American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [14]
I’m spending time with a pretty gringa, he writes to his mother, but as you know I’m not one to sniff after mysteries or wager on horses. These women are a chancy thing.
In truth, he finds himself wondering at her mystery, confused about signals. In Peru, things are simpler. There are two kinds of women: the kind you meet on the town and the kind you join at the altar. The kind you court is no random stranger, strolling down the Fenway, taking meals in a basement hall. She’s introduced by family, seen in her father’s home, in the presence of a chaperone. Not in a college dormitory, drinking champagne from a shoe.
The woman you marry is a genteel creature with just enough of an education to patter over a dinner table or steer the schooling of a child. Chief among her virtues is chastity, an unwavering commitment to one man and his children and, by association, to his family tree.
The gringas of the conservatory, on the other hand, are perplexing. They seem reasonably cultivated, decent señoritas, but self-reliant, brash as men. There is an unattached quality, a freedom that would be taken as scandalous in Lima. Maybe it’s a difference in cultures. Maybe it’s the nature of a nervous time.
War has become the explanation for everything. There’s a sense that your time is short. Each cigarette is a miracle. Every song a seduction. A party stumbles along for days.
The women are different; I don’t know how to judge them, he writes to his mother. There’s a code at work here; I don’t know what to think. In restaurants, you say what you’ve eaten and the waiter just trusts you and writes up a bill. It’s an upside-down country. A labyrinth of mirrors. Whenever I think I understand it, I find out I’m wrong.
He is wrong about much when it comes to her. He thinks she is twenty-three, three years his junior. She is thirty-one. He thinks she is rich. She only looks as if she might be, in her fur and her charge-account cabs. He thinks that she shuttles to Seattle and back again because parents await her. What is there is not family; it’s a past of her own.
In June, as Hitler limps out of Italy and American boys march into Rome, he finishes his thesis. The bridge apparatus works; he takes a master’s with honors. But by then, he is deep into a curriculum of a different kind. He is in love, looking for a way to stay. When a General Electric executive from Schenectady offers him work inspecting turbines for tankers, he takes it.
That winter he takes a wife as well. As he tells the story, he and my mother had spent many months apart: she in Manhattan, studying with the distinguished violin maestro Emanuel Ondricek; he in Schenectady, driving steam through a throttle. One weekend, they meet in Boston. By Monday, they are looking for a judge.
This is where the story unravels. Where the string wafts off into unfinished sentences, like a thread into February wind. It is she, after all these years, who fills in the gaps. It begins with her going to a Catholic priest on a Sunday, she tells me. She asks the holy man to marry them, but after a short conversation, he turns her away. When she reports to my father that the priest has refused her, she doesn’t tell him why. The next morning, they find a justice of the peace who agrees to do it. He takes down their information, tells them to return with their documents.
They come back another day, ready to make their pledges, but there are unexpected questions on the judge’s mind. Where’s your birth certificate? he asks my father. You can’t marry without one. My father holds out his passport, but the lawman shakes his head.
And you, young lady, he says to my mother in her teal blue dress. The information you gave me on this application is incorrect. Your driver’s license says you were born in 1913, not 1921. And Campbell must not be your maiden name. You’ve been married before.
My father looks down at the page as she takes out a pen and amends it. She draws a line through the year and writes above carefully. 1913. Then she skims down to