by Nan Cuba
“Only through their father’s story.” He thanked the carhop, who took our tray. “Can you imagine what it must’ve been like coming here, not even knowing the language?” He steered onto the road. “People hated Czechs. That’s why Albina quit third grade.”
Sam had a habit of driving through unfamiliar parts of town. Now we found ourselves on the East Side, passing lopsided houses, three-legged dogs, cluttered yards—nothing like our neighborhood. I wondered if Otis’ illegitimate son and former mistress lived nearby. If so, then Ruby came here on her days off. When Sam waved to some people on their front porch, I asked who they were, thinking Ruby might’ve brought him. “Don’t know,” he said, “but it pays to be friendly.” We didn’t say anything else until we got home.
At our back door, he teased, “Thanks for the date, cutie.” He twirled the keys. “Cheap and quiet—the way I like them.”
“Jerk,” I said. I wished our strange afternoon wouldn’t end.
I caught Sam in his room on a Saturday morning before he left to take Terezie on a date. This would be our last private talk before he moved to Austin.
“Where y’all going?” I asked.
He peered over his shoulder while brushing a shoe. The second shoe and an open can of polish lay on his chest-of-drawers. “To Taylor for a Cervenka reunion,” he said.
“Is Terezie making you go?”
“They have great food, and a band.” He glanced at his hands but watched me. “And I get to take her home.” His eyebrows did a Groucho Marx.
“So, how does she feel about you leaving next week?” I hoped they’d decided to date different people.
“It’s not like she and I won’t still see each other.” He started brushing the other shoe, the first left beside the can of polish. “I’ll come home most weekends.” He flipped the brush then buffed again.
“So you’ll be spending that time with her? I mean…”
“Don’t you like the Cervenkas?”
“Why do you always want to talk about them?”
Sam stopped brushing. “Are you mad at them, or at me?”
I bit my cheek. “It’s just hard, you know, to see you go.”
He tilted his head, leaned on one hip.
“O-ka-ay,” I sing-songed. I wasn’t going to embarrass myself. At least my father wouldn’t be giving Sam anymore whippings. Besides, the Cervenkas’ contrast to our country-club life was probably what attracted him. I guiltily wondered if they, in turn, welcomed him because his mother was their landlord. Still, when Sam helped me take a closer look, even I was curious. I’d recently talked to Josef about keeping a hive at the farm and sharing the honey. Unlike Sam, though, I thought he and Albina were stricter than our parents. “Exactly how are Dad’s rules any different from Josef’s?” I knew that Terezie had a nightly curfew and daily chores. Cyril still worked on the farm every summer.
“People are respected in that house. Everybody can say what they think.”
I remembered my father’s straight back as he said “Yes, sir” to my grandfather and my mother’s rules about being a lady. In fact, we weren’t allowed to say a lot. But there was one thing Sam couldn’t argue with. Josef had told Sam that for as long as Papa lived, whenever that arm cocked backward around a hoe or shovel, the three-fingered claw clamping the handle, he’d thought of earth’s minerals and moisture, its depths, odors and texture, its hidden roots and worms. “Josef’s story about his daddy’s arm, that claw and the worms—it sounds like he’s a farmer because he’s guilty.”
“He may feel guilty, but nobody blames him. They don’t feel sorry for him, either, or for Papa Antonín. They see everybody the same. Nobody’s better or worse.” I wondered if he’d heard Dr. King’s speech on TV two days earlier. “The truth’s all that matters. There’s no secrets. The Cervenkas just get on with it. Life, I mean.” He dropped his shoes on the floor, and stepped into them, scuffs erased, ready to go.
I nodded, thinking, What secrets? What truth? “You hear Martin Luther King at that rally?”
He shrugged. “Of course.” He shoved shoe polish in a desk drawer. “Why?”
“Just wondered what you thought.”
“Be faithful to whatever exists in you,” he said, his brow a question mark. “That way, you become indispensable.”
“Huh?” Had he heard that in class? Was he making fun of Dad?
“Oh. Nothing.” He flipped off the light switch by the door.
“The Cervenkas are like family,” I blurted, deciding to tag along, if he’d let me.
His snicker cut a seam in the dark. “A person can make his own family.”
