Rag and Bone (3 page)

“You don’t know that there won’t be others,” she said.

I looked away from the ghost-filled corridor to my sister’s kind, worn face and said, “I wish I could believe that.”

After two days of walking the hall, we graduated to the hospital’s small interior garden. I was liberated from my IV lines and rode down in the elevator in a wheelchair but discarded it once we got outside. Our course was a circular flagstone path that ringed a dozen rose bushes now in florid bloom, their scent mingling with banks of rosemary and lavender. But after only two laps, I began to tire and said, “Look, there’s a bench. Can we sit for a minute?”

The bench was of snowy marble carved with clawed lion’s feet. Embedded in the stone was a small brass plaque that read,
IN MEMORIAM, CHRISTOPHER GRAYE
, 1963-1992.”

“God,” I said. “I knew Chris Graye.”

“AIDS?”

I nodded and then didn’t want to talk about it anymore. For a moment we listened to the buzzing of bees and the distant thrum of traffic. I closed my eyes. The sun on my face and neck was like the warm breath of a lover. I was ruefully surprised that I could remember that sensation, given how long it had been since I had actually experienced it. Even before the heart attack, I concluded there was not much chance I would meet someone; and while my reflex was to regret it, when I actually thought it through, I felt relief. Love is very strenuous; only the young really enjoy it and I was not young. Now, my damaged heart seemed the perfect metaphor, and I was ready to let go of that part of life.

“This reminds me of the garden in the convent,” Elena said.

I waited for her to continue, because she rarely spoke of her years as a religious. Elena had been an honor student in high school, but because she was a girl, our father decreed it was unnecessary for her to attend college. One day, I came home from track practice and found three nuns in full habit sipping tea with my parents in the living room. They belonged to a teaching order called Sisters of the Holy Cross that was affiliated with a number of small Jesuit colleges. The sisters had come to ask my father’s permission for Elena to join their order. Though they were white women, they addressed him in fluent Spanish in firm, almost lecturing tones, while he sullenly shrugged and nodded. Elena knew that no one else could have persuaded our father to let her leave home and attend college except the representatives of a religion that, though he did not observe it, still exercised a primeval influence over the Mexican
campesino
who lived beneath his thin Americanized veneer.

Yet, she had once told me, after she joined the order she discovered a vocation, or at least enough of one for her to have spent six years as Sister Mary Joseph. The few times I had seen her during this period, she had radiated a calm, purposeful energy and seemed very happy. I assumed she would remain a nun for the rest of her life and was surprised to receive a brief letter from her announcing that she had left the order and could be reached through the English department at Berkeley, where she had been accepted to graduate school. I lost track of her altogether during most of the Berkeley years. Her remark a couple of days earlier about her disorientation at returning to the secular world came back to me now.

“What happened after you left the nuns?” I asked lazily.

“I went to Cal, you knew that.”

“All I know is that’s where you got your Ph.D. I don’t know anything about your life there. Isn’t that where you came out?”

She didn’t respond for such a long time that I thought she hadn’t heard me. I opened my eyes and found her staring into the middle distance, at a hummingbird zipping in and out of the roses in a blue-and-yellow blur.

“Elena? Are you all right?”

Slowly she turned her face to me and managed a pained smile. She said, “I always wondered how I would tell you about this. Or even if I would.”

“Tell me about what?”

“I had a child, Henry. A daughter. I gave her up for adoption the day she was born, almost thirty years ago now.”

A dry breeze rustled through the garden. I said, “What?”

“I started at Berkeley in nineteen-seventy. Do you remember what nineteen-seventy was like on college campuses?”

“I remember what it was like to be a junior at Stanford,” I said. “I had hair to my shoulders and the halls of my dorm smelled of patchouli oil and pot.”

“I was twenty-five. My hair was still growing out—we really did shave our heads in my order—and if you had asked me about pot, I would’ve thought you were talking about cookware. Needless to say, I knew almost nothing about sex. Mom had told me the bare minimum. The novice mother supplied some other clinical details but strictly in the interests of hygiene. We had taken a vow of celibacy, after all.”

