by Sydney Avey
“It’s okay, Mother, there isn’t anything I want except maybe some photographs.”
“We can go through them.” “Not now.”
And now we are at the end of our words. Valerie walks out on the service porch, through the back door and down the steps. I follow her, taking a moment to look at the cardboard box made into a bed that gave warmth to so many of Leora’s little dogs. Posie, her black-and-white cocker spaniel; Scoshie, the dachshund and Chihuahua mix; Roxie, the miniature greyhound— they all lived into old age. I can’t walk through here without seeing them thumping their tails on their beds, pulling themselves up out of warm blankets to walk stiff- legged over to the dog dish Leora refreshed on the hour to keep them interested in their food. I picture them frolicking somewhere, glad to have her attention again.
I walk out into the yard and down the pink stepping stones shaped like playing-card suits—hearts and diamonds, spades and clubs. Valerie is leaning on the short fence that marks the end of our property.
I love the quiet moments I’ve spent looking down into the creek bed, watching the water burble over the smooth rocks. Willow trees lean into the water and trail their branches like children swirling their fingers in the soft eddies. Dragonflies dart and zoom, circle and skate. A radio plays in the distance from somewhere across the creek.
Valerie looks up and her pretty brown eyes widen and spill over with tears. “I should have been here with you. I should have been here with Lita.” Her voice rises to a shrill pitch. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Then she erupts like a pent-up geyser. “Why don’t you ever talk to me?”
Valerie’s face is a kaleidoscope of change: red anger becoming white despair, becoming purple outrage, becoming pink shame and disappointment—a blur of colors that scorch her creamy Mediterranean skin.
My face goes pale. The oxygen rushes from my lungs. Why the hell does she use Spanish to refer to Leora? Leora was Greek, for God’s sake. I say nothing. To my credit, I squirm a bit with shame at her accusation about our poor communication. But I will not cry at my daughter’s bidding. I’ve cried enough. We look at each other and I burst into tears.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” she says. She hasn’t called me that in years. I’m really sick of the frosty Mother.
“It’s okay, honey.” I put my arm around her and we walk back up to the house.
We drive to Saint Matthew’s to meet with Father Mike about the interment and memorial service he has proposed. I take comfort in discovering that Valerie is just as surprised as I was to learn of Leora’s wish to be interred in the chapel columbarium in the small olive orchard that surrounds the tiny church in the hills. I choose not to take this moment to discuss the irony of this with Valerie. One of the few things I know about Leora is that her family were Greeks who sold produce on the avenues in New York. How she ended up on the West Coast I don’t know, but I do know she detested any profession tied to agriculture. Why she would choose an orchard in California as her final resting place is a mystery to me.
I introduce Valerie to Father Mike, who makes space for us in his small office adjacent to the sacristy. The sacristy, Father Mike explains, is a small area behind the altar that holds the clergy and choir vestments. Father Mike speaks a language foreign to me, but he is all too pleased to define the terms. I will attend a service just to see how this all works. Even Valerie, who—as far as I know—has never been to church in her life, is captivated. Father Mike senses our utter confusion and asks a simple question.
“How would you like to honor your mother?” He nods at me. “And your grandmother?” He looks at Valerie. “Who would you like in attendance, and what kind of a ceremony do you want?”
Valerie and I look at each other.
“Actually, I’ve been thinking about this,” she says. “We have no family here, but my grandmother had friends, well, she had neighbors … we could invite them and …” She looks at me. “I’ve talked to Peter. I know he will want to come and I’d like him to play his guitar.”
She turns quickly to Father Mike. “He could play a hymn, or something he’s written. Whatever you think is appropriate.”
Okay, it’s time for me to take back some control here.
I’m starting to picture a Punch and Judy show.
“I think,” I say, straightening my spine and sitting forward in the chair, “a private ceremony with just us, and Peter, if you would find his presence comforting, Valerie. We can include Mrs. Dold, who apparently was a good friend to my mother.” I direct this last comment to Father Mike.
