Rag and Bone

by Michael Nava

  “Did we wake you up, Uncle?”

  “No,” I said.

  “This is the first time we’ve all been together,” Elena observed. “Our first family meal.”

  Late that night, after dinner and after Vicky and Angel had gone to bed, Elena and I sat on the deck. I had dug out a dusty bottle of Scotch that had belonged to Josh from beneath the sink and poured her a drink.

  “It doesn’t bother you?” she asked, accepting the glass gratefully.

  “I hated Scotch,” I said. “Though I suppose if I’d kept drinking, I would’ve ended up guzzling turpentine.”

  “Is the sky always red like this?” she asked, looking out over the canyon.

  “Usually. It’s a combination of smog and city lights, I think. Angel told me you’re taking them back with you to Oakland.”

  “That was always the plan,” she said. She glanced at me. “I would think you’d be relieved. I could cut the tension between you and Vicky with a knife.”

  “I know,” I said. “I swear I try, Elena, but we don’t seem to get along. I’ll miss my nephew.”

  “You’ll come and see him,” she said. “I’ll persuade Vicky to let him come and visit you.” She took a sip of her drink. “You know I feel about her the same way you feel about him.”

  “You’re her mother,” I observed. “I’m her faggot uncle.”

  She looked over her glass at me. “She pities you, you know.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Why?”

  “You seem like a lonely old man to her.”

  “Why doesn’t she feel the same way about you? You’re queer, too.”

  “Well, as you said, I’m also her mother. That gives me a primal claim on her. Besides, Vicky doesn’t take my lesbianism very seriously. When I told her I had been a nun, you should have seen the expression on her face. It was as if I suddenly made perfect sense to her.” She sipped the last of the Scotch. “If she sees you as pitiable, she sees me as sexless.”

  “How does she explain Joanne?”

  She smiled. “Two old crones living together.”

  “How can you put up with that condescension?”

  “I’d put up with more than that to have my daughter back. Anyway, the more time she spends around us, the more accepting she’ll become.”

  “That’s what John said.”

  “John? Who’s John?”

  “My friend,” I said.

  She lifted an eyebrow. “Boyfriend?”

  “I’m a little old for a boyfriend, but I suppose you could call him that.”

  “No wonder you seem so much better,” she said. “When do I get to meet him?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “He’s taking Angel and me to a baseball game. It’s strange to be talking to you about my boyfriend. I feel like I’m a tongue-tied twelve-year-old and you’re a worldly seventeen.”

  She laughed. “We have a lot of years to make up, Henry, including the awkward ones.” After a moment of comfortable silence, she said, “Vicky told me you looked up her criminal record, by the way, and she told me what was on it.”

  “I was only trying to protect you,” I said. “We didn’t know anything about her.”

  “Listen, Henry, whatever else you think about her, she’s tried to be a good mother under very difficult circumstances.”

  “She created some of those difficulties,” I pointed out.

  “You mean the drugs. That was Pete’s doing.”

  “How did she end up with such a loser?”

  “She met him at a party in San Francisco when she was sixteen. She told me it was love at first sight. He’d just been released from jail so she must have looked pretty good to him, too. They came down here to live with his mother.”

  “Sixteen? That’s statutory rape.”

  “If anyone had cared,” Elena said. “No one did and she had already been through worse than statutory rape. Marrying Pete gave her the most stable home she’d ever had.”

  “From what I know about him, he doesn’t seem prime breadwinner material.”

  “Pete didn’t provide the stability, his mother did. Jesusita. Vicky stayed with her even after Pete went back to jail.”

  “He’s spent as much of the last ten years in custody as out.”

  “Vicky blames his cousin, the same boy who introduced them in San Francisco. Butch, I think she said his name was. According to her, he’s always been the ringleader and Pete just goes along.”

  “I can’t believe she’s still making excuses for him.”

  “You have to understand, Henry, they were a family, and what that meant to her after growing up in foster homes and orphanages. He gave her the first happiness she ever had in life. The only happiness. You can’t blame her for trying to hold on to it.”

