Mercy (12 page)

“Look at these,” she said, holding up two clay pots, a hot-pink verbena and a sanchezia, as Palma came through the gate. “Daughters of daughters of daughters,” she said. “I planted their great-grandmothers.”

She was standing barefooted on a wet rock walk where she had been watering her flowers, her baggy gardening dress hanging almost to her dusky ankles, her smile as beautiful now as it had been when, as a child, Palma first had become aware that it was something of a gift. Her mother smiled easily, the sort of smile that made strangers instantly comfortable with her, a disarming smile that told you she was not a complicated woman, a misconception you soon would learn to revise. Palma took a deep breath of the heavy air, the familiar earthy odors of damp plants and stones. She kissed her mother’s cheek and smelled the faint waft of cheap lilac perfume the old woman bought in a neighborhood store.

“I got a new letter from Celeste,” her mother said immediately, setting down the clay pots along the path and pushing back the wisps of gray hair from her temples with the backs of her wet hands as she preceded Palma to a long slatted wood swing that hung from an aging water oak just off the path near the back patio. Stopping at the swing, Florencia bent down a little stiffly and took the hem of her dress and dried her hands. Then she reached into the torn front pocket of her dress and produced the letter, its well-worn envelope torn ragged on one corner, exposing an equally well-worn letter. She handed it to Palma.

“She’s in Huehuetenango now. In the mountains. She says she has volunteered to go up there, tired of the coast, tired of the lowlands. She’s much happier in the high country. She says she had to deliver a baby, up—way up—in the mountains where everything is mist like rain. This delivery was a very delicate matter because this baby was turned. A kind of long story.” Palma’s mother nodded at the letter. “She tells it there, you’ll see. Anyway,” a sparkle of amusement began to pluck at her eyes, “after a long and tiresome night the baby is delivered. So. Everything is okay. The child is saved and the mother is saved—
gracias a Dios
. In celebration, and to honor the good nun, the parents named the boy…Celeste.”

Florencia burst out laughing. “
Un muchacho llamado Celeste!
” She shook her head, delighted by the whimsical ways of gratitude, and sat carefully in the tree swing which Palma held for her. Then, joining her, Palma dutifully took the letter out of its envelope, unfolded it, and held it in her lap as if she were reading it while the swing drifted calmly back and forth, the chain groaning softly on its leather guides above them.

She came by to see her mother three or four times a week and tried to get over to take her to Sunday mass at least every other Sunday. Even though Palma was the only member of her immediate family still living in Houston, the old woman did not lack for companionship. A large and faithful group of older women, many of them widows, who had raised their families in the neighborhood, looked after one another, old friends that Palma had known all her life and who knew how to get in touch with her if it was necessary. Even so, as her mother’s mind began to show the inevitable signs of quirkiness, Palma found herself wanting to keep in closer touch. It was almost as if she could feel that the departure had begun, and as her mother began to slip away from her Palma herself felt the need to move with her, if not to prevent the inevitable then at least to defer it. She knew that this kind of slow separation was a part of the human condition, but to acknowledge that didn’t make it any less frightening, any less painful.

After Palma had listened to the groaning swing for a minute or two, now and then turning the pages of the letter, which was written on both sides of three sheets, after she somehow had shifted the weight of sadness in her heart so she could carry it and fought back the tears that almost instantaneously sprang to her eyes when she took the letter from her mother, she folded the sheets, slipped them back into the envelope, and handed them back. It was the third time within a week that her mother had shown her this “new” letter; the third time Palma had “read” it and listened to the story of the baby boy named Celeste.

“That’s a good letter, Mama,” Palma said. “I know you enjoy getting them.” Florencia smiled and tucked the letter back into her dress pocket and thought a moment.

“I’d like to ask her if she has ever regretted becoming a nun,” she said.

Palma looked at her. The question surprised her.

“I’ve always been curious,” the old woman mused, shrugging. “She was so beautiful.”

“You don’t think the Sisters of Charity need a pretty nun in Guatemala?” Palma asked, watching her mother.

“She was the prettiest of all your cousins,” her mother said, ignoring Palma’s remark. “She could have been a movie star. A model.”

