Suspicion of Deceit (11 page)

After dinner on Friday, Karen said she would teach Anthony to play Spit while Gail took a shower. Wearing jeans and a long T-shirt, Gail came back through the kitchen to make some coffee. She heard the sound of cards snapping onto a table in the family room.

Karen's voice said, "If I had my own stereo, then I wouldn't have to be in here making noise when you and Mom want to talk."

Anthony replied, "You aren't a bother."

"Well, she tells me all the time to turn it down. If I had a stereo in my room, then I could listen to music in there, and you guys could be out here."

Gail peered around the corner. Anthony sat forward on the edge of the sofa, and Karen was cross-legged on a floor pillow, the coffee table between them. Karen's sunstreaked hair hung down her back. Her thin arm flashed back and forth, dropping cards, picking them up.

"The problem is, Mom won't get me one. She says I have to pay for it myself."
      

"I see." Anthony shuffled through the cards in his hand. "You have an allowance, no?"

"Ten dollars a week. It would take
forever"

"What about your chores in the house?"

"She won't give me any money at all unless
everything
is done. I want to start a corporation and do odd jobs for people."

"Like what?"

"I could wash car windows. I could wash the windows in your car."

"Well, I'm very particular." Anthony snapped down a card. So did Karen, then another. "It has to be a good job. How much do you charge?"

"Those are pretty big windows. Plus the sunroof."

"What about . . . five dollars. Two extra for the chrome."

"Okay. Next time you're here, I'll do it." Karen suddenly shrieked and bounced on the pillow. "Spit! Spit!"

Anthony tossed his cards and moved a quarter across the table.

Gail leaned over to kiss Karen on top of the head. "Time to get ready for bed, sweetie."

"Mom! It's Friday!"

"And we're having an early breakfast at Gramma's house. Go on, brush your teeth, I'll be right there."

"I have no life," she muttered. She dropped the playing cards into their box and scraped some quarters and dimes into her palm.

Anthony reached across the table to pat her cheek. "Good night, Karen."

"Night." Then an angelic smile appeared. She came around the table and kissed him on the cheek.
"Buenas noches."
She bounced off the sofa and skipped toward the hall.

Watching her go, Gail said quietly, "I heard that little conversation about your car windows. Be careful. She wants her own phone, too."

"Karen says she's going out with a boy at school. I didn't want to say anything to her. Did you know this?"

"His name is Bobby."

"She's only ten years old."

"Listen, 'going out' means sitting together at lunch and calling each other on the phone. You hear these long silences, but neither one wants to be the first to hang up. It's perfectly innocent."

"I guess so."

"I'll be back in a minute."

He stopped her with a slow smile and a tug on the hem of her Miami Hurricanes T-shirt. "Put something else on."

"What's the matter, you're not a 'Canes fan?"

Of course she knew what he meant. After tucking Karen in, Gail changed into a soft cotton dress that buttoned up the front. She put a touch of perfume at the low neckline.

When she came back, Anthony was listening to the radio so intently he didn't notice she was behind him. It wasn't music but a talk show in Spanish, the volume turned so low Gail had not heard it until she came into the room. The thin voice of an older man said,
"Repugnante . . . un insulto a la comunidad cubana."

Then the host replied. Gail recognized the voice immediately: Octavio Reyes. His convoluted sentences made translation difficult. Yes, an insult to permit a man to sing who has performed for the dictatorship.
Arrogancia.
The arrogance of the Miami opera not to—not to—

"Anthony, what is he saying?" He looked quickly around. "No, don't turn it off. What's he saying?"

"He says the opera and its supporters arrogantly refuse to acknowledge the suffering of our people-meaning the people in Cuba."

The two of them looked at the blue digital display as if Reyes's face might appear. Gail had seen him at Ernesto Pedrosa's house, once at a family dinner and more recently on Christmas Eve. Gail remembered an expensive suit, silver-rimmed glasses, and steel-gray hair combed back from his forehead.

Another call.
"Buenas noches, está en el aire."

"Octavio?"

"Sí, señora, está en el WRCL. Adelante."

