American Chica (27 page)

I came up to the narrow bed, and my grandmother’s head rotated slightly so that her face shone with light from the ceiling. Her profile was waxy and yellow, her forehead grooved with pain. She opened her eyes and I could see how pale they were, how preternaturally blue. Then, quickly, she squeezed them shut. “Pretty little thing,” she said, although I was sure she hadn’t seen me. “Such a sweet face.”

“Go on,” my mother urged me, and I leaned down and pressed my lips against her cheek. She was cold as a gila, even though an electric coil heater hummed and sputtered at the foot of the bed.

I had heard of death, felt human bones in my hands, picked teeth out of skulls. I’d watched Flavio drown drunken turkeys upside down for our dinners. I had seen people wail and screech in funeral processions down the narrow streets of Paramonga. But I had never felt such proximity to death.

I waited there, one hand on the chenille bedspread, my nostrils twitching like a rabbit’s against the acrid smell, but my grandmother did not move, and so neither did I. Mother was like granite behind me. Perhaps it was fear, perhaps it was the way of this strange, inscrutable land, but I did not see her reach out to touch her mother.

Grandma Lo’s night table was filled with an assortment of things I longed to inspect. There was a black Bible with her mother-in-law’s name—
L. E. Clapp
—stamped with gold into the leather; a white linen handkerchief with an embroidered, pink ballerina; a slender flask with a cascade of lilies down its side; a row of brown vials; a hypodermic needle; three rectangular
bottles with cork stoppers and scribbled labels; a wooden ring; a spool of lime thread.

I took in these details as I listened to my grandmother’s labored breathing. From time to time a shudder rippled through her as if some unseen creature were darting down the tunnels of her body. When, eventually, we backed out of her room, my mother’s face was swollen with sorrow.

I realize now how little I felt for Grandma Lo. She was not the vibrant, commanding figure of my abuelita, the sort of presence I would have expected from a woman of her generation. I studied the photographs of her in those apartments, looking for some sign of my other grandmother’s brio, but all I saw was a mild sweetness unlike anything I had encountered before. Even in photographs taken in younger, healthier times, Grandma Lo was an unassuming woman. She used little makeup, dressed modestly in starched white medical vestments, did not dye her hair. She was only three years older than Abuelita and had a prettier face, but there was no vanity to her. As if she didn’t want undue attention from the world.

“Stomach cancer,” my grandfather said plainly when we joined him in his office waiting room. We had heard Mother say those words before. A hat and sheepskin jacket hunched on the coat stand behind him, confirming the grimness of his message.

Hungry for distractions, George and I began exploring Doc’s bookshelves and cabinets. Dentures grinned back at us. Miniature curios had been fashioned from dental enamel: a shiny white bear with his claws in the air, an Indian in full headdress. As we marveled at these, Grandpa Doc explained to my parents how my grandmother’s illness had advanced.

For the more than ten years since they had come to Rawlins, she had been his nurse, secretary, and accountant. He had performed the surgery; she had passed him the tools. He had thrown the X-ray switch; she had held the film. He had built the
practice; she had kept the books. But in recent years, he said, he would chance upon her in a corner, overcome with pain, or doubled over behind a door, so that a patient wouldn’t see.

I hardly knew who Lolelia Brooks Clapp was, but I could see that my grandfather loved her. Her dying was breaking his heart. He was a man of few words, but as he talked, and as George, Vicki, and I gathered at his feet to listen, a hazy picture of their life emerged. She had given him four daughters. She had been the compliant partner, tolerant of his caprices before he’d settled down to doctoring: his land deals, rodeo-impresario days, bridge-building businesses. She had been a lover of books, had persuaded him to stretch out on the waiting-room sofa between appointments to listen to her read Coleridge, Whitman, Kipling. She had played the piano to his violin. She had lounged in his canoe as he fished in Lake Seminoe, crooning sweet verses about happiness to come. But what had come, in the end, was punishing—pain, shrinkage, a flickering in the world.

