friend’s worry about what had become of him—and after everyone had a much needed siesta—he took the Blancos to dine in a restaurant and during the meal was able to persuade Maria Palomina to at least let him sell the cafe for her and provide her with a house in a better neighborhood. A house with a cook and a cleaning maid and a monthly stipend to support herself and Sofia Reina, who had made it clear she would not leave her mother alone in the city.
The next morning he sent a telegram to John Samuel to let him know he would be staying in the capital a while longer but wasn’t sure yet how long that would be. He said he had a grand surprise for everyone when he got home but gave no further details. Bruno Tomas then took him to the cemetery and John Roger placed flowers on Samuel Thomas’s grave. And again wept for his dead brother, whose reasons for ending up in this plot of ground so far from New England and so foreign to it he would never know. When he had told Amos the story, Amos said, “Good Christ, John, that’s some tale. I can’t imagine the odds against finding them as you did. Say now, what other secrets have you been keeping from me, you sly man of mystery?”
Among Amos’s many friends of influence was one of the city’s most successful real estate dealers. John Roger retained the man’s services in the morning and by that evening the cafe was sold. The day after that, the broker showed John Roger and the Blancos an available residence he thought might be what they were looking for, a fine little red-brick house on a lush high-walled property in an upper-class neighborhood two blocks off the elegant Avenida Reforma. Maria Palomina loved it. Loved especially its garden in the rear. She had always wanted a garden but the cafe residence did not have even a patio, and her flowers had always been nurtured in window pots.
John Roger bought the house and put the deed in her name and hired a crew of movers to transport the Blanco belongings from the cafe. Then hired painters to repaint every room to Maria Palomina’s preferences, excepting Sofia Reina’s room, whose walls Sofi would have no color but purple even in the face of her mother’s objections to it as a hideous contrast with the pale yellow walls of the rest of the house.
Amos stopped by to see how things were going, and when John Roger introduced him to the Blancos, they all grinned at the blushing smile he gave Sofi. Disregarding his aversion for physical labor, Amos took off his coat and rolled his sleeves and helped John Roger and Bruno to arrange and rearrange the new furniture until it was all positioned precisely to Maria Palomina’s liking. The corpulent Amos was soaked with sweat when they were done but he took no offense at the others’ gentle teasing of him, and his smiles for Sofi were incessant.
They had a fine time, John Roger and the Blancos, getting to know each other during those days of working together to make the new house a home. In the evenings after dinner they sat in the parlor with glasses of wine and conversed until a late hour. The Blancos wanted to know everything about the childhood he had shared with Samuel Thomas. He told them about Portsmouth and their mother and their Grandfather John Parham. They were not surprised to hear of Samuel Thomas’s propensity for fighting with his fists, but they had not known of his love for sailing, or that he had hoped to make his life at sea, or that he had been a superior student and could have excelled as a scholar if he’d but had the inclination. For reasons of decorum John Roger refrained from telling some things about his brother, such as his larks in the Blue Mermaid tavern. Nor did he reveal to the Blancos—as he had not revealed to anyone save the late Margarita Damascos—the fact of their father’s piracy. A secret he was now sure that Sammy had kept from them.
In answering their questions about himself, he tried to be self-effacing and perfunctory, but the facts were the facts, and the Blancos were impressed by his university education, his legal profession in New England, his management of the Trade Wind Company. They of course wanted to know how he’d lost his arm, and were enthralled by his account of the duel with Montenegro, and deeply moved by Elizabeth Anne’s action in saving his life. They could not hear enough about Elizabeth Anne and asserted that she seemed “muy simpatica,” a characterization John Roger had heard from every Mexican who ever met her. He showed them her photograph set into the inner lid of his pocketwatch, and they cooed in admiration of her beauty. Then became tearful when he told the details of her death. Then smiled again on learning that the younger two of his three sons were identical twins.
