Sometime during that first winter, when I was still quarantined in the living room upstairs, Flor discovered the shoe box on the shelf over my father’s workbench where he kept his garden flower and vegetable seed packets. She secretly coveted those seed packets for months, so much so that in later years her coveting and the patience with which she waited for her chance to possess them came to symbolize her own innocent immigrant’s wide-eyed greed even to herself. Alone, she would take the shoe box down and spread the seed packets out to gaze at the color pictures of flowers and vegetables with the same exasperated longing a deprived boy might lavish on someone else’s baseball cards. The simple logic of asking my father outright if he might please keep the seeds in something else so that she could have the packets of course eluded her.
Flor had already heard my mother joke about how my father seemed undecided over whether to turn our small yard on Codrioli Road into a farm or a forest, so excessive was his annual springtime mania for planting new trees, flower beds, and vegetable gardens. Using her Spanish-English dictionary, she labored at constructing the sentences she imagined would be necessary, and waited. In late March dump trucks arrived, depositing small mountains of rich wormy loam and peat moss on our front lawn.
One day soon after, Flor spotted my father carrying the shoe box full of seed packets out through the bulkhead door, and she followed him into the yard and stood quietly behind while he, on his knees, dug into the earth around the shrubbery in front of the house with a small hand shovel. The first seed packet he chose he tore open across the middle, decapitating the pansies depicted on the cover. Flor gasped so loudly he turned around with a worried look.
“Please, Ira, I like pictures flowers. May I have?” said Flor, speaking methodically and slowly.
Then from her pocket Flor pulled a pair of scissors. My father looked at her in confusion for a moment, then burst out in laughter that made Flor’s face burn. “Of course, Floorie! Of course!”
But he only needed one more seed packet that afternoon, and let Flor cut it open carefully across the top with the scissors, and then let her keep it.
“Ay gracias! Gracias! Thank you, Ira!”
But she was privately disappointed that it was only one seed packet, and of pansies, not her favorite. Still, she went into her room and taped it to the wall over her desk.
My father must have seen it there. A few days later he came home with a whole manila envelope full of both common and exotic flower seed packets that he’d bought at a special nursery in Chestnut Hill for the express purpose of taking them to work with him that day, where with a penknife he cut tiny slivers in each packet’s seam, and then poured the seeds into common mailing envelopes, which he labeled by hand if he thought he might use them later, or poured them out into the wastepaper basket if he knew that, lacking his own tropical flower greenhouse, he wouldn’t. There were two dozen emptied seed packets in all.
Flor was stupefied by his generosity.
“I tell you,” she’d say in later years, “it was as if he’d been growing a secret garden for me all that time just to make me happy. I understood why Mirabel had married Ira once and for all.”
The twenty-five seed packets ended up taped in a five-by-five square to the wall over Flor’s desk—the central spot went to the one depicting red, heart-shaped, yellow-stamened anthuriums, one of her favorite Guatemalan flowers—where they stayed for several years, until they began to fade and curl and she transferred them to the same scrapbook where she kept the reddest maple leaves from our biannual trips to Dartmouth.
Also in that room was the small table that her plastic radio and later her record player shared with a makeshift religious shrine: colored postcards representing the Virgin and the Sacred Heart, her little plastic scapularies. Attached to the wall behind it was the gaudy plastic crucifix she’d bought with her first saved-up earnings, with its impaled Christ on a lid that could slide open, revealing candles inside, a small vial of holy water, a sacred scrap of cloth. Here Flor did her evening paternosters and rosaries, her Gloria Patris, raptly whispering with sidelong smiling glances at me that became more and more frequent and comical as the grip her convent education had on her gradually began, inevitably I think, given the place and the era, to soften.
“—Mirabel and Ira are both wonderful people,” Flor told Moya on the Long Night of White Chickens. “But to be perfectly honest about it—Hey! This is none of your business, Moya, really, the stuff you’re worming out of me. Anyway, if they’d never met, where would I be now?”
“Here, pues.”
