"He's much better. It's amazing how much better he is."
"I knew it! I've always had the highest appreciation for his recuperative powers."
"You have?"
"Both of them. It's a Fairweather thing. One of our few useful genes."
It is only when he says the name, our name, Fairweather, that I am reminded of Edith upstairs, feverish and suffering. And just now, mourning Flirt in communion with Waldo, I am not suffering. Not like that. I am a Fairweather too.
"Don't say that." Up to a point. Only up to a point can I ever be one of them. It's an illusion that comes and goes, a pushmi-pullyu. I say, "Ezra's going to want to know when you'll bury her."
"When you guys get back. Don will cremate her and then we'll bury the ashes next to Gertrude and Pilly."
"We'll have ourselves a regular canine necropolis back there." They already share a stone. And now Flirt. Three seems like a lot of dead dogs to share one gravestone. How is Waldo going to find and move a new gravestone all by himself?
He's not.
"So have you made your reservations?" Waldo says.
"No."
"I could do it from here, but I'm assuming you'd rather do it yourself. We can't bury her until you get home."
"Did Henry say that?"
"He doesn't have to," Waldo says.
"I'm going to have to get a job the second I get back," I say. This is the first I've thought of this. Thought of it in those terms.
"If you want to, Al, that's fine by me. Jobs aren't exactly growing on trees but I'm sure you'll come up with something."
On the opposite end of the courtyard is choreographed mayhem. Graciela runs from the kitchen wing to the shed. Olga passes her as she runs full tilt from the shed toward the kitchen. Even Carmen runs. The tall, white-clad, and unflappable Carmen runs—shockingly—like someone with two left feet.
"Make your reservations, Al. I'm going to find Henry."
I am sitting on the floor examining the smooth lines of the telephone I've replaced in its cradle. I have to find the number for the airlines. I have to tell Lalo we're going home. Does this mean I won't see him again? That we won't make love again? One more time?
The phone rings and unthinkingly I answer it.
"It's me again," says Waldo.
I panic. "What happened?"
"Nothing. I just forgot to tell you something. Something for you," he says, and then he recites, in the funny, somewhat thespian voice he saves for his lyrics, his doggerel, whatever you call them:
"Like the merry monks in their cloisters
Our Alice is devoted to oysters.
She likes them cooked and raw
They slither down her craw
And make her rather boisterous."
"Oh, Waldo, I love it." Absent any handkerchief, I wipe my sniffling nose on my sleeve. This is turning into a three-star crying event. "I just love it. Can you say it again?"
"Nope. You'll have to come home for that. By which time I will have blissfully forgotten it."
"You mustn't."
"There are plenty more where that came from."
Now Lalo is running across the courtyard. Adios, Waldo. Hasta luego, Waldo.
Don Abelardo put his pressed blue shirt into the oven and turned it on to the broil setting, then swore undying love to Graciela. Only tiny Doña Luisa walks slowly and purposefully away from the kitchen and the uproar.
She says, "He will be fine. They make such a fuss, those children. They like drama, you know." She delicately pushes back a single stray strand of silver hair from her forehead. This must be the original template of Carmen's constant tossing-back of her jet mane. Doña Luisa's gesture is the ink sketch on paper; Carmen's is the fully fleshed-out oil on canvas. The pearl-drop ring flops silently.
Mami had a ring like that and I think Audrey has it now. I hope it's with Audrey. She has the nicest fingers. Will I have to call Pop and Audrey to tell them about Flirt? Will they assume I killed her too? I'll tell them I was in another country. I won't tell Annabel. What else will I tell them?
Shall I tell them about the earth denuded by the mudslides, and the damnificados? Or will I just stick to Ezra's recovery, and my return to bury the dog and find a new job?
38
Saint Radio
LALO CHARGES IN. He's wearing yet another pair of pressed cotton pajamas. I am mentally packing my suitcase. "Are you really going back to New York?"
"How did you know?"
"Odilia told me."
"She speaks English?"
"She understands body language," he says. Body language? Did the Lalo I think I know just utter those words?
