by James Blake
The barman nodded. “Yes. Why would you? And Father, well . . . he had secrets, we all knew that.”
“Now you know one of them.”
“There are more of you? Brothers? Sisters?”
“Just me.”
“Jesus. His brother.”
“Yes.”
“How did you find out where he was? I mean, after so long?”
“I heard the tune. I was passing by and I heard the hornpipe. Sammy and I— your father and I—we made it up, that music you were playing. In New Hampshire when we were boys.”
“You mean you . . . the reason you came in here is you were walking by and heard me playing the little pipe?”
John Roger nodded.
“If you had not heard it you would have passed by?”
“Yes.”
“That is . . . that is just. . . .”
“Yes.”
“We were so near to each other and we would never have known it.”
John Roger nodded.
The barman stared. “So then you are my uncle.”
John Roger managed a meager smile. “I suppose I am.”
“Pues, como se llama, tío? Por supuesto su apellido es Wolfe.”
“Sí, soy John Wolfe. Y usted?”
“Bruno. Bruno Tomás Blanco y Blanco. Muchísimo gusto, tío.”
They shook hands across the bar with an awkward formality and then stood staring at each other a moment longer before Bruno came around from behind the counter to embrace him. They hugged hard and pounded each other on the back, John Roger tearful, his nephew grinning.
Bruno Tomás became aware of the solitary patron watching them. He told the man to get the hell out and then locked the door behind him and turned the little “Cerrado” sign in the door window. He poured another drink for each of them.
Bruno Tomás was eager to know what John Roger was doing in Mexico and where he was living. And was stunned to learn he had been in Mexico for thirty years. Which meant he and his brother had both been alive in Mexico for about twenty years without knowing of each other’s presence in the country. Bruno was stunned all the more that this was the first time John Roger been outside the state of Veracruz. It was a long story, John Roger said, one for later on, but he allowed that he’d been the Mexico agent for an American import company for a few years before an unexpected turn of fortune gained him the coffee hacienda where he now lived.
“Una hacienda!” Bruno Tomás said. “Jesucristo, tío! Pero que fortuna.”
John Roger was puzzled by his nephew’s surname, and Bruno Tomás told him the story he and his sisters had been told by their mother, the story of the brutal mistreatment by the American army that led his father and his friends to desert, of the cruelty they suffered after they were captured, of the hatred it had made him feel for his own country and the consequences of that hatred, including the change of his name from Wolfe.
John Roger had never before heard of the Saint Patricks, and he once again wept when Bruno told him of the punishments inflicted on his brother and the other captured ones who were not hanged. He now understood why Bruno Tomás could never have recognized him as Samuel Thomas’s twin. The only face his brother’s family had ever known was the one left to him by the war.
They had another drink, sipping and talking, shifting between English and Spanish, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. Bruno Tomás said his fluency in English had come naturally to him. When they were kids, he and his older sister Gloria had found an English grammar in a bookstore and taught themselves the basics from it. Whenever they heard Americans or Britons conversing on the street, they would eavesdrop. They sometimes bought an English-language newspaper from a zócalo kiosk and read to each other from it. Their younger sister Sófi could probably have learned the language as easily but, like their mother, she did not want to. It was a funny thing, but neither he nor his sisters ever heard their father speak English, not even once. Their mother had told them not to ask for his help in learning it, because he had renounced the language together with everything else American. Bruno thought that was why she and Sófi had never learned English. They felt it would somehow be a betrayal of him.
“Es muy curioso, tío,” Bruno said, “but the older Father became, the more he hated the United States. Mother says it was because he began to miss it very much but he could not forgive it for what it had done to him and so he would not go back. The more he missed his country, the more he hated it for having made it impossible for him to go back. Seems a little mixed up to me, but that’s what she thinks.”
