The Infinite Plan (19 page)

“What did you say your name was?” To hide her embarrassment, Judy spoke in a loud, rather unfriendly voice.

“Jim. Jim Morgan. . . . You look really pretty.”

“Do you still want to marry me?”

“Do I!”

Padre Larraguibel celebrated the mass in Our Lady of Lourdes parish church, even though Judy was Bahai like her mother and Jim belonged to the Church of the Holy Apostles; all her friends were Catholics, and in the barrio the only valid marriage was one that followed the ritual of the Vatican. Gregory made a special trip in order to escort his sister to the altar. Pedro Morales shouldered expenses for the party, while Inmaculada and her daughters and friends spent two days cooking Mexican dishes and baking wedding cookies. The bridegroom provided the liquor and the music. The result was an uproarious affair held in the middle of the street with the best mariachis in the barrio and more than a hundred guests dancing the night through to Latin rhythms. Nora Reeves made her daughter an exquisite wedding gown, with so many organdy ruffles that from a distance Judy looked like a pirate ship and at closer range the cradle of the heir to a throne. Jim Morgan had saved a little money and so was able to install his wife in a small but comfortable house and to buy a new bedroom suite with a special-sized bed big enough for the two of them and strong enough to withstand the rhinoceros charges with which, in all good faith, they made love that first week. The following Friday, the husband did not come home. His wife waited for him until Sunday, when he finally appeared, so drunk he could not remember where or with whom he had been. Judy picked up a milk bottle and broke it over his head. The blow would have killed a weaker man, but it barely split Jim Morgan's brow and, far from deterring him, stirred him to a frenetic state of arousal. He swiped the blood from his eyes with his shirt sleeve, threw himself on his wife, and despite her furious kicking, that night they conceived their first son, a beautiful boy who weighed ten pounds at birth. Judy Reeves, illuminated by a happiness she had never believed possible, offered the baby her breast, determined to give this infant the love she had never received. She had discovered her calling as a mother.

For Carmen Morales, Gregory's departure was a personal affront. In the depths of her heart, she had always known that he would not stay in the barrio and that sooner or later he would search for new horizons; she had thought, however, that when that moment came they would leave together, perhaps live a life of adventure with a traveling circus, as they had so often planned. She could not imagine an existence without him. For as long as she could remember she had seen him nearly every day; nothing great or small had happened to her that she had not shared with him. It was he who had unveiled the childhood myths: that there is no Santa Claus and that babies don't grow under cabbages to be delivered from Paris by the stork, and he was the first to know when at eleven she discovered a red stain on her underpants. He was closer to her than her own mother or her brothers and sister; they had grown up together, they told each other even those things forbidden by the norms of propriety their parents had taught them. Like Gregory, Carmen had fallen in love at the drop of a hat, always with breathtaking passion, but unlike him she was bound by the patriarchal traditions of her family and her society. Her fiery nature was at odds with the double standard that made prisoners of women but granted a hunting license to men. She knew she had to protect her reputation because the least shadow could unleash a tragedy: her father and her brothers watched her like hawks, ready to defend the honor of the house while they themselves tried to do to other girls what they never allowed women of their own blood. Carmen was ungovernable by nature, but at that stage in her life she was still enmeshed in the cobwebs of “what will people say.” She feared her father most of all, then the explosive Padre Larraguibel, and then God, in that order—and, last, the evil tongues that could destroy her future. Like so many girls of her generation, she had been raised by the axiom that marriage and motherhood were the perfect destiny—“They got married and had a lot of children and lived happily ever after”—but she could not find a single example of wedded bliss around her, not even her parents; they stayed together because they could not imagine any alternative, but they were light-years from the image of romantic couples in the movies. She had never seen them embrace, and it was rumored that Pedro Morales had a son by another woman. No, that was not what she wanted for herself. She continued to dream, as she had in her childhood, of a different life, a life filled with adventure, but she lacked the courage to make the break and leave home. She knew that people were gossiping behind her back: What is that youngest Morales girl up to? She doesn't have a steady job, she goes out alone at night, she wears too much eye makeup, and isn't that a bracelet she wears on her ankle? And she runs around with Gregory Reeves too much—after all, they're not related. The Moraleses should keep a closer eye on that girl; she's old enough to get married, but it won't be easy to find her a husband when she acts like one of those easy gringas. Carmen had not, nevertheless, lacked for enthusiastic candidates for her hand in marriage. She was barely fifteen when she received her first proposal, and by the time she was nineteen, five young men had desperately wanted to marry her; she loved all of them with a chimerical passion, and after a few weeks, at the first hint of predictable routine, she became bored. About the time Reeves went away she was involved with her first American boyfriend, Tom Clayton—all the others had been Latinos from the neighborhood. Clayton was an ironic, intense newspaperman who dazzled her with his knowledge of the world and his exciting theories about free love and the equality of the sexes, subjects she had never dared broach at home but had discussed extensively with Gregory.

