But through letters, phone calls, and telegrams, he convinced her to return for the spring semester. He sent a scandalous amount of relentless communications, knowing that each time the postman showed up at her family home, or when the phone rang, she would be terrified her father or sister would find out. Nobody in her house used the phone much; it hung on a wall in a long dark hallway, from where every ring and word spoken could be listened to by all. It was somehow easier to travel halfway around the world again to protect herself and her family from his pestering tantrums. She already had the plane ticket. His last letter was clear: if she didn’t return, he would kill himself, but not before sending a letter to her father telling him that he had fallen madly in love with his daughter. She knew she was being blackmailed into appeasement. She told herself that he would never go through with his threats, and that she should stay right where she was in her room in Madrid. But for some reason she started packing, running her hands over the satin compartments of her small suitcase to flatten a few chosen dresses, skirts, and sweaters. Two weeks later she landed at Kennedy airport again, where Professor Zimmerman awaited her triumphantly.
3
DURING THE SPRING, THEY SPENT more and more time together. They visited other Spaniards in the area. He knew everyone. Odilia realized that they were all exiles from the Spanish Civil War, and she was fascinated to discover that they had rebuilt their lives permanently in the United States. She also helped organize an international conference about contemporary Spanish literature in New York. She worked many extra hours, but when she met the writers, it was all worth it. When the event was written up in the New York Times she sent the clipping to her father.
It was soon after that Professor Zimmerman insisted they get married right away, in the United States. He explained they could do it in no time at with a justice of the peace. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, he said? In America you could get married in the time it took to eat a cheeseburger. People did it all the time. Odilia had always imagined that her wedding would be at a big church in Madrid in the neighborhood where her father lived. She had actually never been too excited about the traditional Spanish society wedding, with the many titled witnesses and all the hoopla. But the idea of this quick wedding made her a bit queasy. He brought the subject up again and again, and said he was starting to make arrangements.
She felt caught, between Professor Zimmerman and her family. How could she get married in the middle of nowhere, like a stray dog?
She asked him to slow down a bit, so that she could at least tell her father and sister. He took her for walks around town and explained that he was trying to turn his current job into a permanent position. Once he did they could buy a house. They had fun walking up and down the town’s prettiest residential streets and daydreaming about which house they would buy one day. Odilia especially liked one with a big porch and a privet hedge that protected the vast lawns. She squinted a bit as she concentrated and tried to imagine living there. Raking the leaves or just sitting on the porch as the mailman or the milkman arrived and said, “Good morning, Mrs. Zimmerman.” She imagined all the books they would have, and how they would need to have special floor-to-ceiling shelves made. She asked “Do you think I could still teach a class or two? I guess we wouldn’t need the money, but teaching has become a passion for me, and I could write my dissertation at the same time. And we could have children.” He replied emphatically, “Of course. That is exactly what we will do. But don’t forget, I’ll still need your eagle eye and your typing skills for my manuscripts. Children will have to wait. We don’t have time now.” She wondered what he meant.
One day, as they drove to a local pub for dinner, he announced that his colleague had agreed to be their witness. Professor Buford was a single American man. He taught philosophy. He was young, in the Navy reserves. Once she and Professor Zimmerman had gone to his place for a drink, and when he hung their coats in the hall closet, she saw his neatly pressed uniform in its dry-cleaning bag. He was tall, thin, and wore his hair with a deep side part. He was considered handsome, but Odilia thought his nose was a bit too big for his other features, and the combination gave him a rodent-like air. It was clear that he disapproved of the situation. He worshipped Professor Zimmerman, whom he considered a worldly European mentor, and Odilia sensed that her presence had interrupted an intense friendship. Buford was absolutely immune to her charms, female or otherwise.
Odilia really couldn’t be pressed to remember how she ended up getting married at the home of the justice of the peace. She vaguely remembered his wife. It all happened so quickly, and then they had dinner, without Professor Buford, at the college inn, as usual. They spent the night there. She was still living in the dorm, and Professor Zimmerman was staying in faculty housing for bachelors.
