I was still young enough to believe that I had missed some kind of happiness and security by not knowing him, even though the more I heard, the less he was like the father I had dreamed about. Good American that I was, I wanted to go and speak to the school counselor, who was a nice lady married to the squash coach. My mother shook her head. I told her I would go live with my grandfather and aunt in Madrid, that at least they weren’t Communists. “That,” she sighed, “you can be sure about.” At least in Madrid I might have a shot at a life that would take me to heaven.
All of this was to be our secret, she said, and I might not understand its significance for many years. She gave me things she had been saving for me, photos of my father, of the two of them together, and thick packets of airmail correspondence between them. She gave me the little plastic bracelet the hospital had put on my wrist the day I was born. She told me it had snowed, and that the doctor who had delivered me said I looked like a little Spanish princess from a painting. She gave me the baby blanket she had knitted for me, and ten birthday cards, in their envelopes, that my father had sent me over the years, all postmarked differently with no return address. In each he had put a $100 bill, and had sent muchos besos to la piqui—his nickname for me, which my mother also used—and su madre. She had kept everything in a small white Samsonite suitcase with its own little key. I had never seen these cards, and had always wondered at the $100 my mother gave me on my birthdays. She told me I didn’t have to look at any of it now, but that it was all mine, forever, and I could do what I wanted with it.
Late that night, alone in my room, I opened the suitcase. Everything was so beautifully organized. I randomly opened bits of the correspondence. A short note from my mother, written to my father after she returned to Madrid, during her initial time with him in the United States. She was clearly trying to avoid him.
I told my father about the possibility of returning to complete my year in America. He is not enthusiastic. He and Inés are so glad to have me back home, that I can’t imagine leaving them again, no matter how much I miss you, and don’t think that I don’t. Don’t be angry. My father is 75 years old. It weighs on me, and I can’t fight it.
If only their relationship had stopped there. If only she had broken up with him then, he wouldn’t have ruined her life. But then I wouldn’t exist.
Soon after that letter, my mother returned to America to rejoin Professor Zimmerman. It went against all she believed in; against the way she had been brought up. How much did she know about my father and what he did in America? Who was this man who would permanently uproot her life, marry her, and vanish?
Then I found two other letters written by my mother that were undated. In these the tables had turned. They were married, he was away. She was already pregnant with me and alone, stuck in upstate New York. My father was back in Madrid working. I was moved by her isolation and loneliness and the love and devotion in her tone.
Everything is fine. A quiet life. The weather is good and there’s light in the “living room,” as they call it here. The street is pleasant, and I take walks around the block, not too far because I get tired. I knit, I sew, I’ve put my books out, and I’ll let you know if I actually get any work done, but I get tired if I sit too long. I have lunch at noon. Sometimes I put the television on, and yesterday I watched quite a bit to hear the news about Robert Kennedy. It’s so horrible, there are no words to describe it. The truth is that death and life are so close together, and it’s much easier to live without thinking about it.
I’m back now. I left you for a bit because the neighbor took me to the “basement” to show me how the washer works. I hope I’ll be able to figure it out. Tomorrow I’ll go down and tackle domestic life, which I now realize I didn’t do while you were here. I’ve hardly taken care of you, I’ve been a terrible housewife and I’m sorry, but I’ll do better next time. I wish (that’s putting it lightly) that you were here. I think of you a lot. I don’t think much about myself, and I think of the baby all the time.
I think I have reached a certain serenity, sometimes it is tinged with sadness, sometimes with joy, but it is serenity all the same—achieved little by little, with great difficulty.
The last one was the most painful to read:
Thank you for the three letters. I think you guessed that I was depressed and that’s why you wrote me so much. Yesterday my little walk was longer than usual. I went to the shops and looked at things. I bought blue wool to make the baby a blanket, since Dr. Spock’s book says that the best ones are “knitted ones.” I didn’t feel like cooking, so on the way home I stopped at a cafeteria and had my classic cheeseburger—which was really good—and an immense strawberry milkshake. These are the only things I know how to order. I came home and read your letters, and then I read them again. I lay down for a bit and then started the little blanket. I had dinner, and took a bath and washed my hair, which felt great. And there you have my day. I just crossed it off the calendar, a schoolgirl habit that always consoles me. Four weeks have gone by, but the problem is that the remaining ones will seem longer because of my impatience.
I don’t really need any shoes or clothes. My good dresses, the “maternity” ones, are pretty much untouched. I’m saving them for when you’re here, and because the weather’s been so bad I almost always go out wearing my trusty raincoat which I consider the invention of the century.
I’m sorry to hear you can’t sleep. Madrid must be unbearably hot at night. I know you’re working fiendishly. The baby and I aren’t any help at all, but we send you what we have, love and kisses.
I couldn’t read any more of these. My mother alone, reading Dr. Spock. Waiting for letters from my father. Eating a cheeseburger by herself. Saving her nice dresses for his return. There were many more letters like these. He saved them all. She asked him to return them to her. The very least he could do. She had hers and his. Letters, photos, and me.
