“C’est vrai, c’est vrai,” Lucia joined in laughing.
“I don’t see anything funny about the French Revolution,” my mother said, nose up, walking up the stairs toward the massive front doors of the Union, my plumpish father cumbersomely running ahead of her and opening the doors.
“So you speak French, too?” he said as Mimi followed my mother inside.
“Well, it’s part of the program. I just do what they tell me.”
Lucia very humble for a moment, almost little girlish.
“That’s what I always did. That’s why I’m still kicking, I guess. I was in the First World War, you know, medical corps. Contracted Typhoid, almost died in the hospital in France—”
“But then he recovered, came back, and I put him through medical school,” my mother always so humble, why hadn’t she gone to Hollywood and hit the big screen instead of turning the everyday into nonstop punishment.
“Well, she helped,” my father feeling the punch, trying to get back on his feet.
“He didn’t work at all while he was in medical school. I did it all, all, all—”
“One more all, come on,” my father sneeringly sarcastic.
My mother ignoring him, suddenly turning into all eyes, looking at the huge lobby, the entrance to the dining room.
“My nose tells me it’s over there.”
A bee to a flower, my mother to the dining room. Which impressed her. The chandeliers, the waiters, the very classy smells.
I’d worked in the same building downstairs in the student cafeteria. Peasantsville. Before they told me I could get a job teaching freshman comp.
We were seated, the menus impressed Mamá, she ordered some Chicken Cordon Bleu, my father some barbecued ribs, Lucia ordered a steak and I went for the Teriyaki Chicken.
I wanted to order a bottle of Chablis but my father insisted.
“You know I don’t drink, and I don’t even like to have a bottle on the same table with me.”
“You don’t drink?” Mimi was surprised.
“A Confirmation pledge. And I keep all my pledges,” my father grave as in a tomb, deathly serious. All this stuff about not drinking. My Irish grandfathers had died when I was born or shortly afterwards, were they big drunks or something?
So we all had Cokes, except my mother, who just stuck with her big crystal glass of water.
“So you’re from Lima?” my father starting in on Lucia as he sipped his coke.
“Lima, Peru; it’s on the coast. About the same longitude as New York,” Mimi’s English a thousand times better than usual. Was ze accent partly feigned, just a little garlic salt and cheddar to make her more interesting?
“Well, I’ve never been to South America. Europe, yes. World War I, Cuba, Mexico. We took bippy-boy here to Mexico when he was about eight. An experiment in E-Coli. I never saw such diarrhea in my life. It’s all over everything, E-Coli is, even all over the money—”
“No tiene nada que ver conmigo, Mexico,” she suddenly said to me: Mexico doesn’t have anything to do with me.
“What did she say? I couldn’t quite catch it.”
“She said Mexico doesn’t have anything to do with her.”
“I never said it did. Although it’s part of Latin America, n’est pas?”
“Je ne sais pas” (I don’t know).
“So she really speaks French, too,” my father amused, impressed, at the same time somehow full of mockery.
“I used to hate it when I was a kid and my mother and her friends would talk Czech and I wouldn’t understand a word,” my mother chimed in.
“I wish she would have taught me Czech,” was my reaction, “It opens the door to Slovak, Russian, Polish . . . like learning Spanish, all of a sudden you’re in the same court as Italian, French, Catalan, Gallego, Italian—”
“Guy-what?”
My father genuinely curious.
“Gallego. It’s what they speak in Galicia. Still speak; just like the Catalans speak Catalan. I think most of the French dialects have died out, which is a shame—”
“Not a shame at all,” my father very definite, dogmatic, “There ought to be one world language—esperanto—whatever, end wars—”
“The North and South both spoke English but we still had the Civil War.”
Why was I fighting him? Why couldn’t we have been talking about football or basketball or something?
“And your father?” my mother threw into the conversation like a car bomb, “What does your father do?”
“Oh, he’s an alcoholic-drug addict. Recovering though. The Peruvian government sent him to Haiti where they have this great alcoholic recovery program,” I said, only nobody laughed.
