by John Rechy
“My father! Lyle forgot his shorts, and my mother found them and told my father, and he asked me if what he suspected was true and if so with whom—and, of course, I couldn’t lie. I said, ‘Yes! With Lyle!’—and he said he was going to do what any decent Mexican-American father would do—kill me, Lyle, and himself. Oh, God, God, God, please help us out of this terribly strange situation!” she entreated Clarita and Heaven.
“I don’t think it’s that bad, is it?” Clarita had to hold on to a pole on the porch because she had not finished her siesta. She almost slipped sideways and grabbed an unpredictable vine, which dodged her grasp meanly.
It was true that Maria’s father was upset. Divorced, he lived in Dallas but he came back now and then to Rio Escondido, mostly to quarrel with his wife, once pretty. She had, as usual, told him that he was a bad father, and as powerful evidence informed him about the shorts.
“I don’t see anyone chasing you,” Clarita said, squinting in case she had missed the pursuer. How could Lyle forget his shorts? She must make sure he always had fresh ones in his drawer. Certainly it was no surprise that he had become involved with this pretty young woman. The Holy Mother had blessed him amply; she had given him handsome looks, endowed him conspicuously, and, apparently, had given him the power to use all his blessings.
“My father’s hiding, crouching in the shadows—ready to spring on me! Let me in, please, please! I beg you!”
Clarita couldn’t remember whether Sylvia was home. If she was, this girl would be in graver danger with her than with her father, even if he was chasing her with a machete.
Too late. Maria, sobbing loudly, had pushed in. “Where’s Lyle? We have to warn him.”
“He’s working.”
Maria was despondent. She had longed for him to see her breathless, running away from anything that threatened their love, running to him, choosing danger over—
“What the hell are you doing here?” Sylvia Love stood like an executioner before the girl.
“My father!”
“I just ran into your father earlier today.”
“You know him?”
“Yes.”
Clarita clutched for her rosary. Where had she left it? No time to go looking for it. She’d just say her beads on her fingers. But first she had to hear what she knew she would hear:
“Yes, I know your goddamned father!”
“Armando!” Clarita breathed before she blacked out, first backing away slowly onto a comfortable sofa.
6
The past catches up with Sylvia Love.
“Cabrón! Maldecido!” Sylvia Love Clemens had riffled through her memory of Lyle the First’s toughest vocabulary and had, instead, stumbled on Clarita’s. “How dare you try to push yourself into my life?” She faced Armando in her living room; she was glad she had braced herself with an emboldening extra nip of her bourbon.
Armando faced her back.
When he had run in, moments earlier, Maria screamed loudly, alerting Sylvia, if her sobs hadn’t already alerted her.
Clarita oversaw it all from the hallway, where she had retreated after her unnoticed faint. She had rushed to her room and found her rosary, which seemed now to be a permanent prop in her hands, didn’t it?
Lyle—having received the news at the stationery warehouse that his beloved had run screaming through town to his house and that a man was chasing her—rushed there to save her. Now he stood staring at the man who had talked to him in his vacant lot—yes, it was him in the picture!—Clarita lurking in the doorway—as if anyone might miss seeing her there—Sylvia, her face white with rage—and Maria, alternating sighs and sobs until she saw him and ran to him, proclaiming, “I shall die in your arms, my beloved!”
“How dare I push myself into your life?” Armando shoved Sylvia’s question back at her. “You pushed yourself into mine, remember? Now I’m here to protect my daughter”—he pointed at Maria—“and my son.” He pointed at Lyle.
“What!”
“What!”
“What!”
“Qué?”
“Yes, my son. I’m his father.”
“You are not!” Maria was emphatic. “Because that would make us brother and sister!” The full horror of it smacked at her. “Oh, God!”
“Oh, God!” Lyle echoed, and clutched his groin as if to forbid it ever again to transgress.
Sylvia grabbed Armando, shoving him toward Lyle, who backed away from both, causing Maria to grab him, because this gave her the opportunity to hug him.
