Harriet Doerr (14 page)

Máximo goes on. “The property is modest in size, the work is light.” He pauses, and they both wait to find out what he will say next. “There is a spring of pure water located a shadow’s length from the house.”

Catalina believes in neither the friend nor the ranch, and least of all in the pure spring water, but the fact that her brother has dared to present this dream to her, the fact that he can fabricate a tale of such good luck, revives memories of him as a child. In those days he boasted of a future when he would fight bulls, race cars, and be paid to dive from cliffs into the sea.

Observing him on this feast day of the Virgin of Help in the town of El Nopal, Catalina recognizes in her brother the thwarted, sullen boy he used to be. For an instant and against her will, she pities him.

Then she brings fifty pesos from her house, hands the money to Máximo, and watches his anger mount. He hurls the bills to the ground.

When Catalina says, “I can give you no more,” she expects him to strike her, but he only pockets the bills, turns his back, and walks off without a word. Catalina contemplates him. Perhaps the problem is only a woman. Perhaps all he wants is money to pay a woman for the night.

On his way home, Máximo stops at a carnival booth that displays dolls and toy guns, straw hats and tooled belts, jewelry and perfume. He buys a rhinestone necklace and carries it away in a twist of pink tissue paper.

 

 

At five o’clock he meets Paco and Gloria in the plaza. La Loba, exhilarated by the crowds, reconnoiters in all directions, her tail curled tight. The three carnival rides are strung with bulbs of all colors, and waltzes swing and dip from the calliope at the center of the carousel. The Ferris wheel, the swans, and the horses have been revolving since midafternoon, but now, at dusk, before the children’s eyes, they take on the aspect of magic.

Máximo buys two tickets for the swans and from the sidelines watches Gloria and Paco soar and sink and soar again. Then they go on to the Ferris wheel, where they have to wait for places. Paco’s hand is in his pocket, guarding the two pesos he collected for the empty bottles. Máximo buys three tickets and, when they are allowed to board, he sits with Gloria, while Paco finds a place next to a fat man in the car behind. When Paco’s car has to wait at the top for passengers to get in at the bottom, he sees the whole town of El Nopal, its church, its square, its post office and school. As they descend, he looks into the car ahead, where his father’s right arm is around Gloria’s shoulder and his left holds both of hers between his knees. Gloria sits still as a statue. Paco understands that she is frightened of the wheel.

When the ride is over, Máximo says, “Once again,” to the ticket taker, but he buys only two tickets, so Paco must dig into his pocket for one of the pesos he is saving for the carousel. The ride is the same this time. The fat man rocks the car, the operator shouts, Máximo’s arm by now completely encircles Gloria, and the music of the carousel absorbs all other sounds.

Their ride is over and the wheel stops, but Máximo says, “One more time,” and again buys two tickets. Paco thinks of the carousel and hesitates, but as the wheel begins to turn, he pays with his last peso for the ride.

Five minutes later Máximo and the children are in the square again, back of the bandstand, away from the crowd. Paco’s father tells him, “Wait here. Gloria wants to go home.” When Paco and La Loba still trail him, he waves them back.

“Will you buy tickets for the carousel?” Paco asks, and his father turns to say, “Why not? Trust me.” The two start off in the direction of Catalina’s house. Paco and La Loba immediately rejoin the crowd.

Now the clock in the church tower strikes seven, and Máximo has not returned. The bishop left in his big black car three hours ago, and the carnival will travel on tonight.

After fifteen minutes, Paco goes to the ticket seller in front of the carousel.

“How long will you operate the horses?”

“Until eight o’clock,” says the man. “The carnival closes at eight.”

Paco runs home, with La Loba panting behind. He opens the door into the first room, which is the sala, the kitchen, and his bedroom. It is dark, but there is a slit of light under the door to his father’s room. Paco listens at the threshold and hears nothing. He pushes the door ajar and sees by the low flame of an oil lamp that his father and Gloria are there.

Gloria lies quiet on the mattress, with her shoes and sweater off. Máximo is at her side, with the palm and two fingers of his right hand across her mouth. His left hand pulls at the buckle of his belt and the fastener of his denim pants. Máximo and Gloria do not see Paco. His father’s back is turned, and Gloria’s head is twisted so that she can look only at the ceiling, which is stained by last summer’s rains. There is a piece of pink paper on the floor.

Paco has silently closed the bedroom door and is crossing the outer room without a sound when he hears the ring of metal on the tile floor. When there is silence again, he enters that room and again is not seen. Máximo’s denim pants are on the floor, also a five-peso coin, escaped from a pocket and gleaming under the lamp. Paco does not look in the direction of the bed, from which the only sound is his father’s harsh breathing.

It is only when he reaches the outer door with the coin in his hand that he hears Gloria. He recognizes the sound she is making. La Loba made the same sound a few hours earlier, when Máximo stoned her. Fear, cold as a knife blade, slices into Paco’s heart.

But as soon as he starts toward the plaza, he hears only his own running feet and the panting of the dog behind.

The carousel is about to close. Leaving La Loba to prowl as she pleases, Paco buys five tickets at the booth and takes the reins of his coal-black, gold-shod steed. He breathes in cold night air, deafened by the calliope, blinded by the lights. He believes with each successive ride that he is making wider and wider turns. He swings away from the saddle dangerously, leaning into the dark. When he leans far enough, he sees La Loba looking up at him from under a sidewalk bench.