“Empty words! All he wants is to get you to bed and then cut out,” her friend reproved her.

“Screw you, Greg, you're nuts! You're farther behind the times than Papa!”

“Has he mentioned marriage?”

“Marriage kills love.”

“What doesn't kill it, Carmen, for God's sake!”

“I'm not interested in a church wedding, all in white, Greg. I'm different.”

“Just say it: you've already gone to bed with him. . . .”

“No, not yet.” Then, after a pause filled with sighs, “How does it feel? Tell me what it feels like.”

“Oh, like an electric shock, I guess. The truth is that sex is overrated; all that dreaming about it, and when it's over, you're only half satisfied.”

“Liar! If that was how it is, you wouldn't keep panting after every girl you see.”

“But, Carmen, that's the trap. You always think it will be better with the next one.”

Gregory left in September; the following January, Tom Clayton went to Washington to join the press corps of the most charismatic President of the century, drawn by fascination for his ringing political pronouncements. He wanted to feel the aura of power and play a part in historic events; as he explained it to Carmen, there was no future for an ambitious newsman in the West; it was too far from the heart of empire. He left behind a tearful Carmen, because by then she was in love for the first time; compared to the emotion she was feeling, all her other affairs had been insignificant flirtations. By telephone and in notes spotted with grammatical blunders, she related the day-by-day details of her romantic martyrdom to Gregory, reproaching him not only for having gone away at such a crucial moment but also for having lied about the electric current; had she known, she said, what it was really like, she would not have waited so long.

“It's sad you're so far away, Greg. I don't have anyone to talk to.”

“People are more up-to-date here; everyone goes to bed with everyone, and then they discuss it.”

“If my parents find out, they'll kill me.”

The Moraleses did find out, three months later, when police came to their house to question them.

Tom Clayton had not answered Carmen's letters, and she had no sign he was even alive until some weeks later, when she finally reached him by telephone at an ungodly hour and announced, in a voice choked with panic, that she was pregnant. Clayton was pleasant but unmoved. It wasn't his problem; he was devoting his life to political journalism, and he had to think about his career; there was no way he could come back just then—and besides, he had never uttered the word “matrimony.” He believed in spontaneous relationships, and he had supposed that she shared his beliefs. Hadn't they discussed that very subject many times? In any case, he didn't want to see her hurt, he would accept his responsibility; the very next day he would put a check in the mail, and she could resolve that minor inconvenience in the usual manner. Carmen stumbled from the telephone booth and walked in a daze to the nearest café, where she slumped into a chair, at a loss to know what to do. She sat there with her eyes on her cup until they announced closing time. Later, lying on her bed with a mute throbbing in her temples, she decided that her first priority was to keep her condition secret, or her life would be ruined forever. Several times she was at the point of dialing Gregory's number, but she did not want to confess her disgrace even to him. This was her hour of truth, and she must face it alone; it was one thing to talk a big game, making vaguely feminist statements, but something quite different to be an unmarried mother in her corner of the world. She knew that her family would never speak to her again; they would throw her out of the house, out of her clan, even out of the barrio. Her father and her brothers would die of shame; she would have to bring up the baby all by herself, support it and look after it alone, and find some kind of work to survive. Women would repudiate her, and men would treat her like a prostitute. She knew that the child, too, would bear a terrible stigma. She did not have the courage to fight such a long battle—or the courage to make a decision. She argued back and forth for what seemed forever, unable to make up her mind, masking the incapacitating nausea every morning and the drowsiness that paralyzed her every evening, avoiding her family and barely communicating with Gregory, until the day came when she could not button her skirt and she realized the need for urgent action. She called Tom Clayton once again but was told that he was away on a trip and no one knew when he would return. She immediately went to Our Lady of Lourdes, praying the Basque priest would not see her; she knelt at the altar, as she had so many times in her life, but for the first time spoke to the Virgin as woman to woman. For years she had had silent doubts about religion; Sunday mass had become a mere social ritual, but being so frightened, she longed for a renewal of the solace of faith. The statue of the Madonna, robed in silk and crowned with a halo of pearls, did not meet her halfway; the colored-glass eyes in the plaster face stared into empty space. Carmen explained her reasons for the sin she planned to commit, asked the Virgin's mercy and blessing, and from there went directly to Olga.