“Let go of me, let go of me, woman!” Armando demanded of Sylvia.
She had pushed him next to Lyle. “Stay there!” she ordered Armando.
“Ave Maria, madre de Dios—” Clarita prayed.
“Stand up straight, your full length, Lyle, stand up!” Sylvia said to Lyle, and shoved Armando right up to him. “He’s a foot taller than you, squirt!” she pointed out the obvious to Armando.
Clarita prayed aloud now: “Bendita tu eres—”
“So what? You’re not tall yourself,” Armando shot back at Sylvia’s comparison of his small stature and Lyle’s much taller one. Realizing he had produced evidence he didn’t want for these moments, he said, “My father was very, very tall, just like Lyle! Lyle is my son, and you know it. Look at his eyes!”
“Blue!” Sylvia said, but she knew otherwise.
“Brown,” Armando upheld, “like mine.”
Lyle shut his eyes tightly.
They’re brown that sometimes manages to look blue, though God knows how, Clarita thought to herself, and started another decade on the rosary.
Sylvia grabbed Armando’s hand and held Lyle’s against it. “Brown!” she described Armando’s skin.
“White!” she described Lyle’s.
“Wrong!” Armando said. “Brown, like mine. Well, not as dark,” he had to admit.
“That’s a tan, you son of a bitch, fucking cabrón!” Sylvia used everyone’s vocabulary of anger. “Besides, you never knew that my father was brown, did you, did you? I saw him at Eulah’s funeral.” But she had also seen another man, not brown—white—who had wept.
Lyle’s skin is darker than Sylvia’s, Clarita evaluated, but not as dark as Armando’s. Lyle always looked as if he had a tan, and she thought in elevated moments that that was because God, through the intercession of the Holy Mother, the Sacred Virgin Guadalupe, held a special guiding light over him that tanned him.
Sylvia pointed to Armando’s hair. “Dark!” She pointed to Lyle’s. “Auburn.”
“Brown, and almost as dark as mine,” Armando said.
Sylvia groped hard at Armando’s groin. “And this? Tiny!”
“Ow!” Armando clutched himself.
Clarita had to interrupt the new comparison because the fire she saw in Sylvia’s eyes warned her that she would go right up to Lyle and pull out his—“Stop!” Clarita commanded. “You listen to me, Armando. You know there’s no way that Lyle could be your son. He’s the image of the tall cowboy—”
“That’s right,” Maria agreed, although she had never seen the tall cowboy, “and he wears boots, too, and a cowboy hat, even when it seems strange.” She pushed herself closer into Lyle’s body, fitting wonderfully into it. Lyle put his arm around her, holding her close, as if any moment someone might pull her away, easily forgetting the promise he had just made to his groin.
Sylvia seemed to see Lyle and Maria for the first time—close together. Her eyes narrowed, to filter the sight.
Clarita thought, Sylvia is about to do something horrible.
“You know,” Sylvia said, placing one hand against her cheek to add thoughtfulness to her measured words. “You know, Armando, maybe you’re right, maybe—”
“Sylvia!” Clarita had to stop her. Had she become as crazy as her mother?
Sylvia continued, “Maybe, Armando, it’s possible, yes, that you are his father—”
Maria raised her face toward Lyle, and he bent down toward her, about to kiss—
“—and that would make him,” Sylvia said to Armando and Maria, “yes, that would make Lyle Maria’s brother.”
“Mujer! Woman!” That’s all Clarita could think to say now in protest—as Lyle and Maria eased away from each other.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
A confrontation, and a reminder of what might have been.
How could you say such a thing?” Clarita demanded of Sylvia that night when the two were alone.
“What?” Sylvia pretended.
“That Lyle might be Armando’s son.”
“He might.”
Clarita grasped for indignant words. She found only these: “He looks exactly like the cowboy, you’ve said so yourself.”
“He does have brown eyes, though, like Armando—”
“Loca! That’s what you are. Tell me! Where did Lyle get his height? Not from you—and certainly not from that baston … that squirt.”
