A Private Sorcery (34 page)

Two nights ago, listening to Hank's treatise complete with citations from
Nature
on the latest thinking about the molecular structure of the various hepatitis strains, it struck me how similar the food we were eating was to the fifties fare I'd eaten in bucketfuls. What happened to that place? I stopped going there shortly after I met Maria, those first months so arduous with her screaming every time she saw my beard that by the time I finished my charts, I couldn't face a subway ride downtown and an evening of my colleagues' off-color banter.

So
, I hear you saying—your landmark syllable, a container for persistence, irony and tenderness. You before the three A's: accident, addiction, arrest. From those gentle years when we'd get together whenever Rena was out of town. Over dinner, you would tell me about your cases. You'd developed that young psychiatrist habit of resting your chin in the sling of your hand: terrible for the back and neck but a way of keeping the head and face very still.

So
, I hear you saying,
Are you or are you not going to tell me about this Maria?

It takes me a moment to recognize that the question is mine. But why now? Why tell you now about Maria? Is it that you're safely locked away so I can see or not see you at will if my cheeks turn an uncontrollable crimson and even my mouth and palate feel mortified?
Se mortifier
, the French call it.
Je me mortifie
. I mortify myself. (
You are trying to throw us off the path again
, Merckin—that oedipal Johnny-one-note, I'd called him—would proclaim after thirty minutes of my Maria
lust confessions.) Or is it that Maria is easier to think about than your wife off somewhere with that slick journalist?

S
HE WAS WHAT
my friend Rosen, the other first-year attending, called a ball-breaker case. Two years, already, on a back ward, but young enough and smart enough and beautiful enough that it was conceivable she might recover before we destroyed her with the treatments we used then: drugs they wouldn't give today to a horse, enough voltage to the brain to electrocute an errant cow, excisions of what we thought of as little pockets of wild emotions. Might. That was the ball-breaker part. “Don't kid yourself, Dubinsky,” Rosen would say. “They're all watching you on this one. I got one, too. The test case. Find out if the kid has talent. Can't you see Nettles and the others sitting around the month before we got here making up our caseloads—nineteen hopeless ones and a ball-breaker apiece?”

Maria was twenty-one, though she looked sixteen and acted nine. A long, thick black braid her grandmother used to plait every morning touched her tailbone. On Saturdays, the grandmother had washed Maria's hair in the kitchen sink. When Maria first arrived, the social worker told me, it had been a ward crisis what to do with this hair. In a struggle with the arrogant ward chief, the nurses, usually generous, particularly with childishness such as this, had refused to wash or comb it; things had gotten ugly enough that they'd made veiled references to their union contract and certain clauses therein. Indeed, a decision had been made to have Maria's hair cut when Mrs. Wong—brought to the hospital by her son after she began insisting she'd been the last mistress of the last emperor of China who, disguised now as the greengrocer, the postman, the fishmonger, was still trying to have his way with her—was found early one morning standing in her embroidered slippers behind a chair dragged from the patients' dining hall plaiting Maria's hair.

The family, I learned, had come from Venice in the early years of the war. The grandmother's mother had been born to a Jewish father and, though not technically a Jew herself, had grown up in the Ghetto Nuovo near the Canareggio canal. Maria was eight when her grandmother,
terrified their bloodlines would be discovered, sold the two diamond rings she'd inherited from her mother, her only assets other than the domestic items of her household, to purchase passage to New York for her two children, her one grandchild, and herself. No ticket had been bought for Maria's ne'er-do-well father, Giuseppe. Abandoning her husband, Maria's mother, Francesca, took Maria to the harbor at dawn. Maria watched from the ship's deck as the campanile of San Giorgio Maggiore disappeared in the morning haze. In a ten-day journey, they rounded the tip of Italy, passing out the needle hole at Gibraltar into what her bachelor uncle, Carmine, called the great sea.