"There will be no Saint Tristána Llobet without you," he says.
"I thought you'd bagged that idea?"
"I would," Lalo says. "But it has a life of its own."
"Good. Let it. Then you can have a life of your own. But I need to go home and stop distracting you."
"Why didn't you distract me years ago?" Lalo says.
I say, "You're confusing me. You wouldn't have been interested in me. I was a shallow, flighty creature with perfect breasts. That's all. I promise. I can't remember the first thing I should."
"You remember the saints," he says.
"Only the ladies with beards or the men who roost on pillars. So you see, I am still a shallow creature. And Lalo, I have yet to see you with the hiccups."
"When I was cured, I was cured forever."
"That sounds like a miracle to me."
Lalo sinks to the edge of my bed. He pushes the hair back from my face while the other hand slides under my bottom. He kisses me. The warmth spreads down to his hand and then up to my tonsils. My priorities are completely reordered. Can I justify one more time? Oh, to be justified. (Back in the days of gainful employment, I lobbied Mother Superior to allow me to teach James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner to my honors English class. I was unsuccessful.)
"Does Ezra know you're leaving?"
"No. Don't stop."
We kiss again. I am thinking that the problem with celibacy is not going without intercourse, but without kissing. The whole mouth-to-mouth thing. This alone completes us, and to go through life—those poor, sad virgin saints—without it seems a rejection of the gift of life.
There is a slight pop of released suction as I pull back. "Were you seriously planning to be celibate? When you were in the seminary?"
"That was my plan. But it wasn't going to be possible."
"That wasn't why you left," I say.
"No. I was having trouble believing. I had doubts like anchors."
"But you believe so much. So well." I want to hold him and never let him go.
"I think you believe more than I believe," Lalo says.
"More than what?"
"More than has any basis in reality. Sweet Alice."
"I almost miss the rain. Or the noise of the rain on the roof."
"Be careful what you wish for."
"I've heard that before."
Lalo leans back again. "What are you going to do about Edith Dilly-Glass?"
"Nothing. I'm going to do nothing about her."
"Will you say goodbye?" he asks.
"I don't think so. Why would she want to say goodbye to her ex-lover's wife? Would you?"
"Oh, Alice, Alice, there is nothing shallow about you. You are so deep you can't see the bottom," he says.
"I love you for saying that! Even if it's only about sex in the immediate future, I love you for it."
His warm mouth refastens on mine, over and around mine. My hand follows its natural inclination to breach the elastic of his tidy pajamas and venture south. His low moan would cause anyone to give up religion. "It's a murky bottom," I whisper.
"How many times in life do you get the opportunity to do something for the last time and know it is the last time? Rarely. Let tonight be that for us."
Until this second I didn't know where this would go. Until this second I might have snuggled into his
arms and curled up like a sleeping dog. But now I know.
"The last time was the last time."
"Oh. Are you certain?" Lalo asks, so very kindly. Kind because he must sense how uncertain I am.
"I am."
When we have disentangled, rearranged, and smoothed, I tell Lalo that Flirt died today. He couldn't tell the difference between Dandy and Flirt. Flirt was the healthy one, the risk-taker, the rambunctious one, the Puppy Kindergarten flunkout. Flirt stole food from Dandy's bowl. She caught baby rabbits and squirrels and proudly presented herself with a furry tail dangling from her jaws. The more I enumerate Flirt's infractions, the harder I cry.
We sit silently except for residual sniffles.
Lalo asks me if we will invite Hubert to the funeral.
No, I tell him, it will be a private, family affair.
Carmen asks George if Edward and Sam the corpse-sniffing dog have had any success yet.
Don Abelardo is spreading guayaba jam over his white cheese with painterly strokes. Without looking up, he says, "Did you say sex-sex?" He laughs to himself.
George looks straight at Carmen and says, "If you mean has he found any bodies yet, the answer is yes, and no.
