Dalva (8 page)

Andrew stopped by this afternoon to say I may have to move. The boy's uncle, Guillermo Sandoval by name, can't be reliably controlled except by a bullet, and unless I would agree to that measure, moving was the only option. I wouldn't agree. Andrew expected that, and went to some lengths to describe what kind of man we were dealing with: a barrio drug enforcer, a U. S. citizen out of McAllen, Texas, so he couldn't be deported; an intelligent psychopath who claimed that he and his nephew were in love (!), a man who claimed he didn't hate me for causing his aerial whipping though God would surely cause me to have an accident at some point. Meanwhile Ted had had the man put under twenty-four-hour surveillance, which might prompt rash behavior if discovered. I asked Andrew
how he found all of this out. He said he “held a gun to the sucker's head.”

When Andrew left I sat at my balcony and stared at the summery Pacific and thought how deeply irrational the situation had become, that just beneath the ordinary skin of ordinary life—the life that looked so comforting and normal from the balcony—something uncontrollable was whirling with all the indirection of the Brownian movement. The posture of writing it down is after the fact; the event recorded in tranquillity has a larger sense of tranquillity than it has earned.

But I am getting ahead of myself. It was some time before I realized that it was my uncle Paul who saved my weary soul that summer. I had come to him in Patagonia, Arizona, actually south of a point between Patagonia and Sonoita, by a circuitous route. The Monday after Thanksgiving Mother drove me northeast toward Marquette, Michigan, on Lake Superior where I was to live with her cousin and his wife and have my baby. It was a two-day trip that was stretched into five by snowstorms. We spent nights in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Blue Earth, Minnesota; Minneapolis; and two nights in Duluth, before reaching Marquette on the kind of brilliant, cloudless day that signals the passing of an Arctic front. Lake Superior, surely our most inhospitable body of water, was roaring under a glittery sky only a few blocks from the house. I hadn't minded the delay, because beneath my breastbone I knew that this would be the first time I had spent more than a night away from my mother. It all seemed a mistake because it was barely three months and the baby hadn't made its presence felt. I wanted to be either home or back in Duluth, in the hotel where we could see all of the harbor during the few hours the blizzard let up. We had had a wonderful room-service dinner sitting by the window; then Mother began to cry and I comforted her with more strength than I owned. I liked the snow-laden forest and hills, so unlike Nebraska, on the road between Duluth and Marquette.

Mother's cousin, Warren, was in his early forties and a game biologist for the Department of the Interior, and his
wife, Maureen, a plump vigorous woman, taught drama at the local college. Warren was slender, quiet, contemplative, obsessed with birds and mammals, while Maureen was loud, hearty, profane, the first woman I ever met who swore a lot. In fact, the first thing she said at the door was “Jesus H. Christ, what a beauty!” For some reason I laughed, and she embraced me. But I cried for an hour or so when Mother left the next morning, so Maureen insisted I go to a play rehearsal with her. I was abashed sitting in a small auditorium watching the students speak their parts in Garcia Lorca's
Blood Wedding.
It had never occurred to me that people could speak that passionately out loud. Grandfather had read Shakespeare to me but this was raw and direct. Several of the men sat down next to me during a break but I was too shy to say much. One of the men, a graduate student from Chicago, was unbelievably handsome and this made me nervous. He was dressed in the fashion of the bohemians I had seen in a photo essay in
Life
magazine. Maureen waved the men away, whispering to me, “No wonder you're pregnant.”

The time passed quickly because I was given so much schoolwork to do and on a level beyond my capacity. Warren tossed my schoolbooks aside and put me on a science program of his own devising. Maureen did the same in the humanities, screeching “Puppy shit” as she threw my textbook on English and American literature into the fireplace. She taught me what she called “living literature” rather than the writers she loathed in the text—Pope, Dryden, Tennyson, William Cullen Bryant, Howells Markham. Her favorites were Keats and Yeats, Dickens, Twain, Melville, Whitman, and William Faulkner, who was difficult at first, though I identified closely with
Light in August.
Maureen also started me on a rigorous study of Spanish which I hated at the time but have been grateful for ever since. They both strongly disapproved of the country-Western music station I listened to all day but decided I must need the music in order to endure it. The music made me homesick but had the familiarity of old and favorite clothes. Duane's favorite singer was Hank Williams, who Maureen admitted had a certain quality she called
duende,
a Spanish gypsy term for “ghost” or “soul.”

