Island of Divine Music (12 page)

O
n Tuesday evening Paulie passed her house again. When he got home the president was on TV describing offensive nuclear missiles on the
imprisoned island
of Cuba. Paulie’s little brother Angie imitated Kennedy’s voice until his mother told him to hush. The handsome man’s face was haggard, the eyelids swollen, lizard-like. These missiles would make it possible for the Soviets to vaporize major U.S. cities in minutes. The president’s pompadour wagged up and down as he spoke. He said that our armed forces were prepared for
any eventuality,
and that a missile fired from Cuba would result in a
full retaliatory nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.

Oh, my God in heaven, Paulie’s mother said.

The missile crisis lasted six days, and each day a larger crowd gathered before the appliance store in Berkeley, college students
and working people on break among the neighborhood winos. Mrs. Rinaldi’s face was pale, her eyes swollen in class. She told him to stay after, placed her hand on his arm, and asked if he knew where she lived.

The Cadillac was gone. Paulie’s heart bounced against his sternum as he walked to her door. She had changed to a blouse and culottes, which Paulie took for a very short skirt until she turned and led him through the house.

Stern faces of dead relatives scowled from the mantel. A marlin encased in laminate stared as he followed her out the back to a small iron door leaning at forty-five degrees into a hump of earth behind the house. Mrs. Rinaldi lifted the latch and swung the door open. He followed her down a ladder into a concrete chamber buried under the dandelions.

She had him carry five-gallon drums filled with drinking water, boxes filled with canned food, blankets and pillows, candles and Sterno. After several trips they sat together on a canvas cot wiping their brows and breathing the dank air. Do you have one of these?

Paulie said they didn’t. Mrs. Rinaldi sat beside him in the semi-darkness and said she hadn’t been this frightened since the Nazi bombs, the many nights of her childhood spent in terror waiting for death to drop from the sky. Paulie only vaguely understood what she referred to. Black-and-white newsreels of buildings reduced to rubble, bomber pilots holding their thumbs up. This is really so much worse, she said, because if neither side backs down . . . Her voice trailed off.

Paulie sat a moment wishing the sirens would sound. He remembered
all the drills in elementary school, his head resting on his knees, the children under desks with eyes closed, waiting. A rocket with an atomic bomb on its way to San Francisco, the blast so bright even from across the bay he would see through his eyelids, he would see the bones in his legs. He wished for the screaming civil defense sirens and maybe just one bomb hitting New York, so that he and Mrs. Rinaldi would have to wait it out together. His family would drive to the shelter under the library, and if San Francisco did get hit the fallout would blow south to Los Angeles. Pete, drunk on some park bench in the city, would be vaporized.

Their elbows and knees touched. He listened to her breathe. They would share the water and canned soup, listen to his little radio for war updates. To conserve power they’d lie together in the dark, on this little cot.

Did you hear that, what is that? She climbed the ladder, and Paulie stood beneath her, weak with lust. A droning engine noise grew louder and louder. Mrs. Rinaldi reached into the sunlight, her arms flailing, and pulled the door closed.

He had never been in such total darkness. Her voice trembled in the space above him. He could feel the heat of her legs in front of his face. Help me down, please, help me. It sounded like she was crying.

His hands touched her buttocks by mistake and swiftly slid up to her waist. She stepped down, slowly, into his arms. She trembled, and he felt moisture where her face pressed against his shoulder. What was it?

A huge plane, a military plane. She sobbed. Pardon me, I’m a mess.

Probably from Travis AFB.

I must find the light switch. Oh, dear. He felt her body pivot from his embrace without entirely disengaging. Travis what did you say?

An American military base. The light came on, a single glaring bulb hung from the ceiling. Her face was pale and blotched, her cheeks shining with tears. Mrs. Rinaldi, if the Russians drop a bomb, it won’t be by plane.

Oh, of course not. She sat on the cot. Oh, I’m silly, aren’t I? Oh, Christ.

In the movies of that time, a man would give a hysterical woman a glass of liquor to settle her nerves. Paulie searched the plywood shelf filled with colorful labels, tomato-vegetable soup, Spam, flashlight batteries, until he spotted a brandy bottle. The shelter was so snug he was able to reach it without moving from the cot. Would you like some of this?