“So I’m not your sister?” I blinked, and his silhouette emerged from shadow.
“You can’t get rid of me that easy.”
When I turned on the light above the stairs, he started down, his shoes gleaming. Glancing back, he winked.
Instead of coming home in October for my birthday dinner, Sam sent a postcard. The cover photo showed the Jets and Sharks from West Side Story, along with the caption, “Play it cool, boy.” On the other side, Sam wrote, “Breeze it, buzz it, easy does it.” Next to his signature, he wrote, “Your badass brother,” and sketched a torso in blue jeans, leaning casually against a wall.
CHAPTER 7
SPIRIT DAY IS THAT awkward few hours during the opening of the fall semester when a parade of student-decorated floats winds through the campus, ending on a back lawn where contests and general mayhem commence (dunking booths—ugh!). Since classes are called off, faculty members are expected to attend. I usually appear just before the parade begins, wave to any administrators I see, then sneak my way back to the side door that leads to the staircase across from my office.
I’m standing on the mall, twenty feet from the floats, trying to catch my dean’s eye, when someone calls my name. “Dr. Pelton, yoo-hoo,” she sings. “Hey, yo, over here.”
Behind me, no; to the side, nothing. I try again, no one.
“Dr. Explorer-Who-Can-Find-Anything, this way. Up here.”
Cornelia is standing in a pickup’s flatbed with a group of girls wearing green t-shirts and throwing pieces of hard candy into the crowd. A hand-painted banner reads, “Kappa Delta Chi.” Cornelia waves: not hello, I realize; she’s calling me over. “We saved you a spot,” she shouts.
Now, the dean is watching. He claps and nods, laughing, poking the Vice President of Academic Affairs with his Brooks Brothers elbow. She points her accountant finger and smiles.
I shake my head, no. I wave to the truck.
Suddenly, the girls are chanting, “Doc-tor Pel-ton, come on, get on.”
I scowl my most ferocious scowl. I glare.
“Doc-tor Pel-ton, come on, get on.” They’re bending, twirling their arms: cheerleaders. Three sweet-faced devils, not Cornelia, hop down and skip over. I’m lifted forward, limp, sputtering.
On the truck, Cornelia is wearing yellow flippers. She smacks her right foot three times, and music pounds from someone’s speaker. Candy is shoved into my hands. So I throw the handful, pieces pelting the air like bullets, a cherry sour ball ricocheting off the dean’s shiny forehead.
When I was thirty-four, an oncologist told my mother that she had multiple myeloma. Kurt said the only difference between her situation and ours was that she didn’t have to wonder how and when she’d die, a prophecy that unfolded twelve years later. Her surgeries and cycles of medications began thirteen years after Sam was gone. At the end, stoic as her hero Dorothy Parker, she slumped in a wheelchair, a silk scarf serving as a sling for her broken arm, a glass of champagne in her free hand. During her final months, I drove home most weekends, and we lay on her bed, talking. Although she didn’t ask about my work, I once heard her say into the phone, “She’s an authority on the indigenous people of Latin America.”
When my father had a heart attack two years later, Kurt, by then a celebrated surgeon, inserted a calf’s aortic valve, and following recovery, Dad broadened his contemplation of the spiritual.
During weekly phone calls, he’d make some reference, like “avoid the tunnel,” or “exponential diminishment,” or “the Gnostic self as compared to the Buddhist self.” I visited him on Christmas and his birthday. He never asked me to stay, but occasionally he’d call me Mama. His hand squeezed my elbow, bruising, when he walked me to my car.
He drove to Austin for acupuncture treatments and began a regimen of vitamin therapy. He’d been visiting me monthly since my mother died. Over vegetarian lunches—his acquiescence to my new habits—he asked questions about other cultures’ medical theories. I hoped he’d incorporate some of the more conservative ideas into his own practice, but my brothers, of course, wouldn’t have approved. He arrived most third Mondays at 11:00 a.m., once asking a waiter to take a picture of us sitting at our table eating geranium ice cream, our dishes topped with blooms. Two weeks after his funeral, as my brothers, their wives, and I walked through the house, Hugh, who’d slept in a recliner at the hospital, held out the framed photograph, our father’s smile straight from my youth, genuine. “Here,” Hugh said, “this is yours.”