“My father”—Sylvia chose the tall man she had seen at Eulah’s funeral—“was tall and handsome.”
“Lyle is the cowboy’s son!” Clarita asserted, and crossed her arms over her bosom, firmly, to emphasize her declaration. “You know that, too.” She had begun rehearsing the entreaties she would have to make later to the Holy Mother to yank Sylvia away from this terrible charade.
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know everything—like you, Clara.” Sylvia started to walk out of the room. “All I know is that he might be Armando’s son. Have you forgotten?”
“No, I have not forgotten all the crazy things you did,” Clarita said. “But nothing as crazy as what you’re doing now. You don’t fool me, Sylvia. You want to come between him and that beautiful girl—”
“Oh, do I? Do I?” Sylvia challenged Clarita with a cool look.
“—and she is beautiful,” Clarita extended her accusation, “perhaps as beautiful as you when you were her age, and that too is the reason that you—”
Sylvia turned around, ferocious. “How dare you!”
Clarita could no longer withhold these words. “You have to face that you’re never going to be—” She couldn’t finish.
“Miss America,” Sylvia whispered, so softly she seemed not to have spoken at all. She placed one hand on her hip, held the other out lightly, as if to initiate the royal walk. “I would have been Miss America.”
Clarita relented. “Yes, I’m sure you would have been.”
Sylvia smiled, accepting the words graciously; but then she thought of Eulah, and her curse, and of Lyle the First, who had left her so easily—who had confirmed the curse of a miserable life! “Eulah was right,” she gasped, “I was sinful, and I’m being punished for it; all I was for the cowboy was flesh to lust after—that’s why he could discard me like he did, the way Eulah knew.” She frowned, brushing away at something she felt on her shoulders, something clinging there.
“Are you ever going to let that crazy woman leave you in peace?” Clarita wondered. “Are you ever going to leave her?”
Sylvia Love shook her head in bewilderment.
For days she stayed mostly in her room, coming out in a long robe that concealed her body; she pecked at delicious food that Clarita fixed for her, all her favorites. Clarita would try to coax her appetite by announcing her most delicious delicacies: “Tomatillas, arroz con pollo, empanadas.”
Lyle watched Sylvia as she walked by him like a ghost, touching him on the shoulder, as if to assert that she wasn’t a ghost. To Lyle it seemed that way: that she was a ghost of Sylvia Love, of his mother, whom he loved and suffered for, so much, and who was becoming more and more of a mystery to him, the more he longed to understand her.
2
A secret sortie into Sylvia’s past yields new questions.
Clarita knew that Sylvia kept papers—perhaps only mementoes—gifts from Lyle the First?—in a wooden box in her bedroom. Clarita was, it must be understood, not a curious woman; she respected people’s privacy; she would never have thought of rummaging through that box—
Except that she needed to know!
She pulled out the box. It was not locked, and so what harm was there in looking? She opened it. There was a note from Lyle the First, when had left Sylvia. … Within its fold something dusty, umber—the crushed petals of a white rose?
And a newspaper account:
The Alamito Gazette
HOWLER AT MISS ALAMITO BEAUTY PAGEANT!
An enraged woman claiming to be the mother of Sylvia Love, a contestant for the Miss Alamito County Beauty Title, stole the show last night when she rushed onstage brandishing a Bible and then threw a sheet over her daughter during the bathing suit competition. According to others onstage, the contestant’s mother shouted a series of curses at her daughter for exposing her body. Miss Love attempted to flee the stage but tripped on the sheet, creating a scene that could have come out of a slapstick comedy and that was greeted with howls of laughter from judges and spectators alike, a hilarious commotion that must have lasted 15 minutes, during which Miss Love continued to struggle with the sheet, stumbling over and over, causing gales of laughter each time, until she managed to leave the stage. According to one judge, Miss Love impressed the panel during the talent competition, when she “sang ‘Amazing Grace’ very sweetly,” and when she said her first wish would be “to banish meanness from the world.” According to this judge, right up to the time of the uproarious intrusion, Miss Love was the leading contender for the title that would have taken her to the Miss Texas competition and eventually might have earned her the Miss America title.