Once Maureen came home from work early. I was in the
shower and didn't hear her and she found me standing nude in front of my bedroom mirror looking for signs of rumored baby. I was a little embarrassed after I dressed and sat down to review my schoolwork. She had a large tumbler of imported sherry and poured me a small glass. The Jerez sherry was an indulgence she had learned during the two years she had lived in Barcelona and Ibiza. She pushed the schoolwork aside and started to talk, more a slangish monologue than a lecture: “I certainly don't believe that story about you screwing a pheasant-hunter but that's your business, and right now it should matter to no one except you. You're going to have a hard time, because you are lovely and your body is as fine as I've seen.” I objected to this as ugly and irrelevant but she went on: “You have to study extremely hard and find some subject or profession you're obsessed with because in our culture it has been very hard on the attractive women I know. They are leered at, teased, abused, set on a pedestal, and no one takes them seriously, so you have to use all your energies to develop the kind of character that can withstand this bullshit. You don't want to waste your life reacting to it. Don't waste your time on men who talk and stare but don't listen to you. They just want to fuck you. Women I've known in your position get easily depressed because they are valued for something, their looks, which they had nothing to do with, you get it? It's all genetic. And there's a lot of envy from other women. I wouldn't mind looking like you for a few weeks just to bowl the assholes over for a change.”

“Aren't you happy with Warren?” I asked.

“Of course. He's the best man I ever had and I tried quite a few, though most of them weren't top-drawer. I met him when I was twenty-eight and it took two years to get him to marry me. I hiked every goddamn hill and swamp in the Upper Peninsula with him during that time. I quit that on our honeymoon which was a week of more camping on Isle Royale. Warren thought it was very funny when I quit because he knew I never liked it in the first place and I was just acting. Then he sent me off to New York City for a week of theatre as a present. I also know you're thinking of ways to keep your baby but you can forget it because no one's going to let you.”

Unfortunately, the week before Naomi, Ruth, and Grandfather
were to arrive for Christmas vacation I became ill with a particularly virulent form of flu. At the tail end of the flu came a serious case of pneumonia which put me in the local hospital. I did not become better and the holidays were an uncomfortable dream of visits from Naomi and Ruth. For a stretch of time my fever made me somewhat delirious and the regular doctors were joined by a specialist Grandfather had flown up from Omaha. The pregnancy complicated matters and there was fear for both of our lives. One late night after the fever had begun to subside Grandfather came in against the wishes of the nurses. He said he had made a mistake that he wanted to correct. He had hoped so badly that I would forget Duane that he hadn't given me the necklace that Duane had left behind for me. I grasped the necklace, seeing immediately it was the one Duane wore with a plain small stone in a copperish setting. There was also an envelope that had come more recently in the mail. It was a Christmas card with a Rapid City postmark. The card was a crèche scene and Duane had printed “This here card is a joke. You sing one of your songs for me and I'll sing one of mine for you, your friend Duane.” There was no return address. I kissed Grandfather's hand and rolled over to face the wall, holding the necklace to my lips. When he left, a nurse who had become a friend came in and asked me what was in my hand.

“My boyfriend sent me his good-luck necklace.” She helped me put it on and brought a hand mirror so I could see myself. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. That night I dreamed of riding with Duane on horses that ran through the air, under the ground through the soil, under the surface of lakes and rivers. I awoke the next morning feeling much better. I hid the necklace from Naomi and Ruth because they would recognize it.

