I suppose this tells a thing or two about my father (the man who was sitting there listening to Consul Simms suggesting that his murdered “daughter” might have been selling babies). It’s one thing to say that he’s a moral man, but plenty of people would be outraged by a war hero colonel enslaving a little foreign girl. But not many people ever get the chance to find out if they are willing to go to such extremes to expose and condemn another man’s evil and betrayal of the standards by which the American community is proud to live. (I don’t say that with much irony—many Guatemalan military officers have done much worse to little orphan girls, but this seems to outrage no one who matters down here.) I believe that, after that one time, my father had had enough of it. I think he hated being temporarily in the spotlight like that, the witness and target of so much human ugliness. Which isn’t just to say that he lacked the temperament, finally, to be something like a prominent Nazi hunter. But he had wanted to be an M.P. detective, and he’d wanted to be a lawyer too, like his brothers—but district attorneys have to do that all the time, stand up in public and accuse others of heinous crimes.
After all that he was tired, I think. And he settled into his happy decade of Boston bachelorhood, living a bit over his head. He sold insurance in a small firm that his friend Eddie Rosenberg had started, but he dined at Locke-Ober’s. Became a Massachusetts Class B squash champion, defeating a future governor of the state in the finals. Bridge at the Cavendish Club, dancing at the Copley Plaza, vacations in Havana. He took his nephews and friends’ children to Harvard football games. He was just past forty when he met my mother—but he was fit, he was a squash champion, he looked kind of like Dean Martin and had the good manners of a professional bachelor. They married a year later, in 1956. She was twenty-four, and Catholic, and came from a wealthy Guatemalan family. She’d gone to a Catholic women’s junior college in New Orleans, and then had come to Boston. Her mother wasn’t going to let her come home to Guatemala until she was ready to renounce forever the handsome, blond and blue-eyed, and utterly penniless Italian who’d come to Guatemala by boat to seek his fortune and walked into the family store on Sexta Avenida one day and stolen my mother’s heart, my mother pale as Snow White with her chestnut-colored hair worn in the style of Rita Hayworth, and big, honey brown, gold-flecked eyes, and the daydreamy pink and opulent lips of a lighthearted niña indígena. The Italian eventually married the daughter of an illustriously surnamed German-Guatemalan coffee planter, the same year that my mother fell in love with my father. Then my father moved my then pregnant mother from the small but swankily situated apartment on Commonwealth Avenue near the Public Garden in Boston, where they’d spent the first eighteen months of their marriage, to Codrioli Road in Namoset, which she hated.
It was Uncle Herbert who got to go, before the War, to Harvard, where he became a second-string tailback. Uncle Josh, my father’s other younger brother, avoided the War because of flat feet and nearsightedness and went on to Suffolk Law, and was, for a while, an assistant D.A., but then became co-owner of a big hardware store out in Framingham before making a killing with his partner in North Shore real estate. Uncle Herbert eventually became Judge Herbert Graetz of the Massachusetts Appellate Court. He and Aunt Milly never had kids of their own. But Uncle Herbert could get us tickets to any Harvard game, even against Yale, and often sat with us at home games and took us into the alumni tents, and sometimes accompanied us on the road.
