A Scarcity of Condors

by Suanne Laqueur

  “Which one was the undertaker?” he asked.

  “Tatán. Ysidro was the memorial mason.”

  “He made the gravestones.”

  She nodded. “He did beautiful work. I never saw anything like his skill. He would chisel completely freehand. Maybe a little penciled mark to center the name and date, but no guidelines to keep it straight. He had a perfect eye the way you have perfect pitch.”

  “Perfect plumb.”

  She laughed. “Exactly.”

  “Did he do any sculpting, like Uncle Louis?”

  “No, he was strictly an engraver.” She leaned on her elbow, cheek on her fist, her face going all soft with memory.

  “What?” Jude said. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Ysidro had a record player in his workshop across the road, and you’d hear the Fab Four all day long. He’d take scraps of stone and chisel Beatles lyrics into them. Like something you’d find in a Homegoods or TJ Maxx today. A little block of granite with Come Together carved into it. Or a big flat paver, like…” Her hands shaped a rectangle of remembered space. “He chiseled sitting in an English garden, waiting for the sun. I put it next to one of the stone benches outside, in a big patch of California poppies.”

  “He chiseled all the lyrics in English?”

  “Mm. Papi joked that he and Ysidro spoke terrible English but they were fluent in John, Paul, George and Ringo. We had dozens of those Beatles stones. In the garden beds, on side tables and the windowsills. Papi used one for a paperweight. I’ll never forget because Ysidro botched it.”

  She took a pen and jotted on a scrap of paper, Nothing’s Gona Change My World.

  “Ysidro was mortified about the misspelling but Cleon wouldn’t let him re-do it. He said, ‘Nothing’s gonna change my stone.’”

  As Jude stared at the two-dimensional photograph of the gay couple, the anecdotes made them take on depth. “I wish we knew what happened to them.”

  Penny exhaled long. “So do I. Now more than ever. They both held you in the hospital. Ysidro was the one who came up with your nickname.”

  Jude put down the photograph. “Pretend I don’t already know this story.”

  Arriving in Chile in 1941, Cleon’s father, Felix Tholet, had dreams of getting into public park planning. When that didn’t pan out, he opened a nursery and landscaping business, designing private gardens for upper-class families, among them the prominent Larraín family.

  Felix’s brother, Louis, made a modest living creating garden statuary, either on commission, or to sell at Felix’s nurseries. In 1960, he entered into a business arrangement with the Sepúlvedas, an Italo-Chilean family of memorial masons. Louis sculpted ornaments for markers, obelisks and mausoleums, and designed Hebrew inscriptions for Jewish gravestones.

  “It was fashionable in Jewish circles to say ‘Tholet did the stone,’” Penny told Jude.

  In 1963 the Larraíns’ ranch was sold to the city of Santiago and developed as a suburban neighborhood, La Reina. Felix Tholet purchased one of the first plots for sale. He bought the adjacent plot as well, creating a satellite nursery that did a killing as the neighborhood grew.

  “Louis bought the lot across the street,” Penny said. “But he didn’t do anything with it for years, not until Ysidro Sepúlveda suddenly needed a place to live and work.”

  “Because his family threw him out.”

  She nodded. “The Sepúlvedas wrote their laws in stone.”

  “That’s when he and Tatán came to live with you.”

  “Louis had been using the second bungalow on our property as a studio,” Penny said. “He cleared it out so the boys could live there… Funny I always say boys when I tell this story. They were only four years younger than I was. Anyway, they built a new masonry workshop on Louis’ vacant lot. Tatán lacked the capital to start an undertaking business. He cobbled together a living driving a hearse for a funeral home and driving an ambulance for the city coroner.”

  “They were living with you the whole time you were pregnant with me?”

  “Pregnant like a strawberry.”

  Jude’s head tilted. “You always say that. What is that from?”

  She shrugged. “Your father made it up.”

  “Tell me about Ysidro coming up with my name.”