It pained John Roger that Sammy could have felt such rancor toward his own country. That he had renounced his American past so utterly that he would not even tell his own family he had a brother. So utterly he would not even let his brother know he was alive. It crossed his mind that maybe Sammy had not contacted him for fear that he would be ashamed of him for his desertion. Then dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Sammy knew better than that.
He asked Bruno if he knew why Samuel Thomas had enlisted in the army anyway. He had never wanted to be anything but a sailor. Bruno Tomás didn’t know and said his mother didn’t either. “She asked him once why he joined the army,” Bruno Tomás said, “and he told her he didn’t want to talk about it and so she never asked him again. She truly did not care where he had been or what he had done before she knew him. That’s what she’s always told us, me and my sisters. And he was never muy hablador. He never talked about himself.”
They talked for more than an hour before Bruno Tomás said they should go upstairs so he could meet the Blanco women—two of them, anyway. He had not seen his older sister since she got married more than sixteen years ago. “Gloria se casó con un gringo,” Bruno said. “You’ll never believe how that marriage happened. She was always a wild one but lucky too. She lives with her husband’s people in San Luis Potosí state.”
They went up to the apartment and through the parlor and into the kitchen, where the two women sat drinking coffee. They looked at John Roger as much in suspicion as surprise—their eyes making swift appraisal of his expensive boots and fine suit and lingering for a moment on his folded coat sleeve before fixing on his face. They nodded and said “Mucho gusto, señor,” when Bruno Tomás introduced them to him. The mother, María Palomina, was as darkhaired as the daughter and almost as lean. The daughter, Sofía Reina, called Sófi, was very pretty. John Roger guessed her age at around twenty. But when Bruno presented John Roger as “el señor John Wolfe, el hermano de papá,” they looked confused, and then María Palomina glowered as if she thought they were playing a bad joke. Then she saw they were serious and her face changed.
“Es la verdad?” she said.
“Sí,” John Roger said. “Éra mi hermano.”
“Ay, dios mío,” she said softly.
She stood up and went to him and hugged him hard, and then Sófi had her turn at embracing him. Sófi then brewed a fresh pot of coffee and they all sat at the table to talk.
TURNS OF FORTUNE
So then. This reunited family that for almost forty years had not known it was disunited and had in the interim produced a second generation and gained a second surname—this family that on the night they discovered each other was represented by all the living Blancos save the elder daughter Gloria and by a sole Wolfe, but he the patriarch—this mutually discovered clan passed the rest of that night in a long conversation of acquaintance and revelation. John Roger and Bruno Tomás would at times lapse into English when addressing each other, and María Palomina or Sofía Reina would each time clear her throat to make them aware of it and bring them back to Spanish. It was a conversation marked by interrogations and explanations, expositions and clarifications, interspersed with tears and chuckles and sudden crescendos of everyone talking at once and sudden silences that as abruptly gave way to laughter and still more questions and more explications and more expressions of awe at their having found each other as they had. What if Bruno had not played the tune when he did or if John Roger had
not been walking by and heard it when he did or even been in Mexico City when he was and so on and so forth. Only Sofía Reina was unmoved by the chain of coincidence. Everything had to happen in some way, she said, so why not the way it did? But then, as John Roger would learn, Sofía Reina had already known so many fantastic turns of fortune in her own life that nothing that happened to her or to anyone else, however improbable or even bizarre, could surprise her anymore.
By dawn they had addressed the most pressing particulars and learned much about each other that it was of greatest importance to know. They would become still better acquainted over the next few days, but on that gray dawn in that upstairs residence of that rundown café in that ramshackle neighborhood near the center of Mexico City, the only important question remaining was what they should do now.
For John Roger the answer was simple. The three Blancos should go to live at Buenaventura. The family would be united and the Blancos would be relieved of the burden of the café, which by their own admission was barely earning enough to maintain them. More to the point, they would be relieved of financial concern for the rest of their lives. There are worse fates, John Roger said with a benign smile, than to have a rich relative with a fondness for his kin.