The foursome landed in New York and then, because a cousin lived there and because they felt more at home by the water, settled in New Rochelle in a house not far from the Long Island Sound. Trained as a stone mason, Carmine got a job working on the construction of the northern apse of the great Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Every morning, he would walk the mile and a half to the train station to catch the commuter line to 125th Street. Maria's mother took a job in one of the many Italian restaurants that dotted the shoreline. The grandmother, after enrolling Maria in elementary school (because Maria didn't speak a word of English, she was placed in the first grade), found a job cleaning the large Tudor house and doing the starching and ironing for a rich Jewish lady in Wykagyl who would send a black driver to pick her up every morning at eight.

Pooling the modest salaries of the three working adults, the family had lived comfortably. Saturdays, Maria's grandmother would make fresh raviolis and lay them out to dry on trays on her bed. Sundays, they attended mass at a Catholic church in Pelham. In the afternoons, while her grandmother rested on the couch listening to opera, Maria and her mother and uncle would, weather permitting, walk over the drawbridge to Glen Island where they'd watch the sculls and the birds and hear the sounds of the big bands floating down from the casino at the northeast point. Sometimes Carmine would carry his fishing pole, and while Maria and her mother played cards on the grass, he would strike up conversations with the other men, all either old or infirm or immigrants
like himself, about the progress of the war.

One morning in the fall of 1943, Maria's mother announced that she was leaving by boat that night for Italy. “Are you
matto
?” Carmine said. “There's a war going on now.”

“I need to see the child's father,” Francesca replied, refusing further explanation. It struck Maria's grandmother and uncle as odd since there had been no letters from Giuseppe to either Maria or her mother, and if letters had been sent eastward, it had been done in secret. Weeping, the grandmother sent the chauffeur back to her employer's house with the message that she was ill. No one thought to get Maria ready for school. Maria watched as her usually taciturn grandmother literally threw herself at Francesca's feet, but in the end her mother left with the promise that she'd be back by the end of the year.

A month later, on the day after Maria's eleventh birthday, a telegram informed them that Francesca had been killed and that Giuseppe was in jail, the suspect. The war and lack of funds precluded Maria or her grandmother traveling to the funeral. Instructions and money were sent for the aunts and cousins to arrange for the burial. Some time later, a letter came from the sister of Giuseppe: “Not to speak ill words of the deceased, nor to defend the ungodly act of my brother, she was a whore. She came here to taunt him. One lunchtime, he comes home to surprise her with panini and she is doing it with another man in his own bed. He did not kill her. She killed him.”

Maria never returned to school. At first, it was because of the nightmares. Such bad nightmares that she became terrified of sleeping during the night. Feeling sorry for the motherless girl, her teachers let the absences slide. Carmine took off a morning from his job to meet with the principal, and arrangements were made that Maria would return in the fall to redo the third grade. It was over the summer that Maria began telling people she could talk with her mother. In public, the grandmother dismissed it as nonsense. In private, she inquired about the conversations. “She is wearing her blue silk dress,” Maria would say. “The one with the rose-colored petals. She told me that you should braid my hair more tightly. She thinks Uncle Carmine should get a new
fishing pole.”

I never figured out why a truant officer was not sent when Maria did not return to school in the fall. Perhaps the family had moved. Indeed, there were many moves over the next several years, one of which was to an apartment where they lived next door to three sisters who worked in a dress factory and would bring the lonely girl bags filled with scraps of fabric—pieces of taffeta, strips of velvet, clippings of lace. Maria began making doll clothes, exquisite creations: fur-trimmed skating outfits, gauzy bouffant evening dresses, lacy wedding gowns. Her grandmother brought some of the clothing to show her employer, who showed it to the women she lunched with on Wednesdays at the B'nai Brith Ladies Auxiliary. Soon, mothers as far away as White Plains were bringing their daughters' dolls to the back door of the house where Maria's grandmother worked with instructions for the outfits their princesses desired.
Sì, sì
, Maria's grandmother would say to each request. Sometimes things got lost in translation, like the request for a tennis oufit that became a dentist outfit, but nonetheless the orders grew to where Maria's little business was making a dent in the family's bills.