She laughed. No, thank you. I think we were saving that for . . . well, for some comfort.

I love you.

She stared at him. He thought he had only said this to himself, the way he would chant prayers and encouragements during games when his family was around, but the words had slipped out. Oh, my, she said. You mustn’t.

I mustn’t.

She climbed the ladder. He sat on the cot and listened to her grunt softly. He was an idiot, a child. He heard her gasp. Paul, you try this. She came down, and he got up slowly, then climbed to
where she’d been. It was over. Push, Paul. The door wouldn’t open. He shoved and shook it. Is there some kind of handle? he asked.

She climbed up beside him. He was pressed against her backside. Push, Paul, hard as you can. They pushed together.

I think it’s latched on the outside, he said. It must have fallen in place when you closed it.

Oh, my God! Oh, goddamn my idiot husband! This is the most ridiculous door! She bounced up and down against him, pushing, and her hair brushed his face, and he wanted to stay right where he was for hours and inhale the smoke and perfume in her hair, even though he mustn’t. He figured Pete would open the door eventually because they’d left such an obvious trail: the open back door, the missing supplies from the back porch. Oh, this is ingenious! You survive the blast only to starve to death in a crypt!

T
hey lay together under the wool blankets. She wanted to be held, and after they kissed once she said, Please, just hold me, and he did. Hours passed. He inserted the nipple into her ear when she asked, pressing it carefully into the delicate shell of her flesh, and she lay breathless beside him, taking in a conveyance new to her, though she was seventeen years his senior. He could feel the difference in her breathing when she took it in, as she listened to the talk of missiles lying atop ships, swaying over the black ocean.

She fell asleep, and he turned off the light. Russian merchant vessels approached the American battleships surrounding Cuba. His life as a schoolboy was over. He knew that if one should pierce that
circle and reach the island a terrible new life would begin. Cities illuminated by white flames, families incinerated while he and this woman remained safe underground, waiting to emerge into their new lives. He knew that if the crisis passed he should join the service, that he should take what grace he’d had on the field and make a life of protecting loved ones from communists and Nazis. He held her and thought of the end of this life and the start of another and fell into a dream of chasing a ball across the outfield of Seals Stadium. He was dressed in baggy pinstripes which flapped like pajamas as he ran, and his glove was fat and barely larger than his hand. The grandstands were filled with his classmates and family, even those who had passed away, and they wore black suits and round hats like immigrants gathered on a ship. He was reaching for the ball, struggling to lift his legs in the heavy garment, when he woke in the dark, and they were moving against each other, sliding out of their clothes. He felt her hand on his back, and they moved with each other and into each other until she cried out and the brilliant light of day exploded above them.

Penelope

O
f his youth she knew only sketchy details. Penelope learned from the old woman, Rosanidia, that Jesús and his teenaged mother had left the city to pick artichokes near Salinas after old Giuseppe, Penny’s grandfather, had died. She heard rumors about Maria and the evil men from her past, drug pushers and criminals, men who had stalked her like wolves until Giuseppe had taken her in. Her mother and aunts defended Maria against all allegations, agreeing with Rosanidia, who called her
pobrecita,
or a poor little thing. Her father and Uncle Ludovico shook their heads or smirked, and sometimes used the word
tramp
instead of
thing.

In the years that followed Jesús and Maria’s flight from San Francisco, Rosanidia received cards from places with quaint names: Hood River, Vale, Nampa, Rupert, and she showed them to Penny and her Aunt Francesca. The old ladies touched each other’s arms and waved their hands as they shaped the words in Spanish, Italian, and English. Penny puzzled through the language and gestures of the women as they described the travels of the mother and child.
Her catechism teacher said that they’d probably
joined the migrant stream,
and in Penny’s imagination they were carried away by a wide brown river through the valleys of California, floating to faraway fields where the earth provided sustenance and the Romans and Pharisees from her Sunday missal couldn’t persecute them. At night, before drifting to sleep, she’d picture herself joining them, floating in the soft water and the sweet winds of summer to some fragrant field where they would embrace and eat their fill of strawberries, where she would hold the toddler on her hip in a field of wildflowers and laugh.

