The Ladies of Managua (8 page)

It wasn't until fifth grade that I realized no matter how good I was, it wouldn't make Madre stay. Plenty of kids were picked up from school by their grandparents, and with Tía Celia around, I still had two people I could give a flower to after the Mother's Day assembly, her and my Bela. I didn't walk around all the time feeling I was different, or missing something because Madre didn't live with us. But this was the first year she was going to be in Miami in time for the Christmas assembly at school, and I was counting the days until everyone got to see how beautiful and cool my mother was. And that she really existed. When I gave my book report on
A Little Princess,
Maribel Guzman asked me if I chose the book because it was about an orphan, like me. I explained that I had a mother, she was just busy “helping Nicaragua.” That's what my Bela taught me to say when people asked where my mother was; with so many Nicaraguans in Miami fleeing the conflict, you never knew who hated the Sandinistas or loved them. If I said Madre was helping Nicaragua, my Bela told me, they'd just assume she fought for whatever side they supported. And most of the time, she was right. Still, Maribel Guzman didn't seem convinced that Madre existed. But we were both in choir together and I knew she'd see Madre watching me and clapping after I did my solo. I convinced the teacher to let me sing “I'll Be Home for Christmas” instead of “Silent Night” because I thought Madre would understand it was a personal message to her. When the day came, Madre was there, watching me sing, with tears in her eyes. And she was as beautiful as ever. But Maribel wasn't impressed at all. She was whispering to Dave Gonzalez during my entire solo. And I became convinced that they were talking about me, that they were making fun of me, laughing about what I had just realized: the mother of the little princess, and the blond kid on
Silver Spoons,
and the black boys on
Diff'rent Strokes
—all of those orphans, their mothers died, and they couldn't be with them. But my mother chose to leave me, year after year.

If it didn't matter back then when Madre saw how good I could be, maybe it doesn't matter now when she sees how cruel I can be. Or, more likely, she doesn't care either way; the amount of time she spends thinking about my behavior must take up a total of five minutes on her overfilled calendar. And after the way I behaved tonight, that's probably a good thing. Maybe Madre didn't hear me, or at least didn't notice what I said. She's got plenty of other things on her mind, other people to worry about. T
í
a Celia has arrived and she and Madre are hugging each other and rocking back and forth a little bit. They're the unlikeliest of sisters, but now they have one more thing in common, they share the same loss. Madre is clinging to T
í
a Celia's warm, fleshy body as if she has no intention of letting go any time soon. It's not quite a fair trade, this hug; Madre's so thin and fit, all bone and muscle. But T
í
a Celia doesn't seem to mind. That's what it is to have a sister, I suppose.

And my Bela, I'm almost positive that she didn't hear my exchange with Madre. It seems like she doesn't even really hear the words of condolence well-wishers are offering her, as if they were canap
é
s she could nibble on to slake her hunger. She nods, but then she looks back at her handkerchief and they know they're dismissed. And then, it's strange, but as she holds the handkerchief to her forehead, dabs it at her face, she almost seems to smile a little. Relief, I suppose, at having been left alone until the next sympathetic mourner leans in to offer inadequate comfort.

 

11

Isabela

Silvia never spoke to me again. I don't blame her. Who knows what hopes she had pinned on the pleated navy dress, what it had cost her father? And she was back at school not one hour after Mauricio picked her up; I heard her heels clicking on the marble of the hallway, and even her shoes sounded angry.

The next night, Mauricio and I were out until the chaperone insisted it was time to leave or I'd miss curfew and she'd lose her position. We'd had coffee at Charlie's Steak House on Dryades, just behind the school; Mauricio told me later he felt it wouldn't be wise to go farther than a few blocks from campus, at least until we'd earned the chaperone's trust. I didn't speak much; it was the first time I'd been out with a man who wasn't a relative. But by the time he dropped us off, Mauricio had learned several important things: first, that if he pressed her, the chaperone could be induced to order a milk punch or a little sherry—“My mother, she does love a glass of sherry in the afternoon, sometimes two. It's quite the fashion in Cuba,” he told her.

