by Lucia Berlin
The silence gave this flood a particularly eerie magic. The trolleys couldn’t run and for days there were no cars. Hope and I were the only children on the block. She had six brothers and sisters, but they were bigger, either had to help in the furniture store or were just gone somewhere always. Upson Avenue was mostly retired smelter workers or Mexican widows who spoke little English, went to Mass at Holy Family in the morning and the evening.
Hope and I had the street all to ourselves. For skating and hopscotch and jacks. Early in the morning or in the evening the old women would water their plants but the rest of the time they all stayed inside with the windows and blinds shut tight to keep out the terrible Texan heat, but most of all the caliche red dust and the smoke from the smelter.
Every night they burned at the smelter. We would sit outside where the stars would be shining and then the flames would shoot out of the stack, followed by massive sick convulsions of black smoke that darkened the sky and veiled everything around us. It was quite lovely really, the billows and undulations in the sky, but it would sting our eyes and the smell of sulfur was so strong we would even gag. Hope always did but she was just pretending. To give you an idea of how scary it was every night, when the newsreel of the first atom bomb was shown at the Plaza Theater some Mexican joker hollered, “Mira, the esmelter!”
There was a break in the rains and that’s when the second thing happened. Our grandmothers shoveled the sand away and swept their sidewalks. Mamie was a terrible housekeeper. “She always used to have colored help, that’s why,” my mother said.
“And you had Daddy!”
She didn’t think that was funny. “I’m not going to waste my time cleaning this roach-infested dump.”
But Mamie took trouble with the yard, sweeping the steps and sidewalk, watering her little garden. Sometimes she’d be right on the other side of the fence from Mrs. Abraham but they ignored one another completely. Mamie did not trust foreigners and Hope’s grandmother hated Americans. She liked me because I made her laugh. One day all the children were lined up at the stove and she was giving them kibbe on fresh hot bread. I just got in line and she served me before she realized it. That’s how I got my hair brushed and braided every morning too. The first time she pretended she didn’t notice, told me in Syrian to hold still, hit me on the head with the brush.
There was a vacant lot next to the Haddad house. In summer it was overgrown with weeds, bad thistles so you wouldn’t even want to walk through it. In fall and winter you could see that the lot was carpeted with broken glass. Blue, brown, green. Mostly from Hope’s brother and his friends shooting BB guns at bottles but also just throwaways. Hope and I looked for bottles to turn in for refunds, and the old women took bottles to the Sunshine Market in their faded Mexican baskets. But in those days most people would drink a soda and then just toss the bottle anywhere. Beer bottles would fly out from cars all the time making little explosions.
I understand now that it had to do with the sun setting so late, after we had both eaten dinner. We were back outside, squatting on the sidewalk playing jacks. For only a few days, from our position low on the ground, we could see beneath the weeds on the lot at the very moment when the sun lit the mosaic carpet of glass. At an angle, shining through the glass like a cathedral window. This magical display only lasted a few minutes, only happened for two days. “Look!” she said the first time. We sat there, frozen. I had the jacks clasped tightly in a sweaty palm. She held the golf ball up in the air, like the Statue of Liberty. We watched the kaleidoscope of color spread out before us dazzling, then soft and blurry, then it vanished. The next day it happened again, but the day after that the sun just quietly turned to dusk.
* * *
Sometime soon after the glass or maybe it was before, they burned early at the smelter. Of course they burned at the same time. Nine p.m. but we didn’t realize that.
In the afternoon we had been sitting on my steps, taking off our skates when the big car pulled up. A shiny black Lincoln. A man sat in the driver’s seat wearing a hat. He made the window near us go down. “Electric windows,” Hope said. He asked who lived in the house. “Don’t tell him,” Hope said, but I told him, “Dr. Moynahan.”
“Is he home?”
“No. Nobody’s home but my mother.”
“Is that Mary Moynahan?”
“Mary Smith. My father is a lieutenant in the war. We’re here for the duration,” I said.