By the next year, I had read Anne Frank in school and thought that having a Jewish father was fascinating. I no longer thought about hell. I had favorite teachers and loved English, French, history, and drama. As I began to grapple with adolescence, things with my mother changed. Weekends were for my friends, time at home was spent in my room, records blasting, gabbing on the telephone. I had managed to turn some of my insecurities into uniqueness, and my sadness into humor. I loved some of my classes and wrote a long US history paper on protest songs from the Vietnam War. I was obsessed with music, and was sometimes late to school if a good song came on the radio. I couldn’t bear to leave it. I loaned all my clothes and borrowed everyone else’s. I hung an Indian tapestry on the ceiling of my bedroom and every afternoon my little gang and I played music, snuck cigarettes, and talked about boys. Some of my friends were boarders from New York and I often went home with them on the weekends. It was clear to me that New York would be my post-high school home—and it was, for over a decade. Somehow, my ever-resilient mother adapted to everything that came her way. She became a national prize-winning teacher. She bought sleek, neutral Scandinavian furniture and redid her apartment. She read poetry, novels, and learned to cook and have dinner parties. She continued to knit beautiful things, made from spectacular and rare wool from Iceland and Scotland. She made countless baby blankets for anyone she knew who was pregnant.
The weekly Saturday excursions got better with every passing year. At some point in my early-twenties, the Saturdays together shopping and having lunch became scarcer. They usually took place in New York or Madrid, and were always special days.
Part II
Fifteen Years Later
10
I’d like to be the same woman for at least three months in a row, maybe even a year. And I’d like to have a home, some place to keep my winter coat and my books and to read in bed in.
—Martha Gellhorn, Diaries
I WAS IN A CAR, being driven from a small Northeastern college, where I’d given a talk to an all-white audience on African Americans who fought in the Spanish C
ivil War. I was on my way to another college, where I teach and live. In my talk I told the students that those young black Americans who risked—and in some cases gave—their lives in Spain in the late thirties had been neglected by history. I was moved as I said this, but I don’t know if it meant anything to them. Obama was president.
My driver was proudly at the helm of a new hybrid car. He was a seemingly kind, elderly man from Poughkeepsie. He asked me if I was married. No, I said. Did I like to ski? No. The truth was, every one of his banal questions made me feel like an impostor. I needed a driver because I don’t drive. This was just one of the many things that prevented me from fitting in completely to the daily life of the pastoral landscape I’d settled in.
The driver’s name was Abraham, and during the long, slow ride that evening he told me he was Jewish. He had to relax quite a bit and peer back at me repeatedly through the rearview mirror before bringing that up. I told him there was a Jewish Studies program at Sheldon, my college, and we happily talked about New York delis, rugelach, mushroom barley soup, and Florida. He told jokes. He was going to retire in Florida with his brother and sister-in-law. The Northeast was too cold, he said.
I simply expressed enthusiasm for his plan. He nodded in agreement, but then said wistfully, “On the one hand there’s nothing like the colors of the leaves in the fall around here. And the summers are something.” “Indeed,” I said. The truth was, my thoughts had nothing to do with the weather or nature. I myself was wistful because I was about to leave.
There were no other cars on the road. It was just Abraham and me. It was dusk, and a sparkling evening, for what it’s worth. I wasn’t in the mood to tell him things that would undoubtedly interest him but would require hours of explanation: that only my father was Jewish, that I was raised Catholic, and that even though I sounded and looked American, my family was from Spain. I was passing, and though part of me did want to talk all about it, most of me just wanted to get home, privacy intact.
As we approached the town where I live, its green lawns gracing the campus, its pretty, Puritan, wooden houses impeccably restored by architectural historians—far from the pseudo-urbanity of Poughkeepsie—the driver kept saying that this was real countryside. He called it Hicksville, “the stix.” He began to rap and rhyme in American Yiddish about Sheldon—no hustle-bustle, full of local-yokels, a rinky-dink town. “How can you live here?” he asked.
Abraham dropped me off on my empty, carefully landscaped lane—a movie set, really, It’s a Wonderful Life meets Nightmare on Elm Street—in front of my looming empty house, and I wondered if he would drive straight back. I drew all the blinds and was afraid to peek out to see if he was still there, parked with his lights off, a testament to my phony conversation, to loneliness in rural America, to everything that was wrong with my life. He was gone. I saw bats flying around in the dusk.
The spring semester was almost over. Soon I would be leaving on sabbatical, returning once again to Spain. As I got ready for bed I remembered what it was like when I first arrived in this New England town. One particular moment stood out. It was noon on a sunny fall day, not a week after the September 11 attacks, and I couldn’t quite believe I had left New York. I was once again in a small town, this time on an isolated, pristine campus in western Massachusetts. A gentle wind was blowing the first fallen leaves around the lawns and the knobby paved walkways linking one stately colonial-style college building to another.
