Though her father had conceded, he had done so with a “Mark my words, this will not turn out well.” And he would yell to her mother, “They are at it again” when he heard her speaking French on the phone with Steve. But it wasn’t Steve for whom she had yearned to sound like Piaf, though he was, in a way, responsible. Steve and Aunt Ida. For Steve, at her aunt’s suggestion, had taken her to see A Raisin in the Sun. And so, when other girls her age developed crushes on a beloved teacher or older brother’s best friend, she had dreamed of whispering milord to Sidney Poitier. At least until Noah came along.
Seven
WHEN CALLIE GOT HOME FROM THE LIBRARY, HER answering machine was flashing. She made herself a salad and then pressed the play button.
The first message was Armando reminding her to meet him at the Santa Fe for dinner. She sighed. She would prefer a dark corner anywhere, but Armando enjoyed the bustle of the plaza-side tables and, besides, had asked so sweetly if Chou would dîner dehors that, of course, she said she would.
The second message was from her aunt Ida. Had she spoken with her mother? That was all. She made a note to call her mom, but not then. Her mother would be at the store. She picked up her fork and started on her salad.
IT had been on the way to the store that she had gathered the courage to tell her mother. When she got there, she parked and sat watching the lights go off one by one, all but the series running down the center of the store. She saw Mr. Charles approach the door, then turn back toward her mother, lift his hand and say something, which she knew to be “Be good … and you’ll be lonely.” Usually she arrived a few minutes early, just to hear his nightly refrain and to watch the corners of her mother’s lips curve into a quiet smile. But that night she had waited to enter until Mr. Charles left. She had paused at the door before tapping.
Her mother had been wearing her customary white cotton blouse, cardigan sweater, and a straight skirt that came just below her knees. She was thin. “Thin as a rail,” Aunt Ida said. With narrow hips and a flat chest, she appeared drawn and even a little severe. Her dark hair was combed back from her forehead to the nape of her neck and twisted into a bun covered with an almost invisible circular hair net. She wore black pumps and nylons, whose seams never wavered.
She stood folding sweaters at one of the wide wooden chests that ran down the middle of the store. The sweaters had matching wool skirts with sewn-down pleats. All the popular girls wore them. Callie had asked to buy a set with money she was saving for college next year. “Absolutely not,” her mother had said. “We’ve scrimped and saved for you to get an education. You are not going to waste money dolling yourself up.”
Now she wondered if she would go to college after all.
“We can leave in a minute,” her mother said when she let her in. “I just have to finish the sweaters. The Jensen girls came in an hour before closing, tried on all of them, and then pranced out without buying a thing.”
Following her mother’s lead, she picked up a moss-green cardigan, buttoned it, and laid it face down on the table. She smoothed out the sleeves, folded them across the back, doubled the bottom of the sweater to the top, and turned the sweater over.
“That would look lovely on you,” her mother said. “I wish …”
“It’s all right.” She squared the edges of the folded sweater, held it to her cheek a moment, and then added it to the stack her mother had folded. “There’s something …” The words did not want to come out. Maybe if they did not, everything would be all right. Maybe it was all her imagination. It had to be. Words would make it seem real.
Her mother looked up and searched Callie’s face. “Callie, what’s wrong? You look pale.”
Her throat constricted at the tenderness in her mother’s voice.
“Have you been sick again? Maybe you should sit down.” Her mother straightened for a moment, rubbed her lower back, and sighed.
“No, Mother, no, not sick.” She watched her mother push a loose strand of hair away from her face and tuck it into her bun, then lean toward the table again, and lift another sweater. How disappointed her mother would be. She felt tears slide down her face and watched them form circles on the sweater she was folding. “I’m sorry, Mother. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right, Dear,” her mother said, taking the sweater from her. “You must be overly tired. You were up past midnight again last night. Sometimes I think you take school too seriously.” She laid the sweater on the stack. “Your father wants you to do well, and so do I. But your health …”
She told her mother then of her periods, that she had missed two months of them, and of her swelling breasts.
“Oh, Callie.” The words fell as softly and finally as the last leaf before winter. Her mother pulled opened a deep drawer and returned the stacks of sweaters, placing them side by side. Then she pushed the drawer shut and smoothed the top of the chest with her hand. When she had everything in its place, she shuddered and looked like she might collapse. Callie moved toward her. But before she could reach her, her mother gripped the side of the chest, steadied herself, and turned toward Callie. “Have you told Steve?”
Steve … ? And then it came to her. Of course, her mother would assume Steve was the father. She had not told her parents about Noah. And now she would not have to. “No one knows.”
“Well, that’s good. Maybe we can keep this in the family.” She sighed and closed her eyes a moment. Then, she looked at Callie. “I have to tell your father.”
Her stomach tightened. Tell her father. She had not thought that far into the future.
“It will be all right,” her mother said. “We will find a way …”
Later, when she was upstairs sitting on the floor in the hallway outside her room, she heard her father yelling. “I’ll teach him a thing or two. You’ll not stop me.”