“He’s a mining engineer. There are lots of minerals in Peru. That’s what he does: minerals. He’s in the mountains right now, near Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Inca empire. My mother is in Lima, my brother Mario is an M.D. in Trujillo, in the north of Peru, my other brother Manuel—we call him Mañuco—lives in Lima, is a lawyer.”
“Impressive,” my father getting almost solemn as the food came and suddenly the table was filled with festive smells, “very nice. It reminds me of the Swedish club. You’ll love the Swedish club—”
“So you’re Swedish?”
“No, we’re just ‘snobbish,’” my father laughed as he started cutting his barbecued ribs, just a little licking of the knife.
“You don’t lick knives!” my mother corrected him with papal arrogance.
“But watch me cut!” he answered and took the special serrated-edged knife they’d provided him and started doing surgery on the ribs, quick, adroit, effective, beautiful.
“Cirujano, no es cierto?” she asked him.
“There you go again, you seem deaf to warnings,” my mother said not laughing. She never really laughed, did she, except when they were drowning cats or electrocuting murderers.
“She asked if you’re a surgeon.”
“Well, I really am, but according to ‘official statements’ I’m just a GP: General Practitioner. I never specialized. Although a doctor friend of mine, Eugene Chesrow, has just offered me a job at the Oak Forest Infirmary, an old people’s home in the Chicago area, so I may be a kind of geriatrician in my own old age.”
Me thinking of Dolores Volini’s father, when I’d take her out him always kind of “around,” like he was waiting to see me, always telling him “Greetings to your father, one of the most brilliant physicians I’ve ever met,” although Volini, in my father’s mind, was un bete noir (black beast) who hadn’t given him a recommendation that would have turned him into an obstetrician.
“I’ve got this great professor for American literature. Edward Davidson. Specialist in Poe. He wants to be my dissertation advisor—”
“Dissertation?” My mother had gone to secretarial school and knew tons about medicine, picked up from my father’s endless lecturing both at and away from the dinner table, but . . . dissertation?
“To get a Ph.D. you have to write a kind of book about some topic. He wants me to write about Poe’s “Eureka.” I even have a tentative title: Cosmology in Poe’s “Eureka.” It’s a long poem about the beginning of the universe.”
“Edgar Allan Creepo Poe? What did he know about the beginning of the universe?” My father, skeptical, but at least I’d steered the conversation away from (for me) taboo topics.
“He was very deep, profundo,” Mimi had to say.
“And what do you know about Poe? Isn’t he a bit outside your territory?” mocked my father.
“Well, I’m interested in American literature, too, now since I met Hugo—”
“’Hugh,’ if you please!” My mother acidly corrected her.
“Hugo in Spanish.”
“But he’s not Spanish!”
“Not yet anyhow; we’re thinking about a June wedding.”
Why not just throw a bomb right on the table, get it over with.
“No financial help from us!”
My f
ather unable to even imagine that I could ever get “independent” financially. I hadn’t really grown up for him/for them, had I?
“We’re fine financially. The two of us. I can always get a job teaching Spanish once I get my degree. I could even get it now with my Master’s from St. Louis, but the salary doubles with a Ph.D.”
“Piled higher and deeper!” my father laughed.
“Higher and deeper?” Mimi bit.
“I wonder what’s for dessert!” I said, beckoning to the waiter, who came in an instant with a menu.
“But you haven’t finished your meal.”
My mother’s rule had always been to eat every morsel on my plate, period. Either that or get it re-warmed at the next meal. More than once I’d had my uneaten morning’s oatmeal for dinner.
“Well, I’m thinning down a little,” I answered looking at my big balloon of a father.
“I’m simply healthy,” he answered.
“Who said you weren’t?”
Looking at the menu. Some chocolate cheesecake looked good. The Teriyaki chicken at been grand, spoken with a genuine Japanese accent, but the whole context of this “meeting” had soured my stomach. I wanted to get out my pipe, fill it with Mixture 79 to the brim and go and take a long, long walk in any local forest.
