They stood in the doorway, Rob and Alicia: Joel’s children, not hers, red-cheeked and insubordinate and already dressed in their ski clothes. Joel had told them that they were not to go out alone until he’d had time to show them around. He was forty-two and panted each time he moved quickly. His children breathed easily and looked at Zaga with interest but no sympathy.
“Zaga’s sick,” Joel said, and Alicia said, “No kidding,” and moved closer to the bed. Although she was only fourteen, she was three inches taller than Zaga and weighed thirty pounds more. There were long streaks bleached into her hair, from the hours she’d spent beside the pool, and her figure was so flamboyant that she made Zaga feel like a twig.
“You can’t come skiing?” Rob asked Joel. He was twelve, Alicia’s height already, and so strong that Joel had given up wrestling with him.
“Your stepmother’s sick,” Joel repeated. “No one’s going anywhere until we get her fixed up.”
Rob and Alicia exchanged a look. “We’ll just go downstairs then,” Alicia said. “Have some breakfast. Okay?”
Zaga leaned over and threw up again, diverting Joel’s attention. The children moved out of the doorway but not, Zaga learned later, out of earshot. And so when Joel, holding Zaga’s head over the wastebasket, said “Do you think it’s morning sickness?” Alicia apparently heard every syllable.
All day Zaga lay in bed, dizzy and nauseated and only—vaguely aware of Joel’s comings and goings and of the scene Rob and Alicia made when Joel found them. They’d stormed off to the slopes without Joel and returned unrepentant, hours later. In the lounge, where Joel finally caught up with them, they had said the idea of a baby disgusted them.
“It’s so gross,” Alicia had said. Rob, ever practical, had apparently said only, “Where’s it going to sleep?”
Joel imitated Alicia’s disgusted squeal and Rob’s nervous rumble as he described the scene to Zaga. “They’ll come around,” he said. “It’s natural for them to feel this way—now they have proof that we sleep together.”
Zaga had trouble smiling back at him, and by the time the hotel doctor arrived she was very weak.
“Dr. Sepulveda,” he said. His face was lean and tanned and his hair fell back in a smooth black wave. He leaned over and rested his hand on her forehead. “You are feeling poorly?”
His short white jacket buttoned to one side and was starched and crisp. “Can you tell me your symptoms?” Lightly accented English, perfectly correct. Because Zaga couldn’t speak, Joel told the doctor about the dizziness, the vomiting, the headache that spiked down the back of Zaga’s neck and pierced her eyes.
“Yes?” Dr. Sepulveda said. He took her pulse and her temperature, looked in her throat and listened to her chest. Joel told him that Zaga was three months pregnant, and Dr. Sepulveda nodded and ran his fingers gently over her belly.
“You have soroche,” he told her. Then he looked up at Joel and repeated the word. “Soroche. Altitude sickness. That’s all.”
“That’s it?” Joel said. “No virus? There’s nothing wrong with the baby?”
“The baby has nothing to do with this. She has all the classic symptoms.”
He gave her two injections and then he left. An hour later she stopped throwing up; he returned the next morning and gave her two more shots and by nightfall she was almost well. The next day she dressed herself, after Joel and Alicia and Rob had gone out for the day. Then she began waiting for her time in Portillo to end.
Zaga knew she hadn’t gotten what the house was worth, but at the closing, even the amount left after the broker’s commission still took her breath away. She moved into a furnished apartment while she decided what to do. For nineteen years Joel had fussed about his health, but he’d never really been sick and she’d made no plans for a life without him.
He meant to retire young, he’d told her, during a quiet moment stolen from his sixtieth birthday party. They could travel again. Not the sort of family vacations they’d had for years, to Florida, Mexico, Maine—but a real trip, just the two of them. He didn’t say, “We could go back to Portillo,” but she knew it was on his mind. She’d thought about that: Portillo again, the way it was meant to be. Six days later a weak spot on the wall of his aorta had opened like a window.
