Mercy (27 page)

The afternoon heat was settling, and in the shady courtyard where the paths were bordered with lilac liriope and the fragrance of the Mexican broom’s yellow blossoms sweetened the still, moist air, Palma listened to her mother gossip of the horrors of the barrio and thought of Vickie Kittrie, a capricious mix of innocence and guile who, in her own peculiar way, seemed to hide more potential perfidy than a woman twice her age. She thought of Vickie Kittrie unselfconsciously stepping out of her pink panties, the milky flesh of her inheritance so readily displayed, bending past her generous breasts, nipples as rose as her panties, to pluck the hairs from her strawberry crotch with locker room familiarity and the aplomb of a woman whose youth and genetics had given her a body that provided no cause for modesty.

And the women. Several dozen, and several dozen more. Women whose bliss was the smell and taste and touch of other women, who admired in another woman even the smallest details of their own form, desired them, and took them with as much passion and abandon—perhaps more, they might say—as they had spent in breeding sons and daughters. Hidden lives, double lives, all the more intriguing because they were not women of the verge, but women of the mainstream, and Palma had a hunch that if she were to walk into a room with these women she would feel as much at home as if she had known them, public and private, all her life.

With the sixth sense that adult children of the loquacious elderly quickly develop in self-defense of their own sanity, Pal-ma’s wandering mind quickly snapped back to the present moment. Her mother had stopped talking. She had taken a small white handkerchief from the baggy pocket of her gardening dress and was patting it over her forehead and neck.

“The real summer is here,” her mother said. “No going back now. No more little cool days.” She waved the handkerchief around her face to stir the air.

Palma looked at the older woman’s profile, and her mind overlaid the face she had remembered as a child. Her mother had not changed all that much, or maybe Palma simply wanted to believe she hadn’t. It was a curious thing to see a parent aging. Her father had died too young for her to really see it happen to him, but to watch her mother enter old age, step by step, hour by hour, was a humbling thing. Life gradually was taking away what it had gradually given. It was the nature of things, but few people understood their tentative ownership of their gifts until they saw them being taken away from someone they loved. If you were lucky life allowed you that, a preview of the way it was going to be.

“Mama,” Palma said, still looking at her mother. “Have you ever known any homosexual women?”

Her mother continued to flap her handkerchief with a delicate action of her wrist, showing no sign that she might regard the question as unusual or embarrassing or improper.

“Homosexual?” the old woman said, tilting her head back slightly and staring up into the mottled shade of the water oaks and pecans and catalpas. Palma knew she would take the question and the subject with equanimity. Her mother had never been a prude or pretended that life was anything other than what sensible people knew it to be.

“I’ve got this case,” Palma said, and instantly thought of her father. That was the way he always began his discussions with her mother. He had talked about the cases that troubled him more than any detective she had ever known. For him, Florencia was his lifeline to sanity. Palma remembered coming into the living room or onto the screened porch late at night and finding them talking, her mother combing her hair or sipping ice water and lime, her father with his shoes off, his shirt-tail out and his feet propped on a hassock or another chair talking to her, his voice coming solemnly, softly, from deep within his barrel chest. “I’ve got this case,” he would begin the conversations, and Florencia would grow still and quiet as though she did not want to distract him, everything she was doing, or might have intended to do, was pushed into oblivion, wiped away, as she gave her total attention to his story.

“Two women were killed recently, and it happens that both of them were bisexual,” Palma said. “One of the victims was married and had a family, two children. During the investigation I’ve come across a group of women like the victims, a kind of secret organization whose members lead double lives. Many, maybe most, are married, have families. Most of them are middle- to upper-class…”

Palma stopped. She didn’t know what it was she expected her mother to tell her, and she didn’t know where to take it from there. She couldn’t outline the case. There was no point in it really. In fact, now she felt a little foolish for even broaching the subject, so far removed was it from her mother’s life.

“There were, in 1968,” her mother said, “several women living in two houses close together in the area—I forget the street—of Magnolia Park. They were there for some years, and then they left.”