“No other family?” he asks.
“No sisters, no brothers, no cousins, no … no other family.”
Valerie shifts in her seat as if she wants to say something. I look at her. “Valerie, we have no other family.”
On Wednesday I retrieve Leora’s ashes from Spangler’s Mortuary. I drive Mrs. Dold up to Saint Matthew’s where we meet Valerie and Peter. It’s a bit awkward, but Father Mike disappears behind the sacristy with the box and reappears with an elaborate brass urn. Our little party makes a pilgrimage to the chapel. Father Mike places the urn on a shelf and closes the glass door. A bronze plaque inscribed Leora Doulis Moraga, June 6, 1868–September 15, 1953 adorns the ledge. Father Mike reads the twenty-third Psalm and Peter strums some unrecognizable tune on his guitar.
Mrs. Dold tells Peter she thinks his music is soothing to the soul. I avoid comment by admiring a spray of flowers set near the side of the columbarium. Bending to touch my nose to a lily, I finger the card and manage to open it. It reads: With deepest sympathy for your sorrow. Roger. Not the GE Accounting Department. Just Roger.
We gather for dinner at the Echo—Valerie, Peter, Mrs. Dold, Father Mike, and I. Father Mike tells stories about his last parish. Mrs. Dold extolls the bounty of this year’s Italian plum crop and mourns the poor yield she got from her tomato vines because of hornworms. In the midst of a cacophony of conversational bits, my antenna picks up Peter talking about a trip to Spain that Valerie has not mentioned to me. Apparently, she will be leaving soon to oversee the publication of a book she has written. I look at Valerie with a raised eyebrow.
“You’ve written a book?”
“Oh, it’s just my thesis,” she says.
Peter opens his mouth to say something, but she continues, a little too quickly and a bit too loudly.
“It’s about Spanish literature. That’s why it’s being published in Spain. No one in the United States cares anything about the Spanish Civil War’s influence on Spanish literature.”
“And you do?” I ask. Peter has gone quiet, perhaps sensing that there’s more going on here than he grasps. “I’m sorry,” I say to Valerie. “It’s your major field of study. Of course you do.”
I have to admit that I have never understood her fascination with Spanish language and culture. Even Leora was a little uncomfortable with it. She evaded Valerie’s questions about the Moragas, just as she’d always been vague with me about my father and where he came from.
“He died” is all she would tell me. “And he left me with a young child to take care of and no means to do it. I made my way in life. I made a good life for you, Dolores, and here we are and that is that.”
I knew my mother well enough to know it was useless to question her further. So many of the stories she told about growing up in New York and coming out to California had gaping holes. The facts just didn’t add up, so I gave up trying to figure it all out a long time ago. Not Valerie, though. She wheedled her grandmother for stories. When Leora got older, the two of them would sit, heads together, Valerie rapt over some yarn Leora was spinning. Leora did not become mi abuela or Lita until Valerie started Stanford. I don’t know what triggered her sudden fascination with all things Spanish.
We all chip in on the bill and Valerie announces that she and Peter plan to stop by the house for her things and then return to Stanford. I probably missed an opportunity to try to get to know Peter better. Frankly, I’m not very interested in a young man whose idea
of offering comfort to the bereaved is to work up a quick tune on a guitar. I was surprised that he wanted to be a part of our hasty ceremony. What would Leora have thought of a crew-cut baseball player in a Stanford letter sweater serenading her ashes?
As we walk out to the parking lot in the last of the day’s warmth, the six o’clock train rumbles nearby. The leaves are turning early this year. Valerie gives me a quick hug and heads for Peter’s car, an impressive Packard two-door coupe. Peter lingers, pats my shoulder, and looks into my eyes.
“Thank you for the privilege of playing for Mrs. Moraga’s service, Mrs. Carter,” he says. He really is an appealing boy. He follows Valerie to the car, stopping to help fold Mrs. Dold into Father Mike’s old Willys Jeep. I think she would have preferred to ride with Peter.
