In the Name of Salome

by Julia Alvarez

  But better the heart that chooses, she thinks, than the heart that keeps itself aloof, safely, in indecision.

  “Dear Marion,” Camila writes her friend that night. “I think I am in love.”

  SHE HAS TURNED THE attic room into her bedroom, now that Max and his family have arrived. She draws the ground plan of the house for Marion, the formal entryway, the door with its curious spyglass (“You pull a wooden slot and look out at your visitors, but they cannot see you!”), the formal parlor to one side, the dining room to the other, the sitting room with the grand piano on which Camila plays the pretty Debussy pieces that please and soothe her father, and in back, the large kitchen where Isabel spends much of her time cooking up meals to impress her new in-laws.

  We are bursting at the seams, dear Marion. I’ve put initials by each room so you can see how I’ve arranged everyone. Papancho and Tío Federico sleep in the southwest bedroom. Beside them to the east: Pedro and Isabel. In the larger front bedroom: Max and Guarina, with the boys in cots in the alcove. The other bedroom, Peynado’s, should have been mine, but how can I sleep in the quarters of a man my father rants about all day long? I have moved myself upstairs to the attic, which gives me a little more privacy, but it is getting hotter and hotter as the summer progresses. I am not sure how long I can stand it.

  She stays up late, stripped down to a slip, writing Marion daily letters she does not send. Sometimes she stands to stretch her back and look down at the quiet, residential street below. When a car approaches, she moves back from view, though her perch is hidden by the branches of the huge sycamore in the front yard.

  We went out today Sunday for a stroll to see the Lincoln Memorial that there’s been all the fuss about. Max and Guarina walked ahead with their noisy boys. (I think those boys, and not the influenza everyone blames, are what have made Guarina’s deafness worse!) Pedro and Isabel and I trailed, talking about Mr. Lincoln, whose speeches and writings my brother, of course, quotes from memory—you know our Pedro! Papancho and Federico stayed home, plotting the overthrow, no doubt. It was one of those beautiful breezy days of early summer, when you look up at the sky and want to cry.

  But then, looking at the sky has always brought tears to her eyes. Somehow that blank, blue expanse fills with the ghostly features of her mother. The summer she spent with Marion’s family in LaMoure five years ago, it was difficult not to gaze up. Half the world was sky! No wonder she was constantly on the verge of tears, sentimental and emotional, taking offense every time Daddy Reed tried to set her straight on Woodrow Wilson and the Monroe Doctrine.

  Suddenly, there he was ahead of us, S.A. in uniform, walking with an attractive young lady, as fair as he, her arm slipped in his. He was pointing out this and that as if he were giving her a tour. I pulled down my hat at an angle, hoping he would not notice me. But here comes one of Max’s boys, the little one Leonardo, screaming, TÍA CAMILA, I CAN COUNT MR. LINCOLN’S FINGERS, and of course S.A. turns and takes in the whole family at a glance. I thought maybe he would tighten his hold on his young white goddess, and walk off, but no. He hurried over. “So it is you, Camila! What a surprise!”

  Why? she has asked herself over and over as she writes, why does she not send these letters to her friend? Or if she fears losing Marion, then why not just keep a diary as any countless number of ladies are doing? (Scott Andrews has told her Mrs. Harding keeps a little red one in which she writes down every grievance.) But why this pretense that all she is doing is reporting her summer to someone who will listen?

  Of course, she thinks as she writes pages and pages of unsent letters, I don’t want anyone, not even Marion, to see me this upset.

  My suspicions were all wrong. The fair companion was his sister Franny, visiting from Concord. When we finished the round of introductions, we all went and stood at Mr. Lincoln’s feet and listened while little Leo counted the huge marble fingers in English and Spanish. Then, S.A. invited us all for refreshments at an elegant café nearby. Ay, Marion, what a painful moment. The establishment would not serve us. They said they did not have enough room for such a large party, but there were many empty tables, and we all guessed the reason. Pedro immediately turned on his heels and took Isabel home. But the boys insisted on their promised ice cream sundae, and so we found a nearby stand and sat on park benches, S.A. beside me, silent and shaken. Before we parted, he turned to me and said in the most feeling way, “Camila, I am so sorry.” I cannot tell you how moved I am by this demonstration of S.A.’s support.

