Mamita, you were in love with el joven before you met Daddy, is that it?
Ay, Frankie, do you see now? This is why I never want to tell you anything, because you take just a little thread of truth and pull on it and out comes a made-up story. His name wasn’t el joven, it was René, and he was just a special friend. We’d grown up together. I liked him, he was intelligent, and he loved to laugh. He did have feelings for me, I know that, but I never felt that way. He was necio, very stubborn. I know Memo told you about this, because you’ve pestered me about it before. Do you remember that day when you were just back from your year of living in Memo’s house? It was winter but you didn’t own a winter coat or have any money, and I took you into Boston, to Jordan Marsh. That Beatle, John Lennon, had been murdered the night before, and in the store they were only playing his music and you couldn’t stop crying. Ay chulo, there we were in the store looking for coats and you walking around crying like that, like a little boy. I used to worry, Frankie, that life, especially those difficult years you had growing up and at home with Bert, had given you a hard heart. Now I saw that you were a feeling person, and it made me happy. But I wished you’d be nicer to Lexi. Afterward, you started asking me about René, though you called him el joven, how silly, el joven, and she laughs.
Mamita, I admit it. I read that stuff about postcoup Guate and the Commie list in a history book. Please don’t look at me like that, with those reveal nothing other than what’s here on the canvas oil paint eyes. So whatever went wrong with your marriage during that first year had nothing to do with this René. But even if Bert was jealous because René came and visited you, that wouldn’t have justified him hitting you, my God, well of course not. Something made you take me back to Guatemala with you. Most likely, Bert was already failing you as a lover, but then, what caused that? Or else, despite it being so soon in your marriage, he’d already started in on the verbal abuse. But if he was getting physically violent with you by then, during those several months of my life before we went back to Guate, it’s so horrible to think we would have come back to Massachusetts anyway two years later like we did, even for the hospital. Instead of living with Daddy on Sacco Road, Mamita, we could have lived somewhere else and let him visit me in the hospital and pay the bills. That would have been so much smarter. Maybe you felt like you had no other choice, like you were a captive. Yet you at least loved him or desired him enough to make Lexi? There was still some love left in your heart, if only enough for it to be the equivalent of a heart that’s deaf in one ear. Doesn’t even have to have been that. That is if it was Daddy you made Lexi with.
Mamita, you were brought up keeping secrets, you know you were. Oh, your rancher grandfather was a Spaniard? You don’t say, Yolanda, my, how impressive, a descendant of the conquistadors, even. But you and your brother never knew anything about his wife, your own abuela? Well, sometimes parents forget to tell their children about their own mothers, sure, very common. You were raised in a ludicrous tropical criollo society that somehow collectively realized there was a certain kind of truthfulness it was essential to do without, and so they tore it out like ripe radishes from the earth. This lack of truthfulness, twinned with secretiveness, has been passed down through the generations among the racially hyperstressed Central American petite bourgeoise, you know, all those people from “good families” without any indigenous or African blood. One look at any of us, and not just from the Montejo Hernández families, screamed out that was a lie. It was just second nature to you, Mamita, to keep things secret. Mamita, why are you suddenly huddling, grasping your elbows and shivering?
Are you okay, Yolanda? Herb’s thick expressive eyebrows rise and move closer together in worry. Are you coming down with something?
I think the fire in the stove has died, she says. Can I put on the shawl?
Because she is allergic to wool, Herb bought a shawl for her that seems made of colored, thickly braided mop strings. Holding it up like an unfurled cape, he drops the shawl around her bare shoulders. He gets down on his knees in front of the stove, opens its little door and blows, picks up a magazine and fans, blows again, until new flames lift off the logs. Mamita loves coming to Herb’s studio. She knows that when the sittings are over and her portrait is finished she won’t see her gallant voluble artist friend so much anymore, not in this way, and a certain magic will go out of her life. Soon, though, a new magic, the one of motherhood, will be upon her.