Not until then did it occur to John Roger that he had not told any of them that he and Sammy were twins. He thought to say so now, but decided against it. What difference did it make? They had not been physical twins since Sammy’s disfigurement by the army, which occurred before Maria Palomina met him. He supposed they might like to know that he was a good approximation of what Sammy would have looked like but for the war. But still he did not tell them. He wanted to keep something of Sammy for himself alone.
I have always thought it would be wonderful to be the mother of twins, Maria Palomina said. Now I can only hope to have twin grandchildren. Imagine how fabulous it would be to have a set of twins in every generation! She gestured toward Bruno Tomas and said, Maybe this one will father twins someday, if he should ever find some fool of a woman to marry him.
Bruno grinned. Don’t lose hope, Mother. I’ve heard there are plenty of foolish women in this world.
Only Sofi did not join in the chortling. She tended to reticence on the subject of children, and John Roger had come to know why. She was thirty-one years old, a decade older than he’d thought when he’d first seen her, a fact the more startling in light of a history of marriage and motherhood that struck him as nothing less than tragic. No less awesome to him than Sofi’s chronicle itself was the matter-of-fact manner in which she had related it to him. He had long suspected that the female heart was stronger than the male’s in almost every way, and her account left him doubtless.
She had just turned sixteen when she wed Melchor Cervantes, two years after her sister Gloria had married and gone. Melchor was twenty years old and newly graduated from military college. Maria Palomina had warned both daughters since their early childhood never to fall in love with a soldier, especially a young officer with dreams of glory, and how many young officers did not have such dreams? Few young men of that sort lived to be old men, she told the girls, and told them too of her own passionate betrothal when she was seventeen to just such a young soldier who was killed before they could marry. She anyhow thought Sofi too young to marry anyone. She pleaded with her and Melchor to wait at least another year, but she was arguing with a wildfire. Forbid them, she beseeched Samuel Thomas, make them wait. But he would not. They would only run away, he said, and you would regret that even more. Maria Palomina was in tight-lipped vexation for three days before she finally admitted defeat, and Sofi and Melchor were married three weeks later.
They lived in a little house next to the army post, just outside the city. He was permitted to come home on most nights and they were very happy. They had been married almost four months when his battalion was sent to quell an insurgency in the hills near Pachuca, some fifty miles from Mexico City. Rebels. There were always rebels. Melchor was eager for his first combat and promised Sofi he would earn a medal of bravery in her honor. He rode off like a prince of war in his pristine lancer uniform, his high boots gleaming, his shako affixed with a proud black plume. The following week he was killed in an ambush. His comrade and best friend later told Sofi that Melchor had been shot in the head by a ragged and shoeless boy barely big enough to hold the antique musket. For lack of proper ammunition the boy used a stone for a bullet. The friend wanted to tell her what they did to the captured boy but she did not want to hear it. She lit a candle for Melchor’s soul three times a day and prayed to the Blessed Mother to please, please let his seed from their last lovemaking take root in her womb. Then awoke one morning to the death of that hope, its blood staining her bed sheet. She thought she would never stop crying. But of course did.
She went back to live with her mother and father. She dressed in black for a year and wore her hair loose in the mourning mode and passed her days working in the cafe. She grew to understand that you can mourn someone for a long time, even for the rest of your life, but you cannot grieve forever. Besides, she dearly wanted children.
Almost as soon as she put away her black dress she began to be courted by Arturo Villasenor, a thirty- three-year-old city policeman whose beat took him past La Rosa Mariposa three times a day and where he often stopped in for a cup of coffee. Arturo had known many women and received much pleasure from them, but he had never wanted to be married until he met Sofi. She let him woo her for three months before she said yes to his proposal, and they married the month after that. She was yet only seventeen.
They say you can never love anyone else as much as you love the first, Sofi had told John Roger, but I disagree. I think you can love somebody else as much or even more than the first one. What you cannot do again is be in love for the first time. The sadness of that knowledge is why the first one seems so special.
But there is only one first time for anything we do in life, John Roger said, from birth to death.
Exactly so, Sofia Reina said.