“Oh no,” she said. “More likely in Europe, a Spanish ambassador’s servant.”
“Noooo ...”
“Síííí, that’s if I was lucky. Spanish ambassadors had this thing about hiring Espíritu Santo girls, supposedly we made the best servants . . . But if Ira and Mirabel had never met, you would never have met Roger.”
“And you would not have come to our meeting tonight.”
“Well, that goes without saying.”
“But destiny would have found another way for us to have met.”
“You mean you would have been, what? A Spanish ambassador’s gardener?”
“Yes, bringing you flowers every day!”
“I didn’t want flowers. I wanted seed packets.”
She told Moya then the story of her seed packets.
“Wasn’t there a mayflower in your collection?” asked Moya when she was done.
“That’s just any flower that sprouts in May, an anemone, for instance. I guess Papito named me that so I’d have a way of remembering my birthday after he was gone, like he foresaw it all, no? There’s a girl in my orphanage whose parents named her Aspirina, imagine.”
“She must have been a terrible headache.”
“Hah hah. Or cured one. Can’t let a kid go through life called Aspirin, though. Well, she was only an infant. She’s Magali now.”
“A pretty name. So you are a benevolent tyrant.”
“A tyrant! Oh no, is that what you’ve heard?” And she smiled too brightly, showing her gums.
Moya’s comment had aroused her suspicions in a new way. Was she aware that people did not always speak kindly about her, to say the least? But Moya had no desire to discomfort her now. Frantically his mind searched for a remedy. Then he remembered an English rhyme from his early Colegio Anne Hunt days and recited it:
“Old Mother Hubbard lived in a shoe. She had so many children she did not know what to do.”
Flor’s luminous dark eyes scrutinized his face, and, perhaps because she finally liked or at least trusted what she saw there, her smile relaxed.
“So what did she do?”
“. . . Pues,” stammered Moya. “I don’t remember.”
“Mother Hubbard lived in a cupboard, Moya.”
“You know what Doña Emilia told me right there in the mother superior’s office?” exclaimed Flor, referring to Roger’s abuela and the day she came to choose her; this was somewhat later in the Long Night, when she’d already from so much rum just begun to slightly slur her words. “She said, ‘Now, Flor de Mayo, it is time for honest talk. I have reason to believe that God is angry at my daughter. As for the little boy, my firstborn grandson, I am worried that even his Guardian Angel will forsake him. I have been told that you may not be absolutely the most devout girl here, but that you are one of the brightest and stubbornnest, and that you have a laughing heart. So I am sending you to Boston to be bright, stubborn, and happy for me but above all for God. I want you to make sure that boy grows up a Catholic. This should not be difficult, he is very affectionate and, right now, truly lonely. I am not asking you to make him a priest. He has already been baptized, thank God. If he had not been, I think that would be the hardest thing.’
“That’s what she said, Moya, just like that. Then she tried to explain to me what a Jew is. Was I scared or what? A Jew? What did we know from Jews!” Flor almost shouted, in English, her simultaneous laughter making her voice squ
eal, while her exaggerated accent was one that Moya had, in fact, heard some gringas speak naturally—such hearty, playful laughter caused Moya a brief pang of envy, followed by another of warm admiration.
“Listen, we had nuns that taught Jews as metaphors for evil, OK?” she went on. “Well, you know how it is here. Go up to an Indian town and tell them you’re a Jew—not that I ever have, of course—and they look at you like you’re out of your mind, or with terror, because they, some of them anyway, think the last Jews walked the earth a thousand years ago and only come back as devils, with actual tails, no less. Or they think Jews are what make volcanoes rumble, that they were imprisoned inside volcanoes as punishment for the crucifixion and there they remain. This Jew, Doña Emilia told me, has the heart of Job. He has suffered as much. My gosh, I was half-expecting Ira to be this poor guy covered in boils and sores. Then she said maybe I could save his soul too, and she and Sor Isabel just smiled at each other, like, Oh yes, wouldn’t that be wonderful.