  A cold, rainy June day. Late afternoon after siesta and Penny was making fruit empanadas. Ysidro sat at her kitchen table, deftly peeling apples.

  “What will you name him?” he asked.

  “You think it’s a boy?”

  “I come from a long line of witches. We know these things.”

  “¿En serio?”

  Ysidro waggled his fingers in a circular motion around Penny’s belly, murmuring some mumbo-jumbo. He closed his eyes, an open palm held a quarter inch from her flowered smock. “Boy,” he said. “Absolutely.”

  “Are we making a wager here?”

  “My honor doesn’t allow me to wager when I know the outcome.” He glanced at his watch, then back at her. “What will you call our boy?”

  The plural pronoun touched Penny’s heart while a funny superstition made her tongue reluctant. She took paper and pencil and wrote the name: Juleón.

  “Juleón?” Ysidro naturally pronounced the J like a H.

  “In English it would be Juleón,” she said, exaggerating the hard J for him. “My mother’s name is Julia. Then the last part of Cleón. The two people I love most in the world become Juleón.”

  “Your father won’t mind?”

  She smiled. “He doesn’t want any grandson of his to be named Walter.”

  Ysidro laughed. “What if you have a girl?”

  “Are you revising your outcome?”

  “I’m predicting your next baby.”

  “If it’s a girl, then either Julia or Suzanne. I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Suzanne,” Ysidro said, with authority. “It’s pretty.”

  He checked his watch again. Not much bothered him, but he didn’t like when Tatán was late getting home.

  “Don’t worry,” Penny said.

  “I’m not.”

  “You are.”

  His eyes looked everywhere but at her and the back of his neck reddened, highlighting the heavy chain necklace he wore. Off it, a saint’s medal dangled.

  Penny sat down and reached a curious finger toward the pendant. “Who watches over you, can I see?”

  “Jude,” Ysidro said, with the J like a Y. “Patron saint of lost causes. He protects people in desperate circumstances.”

  “Jude.” She made the J hard. “I like that name, too.”

  His hand gestured toward her belly. “You could call our boy Jude for short.”

  “I could.”

  “Then he’d have his own song.” In a voice husky but on tune, Ysidro sang the opening notes of the iconic Beatles tune. “I love that song.” He warbled a couple more lines, the English lyrics mushy within his accent.

  Penny put her chin on her hand. “Do you understand the words?”

  “A little. I get make a sad song happy and make bad things better. What does letting someone under your skin mean?”

  “It’s an expression. When you’re in love with someone and can’t stop thinking about them, you say they’ve gotten under your skin.”

  “Ah. I know the feeling.”

  “What feeling?” Tatán said, appearing at the screen door, tousled and tired. As he came in, Ysidro leaned on the rear legs of his chair, gazing up and back. Then both their glances flicked toward Penny, who quickly invented business at the sink. The lovers were still getting used to the freedom to be affectionate within the walls of this house.

  “What’s your favorite Beatles song?” Ysidro asked his mate.

  “Eleanor Rigby.”

  “Why’s that?” Penny asked.

  �
��It’s a lament for lonely people. Eleanor and Father McKenzie could’ve had a beautiful life together but they—”

  “He was a priest,” Ysidro said.

  “An English priest. They can marry.”

  “Punto.”

  “They missed each other, missed a chance to have a connection. All the priest can do is make sure she’s buried along with her name. But it should have been his name.”

  “I’ll never forget how sad he looked telling us about Eleanor,” Penny said. “Fiercely sad. These were real people to him. He believed somewhere in an English churchyard was a stone chiseled with Eleanor Rigby, and a devoted clergyman who kept the grave neat and tidy. He was such a tender soul. He didn’t think anyone should die alone.”

  Tatán’s job was transporting Santiago’s deceased. From the place where they died to the morgue. Morgue to funeral. Funeral to graveyard. Lamenting when he collected people who died alone. When those lonely people were buried, Tatán often attended, just so they’d have someone.