“I mean,” Palma said, “married women.”

Her mother stopped waving the handkerchief and wiped carefully under her eyes, pulling the skin back toward the temples as she must have been taught to do so long ago that she had forgotten it was something learned. She let her eyes fall from pondering the canopy of shadows to three Spanish doves milling around a shallow fountain near a bank of trumpet vines studded with reddish-orange blossoms.

“Two,” she said, dropping the handkerchief to her lap and giving the swing a little push with her bare feet against the stones. “One is dead, and the other is too old to gossip about.”

“Here in the neighborhood?” Palma was surprised.

“Yes,” she nodded.

“Did you know them well?”

“Yes, very.” She watched the speckled doves with complete serenity. Her thoughts, Palma could tell, were traveling back in time, gathering memories before them like dark clouds before the wind, gathering strength for stories and rain.

“Lara Prieto and Christine Wolfe,” her mother said flatly.

Palma was shocked. Mrs. Prieto had been the wife of the neighborhood grocer, a woman of quiet, swarthy beauty who kept to herself and, outside of the store, had little to do with others in the community. Christine Wolfe was the barrio’s guardian angel. The wife of a well-to-do businessman, she was a great organizer of church bazaars, charity benefits, and seasonal carnivals. She was the closest thing to a socialite the barrio could boast and though she had always lived there—as long as Palma could remember—and lived there still, she had too much money to be accepted on an equal footing with the rest of the women in the community. She was genuinely kind, and they were genuinely polite, but the money was an unbreachable barrier to genuine acceptance. There were many things that wealth could do and a few things it could not do.

“They were lovers?” Palma was incredulous. She could not imagine the two women as she remembered them in these strange new roles.

Palma’s mother nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “They were.”

“How did you know this?”

For a brief instant a flicker of discomfort passed across her mother’s face.

“How? I saw them together.”

Palma was surprised by a melancholy note in her voice.

“You saw them?”

Her mother nodded. “At the church of St. Anthony, in the vestry, during the saint’s feast day. Years ago. You must have been eight or nine, I guess. Yes, at least. It was that long ago. You remember Lydia Saldano? I had promised her I would put new candles in the altar holders for her. She had called me the night before; her brother was dying in Victoria. It was in the afternoon.” Her mother paused and shook her head slowly, remembering.

“I left the festival grounds and walked across the lawn and through the trees to the church. I came in through a back door to the rooms behind the altar. It was empty, of course, and all the stained-glass windows were pushed open, and I could hear the sounds of the festival across the lawn. As I crossed toward the other side of the church I heard a sound, something scraped or dragged against the floor, and then I thought there were soft voices. It came from the vestry. I wasn’t even thinking, my mind was on something else, I don’t know what. I turned and went that way. When I came around the corner of the passageway—the vestry is out of the way, at the end of a passage by itself, you know—the door was open. I saw them suddenly. They never even heard my footsteps.”

She paused. She was watching the doves, the three of them pecking at invisible nothings around the damp margins of the fountain.

“I was astonished. You can imagine. They were completely naked, their dresses and underthings scattered on the floor. I was amazed to see this, frozen to the spot. I watched them,” her mother said matter-of-factly. “Lara. Quiet, meek Lara, was very much in control of their lovemaking, and Christine…well, she was the
niña,
I suppose. It was as if they had exchanged personalities. I could see it immediately and for some reason, I don’t know why, that was as shocking to me as what they were doing. They were very passionate, very sensual and imaginative in the way they touched each other. I had never seen anything like it before.” She stopped, her eyes only incidentally on the speckled doves. “I could hear them breathing, whispering and hissing in their passion. I could see the perspiration on their skin in the afternoon light that came through the high windows of the vestry.

“I will admit,” she said with a droll smile, her eyes still on the doves, “I watched as long as I dared, until they had exhausted themselves. For me, this was truly a revelation. Not the kind, I am sure, that God would have chosen to occur in His church, but a revelation all the same.”