“You shouldn't have waited so long,” said Olga, palpating Carmen with expert hands. “It's no problem during the first weeks, but now. . . .”

“And it's not a problem now. You have to do it.”

“It's very risky.”

“I don't care. Please help me,” and she burst out weeping hopelessly in Olga's arms.

Olga had known Carmen since she was a child, and the Moraleses were like her own family; she had also lived in the barrio long enough to know what awaited the girl from the minute someone noticed her burgeoning belly. She set an appointment for the next night, prepared her instruments and medicinal herbs, and vigorously rubbed her Buddha, because both she and Carmen were going to need a great deal of luck. Carmen told her parents that she was going to the beach with a friend and would be gone a couple of days, and she moved in with Olga. Nothing remained of the girl's cheerful self-assurance; fear of imminent pain overshadowed any other fears, and she could not consider the possible risks or consequences; all she wanted was to sink into a deep sleep and wake liberated from her nightmare. Despite Olga's potions, however, and the half bottle of whiskey she drank straight down, she did not lose consciousness, and no merciful dream floated her through this crisis. Bound by wrists and ankles to the kitchen table, a rag stuffed in her mouth to prevent her screams from being heard outside, she bore the pain until she could stand no more and made signs that she would prefer anything to this torture. Olga's response was that it was too late for second thoughts; they must follow the brutal procedure to the end. After it was over, Carmen, with an ice pack on her belly, lay weeping uncontrollably, curled in a ball like a baby until she was overcome by exhaustion, the calming herbs, and the alcohol, and fell asleep. Thirty hours later, when she still had not awakened but seemed to be wandering in the delirium of a different world, while a thread of blood, thin but constant, was staining the sheets red, Olga knew that for once her lucky star had failed her. She struggled to lower Carmen's fever and stop the hemorrhaging, but the girl was growing steadily weaker; it was clear her life was draining away. Olga realized she was trapped. Carmen could die beneath her roof, which would mean her ruin; on the other hand, she could not put her out in the street, nor could she advise the family. As she held Carmen's head to force some water down her throat, she thought Carmen murmured Gregory's name, and immediately she realized that he was the only person she could turn to for help. Her call waked him from his sleep. Come this minute, was all she said, but from the tone of her voice Gregory grasped her urgency and asked no questions; he took the first morning plane and within hours was holding Carmen in his arms. He took her by taxi to the nearest hospital, cursing because through all those horrible weeks she had not confided in him. Why did you shut me out? I should have been with you. I told you, Carmen, Tom Clayton is a selfish sonofabitch, but all men aren't like that; not every man wants to bed you and then dump you, the way your father always warned you they would. I swear there are better men than Clayton. Why didn't you let me help you earlier? Maybe the baby would have lived. You shouldn't have gone through this alone. What are friends for? Why are we brother and sister if it isn't to help each other? Life can get so fucked up, Carmen; don't die, please don't die.