The man got out of the car. He wore a suit with a vest and a watch chain, had a stiff white shirt. He gave each of us a silver dollar. We had no idea what they were. He told us they were dollars.
“Will they take them for money in a store?” Hope asked.
He said yes. He went up the stairs and knocked on the door. When there was no answer he turned the metal crank that rang a raspy bell. After a while the door opened. My mother said angry things that we couldn’t hear and then she slammed the door.
When he came back down he gave each of us two more silver dollars.
“I apologize. I should have introduced myself. I’m F. B. Moynahan, your uncle.”
“I’m Lu. This is Hope.”
He asked then where Mamie was. I told him she was at First Texan Baptist, across from the library downtown. “Thank you,” he said and drove off. We both put our dollars in our socks. Just in time, because my mother was running down the steps, her hair in pin curls.
“That was your uncle Fortunatus, the snake. Don’t you dare tell a soul he came. Do you hear me?” I nodded. She whacked me on the shoulder and the back. “Don’t say a single word to Mamie. He broke her heart when he left. Left them all to starve. She’ll get all upset. Not a word. Understand?” I nodded again.
“Answer me!”
“I won’t say a word.”
She gave me another whack for good measure and went back upstairs.
Later everyone was at home, in their own rooms as usual. The house had four bedrooms to the left of a long hall, a bathroom at the end, with the kitchen dining and living room on the other side. The hall was always dark. Pitch black at night, blood red from the stained-glass transom during the day. I used to be terrified of going to the bathroom until Uncle John taught me to start at the front door, whisper over and over to myself, “God will take care of me. God will take care of me,” and run like hell. That day I tiptoed because in the front bedroom my mother was telling Uncle John that Fortie had come. Uncle John said he wished he’d been there so he could have shot him. I stopped then outside the door to Mamie’s room. She was singing Sally to sleep. So sweet. “Way down in Missoura when my mammy sung to me.” When I came out of the bathroom Uncle John was in Grandpa’s room. I listened there as Grandpa told Uncle John that Fortunatus had tried to come inside the Elks’ club. Grandpa had sent word for him to leave or else he’d call the police. They talked some more but I couldn’t hear. Just bourbon gurgling into glasses.
Finally Uncle John came into the kitchen. I had iced tea while he drank. He put mint in his glass so Mamie would think he was drinking tea too. He told me that Uncle Fortunatus had left home years and years before, just when they really needed him. Both John and Grandpa were drinking badly and couldn’t work. Uncle Tyler and Fortunatus were supporting the family until Fortunatus went to California in the middle of the night. Left a note that said he’d had enough of Moynahan trash. He didn’t ever send any money or even a letter, didn’t come home when Mamie almost died. Now he was president of some railroad. “Best not to mention seeing him,” Uncle John told me.
Everybody was in the living room for Jack Benny. Sally was still asleep. Mamie sat on her little chair, with the Bible open as usual. But she wasn’t reading it. She was looking down at it and there was a look of happiness on her old face. I understood that Uncle Fortunatus had found her and had talked with her. When she looked up, I smiled. She smiled back at me and looked back down. My mother was standing in the doorway, smoking. This smiling made her nervous and she began to make all these Shh! signs and face
s at me behind Mamie’s back. I just looked at her with a blank stare like I had no idea what she was talking about. Grandpa was listening to the radio and laughing at Jack Benny. He was already drunk. Rocking hard in his leather rocking chair and tearing the newspaper into little strips, burning it up in the big red ashtray. Uncle John was drinking and smoking in the dining room doorway, taking it all in. He was ignoring my mother’s signs to him to get me out of there. I figured he could see that Mamie was smiling too. My mother was making Shoo! signs at me to leave. I acted like I didn’t notice and sang along with the Fitch commercial. “If your head scratches, don’t itch it! Fitch it! Use your head! Save your hair! Use Fitch shampoo!” She was looking at me so mean I couldn’t stand it, so I took one of the silver dollars out of my sock.
“Hey, look what I got, Grandpa!”
He stopped rocking. “Where’d you get that? You and them A-rabs steal that money?”