The doctor from Omaha had insisted before he left that I be moved away from the cold damp climate of the Upper Peninsula. It was the kind of suggestion that put Grandfather into his “umbrage” mood, as Naomi called it. He had been staying at the only good hotel in town and Maureen had seen him at a restaurant with an attractive woman. He was also wearing elegant but old-fashioned suits that had the vaguely foreign touch of New York or London.

It was confusing when I got out of the hospital and learned that I was only to be at Maureen and Warren's for another day, or until the weather let up. Warren and Grandfather got me from the hospital in an old Dodge power wagon borrowed from Warren's job. The streets were partly drifted over and no one was around though it was noon. The wind blew so hard the whole world became blinding white, and Warren would stop the truck until it cleared a bit. I could sense their nervousness but thought it was all quite wonderful because I was out of the hospital.

Back at Warren's I ate my promised hamburger in the kitchen with Ruth sitting beside me, the sort of silly relief you want from hospital food, and listened to the quarrel in the living room. Naomi wanted to take me home and Grandfather insisted that it was the doctor's second choice to a drier climate. I could hear the anger in his voice as he repeated charges of how Naomi was suffocating us in our Nebraska “nest” and, in this case, my health was at stake. Naomi's voice was a little quavery in protest though on our way to Michigan, in the hotel in Duluth, she admitted we all ought to get “out and around” more often. She had said she tended to think of the world as something that had killed her husband and the farm as their beloved and safe place. Grandfather made a speech to the effect that everything was arranged. A friend of his from Chicago was going to pick them up in his plane and fly me to Tucson. My uncle Paul whom I had only seen at my dad's funeral would take me to his ranch house near Patagonia, where there would be a registered nurse who was also a teacher. All the calls had been made and the plan was final.

And that's what happened. The weather cleared in the night, the plane from Chicago arrived, and off we went, arriving in Tucson in the evening. It was someone's corporate plane so there were nice chairs to sit on, also a small bed where I could rest. I played gin rummy with Ruth who must have been twelve or so. Ruth whispered to me that she had thanked God I was pregnant because she at last had gotten to go places and ride on an airplane. She was sorry to say it but it was true. We met Uncle Paul at the airport along with a dark-skinned woman who called herself Emilia. Ruth and I sat and watched television—Naomi disapproved of it so we had none at homeo—while
Grandfather, Naomi, Paul, and Emilia had a meeting in an office. Ruth was angry because she had learned we weren't going to keep the baby. She was unsure about my abilities but she knew she could handle the job. They came out of the office and we said goodbye.

Paul put his arm around me when we watched out the window as the plane took off for Grand Island. “You look like your dad and my mother. I was always sort of homely myself. Emilia here knows everything worth knowing. You'll like her.”

At the Desert Inn there were two bedrooms for us and a parlor where we ate dinner. I was so quiet that Paul asked me what I was thinking about. I admitted that I always had heard that he was a wild-eyed and crazy treasure-hunter who lived with different women without being married. I also told him that when I went to see the movie
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
with Naomi she said Humphrey Bogart was just like my uncle Paul. He thought this was very funny and told me he had been surprised and happy when my father had the sense to marry a farm girl.

Like many men who wander the world and live far from their native culture, Paul had evolved elaborate and private theories about many things. The same thing seems to happen with all solitary people, hermits, country bachelors, trappers. The moment we reached his ranch house the next morning we went on as long a walk as my health could bear. His notion was that hard-working Mexican women of the peasant class had an easier time in childbirth because of their enforced exercise. Therefore, at least a two-hour walk was in order every day before I began my studies. In his frequent absences, Emilia was to take me, or make sure one of the two hired hands took me. I went for these walks right through the winter until I reached my seventh month of pregnancy, when I still waddled slowly around the outbuildings. Paul approved of the books I brought from Warren and Maureen, adding his own prejudices in favor of Spanish and Italian culture. He said if I ever visited Spain, or Florence in Italy, I would understand to what depths of greed and stupidity the United States had sunk.