No matter how many times she read the letter, Bambi always got stuck on the line about the happiest moment of his life, more than fifty years ago. How sad. It had been a great moment for Bambi, too, but she had had many happy moments since then. Seven grandchildren, the girls’ marriages. Seder dinners, birthdays. She was happy right now, alone in her apartment.
She checked her watch. Time to pick up Lorraine. Bambi tried to see her as often as possible, to include her in family gatherings. Remembering how she had seethed under Lorraine’s pitying gaze over the years, she did not coddle her old friend or give any indication that she found her pitiable. And, in fact, she didn’t. It wasn’t pitiable to love someone who didn’t love you, or to love someone who didn’t love you in the way you chose, or to love someone more than he loved you. One could even argue that it was brave and pure. Besides, Lorraine didn’t know that Bert had acted out of anything but greed. Tonight, Bambi and Lorraine would drive to Linda’s for Friday night dinner, the youngest grandchildren already humming in excitement for the holidays. For the first time in a long time all the grandchildren would be there, from little Tatiana to twenty-six-year-old Noah and his wife, Amanda, who happened to be pregnant with Bambi Brewer’s first great-grandchild.
Life went on, with you or without you, Felix. What else could it do?
December 31, 2012
Manzanillo
The last thing he saw was the ceiling, an expanse of white. He opened his eyes, looked at the ceiling, then closed them and never opened them again. If he said anything, there was no one there to hear it. The maid found him the next morning.
Señor Felipe, as he was known among the small circle of people he had befriended here, was seventy-eight and he had enjoyed robust good health until the past year. There was no single big thing wrong with him, just many little things. But the little things added up and the local health care was not the best. He liked to joke that he had not chosen this place for its health-care system. He had expected to live a very long time. His own parents had lived into their nineties, although he never saw them. They had harbored different hopes for their son, the one who understood numbers as if they were a language, yet also was sensitive to people, capable of eliciting their confidences, their dreams. Once his parents saw the path he had chosen, they no longer spoke to him. It was easier to pretend they were dead than to tell his wife that he had been disowned. He was a self-made man and he would make his own family, a better one.
He did, too. He had lived long enough to see his daughters grow into beautiful and accomplished women, to make mistakes and learn from them, to have children. Except-he had never seen any of those things.
He saw an expanse of white. A ceiling.
The maid was not disturbed by death. She had seen a lot of death. But she was upset when his only real friend, an abogado, a lawyer, told her that the body would be cremated. That was what her jefe wanted, the abogado said, but that did not sound right to her. They had talked often about religion, she and the jefe, and Señor Felipe had said he was un judio, that his people did not believe in tattoos or cremation. But then-perhaps he was no longer one of his people. There was no evidence of religion in his life, unless women were a kind of a religion. For years, they had come and gone. He preferred European women, for some reason, as long as they spoke English. European, but never from Germany. With most of the wealthy Americanos around here, the women got younger and younger as the men got older, but her jefe liked women in their forties and fifties. True, those women were young enough to be his daughters now, but she liked the fact that he seemed to choose for brains as well as beauty. Plus, he made it clear that they could stay under his roof, but Consuelo ran the house.
The abogado was firm: The body would be cremated, the ashes taken out to sea and flung into the Pacific, which could be glimpsed through this bedroom window. The house would be sold and there would be sums, nice ones, for people such as herself, who had cared for Señor Felipe all these years. Furniture would be sold, everything else was to be given away. If she wanted something, she should ask for it.
“Y las fotografías?” She indicated the set by the bed in heavy silver frames. But not like the frames the turistas bought, in the Mercado. These were smooth and heavy.
He shrugged. “If you want,” he said, mistaking her intent. It occurred to her that he would throw the photos away, which seemed sad to her. So she said she did, and, when he was gone, she slid the photos from the frames, which she would sell. She would give the photographs to the man who came to collect the body, ask that they be burned with el jefe.
There were six. She knew them well, after years of dusting them. One was of a beautiful woman, but very long ago, at a time when waists were cinched and eyebrows dark, arched. Bambi, 1961, was written on the back. The same woman, older but still beautiful, posed with three children, clearly her daughters. Harpers Ferry, 1974. There was one of each daughter, too. Linda, 1976. Rachel, 1976. Michelle, 1976. Pretty, but not as pretty as the mother, although who knows how they turned out, especially the littlest one, still chubby cheeked here.
And then there was the-well, she did not want to say she was a puta, but she wore little more than bra and panties and she leaned forward, blowing a kiss. Consuelo did not approve of her. But she was there, on his bedside. Maybe she was a cousin who had made bad decisions. Lord knows, Consuelo had her share of those. Cousins and bad decisions. She put that photograph with the others, too. There was no name or date on this one, just an inscription, beyond Consuelo’s limited English, although some words were clearly close to the Spanish versions: intelligence, ideas, function. She put all the photographs in the envelope and wrote a note, saying they were to go with the body. They would be a family again, she thought, which helped her accept the ugly fact of the cremation. They would all be together again, in the ashes, in the ocean, in the afterlife.
But Consuelo was wrong. Felix Brewer was alone when he died and he would be alone forever, whether in eternity or the Pacific, where five days later his ashes were distributed by an agreeable fisherman heading out for a day’s work. The fisherman did not make a ceremony out of it, just tipped the container in one swift movement. The dark beige ashes drifted and then sank, mingling with the sand they so closely resembled.
He was gone.
Author’s Note
Almost every writer I know dreads the moment when someone tries to give you an idea. It’s not that the ideas are bad, just that the relationship between writer and novel is so personal that it’s a little like someone trying to play matchmaker for a happily married person.
But my husband, David Simon, was adamant that I should write a novel inspired by Julius Salsbury, the head of a large gambling operation in Baltimore into the 1970s. Convicted of mail fraud and under house arrest while he appealed his sentence, he disappeared never to be seen again. He left behind a wife, three daughters, and a girlfriend.
I think my husband, who is still a journalist at heart, thought a crime writer could solve the mystery of what happened to Salsbury. But I am not particularly interested in real stories. I found myself fascinated by the idea of the five women left behind. What is a wife without her husband, daughters without a father, a mistress without her lover? I turned it into a crime story because that’s what I do, but it’s important to stress here that there was no murder case in real life. So beyond the setup, the Brewer family has nothing to do with the Salsbury family. It would be unfair to them to infer otherwise-and also unfair to my imagination.