Afterwards, when she’d woken each morning and found the undisturbed blankets beside her, his absence had seemed impossible. At dusk she’d strained her ears for the sound of his car pulling into the crescent driveway, and sometimes she’d called out his name in the empty rooms. But her first move eased her grief unexpectedly, and her second relieved her even more. Downtown, near the art museum, she found a lovely old building that had just been converted to condominiums. She bought a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor, overlooking the Schuylkill River: high ceilings, beautiful moldings, smooth oak floors. It cost so much less than the Merion house that she felt virtuous and thrifty.
Morning coffee in the sunny kitchen; a quiet browse through the papers and then a shower and some shopping or a walk. No meals to make, no garden to weed or guest room to rearrange. No guests. For nineteen years she had entertained Joel’s friends and business associates; she had been famous for her parties and Joel had been proud of her success. Their closest moments had been spent on the sofa, going over menus and guest lists or rehashing the high points of a party just past, and she had never told him she knew that his friends still compared her unfavorably with his first wife.
Now she spent days alone in her new place and felt no desire to call anyone. She walked to Rittenhouse Square. She haunted the antique shops on Spruce and Lombard and then spent hours moving knicknacks here and pillows there. Silence, idleness, solitude. Where was Joel in all of this? Sometimes she walked the few blocks to the art museum and gazed at the statues or strolled through the hall in which the collection of Joel’s grandfather’s paintings hung.
Joel had taken her here on their fourth or fifth date, but he hadn’t said a word about his family. He had let her admire the paintings and read the polished plaque in the front of the room. “Any relation?” she remembered asking, when she saw the identical last names—thinking of course not, or at most someone distant; laughing, joking. “My grandfather,” he said, and only then had she realized how surely she was in over her head. She thought how her grandmothers might have done laundry for his family, and she dreaded what Joel might think of her father, who shed his clothes after work in the basement and then showered in a grimy stall, washing off layers of dust and mortar before entering the scrubbed and parsimonious upper floors.
But Joel had already told her he loved her by then. She was gentle, he said. And so flexible—she was as happy lying around in his old pajamas, eating muffins and reading the papers, as she was when he took her out to fancy nightclubs. She sang while she cooked. The rich, complicated meals she fixed, based on her grandmothers’ recipes, made his eyes moist with pleasure.
In a bar off Rittenhouse Square, he courted her with recollections of his first visit to Portillo. He told her how, during the summer after he finished college, he’d found a spot on a freighter headed for Chile. He’d made his way to Santiago; then up the Andes and to the hotel, where he’d joined some old acquaintances. Just a handful of skiers, he said, back in those good old days. She could recall doing a quick calculation in her head as he spoke, and realizing that she’d been five at the time.
Endless white snowfields, he’d said, his hands moving in the smoky air. Daring stunts; condors soaring over the rocks. And although he was middle-aged and filled with the hectic despair of the newly divorced, his stories made him seem young. He was young, he said. He had married right after his trip to Portillo and had two children quickly. His wife had dumped him so she could discover herself.
“She wants to paint,” he’d said bitterly, over a meal that Zaga made him: roast veal with fennel and garlic? Pork braised with prunes? “Watercolors,” he’d said. “So she’s got the house in Meadowbrook, which I’m still paying the mortgage on, and
the kids are with her, and I’m stuck here.”
‘Here’ was an airy two-bedroom apartment with an enormous kitchen, nicer than anything Zaga could afford. She was nothing like his first wife, Joel said, and she took this as a compliment. She was drawn by his stability, his solidity, the radiant success with which he managed his outward life. She was touched by his inability to cook or clean and by his obvious need for her. He reached across his sofa after their first visit with her family, and he lifted a strand of her hair and said, “Did you get this from some beautiful Lithuanian grandmother?”
She took this to mean that he accepted her background, and her. He bought her new clothes and then, in the galleries where he purchased paintings, introduced her as if he were proud. Two years later, when the huge house in Merion was almost done, she was thrilled when he proposed a delayed honeymoon in Portillo. Joel had been shaped by the Andes, she thought; perhaps the mountain air could transform her into someone from his world.
