembering to switch to English for the sake of my father, a rare memory of snug well-being, of happy pride in family. The way Tío Memo, at the start of every sentence he addressed to my father, said, “Bert,” in his deep, resounding voice, sounding so manly and respectful. And my father would say, Well, Memo, to be honest with you … Or, Frankly, Memo, let me tell you how I see it. They spoke to each other the way leaders at the United Nations spoke to each other, I imagined, men who understood power and how things really were, their conversations meant to deepen mutual understanding and to clarify complex matters for the rest of us. That’s why Mamita always chirped along with utterances like: No me digás, or Así es, or Oh no, they can’t do that, or, Memo, is that true? Guatemala’s improving but precarious economic and political position in the world, always threatened by powerful subversive enemies from without and within, always needing to maneuver such treacherous geopolitical currents, gave Tío Memo an urgent-sounding global outlook. My father was a serious Democrat with thoughtfully calibrated positions on world affairs and how these were complicated by US political pressures and rivalries, also from within and without, subjects that he only ever got to talk about in such a seemingly consequential way when he was with Tío Memo. In reality, considering that my uncle was a fanatical right-wing anti-Communist, and my father was just as fanatically against the Vietnam War and all right-wing warmongers, it’s amazing they never even came close to screaming at each other, the way my father and Uncle Lenny, vociferously in favor of the Vietnam War, used to scream at each other, even at one Passover dinner hurling plates of food across the table. The one thing Tío Memo and my father agreed on was that they both hated Russia.
Memo, who’d taken over and enlarged our family toy store business in Guatemala City, was a vigorous man who laughed a lot. Mamita was always quick to laugh too. She had a wonderfully jolly, occasionally silly laugh, but my father laughed less. Instead he sometimes hooted and howled as if he were faking, imitating happy barnyard animals. I’m trying to recall if he ever really genuinely laughed. Well, okay, yes, sometimes he did, though not much at home, not with us; that afternoon in the car driving into Vermont, he sort of did, with those hoots and howls it feels so melancholy to conjure back now.
Lexi once told me about a memory she said still haunted her from another of those family road trips. This was more than twenty years ago, when I’d come for a visit during one of those periods when she was living at home again on Wooded Hollow Road. It was just our parents, Lexi, and me on this road trip, and we’d stopped for a picnic lunch at a highway rest stop somewhere in Cape Cod. I was, as usual, off playing in the woods, said Lexi, and she was sitting with our parents at a picnic table. They ate their sandwiches in complete silence, she said. You could hear every bite. Their chewing was the only sound except for some cars swooshing by and a little breeze that came and went in the pine trees. I remember that breeze because it was loud compared to our silence, said Lexi. It was the most silent silence, Frank. It really started to scare me. Why don’t you say something? I thought. Mommy, Daddy, say something. Talk to each other just a little. I tried to think of something to say just to break the silence, said Lexi, but I couldn’t get a sound out. It was like they were never going to say anything again, and you were never going to come back from the woods, and I was going to be trapped in their silence forever.
Because Aunt Hannah used to fill Lexi in and tell her stories when she came to give her violin lessons, Lexi knew things about our father that I didn’t. Aunt Hannah would tell her about the family history, which is how Lexi knew about our grandmother Rose, who’d died when my father was a boy and whom he never talked about, just as he never told any stories about his own growing-up years. Aunt Hannah, and Aunt Milly too, were the keepers and upholders of the legend of the thwarted genius of Bert, which supposedly explained why he was how he was. Once upon a time, of course, some of the most prestigious universities and colleges of the Northeast had had very restrictive Jewish quotas, and Harvard, locally aspired to by Jewish immigrant children like no other school, was one of the worst, accepting a secretly designated small number of Jews while otherwise keeping qualified Jewish students out, especially those who came from the Russian and Eastern European shtetl families of Boston’s most abhorred immigrant neighborhoods. Maybe Bert didn’t even know about the quotas, or if he did, had a faith that if it was indeed harder for a Jewish student to be accepted into Harvard than it was for a Christian, it must be by some small degree necessitated by the competitiveness of the process and the unsurprising preference of Christian administrators for Christians over Jews when having to choose, say, between two equally qualified students for a last available place in the incoming class. But Bert, gung ho Americanized as could be, one of the top students at Boston English, a football and baseball star, too, determined to become a surgeon, had expected to be accepted into Harvard because everyone else around him, teachers and coaches, were sure he was going to be too. The ruthless Crimson quota crushed that dream. A year later, he was accepted into Johns Hopkins in faraway Baltimore to study medicine, but it was the Depression, and Grandpa Moe made him stay home and go to work as a locksmith so that he could help support the family. That’s why Bert had to enroll in Boston University part-time, where he studied chemical engineering, eventually leading to his long career in false teeth. I only knew those stories from Lexi.
