Secrets of Paris (33 page)

Standing in an office in the American consular section, Kelly felt her eyes flood with tears. For the first time in her life she was standing on American soil. It scarcely mattered that it was in France. Here, American laws applied. The carpet was brown, worn thin. How many hopeful aliens had passed through here? How many of their dreams had come true? How many had gotten to the States? The American flag stood in one corner. Old Glory! Unframed portraits of Presidents Washington and Lincoln hung on the wall. She had time to notice every object in the office before the man at the desk beckoned to her.

“Have a seat,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” Kelly said. And at that moment, as she lowered herself into the torn vinyl chair, magic entered her. A spell was cast, and Kelly knew: one of her sisters had slipped something, a potion, into her coffee that morning. Something to give her the courage to convince her interviewer of her worth. Her fingers quivered with the power; it shot through her spine the way lightning strikes a tree. Her sisters were good at magic. She remembered the time Annette had put a hex on Boy Bilido’s sister, how when the doctors cut her open they found her full of bugs.

The man studied Kelly’s petition. He tapped his finger up and down it. “Let’s see,” he said. “You are twenty-seven years of age, born in Cavite province in the Philippines.”

“Yes sir,” Kelly said, trying to place his accent. She had never heard one like it. A banner on his wall said “Miami Dolphins.” Was he from Florida?

“Ever been arrested?” he asked.

“No sir,” Kelly said.

“You finished college? Majored in accounting?” He spoke too
fast for her to respond. “Worked at a bank in Cavite? You’re a Catholic? Never married? With no children?”

“I have no children,” Kelly said, a bubble of panic rising. She fought it down, forced herself to breathe normally.

“What I don’t understand, Miss Merida,” said the man, smiling slightly, looking at her for the first time, “is how your education and past work experience prepare you to assist Mrs. McBride.”

“I have a flair for the work,” Kelly said, earnestly. “And I am an integral part of her business.”

“So, tell me just what you do.”

Kelly leaned forward, to read the Formica nameplate on the man’s desk. It said “Mr. Wright.” She felt better, knowing his name. “Mrs. McBride is a stylist,” Kelly said. “She is hired by magazines all over the world to create photographs.” Kelly remembered several of the examples Lydie had invented for her. Lydie had told Kelly to remember the examples, then use her imagination. “Right now Mrs. McBride is directing advertisements for d’Origny jewelers. We are putting on a banquet. Everyone will be there!”

“A banquet to advertise jewelry?” Mr. Wright asked skeptically.

“Oh, yes,” Kelly said. “Beautiful guests will be photographed wearing the jewels. We had to rent ball gowns, foods …” What else would you have at a banquet? She tried to picture fiestas in the Philippines, like the feast of St. Mary Magdalene on July 22. “Beautiful tablecloths, embroidered with flowers, birds, and dancing ladies,” she said. “Also centerpieces of fruits and flowers. With a twenty-piece band playing music for dancing. Also men to carry statues, very festive, to swing in tune with the band.” Kelly had no idea how close this image was to what would happen at a French banquet. She hoped the American Mr. Wright would have no idea either.

“And Mrs. McBride can’t arrange that on her own?”

“Oh, no! It takes both of us to do it right. We must have at least twenty different foods on the table—many noodles, beef
and
pork, oysters, mussels, shrimp, crabs, boiled chicken, and some desserts.”

“So you order the food, that sort of thing?” Mr. Wright asked.

“Yes, and Mrs. McBride is very picky about the way the foods look. Not everyone can do it right! Because the magazines and companies are paying a lot of money, so she insists it be perfect.”

“How long have you worked for Mrs. McBride?” Mr. Wright asked.

“One year,” Kelly lied, sitting even more erect. “And she has trained me to know exactly what she likes. And we have the same taste in everything! Imagine how difficult it would be for her to train someone new, someone very different from her.”

“Hmmm …” Mr. Wright said, making notations.

So far all was going well, Kelly thought. But she must not relax or let him trick her.

“Would you be willing to accompany her to the United States?” Mr. Wright asked.

Kelly took her time. Was this the trick question? Her brother Paul Anka had warned her there would be one. “Yes, I am willing,” she said after a minute.

“You have family in America? Your mother and two sisters?”

“That is true.”

“Can you tell me the first President of the United States?”

“George Washington, followed by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison …” Kelly said proudly. She knew them all; she wished he would ask her to name them.

“Have you ever been to Russia?” Mr. Wright asked.

“Never!” Kelly said. “It is the Evil Empire.”

Mr. Wright smiled a little, making Kelly very happy. Then he looked very stern, leaning on his elbows in a way that warned
Kelly he was possibly about to ask the trick question. “How did you get to France? Your passport shows no French visas.”

Everyone in her family and Lydie had told her not to mention her brother or the Philippine ambassador. “I crossed the German border,” she said.

“How?”

“On a bus.”

“That seems unlikely. They check passports on buses.”

“They didn’t check mine. It was nighttime, very late … all the passengers were asleep.” She said exactly what Paul Anka had told her to say.

“On most buses the passengers give their passports to the driver upon boarding, and he gives them to the border guards,” Mr. Wright said, watching her carefully.

“It was a local bus, from Fribourg to Colmar,” Kelly said, willing herself to not avert her gaze. She felt the bones in her jaw would crack. “I think perhaps the driver knew the guards.”

“Hmmm,” Mr. Wright said, making more notations. He wrote silently. Then, “Why Colmar? What was there to see in Colmar?”

