That seemed to rouse his indignation. “You don’t know the least beginning of what it means to be a Cordova!”
“What I’ve learned, I don’t want to be.”
He smiled at me thinly, his face lighting briefly. “You have a certain arrogance yourself, Amanda. You are instinctively more Cordova than you know.”
Impatient, and moving in angry denial, I sprang up from my chair. On the wall behind him hung a narrow mirror in which I glimpsed myself—and was astonished. The stranger in the glass looked proudly Spanish with her black hair and flashing dark eyes, and there was nothing of humility in her. I hadn’t known I could look like that, and I turned away from my reflection, rejecting it.
“If there is evil in me, then it lives on in you,” Juan said slyly.
I knew he meant to torment me and I stood up to him. “All right—I’ll accept that. But I think there was no evil in my mother. The miniature you painted tells me that she was gay, perhaps a little reckless, but not wicked.”
“Sit down,” the old man commanded. “Tell me what you know about her death.”
I took my chair again, shaking my head. “Nothing. My father told me only that she died in a fall.”
“And no one here will tell you the truth. As I’ve told them not to. I wanted you to come to me.”
“I’ve come. And now I’ll put it to you directly. Is it true that she died in a fall?”
His thin hands were clenched together on the desk before him, and he stared at them for a moment before he looked back at me, his face expressionless and deeply lined.
“Yes, she died in a fall. But first she killed a man. The law calls her a murderess, and then a suicide.”
It was as if I had been suddenly frozen in my chair. My muscles tightened in rejection of his words, my hands were clenched about the carving of the road runner as tightly as his own were clasped on his desk. My breath seemed locked in my chest. Only by a terrible effort was I able at last to move, to cry out.
“I don’t believe that! I will never believe it!”
There was pain in his voice. “That is what I said in the beginning—that I would not believe. But of course there was a police investigation and the result left us no choice. Clarita saw what happened. She stood in the window of the room you now occupy and she saw it all. Even I had to accept the truth in the end.”
“Katy didn’t accept it,” I said.
His look sharpened. “What do you mean by that?”
“My grandmother wrote my father a letter before she died. She said he had misjudged my mother, and she wanted him to bring me to visit her. He never told me about the letter. I found it among his papers after he died, but I didn’t know what it meant.”
“Katy did that?” He seemed both astonished and outraged. “She should not have acted without consulting me.”
“Would you have told her not to write?”
“But of course. I would have known it would be no use. Your father would not change. Katy wanted to deceive herself up to the end. She wanted to believe what was not so.”
“Could she have had some reason for believing it wasn’t so?”
The fierce, dark eyes examined me, probing as though his clouded vision sought for clarity. “I wish I could think that. She had only a mother’s heart. She had the love she felt for a daughter.”
“Perhaps there’s wisdom in love.”
He answered me in a tone more gentle than I had heard from him. “I loved Doroteo too. As she loved me. We were very close, your mother and I. That is why I have sent for you to come here.”
I believed him. And yet I didn’t quite believe him. That air of gentleness was uncharacteristic. Surely if he had brought me here because he loved Doroteo, and thought with any warmth of her daughter, he would have greeted me differently. My uncertainty strengthened me and hardened me against him as I spoke my thought.
“I can’t believe you sent for me because of any love for my mother.”
Again he spoke in sudden anger. “You know nothing of me!”
It no longer mattered whether he kept me here or sent me away. It didn’t matter at all, I told myself. I had been terribly shocked, and there was still a trembling within me. Tears burned in my eyes and I hated my own weakness.
“I already know that you’re arrogant, and perhaps a little cruel,” I told him, blinking weakness away furiously.
His own anger seemed to die. “You are more like Katy than like Doroteo. They both had spirit, but Katy would fight for more. Perhaps you have possibilities. I can offer you nothing but hurt when it comes to the past, though perhaps there were extenuating circumstances. I have tried to believe that.”
Possibilities? I didn’t like the sound of the word. What use he had for me, I didn’t know, but I would be on guard against anything that might violate my own feelings. Now, however, was the moment to learn as much as I could.
“Who was the man my mother is supposed to have killed?”
“His name was Kirk Landers. He was the stepbrother of a second cousin of yours—the woman who brought you to Santa Fe today. Sylvia Stewart. They both grew up in this house because Katy took them in when their parents died.”
I tried to digest this, remembering Sylvia’s uneasiness with me. She must have felt a reluctance to meet the daughter of the woman who was supposed to have killed her stepbrother.
“What were the extenuating circumstances?” I asked.
Juan Cordova sighed deeply. “That is a long story. Shall we save it for another time?”
He looked suddenly tired and old, and I remembered Clarita’s warning not to stay with him for long. The effect of that shocking revelation he had made still seethed in me violently, but I must not push him now in his illness.
“I’d better go,” I said. “I’ve tired you.”
One long-fingered, aristocratic hand reached out to rest on my arm. I could feel the strength of his fingers. If there was weakness in this man, it was not something he chose to accept.
“You will stay with me until I say you may go.”