She hadn’t told her friends about the wedding, though they must have suspected. The next day she sent a cable to her father and sister in Madrid. She sent another one to Edith. She hated to do so, because she instantly and deeply regretted the wedding. It had been like rushing down the street in the rain and inadvertently stepping into a huge puddle, slipping, and not being able to get back up. When she asked about cabling his family, he said, “They’re all dead.” That weekend, Professor Zimmerman took her for a two-day honeymoon to Niagara Falls.
Two months later she realized she was pregnant. She hoped the news would bring cheer to her life and her young marriage, but her husband seemed to view it as more of a passing inconvenience than a joy. The funny thing was she found it ridiculous to think of him as her “husband”—he was still Professor Zimmerman in her mind. He made her swear not to tell anybody (as if she would) and promised to find a swift solution. A solution? She saw his declared passion for her waver for the first time. She refused to talk about a solution. She continued to teach all semester. She dragged herself to class—the students were her only consolation. She wasn’t really showing yet. What she didn’t know was that he was returning to Madrid to teach summer courses. He needed the money and had made all the plans in advance. Why didn’t he tell her this before the wedding? Was she going to be stuck in America alone? And then what would happen? She wrote to her father and sister and said she had found a summer research position. They were baffled that she didn’t want to come back to Spain and spend July and August in the country with them, which she always enjoyed. And they were looking forward to meeting her husband.
Professor Zimmerman did not want the child, saying he really couldn’t afford to start a family just then. He first found her a Catholic home for unwed mothers, where he said she would at least be properly looked after during the pregnancy. During her brief stay there, the nuns changed her name from Odilia to Mary. Mary was a good Catholic name and so easy to pronounce, they said. Sister Catherine said the name would help her assimilate if she was going to stay in the United States. At first Odilia thought the Catholic home was a dreary but safe place for her to wait and have her baby while they figured things out, but she soon realized it was Sister Catherine’s intention to give her child to a nice American family that couldn’t have their own. After two days with the nuns, she called Professor Zimmerman and said, “Do what you want afterward, but get me out of here now.” He found her a room in a small boardinghouse and gave the landlord six months’ rent. He came to visit her and promised to find her a good doctor. But he did not change his summer plans. Professor Zimmerman told her, before he left, to call Professor Buford whenever she needed something, but she knew she would never ask him for help. Not even if she was dying.
Edith would be in Spain through the fall, so Odilia was really stranded. She didn’t want to tell people about her unhappy situation. Professor Zimmerman sent news from Madrid. Her father and sister also wrote reporting on their unchanging lives. The weather. How everyone missed her. Nothing was altered for them, except the void left by Odilia’s absence. It was sad, but sadder yet that they would get used to it. Neither her father nor her sister would raise an alarm or pursue her. Or help her. Or
ask questions. How easily she had vanished from their lives. A couple of girlfriends from university sent postcards from their summer travels. She couldn’t bring herself to write back to anyone.
And there she was in New York State, far from New York City. She had never imagined that something called “New York” could have nothing to do with the exciting, beautiful parts of Manhattan she knew from so many movies and her two brief visits. Upstate, as they called it, there was no one to tell about her loneliness and fear, or her terrible craving for sweets. At the tiny store a few blocks away from the strange house where she waited for the baby, for the future, and for a chance to go back to Madrid, she discovered tubular striped candy sticks. There was nothing like them in Spain. They were swirly and came in all different flavors and colors. Crazy flavors. Root beer and cinnamon. She lived on these candy sticks while devouring paperback dime novels. It helped her pass the long, lonely hours, waiting for Professor Zimmerman’s letters, or the rare phone call which she had to take in the hallway near the stairs. She was well aware that she had regressed to a childlike state. It was as if he had kidnapped her, and she no longer had any agency. The person she had been in Madrid less than a year before seemed like someone else. She had raced around the city, by foot, on the tram, with her high heels, her hair done, and her strawberry-red nail polish. She had lived at home, attended her graduate classes, and gone to parties at embassies and into the countryside with Edith. The future had seemed so exciting, so open. It all seemed impossibly long ago. This was the only real self she had now.