"Que barbaridad, que la opera invitó a una persona comunista a nuestra ciudad. "

"Estoy de acuerdo, señora—"

Anthony hit a button and the room went silent. He continued to stare at the radio.

Gail murmured, "Such a barbarity, the opera inviting a communist to our city. Does he truly believe Tom Nolan is a
communist?"

"Well, their definition of communist is fairly broad. It can mean anyone who supports the regime of Fidel Castro in any way." Anthony glanced at Gail. "Does Octavio believe Nolan fits that definition? I don't know. But he is patriotic, so he will use it."

"Strange definition of patriotism," Gail said.

"In a war," Anthony said, "to yield one inch is to lose everything. It's what we call 'noble intransigence.' The struggle to liberate Cuba comes before anything."

"Like your grandfather," she said.

"Precisely."

"I'm not sure," Gail said, "whether Octavio is principled or just ambitious. I suspect that if I weren't involved with the opera, and you weren't engaged to me, he would find some other issue to hammer on. I do regret that."

"Don't let it bother you," Anthony said.

"It's hard not to. He's putting a knife between your ribs." I know you don't care about inheriting your grandfather's businesses, but he could alienate you from your family. That's what concerns me. I know how much they mean to you." She put her arms around his waist. "I love you. They'll be my family, too."

He kissed her forehead. "Don't worry. Ernesto is too smart to fall for Octavio's bullshit."

"He's almost eighty-four years old," she reminded him.

"So hard to believe. I never thought of my grandfather growing old, and now he has. I don't want to think about it."

"Then I guess we'll just have to find something else to do."

Gail turned off the torchiere, leaving the soft light of a smaller lamp across the room. When she came back to him, Anthony finally noticed what she was wearing. His eyes moved slowly over her body, then up to her face.
"Ay, tú estás pa' comer."

Holding his face, she stroked her thumb across his mouth.
"Te quiero."

He bit the end of her thumb before she could pull it out of the way.
"Yo te quiero más. "
I love you more.

She wanted to go for his buckle, but settled for a kiss deep enough to make her dizzy. He would spend the night, but until Karen was soundly asleep, he would not go near Gail's bedroom.

They brought their coffee to the sofa. With a long exhalation, Anthony slumped into a pillow and closed
his eyes. He had delivered final arguments in a manslaughter trial this morning, but the jury had not come back with a verdict. They would resume deliberations on Monday.
      

Her head on his shoulder, Gail said, "Tell the truth. How will your grandparents feel about my being at the party tomorrow night? Not just me. Karen, my mother, my aunt, my cousins—"

"They're looking forward to it. The opera or Thomas Nolan will not be mentioned. I promise." He picked up his mug from the end table.

"I've wanted to talk to you all week," she said.

"If you would make up your mind about a house," he said, "we could get married, and then we could talk every night."

"Me? Make up
my
mind?" Gail smoothed her hand down the front of his collarless black pullover, tucked into pleated gray wool slacks, which were belted with snakeskin. "Anthony, tell me about Nicaragua."

"Why?"

"You said you would." "Did I say when?"

"Stop acting like a defense attorney," she said. "I talked to Rebecca Dixon Wednesday. She said it was horrible. She saw bodies. Bones rising from the earth. That's awfully grim."

Anthony sipped his coffee. "Yes, it was. I don't want to ruin our evening with it."

"What was Rebecca talking about?"

"We saw dead people. I told you that. It's a long story."

"Just give me the short version. Ten minutes."

"Gail, please. Not tonight."

"How long do you plan to avoid it?"

The sharpness in his tone startled her. "I am tired. I did not come here to get into a discussion about events that occurred twenty years ago, that do not matter to me, to you, or to anyone. I am not in the mood."

Slowly she sat up straight. "Fine. Then leave if you're in such a pissy mood."

They stared at each other. Color flooded into his cheeks, and his lips were pressed together so hard they turned white. Then he gave a shrug and stretched his arm toward the end table.

"If you put that coffee cup down, I swear to God I will break it over your head."

The mug hung suspended. He said, "Okay. I'm not leaving." It clunked softly onto the table.