My private resistance to such male authority stirred in me, but he was old and ill, as well as domineering, and I let the command pass with only a small effort to deny it.
“Aunt Clarita warned me that—”
“Clarita is sometimes a fool! She will do as I say.”
Even though he knew her so much better than I, I had the sudden feeling that he underestimated his older daughter. Clarita had more to her than surfaced in her obedience to her father.
“Tell me,” he said more gently, “do you remember anything at all about the day your mother died?”
“I don’t remember anything of that time. Since I’ve come here, I’ve had a few flashes of recognition. But these seem to do with places, not people. I suppose the people I might remember have all changed in twenty years.”
“It’s probably just as well,” Grandfather said. “Paul Stewart is planning to write a book about famous murders of the Southwest.”
So that was the answer—a book about murder! This was what they had been hinting at, and why no one had wanted to come right out and tell me what his book was about.
“You mean he is going to—to include—” I faltered to a stop.
“Yes. He means to write about Doroteo and Kirk.”
“But that’s dreadful. He should be stopped. Can’t you—”
“I have tried. Without success. Naturally, I don’t want these happenings resurrected at this late date. It can only hurt those who are living. The affair has been mostly forgotten, except by us. Now he will renew interest in it, and we will have to live through it all over again.”
Sorrow seemed to crush him, and for the first time I felt a sympathy for him. In spite of his arrogance, he had suffered too, and my coming here must be a goad to old pain.
“Sylvia told me that Paul would have gone to New York to see me, if you hadn’t happened to bring me here.”
“Yes. He is questioning anyone who was present at
the time of the tragedy. I suppose even a five-year-old might have memories that he could find useful. But now you can tell him that you remember nothing, and he’ll have to leave you alone. Perhaps it will help if you can be as discouraging as possible.”
“I’ll certainly try, if he questions me,” I promised.
“Now tell me something about yourself,” he said. “What do you do? What do you want to do?”
“All I want to do is paint.”
He laughed softly, delightedly, the bitterness gone, the mood change instant, and in its suddenness unnerving. My own emotional transitions were made less quickly.
“So there is such a thing as heritage! The strain has come down through the family. Along with other things less pleasant. I am an artist manqué. So I give myself to the collecting of the art of others. As an appreciator and critic, I have few peers. Doroteo had the talent too, but she would not work at it. She did not care enough.”
“I care. I work very hard. It’s the way I earn my living, though mostly in small ways. I’ve had a showing of my paintings at a gallery in New York, and I’ve even sold a few. I’m already eager to paint in Santa Fe.”
“Good—this is a fine country for painters, and a town that is kind to them. What is that you’ve been fondling in your hands ever since you came in? It looks like a carving.”
I remembered the figure of the road runner and handed it to him across a corner of the desk.
“You made this for me when I was very small. I’ve kept it ever since. It was the toy I took to bed with me at night when I was young and sometimes frightened.”
He took the carving and turned it about in his hands. I knew he was sensing the smoothness of the wood with his fingers, noting the indentations of the carving. His love for wood as a medium was evident in the sensitivity of his touch, and perhaps too his sorrow because he could no longer create, as once he had done. I felt a bond of understanding with him, because I too wanted to create.
“Yes, I remember this,” he said. “I remember the high hopes I had for you as Doroteo’s daughter. You loved me quite innocently then. Without wanting anything from me.” Sudden suspicion came into his voice, and my brief sense of a bond was broken. “What do you want from me now?”
These changes of mood ruffled me, but on this I could answer him readily. “Nothing except what you want to give, Grandfather.”
The look he returned was arrogant, proud—it gave me no relief. “There is little I can give you. But there may be something I want of you.”
“I’ll give it, if I can,” I said.
“You are like Doroteo. Generous. I am surrounded by those I can no longer trust. Those who are my enemies. I suffer over this. But then—the essence of your true Spaniard is his ability to suffer. To suffer and to laugh. But laughter turns to mockery after a time.”
He seemed to go into a brooding silence, and I tried to draw him from it.
“I would like to know something about my grandmother,” I said gently. “What was Katy like?”
His expression softened and he opened a drawer of his desk and took out a picture in an oval frame—another miniature. “This I painted too, before any of the children were born.”
He handed me the picture and I saw again the gift he must have had for portraiture. The young face that looked out at me had strength and character. She was a woman who might have hated adobe walls, as Sylvia Stewart had said, but she’d have loved her husband with a loyalty that would permit no weakness. Her hair was fair, like Eleanor’s, and she wore it short in the picture and fluffed youthfully about her ears, yet there was maturity in the blue eyes and a forcefulness about the chin. Here was a woman who had been able to cope.
My grandmother, I thought, and felt a stirring of recognition in me. She was not a stranger to me. I could recognize kinship, even though I resembled her outwardly not at all.
He took the picture back from me and put it away. “She did not look like that as I remember her. I wanted her to have long hair, and she grew it for me. Her hair was thick and heavy as the gold it resembled. She wore it high on her head, and it gave her a look of poise and assurance. She could have been a great Spanish lady—my Katy.”
