The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  And there were so many men out on the sidewalk; that was unusual, men looking very rigid and erect in their overcoats and whitening hats, rushing past her.

  “You know, that should have been a warning, so many men on the sidewalks at that time of day, with their briefcases! Hurrying home! But what did I know?”

  The buildings seemed to be dissolving, their shadows seeping over the snow and meeting in the middle of the buried streets and slowly darkening. The snow on the suddenly ever so quiet sidewalks was soon unbroken by any footsteps other than her own. By late afternoon the subways had stopped running out to the suburbs, and she was lost anyway. She’d strayed, it seemed to her, far from downtown Boston. Even the coffee shops were closed, as if for a day of national mourning.

  For the first time that day she felt cold.

  “Really cold, man.”

  She held her ice-beaded mittens between her chattering teeth as numbed fingers poked through the wet wool pockets of her soaked coat, descended like a cow’s hoof into the delicate folds of her almost empty little plastic wallet, into the throbbing and empty pockets of her baggy corduroys. She’d lost the slip of paper with our phone number printed on it; maybe she’d left it at home in her bedroom! She didn’t speak enough English to phone the operator, not even close to enough. Actually, she didn’t even know about operators.

  “Oh my. Now what?”

  The snow seemed to breathe, seemed to be climbing up the walls of the black iron buildings pressing close around her. It crackled and flared like a swarm of self-incinerating mad white moths around the streetlamp’s glare. Could you drown in snow?

  “If you went to the ocean for the very first time, had never before seen a sunny blue ocean, would you immediately understand undertows?”

  During her disappointment over the illusory shelter of a streetlamp’s encircling glare on a deserted street corner in Boston, she’d suddenly remembered Petrona—one of the orphans at the Sisters of the Holy Spirit orphanage. One day, on an outing to the beach at Puerto San José sponsored by the Guatemala City Lions Club, poor Petrona had been pulled out into the ocean forever by an undertow. But that’s another story. Roger knows that story. Roger used to think he knew all Flor’s stories, right?

  So what deadly and unsuspected property might snow have? She really was afraid. She had to think her prayers because her lips would not move, only her teeth. To make matters worse, she really had to pee.

  “I was shaking like a washing machine gone berserk. You know how washing machines go berserk? Like suddenly they’re possessed by some insane panicked demon going thumpa thumpa thumpa! Only you couldn’t actually hear my bones shaking. But the police stopped because they could hear my frozen feet screaming. Aieee! Help me! They could hear this. ‘You hear screaming?’ They looked over and saw this snow girl shaking like a washing machine gone berserk. And my feet were screaming. Aieee!”

  A Boston police car with heavy chains wrapped around each of its tires had come crunching down the street like a Soviet tank and to a slow stop where she stood beneath a streetlamp cowering and shivering and forever memorializing an anonymous street corner that in later years we decided must have been somewhere in the area of North Station.

  The window of the police car came down, and a young, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed policeman, so big and handsome and strong, not at all like our poor little police in Guatemala . . . This Boston policeman said, “Hi.”

  She knew Hi of course, she knew some words. But she could barely enunciate even Hi, her lips were so numb, her teeth so chattery. What should she say? It didn’t matter. They were going to save her! The policeman had gotten out of his car. Boy, did he look warmly dressed! His mitten looked like a seal’s flipper, and he laid it gently on her shoulder and guided her, very carefully and slowly, so that she wouldn’t trip over her own giant throbbing feet or spill any of her brimming bladder, into the car.

  “I have never, I tell you solemnly, been more in love with anybody or anything than with that policeman’s seal-flipper mitten or the heat in that car. It was blasting! Madre de Dios!”

  But she couldn’t attempt to enunciate even in Spanish until the heat in the car had penetrated past her lips into her brain. Yes, even her brain had begun to freeze. You think she’s smart now? Brain cells had been dropping dead like cows, like frozen to death cows!

  Don’t exaggerate, Flor . . . (or Purísima).

  “I’m not! I’m not exaggerating!”

