By the Light of My Father's Smile (4 page)

From the window of my study in the small house we were given I watched them. Susannah and her mother intent on learning a
skill. Enthralled by the women's serene mastery of their life-sustaining craft. For it was in their pots that the tribe's food and drink were stored. And Maggie, off in the arroyos with the wild Indian boys who were already teaching her such feminine skills as how to leap from one formidable boulder to another without breaking a leg. And to run, as they did, like the wind.

I did not understand her spirit. I yearned for guidance. It seemed to be necessary to tame her, though no one among the Indians or in my own family showed any signs of thinking so. The Indians, I think, admired her. By the age of ten she was like, and even resembled, one of their sons. Their own daughters, however, were, like Susannah, demure, interested in women's things. There was not one as wild as MacDoc, as Maggie by now was called. She had wanted to be known as Mad Dog, but I drew the line there.

MacDoc. My daughter MacDoc. At puberty I began to keep her from her friends, the wild boys who were now, some of them, beginning to notice her femaleness, and to attempt to protect her. They did not think she should jump over boulders as recklessly as before, or run about the village with quite the same abandon. Magdalena flaunted a transformation they could not match. Did they have buds forming on their chests like hers? No! Did they have hair beginning to grow on their lower bodies, as she did? No! Well then, they were still children. And not women. Only green little boys!

She would weep and rage over her homework in the room she shared with Susannah. When the wild boys came to look for her, a hurt puzzlement in their eyes, I sent them away. I insisted that she be called Magdalena.

This was one of the reasons Langley and I fought. She did not agree that Magdalena did anything wrong in expressing her own nature.

But what if she gets pregnant? I said. Imagining the expense of supplying rubbers to every young man in the village.

My wife was quiet. My thinking this way about our daughter disappointed her. It was one of those silences I'd come to read. It meant: Really, why am I with you? Finally she said: But it does not seem to me that Mad Dog wishes to sleep with anyone, other than with her sister.

This was so like Langley. To be blind to the obvious and to be subversive about it too.

Magdalena, I said.

Oh, sure, she said. Don't you understand there is no more Magdalena? There is no Maggie either. Both Magdalena and Maggie are finished.

But that is what we named her, I said.

Yes, said Langley, and obviously before we knew who she was.

Well, she cannot be called Mad Dog, I said. She is the daughter of a minister!

But mad dogs here are considered wise, said my wife. Perhaps you should not have brought us here. She sighed, and took my hand.

You must talk to Mad Dog, she said, and explain to her why she cannot be both Mad Dog and your sane daughter.

I tried.

By now Maggie, Magdalena, Mad Dog, MacDoc was fifteen. And taller than I. Except for summers, which she and Susannah often spent with their grandparents on Long Island, she had grown up in the Sierra Madre. She was a silent, brooding young woman whose pleasure lay, almost exclusively, in reading. I liked this. Not the silence, or the brooding, but the calm. Reading at
her desk or under a tree or in the shade of a boulder in the yard, she seemed, especially from a distance, quite ladylike, demure. Because she was less active she began to gain weight, and to acquire a lumbering tilt to her gait; a condition that worried Langley but did not particularly bother me.

She eats so much more than usual. Haven't you noticed? asked my wife.

In an attempt to show affection I would sometimes heap more food on her plate.

I monitored her wardrobe. Her dresses were long. Her necklines high.

Soon you will be sixteen, I said. And a woman. At that time you may choose a new name. I glanced sidelong at her. Where we walked, because it was spring, coming into summer, our path was carpeted with tiny blue flowers that popped open after each rain. Before us the mountains rose in a hazy mauve and shaggy bluegray splendor. I remarked to myself that she had lived in this gorgeousness practically her entire life. The impact of such beauty on her soul would have to be tremendous, I mused, and was likely to be a ballast for her throughout the wild storms of life.

I know we are going home soon, she said. Is that why I get to choose a new name?

It was, really. And I said so. On Long Island, in Sag Harbor, you will need a name others can relate to. Your cousins, for instance. She frowned. She disliked her cousins, who were dressed exactly like dolls, and sat and stared out unblinking, also like dolls. She had always longed to put dirt on their dresses. And probably had.

I shall be called June, she said.

I was surprised. It wasn't the name of a person but of a month. Still it was feminine, soft. She might have done worse.

And if you object, she continued, I shall be called July.

Oh no, I said, laughing, attempting to squeeze her shoulders as she swerved away from me. It is perfect. And that is the month we are in!

Yes, she said drily, without returning my gaze.

I don't think we know we have lost our daughters until they are gone. But perhaps I should, in modesty, speak only for myself. When we came down from the walk in the mountains it is true that I felt I missed, was missing, something. I felt a vacancy around my heart, an emptiness. The conquest had been easy. Too easy. I knew she must have planned and plotted to escape the corral of a new name but in the end, without struggle, she had given in. What did it mean? And why didn't I care?