And second, that once she'd had her drink, she didn't mind if we lapsed into Spanish, which she said she knew, “of course, it's just not my mother tongue.” Not ten minutes into the date she'd forbidden us from speaking Spanish, saying it was school rules that I should practice my English, but I think the truth was that she couldn't understand what we were saying, not with the way I swallowed the ends of my words, or how quickly Mauricio nattered on. But by the end of the afternoon, her cheeks were rosy and she was starting to nod off, and Mauricio was bold enough to say, in Spanish, “My mother only drinks at Christmas and Easter,” which made me laugh, waking the chaperone. That's when she insisted it was time to go. But on the way back to school we passed a shoe-shine boy and Mauricio whispered to him and handed him something and when we reached the arched gate that spelled out S
ACRED
H
EART
as if the letters were floating across the sky just like in my Mariana's painting, the little boy ran up with two bunches of flowers, violets for me and sweet peas for the chaperone. “To thank you ladies for the loveliest afternoon I've had in this country,” Mauricio said, and the chaperone—we called her Miss Birdie—she actually blushed. She was the one who said she looked forward to seeing him in two weeks, not me.

And so Miss Birdie and I started seeing Mauricio every fortnight, on Friday afternoon, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday after Mass—and by the time I was a junior and given more free time off campus, sometimes Saturday night, too. It wasn't technically allowed, such frequency, not without a girl's parents having given written permission. But Dolly was there and a year older than I, so she counted as an approving relative (although not as a chaperone; that would be taking things entirely too far). Dolly had been significantly harder to win over than Miss Birdie, but Mauricio arranged for Cristian to take Dolly for a spin in his convertible at least once a weekend when they were in town, and she liked having a date, and a reason to walk past Silvia and her emerald cross in her dotted-Swiss afternoon dress. So she wrote to Mama and convinced her to send permission to the headmistress for us to go out in a mixed group when the boys visited, like all the girls from the best families did, so that no one could make fun of our family for being old-fashioned. After that, Dolly waited for the weekend almost as eagerly as I did.

The chaperone was even easier to amuse. Since we couldn't often leave the school's neighborhood, Mauricio brought the city to us. King cake during Lent, Elmer's Heavenly Hash chocolate-and-marshmallow eggs at Easter. And the rest of the year there were beignets from Caf
é
du Monde, and almond croissants from Haydel's Bakery, and, once, fried shrimp po'boys from an uptown shack run by some Italians; I never could pronounce the name, but that was Miss Birdie's favorite. She napped sitting upright on a bench for a good forty minutes after having eaten hers, leaving us unobserved in Audubon Park and near a particularly wide oak tree we could step behind but still emerge from quickly when we heard her stir.

Miss Birdie was a lifelong New Orleanian and the way to her heart proved to be through her stomach and her sense of civic pride. As Mauricio and I were finishing our beignets in the school courtyard one Saturday—Miss Birdie had already made short work of hers and was licking powdered sugar off her fingers, glancing right and left to make sure none of the nuns was approaching—she said, “Well, of course they're better warm.”

Mauricio leaned forward, pushing his last beignet in front of Miss Birdie. “Why, Miss Birdie, what a wonderful idea!” he said, sounding just like Clark Gable, even though he didn't have a mustache; he said a Cuban with a mustache was asking for trouble when I inquired if he'd ever considered growing one to capitalize on his resemblance to the film star. “We should take Miss Isabela down to the Quarter so she can have them warm, as God intended.”

Miss Birdie started to protest through a mouthful of dough and powdered sugar, but Mauricio kept right on talking. “I'll collect you both tomorrow after Mass, and Miss Dolly, too. We'll take the streetcar down for an adventure and Cris will bring us back in his car; we'll have to squeeze a bit in the back, but you ladies are slender enough.”

