The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  From one of those maids, I’d contracted tuberculosis.

  * * *

  I wonder what our Codrioli Road neighbors were thinking of us? Here was this suburban, barely middle-class street of new yards, new trees, new little ranch houses, a neighborhood of almost entirely Irish and Italian working people who had left the ethnic enclaves of Boston behind, many of them so full of the pretension that this meant everything that they started voting Republican, even against the Kennedys. There was not, at that time, a single black family living in Namoset. So it was bad, or rather disconcerting enough that a Jewish man was living on Codrioli Road with a vain Latin Catholic wife much younger than he and who’d left him and then come back three plus years later with a sick little boy (what I had was kept from the neighbors), who often sat for hours like a house cat in a picture window, wanly watching them. And now these people were getting a live-in maid? And was she really going to be some jungle-reared Indian in National Geographic getup? They knew all about it, as Mirabel Graetz, who still signed her name Mirabel Arrau de Graetz, was not above bragging about how she’d grown up like a queen in her far-off, crummy, Communist-ridden country. As if she already wasn’t ridiculously superior-acting enough: the neighborhood’s first two-car family, because her mother had bought her the Plymouth so that she could drive in to Boston to finish her college degree at Simmons, which her mother was paying for too—leaving her sick little boy at home so that she could go to college, and for what? And refusing even to attend church with them in Namoset, driving off every Sunday in her car to attend mass at the cardinal’s cathedral in Boston!

  In Namoset, before she learned to drive, my mother had to have felt like a prisoner in the little house that she never learned to like much anyway. In Guatemala City she would have been content to be a housewife, surrounded by servants, absorbed in the city’s endless upper-class social whirl of baby showers and baptisms and afternoon teas and evening galas. But for friends in Namoset she had Girlie O’Brien, who lived across the street, and Mary Codrioli, next door. Girlie worked as a police lady at school crossings. Mary Codrioli, married to a laborer-cousin of the Codrioli developer who’d built our neighborhood, did beautician work at home. Once Mary Codrioli asked my mother if my father worshiped a Golden Calf like other Jews. And Girlie saw a television show about Guatemala and told all the neighbors that my mother had grown up bathing naked in dirty rivers.

  * * *

  Waiting at the gray Formica table, I must have heard the car pull up, footsteps on the frozen wooden planks of the breezeway, but all I remember is the door opening and an icy draft swooping in on wings and my father standing in the doorway in a state of great excitement, a shopping bag from Calvert’s under each arm. What was I doing in the kitchen? he wanted to know. Just as a small cardboard suitcase appeared in the space between his leg and the doorframe, and was set down on the floor and then pushed from behind into the kitchen. You were dressed in fire engine red—the winter coat my father had just bought at Calvert’s, the discount outlet in Namoset Square. “Oh Roger, she was so cold, imagine! They sent her up with just a sweater!” He stepped aside, unveiling you. “C’mon, Flor de Mayo”—he pronounced it “Floor de Mayo” as in “mayonnaise”—“C’mon in and meet your new family.”

  You didn’t wipe your feet at all, but took a few wet steps in your brand-new rubber boots onto the kitchen linoleum and stood staring over my head through the den into the pale, motley light of the living room. I don’t think you even looked thirteen. Your hair was black and not quite straight, a soft, viny cascade falling around your slim shoulders, an uneven bang over your startled eyes. Years later my father would recall that it was days before you changed the expression you’d worn from the moment you got off the plane, stepping into a gale of harbor winds and snow, panic ringing inside you like a bell. Your timidity and fright over the strangeness of all that was happening to you went right through me then. I loved you from that instant on, loved you almost as if not for yourself at all but as if you were a girl in a storybook that we both had a part in, a sweet pretty orphan girl who’d come to live with us, a scrawny little thing with a doll’s wide-open eyes and pert little nose and a sad little girl’s mouth poised on the edge of a bereft pout, your skin brown and suffused with faraway sunshine. It was an ideal and lyrical beginning—the other kind or kinds of love came later but were often hard to distinguish from the first. After all, our lives, mine and yours, needed a shape that we could express. A yearlong quarantine is an eternity at that age, and I must have grasped the ghoulish reality that I’d had something more than just a brush with death, survived, and had been transferred to this strange new place too, where I was spending a year being orphaned from a normal little boy’s life. When I’d be able to go outside again, in the spring, it would be alongside you, Flor. Until then I hardly had any idea of where we lived. I didn’t even know that Codrioli Road ran through a cozy valley, and that the steep incline behind the O’Briens’ house had a cemetery at the top (where my parents had resolved their religious differences by buying a family plot so that none of my father’s relatives could ever even entertain the notion that my mother might end up among them one day in the Jewish cemetery in Roxbury . . . this new family plot where Flor, twenty years later . . .). So the world that I still live in begins for me then and there, with you stepping in from the breezeway so that we could be infiltrated into it together.