There had been more than a chance of Sylvia’s winning the title. Oh, the heartbreak of it all! She had kept the vile account because it affirmed that she might have won. … Clarita was about to locate the newspaper clipping exactly where it had been, along with the ashes of the rose, when, through her tears, she saw what she was looking for: Lyle’s birth certificate.
Footsteps. Dios mío! It was Sylvia, coming home early, as if she could not cope with anything other than her sorrow and her anger, and her increasing “nips.” Clarita put the birth certificate in her pocket and dashed out of the room.
3
And still more mystery.
It wasn’t Sylvia who was returning. It was Lyle. Ordinarily she would have known that. Lyle made a distinctive sound as he walked in, his bootsteps soft for such a tall young man. Only her fear of being caught going through her things made her believe it was Sylvia.
“Clarita! You look scared.”
“No! Relieved!” Clarita said. “Because I’m going to give you evidence you need so you can go on with your sweetheart.”
“My sister—” The words had come unwanted.
“She’s not! Look.” She shoved the birth certificate at him. That would end it. Sylvia would have had to give the cowboy’s name as the father.
Lyle looked at the paper. He frowned.
“What?” Clarita grabbed it back and looked at it for the first time. She read the entry for Father: Unknown.
And Lyle’s name had been entered as Lyle Love.
4
A melancholy interlude. A firm decision is made, the risks not considered.
Lyle was sadder than he had ever been, sadder than he had ever imagined he could become, so sad that he wondered, whether, without knowing it, he had always been sad. Of course, there were intervals of joy, but only now could he compare his greater sadness with his earlier state.
If Maria was his sister—
That was it, cut it out!
She wasn’t his sister. Still, she hadn’t been at school the day after the confrontation with Armando and Sylvia when she had run out crying, “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God! Incest!”—and so he didn’t know how she would react to him, whether she had changed toward him, or would gradually.
He lay on his bed in his room, his guitar across his stomach. Try as he might not to, he felt enraged at Sylvia for announcing that he could be Armando’s son, and then in a moment pity would wipe away the anger, which w
ould surge again.
“What’ll I do, Clarita?” he asked her when she came into the room to “teach him history,” although her lessons had all but stopped some time back. She had come here only to talk to him.
“Sylvia, beautiful Sylvia, your mother, is a sad woman, she never recovered from the dual loss, that son-of-a-bitch cowboy leaving her and—”
“What?”
“Ay, Dios mío.” She had slipped.
“Tell me what you were going to say!” Lyle coaxed her silence, because she had zipped her lips shut.
“Nothing, nothing!” It would be selfish of her to relieve the pain Sylvia’s secret caused her. “I was only going to say her suffering doubled, that’s all, when the cowboy left her.”
“He is my father,” Lyle asserted. “Isn’t he, Clarita? Maria isn’t my sister. The cowboy is my father—not Armando—isn’t that right, Clarita, isn’t it?”
“Of course!” But, oh, oh, she thought, Sylvia’s confused even me.
Unable to keep anger from his voice, Lyle said, “I’m going to talk to Sylvia, I’m going to ask her a lot of things.”
Lord God! Blessed Virgin Mary, look down upon us in these moments of woe. That was all Clarita could pray for now, although there was more to contend with: The Pentecostals were back in Rio Escondido for the Gathering of Souls.
5
A passionate confrontation.
That very evening, Lyle asserted his resolve to speak to Sylvia as soon as he came home from his job. Knowing what was about to occur, Clarita fled to her room, intending to say a full rosary while that encounter occurred.
As if she had been waiting for him—she often did—Sylvia walked toward him as he entered. He had intended to talk to her when she had not been drinking, but that was impossible now. “Sylvia, there’s some questions I have to ask you—”
