Santa Fe Mourning

by Amanda Allen

  The train was gliding along the crest of a mesa, giving passengers who dared to be up so early a transcendent view. The towering mountains in the distance looked like blue-purple shadows, hazy as the bright coral light peeked over them before bursting into the twilight sky in a blaze of gold, orange, and magenta, swallowing the fading stars.

  The wild, fauvist light turned the desert around them to gold as well, the pale, mellow yellow and shell pink of her grandmother’s old pearls. Veins of darker charcoal brown ran through the undulating pink sand sea, and a line of twisting, graceful willows in the distance showed a river was near. Their green-yellow-tipped branches waved like feathers, delicate against the hardier, scrubbier olive green of the cactus and chamisa.

  “Just watch,” Maddie said, entranced as she always was when she came back to New Mexico. She felt her soul go peaceful inside of her, and the clamor and confusion of New York, of her family and their pressures and exhortations, faded away. “Once the sun is up and the clouds clear, you’ll only see blue. The bluest blue ever, bluer than the sea.” She should know—she had tried to capture that very blue with her paintbrush so many, many times, only to end in frustration when paint could not match the vision in her head. The perfect blend to make that blue—she would surely never find it.

  “It seems to vibrate. The sky,” Dr. Cole said quietly. “As if the colors are alive.”

  Surprised at his wondering tone, Maddie glanced at him. He stared out the window as if entranced. “Yes. It’s the light here. Scientists say it’s the altitude. To me, it just makes the colors more vivid, more full of contrast. The brown and gray and green of the desert, the tan houses against the vast blue sky that never ends.” The infinity of the horizons seemed like a refuge after being closed up in the city. This was a place of quiet beauty that always welcomed her.

  “There is a strangeness to the beauty, though,” Dr. Cole said. “A danger that humans will just be absorbed into it and never be seen again. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve been to lots of places.”

  Maddie smiled as she looked at him. She had been right—people were always fascinating, always surprising. The English doctor had poetry in him. “Some people hate it here, can’t get away fast enough. My housekeeper, Mrs. Anaya, is from San Ildefonso Pueblo. She says that the mountains here will either embrace a person or spit them out, if they don’t truly belong.”

  He looked at her with a quizzical smile. “Which do you think will happen to me, Mrs. Alwin?”

  Maddie studied him carefully, mindful of Oscar’s warnings, of the fact that she didn’t even know the doctor at all. “I think you’ll be just fine here, Doctor. But I thought I said I was Maddie.”

  “I thought that was only for your friends.”

  “I have hopes for the future. It’s easy to make friends here, Doctor. We all long for new faces, new stories. This is a small town. Just don’t try to dig too deep for secrets. We all have lots of those too, I’m afraid.” Santa Fe was indeed a town of black sheep, people cast far from their families by artistic desires, or romantic ones, or financial woes. She was sure Dr. Cole, with his sad smiles and pretty eyes, was no different.

  “I can’t imagine you have secrets all that dark—Maddie.”

  She just smiled and reached for her handbag. “I need to pack away my clothes. We’ll be at the Lamy station soon.”

  “Maybe we’ll meet again one of these days.”

  Maddie laughed. “There’s only a few thousand people in Santa Fe, Doctor, and only a few hundred Anglo artists. I’d say we’re bound to meet again. Everyone gets together on the portal at La Fonda most nights, unless someone is having a party. You should come. Unless you’re too busy? There surely aren’t enough doctors around, and lots of work for them to do.” And she knew how hard doctors worked when there weren’t enough of them. She had volunteered with the Red Cross when the boys came back from war, and then the influenza hit.

  “Even doctors need a bit of fun sometimes. Just like artists, right?”

  “I do hope so.” She made her way through the now-crowded dining car. At the door, she glanced back to find Dr. Cole watching her with that unreadable little smile on his lips.

  She hurried on her way, feeling rather pleased—and then very flustered. She hadn’t felt that way about a man since Pete—that fluttery little nervous feeling deep inside. It was strange, exhilarating. And just a little scary.