  My father is not even conversational in Spanish: “Tell Floor de Mayo to take her coat off, Rog.”

  He was all worked up, grinning around like a happy frog puppet. He was already acting as if he’d brought a daughter home, not a maid. My Spanish, at that time, was much better than my English. I often didn’t know what my father was saying.

  “Take off your coat, but take off your gloves first,” I said, in Spanish.

  Actually, you were wearing mittens, but I’d have to run to a bilingual dictionary right now to know the Spanish for mittens (I just did: zolapas). You looked at me, startled. But you must have felt relieved that I spoke your language. Slowly, watching your own hands as if giving it a great deal of thought, you pulled off your mittens. My father took them from you, laid them on the table. Then he helped you off with your coat. Underneath you were wearing your convent orphanage uniform, the eternal school uniform, indistinguishable in style from those girls wear even now, two decades later: dull blue-and-gray plaid skirt, white blouse, droopy navy blue sweater, white knee socks. It was about two sizes too big for you even then, and for years it was what you would put on after school for comfort and warmth when you had laundry to do in the cold part of the basement, a flannel shirt and sometimes two worn instead of the white blouse.

  What terrified you most of all that day was being shown to your bedroom—having to descend into a basement for the first time in your life, and then having to sleep there. A room recently paneled with finished plywood, and narrow, rectangular windows at the top of the walls, partly blocked by snow and wind-trembled shrubbery, the suburban glow of streetlights projecting trembling shadows into the room.

  Houses in Guatemala generally don’t have basements. It’s an earthquake country, so people aren’t going to rest an entire house over an abyss. During the rainy season basements would flood. In Guatemala City’s General Cemetery even the dead are buried aboveground, the rich in mausoleums and the poor in long, high walls, coffins slid into them like cabinets, decorated with flowers and wreaths, Indian boys running around with rickety wooden ladders they rent for ten centavos to mourners who need to reach the top rows.

  So that late at night, after we’d all gone to bed, I think I sensed your fear. Or maybe I heard you coming up the stairs into the kitchen. Something made me get up from my bed on the sofa and go to the kitchen. You’d left the refrigerator door open to throw a little light into the room, and you were sitting at the table in your pajamas and your sweater, your eyes glowing like a frightened forest animal’s, devouring, as if it were a candy bar, a whole bar of butter.
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br />   THREE

  How could my father believe it? His own and only, practically raised by him, taught by him, Guatemalan, overachieving, sweetheart, Ail-American Ivy League girl—a baby seller? He’s never believed it. He won’t hear of it, he just paws the hair with a disgusted swipe. That’s how he’s been ever since that day in Consul Simms’s office at the embassy when the consul gave us his lowdown. Until Moya visited me in New York, and we took the Amtrak together to Boston and went to see my father in Namoset and so on. Small comfort we gave him even then, it being true that Moya’s “information” clouded as much as it clarified. Only my own excitement must have seemed really new to him, but even then my decision to return to Guatemala struck him, I think, as belated, as too much too late.

