Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books)

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  Wow, Roberto thought, how did they get him to sell? Mr. Garduño was a mean and stubborn old man, not a pushover. Roberto had grown up to the sounds of Mr. Garduño’s kids yelling when he whipped them with his belt.

  Mr. Lopez said to Mr. Garduño, “But you’ve lived here all your life, Tomaso. Why sell to anybody? Where will you go?”

  “I’m getting too old to live by myself,” Mr. Garduño said. He shifted his twisted hands on the head of his cane. “You need a lot of money to get into a decent home for old people.”

  “A home!” Mrs. Ruiz cried. “But what about your relatives, your kids!”

  “Don’t tell me about them,” the old man snapped, “I wouldn’t live with any of those bums.”

  Mrs. Ruiz — pug-nosed, hair combed high on her head — gave Mr. Garduño a look of outrage. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “You’d go to one of those old people’s places? Why not ask your neighbors to come in and help once in a while? People would do it, if they knew you needed help. You don’t have to leave the street.”

  Mr. Garduño shook his head. “There maybe won’t be any people here, not people I know, and I’ve got no special love for Pinto Street. It’s just a place I live. Besides, I’d rather pay money to professionals. That way you know what you’re getting.” He gave a hitch to the crease of his faded pants. “The thing of it is, I feel like I’ve been had by those bastards. They’re paying me chicken-feed compared to what they can make off this street if they buy up the whole thing and rebuild. They’re giving me a goddamn tip.”

  Pete Archuletta, who had slowly sunk back into his seat, said angrily, “You can feel like a fool if you want, Garduño. I got a good price for my place.”

  “You think so?” Mr. Garduño looked him in the eye. “Well, I got twenty-two thousand for mine, half down and half when I vacate.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then Mr. Ortega said, “For that shack? I just put on a new porch and a new water heater, and they only offered me seventeen-fifty!”

  Mrs., Ruiz stared from face to face. “My God,” she said, “how many people on this street have already sold out?” Her sister, anxious-looking herself, patted Mrs. Ruiz’s arm.

  Mr. Escobar said, “I don’t think we should talk any more about this with Pete here. Anything we decide, he’ll just run and tell these Valley Reconstruction people.”

  “That’s right, he’s a spy,” Mrs. Ruiz said. “Get out, spy. Nobody wants you here.”

  Everybody stared at Pete Archuletta. Oh shit he’s going to fight, Roberto thought. The Maestas brothers thought so too: they stood up. Roberto saw his mother lean over to whisper anxiously to Mr. Escobar. Roberto avoided looking at his mother. His mouth was dry. Nerves. Pete would have a knife on him, maybe worse. He was only one guy, but even one knife can do a lot of damage. I’m ready, he thought. I can’t leave it all to the Maestas, this is my house, my Mom’s place. I’m ready.

  Pete shrugged contemptuously. “I don’t stay where I’m not wanted,” he said. “You could all learn a lesson from that.” He stomped out, slamming the front door behind him.

  “All right,” Jake Maestas said, when everybody had settled back down again, “we need to think about what we can do to save our street. If just a few of us refuse to sell, whatever these sharks have already bought up won’t be worth a damn to them. Can you imagine some fancy Anglo family paying a hundred thousand dollars to come live next to the Ortegas’ place, or Tom Chavez with his goats?”

  People laughed, nervous laughs.

  Roberto chewed his thumbnail and tuned out the talk. He felt jittery and let-down, getting ready for a brawl like that and then ending up with nothing but more damn talk. He looked admiringly at Martín Maestas’s strong chest and shoulders under the tight t-shirt and he wondered if maybe Martín might go for a little trip to the offices of this J & K Builders company. No spray-paint cans, either. Crowbars, maybe a pick-axe and some sledge-hammers, bash the place apart.

  Somebody had to do something besides talk.

  Blanca and her mother got back from the clinic and found Father Leo waiting on the porch. While the two adults sat in the front room to talk, Blanca made lemonade in the kitchen. From here she could listen to what they had to say.