CHAPTER 8
1964
DURING THE FIRST MONTH after Sam left, I pretended he still lived upstairs. The second month, although he skipped my fifteenth birthday, he came home to see Terezie. That weekend, he slept at our house, but he spent his days with her parents or fooled around at the farm. After he left again, I tried to figure a way to visit him in Austin. He shared an apartment near the campus with Kurt, who spent most of his time at the ΣΑΕ house. In November when President Kennedy was shot, the school sent us home at exactly 1:42 that afternoon, and I phoned Sam. I didn’t care if I got in trouble over the long distance bill. I needed his reassurance, but, instead, he cried. After that, I made myself wait until the Christmas holidays, thinking we’d have time to go to the movies, to talk. Instead, he spent his two weeks with a few friends and, again, Terezie, then Kurt drove him back to school. He hadn’t mentioned the torso on the postcard, but to tell the truth, he was already somewhere else. By February, I turned my attention to my father.
On a Saturday morning at the end of spring break, I stood in the upstairs hall ironing a blouse on a contraption that folded out from the wall. From my position, I could see Hugh’s back as he stood in our parents’ bedroom. Together, we watched our father sitting on the bed, tying his wing tips. I imagined his hands gloved, holding a metal tool, blood daubed with cotton by an attentive nurse.
Routine circumscribed my father’s life. Saturdays, he met my grandfather for golf. He used an old set of clubs, the bag limp and faded, its crudeness, for him, advertising his sacrifice. “My P.G.A. rabbit’s foot,” he’d say before he left, holding out the stained canvas, hoping someone would comment on its ragged condition. At the end of the match, he’d privately tip the course starter so he could return at 5:30 the next morning and practice a shot he’d hit poorly. He stayed most Sundays until just before church, where he taught a Bible study class, its members the same eight men for fifteen years.
Most of the hour they talked sports, each game a contest between good and evil, the key players God’s acolytes. The last twenty minutes, the men discussed Bible chapters my father had researched in books of historical and textual analysis. He’d become a scholar, the individual figures, especially reluctant, ill-fated Moses and devout Paul, his friends, their doubts and talks with God described as family anecdotes.
“After guiding two generations through the desert,” he liked to say, “barely any food, his people squabbling, sinning, Moses wrote his five books, then took a break at the Water of Contradiction. And for just one second”—he’d snap his fingers—“he wondered whether God could actually get them out of this mess. And what do you think he got for that?” Here, my father would search the faces of his audience. “He got to stand on Mount Nebo and watch everybody take off, leaving him to die by himself. One mistake,” my father would add while raising an index finger. “One.”
Hugh, who’d just turned eleven, had a different passion—music—and that Saturday morning I had a clear view of him tilting his head, pretending to hold a horn. “I was playing this big ole saxophone,” he said. “Big, big as a tuba.” He hopped then drummed his feet.
“Can’t usually remember my dreams,” my father said, standing, sliding his wallet into his back pocket. “Try not to, in fact.”
“Playing, you know, that one from July Fourth. But the notes were bubbles.” Hugh punched the air as his bare feet slid across the carpet. “Like clouds, except kinda shark-shaped.”
My father clapped teasingly. “Shark clouds from a tuba, huh Hugh?”
Hugh grinned, shrugged twice.
“I hope you’ll be sure and tell that to the guys at school on Monday. They ought to get a real kick out of it.”
“Aw, Dad, it’s only a dream.”
Hugh walked, dragging his toes, toward the doorway. “Did I ever tell you,” my father said, “about my patient whose foot had been eaten by a shark?” They stepped into the hall, and my father lifted his hand to pat Hugh’s head then returned it instead to his pocket. His keys clinked; I smelled coffee, Vitalis.
Hugh’s eyes widened. “You’re just kidding, right?” He grabbed the banister when they started down the stairs.
I unplugged the iron, followed. The only way I’d learn details about my father’s work was by overhearing him with one of my brothers.
“Said he’d been working for Texaco off the Houston coast,” my father said. “Can’t remember exactly how it happened, but with his prosthesis he got around pretty good.”