  “Uncle Louis went with him,” Penny said. “He had that same holy regard for death. Insisting nobody should go to their grave unwitnessed.”

  Whatever the deceased’s affiliation, Louis would read Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead that celebrated life rather than mourning it.

  “But who read Kaddish for Louis?” Jude said.

  “Ysidro promised someone would,” Penny said. “When he visited me in the hospital. He promised Louis would be buried in the Jewish Cemetery. He’d find a rabbi to say Kaddish and Ysidro would make the stone.”

  “And he did?” Jude asked. “That happened?”

  “I don’t know. But he promised and I have to believe.” She smiled, dreamy with bittersweet memories. “He made you one.”

  “He made me a gravestone?”

  She laughed. “No, I mean one of his Beatles lyric stones. A beautiful piece of rough, pink granite, chiseled with Hey, Jude.”

  “Really?”

  “Mm. He left room underneath. Said, ‘I’ll add our boy’s birthday when it’s time.’”

  “What happened to it?”

  “I left it,” Penny said. “I went back to La Reina just once, with an armed guard. He gave me twenty minutes to pack essentials and a handful of luxuries. A heavy piece of granite didn’t qualify as either. I had to let it go.”

  “I wonder if he finished it. Along with Louis’ stone.”

  “He did. I know he did. Not just because it was a promise to me, but because Sepúlvedas write their laws in stone.”

  Jude nodded slowly. “I didn’t pay much attention to this story before but now, God, I wish I could meet them. For so many reasons. Jesus, they helped deliver me on the freakin’ floor and…” He took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. “Not me, but him. Shit, I’m never going to get used to this.”

  “I know. It keeps tripping me up, too.”

  He looked up at her. “What should we call our boy?”

  Her own laugh was half a sob. “Oh God, don’t.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m trying.” He passed her a tissue.

  “You were meant to be my boy,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Don’t ask me how, but if I’m going to profess belief in a divine order, I can’t cherry-pick what’s divine and what isn’t. You ended up in my arms in the hospital and I never had any inkling, any suspicion, any strange instinct you didn’t belong there. I have no idea why my biological child ended up where he did… Or she did…”

  Jude drew a quick, sharp breath. “That’s a pretty brutal and brave admission. To say it might’ve been a girl.”

  “Well? It could have. The brutal, brave truth is I don’t remember.” Penny opened her hands to the ceiling. “Who would Serena and Aiden be without you as their older brother?”

  Jude shook his head. Smiling a little but saying nothing.

  “Why don’t we call it a night, querido?”

  As he stood up from the kitchen table, he blurted, “I met someone.”

  Penny blinked. “Did you now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  He laughed. “At a bar. Which sounds like a cliché, but he’s not… He’s different.”

  “How so?”

  A long pause, Jude’s face now filled with puzzled revelation. “I feel different when I’m around him,” he said. “Or rather, I feel like I remember who I am. It’s hard to put into words.”

  “Well, those words sound terrific.” She kissed him. “I’m glad, honey. Go home and get some sleep.”

  Penny counted five after the front door closed, then called her daughter. “Jude said he met someone.”

  “He said that?” Serena said. “Out loud? To you?”

  “Word for word.”

  “Who is he?”

  “No idea. Jude met him in a bar.”

  “Shut up. Jude hates bar pick-ups.”

  “He said it was different.”

  “If he’s telling you they met, it’s definitely different. I’m just relieved he walked back into the house.”

  “Well, Papi had to pull rank, go over there and beat on the door. You know how he gets when any of you kids disappears.”

  Serena laughed. She’d been grounded countless times for not phoning in her whereabouts or being where she was supposed to be.

  “Did you come to any action plan,” she asked. “Or you just kept company?”

  “We kept company, looked at papers and pictures. Tried to look at the story from a new angle and see if we missed anything obvious. We talked a lot about Ysidro and Tatán.”

  “You never found out what became of them, did you?”

  “They fled to Argentina. I know that much.”