  “I think I am in love,” she writes again. But this time, reviewing what she has written, she crosses off the first two words just to see the bold pronouncement in print. I am in love. Has she ever said this about anybody before?

  She stands, turning off the desk lamp so that the attic is suffused in the soft light coming up from the hall below. She walks to the window, watching her full reflection. She is supposed to be taller than her mother, more attractive, though she has never known if this compliment is a euphemism for “whiter, paler, more Caucasian” in her looks. According to Mon, Salomé was a plain mulatto woman. In the posthumous portrait her father commissioned, Salomé is pale, pretty, with a black neck band and a full rosebud mouth, a beautifying and whitening of the Great Salomé, another one of her father’s campaigns.

  NIGHTS, CAMILA LIKES TO roam the yard. The house is surrounded by a high hedge, and so she feels at ease, sitting on a lawn chair in her slip with only a light shawl to pull about her in case anyone from the house should surprise her, smoking her cigarette. She doesn’t know if anyone suspects she smokes. Of course, Marion knows. After all, it was Marion, who introduced her to this vice as well as to skinny-dipping in the James River, and fast rides in her daddy’s “speeding machine.” But unlike her bold, boastful friend, Camila does not like to call attention to her transgressions. Why on earth invite judgment? She has enough of that in her own head, thank you.

  At night, she can sit back and look at the sky, and not feel weepy. Contrary to the behavior of most ghosts, her mother’s face never appears in the darkness. Camila gazes up, and, like a schoolgirl assigned a problem at the blackboard, she begins connecting the stars into the shape of the future everyone expects of her She will live in a house, not unlike this one. She will bear children, not unlike her little nephews. She will kiss her kind husband, a man not unlike Scott Andrews . . .

  Already she feels bored with this version of what is coming.

  ONE AFTERNOON, HOME FROM their call at the outer offices of the State Department, she is sitting in the backyard reading when she is summoned to the front door by Isabel. Pedro is at the Library of Congress, doing research, and Max and Guarina have taken the boys sightseeing for a few days in Philadelphia. Upstairs, the two eminences grises are snoring away at their siesta, and Isabel, dear heart, has been making meringues in the kitchen in this heat. Blessed be the young brides. They shall fatten the earth.

  “I looked through the hole as you showed me,” Isabel explains, “But it is no one I recognize.”

  Camila feels a slight twinge of disappointment. She had thought it might be Scott Andrews with news of a granted interview. But of course, if Isabel does not recognize the stranger, then it cannot be Scott. For several restless days, she has waited, but there has been no word from him since their last stormy meeting. It baffles her how they have come to this impasse. She had never meant to deliver an ultimatum.

  We had just ordered dessert when S.A. leaned close and asked if I had given any thought to his proposal. He had undoubtedly had too much to drink. Before we went any further, I decided to tell S.A. that it is absolutely necessary to arrange an interview between Papancho and President Harding. Absolutely necessary. My father must close this chapter of his life, and without that final interview, he will stay in that horrible limbo that almost killed him last year. And there is a chance, a small chance, that Mr. Harding will listen. Next year is an election year, and the presidents in this country always dust off their noble aspirations about thi
s time. “But what if I can’t line up an interview?” S.A. asked. So I looked him straight in the eye and said, “If you want a future for us, you will not refuse me.” He was quite upset, but I held firm, and just so I wouldn’t soften, I left my dessert untouched, put on my stole, and hailed a motorcab home.