“No. It was a present!”
My mother was slapping me. “Rotten little brat!” She dragged me out of the room and threw me out the front door. I remember it as her carrying me by the neck like a cat, but I was very big already so that can’t be true.
The minute I was outside, Hope hollered to come quick. “They’re burning early!” That’s what I mean about us thinking it was early. It just hadn’t gotten dark.
Massive billows and swirls of black smoke were rising from the smokestack high into the air tumbling and cascading with a terrible speed unfurling in billows over our neighborhood as if it were night now with foggy wisps creeping over the roofs and down alleys. The smoke thinned and danced and spread farther over the whole downtown. Neither of us could move. Tears flowed from our eyes because of the foul sting and stink of the sulfur fumes. But as the smoke dissipated over the rest of the town it too was backlit like the glass had been by the sun and now even smoke turned into colors. Lovely blues and greens and the iridescent violet and acid green of gasoline in puddles. A flare of yellow and a rusty red but then mostly a soft mossy green that reflected in our faces. Hope said, “Yucko, your eyes turned all those colors.” I lied and said hers did too but her eyes were black as ever. My pale eyes do change color so they probably did turn in the spirals of the smoke.
We never chattered like most little girls. We didn’t even talk much. I know we didn’t say a word about the terrible beauty of the smoke or of the glowing glass.
Suddenly it was dark and late. We both went inside. Uncle John was asleep on the porch swing. Our house was hot and smelled of cigarettes and sulfur and bourbon. I crawled into bed next to my mother and fell asleep. It seemed like the middle of the night when Uncle John shook me awake and took me outside. “Wake your pal Hope,” he whispered. I threw a rock at her screen and in seconds she was outside with us. He led us to the grass and told us to lie down. “Close your eyes. Closed?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, open your eyes and look toward Randolph Street up in the sky.”
We opened our eyes to the clear Texas sky. Stars. The sky was filled with stars and it was as if there were so many that some were just jumping off the edge of it, tumbling and spilling into the night. Dozens, hundreds, millions of shooting stars until finally a wisp of cloud covered them and softly more clouds covered the sky above us.
“Sweet dreams,” he whispered when he sent us back to bed.
By morning it was raining again. It rained and flooded all week until finally we got tired of getting cold and muddy and we ended up spending our dollars going to movies. The day Hope and I got home from The Spanish Main my father had come back safe from the war. Very soon we went to live in Arizona so I don’t know what happened in Texas the summer after that one.
ANDADO
A GOTHIC ROMANCE
It was just flowering. In other countries the tree is called mimosa or acacia, but in Chile it is called aromo. The word has the softness of the fallen yellow blossoms that carpeted the courtyards. It was last period; the girls in fourth form were dreamy, inattentive by that hour, the white aprons that covered their school uniforms grubby and wrinkled. The girls filled pens from inkwells on each desk and the nibs made rasping sleepy scratches in their copybooks. The rain-wet branches of yellow aromo echoed the sound against the windows.
Señora Fuenzalida droned. The students called her “Fiat.” She looked like a car. Short, squat, almost black, with mirrored headlight sunglasses. Where did she get those sunglasses, in Santiago, in 1949? American glasses, nylons, and Zippo lighters were luxury items then.
She would have seen everything even without them. She heard Laura in the back row, behind Quena and Conchi. The faintest hiss of pages being slit with a penknife, pages Laura should have cut and read the night before. The teacher called Laura “Suspiros” as her page cutting made the sound of sighs.
“¡Suspiros!”
“Mande, señora.” Laura stood at attention, hands clasped in front of her stained apron.
“Who said, ‘Lloveré cuando se me antoje’?”
Laura smiled. She had just seen it. I’ll rain whenever I feel like it.
“You haven’t read it!”
“I have. It was the crazy man, in the asylum.”
“Siéntese.” Señora Fuenzalida nodded.