I don't know if it was the idea of warm beignets or the novelty of being called slender, but somehow Miss Birdie agreed and signed out me and Dolly. After that first trip, we enjoyed a culinary excursion at least once a visiting weekend. Mauricio even took Miss Birdie and me to Commander's on my birthday, and she was so delighted to be eating in the Garden Room among the oldest families, some of whom were even Mardi Gras royalty, that she excused herself for not one but three long trips to the powder room, taking her sweet time to ogle the other patrons as she strolled past the tables, and leaving us completely alone for several minutes at a stretch.

In between there were letters. Oh, the letters! The postman knew me by name; I tried to find reasons to pass by the front desk every afternoon when he arrived, to collect my letters myself. It wasn't unusual to find your envelope opened by the time it was left on your desk, whether by a nun acting in your best interest or another girl looking for something to embarrass you with at the right moment.

I thought someone must have been protecting us because our letters were never opened; I imagined it was the Virgen, but maybe that's sacrilegious. In any case, we were careful. Mauricio would write in English describing his progress at his studies and outlining the plans he had for our next visit, and then he would write something like, “I miss you but patience is a virtue and I am strengthened by God's love. It's like it says in the Bible my grandfather left me,” and launch into Spanish. The first few lines were always an actual quote or Bible passage, in case someone took the time to try to translate them. But if they did, they'd give up soon enough, he reasoned, and so he would veer from the evangelical and start writing about the warmth of my hand in his, the way he could feel my kisses all the way back to Mississippi, how it made him smile every time he found powdered sugar from our beignets embedded in his jacket. And how next year, when he would be a freshman at Loyola and I would be in my final year at Sacred Heart, we would find a way to be together without the interference of Miss Birdie and assorted baked goods, a way to be together now and always.

For him—I know because it was this way for me, too—a letter a week wasn't enough to cool the fever of needing to communicate with each other. But any more than one envelope weekly would be quickly noticed by the nuns. So we developed a plan. At first he suggested that he send letters to Dolly as well as me, with no return address, and that she just hand them over. I told him he clearly didn't pay much attention to his own sisters if he thought that Dolly would happily pass on letters from her sister's boyfriend while she had none of her own. She loved me, Dolly did, but playing courier for her younger sister—it would be too much. I knew better than to ask.

Connie would have done it in a heartbeat, Connie would have been honored to have been asked, she would have paid for the privilege! But I knew her and she was far too curious to leave what she knew to be a love letter unopened. None of the girls around me could be trusted, really. They would never spy on us out of malice—well, Silvia would. But the others would want to be bit players in our love story, to see what the North American girls would have called “an honest-to-goodness love letter” said.

But I did have one sort of friend who had too much on her mind—and too much to lose—to meddle in our romance or give it any consequence. “Friend” might be the wrong word, but we were friendly. And even that was forbidden. The only ugly thing I remember about New Orleans at the time was the segregation. The colored adults, they managed. They walked to the back of the bus as if they had intended to do so anyway. But it was horrible to see the children, the little boys peering through the gates of parks where they weren't allowed to play, or staring in at the bakeries where we'd stop for coffee. It was the custom of the country, and not our place to disrupt it, my father said when he dropped us off. But when Sister Dunphy, a nun so sour she reminded me of Silvia, only wearing a habit, said we weren't to speak to the floor maid, I thought it was some sort of perverse joke. I had girls to clean my room and wash my clothes at home, they were dark-skinned, too, and I couldn't imagine not chattering away with them as they hung up my dresses or pressed my petticoats. How could I tell them what I wanted otherwise? And, if we never spoke, how could they tell me that Carolina Santamaria around the corner was having a dress made in the very same material as my favorite skirt, which I should be sure to wear to Mass before her frock was finished? And why would they want to tell me that if we didn't get along?

I'm not saying I was close friends with the staff at home—that would have made everyone uncomfortable. But we enjoyed each other's company. How could we not? We all worked at the same business: it was our job to bring honor to the family and each of us hoped to do it well, in her own way. We couldn't begin to achieve that goal without working together.