by Andrea Lewis
When I turned, Mr. Delgado strode toward us. I introduced my brother. Rodney gave me a quick, questioning, what-have-we-been-up-to glance and shook Mr. Delgado’s hand. “Won’t you lunch with us?” Rodney asked.
“Yes,” Mr. Delgado said, “but you must be my guests.”
“Even better,” Rodney said.
I did not object. There seemed no end to Mr. Delgado’s largesse. We walked to a restaurant in Kensington High Street and he promptly ordered champagne.
“Excellent!” cried Rodney. “What are we celebrating?”
Mr. Delgado filled my glass. “Your sister’s valiant efforts at our committee meeting.”
Rodney groaned. “Oh, that’s far too boring.”
“Shall we toast your diver?” I suggested.
“You have a diver?” Rodney was intrigued.
“He is Mexico’s diver,” Mr. Delgado explained. “In the Olympic Games. Joaquín Capilla Pérez. My family knows his family.”
“Mr. Delgado came all this way expressly to see him.”
“Please,” Mr. Delgado said. “You have to call me Ramiro.”
“What charming names you Americans have,” Rodney said. We all reestablished ourselves on first-name footing.
“To Joaquín Capilla Pérez.” I raised my glass.
“Long may he dive.” Rodney raised his.
If the butter had induced guilt, the champagne would surely send me straight to hell. As would the expensive lunch we all ordered. Rodney asked for oysters, and even I could not resist the beefsteak, which Ramiro approved of with an enthusiastic nod, ordering the same for himself.
“When does the diving take place?” Rodney asked.
“The first event is tomorrow morning, I’m afraid. Ten o’clock.” Ramiro looked at me.
It took a moment for this information to sink in. “But what about our meeting?” I asked. “Our meeting is at ten o’clock.” I realized this meant I’d be facing the committee alone.
“Your meeting?” Rodney was horrified. “Why would he listen to ladies’-congress puffery when he can watch this Capilla chap?”
“Joaquín Capilla Pérez,” Ramiro said.
“Yes. Joaquín Capilla Pérez,” Rodney repeated, as if he knew the man. “His name alone makes it worth missing a meeting. By the way, can you get us in? To the diving?”
“Rodney, please. He has been far too generous already.”
“Of course I can,” Ramiro said. “Will you come? Both of you?”
“Count me in.” Rodney poured himself more champagne.
Our food arrived. All at once, my slab of beef looked wasteful and detestable. My appetite evaporated. I dreaded facing the committee without Mr. Delgado. But I was determined to try. “Forgive me, but I must rejoin the committee tomorrow. You saw how it was.”
“Carrington,” Ramiro said, “if you don’t mind my saying, I don’t hold out much hope for that group, in terms of it accomplishing anything.”
“But we have to try. We have to begin somewhere.”
“Carrie, start with your own life.” Rodney downed an oyster and filled his glass yet again. “Have some fun.”
“Rodney, there is work to do.” Suddenly I detested him as well. “We can’t all be playboys.”
“We can’t mourn dead fiancés forever, either,” he shot back.
We never sniped at each other like this before the war. We had always been such good chums. I clenched my knife and fork. “You are drinking too much, Rodney. As usual.”
“And you are becoming a stuffy old spinster at twenty-four. Do you think Lawrence wanted you to live like a nun?”
“Do not use his name to insult me.”
“He’s not Jesus Christ.”
“He’s closer than you.”
A humiliating silence descended. Rodney continued with his oysters as if nothing had happened. I turned to Ramiro. “Forgive us,” I said. “We’re behaving abominably.”
“Don’t worry. You should’ve heard me and my brother go at it. I mean, when he was alive. He died in France.”
“I’m so dreadfully sorry,” I said.
“Very sorry,” Rodney mumbled.
“As for me,” Ramiro added, “the army didn’t want me. Scarlet fever. Apparently it leaves its mark on your heart.”
“My fiancé died in Tunisia,” I said. “I miss him terribly.”
“It was five years ago, Carrie.”