The bell finally rang. The pupils stood by their desks until Señora Fuenzalida left the room, then gathered their books and filed out into the hall. They hung their aprons in lockers, buttoned on clean white collars and cuffs. They buttoned their gray gloves, put on broad-brimmed hats with long ribbons. Book bags heavy with homework, even though there was a four-day holiday.
Laura walked with Quena and Conchi up Las Lilas toward Hernando de Aguirre. The sky had cleared; the sun was setting coral pink on the immense snow-covered Andes. Their shoes crushed aromo blossoms as they walked and the smell enveloped them. The yellow flowers carpeting the sidewalks muffled their footsteps.
It would have been hard to tell that Laura was an American. The daughter of a mining engineer, she had the quality of adaptation common to army brats and children of diplomats. They learn quickly, not just the language or the jargon, but what is done, who is to be known. The problem for such children is not being isolated or always new, but that they adapt so quickly and so well.
The girls stood at the corner of El Bosque and Las Lilas, discussing plans for the long weekend. The French Olympic team was spending its summer at the Chilean resort. Quena would take lessons from Emile Allais himself. It had snowed in the mountains all week, but look, now it’s clear. The sky was almost dark. Two caped carabineros passed, rifles over their shoulders, boots black against the aromo.
Conchi’s plans were the same every weekend. Dressmaker, hairdresser, ballet lesson, tennis lesson. Lunch at the Crillon. Rugby or polo in the afternoon. Tea at El Golf. She was having cocktails with Lautaro Donoso at the Charles. What if he should want to dance cheek to cheek?
Laura mentioned that she would be spending the four days at the Ibañez-Grey fundo. Conchi and Quena were impressed. Andrés Ibañez-Grey was senator of mines, had been ambassador to France. One of the wealthiest men in Chile, his estate in the south spanned the entire width of the country, from the Andes to the Pacific. “Chile is a narrow country … but still…!” Quena said. What neither girl knew, and Laura didn’t care about, was that both Ibañez-Grey and her father worked with the CIA. Her friends also didn’t know that Laura’s parents weren’t going. They had backed out that morning, her mother ill again. Laura knew they would say it was improper for her to go, even though Don Andrés’s sister would be chaperone. It would be a small party. He was a widower. Two of his sons were going, and the fiancée of one of his sons.
They parted then, agreeing to meet on Monday evening to study chemistry. At home Laura hung up her hat and blazer, changed from her school uniform. Her parents were having a reception that night. Her father was.
Laura checked on her mother, Helen, who was asleep. The room reeked of Joy perfume and gin. In the hall o
utside her mother’s room old Damián was shuffling around, rags tied to his feet, polishing, polishing the parquet floors. He was always there, upstairs and downstairs, day in and day out, just as his small grandson was always in the garden. His sole task was to pluck dead petals off azaleas. Two mozos and Domingo, the butler, moved most of the garish “French” furniture into the garage. Domingo helped Laura arrange masses of cineraria and ranunculus from the florist, daffodils from the garden, hundreds of candles. There were mirrors everywhere … Helen never could decide about paintings. At night, with the candles lit, it would look better, Laura said. She went over lists with Domingo and the maids, checked the meatballs, the empanadas. María and Rosa were excited; their hair was in curlers.
Laura put on a cocktail dress and makeup that she would never have worn around her own friends. She looked at least twenty-one, pretty, and a little cheap. Her father, in a tuxedo, knocked on her door and they went downstairs. They greeted military and mining people, diplomats, Chilean and Peruvian dignitaries, the British and American ambassadors. One of Laura’s functions was to translate; few of the Americans spoke Spanish. Helen, in three years, had learned only “Traiga hielo.” “Traiga café.” Laura circulated, making introductions, conversation. She was cornered by a Señor Soto, a seedy Bolivian official. His remarks were insinuating, offensive. Laura signaled to her father, who came over, but just grinned at Señor Soto and said “Isn’t she a honey?” and left. Laura shook her arm away.
Andrés Ibañez-Grey was in the foyer. His hair was silver, his eyes so pale gray they seemed like the sightless eyes of a statue. Domingo took his hat and coat. Laura went to greet him.