But her mother prevailed. “Believe you me,” she had said, “your daughter is the one who will be blamed. And we’ll be blamed, too. Is that what you want?”
“We?” her father said. “You are the one who let her go around with that boy. I told her if she wanted someone to study with, she could study with the girl across the street. But no, she stuck up her nose. And you had to go and side with her, just like you always do.” He was sobbing by then, angry choking sobs. “If anyone is to blame, you are. You dropped the ball. You. You and her.”
“She can go away,” her mother had said so quietly Callie had barely been able to make out the words. “Ida will take her in. No one here will ever know.”
“They had better not know.” He sounded weary. “They had better not.”
In the end, there was no choice. She had to go away. She had to keep it quiet. No one there could ever know. No one.
SHE pushed her unfinished salad away. There she was, dwelling on the past again. She covered her plate and put it in the refrigerator. Her translation. That’s what she needed. She felt better just thinking about it. Then she would treat herself by washing the small panes of the terrace doors.
SHE had finished the allotted portion of her translation sooner than she expected, leaving her plenty of time for the windows. She placed a stack of newspapers and a bucket of water with vinegar on a chair and a wastebasket beside it. She tore a section of newspaper and dipped it in the bucket. Then she stood on another chair to start with the top windows. Before reaching for the first small pane, she noticed the trumpet standing upright on its bell by the doors. She had not touched it since Juanito put it there.
She reached upward to the corner small pane. She would rub each pane nine times, as usual. She started rubbing and counting. One. Two. Three. Armando had said she was right about the trumpet coming in handy. She rubbed slowly, from top to bottom, taking special care with the corners, and then rubbed from top to bottom again. Odd, after having called the trumpet “a piece of junk.”
She tossed the used newspaper in the basket and stooped to prepare another section of paper. Then started on the next pane. One. Two. Three. What could he h
ave in mind?
She recalled leaning against the basement door, listening to the long, low pedal tones her father warmed up with before the birds began to sing. In the evenings, when he played songs, she would close her eyes and see soldiers marching through clouds of confetti, sad-eyed clowns dropping the pins they juggled, mothers cradling their babies. Scenes, she realized years later, that her father could not describe verbally without scorn or self-pity. It seemed that, by picking up his horn, he entered another world, one where he was free from the chip soldered to his shoulder. And so, if he stormed into the house after work, railing over some slight, her mother would suggest he go to the basement. If she caught him before he got really wound up, he would come up later with a little circular dent from the mouthpiece on his lips and a twinkle in his eye. He would take Callie’s hands and swing her around in a circle. “Oh, your mum, she’s a bonnie lassie,” he would say.
She prepared another sheet of newspaper and started on another window.
She had thought her father’s trumpet was magic, like the fairy godmother’s wand. And so she loved going to the basement when her mother went for canned corn or string beans for supper. She would stand transfixed by the shining trumpet, hanging from a hook on the wall by the shelves. She longed to hold it and look inside the bell. But it, along with the saws on hooks beside it, was out of her reach, “for a reason,” her father said. They were not toys. Neither was the basement, where black widows lurked, a playroom. And so the door remained latched with a hook and eye.
Still, it was easy enough for a curious child to scoot a chair over, lift the hook, and lean through the door to turn on the light. She wasn’t such a little girl any more. She knew to hold onto the stair railing. She would not touch her father’s saws. She only wanted to hold the trumpet, to find a clue to its magic.
She never found out. Her mother circled an arm around her waist as she leaned to turn on the light. “Oh, no you don’t, young lady,” she said. “You can’t handle those stairs on your own.” That very night her father had installed a lock and hid the key.
SHE looked at the newly shined pane in front of her and smiled. Imagine that. Thinking that a trumpet could work magic. She shook her head. What funny ideas children have. Still, when she finished the windows, she found herself picking up the trumpet and looking inside the bell.
Eight
WHEN CALLIE STARTED DOWN THE CALLEJÓN, SHE caught herself humming “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” She felt her face grow red. What if someone heard her? She looked up to the window opposite her entry door. Shut. Good. She laughed. It wasn’t morning, but it was beautiful. The sky was blue, the air fresh and with a slight breeze. Her translation was going well. With luck she would enlist Nacho in the search for Tavelé. And then she would have dinner with Armando, who would tell her all about his plans for seeing Claude in Veracruz.
Everything did seem to be going her way, but there was something on her mind, as she turned onto the dead-end callejón where Nacho lived. Her aunt’s message asking if she had heard from her mother. She had not sounded worried, just bursting to tell Callie something. Well, she had news of her own. The lovely trumpet teacher. Her new friend. Well, not really. Not yet anyway. Probably never. But she could at least meet her. That would make her aunt happy. Her getting out of the house. Meeting someone new. But how would she meet the young woman? She could hardly just go up to her and introduce herself. And if she did, what would she say? Nothing. She paused a moment before knocking at Nacho’s door to figure it out. Tavelé. He would surely turn up at the young woman’s house looking for the geese. She would call Armando with the good news. And then the young woman and he would become great friends. He would take her along sometime to meet the young woman. The two of them would talk. All she would have to do was listen.