My father’s patients often called, tongue-tied, or sent gifts, some expensive, but he discouraged visits. Mr. Gueldner, muscled as a weightlifter, his voice like a radio announcer, had come anyway, right before Christmas—he, his wife and three children, one an infant. They brought a Swedish ripple coffeecake baked by the patient himself. “Bless you,” he kept saying while my father mumbled something, shook hands with one of the older kids. They sat on the sofa, and when my father said he’d leave some cake for Santa, they all blinked, nudged one another. After they’d left—Mr. Gueldner thanked at the door, the baby needing to be changed—my father mentioned the leg.
“What’s a prosthesis?” Hugh asked when we reached the downstairs landing. My father checked his watch. He pushed Hugh toward his study.
“Can I come?” I asked.
He nodded while we walked. “It’s an artificial limb.”
“What’s it made of?” Hugh leaned close, tripping on his toes, grabbing my father’s sleeve.
“Various man-made materials are—”
“But how does it stay, you know, on the leg?”
I sat on a stool in the corner while they walked over to the copper kettle filled with bleached human bones. My father picked out a fibula, a tibia, a talus, then one of the feet, its sections held together with wires. Pointing, working the joints, he helped Hugh memorize the names, explained the procedures for making and wearing a prosthetic foot. Hugh assumed I’d already been given the lesson, and my father seemed to forget I was there. Hugh asked questions (“Does it hurt when you walk?” “Can you swim in it?”), and my father answered, using medical terms (“mechanical device,” “supplement the function,” “extensor digitorum longus”).
“Are these real?” Hugh asked. “Did you know…him?” He tried to walk the foot across the desk, anklebones limp at the joint, toes skidding.
My father folded a section of newspaper, stuffed it in a wastebasket. “He wasn’t anybody. Granddaddy calls him Beaner.”
I laughed, thinking the name sounded silly. Now, knowing how close my father was to Otis and Ruby, I wonder how he reconciled his father’s racism. Years later, he’d try to explain. “It was common in that generation.”
“Cause he’s like a bunch of beans?” Hugh asked. He turned the foot over, its segmented parts flopping.
“No, it’s just his name.”
“Crazy,” Hugh said, balancing the sole on his h
and, toes like claws, dangling. Then, appalled: “Granddaddy knew him?”
My father slumped in his chair, his elbows on his thighs. He wiped one side of his high-boned face, tugged his nose. “No, of course not. I didn’t say that.”
“But where’d the name come from? You said—”
“Granddaddy told me the story.”
“Tell us,” Hugh said, peeking over a scapula, “please.”
My father ruffled a book’s pages. “I don’t think so,” he said, looking at his watch, then surprising me with a wink. “I’m awful late. Couldn’t possibly.”
“Awww, Daddy, please?” Hugh’s forehead wrinkled; his mouth fell open.
“Are you big enough?” My father caught Hugh’s arm, pulled him like a crane hook—Hugh’s feet barely kept up with his body. “This is serious, now.”
“Yeah.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, sir.”
My father glanced at the carpet. “The whole thing started when a farmer and his family were killed, and the sheriff arrested a man who had swum across the border from Juárez. He was wearing the farmer’s pants, and the farmer’s wedding ring was in the pocket.” Folding his arms, he seemed to go into a trance.
Hugh blinked, then stared, receptive as Sam must’ve been at the same age.
“Know what?” My father slapped his thighs then leaned on his hands, serious. “I really don’t like this story much.” He studied his watch, sucked his teeth. “I really do have to go. Granddaddy’s waiting. We’ll have to finish our talk later.”
“But you can’t quit now,” Hugh pleaded, not realizing that our father wasn’t teasing anymore. He wrapped one arm around Dad’s neck. “You already started.”
“Hugh,” my father said, exasperated. He rolled his chair toward the windows, stared at a pecan tree in the yard. “Those days, you see,” his words uttered by rote, as if counted off a list, as if dredged then reported, “Nugent was a wild place with things happening we’d never stand for today.” He faced Hugh again. “And, with everybody so mad at the man for killing their friend, a big crowd got together and, oh, they hanged him. And since nobody knew who the guy was, Granddaddy thought, well…he brought the body home.” He stood, then swatted nervously at a grease stain. “Anyway, that’s Beaner.”