Harriet Doerr (6 page)

The nursing home, when finally hunted down by the police sergeant, had called Theo’s apartment and found him there, returned prematurely from his alma mater. He had made a thorough search of the anniversary classes and encountered only eight alumni of his year, all so altered by time and varying levels of despair that none recognized the others.

Theo, reached in time, was standing at the yellow stucco entrance of the nursing home to meet his mother when the police car drew up and discharged its two passengers. He still wore his straw reunion hat, a boater whose ribbon band bore in golden numerals the year of his graduation.

“Theo, dear,” his mother said. “We’ve had a lark. So many young men, and such good manners, They wined and dined us.” Then, aside, “I don’t have my purse. Would you give the driver something?”

In a later, lucid period, Great-Aunt Alice, perhaps more perceptive than the family would acknowledge, filled out a Living Will, the instrument by which she expected to be discharged into eternity with a minimum of fuss, discomfort (as agony is often called), and the inept ministrations of Dr. Hilford, the family physician. The esteem in which he was originally held had been undermined long since by familiarity.

“Doctors should be strangers,” Great-Aunt Alice always said. “The only common meeting ground should be the examining table.”

From the Living Will she deleted clergyman, lawyer, and doctor as witnesses and wrote in driver, gardener, and hairdresser. Once this was executed, she sent a copy to Theo, who wished neither to antagonize nor to encourage her.

“Gee whiz, Mother,” is all that he was known to have said. Theo had married late and been left a widower early. He remained alone, having sought in vain for a mate as considerate and self-effacing as Amy. For his first wife, fifteen years younger than he, had skidded in a dense fog off a coast road and died on the rocks below. Even now, thirty years later, he often said to himself, She might have chosen a different route.

Great-Aunt Alice’s driver and gardener were a father and son named Joe. Big Joe, small and wiry, took care of the garden, and Little Joe, tall and muscular, drove Great-Aunt Alice about in her machine. When the car was not needed, Little Joe helped his father with the flower beds and ryegrass lawn, occasionally trying out inventions of his own. One of these was his rooting out of two eucalyptus stumps by means of a personally conceived mixture of explosives. The force of the ensuing blast flattened one wall of the toolshed, lifted its roof, and splintered the old water tank above it.

Big Joe and Little Joe were originally Portuguese, from the Azores, and without demurral or curiosity signed the document at her request.

The hairdresser was Oliver, born in Cheapside, London. Great-Aunt Alice associated him, because of his address, his name, and his accent, with Shakespeare, Dickens, and a nurse she once had who called her Halice.

She had patronized his shop for years. When she suffered her penultimate stroke and could hear and see but not speak, Little Joe delivered her weekly, by car and wheelchair, to Oliver’s mirrored booth. Here he brewed and shared a heady concoction of frivolity, fantasy, and unswerving friendship. Great-Aunt Alice had concluded that in time of need Oliver would be of more use to her than oxygen.

Later on, this proved to be the case. When Great-Aunt Alice was at last brought low, not to rise again, Oliver went to the room where she lay, unconnected to any life-prolonging apparatus. Three pillows were behind her, and her eyes were closed. Oliver opened his black case, took out a brush and comb, and arranged her hair. After that, he stepped back to survey her.

“ ’Igh style’s your style,” he said loudly, in the event that she could hear. And yes, he detected the remote beginning of a smile. Or believed he did.

Two weeks after Great-Aunt Alice died, Theo found a note in her bed table drawer. It must have been written on various occasions, months ago. The separate lines, penned and penciled, slanted independently across the page. For a moment, he thought it was a verse, unpunctuated.

Theo, it was headed.

Yellow is the color of fall. The cottonwoods burn with it, and only flowers that are yellow go on blooming. At the edges of fields, against unmortared stone boundaries, in roadside ditches, grow all the wild daisies in the world. They are gathered in armloads and carried in sheaves on the backs of burros to the cemetery, where each grave is a raised mound of stone and rubble. The burial place, bare of grass or trees, is contained within its crumbling adobe walls on the fringe of the village—perhaps because the soil discourages digging—and is known as the pantheon. In this way station to heaven are honored the spinster aunt who had to beg, the father and son who died five years apart of cirrhosis, the twelve-year-old boy who jumped high enough to swing on a high-tension wire.

On the November evening of All Souls’ Day, the flowers are lavished on the dead. By midnight, the barren holy ground, where children play by day with bone fragments, is drowned in yellow. Lit by an extravagance of candles in front of the crosses, the daisies almost grow again. They cover the names: Salvador, José, Rosita, Panchito, Paz,

Sometimes in winter, but rarely, snow falls. It forms an unlikely icing on the tops of adobe walls and red clay pots. It piles up on the branches of pepper trees and freezes the geraniums. Icicles hang from the corrugations of the roof. The
magueys,
usually wreathed in shirts and dresses hung out to dry, now shine with snow like any pine or fir. Only a few remember the last time. Don Bernardino, who grew up on an
hacienda
before the revolution and can’t read or write, says it was forty years ago. He says, “There was ice an inch thick in the water bucket. My pinto calf died.” Then he forgets the phenomenon at hand, the blanched fields, the capped mountaintops, and says, “As soon as we were twelve, we went with the men into the fields. We worked from sunrise to sunset, fourteen hours in summer. They paid us in lard and beans.”