  “Why did she come to you rather than go to his mother?”

  “I think she’s had enough,” Elena said. “She knows she has to break the cycle and that means separating herself not only from Pete, but Jesusita, too. For better or worse, we’re the alternative.” She put her glass on the railing and said, “I wish we could talk all night, but I really have to get some sleep. You really don’t mind me taking your bed?”

  “The couch in my office will be fine for me,” I said.

  She kissed my cheek. “Good night, Henry. Thank you for taking care of Vicky and Angel.”

  The next time I saw my sister, she was shaking me awake, a frantic look on her face.

  “Elena? What’s wrong?”

  “They’re gone,” she said.

  9.

  A SUDDEN TWISTING PAIN in my chest as if I’d strained a muscle, made me wince as I got up from the couch and threw on my bathrobe. I limped across the house to the guest room. The bed was neatly made up, the room was empty. I looked beneath the bed where I had seen Vicky stow their suitcase. It was gone. When I looked up, Elena was sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “I don’t understand it,” I said. “If she was going to leave, why didn’t she just leave? Why pretend with us? It’s not as if we could have forced her to do anything she didn’t want to do.”

  “The only way she could leave was without telling me because she knew if we had talked it out, she would have changed her mind.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. You offered her hope of a new life.”

  She smiled wearily. “At the price of her old life.”

  “You mean she prefers the devil she knows.”

  “Pete may hit her, but she doesn’t feel inferior to him. Not the way she does to us. She’d always feel like she was the poor relation.”

  “Are you defending her decision to go back to him?”

  “No, I’m only trying to understand how she feels,” she said. “So that next time I’ll know what to say to her.” She stood up. “God, I need a cup of coffee.”

  “I want to call Edith Rosen,” I said. “She talked to Vicky yesterday. Maybe she said something to her. Come into my office. I’ll put her on the speaker phone.”

  When I told Edith that Vicky and Angel had left, she said, “I thought there was a good chance this would happen.”

  “Elena thinks it was because we overwhelmed her. Do you?”

  “Possibly,” she replied. “On the other hand, it could have nothing to do with you. The literature on battered women’s syndrome talks about three stages of abuse. Tension-building, acute explosion and loving contrition. If that’s Pete and Vicky’s pattern, they might be in that third stage where’s he’s promised to change and she’s talked herself into believing him. Of course now that she’s gone back to him, the tensions will start again, like clouds gathering before a storm.”

  “Then another explosion,” Elena said.

  “Another blowup may be what it takes to break the cycle, if that’s what’s going on,” Edith said.

  “You keep saying ‘if,’” I said.

  “I wouldn’t swear that Vicky’s a battered woman.”

  “She still had the bruises from the last beating he gave her,” Elena said
.

  “I know, I saw them, but when I actually pressed her for details of the abuse, she was vague.”

  “Can you blame her?” Elena asked. “She was ashamed.”

  “I’ve been a forensic psychologist for a long time,” Edith said. “I know the difference between someone who’s evading a painful subject and someone who’s making things up.”

  “You think she fabricated the abuse?” I asked.

  “I don’t know that,” she said, a bit defensively. “But something felt a little hinky.”

  Usually I deferred to Edith’s intuitions, but this one seemed off base. “Then she’s either a pathological liar or she was playing on our sympathy,” I said. “Vicky doesn’t fit the profile of a pathological liar and if she wanted us to feel sorry for her, she didn’t stick around for the payoff.”

  After a moment, Edith said grudgingly, “You’re probably right. I didn’t have much time with her and she wasn’t particularly forthcoming.”

  “You have any idea where she might have gone?”

  “There was one thing. She asked me to drive her to a church somewhere on Beverly. A storefront church. Pentecostal. It had a Spanish name. Iglesia de Cristo something. She went in while Angel and I waited for her. She was there for a good thirty minutes. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “It’s probably the church she was looking for the night she turned up here,” I said, and related what she had told me. “Maybe she went to arrange marriage counseling.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic about her faith,” Elena said. “It turned her life around.”