From what her uncle would later tell me, Maria was happy. Every morning, after her grandmother left for work, she'd clear the kitchen table and begin to sew. As she sewed, she listened to an Italian radio station that featured romantic ballads. At eleven she'd break to take a walk, winding her way through the little cottages that abutted the sound and then over to Glen Island, where she'd feed the gulls scraps of the morning bread. She'd eat a simple lunch and, because she could not sleep at night, nap until five, when she'd rise to prepare the family's meal. “A wonderful cook,” her uncle said. “Nothing fancy, but everything fresh and delicate. Like herself.” He wiped a tear from his eye. After dinner, while her uncle did the dishes and her grandmother went early to bed, she'd return to her sewing, working through the night with the radio for company.

Then, the spring after she turned sixteen, everything changed. A man with a black beard and eyebrows that ran unbroken across his forehead rang the apartment bell. Instructed by her grandmother to never open
the chain, Maria peered through the crack. “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” he said. She shook her head no. He smiled, and then slipped a free calendar through the slot between the door and door frame. There were photographs of each month's flowers. January orchids. February roses. March cherry blossoms. She cut out the April tulips and taped the page on the refrigerator door so she could look at it as she worked. The next morning, the man rang the bell again. “Sorry, miss, a mistake,” he said. He pointed to the chain and smiled. She smiled back. He offered her a licorice. While she chewed the black rope, he mopped his brow with a handkerchief. “Warm day,” he said. “You wouldn't be so kind as to offer me a drink of water?”

She opened the chain. That evening, her grandmother found her huddled in the corner, her clothes ripped. There was dried blood on her thighs. She was whimpering. She would not let her fingers be peeled back from her face. Her grandmother bathed her. Maria was laid in the grandmother's own bed. Every day, until Maria's next period arrived, her grandmother lit a candle, praying for the flow to come.

After that, according to her uncle, Maria stopped sewing. She never left the house unless accompanied by her grandmother or him. He could not say what she did during the hours he and her grandmother were at work. This went on for three years until, when Maria was nineteen, her grandmother died after lifting the mattress from her employer's bed to vacuum the frame underneath. When the driver came to tell Maria that her grandmother had been taken to the hospital, Maria refused to open the door. While her uncle made the funeral arrangements, she kept the sheets over her head. Visitors heard her murmuring as though she were talking to someone. The morning after the funeral, the uncle took her to the emergency room. In the admitting report she was described as semicatatonic and urine-soaked. A month later, she was transferred to the state hospital.

She'd been there two years by the time I met her. “You should have seen her when she first came,” the nurses told me proudly. I was standing in the glass-enclosed nursing station. They pointed at a young woman dressed in a tight red skirt with a wide black belt. She was
playing cards with two other patients, smoking and laughing. A long braid lay fetchingly over one shoulder. “Frozen like a statue. We had to lift her onto the toilet. And that hair. What a struggle we had with that.”

I
T TAKES NEARLY
an hour to wind down the mountain to Panajachel. Through the window, I catch glimpses of a royal blue lake with three volcanoes overhead. I keep my forehead pressed to the glass, transfixed for the first time in my sixty-eight years by Nature's glory.

Inside the town, the spell is broken by the primitive tourism. Indians stroll in native dress, their wares spread out on the sides of the dusty streets. Against the background of the shanty bars and the sixties-style shops with names like Yellow Submarine, they appear to be actors in a historical reconstruction rather than the actual residents.

I settle on a hotel with a view of the lake. It's twice the cost of the room at La Posada de las Madres, but with Rena's insistence on paying for everything, I haven't spent more than a few quetzals. I put bathing trunks on under my shorts, stuff one of the towels into my camera bag and head to the hotel dining room, knowing full well that I'm making a poor choice. It's depressing: all German families and businessmen. I watch a woman in her fifties with her poorly preserved septuagenarian husband. Fingers heavy with rings. Unnaturally thin. Unnaturally tanned. A tall, sultry youth brings her an iced drink with a straw and wedges of fruit perched on the rim of the glass. She examines him head to toe. Her husband appears to be dozing. Am I imagining this, twisted as I am after twenty-seven years (
twenty-seven years
, I hear you echoing, your eyes round with amazement) with only my fantasies—Maria's bottom, her swinging braid—or does she press a folded piece of paper into the waiter's palm?