  “I’ll be right there, Isabel,” she tells her sister-in-law, closing the new Willa Cather novel Marion has sent her, A Lost Lady, a title she takes personally. She goes up the back steps, tucking stray hairs into the net she is wearing to hold the marcelling in place. She is long overdue for a wave, but the salons in Washington are so expensive. She considers taking off the net, making herself more presentable, perhaps stopping quickly in the bathroom to check her appearance in the mirror. As the first daughter and official hostess, she has had to pay attention to these details for the last seven years. Her stepmother was spared. Eight years dead, just in time. Worn out from being the wife of private-citizen Pancho, she would not have lasted a season as President Pancho’s first lady. But Camila has not had a convenient alibi since she left her job in Minnesota.

  Marion, I don’t know what Fury possessed me at that restaurant. But then, in the backseat of the motorcab, when I reflected on the opportunity I had just lost, I felt sick to my stomach. I calmed myself, breathing slowly, sitting on my hands. And I swear I heard my mother speaking to me in a voice very low, but firm: This is what it means to love your country. Duty is the highest virtue. What an oppressive ghost my mother has become! I, too, am an occupied territory. I had to tell the driver to stop the car. We were just then crossing Rock Creek Park, so he pulled over, I paid him quickly, stumbled out onto the grass, and threw up.

  In the bathroom she decides that the hairnet is unobtrusive as it is the same color as her dark brown hair. She pats her cheeks. Her brothers are right: she is looking too thin. “It is the style now to be slender,” she tells them, waving their worries away. The Cheerful Front. “If you could bottle it,” as Marion says, “you could make a million bucks.” Guaranteed to promote tractability and smiles. She saves her breakdowns for late at night under the stars, when the family has gone to sleep, for secluded parks with strangers coming up to her as she leans against a tree, asking is she all right, can they be of any assistance.

  “Leave me alone,” she wants to say. “But if you would, just get out of my country.”

  At the front door, she pulls the slot and is shocked by what she sees. Peynado had mentioned that he might be using the house for an occasional visit during the summer. But it is May, campaigning is going strong back on the island, and Peynado is running for president. In fact, Camila had purposely planned her father’s trip so that they would be departing just when their host might be returning to Washington.

  But what shocks her even more is to catch sight of the tall, blond escort, standing behind the short, frocked man. Scott Andrews in uniform! What on earth is he doing here?

  Camila considers ignoring the guests, but then of course, Francisco Peynado is not a guest. This is his house. In the front bedroom that Camila has refused to occupy, she has found ear plugs, a tin of lozenges, a stack of cards with pictures of sassy ladies, half-clothed, their bosoms bursting out of their corsets like leavened bread rising in a warm oven.

  “¿Quién es?” Isabel whispers. Camila jumps, startled at the sound of her sister-in-law standing beside her. She looks frightened. The poor dear probably thinks officials have come to extradite the whole clan. “Do you know them?”

  Isabel must not have recognized, beyond Peynado’s shoulder, the face of the handsome major they met several weeks ago at the monument. “Yes, I know them,” Camila says calmly to allay her sister-in-law’s fears. “But I do not want to disturb Papancho,” she adds. “Keep him inside, all right?”

  The girl gazes warily toward the stairs and nods. Camila turns the lock, opens the door, and slips outside.

  SHE LEADS THE TWO men to a dainty wrought-iron bench that looks merely ornamental under the sycamore tree. During the anxious interview, she is, of course, constantly checking to see if Pancho or worse, his eagle-eyed brother, Federico, is at the window, or if Pedro might be coming down the street, returning on foot with his book bag full of the free literature he has picked up in one of the many museums on his walk home. And of course, the whole time, she is wondering and worrying about what Scott Andrews is doing accompanying her father’s rival to her front door.

  By the time this trip is over I will have a new degree: master’s in intrigue. Even when I was choosing where to sit on the bench with Peynado (S.A. insisted on standing), I was thinking of which side would be best for watching both the street and the house. Meanwhile, I am quickly losing my degree in manners. I didn’t even greet our visitors. In fact, I told Peynado in no uncertain terms that if he came in the house, Papancho would die of apoplexy. He seemed baffled. “But why, Camila? We’re old friends. He is using my house.” And so I had to explain that Papancho had no idea whose house he was using, that he thought it a long-term lease of the Dominican government, that he felt he had a right to use the house as he was the president when the island was invaded. I could see the whole sad situation slowly dawning on Peynado. “I understand,” he said at last. “I will stay at the Portland. But you must reason with your father.” That is when he looked toward S.A., who had given us his back, and was plucking leaves from a nearby hedge like a nervous schoolboy.

