“Time to skedaddle,” he told the driver. He drank from the bottle as they drove along, the driver narrowly avoiding several crashes on dark corners. They passed a dray horse that had been broadsided by a little truck—both of them lay on their sides expiring loudly in the backlit fog that was starting to creep down the street.
When he went upstairs, he found a letter tucked into the door. Heavy cream paper wrapped around a long white feather. Feathers again! What was it with feathers lately? He opened it and shook his head and tossed it on the floor.
“Wonderful,” he said.
It purported to be from the angel Gabriel. Welcoming her to New York. Congratulating her for keeping true to her duties to God. He had no idea that Teresita and Gabriel were correspondents from way back, but he wouldn’t have been surprised to find that out.
John hunted for some fresh matches and his bag of tobacco. He rattled around in the flour tins to find some folding money. As he walked out for the night, he stepped on the letter. Gabriel had warned again of doom coming to those who did not heed God’s call. On the street, John thought he should have thrown the letter away. Later, Teresita would prove him right.
The hot bodies crowded around him in the little bar he found on Second Avenue. “She can’t be known,” he said, bending an elbow and downing his third shot. “I know her better’n anybody, I reckon.”
“Have another, Tex,” said the barkeep.
“Think I might,” he said. “But, fellas, I’m telling you, she can’t be known. You look at her, and she’s a mystery.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” said one of his new pals. “About all of ’em!”
Haw! The boys nodded and guffawed. Women! By God!
“I married me a German gal right off the boat,” confessed the barkeep. “Try that one on for size. Can’t understand a damned thing she says.” He tipped a slug of amber into John’s glass. “But she keeps the bed warm and boils me a pot of red taters every day!”
Uproar. Fraternity. John bought the next round for all his bene coves.
“To Tex!” they bellowed.
It was the best he had felt in a week.
Teresita came home from the Waldorf a changed person. John was sitting in the shadows with his legs extended, reeking of whiskey and smoke. He just stared. She was now attended by noise—the skirts and underskirts and clattering bracelets rattled like turkey feathers. She took up twice as much space in her new dress. Her hair was sculpted atop her head, and a ridiculous little black hat was pinned there at a jaunty angle. It reminded John of a boat on a wave in some painting of ocean storms.
The grandes dames had remade her in their image. For the longest time, he had fantasized such a scene, fine clothing on his little Yaqui. Lifting those great skirts. But now that he saw it, he felt like laughing.
Worse was Dr. Weisburd, standing behind her all wet-eyed. Damn it. Another sucker in love with the Saint. The doctor placed a small stack of white boxes on their table and kissed her on each cheek. He tipped his hat to John and trotted downstairs.
“He kissed you,” John said.
“That is the style,” she announced.
“He kissed you twice.”
“Everyone in Paris kisses each cheek, John,” she said, an expert suddenly in the world of high society. “New York City is the Paris of America.”
Snooty.
He smirked.
First Don Lauro, now the Wise Bird. He wasn’t a fool. Teresita and her men.
“I see,” he said.
She busied herself removing her spiderweb shawl and folding it carefully.
“What’s this stuff?” he asked, gesturing at the boxes with his chin.
“Oh, John! They showered me with gifts!”
He massaged his temples with his fingertips.
“And they sent this for you,” she said, handing him a small case.
He popped it open. A gold watch and chain nestled in red velvet. He lifted the watch and swung it in the dull light.
“Do you like it?”
“Sure.” He put the watch away. “Who wouldn’t.”
“Perhaps we could get it engraved.”
“Perhaps.”
He checked his glass—it was empty.
“Say,” he said conversationally, “have you done any healings lately?”
She was distracted with her boxes.
“Healings, mi amor?”
“You know—that thing you do that makes you a saint.”
She glanced at him as she fluttered out the pale silk petticoat she was holding.
She smiled.
“Mrs. Oppen had a terrible toothache,” she offered.
He nodded.
“Mrs. Oppen,” he noted.
He got up, walked to the kitchenette, poured himself some water from a pitcher.
Staring at the wall as he drank, he said, “Have you seen any immigrants lately?”
She stared at his back. She went to the couch and sat. She unpinned her little hat and put it on the table.
“Didn’t think so,” he said, coming back and sitting down. “So busy with rich ladies and hats.”
He chuckled.
“You have a ministry of stylish hats!”
He yawned loudly.
She crossed her arms.
“Why are you so angry with me?” she said.
“Angry? Do I look angry?”
“Yes.”
“Not me! I’m a happy cowhand. I ain’t got a thing to complain about. Hell, I got a roof and three squares. Even got a indoor crapper just like real people. I think I’ll get me one of them fancy straw hats so I can be just like your friends.”
“John!”
“John!” he cried, mimicking her.
He smiled.
“Our first fight,” he observed.
“You are impossible!” she cried.
He sat back in his chair and sighed.
“Not worth talking about,” he said. “Everybody changes. You aren’t any different.” He paused. Picked at the chair arm. “After all,” he said.
She gasped.
What was happening here?
The air inside the room felt like it weighed hundreds of pounds. They were trapped in their seats, staring at opposing walls. Unable to stir. Unable to speak. Whole landscapes, crowds, nations churned in their minds.