The shack where Nacho lived with his mother was made of tin pieced together with rough strips of wood. The door rattled when she knocked.
Nacho’s mother opened the door. “Buenos días, güerita.”
She took in a breath. After years of being called “güera” and its diminutive “güerita” by various neighbors, shopkeepers, and peddlers, she still felt odd about the label given her on account of her fair skin and hair. But she preferred it to “gringa,” since “güera” was, at least, one of the descriptive nicknames Mexicans used for each other, apparently without intending offense. And it embarrassed her less than “gordita,” that is “fatty,” which would, she feared, be equally fitting.
She held up a flyer and explained that Armando was offering a reward for Tavelé.
Nacho’s mother took the flyer. “Que le vaya bien,” she called after Callie as she left.
Approaching the callejón to the young woman’s house, it came to her. What if someone called the young woman “morena”? She paused. Would it bring up experiences of racial name-calling in the States, where no brown person was exempt from derisive labels? She shuddered, recalling the patronizing tone of the nurse with the cross necklace. “Time to feed your little darky.” She continued straight down the hill. No need to stop by the trumpet teacher’s house. She had already left the flyer in the morning. And, besides, Armando would walk her home later and could stop by to see the young woman on his way back down. He would be charming, the way he was with everyone.
She smiled, thinking of how Armando had hit it off with Aunt Ida. Thanks to the mummies, Aunt Ida’s passion. She had shared that passion with Callie from the time she was tall enough to peep over the side of a sarcophagus. Mummies had, in a sense, led them to Guanajuato, for when Aunt Ida heard about Guanajuato’s mummies, she had started packing. Because Callie had a break between translations, she had come along, though the only true appeal of mummies, as far as she was concerned, was that she need not speak with them. She had been relieved, then, when the day after their arrival in Guanajuato, her aunt returned from her morning coffee saying she met a nice young man named Armando who loved mummies, too, and had insisted on becoming her personal tour guide.
The next day the young man had taken her aunt to the mummy museum, where she learned that bodies buried in Guanajuato’s soil mummify naturally, and so, she told Callie, she had decided then and there that, when the time came, she was to be buried in Guanajuato. On other days, Armando took her aunt to places where mummies, as he put it, “began their transformation”: the bottom of a mine shaft, an inquisition torture chamber, a curve on a mountain road marked by a wreath of plastic flowers.
While her aunt was “off gallivanting,” as she put it, Callie had wandered through the web of callejones that spread up the canyon sides. She got lost, sometimes for hours, and could only find her way again by asking a passerby for help, but that didn’t stop her outings. She had become fascinated by the occasional property with vines creeping over the top of stone or stuccoed walls, suggesting a hidden garden.
One day, an older woman walking with a little boy saw her gazing at one such treetop. She introduced herself as Petra Rodríguez Gómez and the boy as her grandson Juanito. She said she knew of a house with a garden for sale. It belonged to a philosopher, a foreigner, like you, she had said. Callie followed the woman up the hill and alongside a stone wall to the house, but the philosopher was not at home. It had been a relief at the time. What would she say to her, after all? But, still, she could not stop thinking about the limb that stretched over the patio wall as if beckoning her. Their last day in Guanajuato, she took her aunt up the slopes and stairways to the philosopher’s house, where she herself knocked on the door and asked if they could see it.
She loved everything about the stone house stacked on the hillside. She loved the upstairs kitchen with its beamed ceiling and tall French doors to the entry terrace. The small guest room with a balcony overlooking the patio below. The bedroom off the patio, with an alcove for a desk under waist-high windows. The bath tiled from floor to ceiling with soaring blue birds. Most of all, she loved the hidden garden.
Still she had balked at her aunt’s suggestion that
she buy the house.
“What more would you want?” her aunt said. “A lovely house, gracious people, live music everywhere, year-round spring, and mummies. And don’t worry about money. It’s not much in any case, and I’ll have plenty to loan you after selling my house in Chicago. The house I’m moving to in Farmtown is half the price. So, what do you say?”
“No, thank you.” She preferred to stay in Chicago. But her aunt insisted. “You can’t spend your whole life there waiting.”
She could, she knew, wait a lifetime, if that’s what it took. Not, as her aunt thought, for Jacob. She had no illusions about getting back together with him. If anything, it would be easier being in Guanajuato than in Chicago, avoiding the places they had once entered hand in hand. And so she bought the philosopher’s house.
In the end, her life in Guanajuato was not so different from how it had been in Chicago. Though she knew no one was likely to call but Aunt Ida or Armando, her heart still skipped a beat each time the phone rang.
WHEN Callie got to the restaurant, Armando was sitting half-turned away from his table, talking with a couple behind him. He must have been recounting the story of losing Tavelé because at one point he held his hands up in a way that suggested the width of a sheet cake.
The Trumpet Lesson Page 4