“That was that, she hired me, said she’d need a week to fix my papers. I was so sad and terrified that night that I couldn’t sleep or stop crying. One of the other girls took me out into the yard behind the kitchen, woke up a chicken, and, you know, holding it like this, rubbed it up and down my body.”
“Qué raro. How strange,” said Moya, watching Flor lean back in her chair as she waved her hands cradling nothing up and down in front of her chest.
“Well, this was a cure for fright. Though this was against the rules, such superstitions, of course.”
“Did it work?”
“Claro! We were laughing so much and trying not to so the nuns wouldn’t wake up, and this squawking, shitting hen. It was completely hilarious.”
Both Flor and Moya had a good laugh over that. Flor poured herself a little bit more rum, squeezed limón into it, and took a bite from a long-cooled wonton.
“Of course this is not unusual, that an abuela would be concerned about this,” said Moya. “But Rogerio is not religious, is he?”
“Ohhhh, I failed,” said Flor. “He’d watch me do my rosaries and stuff, and I’d be thinking, I am putting on a show, but this isn’t supposed to be like a show. I got myself so mixed up, Moya. None of the priests in Namoset spoke Spanish. I kept waiting for a miracle, for the Holy Spirit or the Virgin to speak to me in any language, but it was like they’d lost the trail of my soul in the snow. And I loved Ira so much I was practically waiting for him to invite me to be Jewish, you know? And what was I supposed to do on weekends, give up my Harvard football trips? Forget it! Eventually I just kind of said, Oh well, God forgot me. If he can’t sniff me out here, it is because my faith is not strong.”
“A theology of smells?” said Moya. “I see, true faith is always unwashed.”
“Hmm-hmm,” singsonged Flor, “very medieval. Though later me and Roger both really got into Jesus Christ Superstar for a while.”
“But soon you fell in love with sin,” said Moya, with jesting humor of course.
“Hah! That came later.” And now Flor smiled with a disarming touch of bashfulness. “Ohhh, come on, I was a good girl. Most of the time.”
Flor was pretty schizophrenic about religion, to say nothing of my own early and never quite resolved confusion. But there was desert anarchy and near paganism in Flor’s early unreligious upbringing. And I think that wild empty space, that small desert world inside of her, was merely surrounded by her seven years in the convent orphanage; it was an outer layer of sorts but one she felt compelled to live in too, her second incarnation. Later love plunged her back into the small wild place: Flor gave herself to Tony—in the Namoset woods, just once in her basement room when no one else was at home, she’d finally tell me in later years—like a young desert girl who has never learned anything about making love except that everyone around her seemed to consider it a great and necessary joy. Then guilt and caution overtook her, and she made him wait nearly a year to do it again. But Tony was still a year or two in the future.
If in the desert Flor had barely even understood the need for clothes until she was four or so, seven years with the nuns had left her self-conscious enough. We almost always returned after school to an empty house, and I’d follow Flor right down into the basement, where I’d camouflage myself with mundane idleness in the playroom, shuffling over to my toy chest or turning on the television, while she changed out of her school clothes. Her back to me while she held her checked-flannel laundry shirt ready in one hand, she’d pull her dress off over her head with a sudden dolphinlike upward thrust of both arms: the sudden baring of smooth, cinnamon brown skin, black hair tumbling down around gracefully bladed shoulders, the slender arch of her long back and sapling waist, her high, rounded rear in girl’s underpants, her pretty fourteen-year-old’s legs taking a few steps in place; from behind like that, for those few seconds when she was almost naked, I always thought Flor looked just like Pocahontas. Next she’d have to disentangle her arms from the dress and then her shirt from it too. She’d toss the dress underhanded onto her bed and quickly dip one skinny arm down one shirtsleeve, then lean forward while her torso turned and her other arm reached across the small of her back to pull the checked-flannel curtain closed . .. Sometimes, in winter, she’d add another flannel shirt over the one she’d just put on. Then she’d don the oldest clothes she owned, which she wore only for housework now, the droopy sweater and skirt of her convent orphanage uniform. Sitting on the bed and facing me again, she’d smile as if saying hello, pull off her knee socks or tights, and in winter replace them with a pair of long, woolen, red ski socks that she tied on with shoelaces just above the knees.