"I should explain," George says. "Sam, who is a diligent dog, has identified remains beneath the mud and the rubble. All indications of there being remains are there. But not actually found. Dug up. So I think I can speak for Edward when I say yes, and no."
"You poor man," Carmen says. "Where are your theological underpinnings? Where is the absolute belief that leads to the crown of martyrdom?"
Doña Luisa, who chews very tiny bites to match her very tiny frame, chokes on her piece of toast. Her coughing would rack a much sturdier body, but she remains seated at the table, just this side of turning blue. Her family ignores her.
George says, "Did I say something wrong?"
His hostess continues coughing, and little projectiles of spittle fly from her mouth.
"Maybe I should leave now," George says. He bumps into Ezra, running at full speed, next to the scarred wooden San Raimundo Nonato.
"How can we leave when I've just gotten better?" Ezra demands. "I wasn't consulted!"
Carmen asks me, "Does he know?" At first I think she is referring to Edith Dilly and Waldo's past entanglement. But no, something about the hangdoggedness of her elegant eyes tells me she is referring to Flirt. Lalo must have told her.
What else does she know?
"Not yet. I was going to wait."
Carmen says to him, "Don't you miss your father?"
"He could come down here," Ezra says.
"He has a job," I say. A job, a job. He wakes up each morning with a problem to be solved, and he attacks it from all angles. Generally he solves it.
Doña Luisa's coughing dies down to intermittent gasps. Don Abelardo says to me, "The next time you come you must bring the whole family, even the dogs." I nod dumbly.
Next to the pendent and rubbery heliconia, the one with pointy yellow tips, the one that always looks fake, George corners me. "I hope you'll come say goodbye to Edith. She has something to show you."
"To show me?"
"Nothing awful. Just come."
First I prevail on Ezra to let me pack his things.
Edith is sitting up in bed. Balanced on her knees is an atlas of Nicaragua on top of which she is playing solitaire with a pack of miniature cards.
"You see?" she says.
"You look better."
"I am."
George says, "Guess what."
"What?"
Edith continues peeling cards off the pile in her left hand.
"I prayed to your saint, the aunt."
"She's not my saint."
"It was my first time ever for that kind of praying, and guess what."
"What?"
"It worked."
"Huh?"
"You can see for yourself. I prayed for her recovery, and she's better," George says with a theatrical flourish of his long arms. His arms are exceptionally long and apelike. We knew a boy in high school whose arms hung down below his knees, and the other boys teased him by scratching their armpits and making monkey howls. He died of a drug overdose in college. Mami knew his mother from the garden club. After Ape-Boy died, all his mother's plants grew to enormous sizes.
"She would have gotten better anyway. I'm glad you prayed, but it's rather simplistic to think that's why Edith recovered from a perfectly recoverable fever. Look at Ezra."
"I don't think you understand," George says.
"What don't I understand? I need to go pack," I say.
"What I said. She recovered—poof— in a matter of minutes. One minute she was lying here with pain in every bone in her body—that's why they call it breakbone fever, you know—and the next minute she was sitting up and hungry and wondering where she had put her red skirt."
"You must be relieved," I say.
"There has never been a recovery like this before," George says. "So it must be because of the saint."
"She's not a saint yet. And probably never will be. Unless you want to write the Vatican a letter." I need to get out of here as fast as possible. I told Lalo I wouldn't see Edith again, and I should have stuck to that. It's important to stick to things: resolves, food preferences, vows.
Edith looks up from her cards but does not lay them down. "George, dear, she doesn't think it's quite as wonderful as you do. She is a skeptic. When she told you to pray she was mocking us."
"No, I wasn't. It's not skepticism," I insist. But isn't it? Has that been my problem all along? I am walking backward toward the door. "I'm going back to the States."
"How can you?" Edith says.
"You're not staying to help?" George says.
"There's nothing I can do. I can't make her a saint. My research was all misguided."
"I don't mean that! I mean with the hurricane victims, the corpses under the mudslide, the homeless and destitute," George says.
"Los damnificados."
"They are exactly who he means," Edith says.