So we, Flor and I, my father, sometimes Uncle Herbert and some of their old neighborhood pals, strolled Ivy League campuses as if on inspirational tours of my and Flor’s bright future destinies; we ate corned beef on bulky roll sandwiches on the steps of every Ivy League library—Flor liked to have premonitions, and once on the library steps at Dartmouth she turned to me and announced that one snowy night far in the future I’d ask a girl to marry me “on this very spot” and then a few years later had the exact same premonition all over again on the library steps at Princeton; sat in bone-chilling stadium shadows under blankets, squeezed between broad, overcoat-clad shoulders, while the grown-ups bit into unpeeled oranges and even into onions like apples and passed the whiskey flask, their talk arcing through half a century of Russian Jewish immigrant boys’ tales; Flor memorized every Ivy League fight song, dreamt of being in one of those exuberantly irreverent marching bands; we stood feeling small and isolated in the parking lots of highway motels while my father napped, gaping at the late-afternoon sun on the flaming mountains, wandered into the woods to see who could find the reddest leaf, and were terrified by the war movie Nazi specter of a small German immigrant town in upstate New York (Flor saying, “They’re Americans now, Americans. Just like me, just like my friend Ingrid,” but her German friend Ingrid lived in Namoset and spoke English and Flor sounded like Dorothy going “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”). Harvard at Columbia brought us to New York City, where we always stayed at the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge on Eighth Avenue (it was there that my father had his 2:00 A.M. gallbladder attack and had to be hospitalized in New York City for more than a week, but that’s another story); Radio City Music Hall, Marme on Broadway, numbingly long drives through old Jewish neighborhoods now mainly populated by blacks and Puerto Ricans in search of dairy restaurants my father half-remembered and could never find, and following Flor around in Central Park while she retraced Holden Caulfield’s footsteps: the merry-go-round, the duck pond . . .
No other kids in school got to do this, year after elementary school year and even into junior high, getting released early from class on Fridays to go pilgrimaging around after the Harvard football team. We were children, and eager and defenseless before the lessons my father infiltrated into his great, mystical, culminating lesson of Harvard. (But imagine how paralyzed I was becoming—a mediocre third-grade report card and my well-meaning but hopelessly heavy-handed father telling me I could just about forget about getting into Harvard; well, after that the report cards got even worse.) Then I was still pretty much “children” when Straight-A Flor really wasn’t, though she could pack that all away in a second when it came time to hit the road with our old man. She was fiercely loyal to him, knew just what he wanted. It was me who tired of those trips, becoming embarrassed, inwardly defeated by them.
In the consul’s office we were discussing the nitty-gritty now, the conversation proceeding pointedly, minimally, through the awful vacuum of there being nothing pertinent left to say about the living Flor. According to Guatemalan law, we should have had twenty-four hours to transport the deceased out of the country, but the consul had managed to get this extended for us by a day. Which funeral parlor should prepare her for the flight to Boston, the costs, the U.S. Customs details, et cetera—all this was the worst.
But my father and I were taking it now like a couple of—Maybe I shouldn’t say this. So OK, please don’t construe the slightest disrespect. Maybe we all have our own names for the standards we are taught to live by in childhood, and because these standards are taught to children they all sound embarrassingly silly later on, even if we do still think we at least privately understand, translate, and carry the truth they hold.
Almost twenty years ago, on a bright, sunny Saturday afternoon in Harvard Stadium, the Dartmouth football team routed Harvard 48—0, and I, frenzied beyond belief with humiliation and frustration and cringing already against the taunts I would undoubtedly be facing on the school playground on Monday, stood up and shouted, “Harvard! You stink!” shouted it so loudly that alumni heads turned throughout our section to look at me. Flor gasped my name. And my father slapped me across the face with his heavy gloved hand and said:
“That’s not how a Harvard Man acts.”
We walked back to our hotel, just a few blocks down the Avenida La Reforma from the embassy. The cool, high-elevation air of Guatemala City felt buoyant, alive, spicy with fresh and coniferous scents. The brightness puzzled my eyes, as if I’d just come out from years in a cave. The Avenida La Reforma is a broad, European-style boulevard
(inviting to fast drivers), lined with eucalyptuses, cypresses, long-needled pines, palms, fuego del bosque trees with their big, flaring orange blossoms; it has a wide, grassy divide. Along the sidewalks Indian women were selling gladiolus—magenta, vermilion, brightest pale yellow—wrapped in newspapers. We were walking in silence; my father’s bent forward stride looked angrily purposeful.
