In the Name of Salome (26 page)

But Camila is surprised by her brother's reaction. “Papancho has every right in the world,” Pedro says, his voice rising, his hands closing into fists. Beside him, Isabel seems startled for a second time this evening. Who is this stranger she has married? What a worked-up family of fervent idealists! “Look at what the Yanquis have done in Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico. Who is going to stop them?”

Not Papancho, Camila thinks.

“As for you, my little sister,” Pedro changes the subject, reaching for her hands and giving one to Isabel to hold as if he is sharing a prize with his young wife. They sit there, sweetly, holding hands as if they were at a seance. (Scott Andrews has told her how Mrs. Harding frequents a clairvoyant on R Street!) It is rare for her brother to be so outwardly affectionate. But Camila has noticed a warming in his manner since he heard of Marion's departure from Cuba. “Let me give you some advice, since I am your older brother and I have already made all the mistakes you are headed for. Don't let Papancho's politics take over your personal life. This friend you mentioned, just enjoy getting to know him. He is American?”

“Yes,” she says quickly. Why does she suddenly feel she should apologize for Scott's nationality. She knows her brother is glad she is seeing any man at all. Ever since he surprised them in Minnesota, Pedro has worried about Camila's friendship with la norte-americana. “Scott Andrews's people are from New Hampshire.
They were early abolitionists,” Camila adds, trying to make the Marine major sound appealing to her brother.

“Does he know about Mamá?” Pedro asks, casting a knowing glance in Isabel's direction. Back home, everyone expects these mixtures. Isabel herself obviously has a little Indian in her golden skin, and a lot in her black hair and dark, almond-shaped eyes.

“Things have not progressed that far,” Camila answers quietly.

“When he meets me, he will know right away.” Despite his effort to speak lightly, Pedro's voice is edged with bitterness. Camila remembers hard moments in Minneapolis for her brother, rentals suddenly unavailable, entry refused into certain clubs. Pedro and Max have turned out to be the sons who look most like Salomé's side of the family, darker-skinned, a kink in their hair, all the telling features. Camila thinks of the musicians on stage at the jazz club; how they came in a separate door; how she saw them sitting on crates and eating outdoors when she and Scott left during a break in the music. They could have been her brothers, especially the light-skinned saxophone player. She recalls how Max once earned his living playing the piano in New York. Where do they eat in the winter? she wonders.

“When will we meet him, Camila?” Isabel asks after several moments of silence. This is the first time she has spoken up. She is nineteen years younger than Pedro; perhaps she believes she has to ask permission of her elders to speak up!

If Pedro should say anything at all about Scott Andrews, Camila will say, You of all people should know the heart chooses strangely if it chooses at all. Look at you, the old man in the family, picking a child bride; or Max, a talented musician, with his deaf Guarina; or Mamá choosing a boy obsessed with her talent and great causes.

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.”

S
HE 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.

N
IGHTS
, C
AMILA 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.

O
NE 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 this 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.