  What was the name of the family she lived with? C’mon. She must know this. She should tell them right away!

  “What is your name?” asked the policeman, enunciating so that every word floated clearly and separately towards her in the warm air of the car. There were two policemen in the car, both so rosy cheeked.

  Oh yeah. “Flor de Mayo Puac.”

  “Puac?”

  Could she nod yet? She could!

  One of the policemen began speaking into his radio, pronouncing her name to the best of his ability.

  “Graetz,” she tried to say, though it must have sounded to them like graze or grass or gretz or grease, whatever.

  “Nam . . . o . . . set.”

  They understood that. Namoset, that’s pretty far, especially in a blizzard, the two policemen were probably saying to each other. Did she know her address in Namoset? Namoset? Her address there?

  Time went by. With great effort, surviving cows in the thawing muck of her brain shook themselves awake, slowly pushed themselves up onto their legs and emptied their steaming bladders.

  “Flor.”

  “I’m serious! Emptied their . . .”

  They handed her a pad of paper and pen. But her fingers didn’t work yet. Her fingers were full of bees. And the police car was slowly driving along now, which made it hard to write. She spilled the pen onto the floor, and the handsome young policeman smiled and bent to pick it up. Then he put the pen down on the seat and took both her hands between his own and rubbed them vigorously and she almost fainted with pleasure right then and there, with pleasure and, yes, completely rapturous love of uniformed blue-eyed humanity punctured only by the burning disconcertion and paradox of her bladder.

  Finally she could write. She wrote her name. She wrote Don y Doña Graetz. She wrote 16 Codrioli Road. Of course she’d memorized that, but not her phone number. Who ever phoned her?

  Not even Zoila, the Cuban maid on Pine Way, was her friend yet. Eventually Flor had friends, but it wouldn’t be until later that same year that Father Milligan at St. Joe’s in Namoset would introduce her to Zoila. And during Flor’s second summer with us she would meet Ingrid Klohse, whose family had just moved to Namoset from West Germany, at the Girl Scout camp on Sarah Hancock Pond. And during her third year Flor, through the help-wanted listings at the Cuban American Institute in Boston, would find a maid’s job in Chestnut Hill for Delmi Ramirez, her very best friend from the Espíritu Santo orphanage.

  The police had been speaking on the radio. “Don Graetz,” said the policeman, and he gave the address and waited for a reply. Everything wasn’t computerized back then, you know. But eventually it must have come to this: “Well, there’s an Ira Graetz at that address. And he phoned the station just a little while ago.” And the other one perhaps slapped his forehead and said, “Don’s like Mister down there. Duh.”

  Taking into account their general responsibilities as protectors of citizenry safety, the police couldn’t very well command Ira Graetz to drive all the way into Boston in the middle of a treacherous blizzard. So they, in their powerful tank-tread car, drove Flor to Namoset, down the turnpike in a blizzard like in that nostalgic James Taylor song about the Massachusetts turnpike in the snow, past all the stranded automobiles belonging to commuters who, in just a few years, my father would always be pretending to be responsible for. What? Yes, responsible for, even on ordinary snowy nights! My father would stand at the open front door with his hand cupped to his ear, calling, “You hear them, Rog? Hear them, Flor? Chief Namoset and the Indians are
hooting to me! They want me to come and help them dig cars out on the highway!” and he’d drop his hands to his mouth and hoot back so loudly that all the neighbors must have wondered.

  “And really,” Flor would reveal, “Ira was just going out to play cards with his friends. That’s why Mirabel didn’t think it was so damned funny.”

  But it was slow going even in that police car.

  Among the three phrases my mother had made Flor memorize before allowing her into Boston by herself was “Where is the ladies’ room?” and she’d already found that she could usually accomplish her mission whenever she had to say this. But where was there a ladies’ room on the turnpike?