Then, a few blocks down from the embassy—and another block away from the military base farther on that looks just like a Disneyland castle with its bright gray castellated walls, turreted towers, drawbridgelike entrance, and antique cannons positioned outside—we passed through a tree-shaded grove of pedestaled statues like something out of Imperial Rome: huge, black, cast-iron statues of ferociously muscular beasts. Here we had to cross the avenue. My father was about to step blindly out into the traffic, and I grabbed his elbow, said, “Dad.” With both hands on his arm, I felt his unsteadiness—he seemed almost to leave his feet, bobbing back onto the grassy curb with the lightness of a tugged balloon. Still, he said nothing. We waited to cross (this is always a difficult avenue to cross and sometimes I wonder how people who can’t run manage to ever cross it without waiting hours), and I looked up at the statues: two boars in a back-biting fight to the death; a virile stag; a night-stalking puma; a densely maned allegorical lion with one conquering paw planted over the snout of a baffled crocodile; and, stomping atop its high, wide pedestal in the middle of the intersection, a massive bull. But the bull’s member, and it is far from small or discreet, was painted a bright subversive red (it always is—they restore the bull’s dick to black, someone comes along and reddens it again, over and over). And I was recalling that a few years back my cousin Freddie (Fernando) had totaled his car against the bull statue one drunken night and that shortly after Uncle Jorge sent him to a technical college in Florida to get him away from the wild finqueros’ and generals’ sons he was running with . . . when I noticed that the smell, the one that had been trailing us around all day, that smell of the morgue like an infection in my nostrils had grown weirdly stronger, much stronger, as if it wasn’t merely some understandably lingering olfactory trauma of our own but had suddenly been blown into our faces by a rising wind, only there was no wind, just the smell, all around us, as if it didn’t come from us but from the statues or the military base or from a nearby ditch filled with rotting ravens that we couldn’t see or from somewhere ... I wanted to gag. I felt scared. (And I’ve been back to that spot since, and I smelled nothing.) My father’s eyes met mine dartingly, and we both looked away. He could smell it too. We didn’t dare say it.
But it stayed with us. Because when we got back to our two-room suite on the ninth floor of the Cortijo Reforma, my father decided he wanted a scotch and soda and a cigar. Our room came supplied with two-ounce bottles of Johnnie Walker and Chivas, a box of Honduran cigars, and the square little refrigerator was filled with bottles of Gallo beer, Pepsis, and agua mineral. But we couldn’t find the bottle opener. After a while I went to find a chambermaid, and when I came back with her my father was out on the little balcony with his cigar, looking back into the room through the open sliding doors as if there was something he’d wanted to get away from in there. And the chambermaid, a plumpish Indian girl with platinum blond dyed hair, glanced around, her nearly black eyes suddenly bright and round with consternation, she could smell it too. She found the bottle opener chained to the inside of a cabinet and instantly fled the room. And my father and I just looked at each other.
FOUR
Guatemala is small and the world is huge, not the other way around, that’s what I went around telling myself during the year plus after Flor’s murder. I needed to pound my planet back into perspective.
But I never put away the framed picture of Flor in my bedroom, which she’d mailed to me with her next-to-last letter. It was a picture of her, not of Guatemala, even though it was taken down here: Flor, one of her Scandinavian volunteers, and a half-dozen orphan girls—including temporarily orphaned Belinda, the abandoned little Texan—on an outing to the Guatemala City Zoo. Actually they’re posed at the zoo’s rear entrance, on a dark-dirt boulevard lined with the whitewashed trunks of eucalyptuses and brightly painted food kiosks; in the background are the hangarlike corrals and arena where the ranchers’ livestock shows and the occasional rodeo are held, walls emblazoned with the black, gold-eyed rooster head of the Gallo beer logo; a giant Marlboro Man stands up against the sky.
Five of the six orphan girls, including Belinda, are wearing bright red jeans that must have arrived as a single orphanage donation. The sixth girl is wearing a yellow dress and holding her arms out to the photographer as if beckoning a hug. The others look straight at the camera, saying “cheese,” or glance back over their shoulders at Flor, their mouths open as if they are laughing or gleefully shouting something. The Scandinavian volunteer, a girl in her twenties, is having a closemouthed giggle over whatever it is Flor has just said.