We all began to call her June. It is without question a beautiful name. Elegant. Evocative of mystery. Warmth. It is promise itself. It says many things—all about the moisture, readiness, richness of summer. June is always the new beginning of whatever is bountiful. I said some of this to her. I mentioned the illustrious people, poets and musicians, painters, who carried the name. By now my daughter only smiled when I spoke, never showing her sharp white teeth. I felt she tolerated rather than engaged me. As we packed to leave the mountains for good she hummed a pagan song. Something about the oneness of the unclothed human body and the nakedness of the sky.
Por la luz, por la luz … by the light, by the light
, seemed a melancholy refrain.

It was a song not permitted in our church. The small white chapel, the inside of which startled visitors with its vivid blue and green and yellow murals. Its starry sky overhead. Its fields of corn with rows marching into each window. Its big green watermelons painted, with red insides dripping and black seeds painted like
eyes, just above the pulpit. No one ever took credit or responsibility for painting the inside of the church, which was as different from the outside as night from day. Yet the paintings were never permitted to fade. When my superiors from Long Island came to see the state of my mission they were dismayed by it. Heathens, they sniffed. I was not disturbed. It reminded me of the summers I had spent in North Carolina with my grandparents who farmed. The lushness of corn fields there, the dark, starry sky at night, the immense transcendent beauty and taste of my grandfather's watermelons. The murals inside the church made me less lonesome, as I fought the blasphemous, unbidden thought that the appreciation of corn and melon is more universal than the appreciation of Christ.

Some of their songs were permitted in church. And many standard hymns—“Onward, Christian Soldiers,” for instance—were translated into their language. This seemed only right, since we were in their territory. But not the song June sang, with its carnal message of unity with creation and no credit to a Creator. I had heard it only once before, the month we'd arrived, ten years ago. It was a chant, really, repetitious and monotonous as all chants are. The tribe had seemed hypnotized by it. Taken someplace deeper than church, where they had to stay riveted on the convoluted ideas, customs, and lives of foreigners in a book, the Bible, that had no particular fascination for them. The song was not written down. How had she learned it? What did it signify? Were the people still chanting this song in secret ceremonies? June obviously knew. And knew as well that I did not know. This was her power, exposed. It was a power, not only over the God we'd come to share with these people, it was a power over me.

I did not know until much later that Susannah was outside our bedroom door while Daddy was punishing me. It must have been as incomprehensible to her as it was to me. I knew I had disobeyed him, but he was after all a minister, or at least putting up a mighty show of being one. He'd even gradually graduated from pastor, wearing a plain tan colored suit on Sundays, to priest, and wore black every day. His profession, as he explained it to me and Susannah, was based on the forgiveness of other people's sins. In the long white dresses he ordered for me and the Mary Jane shoes, the quaint colorful shawls he purchased from the village weavers, I'm sure he thought me hobbled. But he did not understand my passion for riding horses, or my particular passion for riding Vado, the black stallion that belonged to Manuelito. And so, of course, he did not know where to look when it was clear I had escaped the nest. That from the look of things I had escaped at will, even while the door was locked. That even Susannah, his adoring flunky, had been in cahoots with me, and had lied to him. Oh, Daddy dear, as she sweetly and sickeningly called him, our
Magdalena is sleeping. Oh, Daddy dear, our Magdalena is in the water closet. Oh, Daddy dear, she seems to have fainted from stomach cramps.

But on that last day I did not sneak. Manuelito and Vado appeared on a rise I could see from my window, and while the family ate lunch, I went out to them. I hitched my long skirt high up on my thighs and Manuelito swung down for me. We were equally brown, equally bold of dark and reckless eye. We'd been twin spirits since the day I arrived with my family so many years ago. And Manuelito had pinched me in the ribs while Daddy led his first froggy-throated prayer, a prayer he'd learned in the car on the way down and obviously didn't believe, and I'd promptly stepped on his bare foot—in my leather-soled North American shoes—hard.

It was like that with us. No tears, lots of pain. We did not speak of loving each other. No. That was not our way at all. We instead discovered bird's nests together, abandoned trails, poisoned wells, vulture feasts, rattlesnake beds, a valley of bluebells early in the spring. All these we shared almost wordlessly. And when we touched each other there was a casual ownership about it, an ownership that claimed just the moment of the actual touching, nothing more. But what this meant was that when Manuelito touched just one curl of my wayward hair—for in Mexico we were not bothered to straighten it—that one seemingly absentminded fingering was felt as something alive, curling, electric, as far down as my toes.

The place we went to was familiar. In fact, it was our home. We went home. We went to our house. I love to think of it this way even now. It was a shallow cave in the side of the mountains. A rusty shrub obscured our door. But from inside you could see through the shrub, and then our living room faced a valley. And it was in our yard that, in springtime, the wild bluebells grew.