“Ladies,” my mother told me, “never put their elbows on the table.” I slid mine off. “Fold your hands in your lap. When the waiter comes, address him as ‘Sir.’ Do you know what you would like to order?”
The restaurant at La Fonda was more enchanting than intimidating, despite my mother’s sudden penchant for rules. Set in the hotel’s enclosed courtyard, its roof rose three stories overhead, and railed balconies circled the second and third floors. Minute motes of dust floated in the muted noonday sun; bright paper piñatas hung near the double doors beneath the entrance that led to the Plaza.
Waiters and waitresses dressed in the white cotton and primary colors of old Mexico balanced huge round silver trays of food on one upheld hand. My mother’s margarita, which she let me try, tasted bitter, but sported a matching lime green paper umbrella that enchanted me. Mexican music filtered tinnily from invisible speakers, and I was certain that somewhere people were dancing, though I couldn’t see them. I had a sudden thought.
“Is this what an ocean liner is like?” I asked my mother.
She turned her distracted eyes to me then looked away again, over my shoulder this time. “An ocean liner? Heavens, no. Put your napkin in your lap. That’s right, smooth it. Don’t fiddle with it.”
Why were my mother and I having lunch in Santa Fe? How old was I? How had we gotten there? (My mother disliked driving.)
My memory decides to answer one of these questions. Here comes a man, a man so unlike my father that he seems another species: he is reed-thin, blonde; his gestures remind me of birds, flying. The man comes up to our table, and says, “Katherine! What a delightful surprise,” then kisses my mother on each cheek. He turns to me. “You must be Anna,” he says. His voice is funny, not the way a man’s voice should be.
“Say ‘how-do-you-do,’ Anna,” says my mother.
“Hullo,” I mutter.
The man has already pulled back an empty chair. “May I?” he asks.
“Of course,” says my mother, whose eyes look different. “Anna,” she says, “this is Carl Mayer. Carl is a violinist. A virtuoso.”
The man Carl laughs. “Flattery will get you everywhere, Katherine,” he says, scooping up her hand and holding it between his own. “How are you, darling? Are you well? Are you playing? Please tell me you are.”
“I live in Los Alamos,” my mother says, as if that is an answer to all his questions. And apparently it is, because Carl laughs again.
“Enough said,” he says.
“But you, what are you doing in Santa Fe?” my mother asks.
“They’re starting an opera here,” Carl says, “and the fools have asked me to organize an orchestra. Me. Can you imagine?”
But now I remember seeing the New Mexican opened to an article about just such an opera, about the young bachelor who’s been hired as its musical director, how he lunches every day at precisely noon at La Fonda. I’m old enough to read, apparently, and I’m old enough to realize that my mother has employed me in some sort of deceit, or that she is for some reason attempting to deceive me.
“My father is in charge of Los Alamos,” I blurt out, though I’m not certain why.
Carl takes my hand and squeezes it. “What a wonderful child, Katherine,” he says. “She’s absolutely delightful.”
But why deceive anyone? Carl Mayer was obviously homosexual; my mother did not make her clandestine plans to begin an affair. Still, she did not want my father to know that she had planned to meet Carl, and she used me as her cover. I could say we met a man that Mommy knew, and it would all seem like a coincidence.
But had Carl been expecting to see my mother, or had she kept her plans from him as well? What were my mother’s plans?
And here I sat at La Fonda thirty years later, looking around the room as if I expected Carl Mayer to suddenly appear once again, unaged, unchanged, a man, I realized, who had been my mother’s friend.
How could I have forgotten someone so important to my mother? Other meetings with Carl tumbled forth all at once: outings to the Symphony in Albuquerque; picnics in the Sangre de Cristos north of Santa Fe. With Carl, my mother laughed and said clever things. With Carl, the things that had attracted my father were once again in evidence.
But I had forgotten. Until this moment, I had forgotten. Why? And what else was there I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—remember?
When my mother died, Carl Mayer had disappeared, I thought as my waitress brought my salad. “Is there a phone book I could see?” I asked her. She gave me a curious look, then indicated the pay phones up the stairs by the rest rooms.