Dressed for battle, she’d attack the laundry—or any of her household chores—with an energy that looked like enthusiasm and seemed to suggest she’d been born for nothing else, and always with the radio on, her voice evaporating when she tried to sing along to the higher notes, the sleeves of her sweater and shirt rolled up and her arms plunged into suds, her hair falling over her eyes and dabbed back with quick, sudsy taps of her fingers.
I still had a tubercular child invalid’s absorption in all that was immediately around me, for I’d discovered that the basement, after a quarantine year of living above it and not even fully realizing it was there, seemed more full of possibilities and fascinations, especially with Flor in it, than all outdoors, where everybody basically hated me anyway. Building rudimentary Rube Goldberg contraptions out of whatever was at hand became a yearlong obsession. They were all theoretically designed to execute Flor, and she was my willing accomplice, holding the stepladder for me if I needed to climb up to some hard-to-reach place and so on. I remember running upstairs to fish the white lace mantilla my mother had married in from the plastic pouch in a bottom drawer of her dresser, where she kept my tiny, fake-pearl-brocaded baptism pajamas too. Downstairs I draped the mantilla over Flor’s head while she sat patiently in my red wagon in her laundry uniform, her red-stockinged knees up and her arms wrapped around them. Then I explained that I was going to give the wagon a push and that it was going to roll into the T-shaped system of two-by-fours I’d laid out on the floor, knocking the stem of the T into the overturned laundry basket that had a metal bucket on top with a mop handle standing up in it, the mop handle suspended by string from a pine board balanced between two rafters, that board lashed by more string to another board positioned just over where the wagon carrying Flor was destined to stop, a Dixie Cup full of powdered ant poison balanced at its very edge.
“OK?”
“Bueno, mi vida,” she said, looking extremely happy to be taking a break from laundry to go to her death in my mother’s wedding mantilla.
I offered her one of my mother’s Kents. She put it in her mouth and looked at me expectantly.
“Make a last wish.”
“Just that you give me a little kiss good-bye,” she said.
I gave her a kiss on the corner of her lips with both my hands on her cheeks, stood back, commanded her to cross herself,
which she did, and then I bent over and shoved the wagon off with as much force as I could and watched as it slowly rolled forward while Flor, the back of her head covered by white lace, waved good-bye over her shoulder. I was already cringing with my eyes half shut and shouting “No!” when the wagon came to a complete stop a few feet short of the two-by-fours that were to set the demonic contraption in motion. Flor looked back at me over her shoulder with the unlit cigarette still in her mouth and a sorry expression, and then she pulled one foot out of the wagon, deliberately set it on the floor, looked at me a moment longer, and gave a hard push. Everything happened more or less as it was supposed to though much less noisily, causing just enough commotion to nudge the paper cup of ant poison off the end of the board: spilling hardly anything, it plummeted to the floor, landing well behind Flor and off to the side, causing no more mess than a snowball.
“—I know this is ridiculous, but you know what I keep wondering?” said Flor, returning to the subject of her father, while a beguiled and already exhausted by longing and listening Moya leaned forward to position his head as close to hers as possible while she almost imperceptibly leaned closer too, a slow progress he’d been following as if by a nocturnal sundial: for some time the slightly curled ends of her hair falling in front of her right shoulder had remained suspended approximately four centimeters over the sweet and sour sauce bowl, but now that distance had been reduced by half. Now her ultimate tendrils were so close that even laughter or a sneeze might propel them briefly down to graze the surface of the sticky, lava-colored sauce. Moya’s plan was already formulated: when she had leaned forward enough so that her hair had definitely descended into the bowl, he was going to say, “Flor, look, your hair is in the agridulce sauce!” Then he was going to take her hair in his hand and wipe it clean with a napkin or maybe he’d bring it to his lips and . . .
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 22