  After the stiff greetings and vague comments on the weather, Father Leo got down to what was bothering him: that stupid meeting, of course. It really bugged Blanca that she’d missed that, being sick and all. The asthma made her miss out on everything interesting.

  The priest had a pleasing, mellow voice that Blanca liked. To look at he was nothing much: a small, quiet man with a perpetually worried look that didn’t say a whole lot for the comfort he got from the faith he represented. People respected him as a dutiful and concerned priest, though Blanca had heard elderly neighbors sigh over the loss of old Father Diego to a different parish.

  Father Leo came seldom to the Cantu house, maybe because when he did, he always ended up lecturing Mom. Blanca’s mother had sworn not to go to church ever again until Blanca’s asthma went away. She sent her kids, of course, but she stayed home herself. She said God had loaded her with more trouble than was fair, and she would not be argued out of it. Father Leo was no match for her. Blanca took pride in this.

  Today he was complaining, in that sad, roundabout way he had, how the people Mr. Escobar had asked over here had carried on their meeting without their priest’s presence and even had decided things, things having to do with a wedding that he himself was going to perform, without asking him. Cecilia Baca was getting married, and everybody was going to go to the party afterward in the big field across the street, next to the new YMCA construction. Pinto Street Protection had decided to use the amplifying equipment of the party’s band to talk to everybody about the problem of the fake inspections and the land-grab that was going on.

  “It’s not suitable,” the priest was saying. “I’m very disappointed by what happened here in my absence, Mrs. Cantu, and I’m trying to communicate that to everyone who came. We have other ways to handle this problem. Our political people, the city government —”

  Blanca knew the answers. Great-uncle Tilo and Mr. Escobar had been chewing it over together practically every night on the porch since the meeting. The politicals weren’t interested, they said; they couldn’t be trusted; they didn’t have the clout. The city government had already said they would “look into” the question of the false inspections, but everybody knew what that meant: the round-file, the waste-basket. And the man in Santa Fe had kept Mr. Escobar and Jake waiting for two hours and then only made the same kind of promises.

  She whacked the can-opener on the countertop; the thing stuck all the time. There, done: the container came open. Now she had to shave the frozen plug of lemonade to be able to fit it into the neck of the bottle.

  She heard Father Leo shift his ground. He didn’t approve of some of the membership of the Protection society. He didn’t approve, to be exact, of the Maestas brothers, and he was unhappy to see Roberto Cantu hanging around with them. They were older, ex-convicts, trouble-makers. They would drag Roberto into trouble with them.

  Mom protested that she couldn’t get Roberto to listen to her any more, he was too big.

  Well, the priest said sadly, he was not surprised to hear that. “You must realize that in a household where the mother avoids her church and its authority in her own life, the children lose their respect not only for that church but for all authority, including their own mother’s.”

  Here they go, Blanca thought. Nothing would be said that she had not heard a dozen times before. She licked up a dollop of the frozen concentrate that had slid down the side of the mixing-bottle. The sharp, icy taste made her shiver delightedly. She vigorously shook the bottle. Each time she stopped to uncap it and stir the contents with a spoon, she could hear the argument proceeding.

  “Make a promise, Mrs. Cantu, promise something to God if He would mercifully decide to lift the burden of Blanca’s sickness. Think of that young man who promi
sed to walk to Santa Fe if his wife at last conceived a child. God heard, and now that young man has a beautiful daughter and the pleasure of showing our Heavenly Father his gratitude.”

  The low voice of Blanca’s mother: “I made my promise, Father, when my Eddie went into the marines, and you see what came out of that.”

  Blanca’s father had been killed in an incident on the border between North and South Korea. Probably Mom didn’t even remember him any more, she just had these habits of thinking and talking about him. Blanca didn’t remember. Beto sometimes pretended that he did, which Blanca was sure was just an act. Beto could be such a jerk. Mina did remember, but wouldn’t talk about it.

  Shake, shake, shake. The stuff tasted awful if the frozen slush wasn’t fully dissolved.