Perhaps Carl Mayer was still in Santa Fe, and, if he were, he might be able to answer many questions, questions that I hadn’t, until I remembered him, even known I had.
September 1947
The little airport building is made of adobe, and sits at the edge of a mesa next to the runway. Alice is waiting for me outside the building with a man she introduces as “Her-bee, Her-bee Stone.” Her-bee takes my hand and pumps it up and down in that hard American way and says, as if it is one word, “So waddaya think?”
What do I think? I think, where are the trees? I think, why does it burn my throat to breathe? I think, why does my heart beat so quickly? I think, what kind of name is Her-bee, Her-bee Stone?
Herbie (which is the correct way to spell this name) is “in real estate.” Before we get into his car, a black Chrysler with dark maroon seats, he takes my elbow with one hand and waves the other to embrace all the empty space in the valley below us. “Lookit this place,” he says. “It’s a dream just waiting to come true.”
This is the way Americans talk. It is a land without a past, a people who look only forward, to the future. Americans are always making plans, drawing up plans, finalizing plans, implementing plans. One does not hear an American say what happened last week but rather what will happen in the next, as if it is already true.
Americans are direct. They are blunt, but they are also happy people, eager to laugh at jokes which make puns of words or fun of nationalities or races, including, it seems, one’s own: Herbie asks me if I’ve heard “the one about the rabbi, the minister, and the priest,” and Herbie, Alice has told me, is Jewish.
As a matter of fact, I have heard the one about the rabbi, the minister, and the priest. I have heard it first from a man who sat with other men at a table behind me in a restaurant at Idylwild Airport, and I heard it again from the man who sat next to me from Kansas City to Albuquerque. I did not understand it either time, though at least the second time, I knew when to laugh.
“Hana’s probably tired,” Alice says, a phrase which apparently alerts Herbie not to tell me this one. Alice slides into the center of the wide front seat and pats the upholstery next to her, a signal that I should sit there, I assume. I feel as if I must have dreamed Prague, its narrow cobbled streets, stone buildings, gardens and trees. I must have dreamed those mountains and rivers, too, because the mountains here are so unlike them they should be called by another name, and this river—the Rio Grande, Alice tells me—is flat and sandy and shallow; I do not even realize we are on a bridge over it until Alice points to the trickle of water below.
Then we turn around and come back; this bridge crossing was for my benefit, a sort of tour, apparently. We drive back up the street we have come down, a street lined on either side with motorhotels and gasoline stations and little restaurants called coffee shoppes, and then we drive beneath some railroad tracks, climb a hill and turn onto a surprisingly lovely street lined with trees.
Herbie turns the car into a driveway and shuts it off, and we all listen to the engine make some noises. “Dammit,” Herbie says. “They were supposed to fix that.” I realize the car is not supposed to be making these noises.
I am learning such things very quickly. I mention this to Alice, as she sits on the bed in the tiny room where I will be staying until I “find my own place,” and Alice laughs. Alice calls me “Honey” now, as if it were my name, and it is near enough
my name that I respond to it. “Honey,” she says, “You have no idea.” I am unpacking my one suitcase into the small dresser squeezed against the wall. This room is unbelievably tiny; I could not, should I want to, fit even a spinet into it.
“At least your English is good,” Alice goes on. “Mine was terrible, when I got here. ‘Hello. Thank you. Where is the ladies’ room?’ Do you know Spanish?”
Americans often change topic for no reason. “A little,” I tell her. “Poquito.”
“Lots of Mexicans here. And Indians. Cowboys, too. It’s the wild west, Honey.” This phrasing sounds odd with Alice’s Czech accent. And, as if she has heard my thoughts, Alice suddenly switches to Czech.
“You have not heard from Raja yet?” she asks.
“No,” I say. I take a slip out of the drawer and carefully refold it.
Alice lights a Lucky Strike and leans back onto the little headboard. “It’s easier to forget, here.”
I shake out the slip and start over. “I do not wish to forget,” I say.
“I know,” Alice says. “That’s not what I mean.” She takes a long draw of her cigarette and then taps the ash into the ashtray on the little nightstand. “I mean, you can go on, here. You can start your life over. It’s a different place.”