He told Mother that he had driven her out to a hospital in Denver. He had flown in specialists from the East. He had devoured every medical journal he could find. Now, steeled against the inevitable, all he could do was sit in his own waiting room, marking time.

His life did have distractions, as we came to learn. Grandpa Doc was raising two teenage grandsons in the Ferguson Building—Huey and Nub—sons of two of his other daughters, my Aunt Erma and Aunt Helena. He was also minding an ancient mother, Lucinda Ellen Clapp, who, we’d soon see for ourselves, was deaf as a billiard ball, and wild; and he was building a house out on his ranch, thirty miles away, at the foot of Elk Mountain—a neat wood box on a level sprawl of sage. Anything to take his mind off what was happening in the other room.

Now there was us.

“You hungry, Takey?” Grandpa Doc finally said to my mother.

She looked at Papi. He was arched over the desk, studying a map now, running one hand through his curly, black hair. “Well, maybe the children are,” she said softly. “How about you, Daddy? How about Mother?”

“Aw, hell. She won’t eat much,” my grandfather said, and then he reached around and spat a black gob of tobacco juice into a brass spittoon.

George and I glanced at each other and grinned. Vicki’s eyebrows shot up like two birds.

“Well, go downstairs to the store and charge up anything you like,” he said. “Tell ‘em to put it on Doc Clapp’s account.”

“All right, Dad. Tomorrow Jorge and I will start looking for our own place to stay.” She walked over to her father and put a light hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her with a wistful smile. They did no more than that, and yet I felt a bond between them. A language they understood. They didn’t need to fill the air with chatter, these gringos, unburden their hearts, peck each other noisily on the cheek. They could sit stonily by, staring down at their hands, and communicate. They could tend a dying mother without touching her. As we said good night to him, I vowed to learn how to do all of that someday. But first, I’d learn how to spit.

AS THE HOURS
unfolded on that first day in Rawlins, Mother made a point to tell us about the Clapps. It was clear we were disoriented, out of our element, and her teaching nature returned in the form of quick lectures on family history. She began by describing the great-grandmother I had yet to meet, Grandpa Doc’s mother, Lucinda Ellen Adams-Hatter Clapp.

Great-Grandma Clapp claimed to be a descendant of John Quincy Adams. The rest of the family accepted that lineage without argument; her mother, Matilda Adams, had said it was
so. She had married young and come west with James A. Clapp, my great-grandfather. James A. Clapp had descended from one of five Clapp brothers who had set sail from England six years before the American Revolution. Two of those five original brothers had sought prosperity in Canada. Two eventually built names for themselves in Boston. The Boston Clapps produced lawyers and bankers, one newspaper editor, one famous etymologist, one generous patron of Amherst College—pillars of New England society. But the fifth of those English brothers went west to preach God’s word. That was the Clapp of my line.

In 1880, James A. Clapp, who had studied law, and his wife, Lucinda Ellen, established a merchandise business in Hollenberg, Kansas, which included a bank, a law firm, a U.S. Post Office, and a dry-goods store. Within twenty years, they had amassed a fortune. When my great-grandfather died and left his wife everything, she proved a gritty businesswoman. By 1908, she had sent one son to medical school, another to law school, married off their daughter, and made each of their children the gift of a farm.

But Great-Grandfather Clapp’s death was not her first challenge. Great-Grandma Clapp had known her share of disasters. She had survived a Civil War. She had seen insect plagues descend in black clouds and chew landscapes bare. She had seen Indian braves whack their way through white settlements to avenge the death of Sitting Bull. After her husband’s death she outwitted two World Wars by having had sons and great-grandsons who were too old or too young to fight. She survived the Great Depression because her store was stocked and debtors paid her with real estate. Acres and acres of it. She owned so much land that it almost didn’t matter whether she lost a little to the government now and then. “I know all the crooks and turns of the mercantile business,” she crowed to newspaper reporters, but the worldwide financial disaster would change everything. The Clapps
became land rich, suspicious of banks. They began carrying their money in satchels, twenty-five thousand dollars at a time. They owned chunks of Kansas, chunks of Wyoming. When two of Great-Grandma Clapp’s three children died of leukemia, her only living son, my Grandpa Doc, inherited the wealth. Grandpa Doc had grown up with plenty of money. His instinct, unlike his forefathers’, was to spend it. But another of his instincts, right down the family line, was to head west. Ever west. When his four daughters were grown, he took Grandma Lo, left Kansas, and followed that impulse. When my mother became a widow and her Uncle Elver proposed to pay her way through a music conservatory, it never dawned on her that her father might have made the proposal. She did not ask him; he did not offer. Grandpa Doc took his money satchels to Wyoming. He dusted off his medical degree and hung it on a wall.

