by Tony D'Souza
They had had other adventures, too, that first year, like the time they’d gone to see the Taj, had run out of money, and let a couple of old Tatas in dhotis with a big black Mercedes wine and dine them. The men had bought them Western hats in a boutique on the main street of Agra, showed them the Red Fort in their car’s air-conditioned comfort, and at the last hotel bar in Delhi, where the men had conspicuously paid for rooms at the desk, my mother and Lenore had excused themselves from the table to powder their noses, and crawled out the bathroom window in those silly hats. Somehow the Tatas found out the hotel they were staying at, and they showed up in their car to shout curses at them from the street. My mother and Lenore had held each other in the dark of their room all through the tirade, but their luck held out and the proprietor did not let the Tatas in.
And then of course there was Lenore’s brief affair with a married doctor from the Marathi Ministry of Health, the opal ring he’d given her that Lenore threw in the waves at Chowpatti Beach when the doctor told her his wife was pregnant again. Lenore had written my mother all about it over the months that it was happening. She made a big stink at both the Peace Corps and the ministry, and the doctor received a transfer for himself and his family to Madras. My mother had not liked that part of it, though she’d never said that to Lenore.
The giddiness of what being at my father’s house meant was all over Lenore at that dinner, and while her face was flushed with the wine and the knowledge of what she’d been letting my uncle do to her in her apartment, my uncle Sam sat at the table in his tie and was quiet. They smoked cigarettes after the meal while my mother went in to check on me, and when she did, my father leaned back from the table in his chair, patted his belly, and sighed in his happiness and wine. He smiled at my uncle then as though to let him know that this house and this yard and this screened porch that kept the mosquitoes out and this table and this food that they had eaten all belonged to him. My uncle knew my father was thinking, “How about all of this, Samuel? These women? This porch? All this meat we’ve eaten? Could we have eaten this much meat in a month back there? What an awful place. But it’s over now. We have made it out. Now we are here.” My uncle Sam spun the last petal of his wine in his glass as he thought about it, and then he swallowed down what my father said.
My mother came back nursing me through her opened blouse, and she said to my uncle and Lenore, “Here’s my big boy. My Francisco. He’s made me so happy. And now isn’t it good that you are happy, too?”
My father fell forward on his chair and folded his hands on the table. He said roughly to my uncle in Konkani, “E puri kon achi?” “Whose daughter is she, isn’t it, Sam? Papa will be proud.”
My father slept on his couch in the basement that night because my mother locked the bedroom door against him. My father didn’t care. All the things he had hoped to accomplish he had, and he happily sent himself off to sleep with a few last tumblers of single malt.
Sam drove Lenore to her building, and though they listened to music all of the way, it was as though they went in silence. “Come up with me, Sammy,” Lenore said to him.
“It is late. We are tired. It is better that I go.”
“Will you call me?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I had a nice time, you know.”
She waved good-bye from the door, let herself in. When the door closed behind her, my uncle Sam began his drive home. There had been no arguments or apologies at the dinner, just as my uncle had known there wouldn’t be, and still much had happened. It had all been done with glances and gestures, subtle words, the clothes, the food. Big things were always discussed this way among the Konkans. Babu had welcomed him back to the fold. But Babu also wanted him to marry this woman. That Sam hadn’t gone upstairs with Lenore this night meant something, too.
In her bed as she reeled from the drinking, Lenore understood that Sam had received permission from his older brother to marry her. And in her heart of hearts, she was certain she was happy.
At home in his nothing life in his nothing apartment off Division, Sam smoked cigarettes at his window and watched a cop car pull over two Hispanics on the street. The driver staggered through the sobriety test, and while the rest of the world was asleep, my uncle witnessed the cops put the men in cuffs, press their heads down to guide them into the back of the car. No one in the world had seen this but him. And yet it existed. The cops stood together in the beams of their headlights, shared a joke that made them laugh, and one touched the other on the shoulder. No one but him had seen this either.