Then Rob and Alicia, unexpectedly abandoned by Joel’s ex-wife, sailed into their lives like a three-masted ship from a foreign country. Their arrival changed the focus of the trip but made it seem even more important. By the time Zaga discovered she was pregnant, the plans were too far along to change without disappointing everyone.
Those early days came back to her one afternoon, over a lunch of salmon and asparagus salad in the museum café. She realized that she had not seen any of Joel’s paintings anywhere. She went back to the hall where his grandfather’s collection hung, thinking Joel’s bequests might have been mingled in. Then she walked more carefully from room to to room. Nothing. The next day she called the museum and made an appointment to meet the woman in charge of new acquisitions. The woman had an office so softly blue and gray that Zaga felt as if she’d been set inside a cloud.
There were some small financial difficulties, the woman murmured. She crossed her long, narrow legs and regarded her excellent shoes. Of course the museum was enormously grateful for the bequest. But so few people, outside the art world, understood the expenses involved with such a gift: cataloging, cleaning, reframing, lighting—her voice drifted off and so did her gaze, leaving Zaga to fill the empty space.
“You have an endowment, surely?” Zaga said. Joel had taught her a good deal and his friends had taught her more.
“Of course,” the woman said. Her voice hovered between the purr she would have used with Joel and the bite she would have used on Zaga, had Zaga not been married to Joel. “But these are difficult times, and our budget is constantly being trimmed…”
“Would a donation be useful?” Zaga asked. She felt a thrill as she said that. Joel had always made the big donations; of course he had, the money was his. But now Joel was gone and the money was hers.
When the woman smiled her teeth were perfectly white and straight. “Coffee?” she said. Zaga nodded and the woman summoned her assistant.
Three days before they were due to leave the Andes, a blizzard cut them off from the outside world. No traffic arrived or departed and there was nothing to do but wait. Joel and the children still skied, masked in goggles and wrapped in extra clothes, delighted at their extended vacation. Zaga sat, more and more frantic, at a table by the window in the lounge of the Hotel Portillo. Dr. Sepulveda, also trapped by the blizzard and unable to return to his home in Santiago, sometimes joined her. The first time he appeared at her table, he talked about the weather for a while and then fell silent and studied her face.
“You must be Slavic,” he said. “With those cheekbones and that name.” He lit a cigarette and turned from her face to the mountain. “Let me guess,” he said. “Slovenian royalty. Ukrainian landowners. White Russian aristocrats fleeing the Bolsheviks.”
“Lithuanian potato-and-cabbage peasants,” she admitted. Was he teasing her? She had seen faces like his in the paintings of Spanish nobility that hung in the museum at home. “My parents were born in Philadelphia, but only just. I have a brother who’s a bricklayer, like my father; another who’s a cop. The big success is Timothy—he’s an optometrist. My sister works part-time in a bakery, and I was working as a secretary in an art gallery when I met Joel.”
“Really,” the doctor said. “Among the modern languages, Lithuanian is the one most closely related to Sanskrit.”
“I’ll have to take your word for that,” she said. “I hardly remember any of it.”
“But your grandparents…?”
“They never learned English well.”
Outside, beyond the windows, the snow fell and fell and fell. The afternoon had only just started and there were hours to kill before Joel and the children returned from the slopes. There was nothing to do but talk, and so when Dr. Sepulveda said, “And what about your husband?” she answered him more fully than she might otherwise have done.
“Joel’s grandfather was a chemist,” she said. “He synthesized a drug used to treat ulcers, and then he started a pharmaceutical company to manufacture it. The family still owns most of the stock.” When she mentioned the name of the company Dr. Sepulveda raised an eyebrow in recognition.
“Your husband runs it?”
“One of his cousins. But Joel’s on the board of directors, of course, and he works there—all the cousins do. Joel’s the vice-president for community relations.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s the do-gooder,” Zaga said. She would have given anything for a bottle of wine, green and slim on the table between them, but her doctor at home had forbidden alcohol. “He oversees all the nonbusiness stuff,” she said. “The sports programs they sponsor, and the scholarships and grants and the corporate art program. Joel buys contemporary art for the offices, and he collects some privately.”
