When Herb is standing behind the easel again, he says, Your baby is due—he gives a whimsical shrug—this summer, during the sweet corn season?
In May, she says.
Is Bert impatient? Excited to be a father?
My mother seems not to hear him; her thoughts are maybe elsewhere.
I bet Bert is just beside himself.
Just beside himself? She’s heard that phrase before, of course, but can’t connect it meaningfully to Bert. There is Bert, and there he is standing beside himself.
Very excited and impatient to be a father, says Herb.
Oh, I think so, yes. When Mamita says that, I hear a touch of flatness in her voice, and Herb glances at her with curiosity and concern. In not quite a year’s time she’ll have fled home to Guatemala with her baby son, and you don’t think Herb has picked up on something? Come on, Ma, tell us what it is. Sitting there, holding me in about my fourth month inside your womb, you must have some ominous sense of where your marriage is headed. Forsaken or forsaking? Look at you, Mamita, so young, just twenty-six, a pregnant niña bien from the tropics somehow marooned in Boston.
Don’t you think Bert will make a good father, Yolanda?
Because the movements are so slight and discrete, the way her lips part and the way her eyes, looking a little more anxious than absent, lower their gaze to the floor, he feels rocked back by the force of her unhappiness.
Yolanda, he says. You know I’m your friend. You can tell me anything. After all this time we’ve spent together, I’m closer to you than I am even to Bert. Do you understand?
She looks at him as if slowly coming out of a daze. Yes, Herb? she says quietly.
Yes, he says. Yolanda …
That drawing over there, Mamita says, gesturing with eyes and uplifted chin toward the charcoal sketch. I haven’t seen you make a drawing like that one before.
His expression deflates; it perks up again. Do you like it?
Yes, it looks like a drawing in a museum, she says. He looks so real and alive. Did somebody come here to sit for it?
I painted him from memory. But that memory sometimes does seem more alive to me, more real, than anything or anybody I can see around me.
She asks, What is his name?
Eddie Baskin, from Penn Yan, up there by Keuka Lake, in Upstate New York, says Herb. Finger Lakes country, have you heard of it? His father was a caretaker on an estate owned by a bootlegger. It was beautiful countryside, but in many ways a sordid household. Eddie was in my battalion. We were two of the seventeen who made it past D-Day. Not the bravest, not the best soldiers or most skilled, certainly not the most cowardly, it just so happens we survived Omaha Beach. That’s a preliminary sketch for a large painting I’m going to make. Herb begins to explain the experience behind the painting or rather its prelude. It usually takes a long time to tell a war story. Desperate to be understood by people who weren’t there, you want to get it right and feel so obligated to because every war story is never about just yourself but usually you don’t even know where to start.
That time in New York, when I’d run away from college and had dinner with Tío Memo, he told me that René, el joven, came to visit my mother in Boston. The way I see it, Mamita, that means he did. My uncle had had a jealously tinged, disdainful obsession with el joven since you were all teenagers. He didn’t trust him, and as best as he could he kept track of him. Memo meant it when he said he didn’t think René was good for his sister, just like he did when he felt the same way about Bert. But did René come to Boston before or after I was born? Maybe it was three years later, after we’d come back from Guatemala because I got TB. He came to say goodbye, playing that classic role, the romantic who comes to tell the woman who spurned him that he’s going off to war. He was sneaking back into Guatemala to join Luis Turcios Lima and the other rebellious young army officers who were starting a guerrilla war in la Sierra de las Minas. A little before or in early 1960, the year Lexi was born, it would have been. El joven must not have survived the uprising; not many did. It’s the most credible reason for why Tío Memo never heard anything about him again.
It happened in the forest outside the Normandy town of Saint-Céneri-le-Gérei. Eddie and Herb had been doing some reconnaissance patrolling together when they were cut off. The twelve other men from their unit were hiding in an abandoned stone farmhouse way back there, and now there was sporadic rifle fire coming from behind them in the forest but also from up ahead, and they could hear the excited barking of dogs. That’s not combat, it’s hunting, said Eddie. That seemed true, says Herb. We didn’t hear anything that sounded like an exchange of fire. Hunting wild boar, probably, said Eddie. Deer, rabbit, birds. Was it the Jerries out hunting, or was it local farmers? We didn’t know, says Herb. Maybe the Resistance, they hunted for food too. The unreturned gunfire of hunters peppered the silence of the forest in all directions, first over here, then over there, and some of these rifle shots now sounded closer to them than the earlier ones. It was too dangerous to try to get back to our unit, says Herb. It seemed safer to find someplace to hide, at least until it was too dark to hunt, to hunt edible animals, that is. On the path Eddie and I were walking down, we came upon a dead baby boar, bright red guts spilling out its side where the hunter’s bullet had entered. Eddie bent over