I finish folding the slip and slide it into place, then close the drawer. Then I laugh. “‘Different’ does not begin to describe it,” I say in English.
Alice laughs, too. “You can say that again, Honey,” she says, but I don’t.
Carl Mayer is listed in the Santa Fe directory, and I note the address and telephone number. Driving home, I realize he must be in his sixties, perhaps even older.
As I turn off at Pojoaque, I realize something else. Carl Mayer may have known Hana Weissova. The idea is so startling that I have to pull onto the shoulder for a moment. Then I realize something even more startling: It is possible that my mother knew her as well. As soon as I think this, I know it is so, and an image flutters somewhere at the edge of my vision: my mother, and Hana Weissova, looking for all the world like sisters, or even twins. They are holding hands, and one points at something and they both laugh.
“No,” I say. I say it out loud, startling myself, then check my side mirror and carefully ease back onto the highway. I am letting my imagination get the better of me, wishing for things that have never been.
But why, I wonder, did Hana leave me her papers? Is it possible that these are not mere dreams after all?
Mythology tells us that musicians were once afforded special status. A plaintive song could cause a death sentence to be commuted, even elevate its singer to immortality. According to Greek legend, the earliest musicians were the gods, with Athena inventing the flute and Hermes the lyre. Further, when the Muses sang, their voices were so lovely that they moved their listeners to tears, while Orpheus, a Muse’s son could move not just listeners but mountains and rivers as well.
The Bible, too, extols its musicians: David’s Psalms, Solomon’s Song. Biblical composers praised earthly beauty as well as God’s glory, recognizing that what is seemingly simple is deceptively so.
The wedding of music to technology has changed all this; post-modern melodies are no longer meant to please or soothe but instead to show a composer’s technical virtuosity. An instrument’s natural tonality is abandoned in favor of demanding new or unusual sounds: The strings of a piano may be struck with a broom handle, or, worse, the lid of the piano may be slammed to force a dissonant, atonal roar.
Music, in its earliest definition, meant “the art of the Muses,” and more recently, “a rhythmic sequence of pleasing sounds.” The advent of science and technology has demanded that we redefine many things: the existence of a Supreme Being; the possibility of extraterrestrial life; the ability of man to design a weapon capable of precipitating his own mass destruction.
But there are areas science has been unable to define: love, and dreams, and life, and death. Music also resists scientific explanation; by its very nature, it cannot be easily reduced to mere words. Still, music can create beauty in the ugliest of circumstances, and it is singular in its ability to help humans transcend, if only momentarily, their mortality.
Memory chooses what it wishes to keep and the rest disappears, as if it never existed. I had forgotten Carl Mayer just as I had forgotten the name of Paul’s roommate at Cornell, and, though the reasons may have been very different, the result was the same: When I tried to glimpse into my past I saw broad expanses of emptiness, years that had left no trails by which to trace them.
But now, I had remembered Carl Mayer, and I had his phone number safely tucked in my purse. I put off calling him; what would I say? Then Manuel called from the music store to say my CD had arrived, and I drove back down to Santa Fe with Carl’s address in my purse.
The streets around the plaza are narrow and crooked, and the old adobe walls that surround the houses abut the sidewalks or sometimes usurp them. Carl Mayer’s address near the Acequia Madre was marked in tile next to an old wood puerto in just such a wall. As is usual in Santa Fe, there was no parking place nearby.
I drove down an unpaved alley to the lot behind a former bookstore and parked in the shade of a cottonwood, then walked back up the alley and around to the street. The sky was a deep blue, but the wind blew with its unmistakable March insistence, moving last year’s leaves, ancient dust, and this year’s bits of paper to new locations as if that were its purpose. At the puerto, I searched for a bell or knocker, but, finding none, I lifted the heavy iron latch and entered the courtyard, then closed the door behind me.
The wind did not enter the courtyard with me, and the stillness made me aware of my stinging ears. I shook my head, then followed the short brick path through now-brown sage and chamisa to a small covered entrance; ristras hung from the rafters on either side. Again, there was no bell, but an iron-faced lion on the door sported a ring through its nose. I lifted it and let it drop, then listened for movement beyond the door.