Aunt Hannah told Lexi that Bert had a boss at Potashnik Tooth Company whom he hated, who’d been “picking on him” for years, Leslie Potashnik, one of the sons of the company founder, Dr. Simon Potashnik. According to Aunt Hannah, whenever Bert would invent a new kind of false tooth, Leslie Potashnik would put his name on the patent. That jerk took credit for all the work Daddy did, Lexi told me. There are patents for false teeth? I asked. Back then I didn’t know anything about it. Whenever you invent anything for any business, said Lexi, of course there are patents. Because of Leslie Potashnik, my father hated going to work. That’s why, my sister said, so often when he got home in the evenings, she could hear him through the thin door of the downstairs bathroom in the shower cursing: You son of a bitch, you goddamned bastard you, get off my back. Lexi said that used to actually make her feel sorry for Bert.
During the years since, I’ve managed to learn quite a lot more about what my father used to do for living. Back when Bert was starting out, the manufacturing of porcelain dental prosthetics was rugged work. He used to travel to granite quarries in Canada to inspect and choose the veins in the rock he wanted for his source feldspar. At Potashnik, he worked in a Vulcan environment of furnaces and kilns, of grinders and iron mixers, pulverizing feldspar into powders. While the company never stopped producing the high-end porcelain teeth that were Bert’s specialty, it also eventually became a major manufacturer of the acrylic teeth that came to dominate the market. The chemistry was completely different, but my father mastered it too.
A few years after I’d left for college, when the Potashniks sold the company to a pharmaceutical multinational, the new managers realized it was going to take a team of five to do what my father had been doing alone at the tooth plant for decades, seriously underpaid throughout. To convince him to postpone his retirement another five years, until he was seventy, so that he could personally train those apprentices to take over after he was gone, they more than tripled Bert’s salary. He’d been resigned to a penurious retirement. Instead, he was able to buy his Florida condo.
Here in New Haven, the train has to change from diesel to electric locomotives or vice versa. It
takes about ten minutes. It’s cold out here on the platform, but as the heat is always turned up so high inside the cars, I left my coat inside, on the rack over my seat. Back in the smoking days, this was always one of the great moments to light up. The locomotive, just disconnected, looking as if it’s playing a juvenile prank, goes whizzing off all by itself, and now train-yard workers are huddled around the exposed front of the first passenger car, a few leaning over from the platform, the others down on the tracks doing whatever it is they do so that the second locomotive, when it comes rolling in reverse, will ram into that car, iron against iron, and latch on. If you’ve stayed inside in your seat, even though you know it’s coming, it always delivers a disagreeable jolt, flinging coffee up out of your cup. That routine jarring collision of locomotive and car is a pleasing reminder that not everything is all high-tech, smooth, and quiet, the way the high-speed Acela is, which is almost three times as expensive as this regional train and usually doesn’t even get you to Boston, New York, or DC that much more quickly, its velocity constrained by the archaic tracks and all the other traffic, including local commuter lines, sharing them. Though the Acela is a nice ride, with lobster rolls for sale in the café car and a certain elitist, briefcase-carrying Northeast Corridor glamour, if you’re in the mood to spend some extra dosh just for that. I like to wait until the last moment to reboard, when the conductors, some leaning out the doors, are shouting to lingering passengers out on the platform, many of whom like soldiers returning to the front in an old movie take a last drag and toss down their cigarettes as they stride forward to hop back on the train just as it’s starting to move.
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