“Rodney, you’ve been cruel enough.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “I am sorry.” To show he meant it, he refused the glass of cognac that Ramiro offered after the meal. Ramiro paid what must have been an enormous bill. We left the restaurant and returned to the Hotel Alexander in silence.
* * *
I assumed I would never see Ramiro Delgado again. The committee meetings would extend over the next three days, but I imagined he would not return to any of them. Another American trait—follow your own programme, regardless of commitments or inconvenience to others. Rodney asked me for supper that night. I was still angry with him and I refused. I knew then his claim of doing something useful was false. He would gad about London until it bored him. Then he would seek fresh entertainment elsewhere. I returned to my room, resigned to another evening of study before facing the committee on my own.
Much later that night I awoke to the sound of thumping on my door. I had fallen asleep, still dressed and with the lamp on. The brown binder—Copper, Tin, Coal—lay open on my chest. The room was hot. I was disoriented. I called out to ask who was there.
“It’s your darling brother,” Rodney sang out, in his loudest, most drunken voice.
I opened the door. He looked like a gangster from an American film, with his suit jacket hooked on his thumb and a bottle of gin dangling from the other hand.
“Oh, Rodney.”
“I must talk to you.” He tried to articulate each solemn word, but he couldn’t stop grinning his old boyhood grin. And there was someone behind him in the shadows of the hallway. He was a very fair, very young man, young enough to have two or three spots on his face, but he was wearing an immaculate dinner jacket. He eyed me quickly, then looked away and stepped farther into the gloom.
“Who is that?”
“That’s a friend. That’s Nicky. He’s a friend.”
“The motorcar?” I guessed.
“Nicky indeed possesses a fine motorcar. Don’t you, Nick?”
No response.
Rodney turned and handed Nicky the bottle. “I’ll be back straightaway,” he told him.
He came into my room and closed the door. I still had the brown binder in my hand. Rodney took it from me, riffled the pages, and read aloud: “‘Commercial possibilities vary with the initial cost outlay of sinking deep pits, depending on the expenses accrued….’” He slapped the book shut.
“Really, Carrington, you’ve got to pack this in.”
“Pack what in?”
“This mission you’re on.”
“And do what? Drink and pick up boys?”
“Now that hurt.” He sat on the bed and let himself topple over, pressing the binder to his heart. “I’m deeply wounded.” He was still grinning.
“You should not have come here, Rodney.”
“That Ramiro chap likes you,” he said to the ceiling. “He’s quite lovely as well.”
“He does not like me. All Yanks act like that.”
“You don’t even know any Yanks.”
“Well, they shouldn’t traipse in here with their dollars and their silver mines and pretend everything’s wonderful.”
“Why not?” Rodney flung his arms across the bed. “Let’s pretend! Maybe wonderful will happen.”
“And maybe it won’t.” But already my heart told me otherwise. Ramiro Delgado was, after all, everything I had dreamed of back in those pre-war days, when we all felt free to dream. Charming, mysterious. Apparently wealthy. Even sexually attractive, although I hardly dared think the words. I had never had sexual relations with a man. The clo
sest I had come was sitting on a bed like this with Lawrence in a hotel room in Bristol, just before he left for military training. That was the pinnacle of our intimacy—sitting on a bed. Kissing. We didn’t make love, though we came that close. I made him wait.
Rodney startled me from my daydream by sitting up and slowly ripping a page from my binder. “Quit trying to do the proper thing for England.” He tore the page in half and then into quarters, then eighths. “Lawrence is dead. Do something for yourself.” He let the pieces flutter down. It was a graph of a century’s worth of coal exports.
Much to my consternation, I began weeping. Rodney folded me in his arms and kissed my hair. “Now look, Carrington. Take Nicky-boy out there,” he said.
“You take him,” I sniffed.
“Oh, I will. But he’s patriotic, just like you. Rule Britannia, that’s Nick. And you know how he serves his country? He serves his country by saying, ‘Nicky-boy is no good for England or anything else if he’s unhappy.’”
“Rodney, you’ve found a very convenient philosophy.”
“It’s what I learned in the war, Carrie.”
“Philosophy?”