My uncle brushed his teeth in his tiled bathroom, spit, rinsed his mouth. Then he looked at his face in the mirror. Was he getting older? He could not see it. His face was as his face had always been, even despite its being in this place, in this small apartment in America. He undressed in his room, hung his clothes on their hangers in the closet, lay on his bed to sleep, and after a half an hour of it, he sat up and looked at the dark.
It was time, Lenore told him, that they meet her parents in Lincoln. Sam decided to let this happen, too. Lenore called my mother and told her they were going, and the next Saturday that my uncle darkened my mother’s doorway, my mother ran to open it onto him.
“Can you get the time off work?”
“They have already given it to me.”
“You must look them in the eyes, Sam.”
“I will look them in their eyes.”
“Lenore is a nice girl.”
“Lenore is fine to me.”
“You must be good to her and give her time with all the difficult things that will come.”
“I know this, too, Denise.”
“You are a long way from home, Sam.”
“I feel that.”
“You can be whoever you want to be here.”
“I know that as well.”
Lenore and Sam drove in Sam’s car through the cornfields of Illinois, and it was September, and the corn stood tall in its rows as far as they could see. At the Mississippi River, they stood on the bridge and waved down a motorcyclist who snapped pictures of them with Lenore’s camera without taking his helmet off. The pictures still exist, taking up a page of one of my uncle’s disjointed albums from that time. The albums speak of the confusion of my uncle’s heart: page after page of different sizes of prints, odds and ends, the photos all given to my uncle by other people. There’s him and Les freshly shaven in my father’s basement the night they arrived in America, him and Les dressed in Cubbie blue and holding up beers at Wrigley. Him and Javier at a neighborhood yard party, drunk, crossing their arms in macho poses, him in his Polk Brothers uniform and smiling with his hand on a washing machine still wrapped in the plastic. Him at the wheel of his Cutlass, a cigarette in his lips, him and my mother in my father’s backyard in Ridge Lawn, the lilac bushes in bloom behind them. And then two pictures from that trip to Nebraska; my uncle and Lenore on the bridge over the Mississippi, a skinny Indian in a white collared shirt and a curvy white girl in a scarf and sunglasses, leaning against the railing like a movie star. And then the two of them turned around and leaned over the railing looking down into the water, Lenore with her left leg cocked up behind her. Years later, my uncle would touch his finger to those pictures as he’d tell me the stories behind each one of them.
“What do you think of this part of America?” Lenore had asked my uncle Sam as they drove through the wheat fields of Iowa.
“It’s big.”
“What do you think of all this empty space?”
“It makes me feel quiet.”
Lenore made a joke as they passed through Council Bluffs that they should find a motel room and make love a last time. Because at her parents’ house, they would have to sleep in separate rooms. Sam drove on, and Lenore took her heels off and put her feet up on the dashboard. She coasted her hand out the window on the wind and said, “It’s been three years since I’ve seen them.”
Visiting Lenore’s parents was like visiting dead people. They were formal and
old in their living room, in clothes as drab as the curtains over the windows. Their measured conversation revealed that they had been killed by their daughter’s long absences, first by her time in India, and now even more so by the time she’d spent away from them in Chicago. They put Sam in Lenore’s brother’s room, the child they loved in the void created by their other child, a good boy, as they said, a manager at the gasoline distillery in Omaha. Sam folded his clothes into the brother’s empty drawers, and the house felt as quiet around him as the people who lived in it. The son had played baseball through college, and there were trophies on the dresser, pictures of him on the walls with his various teams. In them, he was a pleasant-looking young blond man.
At dinner, the parents clasped their hands before them for the prayer, and Sam bowed his head and thought of all the long blocks of Lincoln they’d driven through to get here, the homes, the lawns, that the people all around them lived like this. Lenore’s father said with his eyes closed, “We thank you, O Lord, for the safe return of our daughter once again, we pray that we make up for time that has been lost, that we can come again to understanding ourselves as a family. We welcome Lenore’s friend Sam and hope that he feels welcome in our home. We’d like him to know that we respect his culture and the distance he has traveled to visit us.”
