Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  They were utterly alone in this new world, the three of them. There had been no word from anyone out west in over a year. John often thought of writing to his mother, but he wasn’t the writing type. He engaged in many dreams of walking up to her door in Solomonville and waiting until she opened it. Perhaps carrying his daughter in his arms. Just to see the look on her face. He imagined the look of shock and then realization as she saw little Laura, then the joy and tears. It was how he went to sleep on many nights.

  Teresita too—when she wasn’t concerned with the doings of her ladies, or the uptown balls, or the upkeep of John and Laura—spent time in reveries of Clifton and her lost family. Consortium money was still coming in, and residual fees from her various commercial appearances came their way. John had managed to put a good sum in the bank as well. And he had put away most of his own allowance. They were almost… wealthy. She had time to dream of home.

  It seemed they had been away for only months, though it had now been a few years. She’d always meant to express her feelings to Tomás in a good long letter, that good long letter everyone means to write. She went over drafts as she lay beside John, kept awake on most nights by his cataclysmic snoring or Laura’s endless snuffling, bellowing, grunting, fussing. Teresita’s head tossed on pillows that always felt too hot; she sought the cool space on the pillowcase. She fretted. Jesus Himself had said to let tomorrow worry about itself, but she worried. She ate herself from the inside with worry. She felt as though she lived in a fever.

  John himself was sometimes awake, kept from sleep by his little Yaqui queen’s oddly delicate snoring. He hated the way her nose went whee, and her lips popped softly. He put his pillow over his head and turned his back to her on those nights. He thought again about his mother. He honestly didn’t know if she was aware she was a grandmother—though his brother Harry had probably beat him to it. In the mornings, he watched his poor little Yaqui bend to the writing desk, trying to compose a note to her father.

  Family was a big joke on everybody.

  John told himself that he could do without any of it.

  Teresita saw his ambivalence. All new mothers knew what their husbands felt, even if they told themselves they didn’t. She could smell it. She could see it in his movements. Sometimes he enjoyed fatherhood, but often he looked upon Laura with a kind of detachment that broke Teresita’s heart as much as it angered her. When he dismissed the child, she wanted to throttle him. Laura snored in her pen, big and already starting to utter words when she dragged herself upright by pulling on the furniture. Now when Teresita and John fought, they fought about their future. About family. She wanted to go home; he wanted to stay. He was drunk on the city as it drank him and finished him, sip by sip. She wanted to take her daughter to her father and Gaby and Segundo. She wanted horses and herbs and aspens and pine trees.

  “It is over, John.”

  “What is over?”

  “This. New York. All of it.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I am not crazy! Don’t you ever call me crazy!”

  “You’re crazy as a doodlebug!”

  She threw a pillow at him.

  “Terry!” he cried. She hated that. Terry? “We’re just about to crack this town!”

  She stared out the window at the oncoming Atlantic weather and sighed.

  “You never even took me to the ocean,” she said.

  But some days were good.

  So it went, circles, the lone edge sharpening.

  “Don’t you miss your family?” she’d asked.

  “Family?” he scoffed. “Hell no.” He was reading his paper. It was a bad time to interrupt him, but she didn’t care.

  Another time.

  “I miss mine.”

  “A lot of good your father and his high-and-mighty family have done you.”

  “I need to fix what happened.”

  “You never will is my guess.”

  Another.

  “I did him wrong,” she had cried. “It is my fault we are apart.”

  “Oh, come now.” But the paper took his attention.

  “I await God’s judgment on the matter,” she had said.

  “Mrs. Van Order,” he had replied, affecting a fine uptown accent, “you are a fool.”

  He thought he was being funny. She did not find it amusing.

  “And you are a drunkard,” she had said.

  “That I am!” he’d boasted, rattling the paper. “By God I am!” He had tossed the paper on the floor. She’d bent to pick it up, her every movement ripe with reproach. “You bet.”

  And then.

  “I want to go home.”

  “Home? What, Arizona?” He blew air through his lips. “They will laugh at you.”

  “Let them laugh.”

  He opened another paper. How many newspapers did he have? He was like a newsprint magician, pulling things out from behind his buttocks.

  “You can’t leave here,” he said, shaking out his pages like someone’s grandfather. “You’re famous. What will all your admirers do without you?”

  “I am hardly famous.”

  “Honey.” He put down the paper. “Who lives with you? Who knows you better than anybody else in the world?” He pointed to himself. “Rich bastards take you to fine suppers. People ask for your autograph, reach out to you as you pass. They take your picture. Nobody does that to me. I’d call that famous.”

  “It means nothing,” she said.

  He tossed the paper on the floor. She went and picked it up and added it to the sheaf in her left hand.

  “You know,” he noted, “you love it. You love being famous.”

  “John!”

  “You, you go around,” he said, raising his hand in a beatific posture, “distributing your fame as if it’s some kind of blessing.” He tapped imaginary people on their heads; he waved and smiled. “You dish out fame like you think that’s healing everybody!”

  “That is not true.”

  “That is exactly true.”

  She turned her back.

  He laid his feet out before him and relaxed into the chair.

