by Mary Cable
Oz and I had one big thing in common: we were both brought up with too many parties going on around us. During the first dozen years or so of our marriage the parties at Gallegos Ranch continued. Lydia and Deck were relentless entertainers, and although we gradually stopped going to their parties, or being invited, in summertime we could plainly hear the laughter. Old-timers used to tell me about the good old days in the 1930s and 1940s, when the annual Fiesta, in early September, had not yet turned commercial. The Anglo community was then small enough so that everyone in it knew everyone else, and just about all of them gave Fiesta parties. The Smithson parties began at noon and went on far into the evening, with barbecued sides of beef, and mariachi bands, and impromptu polo games, played on quarter horses by Deck and visiting buddies from the East.
As Lydia and Deck grew older, they still gave exuberant, inebriated gatherings, even though they and their friends were getting to the point where the gatherings turned out more inebriated than exuberant. Next day the lawn would be strewn with cigarette butts, paper napkins, and perhaps a martini glass or two, or a lost earring. Once, in the lilac bushes, I came upon the president of Oz’s bank, who had dozed off there the night before.
After Deck lost his driver’s license, he had to stay home more, but he didn’t seem to mind. He could pass out in his own library chair and not have to be carried anywhere. Then Lydia stopped driving, drunk or sober, because of cataracts, and when they went out their elderly Mercedes was driven by Filomena. Sometimes old friends came to share that treasured time of day, the cocktail hour, but Lydia and Deck were happy enough by themselves. The important thing for them, the only important thing at that time of day, was the ice bucket and the innocent-looking, water-colored liquid that flowed from bottles labeled gin.
For all their token enthusiasm about the Southwest, the elder Smithsons were still from Rhode Island. Oz told me once that when his parents stopped changing for dinner he had supposed they had psychologically moved West. But no. They still went back to Providence every year to stay with cousins and they still called it “going home.” In summer at Gallegos Ranch they would sit on their portal at sunset-time, watching the Sangre de Cristo Mountains turning blood-red in reflected light, and the clouds of the enormous western sky seething with colors seldom seen in New England - at least, not all at once - deep pinks, violent reds, savage yellows, fierce oranges.
Lydia might say, “Think, Deck, if we didn’t live in New Mexico, we wouldn’t be seeing these sunsets.” And yet it was always clear that these skies were not their skies. Here, they were “from away.”
Once, in a sudden fever of enterprise, I asked Oz if he didn’t want me to give a dinner party for his colleagues and superiors at the bank.
“What for?” he inquired.
“So you’ll be on good terms with them - and get ahead - and-” At that point I faltered, because he was looking at me in such surprise.
“I am on good terms with them,” he said. “I am ahead.”
I said no more. Oz had made it clear that he wasn’t interested in the social side of life, and he had no need of social climbing because in Santa Fe the Smithsons were already at the top. Anyway, Santa Fe has no ranking system, in either the eastern-seaboard sense or the Foreign Service sense, but only many small cliques, some of which interlock with others. Citizens of Spanish descent have their own social hierarchies; and a certain special respect is accorded to Anglo families who, like the Smithsons, are “old-timers,” meaning those who have been here for more than a generation. Still, anyone with a reasonably pleasant personality and plenty of money, who will spend some of it on lavish entertaining and contribute substantial sums to the Santa Fe Opera, can be at the top of any clique he or she chooses.
I asked myself why I continued to give shelf space to my mother’s party paraphernalia. The twenty-four lacquer finger bowls I had saved from her things now gathered dust on a top shelf, along with forty-three Waterford wineglasses and eleven gold-rimmed Spode plates. I felt stupid for being unable to part with them, and I decided it must be because they had given continuity to my disjointed childhood. I had seen them packed and unpacked on four continents, and each time they had emerged from their packing boxes I had experienced the same sense of comfort as when I greeted my dolls and my teddy bear after they, too, had made a long trip by sea or freight train. I depended on them for the reassurance that I, like they, had a unique existence and could survive anywhere. I had also felt closer to my mother when I saw her lift her treasures from their wrappings and put them away in whatever new house or apartment we were moving into. And when she tucked me into a new bed and turned off the lights in an unfamiliar bedroom, I had felt reassured that I, too, was a treasure worth saving.
As I grew older, I sometimes questioned this reverence for possessions. Once, when my mother and I were moving into the East Eighty-ninth Street apartment, I asked her, “Why are we saving these old napkins with holes in them?”
My mother answered - astonishingly - “There is nothing like old linen for bandages.”
“Are you expecting a nuclear attack?” I inquired, in the nasty manner that often comes over teenagers.
But my mother stood her ground. “You never know what will happen,” she said, and found a place for a pile of ragged double-damask. At that point I realized, for the first time, that this mother who seemed so capable and full of common sense was also prey to shadowy terrors. And for the first time I felt compassionate - a little less absorbed in my own fears, a little more aware of someone else’s.