  Flor was thirteen when she came to us, though her passport said she was three years older, but I’m not sure my father ever thought anything she learned before that was of any real worth. Or let’s say of any practical use to her in America and the path she was setting out on. A hindrance, a set of complexes to overcome, is more how he saw it. Well, he’d had humble beginnings too, and realized he’d let it keep him back. He’d settled for too little. By the time we were old enough to notice, he was edging past middle age, and had come to terms with his disappointments, though there had been years of anguish and bitterness over them before.

  But my father knew what he’d helped to make you into, knew he’d taken this poor, pretty waif into his home and heart and treated her like a daughter. His own family was not uncolorful, but it had never produced a base moral criminal, not that he knew of, not even back in Russia! Flor became the daughter of a tough old bird, of a moral as hell Boston Russian immigrant’s son Jew (though only a sporadically practicing Jew), and she fulfilled his every dream, every ambition he’d had for her, almost—Though don’t ever even imply that Flor was anything like an experiment to him, because although in moments of banal cruelty certain family members have been known to suggest such a thing, they’re wrong. Because, how like an experiment? Where’s the original hypothesis? the proud scientific vanity? His decision to send her to school, saving her from a suburban maid’s life and God knows what after? Hardly atom-smashing, gene-recombining Nobel Prize stuff, that, except maybe in Guat. The Dr. Frankensteinian thing to do, I know my father thought, would have been to not put Flor in school. Denying her this, condemning her to suffocation, that was how to produce a monster!

  My father can be pretty heavy handed. The pressures that buried me somehow lifted Flor up. When she was seventeen and weeping with rage and frustration over the endless humiliation of being stuck in school with eleven-year-olds, my father would remind her that by the time she reached Radcliffe or Wellesley she would be in her twenties. As soon as she entered college, she’d meet seniors and grad students practically her own age. The exalted normalcy of that beckoned like a fairy-tale paradise. Do everything right in school, Flor! Keep getting jumped ahead a grade! Paradise is coming closer! Heeding my father’s exhortations was Flor’s only ticket out of the absurdity he’d plunged her into.

  One ambition she didn’t fulfill though: Flor didn’t end up marrying the Cuban and that was good, Antonio Toño Tony the good for nuthin who was her boyfriend for years, but my father would have loved to have seen her married to some serious Ivy League kind of guy—once she was through with her understandable paying back the home country and Guatemalan “roots” thing. (Though really why so understandable? Moya has called this the fundamental mystery of the mystery of You: “Why if Flor had it made in the States did she ever come back to Guatemala in the first place, vos?”) Dad never believed that you might actually reverse the whole remarkable direction of your life and choose to stay on in Guatemala forever. He knew you’d come home and resume, embark on your own serious career, marry, and then have children, his “grandchildren.” My father is getting up there, close to his seventies now, and he’d give anything for grandchildren. And he knew he was probably going to get them from you before me. Well, you were quite a bit older, for one thing.

  Remember how he roared with laughter at the dinner table the Sunday afternoon that twenty-two-year-old freshman Flor—a happy New England college girl glow in her brown cheeks and eyes and dressed appropriately, having shed her eccentrically Frenchified late high school styles for what must have seemed the delicious conformity of sweater, jeans, and penny loafers—when Flor at the table recited that little ditty a Harvard boy had taught her?:

  “Lesley to bed, Wellesley to wed, and Radcliffe girls to talk to.”

  It was kind of like my father had been waiting all his adult life for the insider’s kick of hearing one of his children say something specifically like that; he beamed at the head of our often pretty dismal (especially when Flor wasn’t there) dinner table like a proud patriarch-progenitor of champion scalers of the learning curve. Not since I was getting over TB and rather comically and belatedly learning to speak English had I made him laugh with such simple fatherly joy in a “talented” kid. But I did not feel particularly jealous and was never made to feel that way, because my father did not treat or disregard me in the particular ways that might have forced me to, or else he sometimes did and I’d made myself immune, or in memory have done so, or perhaps have long ago forgiven it. If anyone was jealous of Flor it was my mother, and this hardly crippled her. My own relationship with Flor was too complicated, too riddled by confounding depths, too friendly, yet I have to admit one-sidedly fevered by my perpetual enthrallment, to be set out in some leaky old rowboat of a word like jealous.