“You would have preferred that?”

“Oh, no. It’s best that she’s a nun.” She widened her eyes. “But I don’t understand it.” She waited a moment. “I’m sure it’s hard for the priests, too.”

Palma smiled. Her mother was one of the Almighty’s more straightforward creatures. Her faith that God’s will would ultimately prevail was firmly grounded in a belief in miracles. It was her conviction that only the miraculous could save man from his considerably flawed nature. Man’s only hope was in something greater than himself, something he didn’t fully understand, but in which he had an unabashedly explicit faith.

“How do you think Celeste would answer your question, Mama?” Palma asked. A Spanish dove had settled in one of the catalpa trees and had started its languorous, two-noted cooing.

Her mother didn’t respond immediately, but stuck out one foot and let her big toe drag back and forth over the stones beneath the swing. Then she looked up toward the dove.

“She would say, I think, that she was sorry that being a Sister of Charity was the only thing she had ever wanted or would ever want.”

“Ah, you’re cheating. You’re trying to have it both ways,” Palma chided.

“Oh, no. That’s an absolutely honest answer,” her mother said earnestly, as if she were defending Celeste’s actual words. “Maybe she feels something is missing, or that something might have been, but she doesn’t know what it is. But she’s curious about it, and sorry she doesn’t understand. I’ll tell you,” she added, glancing casually toward the catalpa, pretending a casual interest in the dove. “There isn’t a woman alive who doesn’t wonder sooner or later if maybe she didn’t take a wrong turn at some crucial moment in her past. It’s in her nature to wonder about such things. We all do it. Maybe especially pretty little nuns in the jungles of Huehuetenango.”

Palma suddenly had the feeling that they weren’t really talking about Celeste at all. She suspected that her mother had been thinking about her divorce again. Palma would never forget the anguished look on the old woman’s face when she had to tell her that her marriage was over. The expression had had nothing to do with her mother’s own disappointment. Florencia knew her daughter too well, how long she had waited to marry, how much it must have hurt her when it came apart. Her expression had been one of complete, selfless empathy; her daughter’s pain was instantly her own. Palma had never needed her more than at that moment and the old woman knew this, even through the thickening fog of her senility, and she gave her daughter everything she had from the heart. It had been a crucial time for both of them, and it had been a lesson for Palma that even this late in their lives their relationship was still capable of becoming even richer than it was.

“Anyway,” her mother said, “how’s it going with you?”

Palma came from a family of interrogators. “I’m doing fine, Mama.” She urged the swing with her foot against the stones.

The old woman nodded and let a brown hand go up to her hair, smoothing it back. “Good,” she said.

They let the swing run its course from the push of Palma’s foot, the leather groaning on the oak, the little speckled dove occasionally reminding them of its presence with a low, moaning whistle from the catalpa. Palma thought of the woman on the bed, the pale length of her, the mutilation. What was he doing now, in the afternoon, waiting out the heat? How did a man who did things like that wait out the heat? She knew the answer to that. But she shoved it out of her mind. She didn’t want to think about it now, not here, with her.

Palma asked a few questions about her brother and sister. They communicated mostly through Florencia. It wasn’t that they were not close, but they simply were not involved in each other’s lives. Palma herself rarely corresponded with them. They visited about Patricio’s advancement in the San Antonio police department and about Lina’s children, who were now in junior high school. After Palma inquired about her mother’s friends and they chatted about the neighborhood, Palma left her standing under the Mexican plums and returned back through the barrio to the expressways.

She drove with her shoes off, one of the air conditioner vents under the dash directed to the floor, her skirt pulled up to mid-thigh. How had it ever happened that women came to believe they were not decently dressed unless they were wearing panty hose? It had been a bleak day for women south of the thirty-fifth parallel. Panty hose were nothing less than instruments of torture in Houston’s humid heat, and Palma had mentally threatened to adopt all kinds of alternatives, none of them acceptable, some of them indecent, but all of them considerably cooler. She hiked her skirt a little higher and checked on either side of her for that urban specialist, the freeway voyeur, who rode the city’s hot asphalt ribbons in a variety of high-riding trucks, vans, and pickups, keeping a keen eye out for women in lower cars seeking relief from the thermodynamics of panty hose.