When she was in her seventh month, Professor Zimmerman finally returned from his travels and came to see her. He told her to pack a bag. They went to a house he had rented on a lake somewhere in Connecticut. He drove her in his new dark-green MG convertible. They spent two weeks there. He had been to Scotland, which was inconceivable to her. He had also been to London and Madrid. Now he was with her. What kind of powers did this man have? How had she let him derail her life? He was hatefully well dressed, and brought her two cashmere twinsets, one heather pink, one teal, and a kilt. She wore the dresses she had saved for him. He found her a dentist in Danbury. She had thirteen cavities. It was a shocking number. The dentist cost a fortune.
Sometimes they went out to dinner to the fanciest restaurants he could find, other times he brought food home. In those days, fancy American restaurants had exotic French food that she couldn’t eat: frogs legs, escargots. So much melted butter. One night he went out to get pizza and came back with six large pies. For the two of them. Of course they didn’t even eat half of one. He always ordered too much, spent too freely, went too far. She wondered where he got the money. In Madrid she had never seen anybody spend so much and couldn’t help feeling distaste for his flashiness. She had been raised to value the elegance of austerity. She had never met anyone like him. He was vain. She knew he had chosen a green car to match his eyes. She wished that knowing his weaknesses would give her power, but it didn’t. He disturbed her and sometimes she wished, oh how she wished, she had never met him and that she was free and without her enormous belly and everything that meant. But then she would smell his hair, and he would tell her things about Madrid, even about her own family who knew nothing about her pregnancy, and who he had the nerve to keep in touch with. The family he had taken her from. He would gossip about people they knew, and tell her about his publishing projects, and show her his new essays and poems. He made her laugh despite herself. She sat for hours typing up his manuscripts, feeling intellectually stimulated and a part of his world. She was an excellent typist and editor, and more. She often made suggestions that he liked. She knew that she was becoming a better writer in the process, and thought about the poems and articles she would write one day. He said he couldn’t live without her.
Professor Zimmerman still swore they would be together forever, but wouldn’t it be best to have a child at a more opportune time? Odilia didn’t know what he was talking about. Why was their work more important than her life? He explained that he had two major book deadlines approaching, that they were duty-bound to give Spain a better image in the United States and to bring democratic ideals back to their own country. He hadn’t just fallen for her; he had chosen her, and she was to be a brilliant magnet for American students. He reminded her of the success of their conference in New York, saying that was just the beginning. She hadn’t even known she was being recruited, or that there were any rules to be broken. She thought she had simply come to America to be a teaching assistant. Her family had been pleased for her. Now she was married to him, and he sat there, waving his hands around emphatically, explaining that for reasons entirely related to international politics, it would be selfish of Odilia to have a baby at this time. The new Spain needed young, sympathetic American friends for its future and she was the poster girl. Her students listened to her. As he told her all this, he smoked endless cigarettes and brewed pots of coffee.
He was a lively speaker, and she indulged him, but his political views were not the point. It was true that some of her classmates at the university in Madrid had gone to jail and struggled to change the system in Spain, and she had admired their courage, but to think that she should make a sacrifice in order to keep sowing seeds among a small group of American students was ridiculous. All very convenient for him and the cause. And what about her and her baby?
He had, he confessed, connections with the CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom, and it would be bad for his image if people knew he had married and fathered a child with a recruit without even having a full-time job lined up. He would be taken for a fool. She wondered what he really feared most: the CIA or her formidable father. Or nothing at all. She had no time to fear anything.