  CHAPTER 2

  Maddie stepped down from the train car, pulling on her gloves as she studied the chaos around her at the Lamy station. It was the last stop before Albuquerque and the one closest to Santa Fe, so all the tourists got off there, as well as the patients headed for Sunmount and their nurses. People, all shouting and laughing and hugging, swirled around her, along with baggage carts, barking dogs, and vendors selling silver-and-turquoise jewelry and painted pottery. Nearby waited the long wagons from the hotels and resorts and a few exotic motorcars.

  “Miss Maddie! Over here!” she heard someone call, and she turned to see Eddie Anaya waving at her. Her little terrier dog, Buttercup, was with him, and she barked and twirled in a white blur at the end of her lead, getting herself tangled up. The boy Eddie had been talking to, a tall, skinny lad with distinctive bright-blond hair, slipped away into the crowd. Eddie laughed and scooped up the dog as Maddie hurried toward them, full of happiness to see their familiar faces again.

  Eddie was the oldest son of Maddie’s housekeeper and gardener, Juanita and Tomas Anaya, and at fourteen, he was on the cusp of manhood. Maddie thought he would surely be a heartbreaker, with the glossy black hair that was roughly cut and unruly, the aquiline nose, and cheekbones as high and sharp as a mountain ridge. He hadn’t yet grown into himself, though, and he moved with a self-conscious awkwardness she remembered too well from her own youth.

  There was also a new bruise on his cheek, bright purple against his olive skin, and she knew she daren’t ask what had happened. Not yet.

  “Eddie, how lovely to see you!” Maddie cried. “And you, Buttercup. I hope you’ve been a good dog while I’ve been gone.”

  “She hasn’t, Miss Maddie,” Eddie said with a grin. “Ma’s been at her wit’s end.”

  “I’m quite sure that’s not just because of Buttercup,” Maddie said with a stern look. She did remember now that before she’d left Juanita had been worried that Eddie was getting some bad friends and she was concerned, though she didn’t confide the details to Maddie. Maddie wondered if that was where he’d gotten the bruise.

  Eddie kicked at the dusty ground, his expression abashed. “I’ve been watching myself. Someone has to look out for Ma now.”

  Maddie frowned in concern. Could Juanita be ill, or maybe one of the twins? “Is Juanita . . . ?”

  “Ah, don’t worry about us, Miss Maddie. We’re all right. Us Puebloans always are, aren’t we? We take care of ourselves.” It was obvious that whatever the problem was, she wasn’t going to find out from Eddie. “The pony cart’s over here.”

  Once away from the noise of the station, the quiet seemed to close around Maddie like a comforting, familiar quilt. The road they jolted down was rutted and dusty, but the scenery to either side was beautiful, all light brown and dark green, enclosed by the all-encompassing azure sky. The cool, clear air smelled of piñon and maybe the fresh hint of a recent rain. They climbed slowly, creakily, up a hill and then slid down as Buttercup barked from Maddie’s lap.

  She cradled the dog in her arms, letting the slowness of the place lift her up. She smiled at the way the brilliant sunlight turned everything around them to a shimmering gold, and she couldn’t wait to get to her studio, to pick up a paintbrush to capture it all again. But there was still that nagging concern about her friends.

  “How is your mother, really?” she asked Eddie.

  “Can’t wait for you to get home,” he said as he flicked at the pony’s reins. The slow creature wouldn’t be hurried, though, and kept placidly to her path. “She doesn’t have enough to do with you
gone. Drives the twins crazy, starching and ironing their dresses and hair bows so much they can’t move in them. Your floor’s so polished, you’ll slide right down on it.”

  Maddie laughed to think of seven-year-old Pearl and Ruby, who loved digging in the dirt for worms and climbing trees, trussed up in lace frocks as she once was. They were like butterflies in little cocoons, struggling to break free and fly. “Poor Pearl and Ruby. I’ll be sure to make a great mess to distract Juanita from them.”

  “Ma wants them to go to the Sisters of Loretto school, if they’ll take ’em,” Eddie said tonelessly.

  Maddie was surprised. The girls, at a Catholic school? “Would the sisters take them? If that’s what Juanita wants, I’d be happy to help with school fees, but it seems like the girls wouldn’t like it.”