Katy, from the farmlands of Iowa! Had she ever expected to play the role of a Spanish lady?
“I wish I could have known her,” I said.
Juan Cordova made a sound of distress that carried anger in its depth. “She had the right to know you. Your father took you away.”
“I suppose he did what he thought was best. He wanted me to grow up in a different environment.”
“And away from me.”
The words were flat, certain, and I did not contradict them.
“Enough of all this,” he went on. “I have no time for sentiment. No time for the past. The present is short and there is much to be done. We must make plans.”
I suppose it was sentiment I had come for, but I was beginning to see that I would not have it from Juan Cordova. I could only wait to hear about his plans.
He was silent for a few moments, thinking, and as I waited uneasily, not trusting any plans he might make for me, I looked about the room. There were the inevitable white walls, the brown vigas that graced every ceiling. Burgundy draperies were drawn across the windows, but since the room was only a little higher than the floor of the living room, it could not have looked out upon any distant view, as my room did. There was a door which led into the darkness of a bedroom beyond. And all about, set on bookcase shelves and small tables, were the treasures of a lifetime. My eye was caught by the handsomely carved and painted figure of a bullfighter swirling his cape. On a lower shelf stood a buff-colored pottery bowl with brown buffalo pounding their hoofs as they ran endlessly from hunters around its circumference. It looked as if it might be old and valuable. Here, however, were none of those frightening desert creatures I had seen downstairs. Perhaps Juan Cordova himself played their role, and I wondered if I was the victim upon whom he would next pounce. I put the uneasy thought aside and let my gaze move on about the room.
On the walls were hung paintings of Santa Fe scenes—the Cathedral of St. Francis casting the shadows of its twin towers across a stone walk; a row of adobe houses that might belong to this very neighborhood; a scene on the Alameda and another in the sun-speckled plaza. Undoubtedly these had been painted by local artists, and they made me want to find my own scenes, try my own conception in color of what I saw.
“I have decided,” my grandfather said abruptly, and his voice was strong, assured, banishing all weakness. “There are things you will do for me at once.”
A warning of resistance stiffened in me, but I answered quietly. “I’m waiting, Grandfather.”
“First you will speak to Clarita.” His tone was harsh, commanding. “She guards me like a dragon because the doctor has said I must conserve my strength. There is to be no more of that. You are to come here to me whenever you wish, and without waiting for her permission. Tell her so. Then you will tell Eleanor that she is no longer needed to accompany me when I walk in the patio. From now on, you will come with me on my walks. As for Gavin—you will tell him that he is to take you through the store and show you all that is important for you to know. You will now become one of the family, and you are to learn the store, Amanda. He will teach you. If all this is clear, you are to go at once and begin.”
My gasp must have been audible. It shocked me that I should be brought in from outside and set above everyone in the house. Such an act was anything but just, and I didn’t mean to be so commanded. Setting out to anger members of my new family with these highhanded orders was not for me. What he planned, I didn’t know, but I suspected that it wouldn’t be something I’d want. What I had wanted from the Cordovas had another value.
“No,” I said. “I won’t do any of these things.”
There was a small silence as though he listened to the echo of my words without fully understanding them.
“You said?” he murmured.
&nb
sp; “I said I wouldn’t go about giving orders to the people in your household. If I’m to visit here, I want to be friends with them. I’m certainly not going to set myself above them and tell them what to do.”
Perhaps it had been a long time since anyone had spoken so to Juan Cordova. I saw the angry flush mount in his face, saw the tightening of his hands into fists where they lay before him on the desk. He lost his temper.
“You will do as I say, or you may pack up and go away at once! I will not endure such foolishness. Your mother betrayed us all. Your father was a fool—stupid and mindless in his behavior. I have not forgotten or forgiven the words he spoke to me before he left, and I will not tolerate disobedience from his daughter. You will not go the way of Doroteo. Or—if that is the pattern—you can leave at once.”
I pushed my chair back and stood up. I was trembling and my muscles were tense as my own rage spilled out.
“Then I will pack up and go! The only reason I came here is because I love my mother. Even without knowing her, I love her. If some injustice had been done her, I wanted to set it right. And I won’t listen to words against my father. How could someone like you possibly know his worth and his goodness? He was so far above any of the Cordovas that—that—” I choked on my anger and there were tears of rage in my eyes. As I started for the door, I shoved my chair aside so furiously that it fell over on the floor with a bang. I didn’t care. I was through with this dreadful man.
His sudden ringing laughter brought me to a halt before I reached the door. Juan Cordova was laughing. I turned about in further outrage and stared at him.
“Wait,” he said. “Come back here, Amanda. I am pleased with you. You will do, as none of the others will. The Cordova strain comes through. You are a young, wild thing with a temper. You are a part of me and of your mother. Come—sit down, and we will talk more quietly.”
The unexpected gentleness of his voice warned me. He could not be entirely trusted. Yet the tone of it hypnotized me. With hands that still shook, I righted the chair and sat down in it. I had no intention of forgiving him easily, no intention of trusting him, but something in me did not want to run away.
The Turquoise Mask Page 7