Mamita, you were in love with el joven before you met Daddy, is that it?
Ay, Frankie, do you see now? This is why I never want to tell you anything, because you take just a little thread of truth and pull on it and out comes a made-up story. His name wasn’t el joven, it was René, and he was just a special friend. We’d grown up together. I liked him, he was intelligent, and he loved to laugh. He did have feelings for me, I know that, but I never felt that way. He was necio, very stubborn. I know Memo told you about this, because you’ve pestered me about it before. Do you remember that day when you were just back from your year of living in Memo’s house? It was winter but you didn’t own a winter coat or have any money, and I took you into Boston, to Jordan Marsh. That Beatle, John Lennon, had been murdered the night before, and in the store they were only playing his music and you couldn’t stop crying. Ay chulo, there we were in the store looking for coats and you walking around crying like that, like a little boy. I used to worry, Frankie, that life, especially those difficult years you had growing up and at home with Bert, had given you a hard heart. Now I saw that you were a feeling person, and it made me happy. But I wished you’d be nicer to Lexi. Afterward, you started asking me about René, though you called him el joven, how silly, el joven, and she laughs.
Mamita, I admit it. I read that stuff about postcoup Guate and the Commie list in a history book. Please don’t look at me like that, with those reveal nothing other than what’s here on the canvas oil paint eyes. So whatever went wrong with your marriage during that first year had nothing to do with this René. But even if Bert was jealous because René came and visited you, that wouldn’t have justified him hitting you, my God, well of course not. Something made you take me back to Guatemala with you. Most likely, Bert was already failing you as a lover, but then, what caused that? Or else, despite it being so soon in your marriage, he’d already started in on the verbal abuse. But if he was getting physically violent with you by then, during those several months of my life before we went back to Guate, it’s so horrible to think we would have come back to Massachusetts anyway two years later like we did, even for the hospital. Instead of living with Daddy on Sacco Road, Mamita, we could have lived somewhere else and let him visit me in the hospital and pay the bills. That would have been so much smarter. Maybe you felt like you had no other choice, like you were a captive. Yet you at least loved him or desired him enough to make Lexi? There was still some love left in your heart, if only enough for it to be the equivalent of a heart that’s deaf in one ear. Doesn’t even have to have been that. That is if it was Daddy you made Lexi with.
Mamita, you were brought up keeping secrets, you know you were. Oh, your rancher grandfather was a Spaniard? You don’t say, Yolanda, my, how impressive, a descendant of the conquistadors, even. But you and your brother never knew anything about his wife, your own abuela? Well, sometimes parents forget to tell their children about their own mothers, sure, very common. You were raised in a ludicrous tropical criollo society that somehow collectively realized there was a certain kind of truthfulness it was essential to do without, and so they tore it out like ripe radishes from the earth. This lack of truthfulness, twinned with secretiveness, has been passed down through the generations among the racially hyperstressed Central American petite bourgeoise, you know, all those people from “good families” without any indigenous or African blood. One look at any of us, and not just from the Montejo Hernández families, screamed out that was a lie. It was just second nature to you, Mamita, to keep things secret. Mamita, why are you suddenly huddling, grasping your elbows and shivering?
Are you okay, Yolanda? Herb’s thick expressive eyebrows rise and move closer together in worry. Are you coming down with something?
I think the fire in the stove has died, she says. Can I put on the shawl?
Because she is allergic to wool, Herb bought a shawl for her that seems made of colored, thickly braided mop strings. Holding it up like an unfurled cape, he drops the shawl around her bare shoulders. He gets down on his knees in front of the stove, opens its little door and blows, picks up a magazine and fans, blows again, until new flames lift off the logs. Mamita loves coming to Herb’s studio. She knows that when the sittings are over and her portrait is finished she won’t see her gallant voluble artist friend so much anymore, not in this way, and a certain magic will go out of her life. Soon, though, a new magic, the one of motherhood, will be
