became mixed up in small-time gangster dealings; their marriage only lasted a few years. After Feli left, our home was never a happy one again, not even in a fleeting or illusory way, I really think that’s true. María Xum came next. Abuelita had sent her to do housework so that most days my mother could go into Boston, where now she was studying at Lesley College to become a Spanish teacher. She was probably about the same age as Feli. But neither Lexi nor I ever played with María Xum. Watching television she’d laugh uncontrollably at parts that weren’t funny or stare in bewilderment or fright at the funniest parts. All that used to make me feel sorry for her and sometimes hostile. Her feet, coming out of her black slipper shoes to rub against each other, were rough and calloused, her face dark and flat, wide cheeks, a large fleshy mouth with something fishlike about it, and her black eyes shone with a disconcerting intensity. María never took me with her into Boston on her day off like Feli used to. Soon she left to get married, too—even María Xum could find a husband!—the way every girl Abuelita sent to us left to get married. She occasionally phoned my mother to say hello, but we eventually lost track of her. María Xum was replaced by the mysterious Hortensia. After only two weeks of being our housekeeper and living in that basement room, Hortensia left to get married. I have no idea to whom or how it happened so fast. What I do remember about Hortensia is her tight sweaters and voluptuous bust, her prominent Roman-looking nose. Yolandita from Nicaragua came next, so demure and pretty, always singing along like a happy novice nun to the radio while she ironed. She had her own room downstairs in the new house on Wooded Hollow Road and was my mother’s favorite, though Mamita’s relationship to Feli was emotionally deeper. Carlota Sánchez Motta, who was my age, was the last to come, but she wasn’t a housekeeper. She was a foreign student who in exchange for living with us was supposed to help with the housework. During my senior year, Carlota went to high school with me.
More than forty years after Feli landed at Logan Airport with her little suitcase, the small settlement of Central American women founded by Abuelita in Greater Boston is in its third generation, Feli being a grandmother now, and maybe one or two of the others are too.
Mamita had married Bert because of his resemblance to her big brother, Guillermo, or Memo. That’s what used to be said, though I don’t remember by whom. Was it Feli or Abuelita who said that, or maybe Aunt Milly? They both had big noses, Bert’s classically Jewish, Memo’s a bit smaller, more triangular, classically Maya-mestizo. They both had black hair, Bert’s wavy, Memo’s tightly curly; they both wore eyeglasses and were forceful speakers. That was about it for what they had in common. Few things made my mother happier than my managing to impress Tío Memo the way I already had that day my father drove us to Fort Ticonderoga, with my energetic recounting of how on the night of May 9, 1775, Vermont’s own Ethan Allen and a feisty rabble of his Green Mountain Boys, including the future traitor Benedict Arnold, had snuck into the fort and fought their way into the British soldiers’ sleeping barracks, which used to be right over there, Tío. The redcoat commander jumped out of his bed just as the Green Mountain Boys burst in, and that’s why, Tío, when he surrendered the fort to Ethan Allen, he was holding his breeches over his private parts like this. Jajaja went my uncle’s booming laughter. I really was thrilled to be at Fort Ticonderoga, which I’d read about in Francis Parkman’s Montcalm and Wolfe, checked out from the library, the actual place instead of just a historical re-creation like boring Plimoth Plantation, still-standing ramparts, cold redolent stones, even the same dirt the Green Mountain Boys had left their boot prints in. And Tío Memo was impressed by his nephew’s knowledge and improbably extroverted outburst. He exclaimed, You’ll be a professor someday, Frankie! Ay no, Memo, murmured my mother, crinkling her nose, because coming from her brother, a manly successful international businessman, she didn’t consider that a great compliment. But from how she looked at me and smiled, fur coat hugged around her, rouged cheeks even more brightly fragrant in the cold, I could tell she was proud of me.