Palma was stunned. Her mother seemed to be remembering the event with such detail that Palma could not help but wonder how often she had thought of it in the ensuing years. And why.

“For weeks and weeks I could not get that encounter out of my mind,” her mother said. “I would find myself thinking about it at all hours of the day and night. I never told anyone about seeing these women, not even your father. In some kind of odd way, by this accident of my arrival and my decision to watch, in secret, the great sadness of their passion, I felt that I had shared this with them and owed them the loyalty of my silence. These two women, I have thought about them over the years as I watched them continuing to live their lives, presenting their masks to the community, to their husbands, to their families. They must have suffered greatly, having to hide so much of themselves from the rest of the world. I know they continued their relationship until Lara died. One would not have noticed. But I knew because I watched them. Little things, you know, became significant. They were such different personalities that when they happened to be at the same place at the same time no one took any notice. But I did. I saw their eyes meet, a brush of their hands in passing. Several times over the years I actually saw them passing notes.”

Something stirred the dark plantains near the fountain and the doves flushed in a whir of whistling, beating wings. But they didn’t go far, only to the higher reaches of the catalpas.

“How did you feel about that?” Palma asked, recovering from the surprise of hearing such a story from her mother.

“What, their lovemaking?”

“Yes, the homosexuality.”

The old woman shrugged. “They call them ‘gay,’ I know. What irony.” She paused. “What was I supposed to feel? Pity? Maybe, but not really, no more than I would feel for the star-crossed lovers of different sexes. Condemnation? The church says it is abominable, but I am sorry, what I saw was not abominable, even though I know that there is more to it than what I saw and so, perhaps, there is an abomination in something else.” She took her handkerchief again and wiped around her hairline. “But I have to admit to a little prejudice, I guess, because the idea of two women making love has never offended me like the idea of two men. And when I actually saw it, I still was not offended. I don’t know why that is. Maybe because I am a woman and can imagine a little more the complicated things that women feel, the small winding ways of their hearts. Over the years, I have given them a lot of thought, Lara and Christine. I do not condemn them. I gave up my license to do that along with my youthful wisdom. I don’t even understand it. How can I condemn it?” She shook her head.

Palma looked at her mother. This was one story she could not possibly have anticipated. It never would have occurred to her that her mother had ever given a moment’s thought to female homosexuality. She would have liked to have been in her mother’s mind at this very moment. Palma could have asked her what she was thinking, but no one, not even a woman as candid as her mother, ever answered such a question with absolute honesty. After a few moments one of the doves returned to the fountain, followed shortly by a second.

Her mother turned to her. “I will tell you something, Carmen, something it has taken me a long while to understand. A woman is human first…and a woman second. This fact, I promise you, should not be forgotten.”

24

I
t was just past eight o’clock when she finished the articles that had arrived in the manila envelope from Sander Grant. She had been sitting at the dining room table with a pencil and pad, underlining passages and making notes as she sipped a glass of Soave. She had eaten a variety of cold salads she had picked up at Butera’s deli on Montrose on the way home, and the paper cartons, plastic fork, and napkins she had used were still scattered around the table. And the telephone was there beside her, too, its cord pulled around the corner from the kitchen.

She stretched her shoulders, rounding them forward, twisting them to the left and then the right, and rolled her head from side to side. She wanted a cup of coffee, but she didn’t want to go to the trouble of getting up and making it. She looked at the articles scattered in front of her, now heavily underlined and crowded with marginal notations. They were photocopies from a wide range of prestigious professional journals,
American Journal of Psychiatry, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Medical Science and the Law, Journal of Clinical Psychology, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Forensic Sciences, Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
, and others. Sander Grant had written many of them and had co-authored most of the others. They were incredible documents, providing stunning insights into the psychology and behavior of sexual killers. Sander Grant, she decided, must have had his share of nightmares. She had just about decided he was going to wait and call her at the office in the morning when the telephone rang. She shoved aside the articles, picked up the receiver, shoved the dirty napkins even farther from her, and turned over a clean sheet on her notepad.