On our second day in Rawlins, Papi took me into Room 7, one of the apartments in the Ferguson Building, to meet Great-Grandma Clapp. She was a dried-out little husk of a woman in a black taffeta bonnet, a calico dress, and a circus magician’s black cape. Her long white hair was gathered into a jelly roll at the back of her head. Her jaw was set in a flat grim line. I bowed and kissed her leathery cheek as my father had instructed me to do and then perched on the edge of a hard wood sofa while her two steely eyes took me in. She was stringy, puckered, thatched with a frizzled brow.
She’s a big help to your Grandma Lo,
my father was saying—in a booming voice so that she could hear—but I could see that the woman was a big help to no one. She seemed unreliable, cracked.

We sat there awhile before she got bored and began shuffling her newspapers. She bought two or three a day and went at them with two pairs of glasses—mounted on each other over her nose—and an enlarging glass to boot. “So long as I live in this world,” she squeaked triumphantly at my father, “I want to know
what’s going on.” Papi glanced at me and winked. Clearly, he had reached some level of comfort with her on his last visit. “Just how old are you now, Grandma
Viejecita?”
he shouted in her ear. She squinted and stuck out three fingers in response. She preferred to reckon her age toward a date rather than from one. She was three years from a century. Ninety-seven. She had been born in the age of the musket and would die in the age of the nuclear bomb.

I had no equivalent in my Peruvian life for Great-Grandma Clapp. I had met elderly aunts in Lima—lively, bustling round women with silky soft faces and bosoms redolent with perfume. I knew about femininity, had heard my abuelita say that fine shoes and conversation could carry a woman far. But this wizened little ancestor was like no woman I had ever known: I had no way to gauge her. In her boots, she stood little taller than I did, swaggered as if she were a man. She was beyond my powers to compute.

It wasn’t much later that I found that Room 8, next door to Great-Grandma Clapp, was where my cousins lived. Huey was Aunt Erma’s son—a tall, gangly eighteen-year-old with radiant eyes. Nub was Aunt Helena’s boy—sixteen, unruly, brooding, and beautiful. They were students at Rawlins High School and temporary wards of our grandfather, who had volunteered to break them in.

When we saw the boys, they seemed different as a pair of wild broncos, on the far side of tame. In Huey’s case, he was there because Aunt Erma, my mother’s oldest sister, was a teacher out on the range, in a log-cabin schoolhouse, improving the minds of a rich rancher’s children. We saw Erma only on weekends, mincing up the metal stairs of the Ferguson Building with books under one arm, a pencil jutting from her hair.

Nub was there because his mother was “plumb out of her gourd,” living in an asylum, having her skull rocked with electric
shocks, and because his father was nowhere to be found. He was a bad-boy virtuoso, a genius for testing the law. He had started small: joy rides in the wee hours of morning. A little gas from a neighbor’s truck. But soon enough he was heading down Route 30 in swiped cars, siphoning out filling stations, drag-assing home in the back of the sheriff’s car. He was reckless, raw-boned, irresistible.

Grandpa Doc felt a keen responsibility for those living under his roof—or the roof of the Ferguson, anyway. He told us a story that summed up what he was having to shoulder. One warm spring day when he was working on a Comanche, he found Nub on the waiting-room sofa, a freckle-faced girl at his side. “You two there long?” said Doc.