Tío Memo, during a business trip to New York from Guatemala, had come to Massachusetts by Greyhound to visit, and so Bert had taken us all on that weekend road trip up to Fort Ticonderoga, then across Lake Champlain on the car ferry and into Vermont, a state my uncle had never visited before. I sat in the back seat between Tío Memo and Feli, my mother and sister were up front, and Bert at the wheel, driving us to our motel through winter twilight and long rows of gray, white, and evergreen trees, past the occasional roadside farm stand selling maple syrup and cheddar cheese. Some of the souvenir shops we passed had teepees or big statues of moose out front that made my father shout, Look at that, a moose! the same way he shouted, Look at that, cows! whenever we passed milk cows grazing in a mountainside pasture. Meanwhile my uncle and Feli cheerfully bantered with Mamita, who sat partly turned around with her arm hooked around my sister, their jokes and laughter, ala que alegre, and púchica, and ala gran chucha, vos, Tío Memo regularly remembering to switch to English for the sake of my father, a rare memory of snug well-being, of happy pride in family. The way Tío Memo, at the start of every sentence he addressed to my father, said, “Bert,” in his deep, resounding voice, sounding so manly and respectful. And my father would say, Well, Memo, to be honest with you . . . Or, Frankly, Memo, let me tell you how I see it. They spoke to each other the way leaders at the United Nations spoke to each other, I imagined, men who understood power and how things really were, their conversations meant to deepen mutual understanding and to clarify complex matters for the rest of us. That’s why Mamita always chirped along with utterances like: No me digás, or Así es, or Oh no, they can’t do that, or, Memo, is that true? Guatemala’s improving but precarious economic and political position in the world, always threatened by powerful subversive enemies from without and within, always needing to maneuver such treacherous geopolitical currents, gave Tío Memo an urgent-sounding global outlook. My father was a serious Democrat with thoughtfully calibrated positions on world affairs and how these were complicated by US political pressures and rivalries, also from within and without, subjects that he only ever got to talk about in such a seemingly consequential way when he was with Tío Memo. In reality, considering that my uncle was a fanatical right-wing anti-Communist, and my father was just as fanatically against the Vietnam War and all right-wing warmongers, it’s amazing they never even came close to screaming at each other, the way my father and Uncle Lenny, vociferously in favor of the Vietnam War, used to scream at each other, even at one Passover dinner hurling plates of food across the table. The one thing Tío Memo and my father agreed on was that they both hated Russia.
Memo, who’d taken over and enlarged our family toy store business in Guatemala City, was a vigorous man who laughed a lot. Mamita was always quick to laugh too. She had a wonderfully jolly, occasionally silly laugh, but my father laughed less. Instead he sometimes hooted and howled as if he were faking, imitating happy barnyard animals. I’m trying to recall if he ever really genuinely laughed. Well, okay, yes, sometimes he did, though not much at home, not with us; that afternoon in the car driving into Vermont, he sort of did, with those hoots and howls it feels so melancholy to conjure back now.
Lexi once told me about a memory she said still haunted her from another of those family road trips. This was more than twenty years ago, when I’d come for a visit during one of those periods when she was living at home again on Wooded Hollow Road. It was just our parents, Lexi, and me on this road trip, and we’d stopped for a picnic lunch at a highway rest stop somewhere in Cape Cod. I was, as usual, off playing in the woods, said Lexi, and she was sitting with our parents at a picnic table. They ate their sandwiches in complete silence, she said. You could hear every bite. Their chewing was the only sound except for some cars swooshing by and a little breeze that came and went in the pine trees. I remember that breeze because it was loud compared to our silence, said Lexi. It was the most silent silence, Frank. It really started to scare me. Why don’t you say something? I thought. Mommy, Daddy, say something. Talk to each other just a little. I tried to think of something to say just to break the silence, said Lexi, but I couldn’t get a sound out. It was like they were never going to say anything again, and you were never going to come back from the woods, and I was going to be trapped in their silence forever.
Because Aunt Hannah used to fill Lexi in and tell her stories when she came to give her violin lessons, Lexi knew things about our father that I didn’t. Aunt Hannah would tell her about the family history, which is how