Lenore wore her white sari to dinner and told stories of the dust and noise of India as she again showed her parents her pictures from the albums she had brought with her like documents to plead her defense. Again and again as she explained the details, she said to my uncle, “Isn’t that right, Sam? Isn’t that how it is?” To which my uncle could only say, “That is how it is,” as her parents paused in their eating at his confirmation that the women of that foreign place really did build their cooking fires from dried cow dung, that the Hindus really did worship the lingam by pouring milk over sculptures of it.
“Will you come to church with us in the morning?” Lenore’s father said to my uncle when Sam asked permission to go to bed, and of course my uncle said, “Yes.” Lenore squeezed his hand and smiled at him from her chair. Then my uncle went upstairs and closed the door of that room. He lay on the covers of the brother’s bed in his clothes, looking at those trophies. Soon, the voices downstairs, though not loud, carried the sounds of disagreement and hurt up to him.
Late in the night, neither having changed out of his clothes nor slept, my uncle Sam opened the drawers of the dresser, quietly packed his suitcase. He put on and tied his shoes and went out to his car. By dawn, he was a hundred miles west, and within three days, he was at the Grand Canyon. He did not have much money, and he slept in the backseat. He bought a cooler in Denver and lived off roast beef sandwiches. He sent my mother a postcard from Phantom Ranch, at the bottom of the canyon, which arrived at our house stamped CARRIED BY MULE; and from the redwood forest on the coast of California, he sent a postcard with a scene of those trees printed on an actual shingle of wood. The message read, “These are very tall trees. Sam.” Then he disappeared into the Pacific Northwest through the winter. He did call Javier, who shouldered in my uncle’s door and collected his few important things in a box. Javier also wired my uncle the money he had asked for to a Western Union in Portland. Javier dropped the box off at my parents’ house. He said to my mother, “I’m saying prayers for him, Denise.”
When Lenore called my mother from Lincoln, she was neither angry nor embarrassed. She asked my mother, “Why do you think he needed to do that?” and my mother said back, “You know how difficult their lives are here.” Lenore returned to Chicago on the bus. A few years later, she married an actuary who had always dreamed of visiting India. Lenore invited my mother to the wedding. The timing was bad for my mother, and after that, Lenore didn’t call again. Many years later, Lenore mailed those pictures from the bridge over the Mississippi to my mother in the same envelope as some shots of her three children. In her letter she wrote, “Were we ever really there?”
For the rest of our lives, my uncle Sam would let slip with comments like, “Salmon are covered in slime,” or “Eagles eat at the garbage dump.” But for six months, through that winter and spring, my parents neither heard from him nor had any clue what he was up to. My father traveled often to New York and London on business, and he bought an at-home green to practice his putting in the basement. He didn’t mention Sam to my mother, and my mother didn’t mention Sam to him.
My mother read many paperback horror novels during this time, nursed me, left my father to his work and me to my growing. She lost weight and was so often too tired to host Mrs. Firth or Mrs. Coleman when they dropped by that they stopped calling, too.
Late in the spring, the flowers and trees in bloom, my uncle Sam pulled into our driveway. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and my mother had turned thirty-two three days before. Even before my uncle could ring the bell, my mother had let him in.
Sam’s hair was longer, he’d shaved off the sideburns. He looked younger than he had before. He wore a blue knit shirt under a blue down vest, and there was a quiet in him that hadn’t previously been there.
“I thought I’d never see you.”
“Where could I return but here?”
“I worried about you every day.”
“Every day of it the only thing in my mind was you.”
My mother pulled my uncle to her, and they kissed in the doorway for the very first time. My uncle pushed the door shut with his foot. Then they stopped and opened their eyes.