When Herb is standing behind the easel again, he says, Your baby is due—he gives a whimsical shrug—this summer, during the sweet corn season?
In May, she says.
Is Bert impatient? Excited to be a father?
My mother seems not to hear him; her thoughts are maybe elsewhere.
I bet Bert is just beside himself.
Just beside himself? She’s heard that phrase before, of course, but can’t connect it meaningfully to Bert. There is Bert, and there he is standing beside himself.
Very excited and impatient to be a father, says Herb.
Oh, I think so, yes. When Mamita says that, I hear a touch of flatness in her voice, and Herb glances at her with curiosity and concern. In not quite a year’s time she’ll have fled home to Guatemala with her baby son, and you don’t think Herb has picked up on something? Come on, Ma, tell us what it is. Sitting there, holding me in about my fourth month inside your womb, you must have some ominous sense of where your marriage is headed. Forsaken or forsaking? Look at you, Mamita, so young, just twenty-six, a pregnant niña bien from the tropics somehow marooned in Boston.
Don’t you think Bert will make a good father, Yolanda?
Because the movements are so slight and discrete, the way her lips part and the way her eyes, looking a little more anxious than absent, lower their gaze to the floor, he feels rocked back by the force of her unhappiness.
Yolanda, he says. You know I’m your friend. You can tell me anything. After all this time we’ve spent together, I’m closer to you than I am even to Bert. Do you understand?
She looks at him as if slowly coming out of a daze. Yes, Herb? she says quietly.
Yes, he says. Yolanda …
That drawing over there, Mamita says, gesturing with eyes and uplifted chin toward the charcoal sketch. I haven’t seen you make a drawing like that one before.
His expression deflates; it perks up again. Do you like it?
Yes, it looks like a drawing in a museum, she says. He looks so real and alive. Did somebody come here to sit for it?
I painted him from memory. But that memory sometimes does seem more alive to me, more real, than anything or anybody I can see around me.
She asks, What is his name?
Eddie Baskin, from Penn Yan, up there by Keuka Lake, in Upstate New York, says Herb. Finger Lakes country, have you heard of it? His father was a caretaker on an estate owned by a bootlegger. It was beautiful countryside, but in many ways a sordid household. Eddie was in my battalion. We were two of the seventeen who made it past D-Day. Not the bravest, not the best soldiers or most skilled, certainly not the most cowardly, it just so happens we survived Omaha Beach. That’s a preliminary sketch for a large painting I’m going to make. Herb begins to explain the experience behind the painting or rather its prelude. It usually takes a long time to tell a war story. Desperate to be understood by people who weren’t there, you want to get it right and feel so obligated to because every war story is never about just yourself but usually you don’t even know where to start.
That time in New York, when I’d run away from college and had dinner with Tío Memo, he told me that René, el joven, came to visit my mother in Boston. The way I see it, Mamita, that means he did. My uncle had had a jealously tinged, disdainful obsession with el joven since you were all teenagers. He didn’t trust him, and as best as he could he kept track of him. Memo meant it when he said he didn’t think René was good for his sister, just like he did when he felt the sam
e way about Bert. But did René come to Boston before or after I was born? Maybe it was three years later, after we’d come back from Guatemala because I got TB. He came to say goodbye, playing that classic role, the romantic who comes to tell the woman who spurned him that he’s going off to war. He was sneaking back into Guatemala to join Luis Turcios Lima and the other rebellious young army officers who were starting a guerrilla war in la Sierra de las Minas. A little before or in early 1960, the year Lexi was born, it would have been. El joven must not have survived the uprising; not many did. It’s the most credible reason for why Tío Memo never heard anything about him again.