“You had no feelings toward any of your sisters?”

“I had plenty of feelings toward them,” she said. “But I didn’t recognize them as being sexual. I really was very, very naive. When I walked around Berkeley, I felt like I was branded with a scarlet V.”

“I don’t understand.”

She shot me a look. “Virgin, Henry. All the other students seemed so sophisticated and experienced. I felt like a dress that had never been worn and I very much wanted to be worn. To be part of the excitement around me. To be young. I met a boy. A law student, actually. We went to a party and got drunk and I told him I was a virgin and he said he could take care of that.”

“Did he rape you?”

“God, no,” she said. “Though I can’t imagine it was much fun for him. I was very awkward the first few times.”

“The first few times?”

“I went out with Charlie for a couple of months.”

“Charlie?”

“Charlie Tejada,” she said. “He was the first Chicano I ever met. He couldn’t speak ten words of Spanish and his dad was an accountant in L.A., but he lectured me about
la causa
and told me that studying American literature was assimilationist.” Her tone was rueful but affectionate. “He dropped me for a girl from Chile whose father was in Allende’s cabinet. I was hurt and relieved. Grateful to him for teaching me about sex. He was kind and patient in bed. But not,” she added, “very careful. I knew about birth control pills but I didn’t start taking them until after we’d had sex several times. I remember complaining to one of my housemates that the pressure of studying was making me sick in the morning. She said, very casually, that I was probably pregnant. I went to the student health center. She was right.”

“What did you do?”

“Panicked. I was frightened and ashamed and I didn’t know who to turn to.”

“What about Charlie?”

She shook her head. “As inexperienced as I was, I still knew there was nothing to our affair. I mean, he wasn’t going to marry me and I wouldn’t have wanted that anyway.”

“Why not?”

“I had begun to think I might be lesbian.”

“Just like that, out of nowhere?”

“Those feelings I’d had for other women in the convent that I didn’t recognize as sexual? I did after I started sleeping with Charlie. Sex was the missing piece that finally made sense of things. Do you know what I mean?”

I had a flash of myself at nineteen in bed with the first boy I ever made love to, and how, when he kissed me, it eliminated any doubt in my mind about who I was or what I wanted. “I think so,” I said.

“I liked being with Charlie, but something was missing. I was on the verge of admitting what it was when I discovered I was pregnant.”

“What did you do?”

“There was a professor in the department who was openly gay. I showed up at her office one day, told her I thought I was a lesbian, and begged her to help me deal with the pregnancy.”

“Did she?”

“She arranged an abortion,” Elena replied. “That was very brave of her, because abortion was still against the law and she could not only have lost her job but been prosecuted. I was grateful because my fall-back plan was to induce an abortion myself.”

“Oh, Elena.”

“That’s what women did in those days, Henry. Thank God for Nora.”

“The professor?”

She nodded. “The doctor’s office was on Grant Street in Chinatown above a restaurant. I remember sitting in the waiting room with Nora, trying not to be sick from the food smells coming up the vent from downstairs. To this day I don’t much care for Chinese food.”

“But you didn’t go through with it. Why?”

“The doctor scheduled the abortions late at night, after her regular hours. There was no one else in the waiting room except Nora and me. I went over to the window and looked outside at the neon signs and the people crowding the sidewalks and the shops, and slowly my own reflection emerged in the glass and I saw myself and realized I could not go through with an abortion.”

Her face had a vulnerability I had never seen before. I reached for her hand. “I wish you hadn’t had to go through that alone.”

“I wasn’t alone,” she said, and for a moment I thought she was alluding to her professor, but then I understood.

“You think God told you not to go through with the abortion? But you’re not antiabortion. Are you?”

“My God is not an unpleasant old man who lives in the sky and forces people to make desperate choices and then condemns them if they get it wrong. For me, God is the clear inner voice that guides us to the choices that are right for us, if we’re willing to listen. The choices are different for everyone. For some women, an abortion makes sense. I just wasn’t one of them.”

“What happened after you decided not to go through with it?”