  “You can’t hold your soul hostage in order to get favors from God, Mrs. Cantu. Our Lord will not be blackmailed. By this stubbornness of yours you cut yourself off from God when you most need Him.”

  “I pray every night to the Virgin, Father. She was a mother too, she understands what I’m doing. She speaks to our Lord for me.”

  “We must not elevate the Virgin above God and his Son,” the priest said with real distress in his voice.

  Blanca poured herself a cupful of lemonade and went into her room and shut the door. She was in the middle of reading a book from the school library about a wild horse that a girl tamed all on her own, someplace in California.

  Later, when the priest had gone, her mother called her to come clear up the mess she had left in the kitchen. Besides, they had some dishes from breakfast to wash. Grimly, in silence, Blanca dried each plate and spoon as they were handed to her. Her mother’s silent rage depressed her. The same small pretty woman who smiled at people in the discount store and wished even the crankiest old shoppers a nice day and cried at home so much was the same one who could stand up to the priest and make conditions with God Himself. Mom was a crier, but she knew how to win in the end.

  Any day now, Beto would leave, like Mina. Great-uncle Tilo would die, and nobody would be left with Mom but Blanca, the invalid, the one who couldn’t leave.

  5

  The singing and shouting mounted in volume. The dreamer, place on the page lost yet again, rose to look out the open window.

  Dorothea, watching against her will, saw someone look back in. A head on a pole, bobbing high above the heads of the mob below, gaped in at the window. This time she managed to blur her vision so that she didn’t have to see it clearly. The others, the members of the mob, she saw more clearly than ever.

  The people in the crowd had been looting. They had loaves of bread, and garments slung over their shoulders. A man carried a neat, child-sized chair extended in front of him as he swept along on his roller-skates at the edge of the crowd.

  “Hey, citoyen!” the man at the window was hailed. “What is your trade?”

  “I study the law,” he replied. The shadow of the pole and its burden jiggled across his worn woolen sleeve.

  A woman bawled, “Look well, then, citoyen , for we are the law now!”

  People laughed. Dorothea had just time to notice that the woman who had shouted was Claire, and then someone lobbed something up at the judge. For a nauseated instant Dorothea expected to see a bloody collop of flesh. If he flinched from it they would call him a traitor and rush up the stairs to tear him to pieces. Don’t flinch, she begged him silently.

  He caught a peach, hard and green.

  She woke up whimpering and lay a while with her head buried under the pillow. It’s getting worse, she thought. Maybe we’re making it worse, not better. She blew her nose, sat down at her writing desk with her robe pulled on over her shoulders, and wrote.

  Ricky sat back with his fingers laced behind his head and stared at the beamed ceiling. On Thursday Dorothea had found for him, at the bookstore, a wonderful work by Richard Cobb, a classic study of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary France titled The Police and the People. Ricky had read it once before, during an illness one winter in London, at first for want of anything better but then with increasing fascination. Having just used Cobb’s book to refresh his memory, he was clear on the details of the judge’s period. At least I know enough, he thought, to fill in the gaps in Dorothea’s wretched American education.

  The Revolution had produced a police state, as revolutions historically do. Workingmen had to carry passbooks, called livrets, signed by their employers. The police made constant searches of travelers, stopping coaches on the roads, even bursting into homes and lodging-houses in the middle of the night, Gestapo style. If a country relative came to stay with you in town, you were supposed to report this to the police. A veritable mania about disguise spurred the authorities to harass the life out of used clothing peddlers.

  The point of making mobility so difficult was not primarily to inconvenience spies and counter-revolutionaries, nor to entrap fleeing aristocrats. It was simply to control the roving bands of beggars and deserters from the French army, who plagued the countryside, spreading alarm and unrest.

  Before whom would someone picked up for unlawful travel be brought? Or a working man caught without his livret? Or a merchant accused of hoarding food by spiteful neighbors? Or anyone accused by his enemy — another farmer who covets one’s lower pasture, a rival tradesman who desires one’s clientele — and charged with unenthusiastic support of the Revolution, or the Emperor Napoleon, or later, the returned king? Who would be responsible for fining, imprisoning, or deporting to the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean these victims of official paranoia and repression? The ghost in Dorothea’s dreams, of course: the judge.