I had just finished my first or second week of teaching, my new job. I was proud to be there, and exhausted from smiling, from trying to learn everything I could about an author before daring to mention their name in front of confident students. It was still warm, and the classrooms and my small office were in a particularly old building, a converted fraternity house called Cabot Hall. I quickly learned that I would hear details of campus history over and over—“The Sheldon Inn used to be over there on South Street”—and that any nugget of information could be a conversation piece in this small town.
I bought a bicycle, because I imagined myself commuting to work, gliding down the hill from my faculty apartment like an Oxford don. Obviously, I forgot to think of the snow.
A bestselling book had just come out about a professor in a small New England college town, and though the town was called Athena in the novel, everyone knew it was based on Sheldon, where the author had been a writer-in-residence for a year back in the sixties. One of the secondary characters was a French professor who was the young chair of the Modern Languages department. As I read the novel I identified and imagined her working in my office.
When I went running in the area I rarely saw anybody. People occasionally asked, “Do you like living here?” I was never sure that I knew what “living here” meant. I suspected the question came with an implied assumption that I did not like living here, and that I especially didn’t like living here because I had moved from New York and had a foreign name. But the truth is that I fell in love with the town and the campus from the first time I saw them. They were beautiful. They reminded me of the Vermont of my childhood, and I felt safe there.
After my sabbatical I would no longer be allowed to stay in the faculty housing. I had decided to look for a house to buy. A house for one person. That was not as easy as it sounds. At first, the thought of an actual “house” seemed too complicated for me. But the only apartment option within walking distance was an old mill that was being renovated—very slowly. All the windows were still broken, and the floors were covered with debris. I walked through the halls and projected “units” one day, and it was like being on a movie set for a crack house. When the real estate agent began describing the great common areas they were going to build on each floor, I told him that maybe we should go see the pretty Cape I had initially turned down. He said it had been taken off the market, but he would email me if it came up for sale again while I was away. I knew I wouldn’t be good at buying a house. It could wait until after my sabbatical.
I had plans, tickets, and funding for a year’s research. I had a prestigious fellowship. I had a new passport. In the closet where I kept my suitcases I found a box filled with my first books. My favorite was a vintage, indeed antique, book from the 1940s called The Little Spanish Dancer. Who gave me this book? Perhaps my mother found it at a yard sale? Later in life I took flamenco lessons for years. Was I that basic? Was it because of this forgotten book? Next to the box, my old doll’s house rested on the floor. It seemed to echo the house I was standing in.
I was going to Spain. I looked in the fridge and saw the expiration date on the milk, far beyond my date of departure. It made me sad. I felt like a traitor. I hated expiration dates. I realized once again that I was not sure why I was going for such a long time and that I was rather frightened by the idea. Yes, I had a research project, and I was supposed to write a biography. All of it was official. And I was going to see my mother. These were plans I had made carefully.
I took a car service to the airport. At first I felt relieved to be there, but as soon as I realized I was leaving for so long I started to cry. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of alienation. I made a spectacle of myself among the garishly lit souvenir shops and pretzel carts at the provincial airport. How could I cry in Albany, of all places? Had it come to that?
I’d flown between the US and Spain at least a hundred times, and every time I got to the airport it reminded me that I was apparently born to go back and forth, no matter how permanently I tried to settle in one place or the other. I went outside the terminal and smoked two cigarettes and called a friend in New York but got her voicemail.
I was a historian, and I loved teaching. I had a secure job. My mother was finally back in Spain, as she had always wanted to be. My father was long dead, and thus he could no longer actively offend me by his terrible silence. And yet. My latest relationship had not worked out, and I could not envision my future during or beyond the sabbatical. Not at all. Living in New England alone? Was I really Spanish? European? Did it
matter?
11
I TOOK A TAXI TO my mother’s house in Madrid around ten the following morning. Some people had large groups of family and friends waiting for them at Barajas who received them with kisses and signs, and even balloons, but not me. My mother had been waiting for me impatiently at home. I knew from experience she had been awake for hours, periodically peering out the window of her 1950s brick apartment building, “just in case.” This building was the most recent incarnation of the downsizing that had beset our family’s former grandeur in Spain. The history of my family was one of shrinkage: financial, residential, and biological. My grandparents and great-grandparents had had estates on Mallorca and private townhouses in Madrid near the Prado Museum. The women had their clothes made at Fortuny, and Worth in Paris. The men had tailors in London.
We had lost the original apartment that my mother, and later I, intermittently, grew up in years before, and my grandfather and aunt had moved into what was now my mother’s place. Both of them were my homes, the only semi-permanent places there had been in my life. After three decades of living and working in the United States, my mother had finally made it back to Spain and stayed. The landscaping around the building made me happy: palm trees, cacti, and hydrangeas. Its dry southern air calmed me.
Madrid Again Page 6
