American Chica (6 page)

This is where the story unravels. Where the string wafts off into unfinished sentences, like a thread into February wind. It is she, after all these years, who fills in the gaps. It begins with her going to a Catholic priest on a Sunday, she tells me. She asks the holy man to marry them, but after a short conversation, he turns her away. When she reports to my father that the priest has refused her, she doesn’t tell him why. The next morning, they find a justice of the peace who agrees to do it. He takes down their information, tells them to return with their documents.

They come back another day, ready to make their pledges, but there are unexpected questions on the judge’s mind.
Where’s your birth certificate?
he asks my father.
You can’t marry without one.
My father holds out his passport, but the lawman shakes his head.

And you, young lady,
he says to my mother in her teal blue
dress.
The information you gave me on this application is incorrect. Your driver’s license says you were born in 1913, not 1921. And Campbell must not be your maiden name. You’ve been married before.

My father looks down at the page as she takes out a pen and amends it. She draws a line through the year and writes above carefully.
1913.
Then she skims down to the place at the bottom. Previous marriages, it asks. She checks it off, answers it.
Three.

Fine, says the judge.
That’s more like it.
He is softening, like the crew-cut sailor on that first Boston night.
We can go ahead now,
he tells my flustered father, reading shock as impatience,
but you must promise to bring me a copy of that birth certificate eventually, won’t you? Shall we call in two witnesses and do this?
He waves in the direction of the stragglers in the hall.

Yes,
my father says, pulling himself together, and the wedding is on. The bridge goes up.

PAPI DECIDED TO
accept my mother’s mysterious past in that one split second just as surely as I have come to accept it over the years. I have puzzled over my mother’s heart for almost half a century. She has told me so little about its workings. But now that I am older, I know she has a right to her secrets. I am content to understand that my mother has had real love, hard love, heartbreak, and to know that while my father has given her the first two, he never will give her the last.

Not until I was in my forties and she in her eighties did we finally bring the question into the open. We had traveled to New York together. I hadn’t planned it, hadn’t rehearsed it, but after a few glasses of wine at a Manhattan trattoria, there it was.

“Mother,” I said, “I’ve spent a lifetime trying to ask you one question.”

She looked at me with her steady blue eyes and nodded her
silvery head. Her thumb and fingers were tilting her glass back and forth, as if she were seeking balance in a violin bow. “You’re asking me about the marriages?”

“Yes, I am. Yes.”

She put down her wine, knit her fingers. “There were three before your father,” she said simply.

I was flabbergasted, amazed. She was talking without any hesitation, coolly, frankly. As if we were talking about rooms in a house. “There were
three.”
She had three fingers up now, and she was pressing on one with a finger of her other hand. “In the first, I eloped. Or, I should say, a group of us eloped. I was sixteen. My sister Erma talked me into it. Made me do it. On a dare. On a lark. I never realized how responsible Erma was for that miserable first marriage until I was an old woman, until Erma was dead. Until now.”

She paused there and studied me. I strained to remember Erma. She was the only one of Mother’s three sisters I’d ever met, but all I could summon was a shadowy figure on a childhood visit. I was pulled more to the image of my teenage mother getting married on a dare. It was as if I’d never known her. As if I were seeing her for the first time through a telescope, from another planet. She had allowed me to grow up, it suddenly dawned on me, nothing like her. I was cautious, hesitant, mindful of mores, of my own virginal image, of
como se hace.
The way good Latinas
ought
to behave. It was why she had never talked about her past to me. She had recognized the limits of my circumspection, the essential Peruvianness of my soul.

“That first one’s name was Gerardy,” she said quickly. “The town postmaster. He’d always had an eye on me. So we got married, and that was that. I was a silly little girl. But Erma should have known better. The second was out west, in San Francisco. He was a foreigner who didn’t want to be sent to war. I did him a
favor. He needed papers, citizenship. It was a marriage of convenience. There really isn’t any more to tell.”

I shook my head yes, fine, let that one go.

“The third one,” she held up a lone forefinger now and moved it through the air, “the third one had love in it.” She stopped there. I waited for several beats to pass.

“Campbell.” I said it.

“Yes,” she said, “Campbell. That one. He was killed in the war. And that is all I’m going to say.” She pushed the glass away, across the white tablecloth.

“That is all you’re going to say?” I blinked.