I take the long way home through the Los Altos hills. I will return from time to time to the place where we left Leora—
The olive orchard
That surrounds a chapel
That contains a columbarium
That displays the brass urn
That now houses my mother.
An old nursery rhyme picks up the rhythm of my thoughts:
This is the farmer sowing his corn
That kept the cock that crowed in the morn
That waked the priest all shaven and shorn
A voice chants in my head, and in my mind’s eye I see two little girls playing on a dusty road.
5 — Dolores, Shadows
H Dolores I
5
Shadows
I take the rest of the week off work, Mr. Bradley be damned. I’ve never been a woman who curses, but I’m surly and short-tempered these days and rather enjoying it. If I’m not careful, I’ll lose what few friends I have.
It was Father Mike who pointed out my paucity of friendships when he asked if I had anyone close who could support me during my time of mourning. I did once, but he died.
Henry and I met and married while I was an art student at Chouinard in Los Angeles and he was a signal corpsman stationed at Fort MacArthur. Prohibition and art school mixed a heady cocktail for an eighteen-year- old girl on her own—three parts freedom with a liberal amount of curiosity and a splash of sex. It was the one part conventionality that drove us to the altar and straight into the arms of Uncle Sam. When I married Henry Carter, I wed the United States Army as well.
The Army has a playbook that calls for wives to serve as support troops for their husbands. We quickly discovered that the support position was not a good fit for me, except in the economic sense. I am a lousy folder of socks, but I’m a darn good earner of paychecks. And Henry quietly supported that. We were lovers when proximity afforded and long-distance friends the rest of the time. Shallow work relationships; caring for Valerie, who was born two years after we married; and a repressed yearning for the art career I gave up to marry Henry rendered me the passionless woman I hardly recognize now. It wasn’t until Henry died and I found myself alone in my forties that I began to realize I was in the entirely wrong line of work. I have a head for numbers, but not the heart for banking or industry.
Like an old-fashioned circuit preacher, Father Mike drops in on me once a week. He comes by with his Bible on Saturday mornings because I’m the rare woman in my neighborhood who works outside the home during the week. I’m not sure whether his solicitation is solely for my comfort or whether he enjoys our conversations as much as I do. He challenges my take on things in ways no one ever has.
I don’t have the benefit of a college education like Valerie does, or the experience of making my way alone in the world like Leora did. The Army became a kind of foster family, providing Valerie and me with the basic necessities—food, shelter, medical care—but it was up to me how much we entered into community life. I detached myself as much as possible from the other Army wives. Like Leora, I’ve always found most women’s chatter frivolous. Unlike Leora, who enjoyed being the center of masculine attention, I never found what men talked about very interesting. The men I met at the bank where I worked before I started at GE talked about money, business, and baseball. At GE they talk about stocks and bonds and bowling-league scores. Father Mike is really the only man who has ever talked to me about me, and about God, and that has proved to be both a comfort and a concern.
“You didn’t notice any changes in Leora?”
I’m not sure what he’s after. “Sadly, no, but I probably wasn’t looking. What kind of changes are you talking about? I noticed she was getting weaker.”
“Ah, yes, but her spirit was getting stronger.”
“I don’t understand. Leora always had a strong spirit.”
“Leora had a strong will. There’s a difference.”
As the weeks pass, my attitude softens a bit toward my mother. I grew up feeling as if I were a spectator in her life. Her life had all the drama of a silent film, but there was nothing silent about the early Leora. She told me stories about her immigrant parents who sold produce on the avenues of New York. Later they became grocers, but not before Leora somehow made her way west to ply her trade. She had taught herself shorthand, a skill in short supply in the courts out West. Somewhere in the Central Valley of California, she picked up and shed a husband, and then moved on with me in tow to Portland, Oregon, where she took a job reporting trial proceedings. The U.S. District Court put her up in hotels for the months when court was in session in the towns up and down the coast. She loved this gypsy life.