The three plum trees flower in February, when it is sometimes winter and sometimes spring. Their knotted branches support profusions of white. “They are like wedding veils,” says Angela, who never married. If it turns cold, the blossoms may freeze before the buds set. If one night’s wind rattles the roof and shrieks at the door, by next morning the shriveling petals will lie in a thick mat on the ground.

These winds rush up the canyons and tear branches from the trees. They snatch off sombreros and the cardboard that covers the chicken shed. Concha, who will complete her seventy-fifth year in April, is crouched in the sun against the peeling wall of the post office. She watches a half-smoked cigarette blow over the cobbles to her feet. She lights it with a wax match from the box in her apron pocket.

Sucking in the smoke before the wind takes it, she regards the plaza where unnamed dogs skirmish among the drooping callas. Leaves and scraps of paper have been caught up in a whirlwind of dust and carried over walks and cement benches to the door of the church, where they are deposited just as the parish priest comes out. His habit is lifted by a gust, disclosing brown gabardine trousers. He makes for the post office and notices Concha, who rises with difficulty from her shelter to kiss his hand.

Summer comes suddenly, and all the desert turns oasis. Every afternoon cumulus clouds pile up over the mountains. The apocalyptic sky is referred to as pretty. “How pretty,” says the store-keeper, who pastures three cows in an arid field on the outskirts of town. “How pretty,” says the carpenter’s wife, dragging a tin tub to catch the possible runoff from the roof.

When there is a storm, the thunder rolls up the mountain and down the cobbled street. It stifles the backfire of the passing truck and silences the church bell ringing for vespers. It mutters imprecations in the distance. The lightning forks into an ash tree, into the windmill tower, and finally into the transformer, causing a power failure that may last all night. In the flash there is a second’s eternity of total exposure, the plow left in the furrow, the dented pot on the fire, the woman’s face in the cracked mirror.

The cloudburst that follows drenches the chickens and the cats. It drips through holes in roofs to muddy the dirt floors. It carries excrement to the arroyo, which is now in flood. It pours from the varied terrain of the hills in torrents and rivulets. It sweeps across open spaces in curtains of shifting density.

When it is over, the obstinate ground yields to unsuspected seeds. Patches of short-stemmed flowers appear among the stones like colored lace. The air smells of wet clay and washed leaves. Children splash in pools and puddles. Some are barefoot, some wading in shoes. One little girl is soaking her turquoise-blue pumps. She has abandoned herself to laughter and doesn’t see the puppy shivering on the step. Or the damp red bird in its wooden cage on the wall. Or the first faint green spreading down the slopes to arrive at last at her own house, where her mother is saying, “What a miracle!” And her father, “Now we’ll have
chiles.
Now we’ll have corn.” He will buy her an ice cream stick to eat standing in her wet blue shoes.

One summer, a few years ago, a widow named Morgan Sloane, barely past forty, mother of two, came to live among a dozen exiles in the Mexican town of Santa Felicia. The hill where the foreigners lived with their bridge tables, vegetable rows, and wide green view bordered the southern edge of town. An overgrown strip of park and a zoo of fifteen cages divided the slope from the houses of the poor, who crowded together on the outskirts of the city. On clear evenings, jukebox music and an occasional lion’s roar rose on the still air and reached the expatriates’ open windows.

The first time Morgan heard a lion, she asked Carlos about it.

“Where is that animal?”

“In the zoological garden,” he said. “There are monkeys there also, and macaws. You will hear them all.”

Carlos was the
mozo
who came with the house. He polished the floors, watered the roses and the limes, drove the car, and, when there were guests, put on a white jacket and served vodka and cuba libres. The moment he was out of the room, some woman would say, “So handsome,” and another, “Those eyes.”

Morgan spoke to him in abbreviated sentences of the Castilian Spanish she remembered from a summer in Seville twenty-two years ago.

“How many houses are there on the hill?” she asked soon after her arrival, and Carlos said, “Eight. They are owned four by North Americans, two by English, one by a French, and one by Danes.”

“Why have these people come here?”

“Consider this, señora,” Carlos said, and from the edge of the terrace where they stood, he embraced the landscape, drawing to him the municipality of Santa Felicia, the
presidencia,
the cathedral, and the zoo, as well as all the plowed and wooded world beyond. “Consider the sun, the pure air, and the view. Consider the tranquillity. These people have abandoned their other lives. Now they have this.” He lifted his hand toward scenery in general.

Morgan listened while Carlos, in these words, described flight.

Like the other dwellers on the hill, Morgan, too, had fled. She had taken flight from the sheer weight of the events of the past year. These included a loss of patience with infidelities, a legal separation from her husband, and her widowhood a few months later, when, stricken without warning, he died.

“Your husband has given you this house,” Carlos remarked on the day of her arrival, and she said, “Yes,” without adding that this husband, or former husband, Ned, had left her everything he had. Whether by intention or by mistake, believing he had half a lifetime left to change his will, she might never know.