She took a deep breath and flipped down the sun visor. The traffic on the Southwest Freeway moved like a sluggish equatorial serpent, worming west under the moist glare of a moribund sun, a copper fire sinking through a hazy atmosphere of ninety-one percent humidity.

Leaving the freeway at the Weslayan exit, she doubled back to the left under the overpass and within a few moments she was entering West University Place, a neighborhood of roughly two square miles that had been an incorporated city since 1925. Immediately west of Rice University, it was a village of older homes on quiet streets crowded with oaks, pecans, magnolias, cottonwoods, redbuds, and an occasional fat palm. The street signs were blue instead of the Greater Houston green, and the streets themselves were patrolled by West University’s own police force. Though they accepted gas, electricity, and telephone service from Houston, West University was otherwise fiercely independent, and whereas Houston was distinguished among American cities by having no building code at all, West University was dictatorially vigilant in maintaining its village atmosphere. Fast-food eateries and convenience stores, in fact almost all commercial endeavors, were relegated to the streets that bordered the village, facing the metropolis like jealous sentries holding back the poor taste of commercial progress and town home mentality.

Palma lived on one of the better streets in West University, one of the Yuppie streets where the older homes were being bought up and remodeled or torn down and supplanted by larger “interpretations” of their styles. She sometimes felt a little out of place here, though she couldn’t really put her finger on the why of it. She pulled into the small circle driveway of the two-story brick home, its front door protected from the street by berms of yaupons and scarlet crepe myrtles, its brick drive bordered with flowering clumps of mondo grass. The yard had been made maintenance-free by a solid covering of Asian jasmine and decorative clusters of lantana. She had to admit she liked the way the place looked. Besides grooming himself, it was the one thing Brian had done absolutely correctly.

But she had to admit, too, as she opened the front door, balancing an armful of files as she pulled the key out of the door and closed it with her hip, that the place was too big to live in alone. She laid the files and keys on a hall table and walked into the living room where she lowered the temperature on the air-conditioning thermostat, hesitating a moment, listening for the compressor to click on. She turned on a few lamps, kicked off her shoes again, and picked them up with one hand as she loosened her belt with the other. She walked through the dining room unbuttoning her dress, then back out to the stairway where she started up to her bedroom.

There were times now when coming home to the empty house was the hardest part of the day. She had done it for many years because that was the way she wanted it. Educated and independent, she was very much aware of being a woman of the new age, and even though she dated regularly she relished her independence and had never had a live-in boyfriend. The idea had never appealed to her, for a variety of reasons. And then there was Brian and their marriage and those few good months together before everything turned absolutely wrong. That taste of shared life, of making a forever commitment to someone who loved you enough to make that same promise, of knowing that no matter what else happened in life that other person whom you held so dear would be there to help you endure it or celebrate it, the giddy pleasure of simply being loved by someone who mattered to you more than anything else in the world—all of that had been dangled in front of her just long enough for her to realize it was something she desperately wanted.

And then it was gone. Now there was no hiding from the fact that she missed him—not Brian, but the man he could have been, the man he should have been. It was the most painful experience she had ever been through. Jesus, just to have someone to sleep with, not even the sex, but just someone to bend into when you curled up at night. She really missed that.

And somehow she couldn’t tolerate the idea of boyfriends. Not now, not yet, not for a long time.

She bathed and washed her hair and put on a thin cotton sundress without underwear. She combed out her hair, but left it wet, and then went downstairs to the kitchen and poured a strong scotch and water before she walked outside to the backyard. It was actually a spacious brick courtyard with islands of yaupons, an abundance of rain lilies in clay pots, surrounded by a tall privacy fence, and totally shaded by a high canopy of oaks that let through dappled sunlight in the middle of the day. It was a refuge, and even when the weather was almost unbearably hot she would sit out here in the late evenings dressed in practically nothing, sipping a cold drink. It almost made the loneliness bearable.