  “Finding Jesus isn’t what turned her life around,” I said. “It was the fact that Pete was in prison. I compared their rap sheets. She does fine when he’s locked up, but once he’s out, she slips.”

  She digested this in silence.

  “What about Angel?” I asked Edith. “Did you get anything helpful from him?”

  “No. I’ve rarely met a child as self-possessed as your nephew,” she said. “In the old days, they used to call kids like him ‘invulnerables.’”

  “What kind of kid would that be?” I asked.

  “Kids who become high achievers when all the cards are stacked against them. They’re not only very smart, they’re able to find some inner resource that keeps hope alive for them in the most desperate situations, and without much encouragement from the adults in their lives.”

  “Are you saying he isn’t being affected by a drug addict dad and a battered mom?”

  “Of course it affects him, Henry, but it hasn’t destroyed him.”

  “That’s only a matter of time,” I said. “Vicky’s a write-off. We can at least save Angel.”

  “What are you talking about?” Elena asked.

  “I know family lawyers, kids’ rights advocates. We could get custody—”

  “Absolutely not,” she said angrily. “I’m not going to drag my daughter though a custody fight.”

  “Any mother who keeps dragging her child back into a dangerous situation doesn’t deserve custody. Edith, what do you think?”

  “Where do you think Angel comes by his invulnerability?” she replied. “Your entire family shows remarkable resilience. Look at your own life.”

  “Are you saying that Vicky is one of these invulnerables?”

  “She survived her own traumatic childhood and has managed to keep herself and Angel intact as a family against some very tough odds.”

  “Going back to Pete doesn’t say much about her judgment.”

  “Life is trial and error,” Edith replied. “Vicky is still a young woman. Don’t discount her ability to learn from her experiences.”

  “But she’s had this experience over and over again.”

  “All that means is she hasn’t hit bottom yet.”

  “Why should Angel have to hit it with her?”

  “It’s to protect him that she might finally realize she has to leave Pete for good,” Edith said. “Trying to take Angel away from her would be the worst thing you could do.”

  “For both of them,” my sister added. “Whatever her faults, she is his mother, Henry. You don’t seem to understand how important that is.”

  Outnumbered, I conceded. “Then what do you suggest we do?”

  “Edith is right, Vicky has to make her mistakes,” Elena said.

  “She knows we’re here, and she knows she can come back. We’ll just have to wait.”

  Edith offered any help she could give us and we said our goodbyes. Elena and I continued the discussion over coffee. I was determined to make sure that Angel did not suffer further because his mother was stuck in the rut of dysfunction, but Elena was just as determined that Vicky find her way back to us on her own.

  “I wanted to give Vicky the childhood I owed her, but it’s too late for that,” she said. “I can at least try to give the respect she deserves as an adult.”

  “She’s not an adult,” I countered. “At least she’s not making adult decisions going back to this guy—”

  “She loves him,” Elena said, sipping her coffee, as if that settled everything.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “This is pathology, not Romeo and Juliet.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “You know the Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky?”

  “What about him?”

  She pulled her bathrobe around her shoulders and said, “He wrote that no loneliness is deeper than the memory of miracles. Isn’t that what love seems like, Henry? A miracle? Something that strikes out of nowhere and transforms our life. That’s how I feel about my daughter.” She touched my hand. “That’s how you feel about Angelito. Vicky must feel the same way about Pete. Hard to let go of an experience that powerful or the hope it will repeat itself. I see that now. There’s nothing we can do to help her as long as she still has that hope.”

  “And Angel? He stays hostage to her romantic fantasies?”

  She cocked her head and studied me. “Why do you dislike her so much?”

  “She reminds me of Mom, Angel is like me, and I see history repeating itself. A kid left on his own while the woman who should be protecting him is off chasing some delusion. Religious in Mom’s case, religious and romantic in Vicky’s.”