Parties were certainly one source of my fears, even though I was thoroughly programmed to attend them. As a child, when my parents entertained, and I was there to pass hors d’oeuvres, I felt doubly an outsider. One, because most of the people in the room were speaking other languages, and, two, because of being a child. The guests would accept from me a cracker spread with something fancy, and perhaps would say, “What a pretty dress you have!” or “What a good little hostess!” I learned superficiality from being at those parties, and I can still summon it up when it seems fitting. But I was play-acting then and I still am. And I still grow fearful at parties, remembering my travels around big rooms, gripping, at a slightly tipped angle, a tray of canapes, and forging my way through towering groves of people I had never seen before.
In those days, I longed to be a pretty, grown-up girl, smiling and chattering, and brandishing a cigarette. One time, in Africa, I saw two of our guests slip out through the French doors that led to a terrace. I followed them, and saw that one was the wife of our new vice-consul and the other a Greek consulate official whose child was in my class at school. They were kissing intensely. I had never seen such kissing. This was before the days of TV soap operas, and my parents rarely kissed in my presence, intensely or not. I reported this incident to them - I was then five - and my father told me about the monkeys who could “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.” He said that this should be the motto of a Foreign Service child, and to emphasize the point, he bought me a little charm, with those discreet animals carved in bone. Someone in our Consulate circle must have been less discreet than the monkeys, however, because not long afterward our vice-consul and his out-of-line wife were suddenly transferred.
Although I was so young, I knew that this woman would be getting a low rating when it came time for the annual Efficiency Reports. A wife who was rated gauche, inept, dull-witted, intemperate, grumpy, manner-less, or a “security risk”-that is, open to gossip or blackmail - could drag her husband down. Stories were told of even the most capable of Foreign Service Officers who had been passed over for high posts because the little woman wouldn’t do. I also knew that my mother was rated “an Asset,” and in Santa Fe I compared myself unfavorably with her until I finally realized that my “performance” had nothing to do with Oz and his bank.
Sometimes, in Santa Fe, I had to remind myself that I was there to stay, that I was not going anywhere. This seemed unnatural. When I made friends, I noticed
that I held something back, as though I didn’t expect to know them long. And when I planted lilacs, to shield myself from the in-laws, I couldn’t imagine the day when the bushes would be ten feet high and I’d still be here to see them.
Five years or so into my marriage, I began to suffer from bouts of sadness, sometimes so acute that I would do nothing but lie on my bed most of the day. Oz’s only suggestion was “snap out of it,” but when I failed to snap out, I decided to see Dr. Fischer, a psychiatrist. The first session or two went well, but when he began asking awkward questions, I found myself apprehensive.
He was the kind of psychiatrist who doesn’t put his patients on a couch, but seats them by his desk. Looking straight at his cheery, well-adjusted face, I felt like a child who has been sent to see the principal.
“Well now, Alexandra,” he said, leaning back in his large, authoritarian’s chair. “Are you ever angry because you and your husband live in his parents’ guesthouse, literally a stone’s throw from a mother-in-law you can’t stand?”
“I guess so,” I said. “But the rent is low, it’s a nice house, Oz likes it, and I hate moving.”
He said that those answers sounded evasive, and I responded rather tartly that if I were good at giving direct answers I wouldn’t need a psychiatrist.
“That was a fine, direct answer,” he said. “You really told me off. So it’s clear that you can assert yourself if you want to.”
“But I don’t want to,” I said. “Usually I’m very polite and eager to please. I was brought up that way.”
“And do you like being that way?”
“Maybe not, but I don’t know how to be different.”
“What would you choose as an epitaph? ‘Alexandra Smithson . . . She was polite and eager to please’?”
“Certainly not.”
“Does that notion make you feel anxious? Angry?”
I looked at my watch. “I feel that it’s time to go home,” I said.
“We have fourteen more minutes,” he said firmly. “Please relax. I’d like to hear some early memories about being a good girl and pleasing everyone. What comes to mind in regard to that?”
I closed my eyes, sighed, and saw late autumn on a Florentine hillside, with the roses gone from the garden and the paths soggy with wet yellow leaves. We were packing to move, after two happy years in Florence, to the next post, which was going to be Hamburg. My mother had tears in her eyes as she folded curtains and took down pictures and decided what to throw away. Florence had been the pleasantest post yet, and she clearly felt that Hamburg would be like being cast into outer darkness. Taking a cue from her, I feared it would be outer darkness for me, too, although as far as I knew, Hamburg was only a place where they ate a lot of hamburgers.
Then a friend told me that Hamburg was in Germany, where the Nazis lived. That night I had a nightmare about them. I screamed, and when my mother came to my bedside, I told her that we couldn’t go to Germany, because the Nazis would mow us down with machine guns.
My mother took me on her lap and rocked me. “Don’t be silly - the Nazis are gone now. Everything will be fine,” she said. Somehow, I knew she didn’t quite mean that, and that my nightmare could as well have been hers.
She went on, “Don’t you like stuffed animals? Wonderful cuckoo clocks? Germany is where they come from. And there’s a famous zoo in Hamburg. You and I will have lots of fun together.”
“But it’s fun here. I wish we could stay.”
“Hamburg will be a big step up for Daddy and we must help him all we can.”