“Well, no.” He fumbled behind him on the bed for his jacket. “Perhaps I learned the opposite of philosophy.”
“Rodney, whatever is the opposite of philosophy?”
“My dear, the opposite of philosophy is terror.”
“Terror? You mean fear of death?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. Not those brave, I’m-your-man Royal Engineers. We all stopped fearing death early on.”
“Fear of what, then?”
“Of never having lived.”
* * *
The vaulted ceiling of Wembley Stadium was almost lost in the bright silver light that streamed through banks of windows high above tiered galleries. Row upon row of spectators fanned themselves with programmes that flashed blue white blue white. In the centre of it all, the Empire Pool was a flat turquoise rectangle. At one end, a tower of iron scaffolding supported the diving boards and platforms.
As we entered, Ramiro took my hand—a simple gesture that evoked sensations for me as vast as the stadium itself, as if I had saved the world and now it was laid at my feet for me to enjoy. Oh, there was guilt too. Another part of me felt like a little girl playing hooky. But how quickly I allowed Ramiro—his tailored suit, his warm hand—to bestow upon me his unfamiliar brand of confidence. Maybe this was how all Americans felt as they went about ordering butter and consuming beefsteak and rescuing nations.
Rodney, who had brought the silent Nicky along, kept sneaking me knowing grins and quick V-for-Victory signs. He was taking all the credit for prying me away from my meeting and pushing me into Ramiro’s magic sphere. And it was magic, the way Ramiro produced passes from his slim leather wallet so that the four of us—Ramiro, Rodney, Nicky, and I—sat like the royal family in a row of seats behind the judges for the diving competition.
Joaquín Capilla Pérez, who that day would win a bronze medal for Mexico in the ten-meter platform dive, paced alongside the pool. He noticed Ramiro on one of his nervous crossings and smiled at him. Capilla Pérez was twenty-five years old, but looked like a teenager. His pointy shoulders angled out above his slender waist and red swim trunks. His taut brown back was a triangle of confined energy. Before his event, he joined the other divers in the pool for their two minutes of acclimation, treading water or swimming a few strokes.
Ramiro put his arm round my shoulders and spoke directly into my ear. “Joaquín noticed you,” he said. “He’s wondering why I am here with such a stunning Englishwoman.”
I shook my head and tried not to smile. As far as I could tell, Mr. Capilla Pérez had not looked at me at all.
“I’ll talk to him later,” Ramiro added. “I’ll tell him we’re falling in love.”
I wanted both to believe and to protest this terrifying statement, but at that moment Joaquín Capilla Pérez’s name and dive were announced, in English, then French. He climbed to the top of the platform and stood poised, shimmying his shoulders and dripping water from his fingertips. He stepped to the edge and pushed off. Somehow he suspended himself high above the water for the length of time needed to press his forehead to his knees and carve three and a half languid circles in the silvery air. Each somersault whipped out a perfect arc of shiny drops from his thick black hair. Then, as if it were his decision and not gravity’s, he opened the blade of his body toward the water and pierced its placid blue surface.
Applause. Echoed shouts from every corner of the galleries. Next to me, Ramiro leapt to his feet, cheering, fists raised over his head. On my other side, Rodney, shouting Bravo, hugged me. I looked over his shoulder at Nicky, who smiled at me with his mild eyes. When Rodney let me go, Ramiro took me in his arms. He was laughing. Then he kissed me. It was a hungrier kiss than poor Lawrence had ever mustered, and, even in the midst of it, I had the terrible, brief vision of his falling in the desert. Perhaps the war ended for me when I gripped the fine wool of Ramiro’s suit and kissed him back. I didn’t care who saw us. I wanted to celebrate.
9
Castle Bravo
Carrington raised the silver coffeepot and forced herself to smile. She poured coffee violently enough to splash a few drops onto Alicia Parker’s pink dress. She didn’t like Alicia—or her boring husband John—but she was determined to play the darling hostess. Behind her fake smile, she was worried about her daughter Iris and lusting after several things at once: cigarettes, sex, sleep.