  “General,” he calls out. Camila has noticed how Peynado flatters officers by addressing them by a higher rank. “Perhaps you can explain to Miss Camila that we have turned a corner and we cannot possibly go back.”

  “The election campaigns are proceeding beautifully,” he goes on. And all Camila can think to reply to this is, “So what are you doing here?”

  He laughs at her brusqueness, and she sees he is not offended. Sometimes she wonders if she is incapable of offending. If every angry emotion is filtered through the memory of her noble mother and her suffering nation and comes out as a muted, mannerly remark. She knows it is supposed to be one of her womanly accomplishments: her anger does not show; her fingers will only play a jazz number on her lap under the tablecloth, not on the grand piano in the parlor.

  “I received a phone call,” Peynado is explaining.

  Scott Andrews, who has turned to face them, stiffens. She can see it in his handsome jaw, in the epaulettes at his shoulders suddenly jutting out like knees. What on earth has frightened him? Quickly, she looks up to make sure her father has not spotted them through the window on the stair landing.

  “General Andrews called to inform me that you found it absolutely necessary for your father to meet with someone in the State Department. But you must understand, Camila. We are at a delicate moment historically. Your father must not ruin our chances. I have come to escort him home.”

  She feels her breath coming short and fears that she will faint right here in front of the two men. So, Scott Andrews has indulged her, has made her think an interview might be possible, and then when she has confronted him, he has called in Peynado to come help get her father off everybody’s hands. Now, when they have become close, when she is falling in love, when it will hurt to lose him.

  She does not know how she finally finds her legs and stands up. “I am going to have to ask you both to leave,” she says quietly. Then turning to Peynado, she adds, “We will be out of here by the end of the week.”

  “Please, Camila,” her father’s old friend is at her side. “You have to understand.”

  She brushes past him, heading for the latched gate as if she needs to show them both the way out. She tries to control the fury rising in her throat. In her head she commences playing the tune of the jazz band of several weeks ago. The piano drowns out her mother’s voice, Peynado’s explanations, the whirring of the cicadas, the call of the robins in the trees above.

  Only when Scott Andrews delays a moment to have a private word with her does the music stop—

  Where is the music? She needs the sassy sadne
ss of those ivory keys to keep going. She lifts her hand as if she were playing that piano and has momentarily paused, causing this gap in the music, this hiatus in the love story she has been fabricating in her letters to Marion. And then, because she cannot hold in the fury any longer, she brings her hand down hard on the major’s pale face.

  SEIS

  Ruinas

  Santo Domingo, 1887 – 1891

  Lunes, 6 junio 1887

  Beloved Pancho:

  We just bid you goodbye, and I thought I would not make it back to the house before the tears burst forth. But I had to control myself for our children’s sake: they kept looking toward the boat, then back to me, as if something whole had been halved. (It has, oh it has!)

  Young as they are, our sons feel your loss. As we were walking back from the dock, Fran looked up at the sun, and said—It was brighter before Papancho was gone. Who knows how children come up with such things? Hostos is right: there is a gold mine there. (Imagine him, tapping his forehead, smiling that smile of his.)

  They are fast asleep now, dreaming, no doubt of their father on his way to Paris. I promise, dearest, to keep my vow and present you with your sons, healthy and happy, upon your return.

  Your Salomé

  Martes, 7 junio 1887

  Pancho, dearest:

  Today I feel only desperation. We are mad, you and I, to take on this sacrifice: two years of separation! I know this is such an opportunity for you: to study medicine with the acclaimed Dieulafoy. (I hear all your arguments in my head.) But every day I find myself agreeing more with Hostos’s belief that our dear “president” Lilís wants you out of here. Why else offer you a foreign scholarship in medicine when you already have your medical degree from our Instituto Profesional?