She remembered how men’s heads turned like owls’ when Maria walked down a street, and how women’s faces opened up when they saw the child. Their beauty was palpable; it changed the temperature of a room when they walked in. It started a quivering in the air the way a sudden rhythm-and-blues beat could make her dance before she realized what she was doing.

Two years after their flight Rosanidia gave Francesca a post-office-box number in a place called Jerome. Penny wrote Maria a letter in what she thought was simple enough English for Maria to read. She dotted her “i”s with circles and ended each sentence with an exclamation point. She asked about the orchards and fields, the mountains and valleys. She asked if the baby was in kindergarten or first grade. She described her cantankerous math teacher and sent one of her wallet-sized school portraits.

Maria and Jesús were living in a former internment camp used to contain Japanese Americans during World War II. Mexican families
crowded together in old barracks without hot water, usually six people to a ten-by-twenty-foot room. The camp was circled by barbed-wire fencing, and the nearest store was several miles away, across an expanse of desert sagebrush. An enormous potato-processing plant filled the air with a perpetual stink. Few of the children made it to school.

Of his youth Penny could only imagine something sweet and bucolic, a life spent running in fields and swimming in rivers, days spent eating the fruit just picked from the tree. She imagined their poverty as something simple, a one-room cabin in an orchard, a canvas tent in fragrant fields. When her mother told her they might be living in squalor and that her father should send them money, she pictured squatters living in happy squalor, claiming a piece of God’s earth by the simple act of bending their knees in a clearing near a river. The word
squalor
suggested to her a free and sloppy life, like her bedroom before her mother made her pick it up, a way of living outside society’s rules. In poverty people lived by God’s blessing, she thought, and in squalor most anything out of the ordinary could happen.

I
n Maria and Jesús’s squalid quarters the crucifix above the sheet-metal stove was plastic, and the savior’s feet were accordingly disfigured by years of fire. Little Jesús knelt before its warmth and ate the animal cookies from the box. He could see the first sunlight touch the blond-and-silver foothills of the Sawtooth Range through
a window cracked and mended by masking tape. He was awaiting his first day of school, during which he would sit with two other Mexican children, lost in a dust devil of unintelligible English.

Maria was sick of the camp and the potato and beet fields, the bitter cold and isolation, the stinking wind which tore their clothes from the line. There were lines penciled in Japanese on bed slats, words written from a grief of twenty years before; there were cracks in the walls that let the cold in, and rats that bred under the floorboards. While Jesús would spend his first day lost in a classroom she would find a niche in a motel on the highway, and soon they would live in a room with plumbing, two beds, a hot plate, and a TV. Maria would earn rent on her back and by cleaning rooms, and Jesús would watch Roy Rogers while she sold herself in a vacant room to drunk campesinos and cowboys as well as the Mormon businessmen who ran the city council and school board. Maria would drink the sugary wine that Arturo, the motel manager and pimp, provided her, and in a year she’d gain thirty pounds, yammering at the TV about God’s plan to end the world while Jesús, sitting beside her on the bed, tried to decipher the jokes on the sitcoms.

His schoolmates called him Chuy and sometimes Indio because he was dark and looked more Indian than the others. He was swift-footed and clever, a rascal with a big laugh whom older boys chased but couldn’t catch on the playground. He was often in trouble for drawing instead of adding, speaking Spanish where it wasn’t allowed, and climbing all over the classroom as if it were a jungle gym. He loved the classroom and the kids and the teacher, even when he
was in trouble. Miss Rawlings was a young woman fresh out of the normal school in Albion, and Jesús was her first challenge, a monolingual urchin who wouldn’t sit still, a boy with a huge smile and beautiful hair. She drove to the motel room to discuss Jesús’s behavior on a bitter January evening, and it was all she could do to restrain herself from scooping him off the bed, where he sat eating potato chips and watching
The Honeymooners,
and taking him home. Miss Rawlings sat beside him for twenty minutes among the empty wine bottles and butt-filled ashtrays, watching Ralph Cramden threaten to punch his wife and send her to the moon, until Maria appeared. She had just finished servicing a client, and her hair was wild, and she smelled of wine and a man’s sweat and semen.