"Dave and I—" Gail took a shaky breath. "Dave and I stopped talking to each other. It didn't happen immediately, and at first we hardly noticed, but then it became a habit, and one day our marriage was over. I don't want that to happen to us. I refuse to allow it." Anthony was frowning at the mug, positioning it just so. "It isn't Nicaragua I care about. It's you. Whatever you saw there had an effect. It's part of you, and I want to know what happened."

After a long silence, Anthony began to speak.

"Seth Greer knew a priest from Nicaragua who had come to the U.S. to do fundraising and recruit volunteers to help build schools and clinics. He passed through Miami and we spoke with him. He was a sincere and charismatic man, and we decided immediately to join his movement. Seth wanted to bring social justice to Central America. I wanted to strike a blow against Yankee capitalist oppression." He laughed softly. "That was the view I'd grown up with in Cuba—what my father taught me. I breathed it in the air.

"After the semester was over, we took a flight the next day for Managua. The city was still in ruins from the earthquake in 1972—a very poor city surrounded by slums. Whoever was to meet us at the airport never snowed up, so we had to find our own way to Los Pozos, about a hundred miles north into Jinotega province."

As she listened, Gail remembered things Anthony had already told her about himself. His decision to work in Nicaragua could not be understood otherwise.

Anthony had told her that he had grown up believing that he was part of a great change in human history.

Luis Quintana, a decorated hero of the revolution, had told his son that there would be no more inequality between the races and the sexes. No discrimination, no poverty. Teachers poured into the countryside, educating the peasants. Clinics were built. People referred to each other as
compañero—
comrade. There were ration coupons, but no one minded. For the first time, Cuba would be free. But always on the horizon were the exiles, backed by the Americans, preparing to invade. "I remember the missile crisis in 1962. Everyone was terrified that we might die in a nuclear explosion. My sister Marta watched the sea with binoculars. The entire country was mobilized."

In the Young Pioneers Anthony learned to take a rifle apart and put it back together. He marched .With the other boys, he jeered at the non-communist teachers expelled from the school. At twelve he went willingly to the countryside to do agricultural work, slept in barracks on jute mattresses, rose at dawn, and ate bread and sugared water before going off to the fields. He missed his father and sister, but was too much of a man to complain. He heard some of the others crying at night.

His mother had taken the two youngest children, leaving Anthony and Marta behind. His father said, She abandoned you. Caridad was a
gusana, una traidora—
a worm, a traitor—and her father Ernesto Pedrosa was a monster.

At fourteen Anthony would have been admitted to the Young Communist League—if he had not been attending junior high school in Miami. If he had not been tricked—or rescued—out of Cuba. Which was correct? The boy soldier kidnapped and imprisoned far from home, or the young prince saved by the king? They could not both be true. Or perhaps they were—depending on who told the tale.

Why had he boarded that DC-6 to Miami? Because he wanted to ask his mother why she had left. This had never been explained, since Luis had destroyed all her letters. Perhaps Pedrosa had forced her to go. In that case, Anthony would persuade her to come home. If she refused, then he would confront her with her selfishness. Luis, hospitalized for old wounds, knew nothing about it. Anthony had been told he would be on a return flight within a week.

He knew, walking out of customs at the Miami airport, seeing his mother run toward him, weeping, that his father had lied: She had never stopped loving him. In the next moment he saw the other lie: They had never intended to let him go home.

Anthony said, "When I was young, I thought my father was a hero, but he was only a man. Not a hero. Patriotic, yes, but he turned in his own brother for selling food on the black market He cheated without remorse on my mother. He said to me, a man isn't a man unless he has women. My grandfather was not that way. When I was fifteen he took me into his study and lectured me about women. His ideas sounded so old-fashioned. You must never betray your God, you? country, or your wife. I might have laughed if he hadn't spoken with such sincerity. He was—is—a man of great strength. Unfortunately, like my father, he can see only one side of things. "

This was the same study where late one night, passing by with a sandwich, Anthony had heard men's voices through the heavy door. He listened. They were jubilant about having blown up a radio transmitter in Pinar del Rio.