A Phantom Herd

by Lorraine Ray

"It was my Woman-Marine brassiere," said Mother, sitting herself on the narrow seat of the maple rocker, "It had circles stitched around the bosoms." She ran whorls up both her breast. "I felt like a target wearing that thing."

  My sister and I squealed, "Oh, but Mother, Mother! Did someone really steal your bra? Your Woman-Marine bra?" And we left her where she rested on the rocker with her eyes closed as we flitted around the sunny corners of the little bedroom repetitively posing, forming and reforming faint protests. "Oh, but Mother," we sighed while kissing the cold glass over a discontinuous cross-stitched courtship between a bewigged man and woman. Then we mewed, "Did someone steal?" And we sniffed her drawer sachets, each in turn-the top left smelled of lavender, the middle orange, the top right Eau de Ivanhoe. Our eyes probed the dank, mysterious interior of our grandmother's porcelain beauty jar and into it we intoned "Your bra, Mother, your bra." And when we finally returned to her, to her lovely, quiet figure on that rocking chair, it was to pounce on the runners behind her and try to pump the rocked, all the time panting, and "Woman-Marine bra! Woman-Marine bra!" But she was unmovable, impassive, and humorless. We flopped, stupefied, on the unmade bed.

  "Get off," she said, suddenly rising more swiftly than we thought her able. She spanked our naked legs, saying, "I've got to make this."

  We grasped the bedspread when she tried to take it and held on giggling until she spilled us off. She tossed it over us. "Silly girls."

  "Where were you when you lost your bra?" began Meredith, squirming out from under the heavy spread.

  "I've already told you."

  I peeked out and saw her tug the sheets off the bed corners and wind them in a ball, which she tossed to the dirty-clothes hamper in the adjoining bathroom.

  "What was it you said, Mother?" asked my sister, following her.

  They came out together. "I said I was at the old Conquistador Hotel. I don't know why I begin stories when you're not listening."

  "Who did it?" I asked, pulling the cover off and sitting up to stare at her "Who stole your bra? Was it Father?"

  "No," she said.

  "Was it your boyfriend? A boyfriend before Father?" asked my sister.

  "No," she said.

  "Was it a weird man or a crazy man or something?" said I.

  She had a look for a moment, perhaps of indecision, a thought about the secrets of other people's lives and what judgments you might make upon them. She left the room and we heard the linen closet creak open and shut. When she returned she held neatly folded sheets and pillowcases and was shaking her head. "He was a funny man," she asserted.

  "Tell us who he was," begged my sister.

  "Yes, tell us," I cried.

  "Tell us, tell us, tell us," we chanted.

  "He was an old cattle baron who owned most of Arizona."

  "Owned Arizona!"

  We rolled our eyes back in our heads, fluttered our lashes, and flopped dumbfounded on the bed again.

  "Off," she said, swatting at us.

  We rolled away and watched her spread and settle and tuck the sheets which smelled deliciously warm like a day of desert sun. All the while she worked, she spoke and we listened to her talk the way she always did, by rote it seemed, by some force compelled to repeat the confused minutiae of other people's lives, the long histories that came only tangentially toward the issue at hand. "This old lady Amparo," Mother began mysteriously, "sat on a ranch, a ranch half the size of Southern Arizona. It was hers somehow, in a complicated way, perhaps through a land grand or an earlier marriage which I was never clear on. But with that land, with her owning as much as she did, men came to her for marriage. Perhaps a hundred of them competed for her favor. She had hunts for mountain lions and used those competitions to pick her husband. She chose-first, an Italian, then a Mexican, and an Englishman, and finally an American. She married four times, men from four different countries, and she outlived them all. The number of her children-was eight, I think. In the end she sat out in that great adobe ruin of hers like a horned toad on an anthill, pleased with her brandy, and her plotting, drawing up suits and writs against neighbors. And, well, one of her sons was this man."

  "The man who stole your bra?" asked my sister.

  "Yes," said Mother, finishing the sheets and pulling the spread back on the bed. "But that was years later. He was an old man by then."

  "And you were young?"

  "Yes, I was young."

  Mother worked at stripping the pillows out of their old cases.

  "How did he do it?" I asked, mounting the rocker backwards and attempting to scoot it. "Tell us how it happened."

  "I don't think I ought to. I don't think you're-"

  "She was waltzing," Meredith interrupted, her eyes closed as she spun around the bed, "in the ballroom very happily with the man who owned Arizona. When he put his hand on her shoulder, she thought, 'Oh, my!' When he let his hand go down her shoulder, she thought, 'Oh, my!' But she didn't say anything. Then down and down and down his wicked hand snuck, father and farther until he reached the clasp of her bra and opened it and ripped the bra off!"

  We screamed with laughter, my sister stumbling about and I drooping my head and arching my back until the rocker nearly tipped over.

  "You girls," Mother protested. She left the room to stuff the old pillowcases in the dirty clothes and returned to replace them with the new. "You silly girls."

  I came to her side and sat on the newly made bad. "How?" I asked, "How did it happen, Mother?" Her talking face was the shape of a great pale heart with luminous eyes and a frame of dark hair.

  "I rode there on the bus. A lot of us went together from the dormitory at the University. That old hotel was built like a mission, and I can still see its copper-domed tower with an American flag rising out the top. I remember a lobby with French windows and paintings-frescoes-dark paintings of Spaniards and Indians, the color of molasses. Lots of fat men were sunning themselves in a solarium. There were lovely palm trees around the hotel pool and a lot of rich cattlemen swimming. We undressed in a bath house. I left my things in a locker near the door and changed into my suit. I remember entering the pool when one old cattleman dove. I felt something pass me and then saw that man come up under a girl; I picture them-one rising, streaming shape, him beneath her, her with a lowered head, making horns with her hands and bellowing, charging straight at me! At the last minute the girl saw someone at the side of the pool and rode away from me. People were screaming."

  "Did you scream?" Meredith asked.

  "No, but in the excitement this old man, this Amparo heir, snuck into the women's dressing room. When the hotel detective caught him he was dashing about, stuffing his pockets with bras and underwear like it was some wild roundup."

  My sister and I stared at each other in awe. This vagary of human sexuality astounded us.

  "Someone saw the arrest or else I'd have never known what happened. I didn't get my bra back, though. I went home on the bus." Then she added gaily, "Jiggling all the way."

  "And Father saw you and fell in love with your jiggly boobies," said my sister.

  "No," I admonished her and continued sternly, "Why did that man do that?"

  "I suppose he was shy," she yawned, "He took the police to his ranch which was, oh, somewhere way out past Vail. They said his bedroom was nothing but a pile of moldering underthings, a great big, towering stack. He'd been all over Arizona and Mexico stealing panties and bras, slips and girdles. Some of them at the bottom of the pile were from the nineteen twenties. Or so they thought; it was awfully hard to tell, seeing as how most of the pile went just like compost and they had to shovel it out."

  My sister began screeching with hilarity again. I felt persistent and shadowed Mother as she worked her way down the hall into the kitchen.

  "Was that man punished?" I asked.

  She was intent on making Father's lunch and searched for a can of tuna. She seemed not to hear me; but then she had a funny look for a moment and nodded her head, "Yes."

&nb
sp; "What did they do to him?"

  She opened the can.

  "Did he go to prison?" I asked.

  The oil from the can was draining into the sink.

  "How was he punished?" I insisted.

  "I thought I heard the mailman," Mother remarked and began moving toward the front door.

  "Mother," I demanded of her retreating figure, "how was that man punished?"

  "Well, he lived for ten more years?" was what she muttered.