She was keeping the baby. Once Professor Zimmerman realized she would not budge on that issue, he reluctantly accepted it. But he warned her that she would have to get used to being alone for long periods while he traveled. She assumed he would come back for good in the autumn, but his plans changed. He promised to write to her. And to visit often. Letters. Telegrams. Postcards. Sometimes nothing for over a week. Sometimes ten in one day. For a time she was convinced that these communications were all preludes to his eventual return. They weren’t. He gradually vanished. He was the most inconsistent person in the world. She lived through all of this as if she were watching a foreign movie with no subtitles, in which she was the pregnant star.
4
I WAS BORN SOMEWHERE NEAR Canada. It was snowing.
My mother and I. She’s told me the story so many times, I feel like I was there. Of course, I was there, but I mean I feel like I remember it, as if I was born aware of the strange situation I had landed in.
During the night when my mother was in labor, the shifts had changed, and a new nurse, at least one my mother hadn’t seen before, finally brought me, a screaming infant, into the room. I had been bathed, and a short, thin white ribbon had been tied around the base of my scruffy patch of dark hair, making me look like a tiny blue-eyed samurai. I was a month premature and weighed five pounds, four ounces.
My mother thanked the nurse and did her best to hold me, the first baby she had ever held. The nurse’s nametag said DONOHUE. She was large and thick, with ruddy cheeks and short reddish blonde hair. She couldn’t help staring at my new young mother, who with her olive skin (as she always describes it), long thin arms, oval face, and almond-shaped green eyes looked, she said, like the image of the Virgin Mary. My mother’s black hair was parted down the middle and pulled back with a green velvet ribbon. She said she just wanted to be alone, but the nurse wouldn’t leave. Donohue smiled as she shook her head and remarked, “It’s such a shame your husband couldn’t be here now, Mrs. Zimmerman. Should I call you Mrs. Zimmerman, or just Mary? She’s a tiny thing, but what a healthy baby. Anyway, he came while you were asleep. He and a friend . . . another man. They took care of all the paperwork, but they dashed off. He said they were in a big hurry.” She had been registered as Mary Zimmerman. At this par
t in the story, I would always ask: So my father was there? This was very important to me. Yes, my mother said, he came. He brought roses. I saved one. I still have it. But, I asked, who was the other guy? And why did they leave? She shook her head. I’ll tell you when you’re older.
My mother smiled faintly at Nurse Donohue and looked out the window at the snow falling in fat, wet flakes. The nurse smiled again, and asked if she had chosen a name for the baby. My mother said “Dolores.” She wanted to say Mi hija, but she swallowed the words. She had barely spoken to anyone in so long. It was strange to have this Spanish word, her own daughter’s name, just pop out of her mouth in front of a complete stranger. It took great determination not to choke on the syllables, and she tried to muster a smile. Act normal. This is America. The nurse raised her eyebrows and laughed. “Doh-loh-rays. Well, that’ll be a mouthful.” It quickly became Lola. Never Lolita, of course, because of the association with the novel.
She wondered when Edith, her only friend in the United States, just back from Spain, would get to the hospital. When her water broke, my mother had hobbled to the phone in the hallway to call Edith’s mother’s number. She was disappointed that her friend was out, and had to speak bluntly to her mother, who she didn’t know: “The baby is coming. Please tell Edith.” Her mother said that Edith had driven up to Montreal with some girlfriends to spend the day at the Elizabeth Arden Salon, and that she would tell her as soon as she got back. Edith’s mother didn’t ask any questions.
But nobody had called back, and the time had come, and it had all happened, so it was just Odilia, me, and the snow outside. My mother marveled at the great distances and the strangeness of Americans. Her friend had driven hours, through the snow, to another country, to have her hair done! Nobody in Madrid could imagine the madness of these people. Edith’s hair was in rollers when the beautician brought her a white phone and told her she had a long-distance call from her mother. The minute her hair was set, Edith raced from the salon, got into her new Mustang, and began the long drive south. She was a true Vermonter. The snow was not an obstacle.
Madrid Again Page 2