Bruno Tomás was agog at the prospect of life at the hacienda. He felt he was being liberated from a living death, although, in deference to his mother’s feelings, he did not say so aloud. Downstairs at the bar, however, he had confided to John Roger that he hated working in the café and always had. His calling, as he had discovered in the army, was in working with horses. His father hadn’t been pleased when he enlisted. He had come to view all armies as nothing other than the powerful weapons of the greedy privileged in their contentions with each other, and he did not want his son to risk his life in the cause of such sons of bitches, as Bruno Tomás would surely have to do because there was always a war. But he also believed Bruno was old enough to decide for himself, and so did not forbid him from enlisting. And although there had in fact always been war during Bruno Tomás’s time in the ranks—one rebellion or another always breaking out in one part of the country or another—he had not had to fight in any of it. During his basic military training he and the army had found out that he had a natural talent for working with horses, and he had been made a wrangler whose main duty was to care for the cavalry mounts. He was never near enough to the fighting to have to shoot at anyone or for anyone to shoot at him. He would have been content to make a career as a breaker of horses in the army, but after his father’s death he felt honor-bound to care for his mother and help her to manage the café. “After all,” he said to John Roger, “lo primero es lo primero.” And so he came home when his enlistment expired. But he had not forgotten the great pleasure of working with horses and had clung to the hope that he might one day do so again.
John Roger told him he wouldn’t have to work at all at Buenaventura if he chose not to, but if he wished to work on Rancho Isabela—the hacienda’s horse ranch—he certainly could. His eldest son, John Samuel, had created the ranch and had always been the one to manage it. But he was spending more and more of his time helping with the operation of the hacienda and would soon need a foreman to run the ranch. If Bruno Tomás was as good with horses as he claimed, and if he could manage the other wranglers—a pretty rowdy bunch, it had to be said—John Roger thought there was a good chance John Samuel would give him the job.
Bruno Tomás was confident on both counts. He had been a sergeant in the army and was seasoned in command. But what about the guy expecting to be the next foreman? There was always a guy expecting to be the next foreman, and sometimes the guy had good reason to feel that way. “What of it?” John Roger said. “You’re my nephew. And as somebody just said, ‘lo primero es lo primero.’ Of course, if you’d rather step aside for whoever it is that expects to be the next foreman, well. . . .”
“No,” Bruno said, “I wouldn’t.”
“Didn’t think so,” John Roger said, and both of them grinned.
But María Palomina would not part from Mexico City. She told John Roger she appreciated his sense of paternal obligation toward his brother’s family and she was sure that Buenaventura was as beautiful as he described it and she thanked him very much for his generous invitation to live there, but the capital was her home. She had been born in this city and lived in it all her life and she had met Samuel Thomas here and married him here and lived with him here and buried him here, and she would not abandon it.
John Roger could not sway her. But that evening, after he’d returned to Amos’s house and relieved his friend’s worry about what had become of him—and after everyone had a much needed siesta—he took the Blancos to dine in a restaurant and during the meal was able to persuade María Palomina to at least let him sell the café for her and provide her with a house in a better neighborhood. A house with a cook and a cleaning maid and a monthly stipend to support herself and Sofía Reina, who had made it clear she would not leave her mother alone in the city.
The next morning he sent a telegram to John Samuel to let him know he would be staying in the capital a while longer but wasn’t sure yet how long that would be. He said he had a grand surprise for everyone when he got home but gave no further details. Bruno Tomás then took him to the cemetery and John Roger placed flowers on Samuel Thomas’s grave. And again wept for his dead brother, whose reasons for ending up in this plot of ground so far from New England and so foreign to it he would never know. When he had told Amos the story, Amos said, “Good Christ, John, that’s some tale. I can’t imagine the odds against finding them as you did. Say now, what other secrets have you been keeping from me, you sly man of mystery?”