"I need to be home with my family now," I say, picturing the four of us at dinner, playing Twenty Questions and eating spaghetti and meatballs while Dandy and Flirt slumber beneath the table. No. Flirt won't be there, won't ever be there again, and that deletion from our family circle is a fact I know and Lalo knows, but Ezra still remains innocent of. And Edith will never know.
"So you will see Waldo tomorrow?" Edith says.
"Yes."
"I'm not going to ask you to send him my best wishes," she says.
"Good."
"But you can tell him I am happily married to a good man. Because George is a good man, an excellent man."
"I'm not going to tell him anything at all about you," I tell her.
"That's okay too, if you'd rather not."
"It has to be okay," I say.
George says, "But you will tell our host Abelardo that Edith is recovered by virtue of saintly intervention."
"Nope," I say. "I think I won't be telling anyone anything."
"Of course it's your right, if that's the way you feel about it," George says. I am gone.
Waldo calls again. This is a record.
"Carmen told me," he says.
My heart stops beating.
"I can't hear you."
"She said Edith Dilly showed up. Of all the people in all the world."
It beats again. "She did. With her troupe. So?"
"So. I thought I had better call."
"There's not much to talk about."
"Did you at least curse her out? Poison her soup?"
"No."
"No?"
"Why are you asking me this?" I whisper.
Waldo says, "I wouldn't mind. I would completely understand. I'd rather you poison her than you sleep with Lalo."
"Well, I didn't."
"Didn't what?"
"Poison her," I answer.
Ezra climbs into the back seat of Lalo's Mitsubishi
and opens up a book about Nicaraguan volcanoes that Carmen gave him. I ask if he would rather ride shotgun, and he says no. So for the drive from Las Brisas to León and then on to the airport in Managua, the one whose name has changed three times so far (from La Mercedes to Augusto C. Sandino to Managua International and back to Sandino) and is destined to be changed yet again, with a new regime and a new hero, Lalo sits up front with his driver and I sit in back with Ezra, who could never read in the back seat of a moving car without throwing up. Maybe this is the miracle.
I have to tell him about Flirt before we land in the States, and I have to figure out the best way to do it. Every way will, of course, suck.
Lalo points out volcanoes and names them. He tells us of the conquistadors who landed here half a millennium ago and took everything they could, and spawned little conquistadors and sometimes fell hard for beautiful Indian maidens and gave birth to the culture that would later give rise to Mestizo Baroque architecture.
Ezra keeps reading, if he really is reading. He is turning pages intermittently.
Lalo tells us that in 1522 or 1523 a Spanish adventurer called Pedrarias Dávila or Pedro Arias de Ávila or even Gil Gonzalez Dávila landed on the Atlantic coast with dreams of glory. Dávila had no qualifications for administration other than his marriage to one of Queen Isabella's ladies in waiting. He is the father of the national system of nepotism. Because of his advanced age when he came to the New World, Dávila brought an iron coffin with him. He died in León, where we are now, but the whereabouts of the iron coffin remain unknown.
"Like Rubén Darío's brain," I say.
Ezra looks up from a long description of volcanic activity in the nineteenth century to rub his eyes. He looks pale again. "Ez, maybe you shouldn't read in the car. Aren't you getting carsick?" He says nothing and returns to his reading.
Lalo says, "I presume you know how Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson lost his eye?"
"What?"
"Not you. Young Ezra," Lalo says to me.
Silence.
Finally, Ezra says, "We haven't done naval history in my school." Even to notice its absence seems to me pretty remarkable, but I hold my tongue.
"It happened right here in Nicaragua," Lalo says. "In 1779 Nelson was only twenty years old, barely twice your age, and already he was in charge of the British ships bombarding the Spanish settlements at San Juan del Norte; that's the Atlantic mouth of the Rio San Juan. Did you know that Spain joined with France in supporting the American revolutionaries against the British? No? He succeeded in his attack on San Juan and afterward continued upriver chasing pirates. And somewhere along the river an Indian shot an arrow that struck Nelson in the eye."
Absent a Miracle Page 43