“Have I changed?” she asked.
He laughed once: Ha!
“You know, my father is a great rancher—quite refined.”
“Yep. Your father. Thought he was better than everybody. I didn’t care for that.”
This was news to her.
“You wish you were my father!” she snapped.
He glared at her.
“Bullshit,” he said.
“He might have hired you, John,” she said, “to milk his cows or to brand his horses. But, really”—she shook her head and laughed a little, theatrically—“I have tried—very hard—to make you a gentleman….”
“Christ!” he shouted. “Listen to yourself!”
He flung himself around in his seat.
“You can’t be serious! You? The barefoot Indian girl? It is amusing to hear such talk from you.”
He sat back and looked away from her, red in the face, stung, muttering imprecations against his fate and all fancy people. Teresita, his betrayer.
Her hands shook. She studied his boots, for she didn’t want to look at his face. All her life, she felt, was going to play out like this—a slow river of mud burying her until she suffocated.
She collected herself.
She cleared her throat.
“Is this not what you wanted?” she asked. “Did I not give you the life you wanted?”
He turned his head and stared at her.
“I gave you New York,” she said. “I only came here for you.”
He opened his mouth, but nothing came. He blinked. He lifted a hand slightly.
“I would have gone home to my family. I am nobody’s daughter now. But I am
here with you.”
She nodded as if to herself. She pursed her lips.
“Perhaps we can no longer talk,” she said. “We used to talk.”
“I’m… sorry,” he replied. “I—” But he didn’t know what he meant to say or what he was feeling.
“Maybe tomorrow,” she said, rising.
“No!” he cried, reaching for her. His head was spinning. Had he been wrong?
She stood looking at the floor.
“John,” she said.
She turned her head a little and looked at him from under her brows.
“I am with child.”
She went to the bedroom and quietly closed the door.
Fifty-Six
DID SHE NOTICE THAT as her sorrows increased, the scent of roses faded from her skin? John had noticed that much when he told her, “This ain’t a fairy tale, Teresita. This is real life. And we are in the middle of it.” She smelled of sachet, lilac, sometimes powder. Rarely, sweat. But the roses were hard to smell—he had to go behind her ears, right where the hair sprouted from her tenderest skin. He didn’t often get there these days.
They struggled, as many couples must. Rupture and reunion. Accumulating wrongs hidden tenebrously in the deepest shadows where they refused to be defined, just radiated their pain outward to poison the smallest moments. She grew gravid with her first child, and he was fascinated with her extending belly, with her protruding navel and the mysterious dark line that appeared running down her abdomen. How her breasts suddenly became large. He marked it all and delighted in it. Yet…
She told herself she had been selfish to dream that she could be happy. It was not her lot to live in comfort and joy. Not when so many of her People hung still in dead Mexican trees, when so many of them lay scattered in terrible arroyos all across the desert. Was she being punished? she wondered. Punished for joy? For wanting a life that did not involve sacrifice and nothing but?
When John wasn’t there, she found Mr. Somers a kind neighbor—he helped her up the stairs, and he went to the corner market and the farmers’ stalls and brought her apples or milk.
One day John tossed another egg-spackled plate in the sink and turned to her and said, “How do I know that’s not Weisburd’s baby?” She cringed, knowing that those words a woman would not recover from.
After he had gone on his tortured rounds, she pulled up her shawl and braced herself along the railing and went downstairs to the street. The contract with the Consortium was finally reaching its termination. The men wanted to sign her up again, but she knew she would not. It was over.
She hadn’t felt God stir in her for… weeks. Months, perhaps. She hadn’t heard Him speak, hadn’t sensed Him in her prayers. When she prayed.
It was so hard to remember anything. This roiling child within her. She told herself that the movement of the baby inside was the kick of God Himself. But it was not the same, and no mystical talk would fool her. Magical? Yes. But all flesh and blood. There was no Holy Spirit dancing up and down her spine. The distractions were huge—duties she had attending to the fine people who still presented her to one another as if she were a famed actress from the gaslit stages on Broadway. The endless chess match with John. Her headaches were tremendous.
Prayers—at night she forgot because she was so weary. In the mornings, she often overslept and missed the ritual completely. And frankly, kneeling was becoming out of the question. She realized she hadn’t been in a church since El Paso, perhaps. She couldn’t remember any churches in between there and here.
Mr. Somers had rhapsodized about the stunning new cobalt-blue window in the Marble Church, around the corner. She had seen the church many times, of course, the tall steeple and the baffling sign in front: COLLEGIATE CHURCH. What did that mean? Certainly not Catholic. But a college church? What college? Atop the church, a rooster on a stick, turning in the wind. She had never seen a rooster on a church. Somehow, it felt comforting.
She walked to Fifth Avenue and turned and went a block to the corner of Twenty-Ninth Street. The mud of Fifth was being bricked over now as the city spread like lava, eating the scant woods and small farms at this end, rolling ahead toward the shores of the island. Many carts rushed around the bricklayers and jounced into the dirt beyond, casting up puffs of dust that choked everyone. Teresita paused for a lull in the great flow and stepped into the street, waddling a bit, holding up her belly. She took the proffered arm of a gent on the other side and rose to the curb as a skronking goose of a jitney wobbled by on spindly wheels.