It happened in the forest outside the Normandy town of Saint-Céneri-le-Gérei. Eddie and Herb had been doing some reconnaissance patrolling together when they were cut off. The twelve other men from their unit were hiding in an abandoned stone farmhouse way back there, and now there was sporadic rifle fire coming from behind them in the forest but also from up ahead, and they could hear the excited barking of dogs. That’s not combat, it’s hunting, said Eddie. That seemed true, says Herb. We didn’t hear anything that sounded like an exchange of fire. Hunting wild boar, probably, said Eddie. Deer, rabbit, birds. Was it the Jerries out hunting, or was it local farmers? We didn’t know, says Herb. Maybe the Resistance, they hunted for food too. The unreturned gunfire of hunters peppered the silence of the forest in all directions, first over here, then over there, and some of these rifle shots now sounded closer to them than the earlier ones. It was too dangerous to try to get back to our unit, says Herb. It seemed safer to find someplace to hide, at least until it was too dark to hunt, to hunt edible animals, that is. On the path Eddie and I were walking down, we came upon a dead baby boar, bright red guts spilling out its side where the hunter’s bullet had entered. Eddie bent over and touched the guts with his finger and said, Still warm, Herb. This just happened, it was those shots we heard from over there a coupl’a minutes ago. The forest terrain sloped downward from the path, as if down into a gulch, but the underbrush was thick. We plunged down into it, bent over, our rifles held against our ribs, says Herb. That’s when we heard trucks, the tractor sound of trucks pulling cannon, somewhere on a road above us. Holy moly, now what was this, Yolanda? Was it our side getting ready for an assault on the town, or was it the Jerries bringing in their own hardware? Well, it wasn’t long before we heard the explosion of a grenade, not so near us but not that far. That was followed by the unmistakable racket of combat. Around us, the underbrush had thinned out. The ground was now smooth, covered in plant mulch and some low, soft plants like ivy, and the trees were evenly spaced. A family of boar went by, looking like big furry fish trotting along on skinny little legs, the mom and dad with their tusks and two little boarlets, maybe the siblings of the one we’d just seen dead. An owl flew slowly, slowly over our heads. We heard the explosion of artillery shells, landing in or near the town. Fighting was breaking out over here and also over there and all along a wide circumference that seemed to be slowly closing in on us through the forest. Eddie pulled on my arm and said, Look, Herb, look at that. In the twilight, pecking at the ground, was a family of woodcocks. Eddie and I sat down on the forest floor. Honest to God, Yolanda, I’ve never seen anything so extraordinary as that hidden forest gulch filling up with animals, there in that dark-green glowing dusk, while the earth occasionally shook with explosions. A doe and her fawns, Yolanda, over there, and some more boars went by. I saw a mother and her boarlets calmly lay down behind some trees not twenty feet from us. There were plenty of rabbits, too, including some of those huge French hares, looking so placid. When Eddie went off to relieve himself, he saw a red fox, sitting there calmly watching him. We were in a kind of enchanted wood, Yolanda. It was where the animals came to escape the hunters and the fighting, and Eddie and I were there too. We were blessed, Yolanda, though by what divine power, I can’t say. Maybe it came from the animals, maybe from what was inside Eddie and me. Do you understand?
Mamita asks, a note of wonder in her voice: Herb, this is going to be your painting?
Herb gestures at the charcoal drawing of the young man and says, Eddie and Herb together in the Normandy forest. I haven’t decided yet on our postures.
Herb and Mamita stare silently at the drawing of Eddie.