  Eddie shrugged, but Maddie could tell he was holding his real feelings tightly closed. “Ma thinks with some education they could be proper ladies someday, take care of themselves by teaching or typing in an office. The sisters do take some of us Indians. They think they can whiten our souls.” He gave a harsh laugh. “And Ma’s been going to church at the cathedral a lot lately. She’s been talking to that new Irish priest there, Father Malone. He’s helping her.”

  Maddie bit her lip before asking, “What does your father say?”

  Eddie gave another laugh, a sarcastic sound too old for his years. “Oh, you know my dad. Ma doesn’t say much about it to him. Says he’d never understand. And he wouldn’t. He’s not a churchgoer.”

  Maddie nodded, thinking of Tomas Anaya. Tomas was a silent man mostly, a harsh one to his children sometimes, and proud. Like everyone else in Santa Fe, he seemed to be a man of secrets. “How can he not know?”

  “He hasn’t been around much lately, that’s how.”

  “Has he been going back to the pueblo?”

  Eddie shrugged, trying to seem careless, but Maddie could see the expression in his eyes. That wary watchfulness, that hidden face she remembered from her own youth, when she thought grown-ups would never understand her thoughts and desires. “How do I know?” Eddie said. “He doesn’t take me with him if he does. I haven’t seen my grandma in ages, or my uncles, Ma’s brothers.”

  “Well, I would miss you if you were gone, anyway,” Maddie said, nudging his shoulder with a laugh, trying to distract him from his own painful, adolescent brooding. The Anayas were like her own family; Juanita and the children had done more than anyone except the mountains themselves to pull her out of the dark pool of her grief. She had to find a way to help them now. “No one else can get your sisters to settle down and let me work.”

  Eddie gave her a reluctant smile. “Only because I read them Princess and the Pea over and over. You should never have given them that book, Miss Maddie. They make the salt cedar tree their princess castle and won’t sleep unless they have at least ten blankets under them.” The cart creaked over the crest of a hill, and suddenly Santa Fe was spread out before them, a rolling field of pale adobe houses, shining tin roofs, and in the distance, the square towers of the French-style cathedral. “Almost home now.”

  Home, home, home. The sweet song of it almost drove the horrible patter of duty out of her mind. She hugged Buttercup closer and smiled.

  It was a winding journey to her place on Canyon Road, where her little house and studio waited. The roads twisted in a puzzle she could never quite decipher, a warren of old donkey trails formed decades ago that constantly got her lost. But she recognized some of the shops and houses now and waved at the people they passed.

  They turned at a dusty intersection, where dogs slept in the shade of an ancient horse chestnut tree and chickens clucked their way across the dirt lane. Maddie wanted to wave at the familiar houses as she had the people, the old brick school with its Victorian white cupola, the little general store where old men napped on the portal, the family houses with their open doors, their tethered goats and bright flowers. But she made herself sit calmly so she wouldn’t look too crazy.

  It was the middle of the afternoon now, the sun sliding overhead in a brilliant yellow-white blaze, and most people were indoors where there was cool shade.

  Her own house, the precious little place she had bought with money that Pete had left her and thus was untouchable by her family, waited for her just beyond Garcia Street, across from a tiny grocery store. A tall adobe wall fronted Canyon Road, hiding her portal—what her parents would have called a veranda—and the large garden behind a gate painted bright blue. The blue shutters of the narrow windows were closed against the sun, and it all looked silent, sleepy.

  But as soon as the cart rolled to a stop, the gate swung open, and two little girls flew out, their hair bows coming unraveled. “Miss Maddie, Miss Maddie, you’re home!” they shouted. She had barely climbed down from the seat when they flung their arms around her, knocking off her velvet cloche hat and making her laugh. Buttercup leaped down and ran into the house, away from their noise, as Eddie set about unloading the baggage.

  “You were gone so long,” Pearl said.

  “Did you bring us presents from New York?” Ruby demanded.

  Maddie laughed harder and kissed the tops of their rumpled heads. They were getting taller now but still had their childhood lankiness in their wrinkled white frocks. She inhaled their powdery sweetness. “I did bring you something, but you’ll have to be patient until I unpack.”

  “Is it chocolate?” Pearl, the one with the constant sweet tooth, cried.