  “What is the price?” and “May I have a hotdog and a hot chocolate?” were the other two, and, really, they were all she needed to enjoy herself on her days off. She knew how to take the bus from Namoset Square to Newton Highlands and switch there for the subway train to Park Street, and then how to get home. If it was too dark, or too cold, she could stop at the Brigham’s in Namoset, ask for a hot chocolate if she wanted it, use the ladies’ room, and phone my father and he would come get her in the car, but so far she’d never yet had to do that.

  She needed to pee so badly she worked her hand under her coat and into the pocket of her baggy corduroys to hold herself in. Deeper and deeper went her hand, squeezing harder and harder. Feeling had returned to her fingers by then, and she touched the little slip of paper at the bottom of her pocket, all folded up, tiny as a fortune cookie’s message. So she had brought her phone number! Oh well. No need to mention it now. They were almost home.

  From Namoset Square, Flor could direct them to Codrioli Road, pointing and advising in Spanish, “Por allá!” The walk from our house to the bus stop, that she knew like the back of her hand.

  The Virgin Mary, the rabbits and deer had vanished under the snow. Recently I’d learned that Chief Namoset and the Indians drove the snow-plows, but it would be another year or so before I understood that my father helped them to dig out stranded motorists on the highways. For that they needed Indian snowshoes, and they’d always lend my father a pair. The police car with its twirling red light pulled up in front of our house, Girlie O’Brien’s face appeared in a window, and I saw Flor and two policemen get out.

  But she could barely move, not on her own. She was hunched over the squirming, boiling lobster inside her, biting her lips and feeling all mixed up: her elated anticipation of relief, a nagging sense of guilt over the little slip of paper. The police thought it was something else that was crumpling her, that perhaps being outside in the snow again was making her relive her recent trauma! One of them picked her up in his arms, stumbling a bit as he climbed up and over the immense barricade of snow the snowplow had built, and then he waded down our unshoveled walk to our front door. He’d spilled a little of her bladder, picking her up like that, stumbling. That was why, as soon as my father had shooed me back into the living room and then answered the front door, Flor, bent over, without even taking off her rubber boots or her coat, disappeared, staggering, bouncing off hallway walls as she made her way to the bathroom.

  But the police thought it was something else, and it made them feel even sorrier for Flor, and angrier at my father. It was as if they thought Flor had run off to her bedroom to cry. So the police scolded my father loudly, with furious Boston accent and Irish brogue.

  How dare he let a little girl go into Boston alone without even a phone number to call! On the day of a blizzard! She doesn’t even speak English!

  My mother said Flor was her niece, visiting from Guatemala, which is a very beautiful country, with a modern capital and sophisticated, educated, very well-off people living there, and not just the Land That Bananas Come From.

  And the police, mollified by the reappearance of a blushing, grinning Flor, were pleased to learn a few things about Guatemala from my pretty and charming mother and to drink some tea with her before their long drive back to Boston.

  My mother used to worry that someday police would discover Flor’s true age and origin, and arrest her for employing an underage maid.

  That night was the first time I ever heard my mother call Flor an idiot to her face. The police had left and we were all in the kitchen. Flor was having her soup, and then her dinner, and my mother was having a Kent with yet another cup of tea.

  My mother didn’t call her an idiot in an overtly nasty way. She sighed for about the hundredth time in the last ten minutes and said, almost as if to herself:

  “Ay Flor, pero cómo es que puedes ser tan idiota?”

  Before we left the bar she’d shake “Sully’s” hand. If he made the mistake of asking for her phone number, she’d smile and say, with much graciousness, “I’m sorry. You seem like a really good guy. But I don’t give that out.” Usually there’d follow a brief, uncomfortable silence. Maybe he’d be thinking, Forget it, how was I supposed to get anywhere with her greaseball brother here anyway, or, That cock-tease! Or he’d be thinking that at least he knew where she worked and maybe the Star Market accounting department would get a phone call for Pooreesahma. Flor’s friend Delmi Ramirez had actually worked there for a little while once, long after she’d left her maid’s job in Chestnut Hill.