It was very still.
I knocked again with the iron ring, and this time I heard a scraping sound inside: a door opening, perhaps, or a shoe against tile. Then I heard high-pitched barking, the kind that only a very small dog can make, and the unmistakable voice of Carl Mayer, saying, “Oh, be quiet, Sabrina. Honestly.” Then the door creaked open.
He didn’t seem to recognize me, but I knew him at once; he was remarkably unchanged. “Yes?” he said, wearing an amused half-smile, an oxford-cloth shirt tucked into chinos, a sweater draped casually across his shoulders. He was still thin, still blonde, and still had that air of condescension I’d forgotten.
“Anna Kramer,” I said. “Holtz. Anna Holtz.”
The half-smile broke into a huge grin, and I found myself wrapped in Carl Mayer’s arms. “At last!” he cried, dramatic as ever. “Come in! Come in!” And, with a sweep of his arm, I was in, led to a surprisingly large central room with a skylight and a warm woodstove, parked on an old maroon sofa with yellowed antimacassars on its arms, offered tea, and then left alone for a moment to take in my surroundings, while Sabrina, a longhaired dachshund, thoroughly inspected my shoes.
Built-in bookcases. A Steinway, with a Stradivarius left casually on its bench. Oriental rugs. African masks. Overgrown ferns and schefflera. African violets. A shelf of photographs over the piano.
I got up to look at the photographs more closely. Here were Carl and my mother, talking with someone at a party—was it Stravinsky? It was. Here was my mother again, caught offguard in a snapshot in someone’s backyard, her hair half-hidden under a wide white band, her eyes obscured behind owl-rimmed dark glasses. The smile she had presented the photographer was not one I often saw, but the face was. This was my mother at forty, when I was twelve years old.
“You have her eyes,” Carl said behind me. He’d set a tray on the low table by the sofa and had sat down to pour tea. “No sugar, a little cream,” he said, and I nodded. “It’s Oolong. Everything’s accessible, these days. The chal
lenge of finding the unusual has disappeared, along with many other fine arts.” He patted the sofa next to him. “Come. Sit. We have years of catching up.”
I obeyed and accepted the cup he offered me. “You don’t seem surprised to see me,” I said.
He shook his head. “I’m only surprised you took so long.”
“I just remembered you,” I admitted.
“That’s rather odd,” Carl said. He paused, took a sip of tea, and set his cup down before continuing. “We were very good friends, you and I.”
“When?” I asked.
Now he put a finger to his chin and considered. “From 1958—or was it 59?—until 1965, when poor Katherine died.” He looked at me for confirmation. “Good God. You really don’t remember, do you?” I shook my head.
“I’m afraid your father didn’t approve of me,” he said, “though that would hardly explain obliterating me from your memory. Not that he’s not capable of it.”
“He’s dead,” I said.
“So he is,” Carl agreed. “But a commanding man nonetheless, wouldn’t you agree?” I didn’t respond, watched Carl take another careful sip of the still-hot tea.
“Leon and I had no common place to begin a conversation,” he said. “Except for your mother, we had nothing in common at all, and as I said, Leon did not approve of our friendship.”
“Was he jealous?”
Carl laughed. “Jealous? General Holtz? Hardly. It’s just that he couldn’t abide fairies. Don’t look so startled, Anna dear. I am a fairy. I’m afraid it made Leon more than a trifle uncomfortable.”
“I don’t remember you,” I said. “Why don’t I remember you?”
Carl set down his teacup and took my hand between his own. Feeling it, I remembered the gesture. I remembered him taking my mother’s hand the same way, at that table at La Fonda. “Poor, poor Anna,” he said. “You were such a malleable child. So eager for your father’s attention. Your mother’s, too, and poor Katherine didn’t have a clue as to how to show you she loved you. After she died, I came and packed away her things. Your father stayed in his study, only came out to point where I should set them. ‘There,’ he said. ‘There.’ As if by closing that door he was denying their existence. And then he saw me out and I knew I’d never be back.”
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