“Yes,” she said, “that is part of my life I keep separate. It has nothing to do with the part I’m in now. It is sacred, do you understand that? Sacred. I do not want to go into it. I do not want
you
going into it. It is not for cocktail conversation. It is not for talk over casual dinners in New York.” She stopped, and I could see her shoulders tense with familiar steel.

It was clear why she had to get herself on a train, head for another coast. Thank God Papi had been there. That’s enough, Mother. God knows it’s enough, and I will leave it. I didn’t need to know more.

The irony is that I came to know more anyway, proving the gringo rule that if you shut up, mind your own business, people may tell you a thing or two. In a telephone conversation several years later, I learned from a cousin I’d never met that Gerardy, her first husband, was a hard drinker, brutal. That he’d wanted to get at her father’s fortune. That he threw my sixteen-year-old mother around like a doll. When he wasn’t tossing mail sacks around as the town postmaster, he was punching her face in and flinging her down the stairs.

That’s the reason my mother needed a different direction. Hers was a road that had led from a cruel postmaster to a draft dodger in need of a favor, from a heartbreaking war casualty to a
plane with my father on it—to the mail route from Panama to Miami, with a cargo that was one sack short. She was drawn to my father’s foreignness. He responded by dismissing whatever past she brought. When she reached down to correct the judge’s document
—previous marriages, three
—anything might have happened. But in that pivotal moment, my father didn’t dither. He shot out a sturdy span: To another life. To another world. To a point she might never have touched.

YES,
MY FATHER
says to the judge, pulling himself together, and the wedding is on. The ramparts sink in.

When they return to a Boston apartment as man and wife, their friends are there to raise a glass. It’s when they’re finally alone that the masonry wobbles.
Yes
, she says,
it’s true. I didn’t want to lose you. There were others.
She weeps. The cables so shredded, they could snap.

Never mind,
he says.
It’s behind us now. That part of your life is over. Please don’t say more.

He weighs the choices, knowing what would be the full impact of the truth on his family. Their marriage is impossible in a Catholic society, unacceptable to a faith that damns divorce as devil’s work and remarried women as tramps. But America is so different. For all he knows, his new wife is nothing more or less than typical. He writes to my abuelito and abuelita.
I’ve married the pretty gringa,
he tells them.
We’re coming to Peru. Send out announcements: Seattle is her city. James B. Campbell is her father’s name.

He does not broach the subject of the three marriages with her again. To this day. Even as I move between them now, trying to paste together this story, it is something they do not discuss.

Somewhere in Denver, a city my mother has never mentioned to my father, Elver Reed receives a telegram from my mother,
and the old man’s heart sinks with the news. Uncle Elver is her uncle, a rich Denver lawyer, a pillar of his community. He’s been paying for her studies in New York and at the conservatory, giving her a chance to reshuffle her life. But there’s something he doesn’t like about the news of a Peruvian husband.
God made those people different. Not like us Anglican folk.
It’s understood that the money will stop.

Even as my father arranges their sea voyage to Lima, all he knows about my mother is what he has heard in an American courtroom. He thinks his in-laws are in Seattle, but they are really in Wyoming. Though he knows their name is not Campbell, he doesn’t yet know it is Clapp. As for his wife’s former marriages, he makes a conscious effort to forget them. And so, although he is wending his way home to Peru, he has taken his first step toward becoming an American: The future interests him more than the past.

3

—

A
NCESTORS

Antepasados

Y
ES, BUT IF
you are a Latin American well along the way to becoming a North American, your past is a heavy load of what you carry into your future. That was true for Papi as he brought his pretty young gringa to Peru, and it has been true for me for as long as I can remember. This is not just because we are and always will be Latinos, but because we are Aranas, and for us history is even more inescapable than it may be for other Latin Americans.

I’VE STOOD IN
Venice, on its Bridge of Sighs. It is monumental, rank with history. It is where the tourists go. I’ve lined up behind the Piazza di San Marco to see its stone thrust from one side of the canal to the other. It is a covered span, ornate, with two small, grated windows that look out over the water, and it joins the Doges’ Palace to a dungeon on the other side. They say condemned Venetians were made to walk that chute from judgment
to execution. As they crossed and peered through the grating, they would look out beyond the canal, the lagoon, and sigh for their lives, sigh for their sins, sigh at the beauty of that one last view.