The trick question! And Kelly was ready! “Oh, the museum, of course. It is so very beautiful, with the medieval altarpiece depicting scenes of heaven and hell. Have you seen it, Mr. Wright?”

“No, I haven’t,” he said wryly. He gazed at her for a long time. At that moment, Kelly had hope. Lydie had told her the decision would be made later, after Kelly left the embassy, but just then Kelly could imagine him telling her on the spot: “Welcome to the United States.”

But he just looked down, wrote a few more words. “Do you realize that you are in violation of French law, Miss Merida?” he asked.

“Yes,” Kelly said, her pulse quickening. She listened carefully for approaching guards.

“In most cases, I would have to report you directly to the French authorities. But someone has intervened on your behalf. Mr. Morrison, of this office, has okayed your release pending consideration of this petition.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you,” Kelly sputtered. Her body let loose one great shiver, and she felt a tiny trickle of urine escape. There were tears just behind her eyes. She was all fluid, ready to flood.

“You may go,” Mr. Wright said.

Kelly bowed her head, rose, backed out of the room as if she were taking leave of a bishop.

In the waiting room she looked around for Lydie and Patrice. Not seeing them, she walked outside and there they were, coming toward her through the park. All of a sudden she thought of leaving Patrice and felt a pang. Kelly understood it. In her province, people accepted the great emptiness that accompanied loving someone, because ultimately you would separate in the search for a better life. Even when it meant leaving family, loved ones behind. This was accepted as destiny. When the chance came to get to the States, you were propelled forward by a nameless force. You didn’t stop to think, or to worry, about whom you would miss. In this life, missing people you loved was inevitable. Nothing could be simpler, Kelly thought, watching Patrice come toward her with an expectant look in her eyes. Kelly would pack her bags when the time came.

All the Meridas in Paris came to the apartment behind Clichy to honor Kelly. Colorful streamers hung from the ceiling and music played on the radio. Delicious smells of ham, chicken, and milkfish filled the air. Everyone had questions about the interview. “What was the trick question?” Paul Anka asked. “Something about the German border?”

“Right as usual,” Kelly said, happy to flatter him. He had lived in Paris longer than anyone, without ever finding someone to help him get to the States, and he was growing discouraged.

“You’ll get rich in the States,” Sophia said, and everyone agreed. But while everyone cheered and talked about what Kelly should do with the money she would make, Kelly grew silent. Her head spun with memories of the Philippines. Even unhappy memories made her heart ache! She remembered when the family, eleven altogether, had slept on one coconut mat covered with a mosquito net. The net was the largest in the neighborhood and all the neighbors were impressed.

With the money they earned from Pan Am they bought a fish pond between a public cemetery and the sea. Half salt, half freshwater, the pond contained some of the fattest fish in the province. Prawns, milkfish—national fish of the Philippines—everything. The family raised fish. Her father thanked God and the pond’s proximity to the cemetery for the fishes’ fatness. The fish fed and spawned, growing enormous on seepage from the cemetery, so every three or four months her father would harvest them. He would drain the pond, and all the Merida children would run across the mud with baskets, scooping up all the dying, flopping fish.

“Remember when we would drain the pond and catch fish?” Kelly asked.

“You won’t be doing that in the States,” Jerry said. “There you’ll have your own fish market.”

“You girls had it easy,” Paul Anka said. “Draining the pond, collecting shells to sell to the tourists. You never fished the reefs.”

“Don’t talk about that,” Kelly said. She shivered every time she thought of Paul Anka, Jerry, and Ricky going to fish the reef for tropical fish to sell to pet stores in the States. Five hundred boys—plus livestock, dried corn, and rocks—would squeeze onto a boat and go to sea for two months. They would tie long ropes around
heavy rocks. Then two hundred boys at a time would dive into the water, hanging onto ropes that held the rocks, and they would bang the rocks on the coral to scare the fish. When the fish swam out, the captain would drop a huge net over them. The boys would dive down, eighty or a hundred feet, to make sure the net didn’t tear on the reef. Sometimes boys got caught and drowned.

Now Kelly looked at Paul Anka, her eyes filling with tender tears. Too many minutes underwater had left him with a slight palsy. He was her favorite brother. “Let me get you some noodles, Paul,” Kelly said.

He smiled at her. “Shrimp noodles, okay?”

Kelly felt honored that the family would serve shrimp noodles at a party in her honor. She heaped Paul Anka’s plate high with them. Now Marie-Vic was asking him to tell the story of Imelda’s snakeskin wallet. Kelly knew it by heart, how Mrs. Marcos had called the ambassador to tell him she wanted a red and purple snakeskin wallet to match her shoes, how the only one Paul could find was a sea snake wallet—from the Philippines.

“Imagine Imelda with a sea snake wallet!” Jerry said, making everyone laugh.

Kelly had dived for sea snakes as a child; they all had. Then her father would boil the skins off them and sell them to shoemakers. He had warned the children to be careful, saying that the snakes were poisonous, but only recently, in a magazine Patrice had given her, had Kelly learned they were even more poisonous than cobras.

She took a bite of chicken, savored the flavor and the sound of her family’s voices. The voices wrapped her like a cocoon, and she felt warm and loved. She had never lived without her family before, but she was prepared to try. She had a fantasy of standing in a crowd, swearing allegiance to the United States of America. Sending for the rest of her family, Paul Anka first.