  Worse still — there is always worse — some provincial judges aided and abetted outright murder. The death toll of the Red Terror — the relatively short-lived reign of Madame Guillotine — was probably far exceeded by the death toll of the counter-revolutionary reaction.

  This movement, called the White Terror for the white lilies of the deposed royal Bourbons, brought a wave of killings that began as soon as Robespierre fell. His place was taken by more moderate Republicans who withdrew the protection of the government from Robespierre’s radical followers.

  The country people had throughout remained both royalist and devoutly Catholic. They now turned with fury on the radical firebrands, who had been sent from Paris to rule the provincial districts under Robespierre, and also on any locals who had collaborated with these strangers. Fleeing ex-officials were arrested in neighboring towns, where many were butchered in their cells by rampaging mobs.

  Some judges, informed that an ex-official was to be brought back for trial, would deliberately release the details of the homecoming (often set for mid-day, when people had free time). The townspeople would meet the shackled wretch at the town gate, wrest him from his unresisting military escort, and beat him to death on the spot.

  Ricky reflected on the way Dorothea’s ghost repeatedly threw sacrifices to the mob (or to the soldiery, men in uniform, officialdom of all sorts). This is a ghost, surely, like so many of its ilk, with a guilty conscience! The judge no noble part in these events. No Scarlet Pimpernel here.

  If he could be identified by name, what a coup that would be, what a legacy to leave Dorothea! Pity it wasn’t as easy as saying, it’s famous old Judge Whatnot, my dear, everyone knowledgeable in the field knows his name; nothing simpler. The dreams were not so direct as that. Anyway, suppose the judge was even important enough to show up in the written histories of the time: how to recognize him among the many like him? One would need to sift the stories of hundreds. I haven’t the sources, not here, probably not outside France itself. And I may not have the time.

  Ridiculously on cue, the chipped Seth Thomas clock on the mantle gave out a series of muted chimes. The afternoon was nearly gone. Ricky looked down at the blue tracery under the thin skin of his wrist.

  Who was it, awaiting execution, who remarked on how wonderfully the approach of one’s death concentrated the mind? In one afternoon, this new patte
rn had fully emerged and clarified itself: our judge as an official functionary, perhaps even an Eichmann-like monster. And the occasional, accusatory young voice that Dorothea thought was Claire’s? The judge’s own younger, more idealistic self, perhaps, making its own judgment? Too complicated.

  A motor roared and died outside. Ricky sat still. Go away, no one is home. He and Dorothea had made their peace again, and he wanted nothing and no one to disturb it.

  Whoever it was rapped briskly on the door. Ricky struggled up out of his chair — how could his shrunken body weigh so much? — and went to answer. There stood George.

  “Hi, Dick, how’re you doing? I had a message from Dorothea —”

  “She’s not in just now.”

  “But she left word she had some pictures for me to look at.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve missed her, she’s gone out.”

  “Well, can you tell me where —”

  Here came Mars hallooing round the corner of the house and practically leaping into George’s arms, with gray Brillo trotting daintily in his wake, and of course Dorothea behind them both. She must have stopped at the shed to clean up and drop off her tools, for she came empty-handed and wiping her fingers on her shirt-tail.

  “I got your message,” whooped George. “Dorothea, you’re terrific! I knew you’d wake up and see it my way. Dick, here, was just telling me you’d gone out.”

  “I was taking a walk,” she said calmly, “with the dogs. Come on in, George, and I’ll show you what you can choose from.”

  The drawings were taken out of the bureau in the living room and exclaimed over — black and white, wonderful, not expensive to reproduce, and of course they would do a class job, nothing cheap, this one was clearly the best, and George had brought a contract with him. They headed for the kitchen and the back patio, George carried ahead by his long, ebullient stride.