  “Or dolls?” Ruby said. “We’ve been writing a play, but we need dolls to act it out.”

  “Girls, stop that right now,” their mother called. Juanita Anaya stepped out of the gate, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. Like the girls, she was tall and thin, with large, dark eyes and Eddie’s fine cheekbones, and her shining black hair, flecked with gray now, twisted atop her head in braids. She smiled, but she looked tired, shadows turning purple under her eyes. “Where are your manners? Señora Maddie just got home and must be tired. She doesn’t need your tomfoolery yet.”

  “Oh, I missed tomfoolery a lot,” Maddie said, thinking of the silence in her parents’ house. “I missed you all a lot.”

  “I hope everything is kept up all right for you,” Juanita said. “Eddie, take that cart back to the livery stable, then come right home. There are chores.”

  “Ma . . .” Eddie began in a whining tone.

  “Right back home!” Juanita snapped. Her abrupt tone was not like her, Maddie thought, and she remembered Eddie’s vague hints of trouble and the bruise on his cheek.

  As the cart creaked away, Maddie let the girls tug her under the portal and through the gate into her front courtyard, a flagstone space dotted with blue and purple pots filled with red, yellow, and white flowers, vivid against the pale-brown stucco walls. The front door was open, and beyond was the cool dimness of her house. Her own house, her refuge, not the stuffy, Victorian darkness of Fifth Avenue.

  Maddie had loved the old house since the first time she’d seen it, with its whitewashed walls, its long drawing room with dark viga ceilings, and a fireplace at each end faced with bright-blue tiles. Narrow corridors radiated out from it to lead to bedrooms, sitting rooms, and the dining room. The furniture was sparse, painted chairs and sofas from Spain, scattered with embroidered cushions, shelves filled with books, bright artwork on the walls. Gray-and-red woven rugs were scattered on the polished floors. It was her refuge. She had added new electricity and plumbing but left the old character of the place.

  “I have tea in the kitchen,” Juanita said, “and some fresh cookies.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” Maddie answered as she took off her hat and gloves. She sent the girls to find the valise that held the secret new dolls from Hamleys on Madison Avenue and followed their mother into the kitchen at the back of the house. The low-ceilinged space, with its long, polished table and benches, its brand-new sink and refrigerator, was spotless with Juanita’s care and smelled of sugary fresh cookies and the stew that bubbled o
n the stove.

  It should be a cozy place, as it usually was, but Juanita’s expression was still tight, weary, and she wouldn’t quite meet Maddie’s gaze.

  “Is everything okay, Juanita?” she asked as the housekeeper laid out a plate of the bizcochito cookies and a pot of tea. Maddie bit into the fresh, crumbly pastry, tasting the cinnamon and anise on her tongue.

  Juanita flashed her a strained smile and turned away to stir at the stewpot on the stove. “What makes you ask, Señora Maddie? Is there something wrong with the house?”

  “Of course not. The house looks beautiful, as usual, thanks to you. It’s just that Eddie said—”

  “Oh, that boy! He is going to be the death of me yet,” Juanita snapped. The pot lid clattered to the floor, and she pressed her hand to her mouth. “He won’t listen to me! I’m only trying to do what’s best for him. He has to learn to get along in the world, and making trouble will get him nowhere. Nowhere but jail or an early grave.”

  Maddie nodded sadly. The trouble between the Indians, the Anglos, and the old Spanish settler families was the canker at the heart of her desert paradise, one she could never get used to. “He says that you want to send the girls to Loretto, that Tomas hasn’t been around much.”

  “Tomas. When he is here, he doesn’t say much,” Juanita muttered. She reached for a bowl of carrots and started chopping viciously. “I should have listened when my brothers told me not to marry him, that we would never see eye to eye once the romance wore off. But I was only fifteen, no idea of the world. I had never even been away from the pueblo. What did I know?”

  Maddie took a sip of her tea. At least her own family had liked Peter. Marrying an Alwin was the only thing she did right. “Your family didn’t like Tomas?”

  “Still don’t. But it was good for a while, with us both working and then the children. And this place. Best job I’ve ever had, Señora Maddie, and that’s the truth. I thought we could settle down again.”

  “Where has he been going lately?”