“Maybe we should just leave now,” my father said, taking his napkin and putting it on the table, gathering himself together as if to get up.
“Finish your meal. Let’s all finish our meals. Then we’ll have dessert,” my mother looking penetratingly at me, eyes turned into laser knives, “OK?”
“OK.”
I finished my chicken. Not a lot more talk until dessert, and then, when the apple pie with cherry topping (my mother), the yogurt sundae with hot chocolate sauce (my father), the boysenberry pie with lemon sauce topping (Lucia) and my chocolate cheesecake with sprinklings of dark chocolate on top came, my father relaxed.
“So how’s the University of Illinois doing football-wise this season?” he actually asked.
Sanity.
That’s what sports were for, weren’t they, a substitute for war, terrorism?
“Well, you know me and sports. My idea of sports is Michelangelo lying on his back doing the Sistine Chapel or Ravel writing his piano concerto for left hand . . .”
No one laughs, even smiles.
“Well, Illinois is doing very well this year. They just beat Iowa, they’re number three in the big ten as of yesterday,” chimed in Mimi, amazing me. How the f--- did she know anything about football?
“There! There’s a girl after my own heart!” my father was beaming. I hadn’t seen him so sunny for years.
“She’s hardly a girl!” my mother said, quickly finishing up the last crumb of her apple pie, pushing away from the table, “Speaking of little girls, I think I’d better go to the little girl’s room. It’s a long drive back to Chicago.”
Getting up, all jangling and jingling. She was like one of Santa’s reindeers. I never saw anyone in my life with more pins and earrings and brooches. Why hadn’t she just gone to Hollywood and gotten rid of all her witch’s impulses on the big screen?
“You ought to get a little more involved with sports,” my father counseling me, always the M.D.-counselor twenty-four hours a day.
While my mother was in the john, the rest of us finished up, my father went to take a crap (“My bowels suddenly want to do a hundred yard dash!”) and I asked Mimi, “What do you think of them?”
“Tu padre es muy cariñoso, y no quiero decir nada contra tu madre, pero . . .” (Your father is very loving, and I don’t want to say anything against your mother but . . .)
Just as my mother reappeared.
“I heard the word madre, too bad I missed the rest. I’m sure it wasn’t eulogies.”
“She was just saying how when you walk, you kind of dance,” I lied.
“I loved to dance, past tense, but your father, that pot-belly. I am exactly the same weight that I was at age 16!”
“Impressive!” said Mimi.
“Depressing,” I added, “nothing wrong with a little middle-aged ‘insulation.’”
“Except for the heart,” spoken with high, tragic seriousness.
I was going to say that we all die anyhow, for all our little tricks and dodges, but let it go at that as my father returned and rather solemnly announced, “Well, we’d better get going, as your mother said, it’s a long drive.”
I paid.
“My treat.”
“Very nice,” my father said looking around at the walls, the ceilings, the tables, “it’s a serious place, this university.”
“It is; it is.”
“Of course maybe you should have gone to Harvard or Northwestern or—”
“But this is more budget-possible, nicht war?” (Isn’t it true?)
“Wahr, wahr, ganz wahr.” (True, true, quite true.)
The waiters all smiling as we left, a glorious late-fall day, just getting on the edge of cold, the leaves starting to come down. But the sun made up for everything else.
My mother took me by the arm as we walked over toward their car, pulled me ahead of the others.
“She reminds me of a maid I had in Mexico the last time I was there. E-Coli on everything, even the money. I never get diarrhea, but even I—”
“—am human?” I filled in the blank for her.
“Can’t you find . . .?”
“Some Swedish millionairess?”
“Well, she could be American—”
“Look at those leaves! Pissarro would have gone crazy.”
“Pee . . .?”
“Oh, just one of the French impressionists.”
“Just joking!” Laughing one of her glass-breaking, crystal avalanche laughs as she stopped, waiting for Mimi and my father to catch up, then walking to the car canopied under bright red oak leaves. Their old black Buick Super.