Yes, I knew about that: that fathers and husbands needed all kinds of help. If they didn’t get it, they wouldn’t like you anymore, and neither would the Efficiency Report people in Washington.
Hamburg in winter was the darkest place I had ever been to. The sun was not fully up until about nine in the morning, and it began to head for the horizon soon after three. Now I thought I knew what my mother must have meant when she spoke of outer darkness.
The day after we arrived, I went into the backyard of our new house, exploring. The ground was a sad expanse of frozen snow, most of it too hard to give way when I walked on it. Icicles hung from a clothesline. Drifts submerged a children’s playhouse that looked like the witch’s hut in Hansel and Gretel. And a round, dull-yellow sun, like a big wafer of butterscotch, sank rapidly through bare trees. I thought, we can’t stand it here.
As always, Mother and Daddy were going out for cocktails, and a sitter had been hastily found for me. She was a grouchy teenager who spoke no English and who sat in the living room, playing the radio, while I put myself to bed upstairs. Later, I was awakened by my parents coming in, lively from the drinks they’d had (but not drunk, never that). Their voices sounded happy, as if this weren’t Outer Darkness after all. They’d met such nice people, including delightful Germans. And now they had some invitations. Mother must quickly unpack her engagement book, I heard her say.
I knew then that she and I would not be spending much time at the zoo, or shopping for stuffed bears and cuckoo clocks. She was going to start helping Daddy, and so was I: performing my usual chores of passing hors d’oeuvres, smiling at everyone, and being a good girl. And that was what life was all about.
Oz was very much annoyed when I told him about Dr. Fischer. He said that we couldn’t afford it, and that anyway, psychiatry was a racket. I canceled my visits, but, soon afterward, I drove down to the University in Albuquerque and signed up for an art history course. I had not even consulted Oz about it, and he wasn’t very pleased when I told him.
“If you have to study something,” he said, “why not economics or accounting? I could help you with things like that.”
“Sorry,” I said, “but this is what I’m going to do.” And I wished Dr, Fischer were there to hear this. Nevertheless, guilt and unease soon overtook me, and I started knitting a new sweater for Oz that very evening.
The telephone numbers of the main house and of our house were similar and sometimes people confused them. A few mornings after the newspaper article, I answered my phone and it was Bishy, calling Lydia from New York. When she realized she’d reached me instead, she said, “Oh, well, then, please give her a message. Tell her I’m coming back to New Mexico today and I’d like to stay with her tonight.”
Bishy and I had never developed any empathy, but we were always scrupulously pleasant to each other.
I said, “Bishy, Lydia won’t like missing your call. Why don’t you dial again?”
“No,” Bishy said. “She knows I’m coming today or tomorrow. Just tell her I’ll be there late today. And not to bother about supper. I won’t be hungry. Goodbye, Alex.”
Next morning, Lydia called and said, “Alex my dear, please come right over.”
Alex my dear. And please. Lydia must be up to something, I thought. And I was sure of it when she added, “This is of the greatest importance, Alexandra. As a matter of fact, it is imperative.”
That kind of talk was not like her. I canceled a lunch date in town and crossed the lawn to the main house.
Bishy and I greeted each other tepidly, as usual.
“Hello, Alex,” Bishy said. “How’s Oz?”
“Fine,” I said. “How’s David?”
“I’ve been in the East,” she said, “so I really don’t know.”
I wondered if she also meant “and I really don’t care.” It sounded that way.
Bishy had not lost her ingenue good looks, and she still wore her hair fastened with a child’s barrette. Since the tragedy of her little son, she no longer seemed a sheltered young girl who deserved and expected nothing but the best. Her eyes, which used to say “Life is perfectly lovely” now said something like “What happened? Where is the perfectly lovely life?” Even when I remembered our disagreeable encounter on that long-ago New Year’s morning, I could no longer seriously dislike her. I felt sorry for her.
“How about a glass of something?” Lydia asked. “A Bloody Mary?”
�
�No, thank you,” I said.
“A little sherry? Campari and soda?”
“Thanks, but no.”
“Deck has gone to town for his dentist appointment. He mixed a little batch of Bloodies before he went, so we may as well finish them off. Do sit down, girls.”
We were in the library. As usual, there was no order there. The dog was in Deck’s chair, and we had to move papers and miscellany from the sofa before it was possible to sit on it.
“Bishy has come bearing tidings,” Lydia began. “In regard to David’s awful legal action, she has found something we can do about it.”
“Terrific,” I said, and looked inquiringly at Bishy. There was definitely something too pleasant in Lydia’s manner and in Bishy’s, and intuition told me that whatever was in the wind was going to require my cooperation.
Lydia took a long swig from her glass and said, “Since it’s quite a delicate matter, and I’m rather an old lady, I’ll let Bishy tell it.”
“It’s not easy, Alex,” Bishy said, taking the floor. “I realize that I’m being disloyal to David, but it can’t be helped. He’s doing something insane, going to court like this, and he’s got to be stopped. And it occurred to me that the reason - the real reason - why our parents-in-law have decided to leave the property outside the family is because neither of their sons have heirs. They always pictured the ranch handed down in the family, generation after generation, like an English castle.”