Leora enrolled me in a succession of public schools, but I got most of my education watching my very attractive mother hold a different kind of court. Judges, attorneys, and fellow court reporters loved her. Witty and intelligent, she maintained a high degree of decorum that put them at ease. That ease allowed her to associate freely with the opposite sex without ruining her reputation and losing her job. If there was ever anything untoward about any of her relationships, I never knew about it. She thoroughly enjoyed the company of men—women not as much, me included.
In those days, my mother was the only female employee working in the courtroom. In my job in Palo Alto, I work alongside scientists and engineers who are exclusively male. While I don’t have the easy relationships with men that my mother did, it has never crossed my mind to think I might not belong at a desk across the hall from an engineering lab.
I’m recounting this early history to Father Mike when the judgment I have always felt marches out of my mouth. “Leora was not a good mother.”
“She was not a bad mother either.” Father Mike places a rough-skinned hand on top of mine. I stare at the reddish blond hairs on his muscular forearm. As always, he is wearing a black shirt and clerical collar, but his shirt is short-sleeved in celebration of our mild October climate.
Celebration, it seems, is so much a part of this man’s life. It has never been part of mine. Even birthdays were not cause for celebration when I was growing up, except as a matter for reflection by my mother on how close I was getting to becoming employable. But the way Father Mike talks, everything in Christianity is cause for celebration—Christmas and Easter I think I understand, but Advent, Lent and Epiphany? What is that? He talks to me about heart preparation to receive Christ, and celebrations of God becoming a man who walks with us in sorrow and joy. Then he brings my darting eyes to stillness with his steady gaze and makes it personal.
“Dee. You have a litany of grievances against your mother. You tick them off religiously as if you were saying the rosary, but it brings you no peace. Ask your question.”
“What do you mean? What question?”
“Just assume there is a God. What is the one question you would like to ask Him?”
“Why did my mother …” He stops me right there. “Not a question about your mother, a question about you.”
That stops me for a minute. What is it I really want to know? Then it comes to me.
“Who am I? Who are my people? I know there are some Greek grocers somewhere in New York, but who were the Moragas? They are like a
poem I memorized when I was a girl. ‘I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me.’”
“Robert Louis Stevenson. I know that poem.” He leans back in the kitchen chair.
“I have a shadow family. Sometimes they shoot up tall. I stare at the name painted on the mailbox out in front. Moraga. There’s a big tribe out there somewhere, and I’m a missing piece. Other times they disappear. There’s just Valerie and I, connected to no one. Why have I been disconnected? That’s my big question.”
It feels good to say this.
“A noontime child,” he muses. “No shadow before; no shadow after.”
“If you sketch that child, she lacks dimension.”
“Oh, you don’t lack dimension.” Father Mike stands up and collects the morning paper that I always let him take with him. “You just need to become aware of your standing in this world, and the shadows that define you.” He seems to be choosing his words carefully. “Why don’t you look for your connection to the Moragas? I don’t think it will be that hard. Just ask questions and expect answers; and, pay close attention to what people say and what they don’t say.” Then he sets a Bible down on the table. “You have some reading to catch up on, my girl. In this book, God will tell you what you need to know. Start with the Psalms and the Gospel of John.”
Father Mike does his two-step down the front porch stairs. He walks down the driveway and around the hedge. He’s going to check in with Mrs. Dold before he drives off in the old jeep he’s parked across the street. He jokes with me about leaving himself a clear path to run to his car in case I ever feel like bopping him on the head with a brass bell.
After Father Mike leaves, I stand in the front room at the table I’ve set up by the window. I’m turning this room into an art studio, resurrecting my pencils, easels, and brushes from the storage boxes in the garage. The light in this room is perfect. I’ve pulled out the davenport that was stashed in the back bedroom, still piled high with stuff I moved out of our quarters at the Presidio.