“Well, it’s been . . .” my father almost shaking my hand, his hand never quite getting to mine, my mother getting into the car, “Take care, it’s been . . .”
We stood there watching as they pulled out from the curb. Waving goodbye, I started to say “Drive carefully,” but only got as far as the D.
I’d gotten so used to abraços (hugs), all sorts of effusive emotions, ties, links, pain at parting, expressions of the sense of loss and separation . . .
Of course there was a message in my parents’ whole modus operandi: WE DON’T LIKE YOU, WE NEVER LIKED YOU AND WE ESPECIALLY DON’T LIKE YOUR SO-CALLED FIANCEE; WE DON’T LIKE LATINAS, PERIOD, PUNTO FINAL.
“Well, they were . . . nice,” Mimi said, almost tears in her eyes.
Tough, yes, but....
That night, midnightish, after I’d taken Mimi back to her place, my phone rang. My mother.
“I’ve stayed up especially late just to make this call. I would have written you a note but I know you’d show it to her; you’ll probably detail this call to her, too, but I wish you wouldn’t. On the whole way back home your father and I discussed this whole situation—”
“Not ‘situation,’ I’m in love.”
“Don’t interrupt me or I’ll just hang up and send you to Hell. OK?”
“OK.”
Not a lot of choice, was there?
“So, as I was saying, your father and I discussed this whole si-tu-a-tion, and what kept recurring was this: how do you/we know what she says is true? How can we really know anything about her? How do we know what she really is, is about? She could be the greatest liar in the world and how could we ever check her out? We strongly advise you against marrying this woman. Whatever happened to Dolores Volini?”
“You know. She turned me down—”
“Once! Persistence!”
“OK, well, thanks for the call.”
“Thanks but no thanks,” and she hung up.
Welcome to insomnia.
Mimi and I ignored my parents and their nastiness, went ahead planning for a June wedding.
I bec
ame President of the St. Vincent de Paul Society at St. John’s Catholic Chapel, became great friends with another member of the society, a guy named Joe Weber from Princeton, getting his Ph.D. in French.
One day we were building a floor in this poor family’s house, me; Joe; General Bay, a Chinese-in-exile, one of Shang Kai Shek’s generals who had come to the U.S. when Shang had gone to Taiwan; Sam Tonaka, a Japanese Physics major; Nicolai Greskovitch, Hungarian; this very strangely international St. Vincent de Paul Society, always looking for things to do to help the poor, rebuilding this poor Chicano family’s living-room floor. Joe asked me “Why don’t you let me give the bride away when you get married in June?”
“I want to do that!” said General Bay, tall, imperious, very much a general still.
“Me!” insisted Greskovitch.
“Listen, you guys: you can all be in the wedding party, but Lucia’s brother is coming from Canada to give her away. He’s studying something about pathology in Montreal . . . but I want you all to be in the wedding party, OK?”
“OK.”
A universal OK.
Including Tonaka, who Bay was always joshing around with: “You Japanese always think you’re so original, but where do you get your alphabet from? The Chinese, of course. We invented you . . .”
Just before the wedding Mimi got a letter from Peru: her father had just died. From a ruptured gallbladder.
When I told my father on one of our visits to Chicago (my parents more or less accepting the inevitability of the wedding, whether they liked it or not) he reacted unexpectedly strongly: “But no one dies of a ruptured gallbladder these days. Not with the antibiotics that are available. And Lima must have modern hospitals.”
Mimi just shrugged her shoulders.
“Je ne sais pas?” (What do I know?)
Mystery.
Then, just before the wedding, we had to have our “banns” published in the local newspaper in Urbana-Champaign. Who we were, dates of birth, that kind of thing.
“So we need documents,” I told her, all set to go down to City Hall.
“I don’t know where—”
“Where what?”
“My passport.”
“I know where it is, it’s in your desk drawer. I saw it one time when I was looking for a ballpoint.”
Who, Me? Page 12