  “What was Mom supposed to do?”

  “Leave him,” I said, and heard all the repressed bitterness of forty years in my voice.

  “And go where?” Elena asked softly. “She had a grade-school education, no job skills and her family was far away.”

  “I would’ve starved in the street before going back to him,” I said. I didn’t have to say who—she knew I meant our father.

  Elena closed her hand around mine. “We wouldn’t have starved but something worse might have happened. Instead, she stayed with him and here we are, more or less intact.”

  “More or less,” I said. “I would like something better for Angel.”

  She sighed. “What do you want to do? Take Angel away from her? That’s just exchanging one kind of suffering for another.”

  “It would be better in the long run.”

  “You can’t possibly know what kind of damage he would sustain if we put him through a custody fight. Besides, Henry, I know a little about family law, too, and whatever else she is, Vicky is not an unfit mother.”

  “She will be if she becomes readdicted to crack.”

  “You seem determined to think the worst of her. We’re not going to interfere.”

  “All right, fine. What about trying to find Jesusita Trujillo? You said Vicky’s close to her. Maybe we can at least maintain a line of communication with Vicky and Angel through her. That’s not interference.”

  After a moment, she said, “No, it’s not. It’s actually a pretty good idea for us to get to know the other side of the family. Were you able to locate her?”

  “I called off my investigator when Vicky turned up here. I’ll put him back on it.”

  She nodded. “I’m going to fly home today. There doesn’t seem much point in me s
taying.”

  “I understand. I’ll let you know as soon as I find Jesusita.”

  She stood up. “I want you to promise me something, Henry.”

  I thought I knew what was coming. “I know, no interference.”

  “That wasn’t what I was going to ask,” she said. “I want you to promise me that if Vicky ever needs your help, you’ll put aside your feelings and help her.”

  “I don’t have to like her, I just have to love her. Is that it?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I promise, Elena. Whatever she needs.”

  Elena went off to shower and pack. I put a slice of bread into the toaster and poured another cup of coffee. The phone rang. Thinking Vicky might have come to her senses, I grabbed the receiver. It was John.

  “Hey, you and Angel ready for a little béisbol?”

  “John,” I said. “Actually, there’s a problem.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  I told him that Vicky and Angel had disappeared and that I wanted to spend time with Elena before she flew back north. “I’m sorry about the game. I’ll pay for the tickets.”

  “Nah, one of my brothers will take ’em. I feel bad for Angelito. What do you think is gonna happen?”

  “I think Vicky will reconcile with her husband and they’ll put each other and Angel through hell.”

  “They’re his parents, man. They won’t do that.”

  “You’re very idealistic about family,” I said. “Not me. I’ve seen the damage it can do. Listen, John, maybe we can talk later.”

  After a moment, he said in a quiet, hurt voice, “I know you’re feeling bad, but don’t blow me off. I care about you.”

  “I’m sorry. I care about you, too. You know that.”

  “Come and have dinner with me tonight,” he said. “I promise I’ll make you feel better.”

  “What time?”

  “Like around seven?”

  “Good,” I said. “And John? I feel better already. Should I bring anything?”

  He laughed. “How about a toothbrush?”

  Mount Washington was one of those neighborhoods that tourists to L.A. never see and that even most residents would have been unable to find on the map. It was a hills-and-flats neighborhood. The flats were a backwater of light industry and poor people; warehouses and small, shabby residences on treeless streets where walls were scarred by gang graffiti, and the few businesses had bars on the windows and closed when the sun went down. This was Third World L.A., populated by Central American immigrants. The men could be found standing on street corners hoping to be hired for a day’s work as cut-rate gardeners or painters. Street vendors pushed their carts down the street selling helados and elote—ice cream and roasted corn. Small children with large dark eyes played in dirt yards behind high Cyclone fences. I wondered, as I ascended the street that led to John’s house, whether Angelito would end up in a neighborhood like this one.