  Wellesley was just the next town over from Namoset, so Flor, if it wasn’t too cold, rode back and forth from the campus on her bicycle when she visited. My father, of course, wanted to drive her and the bicycle back, he didn’t want her riding home in the dark. But Flor insisted. I can still see her smiling that new college girl smile, contrived and charming, and getting goofy: “Exuberance ... !” had something to do with it. She was reading William Blake in college and went on about her new philosophy of exuberance, which meant pedaling wildly back to Wellesley through the burnt-leave-smelling dark thinking about how Blake had painted the ghost of a flea—

  “Of a flea!” said my father. “How do you like that!”

  “See?” she said, turning on her bicycle lamp and giggling, waving her hand in front of the dim glow it sent into the dusk. “Doesn’t it look like the ghost of a flea? Though of course Blake’s was really this insectoid, gorgeously monstrous, diaphanously blue and gold man. Is insectoid a word?”

  “Oh Flor, you mean you’re at Wellesley and you don’t know that?” chortled my father. “It’s insectial.”

  “Insectial!” said Flor. “Where did you get such a good vocabulary, Ira?” she asked him for about the millionth time. But my father even remembers Latin, from when he had to study it at Boston English, his high school.

  So there I was, standing in the front yard to say good-bye, my hair falling over my eyes, my fingertips and army surplus fatigue jacket smelling perpetually if faintly of marijuana, with my D-minus average, my summers of forced attendance in the Namoset school system’s special program for underachievers and emotional retards, listening to her and trying to grasp the elusive magic of higher education.

  “But I like anthropology best, so far,” she was saying now, standing beside her kickstanded bike, one hand rested on the domed lamp. “My professor’s young, and kind of shy, he kind of seems to be lecturing down his own shirt collar. But you want to write down everything he says. He tasted human flesh once, in Africa! . . .”

  You were good at it, acting eighteen and all of life suddenly opening up to you when really you were twenty-two and had lived quite a bit already and had even devoured your share of human flesh all right, though not, of course, literally.

  The trees my father had rather obsessively planted throughout our childhoods had all grown pretty huge and leafy, making our yard stand out like a forested autumnal island in the gloomy Atlantic dusk of meagerly treed and shrubbed
Codrioli Road. Our house was painted happy tropical shades of sky blue and yellow, and because my mother had placed scrolled Spanish iron grillwork under the windows and the actual heavy, baroque iron door knocker from her childhood home in Guatemala on our flimsy hollow-core front door, and had similarly decorated the inside with many Spanish-Guatemalan kitschy flourishes, and of course because my mother and Flor lived there, our house was known to everybody at Namoset High as the Copacabana.

  “Well, I better get going . . .” And then, kissing me good-bye, you put your face against mine and your arm around my shoulder, and suddenly I was as moved as if you were going somewhere far away and for a very long time. Flor had abundant, flowing, and fine black hair, as soft against my face as summer’s cool, floppy leaves. “Yeah, see you later,” I mumbled—it was just the smell of you, in part, I guess, so sudden and provoking in the chill October air that was like an echo chamber for smells. Because embedded in those sisterly yet always vaguely anguishing scents, as familiar to me since childhood as the smell of my own bedroom, of your bedroom in the basement, of our kitchen and garage and everything domestic and private, were more difficult matters, of course, that usually lay safe and undisturbed in the frank aroma of a much loved kin.

  We were going to live apart from now on. And of course you felt much readier for that—completely ready, in fact—than I. Set to mount your bicycle and pedal off from the Copacabana, you were pulling out onto a superhighway, that’s how it seemed. You were a victorious orphan, running off with your greedily, secretively possessed prize. So why did I feel stolen from? Or left behind with a secret version of the past that would come to seem as if it had never actually happened? Or one where what had never actually happened came to seem as real as what had?