The hands of the clock are almost at eight when the conductor collects Paco’s last ticket and signals the operator. The motor starts, the calliope blares, the conductor slaps Paco’s black mount on its shiny rear and, when the turntable is already in motion, steps off it backward into the crowd.

Now, for five minutes, Paco is a child without a past. This interval contains his whole life. So his day ends almost as he had planned, riding a horse to music under stars.

If you see a pale-pink chiffon evening dress, circa 1928, the low waist caught at one side by full-blown pink silk roses, in the nostalgia department of wherever you shop, please let me know.

If you run across an original recording of Chaliapin singing “The Flea,” Galli-Curci singing “Caro Nome,” or Marion Harris singing “It Had to Be You,” please buy it for me. Also, anything played by Rachmaninoff or Gabrilowitsch.

In one of those catchall used-book stores, while looking for Updike and Salinger in hardback, you may uncover a collection of old theater programs. Please reserve the following for me: any performance of Max Reinhardt’s
Miracle,
and the Orpheum bill with either Houdini or Sarah Bernhardt in the main act. General deterioration of pages is not a consideration.

When you’re at the beach, hanging on to your board, your fins, your towel, your book, and your beer, as you make your way over a field of human flesh, please see the sand as empty, endless, silent, clean. Please notice eight gulls drilling for crabs in the shallow water. Please look beyond the unmolested surf to your vision’s final boundary, where the deepest and brightest blue runs into the lighter sky. There are two boats, a fishing launch in plain view and a freighter on the horizon. You presume it is a freighter. You presume it is the horizon.

Please drive from your house to the foot of the mountains. The only structures in sight are occasional white frame farm-houses set close to long red barns. Now leave your car and climb across the granite boulders of a dry arroyo. You walk toward an oak tree in an unplowed field and flush a quail. You part a knee-high sea of yellow, orange, and blue. Please don’t pick the flowers.

What I remember of those summers at the beach is that every afternoon there was a low tide at four.

I am wrong, of course. Memory has outstripped reality. But before me as I write, in all its original colors, is a scene I painted and framed and now, almost fifty years later, bring to light.

 

 

Here, then, is a California beach in summer, with children, surfers, fishermen, and gulls. The children are seven and three. We are on the sand, a whole family—father, mother, a boy and a girl. The year is 1939. It is noon. There will be a low tide at four.

Days at the beach are all the same. It is hard to tell one from another. We walk down from our house on the side of the hill and stop on the bluff to count the fishermen (five) on the pier and the surfers (three), riding the swells, waiting for their waves. We turn into Mrs. Tustin’s pergola restaurant for hamburgers. Though we recognize them as the best in the world, we never eat them under the matted honeysuckle of the pergola. Instead, we carry them, along with towels, buckets, shovels, books, and an umbrella, down the perilous, tilting wooden stairs to the beach. Later we go back to the pergola for chocolate and vanilla cones.

“Ice cream special, cherry mint ripple,” says Mrs. Tustin on this particular day, and we watch a fat man lick a scoop of it from his cone. We wait for him to say, “Not bad,” or “I’ll try anything once,” but he has no comment. A long freight train rattles by on the tracks behind the pergola.

As we turn away, Mrs. Tustin says, “The world’s in big trouble,” and the fat man says, “You can say that again. How about that paperhanger, Adolf?” But it is hard to hear because of the train.

Back on the beach, our heads under the umbrella, we lie at compass points like a four-pointed star. The sun hangs hot and high. Small gusts of wind lift the children’s corn-straw hair. We taste salt. Face down, arms wide, we cling to the revolving earth.

Now Mr. Bray, the station agent, a middle-aged Mercury in a shiny suit, crosses the dry sand in his brown oxford shoes. He is delivering a telegram. Everyone listens while I read the message from our best and oldest friends. Sorry, they can’t come next weekend after all. Good, we say to ourselves, without shame.

I invite Mr. Bray to join us under the umbrella. “Can’t you stay on the beach for a while?” He pauses with sand sifting into his shoes. Oh, no, he has to get back to his trains. He left his wife in charge, and the new diesel streamliner will be coming through.

At this moment a single-seated fighter plane from the navy base north of us bursts into sight along the shore, flying so low it has to climb to miss the pier. The children jump into the air and wave. The pilot, who looks too young for his job, waves back.

“Look at that,” says Mr. Bray. “He could get himself killed.”

Time and the afternoon are running out. A fisherman reels in a corbina. Three gulls ride the swells under the pier. The children, streaked with wet sand, dig a series of parallel and intersecting trenches into the ebb tide. Their father walks to the end of the pier, dives into a swell, rides in on a wave, and walks out to the end of the pier again. I swim and come back to my towel to read. I swim and read again.

Winesburg, Ohio; Sister Carrie; Absalom, Absalom; Ethan Frome; The Magic Mountain; Studs Lonigan; A Handful of Dust; A Room with a View.
There are never books enough or days enough to read them.

I look up from my page. Here is old Mrs. Winfield’s car being parked at the top of the bluff. It must be almost four. Her combination driver, gardener, and general manager, Tom Yoshimura, helps her into a canvas chair he has set up in front of the view. His wife, Hatsu, new from Japan, is stringing beans for dinner in Mrs. Winfield’s shingled house on the hill. Hatsu can’t speak English. She bows good morning and good afternoon.