“Huh? Wild guess!”
Had I let something out, absent-mindedly? Bits of Scripture clung to my brain like pocket lint, left over from years of Sunday School and church, and sometimes they slipped into conversations, like “a burning bush” and “through a glass darkly.” Those were common parlance, of course. There were others, like “purge me with hyssop,” and “the widow’s cruse of oil”—and “Balaam’s ass,” a great story, good for a Sunday School giggle. But I certainly hadn’t ever mentioned Balaam’s ass to Catherine, or hyssop either, whatever the heck that was.
“All right,” I said. “I’m an MK.”
“What?”
“Missionary kid. But how did you know?”
“Just a guess. Something about you, I think.” Teasing smile. “Maybe it’s because you don’t swear.”
“Swear? I do so. —Buggers! There!”
“Hush!”
I grabbed the pad. “What do you want, blasphemy, scatology, or minced oaths?” I began printing. Fuck! Shit! Caca! Goddamit! Christ Almighty! It turned out to be a pathetically short list. I added a few from Shakespeare, gadzooks and bodkins. Catherine took over the pad and wrote vete al carajo, chinga tu madre, hijos de los chingados, filling another page.
I got the drift. I was beginning to enjoy this junior high stuff, passing dirty notes across the aisle. Then she scribbled another question in her awful handwriting. What kind of missionaries were your parents?
Kind?
What did they do?
They were teachers, I think.
Where?
In Mam territory.
You spoke Mam then as well as Spanish?
I suppose so. I don’t remember more than a word or two.
So what would you call your first language?
I don’t think there was a first. My parents spoke Swedish, too.
They were Swedish?
Second generation American.
Why haven’t you mentioned any of this before?
I guard my privacy. It’s a Swedish trait. I flipped to a clean page and handed the pad to her with ceremony. “Your turn,” I said. “Give me some facts, names, dates.”
This time she printed neatly:
BORN: Wisconsin, 1949
EDUCATION: Emory University
MARRIED: Martin Rodriguez Calderon, 1970
SON: Alex, born 1971
OCCUPATION: Read Narnia series to son. There. Are we even?
Not really. You still know more about me than I do about you.
That’s because I’m the teacher, silly.
How do you say touché?
Te caché.
Te? Isn’t that a form of the highly familiar pronoun tú?
Oh, sure enough. My mistake.
She tore the pages off the pad, balled them up and tossed them into a nearby wastebasket. So much for the story of my life, and hers, as well. She left then and I fished them out, those scribbled pages, smoothed them and saved them in the back of my canary pad. They became part of the journal, which I continued to keep in the days ahead.
TEN
As usual, it had started to rain as I returned to my room. I didn’t bother to change. I got out the envelope containing my father’s letter and sat at the desk for a long time in my wet clothes, looking at it. I stared at it for so long it began to pulsate with an aura. I held it at arm’s length, which was exactly what I’d been doing all along. It seemed totally inexcusable to me now that I hadn’t taken it to a library in Cambridge and worked it out myself with a dictionary.
Actually, it was Rebecca who found it, in her new phase of getting to the bottom of things. We had just settled my mother in the nursing home and had turned to the task of dealing with thirty years of accumulation in the house, the tiny, run-down rental my mother and I had moved to in 1955. She had chosen Rhode Island because what remained of her family was there, a couple of cousins, who had helped her find a job in an insurance office.
I had never felt at home in that house. Nothing wrong with the location. It stood in a small cluster of one-time summer cottages in a community the natives called “Rivvahside,” a section of East Providence. The river was actually a finger of Narragansett Bay. Our neighborhood was on a peninsula, with salt water lapping against a sea wall not fifty feet away. Single masted sailboats bobbed lazily at the edge of our yard.
The house itself was wrong, mainly because my father was not there. When my mother married again six years later and my stepfather moved in, the place seemed less than ever mine. So I resented Harvey, and everything about him—that he was shorter than my mother, that he parted his hair with a wet comb in front of the living room mirror, that he prayed long, repetitive graces before dinner. I hated him because he sang. I would hear him holding forth lustily, in the kitchen, in the yard, “This world is not my home! I’m just a-passin’ through,” and I would think, “Good, keep right on going.” I was thirteen, and I’d had no more to say about the entrance of this man into my life than I had about the departure of the other. I retreated to worlds of my own, baseball on my radio, pop and jazz, a few LPs (Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins) played softly in my room. Books. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, reading them over and over.
When my stepfather died, my mother stopped eating. She quickly grew fragile, but refused any alternative to managing alone in that house. She would not even discuss the possibility of moving in with Rebecca and me. Or actually, it would be just me, since she barely recognized Rebecca’s existence. Then a neighbor, dropping by, found her prostrate inside the front door, where she had crawled after falling down the stairs. Lying flat in the hospital bed, her broken leg extended, she gave in and allowed a transfer to a local nursing home. Old Harvey, “just a-passin’ through,” had left enough money behind to pay expenses for years to come.
I wasn’t looking for the letter as we cleaned out the Rhode Island house. At that point I didn’t know it existed. I wasn’t looking for any link to Guatemala. I knew there weren’t any. My mother had brought nothing with her from there, none of the weavings and rugs and baskets, no photographs, none of the books that had always been lying about, note paper protruding from their pages. And I’d brought nothing but my fielder’s glove that for years I took to bed with me, my “bankie.”
The first little surprise turned up in the kitchen. Rebecca was pulling out drawers and turning them upside down on the table, and there among the toothpicks and canning-jar rings was an old can opener I recognized with a rush of saliva, hearing again the sound it made on a can of applesauce, a rare and expensive treat in Guatemala.
Then behind a stack of de-handled cups on a shelf was one