“You’ve seen the Grand Canyon.”
“To the very bottom.”
“You’ve seen those tall trees.”
“I see them even now.”
It was just the two of them, their grand friendship, their long and aching desire. My uncle drove away before my father came home for dinner.
Gore Road
My father and uncle’s cousin Winston wanted to come to America. Sam was living in Logan Square near the Kennedy Expressway at this time, in a small rental house where he grew a garden in the back. He had an orange chair in his living room with a feel to it like sheep’s wool, and when my mother would take me over for a visit, my uncle would hold me in his lap and spin us around and around in the chair until I was dizzy and laughing and glad because just what I had known would happen is exactly what did. My uncle had become a great cook in his lungi, his bachelorhood, and while I didn’t like most Indian foods, I liked my uncle’s biriyani. He put extra lamb chunks in the saffron rice of it just for me, which I’d pick out and eat with my fingers on the table where they’d set me with a bowl of it. Often, my mother would take me out to the garden in my bonnet to let me stumble around and lose myself in the colored rows of my uncle’s blossoming plants.
My mother had put on weight and shortened her hair, but this only made her an even prettier woman than she had been. She had hips, pink in her cheeks, and the cutting of her hair had released the color of her eyes. She liked to drink beer, and smoke, and they did not worry about my father, who was always away on business. I remember seeing my mother kiss my uncle in the kitchen those times as he cooked, and I would stop eating to look at them. My mother would help herself to a beer from my uncle’s fridge as though his house also belonged to her.
“Have you heard from Les?” my mother would ask as she reclined on my uncle’s couch with her beer. My uncle would stop spinning me in the chair long enough to tell her, “He called the other night. He is happy and doing fine. He likes the desert. I saw it once, you know. Too hot for me, but he says it suits him.”
My uncle Les had left the navy the year before and had settled in Tucson with a white girl he’d met while stationed at the naval base in San Diego. He was an HVAC repairman and seemed content with what his path had brought him. His life departed from ours in that way.
My uncle Sam took us to Cubs’ games, to Saturdays at the beach on the lake. He had graduated from washing machine salesman to real estate agent, though when money was tight, he would still sell stereos out of his trunk, which his old f
riend Javier had taught him to do. He plied this trade among the growing Indian community on Devon Avenue, and when he’d take my mother and me for North Indian food at The Taj restaurant, sometimes the waiters he’d sold stereos to would come quickly to him and my mother and say, “Hey, Konkan D’Sai! So long we have not seen you here. Any new deals in your trunk?”
Even though I could not yet speak, my uncle began to tell me things about India, that I was a half-Indian boy even though I was white, that one day I must see the beautiful Taj Mahal as my mother had done and send him a postcard to tell him that I had seen it. He’d bounce me on his knee as he’d tell me these things. What could I do but laugh and hug him?
One night at his house, my uncle brought out a blue aerogram from his room covered in the curlicues of Kannada script, and he read it to my mother while I dozed in a sleeping bag on the living room floor. The letter was from Winston, who had only been a boy when my father and mother and uncles had left India. None of them really knew him. He had not been able to get the education that my father had, he wrote, but he had done his best in public school, and he wanted a chance to come to America. Couldn’t they try to help him, as my grandfather had once helped them all with the gold?
“Do you remember this boy?” my mother asked.
“There were so many boys like this,” my uncle said.
“But he must be good if he’s gotten himself together to write a letter.”
“Which one of them is bad?”
“One more here wouldn’t hurt, would it, Sam?”
“I am not a citizen, there is nothing I can do,” my uncle said and shrugged.
“Then there is nothing else we can do but let me sponsor him. Lawrence won’t like it, but Lawrence doesn’t have to know. I’ll sponsor him over and he’ll live here with you as you lived with us when you first came. We’ve settled it already. It will be nice to have someone here who still has the scent of India on him.”