  It might seem somewhat mystifying that Flor would even give the time of day to guys like that, in bars. But, believe me, she thought of it as play and did not think much of men who couldn’t engage in it without hurting themselves. She had an exaggerated hunger for male attention anyway, which I trace to her childhood and youth: an all-girl orphanage, so many years in Namoset classrooms with children far younger than she. Her first boyfriend was Cuban. No wonder the blue-eyed police were such a big deal. Flor was beautiful, and had a cheerful disposition, which of course meant that at some point she had to develop her own way of handling men, but one which allowed her to go on rather methodically learning about them without entangling herself, or too quickly, harshly, even dangerously causing offense. Right up until she left for Guatemala in ‘79 she still hadn’t outgrown an almost adolescent curiosity, an almost “boy-crazy” innocence and fleeting attention span. Flor was a bit of a loner, something of a stray cat, equally comfortable and uncomfortable with suave U.N. diplomats and Boston frat jocks or whoever.

  Flor’s stories became my stories too. Well, of course they did; I found myself using them almost as much as she did, though to somewhat different advantage. I mean, imagine you’re on a first date with me and we get to talking, as one inevitably does, of origins, childhood, formative things. It’s hard to be dry about it. When I was five a Guatemalan orphan became our maid . . . My father put her in school. . . like a sister . . . Once, there was a blizzard . . .

  It was one of her best advantages almost right from the start, another tool, something almost exterior to herself, to be wielded deftly: her own life story! So what’s left if you take away these stories? The truth? Why so skeptical now? (That’s what I ask myself.) Yet it was amazing to see sometimes how quickly she could be provoked into a curled-up, almost crustacean silence. But there was no reason to do that to her. What did it accomplish? I’d always thought she had her own ways of letting you know. Even if she did seem somewhat trapped behind that Japanese girl–like smile and “Namoset Police!”—trapped by repetition and her mixed-up will to accommodate and her eventual disdain.

  EIGHT

  “. . . la policía de Namoset, pues,” Flor de Mayo actually did say—on the twenty-third of October, 1982—when Moya, during the first extended conversation he and Flor ever had, vos, also asked her what it had been like, her first impressions, pues, to go from a convent orphanage in Guatemala City to that snowy, great land ... ?

  Luis Moya Martínez, columnist and reporter for the low-circulation Guatemala City afternoon daily, El Minuto, and Flor de Mayo Puac, directora of the privately funded orphanage and malnutrition clinic Los Quetzalitos, were seated in the walled patio of the Fo Lu Shu II, a Chinese restaurant in Zona 9; butane torches fluttered in each of the square l
ittle patio’s corners, close to the vine-covered walls, and pastel paper lanterns were strung from the eucalyptus boughs overhead.

  —like raisins? Had she really said that, that the Guatemalan police were like raisins?

  When Flor had finished her little recitation, Moya had just looked at her, very straight-faced; he’d let a silence sit there, so that she for once would be the one wondering what that silence held. They hadn’t even known each other for an hour yet, but already, vos, it was war of the softest kind. Flor had won the initial skirmish, within the first fifteen minutes, reaching out to turn off his tape recorder, challenging his ardent venga acá or come-on stare (his Russian-poet-deep-soul-soaring stare) with a much cooler stare of her own, then saying, “Moya, if you keep looking at me that way, vos, I’m leaving.”

  But then she had gone on about Namoset police and raisins, and so Moya had responded with thoughtful-seeming silence. Before this silence could become excruciating, just before she could find a way of turning his deft “nonreaction” to her advantage as she already had several other less pregnant Moya reactions during the course of this newspaper interview on the “orphan situation” that eventually became one then two shared bottles of Botrán rum along with several platters of fried wonton with sweet and sour sauce, this night that Moya met Flor and that eventually became known as the Long Night of White Chickens (or as the Night of Long White Chickens, or as the White Night of Long Chickens, or as the Never-ending Night of . . .), Moya broke the silence, his overall attitude conveying (he hoped) a very wry parody of certain well-known youthful emotions, though the words his tongue lugubriously and dramatically tolled were not those of a love poem, or of anything else obviously apt to the moment: