American Chica (5 page)

MY FATHER LOVES
to tell the story of coming to America and will tell it to anyone who will hear it, in an urgent present tense. He narrates it now so that I can write this book. It begins this way: In early June of 1943, just as General Patton is planning his leap from the African shore, Jorge Arana flies to Panama City. But he finds himself wandering that capital, wondering whether he’ll ever get out. The planes are full. Panama is crawling with soldiers, and all flights to and from the isthmus are preempted for military use.

He spends days looking over the airstrip, lining up, waiting for announcements, loosening his collar against the furnace of the sun. At dusk, he is told to pray for luck, come back on the following day. Nights are tolerable, in town with other Latinos, young men lured north by the promise of bigger careers. They go
down to the sailor dives, perch on stools, sway to mambos, eye women over tankards of rum.

Seven days pass and civilian travel remains paralyzed. The dollars he’s hoarded thin to a precious few. MIT has sent only what is necessary to get him to Boston, and each day in that way station is a drain on his future.

One morning, as he sits in the roiling airport—a suitcase at his side and his parents’ photographs in his pocket—an airport official emerges to bark at the crowd.
The day’s plane to Miami is light,
he says.
We’re one hundred ten pounds short of mail. Anybody weigh fifty kilos or less?

My father steps forward: a stringy man, a tight bundle of energy. They can see that he isn’t much heavier than a sack of mail. They weigh him, rush him through the gates, strap him in. He comes to America as a letter might: with no more than a destination and a sliver of hope. There, beside the green of young soldiers and the dust of old burlap, he feels his fortunes rise.

The Miami he flies into is jittery, quick with street life and cash. War is everywhere evident—in the uniforms, the mongering slogans on walls. He stays for two nights, dodges his way through the mayhem, tries to get on a train. There are other Hispanics headed for universities. Much of South America has taken the side of the northern colossus; foreigners are being welcomed in. It’s a liaison of convenience, between a country at war and educated young Latino men. They’re coming just long enough to learn what they can from the gringos, woo a blonde, man the machines awhile.

At the end of June, he steps off a train into a gray, late night in Boston. He walks through the concrete city to a building he’s been assured will be home. A chain of head-scratching cicerones point the way. The dormitory looks stony, imposing. A uniformed
man sits inside.
Yes, sir?
the sailor says, snapping up brisk under a pale crew cut.

Good evening,
says my father, pronouncing the English words slowly, nodding politely. He rifles through his pockets and draws out the letter that has led him there. The military man scans it quickly, shakes his head.

This was an MIT building last week. Not tonight,
he says, thrusting the paper back into my father’s hand.
It’s the headquarters for a V-12 navy training program now. There’ll be a full crew by morning.

My father’s face darkens, the sailor’s softens.
Here, let me look at that again,
the gringo says, and reads the worn document a second time. When he looks up, the eyes have a different intelligence.
Well, I don’t see why you can’t stay here one night.

With that simple sentence, Jorge Arana takes a liking to America. Its food is bland. Its women rattle on incomprehensibly. Its afternoons rumble with thunder, torrents gushing from the sky. Its streets are all car horn and elbow. But there’s a wartime goodwill in the air: a winking camaraderie, a link with the hemisphere at large.

Within a few days, my father is registered in MIT’s graduate division, paying two dollars a day for a rented room and two meals, struggling to decipher Boston’s expletives, sitting in a classroom with no idea what the professor has said. He has studied English for years in Lima, but he finds himself unable to produce it, helpless before the machine-gun fire of American slang.

Jack Coombs, the man in whose apartment he lives, is a working-class Irishman with a colorful vocabulary and a powerful thirst for ale. Coombs is short, square; so is his “missus.” Together, they’re a monument to chance. The Coombses are gambling aficionados, their conversation focuses on horses and hazards, jockeys and odds. My father sits at their table with a
dictionary at his side, puzzling over the lexicon, marveling at the luck of his draw.

What’s it like down where you come from, Horrr-hey?
Coombs shouts between slurps of beer.
Y’all wear feathers and stomp around barefoot?

We wear shoes, Mr. Coombs. Nice leather ones. We’ve been ordering them from Paris since the sixteenth century, before your people ever set foot in this country,
he bandies back. But only after he’s roared merrily and looked up the words in his book.

Graduate school is hard, and his English isn’t good enough. His professors are direct: If he doesn’t get a perfect score on his engineering project, he won’t be granted a degree. The project is to be an invention, something no one on the faculty has seen before. Within the first weeks, he decides the form it will take. He’ll build an instrument that will gauge the load on a bridge. Not burdens on spans as they’re being erected; there are plenty of those contraptions around. No, his tool will test a suspension bridge that has gone up before anyone has had an opportunity to test it—a cable deemed unsteady, a structure everyone figures will fall.

More than five decades later, I ask him about it. He is over eighty now, paunched and grizzled and gray, nearly blind in one eye, but I recognize an intensity, the deliberateness he must have had as a young man. He takes out a pencil, sketches it for me: a bridge cable and a delicate instrument that squats on it. The next time I visit, he has constructed a model.
Here it is,
he says, setting the device before me. There is a metal cable between two pulleys, weighted with burdens on either side. A triangular pincer presses down from above, displaces the cable in increments, mathematically measures the load. The model is made—as everything he now makes is—out of something altogether practical: a wooden fruit crate, neatly painted, smoothly sanded, clearly labeled with equations. He explains it meticulously. My
eighty-six-year-old mother leans forward, engrossed in its fragile balance. She’s platinum-haired, lovely. She’s holding a tangerine.

THE FIRST TIME I SEE HER,
he tells me,
is through the frame of a window.
He is inside a dormitory, she is walking along the Fenway, a gaggle of women around. He registers her as a color in a rainbow, one swift stripe on a variegated field. She is stately in her fern-green suit, hair smoothed into a golden roll, a brown feather quivering somewhere above. Her companions are fresh-faced girls. She is a decade older, seasoned, a different flux in the well of her eyes.

He sees her often after that. Every day into winter. He is in a houseful of Latinos now, three stories of them, in a building rented out by the Boston Conservatory of Music. In the spirit of wartime frugality, the musicians are sharing a basement dining room with the MIT men.

She comes up the stairs of 24 Fenway with her violin wedged under one arm, shakes the snow from her fur coat, steps into a roomful of dark-eyed lotharios, darts past to a table in the back. She marks the din and the laughter but is removed, disconnected somehow.

She’s unmarried, he can see that from the unadorned finger; she’s sleeker, more studied than the rest. She has the preened, perfumed air of a woman who has been in the world for a while.

At first he sees she’s well-courted, walking briskly from the conservatory with a series of suitors. He notices only in passing. There are more-pressing concerns on his side of the window. Science has swept romance from his prospects, into a far corner of life. Others like him are washing dishes, waiting tables, taking odd jobs, earning money for a weekend jink. He spends his days in a library, in a laboratory, between a dictionary and a stack of books. Some Saturdays he puts on fiestas, mixing punch in a bathtub, ordering
up rhumbas and mambos, navigating the dancers with his drink in the air. The Latins at MIT are known for their parties, for scoring champagne, for serving it up in shoes. Mostly, however, he sees the world from a third-floor window, decoding gibberish he’s copied from a blackboard, digging his shoulder into a wall. Everyone knows how America rids itself of Latino students who do not make the grade: They ship them to Ellis Island or, worse, to holding camps, before deportation home.

Between sirens and blackouts and rations of horse meat, there’s a night of conga and rum.
Come here,
he beckons, when to his surprise she appears at the doorway.
Let me teach you.
He puts one hand on her waist, draws her in. She’s warm with a strange phosphorescence, with a glow on the nape of her neck. She tilts her head to one side and laughs back at him, and then there’s a point when the air is still.

Who can say when the first strand crosses the arroyo? The filament is flung. A fragile span arches down on the other side. The stories differ on the fine points of timing: Is it when she brings him ice cream on a late night before examinations? When he sits waiting for her on the steps of the conservatory building? When he asks for her help with a puzzling phrase?

His letters home say Americans are clever, industrious, admirable in every way. But they are an alien form of life. He cannot imagine himself with a woman of this dryasdust, pallid race. By spring he can imagine it. They are together, sunning themselves in the park, listening to the Boston Pops, stretching out on the grass, imagining life together in Peru.

Now, tell me about your family, Marie,
he says, stroking her hair.

Nothing to tell,
she answers simply.
My name is Campbell. I was born in 1921. I have a mother and a father, that’s all.

Well, start at the beginning. Where are you from?
he says, piling bricks from the bare ground up.

Seattle.
The conversation stops there. She’s from Seattle. By way of Canada. From out there. Down the road. Away. She gets up and dusts off her clothes.

I’m spending time with a pretty gringa,
he writes to his mother,
but as you know I’m not one to sniff after mysteries or wager on horses. These women are a chancy thing.

In truth, he finds himself wondering at her mystery, confused about signals. In Peru, things are simpler. There are two kinds of women: the kind you meet on the town and the kind you join at the altar. The kind you court is no random stranger, strolling down the Fenway, taking meals in a basement hall. She’s introduced by family, seen in her father’s home, in the presence of a chaperone. Not in a college dormitory, drinking champagne from a shoe.

The woman you marry is a genteel creature with just enough of an education to patter over a dinner table or steer the schooling of a child. Chief among her virtues is chastity, an unwavering commitment to one man and his children and, by association, to his family tree.

The gringas of the conservatory, on the other hand, are perplexing. They seem reasonably cultivated, decent
señoritas,
but self-reliant, brash as men. There is an unattached quality, a freedom that would be taken as scandalous in Lima. Maybe it’s a difference in cultures. Maybe it’s the nature of a nervous time.

War has become the explanation for everything. There’s a sense that your time is short. Each cigarette is a miracle. Every song a seduction. A party stumbles along for days.

The women are different; I don’t know how to judge them,
he writes to his mother.
There’s a code at work here; I don’t know what to think. In restaurants, you say what you’ve eaten and the waiter just trusts you and writes up a bill. It’s an upside-down country. A labyrinth of mirrors. Whenever I think I understand it, I find out I’m wrong.

He is wrong about much when it comes to her. He thinks she is twenty-three, three years his junior. She is thirty-one. He thinks she is rich. She only looks as if she might be, in her fur and her charge-account cabs. He thinks that she shuttles to Seattle and back again because parents await her. What is there is not family; it’s a past of her own.

In June, as Hitler limps out of Italy and American boys march into Rome, he finishes his thesis. The bridge apparatus works; he takes a master’s with honors. But by then, he is deep into a curriculum of a different kind. He is in love, looking for a way to stay. When a General Electric executive from Schenectady offers him work inspecting turbines for tankers, he takes it.

That winter he takes a wife as well. As he tells the story, he and my mother had spent many months apart: she in Manhattan, studying with the distinguished violin maestro Emanuel Ondricek; he in Schenectady, driving steam through a throttle. One weekend, they meet in Boston. By Monday, they are looking for a judge.