Her husband Ramiro had invited these people. John Parker would probably win a Texas state senate seat next month in the 1960 elections. He’d be able to help Ramiro’s family firm, Delgado Mines. So if that meant two hours of small talk on the terrace, watching the Parkers work their way through steaks and salads, then Carrington would do it. But now, over coconut crème pie and coffee, she regretted the waste of a beautiful Galveston evening, a soft coral sunset, the shining blue Gulf in the distance.
“Did you make the pie yourself?” Alicia Parker asked.
“No, Pilar made the pie,” Carrington said wearily.
“Oh, that’s right,” Alicia said. “Your Mexican.”
* * *
From her bedroom window on the second floor, Iris Delgado—ten years old, with dried-salt tear tracks on her cheeks—glared down on her parents’ dinner party. She heard the fat lady in pink call their cook Pilar a Mexican. She wanted to yell Nicaraguan! but then they’d know she was watching. For the hundredth time that day she took up the round mirror with the blue plastic handle and looked at her hair. Fresh tears filled her eyes. Her hair poked this way and that in ragged brown patches all over her head.
* * *
On the terrace, Ramiro watched his wife pour the coffee, admiring her trim figure in the ivory linen sheath, her tan arms bare to the shoulder, her naturally curly, naturally yellow short hair. He loved Carrington, no matter her mood, and the anger he detected behind the coffee-splashing excited him. When she got mad and bored like this she liked to burn it off with sex. He imagined her telling the Parkers—in her charming British accent—to bugger off. Then the two of them would obliterate the day’s crises with backed-up lust. They would forget that their daughter Iris had gone a little crazy that morning. They would forget that their hired man, Louis Paradiso, had come in after lunch saying he felt sick. Not exactly a crisis, but Ramiro wondered if the man could be drinking again. He was a good caretaker, and Ramiro counted on him to run their vast corner of Galveston, a spread of land dotted with pecan orchards, lemon groves, hay fields, and swampland.
“Now, how is that daughter of yours?” Alicia Parker asked.
Ramiro answered quickly, before Carrington could say anything. “We have two daughters, actually. Hannah is eight, and Iris is ten.”
“Which one is a little bit odd?” Alicia’s rosebud lips protruded lewdly to vacuum pie off her fork.
“Alicia, what kind of thing is that to say?” John Parker’s voice
, Ramiro realized, was as bland as his brown tie and brown crew cut and brown horn-rim spectacles.
Ramiro smiled. “Our daughters are just run-of-the-mill little girls,” he said, wondering how to change the subject to government contracts and Delgado Mines. “Crying one minute, then dancing in front of American Bandstand the next.”
Alicia scraped invisible remnants of pie crust from her plate. “But isn’t one girl a special genius or something?”
Unlike you, Carrington wanted to say. But she let Ramiro handle it.
“Iris has skipped a couple of grades,” he said.
* * *
Iris heard her name spoken down on the terrace and leaned toward the window again. More than anything she feared being called upon to come down and shake hands. She hated shaking hands. Or being touched by anyone except possibly her father. Well, Louis Paradiso, of course. She adored him. And her mother was okay, but way too fussy and now there was the hair disaster. Below, the pink lady was asking the usual questions about Iris being a genius.
* * *
In fact, at age ten, Iris could easily have been a high school senior, but the schools had balked at moving her beyond eighth grade. “Her sister Hannah, on the other hand,” Ramiro was saying, “Hannah is your average third-grader.”
“Where are they?” Alicia looked over her shoulder, as if Hannah or Iris might pop out from behind the potted palms.
“Hannah’s at a slumber party,” Carrington said. Hannah had flounced out of their Oldsmobile 88 and up the steps of her friend’s house earlier that afternoon, carrying a box of Frankie Avalon and Bobby Darin 45’s and grumbling that her sister Iris was nuts.
“And Iris is in her room,” Carrington went on. “She’s not feeling well.”
“Oh, the poor little thing,” Alicia said. “Does she have a summer cold?”
“Yes,” Carrington lied. That was easier than the truth: that Iris had sequestered herself in her room after chopping off most of her hair that afternoon with paper doll scissors during a test of Galveston’s air-raid sirens.