  “This saint routine got too big for the rubes and cowpokes in Arizona. Don’t you get it? The Indians are as dead as the buffalo. There’s nothing out there for you now.”

  She tried to be present. Tried to hear him, John, and not her father. She was so tired of all of it. Tired of herself. Miracles. Perhaps the miracle was her own child. And the rest? She turned her eyes to him and tried to read his lips because her ears were roaring.

  “You were so busy becoming an American you can’t go back,” he declared. “You don’t fit no more. New York is home now.”

  “You are married to this city!” she yelled. “Not me! Those people out there are your family!”

  He said, “You was Queen of the Yaquis, and now you think you’re the Queen of America.”

  “Stop it!” she cried.

  “I won’t let you abdicate that throne, girlie!” he said. “Not now.”

  Laura snorted awake and started caterwauling.

  “I am the queen of nothing,” she said.

  Laura yelled louder.

  John stood and stared into the crib.

  “Nice,” he noted, fetching his hat and nodding to the apocalypse raging within the wooden cage.

  “At least,” he said, “nobody out there yells at me.”

  He stepped toward the door.

  “Oh?” she said. “Leaving again?”

  “The atmosphere is a touch rich in here.” He sniffed.

  “The master of the timely escape,” she observed.

  “Adios,” he said brightly.

  “How manly,” she said. “Running from a woman.”

  “How saintly of you,” he said, pausing at the door. “Why don’t you go out and heal someone.”

  “Like you?” she shot back, lifting the baby and trying to bounce away her crying.

  “Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama,” Laura added to the conversation. />
  “Excuse me?” John said from the landing.

  “I don’t heal anyone anymore,” Teresita replied. “Didn’t you notice? Your little problems engage me night and day.”

  “You don’t heal nobody,” he said. “Truer words were never spoke.”

  Before he could say anything else, she closed and locked the door.

  He called through the wood, “Well, I guess you’d better get back with God and fire it up again, my dear. I know you like money to buy all them fine dresses.”

  “Someone has to earn money,” she said.

  “As if I won’t,” he said.

  He snarled, laid a fist against the wood, but did not pound. He grinned savagely. He adjusted his hat. He hadn’t even told Teresita he had left Effie Woodward’s antiques emporium. Oh, well.

  “Praise Jesus,” he muttered as he trotted downstairs and hustled toward the city.

  Laura lurched around the apartment like a drunken sailor. Teresita had a headache. She was still nursing but trying to convince the big toothy child that a nice warm cup of milk or cool fruit juice was better. Her nipples were sore, bitten and chewed. She cleaned up the rooms for the thousandth time. She stopped what she was doing and looked at her daughter. Laura had climbed atop the chair and stood with her arms in the air.

  “How’s she do that?” Laura demanded.

  Teresita laughed.

  They shared a bowl of sweet potatoes mashed with butter. They watched little brown birds out their back window. Teresita changed Laura’s diaper and placed the offending cloth in a lidded bucket. They crawled on the floor acting like rabbits. The nanny came in the afternoon, in time for Teresita to prepare herself for her evening appointment in Gramercy Park. After she consulted with the lady there, she and John were going to take a carriage ride up to Harlem to watch singers at a new supper and entertainment establishment. It would be a fine evening. She went to her wardrobe to select her dress, and she stopped for a moment and looked around her bedroom. Still brown, still sad. But comfortable. Like an old shoe. Not in any way the equal of the glittering rooms where she did her work now.

  Then she stopped, silent, and stared.

  No herbs. No cross on the wall. She took a cream dress from the padded hanger; the gold material that wrapped the wood was rich with lilac and heather scents. She held the dress before herself, smoothed it against her bust. She paused again. She looked over her shoulder. As if someone were watching her. But of course, no one was there. She turned and looked again. John’s scuffed and beaten boots beside the bed. But no altar.

  She blinked. Where was her altar? She’d always had an altar. Huila had taught her that much.

  Where were her objects? She had no idea. It bothered her. The fact that she hadn’t noticed they were gone bothered her more than their absence. She looked at the clock. She didn’t have time for this. New York City ran by the clock. There was no dawdling. She thought: Manhattan is a clock.

  But where were her herbs? She had always hung herbs from the rafters. There were no rafters. And where would she find herbs in New York City? She stood in the middle of the room and stared at the floor. She raised her hand to her brow.

  “Who’s there?” she said, whipping around. The room was cold. No one stood behind her. “Huila?” she said.

  “What, Mama?” called Laura.

  “Nothing,” Teresita said.

  “Ma’am?” called the nanny.

  “Nothing.”

  Teresita closed her bedroom door and leaned her head against the wood.

  She could not remember the last time she had touched soil with her feet. She could not remember when she had last put her feet in free running water. She had not pulled a fruit off a tree or ridden a horse or prayed in a sacred spot. Were there sacred spots in New York? Wouldn’t people just laugh at her if they found her talking to trees? Collecting seeds from plants with her old apron?

  Where was her apron? Huila’s apron. Where was it?