Among Amos’s many friends of influence was one of the city’s most successful real estate dealers. John Roger retained the man’s services in the morning and by that evening the café was sold. The day after that, the broker showed John Roger and the Blancos an available residence he thought might be what they were looking for, a fine little red-brick house on a lush high-walled property in an upper-class neighborhood two blocks off the elegant Avenida Reforma. María Palomina loved it. Loved especially its garden in the rear. She had always wanted a garden but the café residence did not have even a patio, and her flowers had always been nurtured in window pots.
John Roger bought the house and put the deed in her name and hired a crew of movers to transport the Blanco belongings from the café. Then hired painters to repaint every room to María Palomina’s preferences, excepting Sofía Reina’s room, whose walls Sófi would have no color but purple even in the face of her mother’s objections to it as a hideous contrast with the pale yellow walls of the rest of the house.
Amos stopped by to see how things were going, and when John Roger introduced him to the Blancos, they all grinned at the blushing smile he gave Sófi. Disregarding his aversion for physical labor, Amos took off his coat and rolled his sleeves and helped John Roger and Bruno to arrange and rearrange the new furniture until it was all positioned precisely to María Palomina’s liking. The corpulent Amos was soaked with sweat when they were done but he took no offense at the others’ gentle teasing of him, and his smiles for Sófi were incessant.
They had a fine time, John Roger and the Blancos, getting to know each other during those days of working together to make the new house a home. In the evenings after dinner they sat in the parlor with glasses of wine and conversed until a late hour. The Blancos wanted to know everything about the childhood he had shared with Samuel Thomas. He told them about Portsmouth and their mother and their Grandfather John Parham. They were not surprised to hear of Samuel Thomas’s propensity for fighting with his fists, but they had not known of his love for sailing, or that he had hoped to make his life at sea, or that he had been a superior student and could have excelled as a scholar if he’d but had the inclination. For reasons of decorum John Roger refrained from telling some things about his brother, such as his larks in the Blue Mermaid tavern. Nor did he reveal to
the Blancos—as he had not revealed to anyone save the late Margarita Damascos—the fact of their father’s piracy. A secret he was now sure that Sammy had kept from them.
In answering their questions about himself, he tried to be self-effacing and perfunctory, but the facts were the facts, and the Blancos were impressed by his university education, his legal profession in New England, his management of the Trade Wind Company. They of course wanted to know how he’d lost his arm, and were enthralled by his account of the duel with Montenegro, and deeply moved by Elizabeth Anne’s action in saving his life. They could not hear enough about Elizabeth Anne and asserted that she seemed “muy simpática,” a characterization John Roger had heard from every Mexican who ever met her. He showed them her photograph set into the inner lid of his pocketwatch, and they cooed in admiration of her beauty. Then became tearful when he told the details of her death. Then smiled again on learning that the younger two of his three sons were identical twins.
Not until then did it occur to John Roger that he had not told any of them that he and Sammy were twins. He thought to say so now, but decided against it. What difference did it make? They had not been physical twins since Sammy’s disfigurement by the army, which occurred before María Palomina met him. He supposed they might like to know that he was a good approximation of what Sammy would have looked like but for the war. But still he did not tell them. He wanted to keep something of Sammy for himself alone.
I have always thought it would be wonderful to be the mother of twins, María Palomina said. Now I can only hope to have twin grandchildren. Imagine how fabulous it would be to have a set of twins in every generation! She gestured toward Bruno Tomás and said, Maybe this one will father twins someday, if he should ever find some fool of a woman to marry him.
Bruno grinned. Don’t lose hope, Mother. I’ve heard there are plenty of foolish women in this world.
Only Sófi did not join in the chortling. She tended to reticence on the subject of children, and John Roger had come to know why. She was thirty-one years old, a decade older than he’d thought when he’d first seen her, a fact the more startling in light of a history of marriage and motherhood that struck him as nothing less than tragic. No less awesome to him than Sófi’s chronicle itself was the matter-of-fact manner in which she had related it to him. He had long suspected that the female heart was stronger than the male’s in almost every way, and her account left him doubtless.