We didn’t expect to make it, says Herb. Especially if our side was taking the town, at any moment we were going to have crazed escaping Jerries crashing through there, into our hiding place. Eddie said, Herb, you better get rid of that dog tag. It had a little Star of David beside my name. As if it’s that simple to say what a person is and what prayers or other nonsense should be said over his corpse: us army private herbert felman, age 34, jew. We’re the Jerries, so we hate Jews, and it’s our duty to treat them with special savagery. There must be thousands of buried Star of David dog tags everywhere in Europe the war was fought, wherever Jewish soldiers found themselves in imminent danger of capture or close-range murder. Sure, I buried mine in that dirt, it must still be there. European kids search for and collect them now, I read somewhere. Well, probably because Eddie and I thought that might be our last night, that’s what made it happen, Yolanda. It was a feeling that had been growing inside us and between us since D-Day, as we made our way through the countryside to Paris. Just like it happens between young lovers in books by Chekhov, Tolstoy, or in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Have you read it, Yolanda? Oh, you should. Like being turned inside out and emptied out and filled back up with a new feeling that seems to have no border, that just wants to flow into your lover any way it can, just as you want your lover to flow into you. Yolanda, I didn’t think that was for people like me. I thought I was going to die, probably sooner than later, without experiencing young love, or let me call it, if you don’t mind, the rapture of love. It was the first rapture for each of us. Like Hemingway wrote in his novel, All things of the night cannot be explained by day. But I’m not going to try to explain. I just want to paint it.
Mamita, could it ever really have been that kind of love with Daddy? Or just with the Italian. Was it like that with the Mexican Honeywell technician?
Mamita laughs with surprised delight. All the animals will be in the painting too?
Yes, of course. And that extraordinary light, Yolanda, of evening falling deep inside an ancient forest, that light somehow also infiltrated by the flash and fire of lethal artillery explosions up above, not exactly visible but that you will see somehow extrasensorially, if that’s a word. I owe Eddie this painting, but I owe it to myself even more.
Oh Herb, it’s going to be beautiful and famous too. I just know it. Biblical, but not like Sargent, it will show the truth because it is true, hiding with the animals saved your life.
Oh no, not biblical! exclaims Herb with a laugh. But you’re absolutely right. If I ever surpass Sargent in only one painting, it will be this one.
What happened after? Where is Eddie now?
Okay, well, it was our American and Canadian troops that took that town. Eddie and I found our unit. The war went on. Eddie pretended that nothing had happened between us, Yolanda. Every day, he performed the most complete indifference and innocence. After the Liberation of Paris, he was found dead with his throat slit in a back alley in the eighteenth arrondissement. The official investigation said that he’d raped a French Moroccan girl and that her brothers had caught Eddie and killed him. I have no reason to doubt that it happened that way. And the war kept going, for me, all the way to the Ardennes. I became a very fierce soldier. If you don’t mind me saying, Yolanda, I deserved a medal.
Yoli has heard Bert indignantly bellowing: We’ve got fellows at the University Club who got medals who didn’t see a tenth of the action that Herb did. You don’t think it was Herb being a thirty-four-year-old Jew with the rank of private from one end of the war to the other that kept him from getting a medal for valor?
Oh Herb, I’m so sorry, she says, such a terrible story. What else can Mamita say? She has t
ears in her eyes, and that’s good, the only possible reaction that won’t offend him.
Do people really fall in love twice, Yolanda? The way Herb asks this, it doesn’t sound like a question.
All the mothers of children I know, Herb, say yes, you can, she answers. They say that when you have your first baby, you think you cannot possibly ever love any person more than this baby son. You are even scared to have another child because you might not love her as much. But when that daughter comes, you grow another heart full of love, and you love your daughter as much as the son, and if you have a third child, you grow a third heart. That’s what mothers have told me. I think it’s that way in romance love, too, Herb, except then maybe one heart dies and another one grows. Sometimes it takes a while.
That’s very well said, Yolanda, says Herb politely. Thank you. Is that what you want, a son and a daughter?
Yes. I only had my brother, and we were very close, and he always made me feel loved and protected.
I hope you’re right about that, about growing another heart. I’ve been waiting a long time.
Mamita has never before been called upon to find words appropriate to a moment like this. She says, Herb if you make that painting, it will be in a museum. You’ll be famous. So many people will want to know you, and you’ll meet somebody, you’ll see.
You’re right, Yolanda. Someday you’ll take your son to see it here in the Museum of Fine Arts, and you’ll tell him all about it. I’m a late bloomer, just like my old friend Bert. He’s an inspiration to me too. Look at him, at his age, fifty not that far over the horizon, starting a family with a woman like you.
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