Because it must have been Flor’s joke, hers is that kind of smile. She has one hand perched on her hip and her head turned just so, her hair dangling in a few loose tendrils over the corner of one mischievously gleaming eye and flowing over one shoulder, sweeping under her chin, her hair providing a frame within a frame for a face that couldn’t look more remote from trouble, so full of Flor’s own wild and particular joy and even innocence. She’s on an outing with her orphans, they’re going to look at farmers’ prize cows and hogs, then into the zoo to sip aguas in the shade by the towering nets of the aviaries and a garden full of rain forest and elephant ear fronds, surrounded by monkey and bird chatter and the bass purr of jaguars.
Whenever people see that picture—Well, actually, when my mother saw it, when Flor was still alive, she said Flor hadn’t aged a day. “Ay Florcita,” and she chuckled with flustered affection. You can follow the arch of her shoulders and slender back, the shape of her full, changeless breasts in the vertical patterns of the boldly checked red and black shirt she has on, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, her brown skin so smooth and satiny it shines along the outer curve of her visible forearm.
For a while Flor liked to put a single plaited braid into her hair along the side, though you can’t see it in the picture. But if you look closely you can see that the girls—rounded Indian faces and Kewpie doll eyes, straight black hair—and even brunette Belinda have put braids into their hair in imitation of Flor. I think that’s my favorite thing about that picture, which I left up on my wall, and took with me to Guatemala later.
Of course I kept her letters and postcards too, the thirteen she mailed to me during her four years in Guatemala. I must have written to her three times as frequently but she was the one living far away and through extraordinary times—running an orphanage in the middle of an all-out orphan-generating war—and was experiencing, I was always sure, significant personal changes because of that. So I imagined that the regularity and friendly mundanity of my letters pleased Flor, and helped her to keep up with herself a bit by reminding her of who she, at least in part, remained.
What I always tried to do was show her that I understood what she must be living through in Guatemala. I knew it bored her to be asked for extended explanations. When we were together I thought I was as intuitively quick with her as she could want, and left it at that. I thought Flor had transformed herself into a kind of heroine in Guatemala, one who was usually beguilingly serene about how this had actually happened to her.
About twice a year she’d find some free time, or rather it would seem to find her, lifting her and her luggage up like a wind and dropping her in New York—these visits were never prearranged or announced, suddenly she would just be there. Then she’d stay a week or less. In the middle of it she’d hop a morning shuttle to Boston, perhaps lunch with some old friend there, spend the evening with my father, and be back in New York in time to go out late that night. Sometimes she would have been in the city a couple of days already before I even knew about it, or could fix the days off from work s
o that I could spend all the time I wanted with her. Or her telephone would be busy for hours. Many of these calls were orphanage related—in her room I’d see papers out, documents with photocopied orphans’ faces and fingerprints, and “home studies” that told in a stack of pages everything that social workers had been able to uncover about a prospective adopting family.
And she had a few old friendships to keep up, from her two plus years of living in New York City, having been hired right out of Wellesley to work in media relations at UNICEF, a job she kept about a year, when she was still planning to go to law school. After that, she’d made a friend on Wall Street—a black gay guy named Cal who’d gone to Columbia, and who she’d met in some nightclub—and for another year she worked with him as a commodities trader, of all things. (There’s maybe a sad joke in that, but I don’t want to make it.) But then that job suddenly ended, I never really knew why, when she’d already been saying for months that, although she was dissatisfied with it, she figured she’d hang on for another year because law school was going to be so expensive even with the scholarships she counted on getting. I was in college in upstate New York, following this from afar, and staying with her whenever I came to visit in the one-bedroom apartment on West Sixty-sixth she’d sublet from a former UNICEF colleague who’d been transferred to Bangladesh. She took her LSATs, was pleased by her scores, and then never gave a reason for not going on, for not even applying. Suddenly, just after she’d turned twenty-nine, she took off for Guatemala in the spring of ‘79, her first visit in years, and everyone, including her, I think, believed she’d just be staying there through the summer at most.
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 10