  She let out a small cry. She tore open her small chest and threw the rebozos out. No apron. Rebozos! When had she last worn one?

  The apron was not in the closet, nor was it in any of the drawers. She spun in place. What had she done with it? What had she done?

  “Huila?” she said.

  She looked under the bed. There was nothing. She didn’t even have a photograph of her father. She had nothing but expensive clothes and buckled shoes, hats and ribbons and hairpins and stoles. Nothing that mattered. No shells. No bones, or seeds, or branches with leaves.

  She slowly sank to the bed and sat there in the dread afternoon light.

  She slid forward to her knees.

  “I have failed You,” she whispered.

  Silence lashed her.

  “I have betrayed You.”

  The silence was punishing her.

  “I am no one now.”

  The silence was complete.

  “Please,” she said. “Please.” Outside her door, Laura laughed in her perpetual state of grace. Teresita’s head bent all the way to the floor. “Please.”

  But it was time for her to go. Her knees didn’t want to allow her to rise. All she wanted was to take her daughter under the covers and hide in a nest as if the last twenty years had not happened. As if they could be little sisters—she wasn’t ready to be anyone’s mother. Anyone’s wife. She had even failed at being someone’s daughter. If she only had wings, she would fly home and be at rest.

  She stared into the mirror.

  “People once believed you could fly,” she told herself.

  Now? Only Laura. Only little Laura would believe her if she told such a story.

  She closed her eyes.

  She turned away from herself.

  She laid out the clothes and undressed and pulled her silks from the drawer.

  She began to enclose herself, pulling the bindings tighter and tighter.

  John wandered around Red Hook taking in the accents and the smells as dusk dragged the sky over him like a blanket. He’d downed three or four flagons of lager, and his attitude had lightened. There wasn’t a faro game to be had anywhere. It had sprinkled, but no real rain had fallen. He clocked along humming a little tune, laughing at the kids rolling hoops down the street with sticks, the myriad piebald street dogs scattering like trash in the wind, all of ’em runts—boys and mutts. He was walking back to Manhattan. Why not? There was some sport to be had at the west end of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  The bridge. How many damned times had Teresita made him walk that? The cables looked like spiderwebs to her, and those Indians liked their spiders. He guffawed. He hiked. He meandered. He had no particular place to be. He didn’t remember their fight. Poles and Russians bumped into him. “Watch it,” he said. “Whoa, hoss!” Hunched and dark and lost in their coats. Lovers strolled around him, pausing and hugging and cooing at each other. He smiled upon them, blessed them. He was ruler of the earth. He dallied halfway across the bridge and produced a flask as if by magic and pulled a sweet ounce of whiskey down his throat.

  Behind him, a voice said, “That’ll do.”

  Recognizing the phrase, if not the voice, John scowled around.

  “By God,” he said, “if it isn’t Mr. Suits.”

  Suits looked a little moth-eaten. Even his bowler hat had a couple of rough spots.

  “How about a snort?” Suits said.

  John handed him the flask. Suits nursed on it.

  “Steady now,” John said. “Don’t drain the bastard.”

  Suits handed it back; John shook it. It was empty.

  “Damn it, Suits,” John complained. “You ain’t been here but one minute and you’re already stealing me blind.”

  Ignoring his rebuke, Suits said, “How’s the Girl Saint business?”

  “Thought you’d retired,” said John, now noting the presence of Elias the nine-foot-tall pistolero from St. Louis. “I see you brung Goliath with you,” he commented.

  “Brought David too,” said Suits.

  Ther
e he was: Swab Dave, the arranger, in his felt top hat.

  “Why, girls!” John crowed. “We’re having a reunion!”

  Suits took his right elbow. Elias waded in and took the other.

  “Shall we?” Suits asked.

  “Where to?” John said.

  Suits shrugged.

  “We’ll find a place. For a brief chat.”

  They walked him down the long slope of the bridge.

  Sixty

  SUITS AND JOHN SAT in a dismal corner of a stinking café in a narrow alley amid clouds of smoke. John nursed a big cracked mug of coffee. Suits had a glass of watery root beer. Elias and Swab Dave lurked outside the window, their faces distorted by the grime and the cheap glass into carnival masks.

  “I was asked to intervene in your affairs one last time,” Suits said. “Seeing as how the Saintess is about to run out of her contract.”

  “How was your retirement?”

  “Pleasurable enough, John. Far as it was from you.”

  “Haw!” John toasted him with his chicory-bitter coffee. “What are you offering?” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m not the problem,” John replied.

  Suits fiddled with his hat, scooting it around on the table. “What’s she want?” he said. “Herbs?” He snorted.

  “Suitsie-boy,” said John, “you’d have to talk to her about that. She has a powerful hankering to head on back to the mountains and rusticate.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning Mrs. Van Order might be just about done. Played out.”

  “I see.” Mr. Suits took a sip of his tonic. “She’s dispirited.”

  “I’d say.”

  “Beyond argument?”

  “She’s firmed up on the plan.”

  “Is she persuadable, though? That right there’s the question.”

  “I think,” John confessed, “this has all been too much for her. The city, motherhood.”