  “And it wasn’t much better there.”

  “Exactly, so they could have moved on.”

  “Or been disappeared.”

  “Maybe,” Penny said. “Maybe I’ll do a little looking around.”

  “Do you think Jude will look around?”

  “I couldn’t say, querida. We didn’t go there tonight.”

  “How would you feel about it?”

  “I think I would be all right with him looking. But if he finds people and they reject him, I wouldn’t take it well.”

  “Reject him because he’s gay?”

  “I watched Chileans do it before.”

  “Punto.”

  “You know I love to say parenthood progresses by trading in one set of problems for a better set of problems. I don’t miss the things that used to keep me up at night when you were teenagers, but worrying about Jude being treated unkindly or with outright malice… It’s never left. He’s thirty-six. Tonight he told me he met someone, and I smiled and said how wonderful. But inside, I chambered a round and put a perfect stranger in the crosshairs. Thinking, You hurt him and I will kill you.”

  Penny was stripping the sheets off Jude’s bed one spring morning in 1988, annoyed he had neglected this chore for the second week in a row. The fitted sheet snagged on the far corner of the mattress and she yanked hard enough to pull it off-kilter from the box spring. A shower of paper fell to the floor, followed by a clattering thump. The latter came from a bottle of Nivea hand lotion.

  Her irritation softened a split second, releasing as a wistful sigh. She grew up with two brothers—how many times did her own bottle of Jergens mysteriously go missing from her vanity? Another sigh, thick with the inevitable passage of years. Her sweet baby was a moody fifteen now. Almost taller than Cleon. Deep-voiced and hairy. No doubt crazed with hormones and consumed with sex.

  She put the lotion on the bedside table. She picked up the scattered papers next and her stomach turned over.

  Newsprint pages moved through her fingers, their margins ragged, torn from magazines. Teen Beat. Tiger Beat. Tabloid headlines thick with bold print and chipper with exc
lamation points. Actors and rock stars staring down the camera. Arrogant. Shy. Contemplative. Seductive.

  All young men.

  These were Serena’s magazines.

  With trembling hands, Penny picked up glossy, color pages from the floor. Torn from the men’s apparel section of the Sears catalog. Some formal wear but mostly men in briefs and undershirts. Broad-shouldered, muscular. Expressions mild above crossed arms or hands on hips. Every bulge in every groin neat, compact and symmetrical.

  She looked at the Nivea bottle. Then back to the images.

  He’s masturbating to pictures of men.

  Fear coiled around her and she fought not to clutch the pages and wrinkle them. No doubt they were filed in a certain order beneath the mattress and she’d never return them properly. He’d know they were discovered. He’d know someone knew his secret.

  Jude is gay.

  “Oh my God,” she said under her held breath. “I’m sorry.”

  I’m not sorry you’re gay, she immediately amended. I’m sorry I found out this way.

  Heart beating, throat clenched, she assembled the pages together carefully. I’m sorry being gay is going to be so hard. I’m sorry this can’t be normal. I’m sorry it has to be hidden.

  She crouched to pick up pages she missed. Clippings from the neighborhood paper that followed the school sports teams. Baseball stories accompanied by grainy black-and-white photographs. Each one about Feño Paloma’s latest win.

  “Jude, honey,” Penny whispered, unable to stop the tears now. Jude crushing on his oldest childhood friend was so ordinary and predictable, it was tragic.

  Please, she thought. Don’t let Feño know. And if he knows, let him be kind.

  Her maternal instincts picked up a sword and tested its weight and edge. The She-Wolf’s eyes narrowed at an enemy not yet revealed, seeking justice for a wrong not done. Not yet.

  Be kind or else.

  His life is going to be difficult enough as it is. You hurt him even more, you will answer to me.

  She put everything back. The magazine pages, the lotion bottle, the mattress, even the sheets. When Jude got home from school, she dressed him down for the forgotten chore, but made no mention or hint of what she found. She wouldn’t dare.