Trinity Fields (56 page)

But she did recognize the boy Marcos, and Marcos recognized her that third and final time he would ever see her, or at least know with certainty he was seeing her.

Months, superb tiny whiskers of time, had elapsed. Franny joined a regional theater company and finally confessed to Marcos her acting aspirations. After he gamely sat through a pretty long performance of one of Shakespeare's plays—he counted more people onstage than in the audience—they kissed in the parking lot, then kissed again the next night and the next. Mary telephoned her mother to let her know she was still in Denver and all was well. She couldn't bear to hear the tearful pleas that she come home and so hung up, feeling for all the world like some thankless monster, but promising herself never to call again. Marcos's parents slowly became surrogates, flesh-and-blood variations on her imagined ideal of what parents might be in a perfect Mary world. Carl's gruff taciturnity. Sarah's ease with anyone and everything. Even the dogs sleeping on the
portal,
the doves in their cages, the horses in their pastures, seemed faultless. Rancho Pajarito carried all the weight of what home might have meant, had fate launched a kinder stork on the day of her birth.

And Marcos, the Marcos of this third encounter with Francisca de Peña, took Franny on a midnight ramble along Rio Nambé to show her a thing he used to do when he was a kid. Hand in hand they walked toward Conchas to see if the
vatos
were partying. That they weren't didn't bother her. She liked to be here with him. To feel her life being lived near his.

—Oh well, he said. —Probably isn't the kind of thing I should be admitting I used to do, anyhow. Not what somebody from Princeton would understand.

—I'm sure it was fun back then.

—Lonely rural kind of fun.

Under heavy starlight, not talking further, straying back to the house along the bank path, their thoughts wandering, they came to the horse gate, and Marcos opened it as he'd opened it a thousand times already in his life, by rote, his thoughts concentrated on the palm of his hand warmed by hers. Gate metal scraped against the earth and the chain clanged. The flume behind them was running high and the moon was just the finest sliver of white where it sat on the saddle ridge near Capulin. The aluminum latch chimed its colloquial hollow note into the cool night. Mary sensed a sudden change in Marcos and asked what was wrong. He was staring into the lower meadow.

Francisca de Peña had drifted into the field where she lay curled like a magpie nest made of long and waning sparks, or some soiled halo unevenly afloat. This light awakened and uncoiled to disclose itself and thus became more a woman than that spherical luster very near to where Marcos and Franny stood. Francisca arose to what complete luminosity and elevation were left her and spoke her own name. She uttered
de Peña,
herself calling out to herselves.

Marcos and Franny stood silent.

She spoke other names—saying, as her mother had so often said,
Esparaván
—and moved slowly closer. Moved slowly because she found that, at least by her impression, she had no other choice than to thread herself ponderous through the Nambé air.
Esparaván? Gavilán?

Marcos asked Franny, —Are you seeing this?

She wouldn't, or couldn't, answer.

Francisca neared them and could almost taste their fear.

—Franny? Do you see this?

Together they stood as Francisca hesitated midfield. She gazed at that whisper of moon, and she admired her familiar mountains and this oddly familiar boy. And as Marcos and his unknown girl saw her fully forming, unfurling like a chrysanthemum of mist, looking much as she had when she was as alive as anyone who ever walked these lands—she who presented herself to them as a kind of soft photographic negative, clearly and with all the dignity of life—Francisca de Peña heard Franny finally say to Marcos, —Yes. Yes, I do.

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A Biography of Bradford Morrow

Bradford Morrow is the award-winning author of six novels and numerous short stories, essays, poetry collections, and children's books, as well as the founding editor of the celebrated literary journal
Conjunctions
. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Academy Award inLiterature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award, as well as other honors.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951, Morrow grew up outside Denver in Littleton, Colorado, where his parents had settled after growing up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and Oak Creek, Colorado, respectively. Morrow's maternalgrandparents were farmers from Nebraskawho eventually migrated to Colorado after losing their farm during the Depression, and his paternalgrandfatherwas a doctor who came to Colorado to set up his practice on the frontier. His family instilled a spirit of adventure and curiosity in Morrow, traits that would be evident in his writing as well as his peripatetic travels and career choices.

Morrow left home at fifteen, traveling first to Honduras to participate in a summer program sponsored by the American Medical Association, where he worked as a medical assistant helping to inoculate thousands of impoverished, rural Hondurans. He then spent his senior year of high school as a foreign exchange student in Italy, earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado, and spent time in Paris. For over a decade after setting off on his own, Morrow lived an itinerant life, moving back and forth from Europe to the States. He then spent five years in California, where he met the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and finally settled for good in New York City. Before becoming a fulltime writer and editor, Morrow worked as a bookseller, jazz musician, and translator, and attended graduate school at Yale. His first book-length work was a bibliography of Wyndham Lewis, published in 1978.

In 1981, Morrow launched the literary journal
Conjunctions
. His taste, passion, and editorial savvy quickly attracted a diverse slate of contributing writers and editors, including Chinua Achebe, John Ashbery, and Joyce Carol Oates. The novelist Robert Coover has called the publication “without exception, America's leading literary journal, one of the greatest such magazines in the literary history of the country.”

After years of contributing to anthologies and supporting the work of others in his role as editor, Morrow published his first novel,
Come Sunday
, in 1988. Morrow's debut set the tone for his later works with its rich historical allusion, globe-spanning plotlines, lyrical prose, and illuminating philosophical exploration. Morrow's second novel,
The Almanac Branch
(1991), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and highlighted the author's interest in the complex interior lives of his characters. The tone of his work is often Gothic, especially in
Giovanni's Gift
(1997), which was partly inspired by the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Morrow meticulously researches his fiction: For his diptych consisting of
Trinity Fields
(1995) and
Ariel's Crossing
(2002), the author interviewed special ops veterans from the U.S. engagement in Laos, students involved in the Columbia University riots, and Manhattan Project scientists, among others. He even lived for a time near Los Alamos—where atomic weapons were first tested—to better understand the characters in his sweeping historical sagas of American life in the atomic age.

Aside from his work as an editor and writer, Bradford Morrow has taught writing and literature throughout his career, which has included positions at Brown, Columbia, Princeton, and the Naropa Institute. He currently lives in New York and is a professor of literature at Bard College, which sponsors
Conjunctions
.

“Lois Hoffman and Ernest Morrow, my parents-to-be, standing in front of the Luscombemy father flew them in on their first date in 1949. My father was a pilot and the owner of a Harley-Davidson that he regularly drove from Oak Creek, Colorado, over the continental divide to Denver, where Lois lived at the time, an all-day drive on his cycle.”

“Age one, striking something of an authorial pose with the forefinger to the cheek. I remember those curtains, very Western in theme with the cattle and other cowboy imagery.”

“Looking at this photograph, it's really those narrative Western-themed curtains behind me that I find most interesting now. I remember staring at them and inventing stories in the drapery. This was in our house on Cove Way in Denver, Colorado.”

“The
H.M.S. Pinafore
outfit that I wore onone of my two youthful outings as a thespian (the other being Gilbert & Sullivan's other workhorse operetta,
The Mikado
). My mother made the costume from scratch, right down to the epaulettes and medals. I still have this outfit in a box somewhere and the bookcase, too. Littleton, Colorado.”

“Me as a grinning Cub Scout in Littleton, Colorado. I would go on to become an Eagle Scout and must confess that the Boy Scouts at that time—in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains where we went camping, sometimes in the dead of winter, and hiking through difficult terrain, learning the flora and fauna, as well as all sorts of real survival skills—is a part of my youth I now cherish.”