“Very enlightened,” the doctor murmured. “He must have a discriminating eye.”
“And you?” Zaga said. “Are you married?”
He ordered more coffee for himself and, without consulting her, removed her cup and replaced it with a glass of fresh juice. “You shouldn’t be having so much caffeine,” he said. “Not in your condition.” Then he turned to the window, where the bright figures of the skiers flashed against the snow. “Charles Darwin came by here,” he said—the first time he mentioned that name, the first hint she had of the stories that were to come. “A century and a half ago, when these mountains were wilderness. He walked through the pass in the Cordillera near here, past Aconcagua and into Mendoza. Did you know that? If it wasn’t snowing so hard, you could see the tip of Aconcagua from your chair.”
Aconcagua; that chain of gentle, open-mouthed vowels could not be more different than what she remembered of her grandparents’ speech. She rolled the word around in her mouth, and only when Dr. Sepulveda said, “Zaga?” did she hear the link to her own name.
The woman at the museum was very persuasive and Zaga, after an argument with her broker and a long phone call from her lawyer, wrote a substantial check. It was thrilling, inking that row of figures onto the smooth green paper. And she felt sure that Joel would have been pleased—he would have left the museum the funds to maintain the paintings had he not been overscrupulous about providing for her. But she had everything she needed. When her sister Marianna came to see the condominium, Zaga blithely told her about her gift.
“How much money?” Marianna said. “You gave that much to strangers?”
Zaga explained the situation: how there was money left from the sale of the house, how the museum needed it. “I’m fine,” she told her sister. “Joel left me in good shape.”
But Marianna wasn’t worried about Zaga’s financial stability. “You might have thought of us,” she said, aggrieved and pinkfaced, and then all the resentment she’d felt since Zaga’s marriage came pouring out. Zaga, she said, had not been sufficiently generous.
“Look at your clothes,” she said. Zaga could not see much difference between her blouse and jacket and Marianna’s pretty sweater. “Look at your cars.”
“I only kept one,” Zaga protes
ted. “Remember when I gave Dad the Oldsmobile?”
“Oh, please,” Marianna said. “Big deal.” And when Zaga reminded her that she and Joel had paid the hospital bills for her father’s final illness, and also the live-in housekeeper who had made possible her mother’s last days at home, Marianna only made a face. “What did that cost you?” she said. “What did you have to give up? Nothing.”
“I had to ask Joel every time—you think that was easy?”
Marianna flicked her hand in front of her face, as if she were waving away a gnat. “Joel was a weenie,” she said impatiently. “If you’ll pardon me for saying so. We all knew he’d do whatever you asked. But things are different now. My kids are headed for college in just a few years, and Teddy and I don’t have any idea where we’re going to scrape the tuition from—how do you think it makes us feel, watching you give that kind of money to a museum?”
“I didn’t know you felt like that,” Zaga said, unwilling to admit how impulsive her gift had been. “The museum was very important to Joel.”
“What’s important is family,” Marianna said. “If you ever came home, you might have some idea what was going on.”
“I visited as much as I could,” Zaga said. But she knew that this was not precisely true. Within a few years of her marriage to Joel, the row houses and narrow streets of her family’s neighborhood in northeast Philadelphia had come to seem unpleasant. Christmas days they had spent with Joel’s family, but on Christmas Eves they went to her parents’ house, where all her relatives gathered. Each year she’d been more uncomfortable turning off Roosevelt Boulevard and heading into the blocks where she’d grown up. Reindeer and sleds on the shabby roofs, shrubs wound with colored bulbs and children everywhere. The contrast with Merion, where her neighbors hung small wreaths on their front doors and framed trees between half-drawn curtains in front of picture windows, had made her queasy. Joel had never mentioned the garish decorations or been less than courteous to her family, but she had always imagined that he suppressed his distaste only out of kindness. Rob and Alicia had sometimes giggled out loud.
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