They were not far from Penn Station, and the traffic was at times jammed to a halt all around it. This was not as bad a day as some. Perhaps the station had not yet disgorged its first travelers, she thought.
The church appeared empty when she peeked in the door. She stepped in and was greeted by a warm roll of notes from the organ. Someone was in the loft, practicing, and though she did not know the hymn, “Filled with the Spirit’s Power,” it was pleasing. She looked around. No holy-water founts. A bare cross above the altar. Ah, she thought—Protestants. Christ risen, not suffering. Well, that suited her fine. She could use a little ascendance now.
She walked into the pews and stared up at the Tiffany window. Yes, she saw the blue. Moses and the burning bush. The flames were deep cobalt in the morning sun. It was quite entrancing. She sat and breathed.
“God?” she whispered. “Here I am.”
A rector came forth carrying a huge key. She blinked. The key was four feet long!
“What?” she said.
The man nodded to her.
“Big clock,” he noted.
She craned around to see a big clock on the wall.
“Yes,” she said.
He heaved the great key up and inserted it in a keyhole that could have held a possum. She started to smile. He regarded the whimsical key.
“I see,” he said. “Yes. It is comedic!” He grabbed the key. “Well, watch this!”
He put his knees and back into it and turned the key with great ratcheting clicks.
“Must!” he grunted. “Wind! The clock!”
She started to laugh.
What a strange little moment.
For a few seconds, the key didn’t want to come free, and he wrestled with it.
She laughed harder.
He looked over his shoulder at her and grinned.
“Blasted key!” he said.
It popped out and he staggered back and hurried away.
“Did you come for the window?” he asked and then vanished through the narrow arched passageway at the far end of the church.
But she couldn’t have answered anyway.
The sharp pain that bloomed in her abdomen as she laughed made her bend over and gasp.
And so her daughter’s journey into this life began: suspended between time and laughter.
Fifty-Seven
SURELY, TERESITA THOUGHT, her powers had abandoned her.
God Himself had abandoned her.
She lay in Bellevue’s maternity ward crying out in pain. Someone, comforting her, had babbled that it was the most modern such lying-in ward in the country, perhaps the world. Modern? She yearned for hot tea, a bundle of soothing herbs, and the hands of Huila herself. Not all this echoing white porcelain and cold metal. No. No!
She heard herself bellow: “I want a banana!”
Why was she not able to work her medicine on her own body? Why was she not able to do for herself what she had done for hundreds of others? She wasn’t thinking well at that moment, but when she could think, she realized she had not brought a little one into the world since before St. Louis. Perhaps she had forgotten how. Perhaps she was without powers.
She was mortified that she was going to pee all over the bed. Or worse. And all these Americans watching.
¡Ay!
¡Ay, no!
Calm, she told herself. Calm. What did she say to those expectant girls in their huts? She couldn’t remember. If she could only remember, then by God she’
d make some progress.
¡Ay!
“I want to get on my knees!” she shouted.
The nurses did not understand her. They patted her hands while holding her in place. She was starting to fight. The doctor peered down at her.
In English, she said, “Knees… please… now, cabrones!”
She didn’t even feel guilty about cursing. To hell with them all. If Tomás were here, they’d hear some ripe words.
The doctor looked at the nurses and grinned a little. They raised their eyebrows. Indians, they were thinking. Mexicans. Raising a fuss. Squatting like animals. He nodded, and they tied her wrists to the rails with cotton straps.
“You’re a tetch combative,” he said. “This will keep you from hurting yourself.”
She stared at the straps.
“We will have our baby the modern way,” he said as he strolled out.
She was breathing like a trapped coyote.
Oh, there was certainly no smell of roses in that room.
Whole nations of pain.
She said to her child: “Why are you trying to kill me?”
She said to God: “Why are You absent now?”
She said to Huila: “You did not come to help me, damn you!”
It turned dark. The dark went on for a few weeks. She cried and shouted. She actually slept, but the sleep was demented, hot, full of monsters and fires. Then it was growing light. How fast was the night in New York? Eternity and a minute were indistinguishable to her now. Still, her body clenched in bone-cracking waves of hurt.
She told God she needed help. But God knew. God knew it all, didn’t He? Even cats, dogs, cows—all mothers struggled in torture. She had not given it its due. She had too easily erased the suffering and never imagined why the suffering was part of it. God knew and didn’t care. Worse, God had made it that way.
“Why do You hate us?” she asked the empty air.
God did not answer.
“Agua,” she demanded. She was beyond asking politely. She was beyond being the Girl Saint. If she could have gotten her hand free, she would have scratched the nurse’s wan smile right off her face. The nurse brought a steel cup to Teresita for a gulp. And another. In between swallows, Teresita smiled drunkenly. She drooled. She grunted. Now, she thought, now I understand. I understand. I don’t care to understand. I get the notion—it is clear. God? Help? Oh, she had not prayed much since arriving in New York. Now, hypocrite that she was, she was begging for help.