“I told Nora. We left the office and went to a coffee shop, where we talked for hours. She was the first person to whom I ever told my life story, and when I finished she said I was an exceptional woman. No one had ever said anything like that to me before. Her saying it gave me the courage of my convictions. Nora got me a leave of absence from school and convinced me to move in with her so she could help me through the pregnancy.”

“And the baby?”

“I held her for a few minutes before I turned her over to a nurse from the county adoption agency,” she said.

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“In those days you relinquished control completely,” she said.

“And you never saw her again?”

She released my hand and sighed. “Around the time I turned forty, I developed some medical problems that eventually required a hysterectomy. I had never wanted another child, but losing the ability to bear them was surprisingly hard on me emotionally. I had a kind of breakdown, or at least I wasn’t acting very rationally, and I was obsessed with two things—you and my daughter.”

“Me? Why?”

“Because of what we talked about the other day. The guilt I felt at not protecting you when you were a child. That was nothing to the guilt I felt about putting my daughter up for adoption. I went looking for her.”

“Did you find her?”

Elena nodded her head. “Yes. The agency was very helpful. They encouraged me because, well, you see, Henry, she was not one of their successes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Thirty years ago, brown-skinned girl babies were not very placeable. She was never adopted. She grew up in foster care and group homes. She was at a group home when I found her. A Catholic charity group home that was run by my former order. I arranged to visit the home without disclosing who I was.”

“Why?”

“I thought it would be less shocking to her if she got to know me first as a person before I told her I was her mother. I went ostensibly to talk to the girls about going to college, and I saw her. She was fourteen or fifteen. A chubby little girl squeezed into pants two sizes too small for her, with teased hair and too much makeup.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“Not directly. I went around the circle and asked each girl what she wanted to be when she grew up. When it came her turn, she said beautician.”

“So?”

“The two girls before her gave the same answer. She was simply imitating them. Seeing her, hearing her, exposed the foolishness of my fantasy.”

“What fantasy?”

“I thought she would be like me at that age, but she was like the
cholas
we grew up with, Henry. The bad girls, the gang girls. I tried to imagine bringing her home, but I couldn’t.” She closed her eyes as if in pain. “My maternal instincts weren’t even as strong as my snobbery.” She fell silent. “A few years later, when I had grown up a bit, I tried to find her again. I was ready at that point to establish whatever relationship I could with her, but by then she had turned eighteen and was long gone. I learned she was married and had had a child. At the hospital where her son was born, I found a social worker who knew where she was, but she refused to give me my daughter’s address. I persuaded her at least to give her my name and how to reach me. But I never heard from Vicky, so I don’t even know if she got the information.”

“Vicky?”

“That’s what they named her. Victoria Maria.”

“That’s a lovely name.”

“Isn’t it?” Elena said. “I’ll never see her again.”

I reached for some consolation and found the same one she had given me when I worried about being needed. “You don’t know that, Elena.”

After a moment, she said, not very hopefully, “I’d like to believe that.”

A
FTER TEN DAYS, I WAS RELEASED FROM THE HOSPITAL.
Dr. Hayward came in as I was laboriously dressing. He stood at the doorway and watched me clumsily attempt to button my shirt. After a moment, he entered the room, gently moved my hands aside and delicately looped the buttons into the buttonholes, applying the same single-minded attention with which I imagined he performed heart surgery.

“Top button, too?” he asked. His warm breath glanced my cheek, smelling of coffee and peppermint.

“No,” I said. “I’m not a geek.”

He stepped back as if to admire his handiwork. “How do you feel?”

“Like nothing happened,” I replied. “And like nothing will ever be the same.”

He dug out a tube of breath mints from his white jacket and peeled two. “Mint?”

I accepted. He sat down lightly at the edge of the bed. I now realized he perched on beds not to create rapport with his bedridden patients, but because he was always tired and took every opportunity he could to rest. Like most good people I had known, he was seriously overworked, a condition that did not lend itself to treacly saintliness. He was unsentimental, direct and caustic, but acted out of such palpable kindness that I could not take offense.