In the evening after dinner, Benny came to my room. I heard his footsteps along the corridor but I didn’t quite believe them until I saw him in the doorway. He hadn’t been to my room in years and he looked around now, inspecting it. ‘Smaller than I remember,’ he said softly. He reached up, tried unsuccessfully to touch the ceiling, laughed. He looked at the magazine pages I’d pasted up, at the photograph of me as a child in my mother’s arms; he gazed at that for a long time. He’d seen it before, but he looked at it now as if it were new to him. He pointed at one of his own sketches, a portrait of me, and smiled. He’d made me pose for it, sitting at the table with my hands folded in front of me, my face framed by towers of jars filled with America’s homemade pickles, pyramids of vegetables. He’d taken a long time to arrange each object, explaining his composition as he went. He’d leaned back to check everything when he was done and told me to look serious but I’d struggled not to laugh as he drew me, and he’d captured in his sketch the tightness of my mouth as I held it in. It was the same expression my mother had when she was trying to stay angry at my father while he clowned around to distract her.
Benny sat down against the wall facing my bed. He crossed his legs, laid his sketchbook across his lap and started, silently, to work. I knew better than to try and make conversation. I picked up the book I’d been reading, one of BabyLu’s, about a village girl in England whose fate lay not in her own hands but in the hands of two men. I struggled to imagine the damp, green valleys that filled the book, the encircling silences; they were like nothing I’d ever known. I tried to read again now, but had made no progress at all when, several minutes later, Benny pulled out a photograph from his sketchbook and, leaning forward, placed it on the bed next to me. I picked it up slowly and looked at it, at the girl, her eyes narrowed against the sun, her image flashing under the bleak electric light in my room. I looked at the photograph on the wall over my table, where my mother creased her eyes on a sunny day. ‘Who is she?’ I said at last and wished for a moment that I hadn’t, for the question seemed to break into the stillness of the room, crashing over the walls like surf.
‘She was my mom,’ he said. I looked again at the girl in the photograph, her small neat features, the long fingers on narrow hands. Her hands, her eyes, her mouth were Benny’s. I stared at him, not knowing what to say. I opened my mouth but he shook his head and I was relieved; I was sure that nothing I might have said then would have been right. He worked at the sketchbook for a while longer and then he gathered his things together and, placing the book flat on the floor, tore the page out and handed it to me. I looked down at it and he left. I closed my eyes to listen to him moving away over the stone flags of the passage and the kitchen beyond.
When I could no longer hear him I opened my eyes again and looked at his sketch. In the centre of it I lay on my bedding, a book by my side, open but discarded, and instead in my hand was a photograph, the girl under the yellow bell tree recognisable even from the few lines that gave her substance. Behind me, the walls of the room crumbled away to reveal a rich landscape, not the concrete and colour of Esperanza Street but a jungle thick with palms and creepers, prehistoric. Over the shattered walls vines crept in, reclaiming the room, the house, and in the centre of it all I lay without fear, a look in my eyes of certainty, of belonging.
I went to the kitchen to find something to fasten the picture to the wall. America was lying on her mat, her arm over her face and her eyes closed, but she wasn’t asleep. As I came in, she rolled away from me. I searched through the drawers, wary of making too much noise. ‘What are you looking for?’ she said crossly but I’d already found where she kept the tape in a tin box with scissors, strips of paper and a pen; America liked to label everything. ‘You put that back when you’re done,’ she said without opening her eyes.
Back in my room, I held Benny’s sketch up next to the photograph of my mother and taped it over the man in the cigarette ad.
When I returned to the kitchen America was sitting at the table. I sat down opposite her. ‘He’s told you,’ she said and she sounded relieved. ‘I’ll tell you the rest if it’ll stop you pestering me, but you’d better not breathe a word.’ She leaned in to me, trying perhaps to be menacing, but all I saw was how exhausted she looked. She’d have been asleep at this time on any other day.
‘It’s Benny,’ I said, softly.
She took a slow, deep breath, nodded. I guess she was trying to build up some suspense but I wasn’t impatient, I knew she wanted to tell me. It must have been a lot to carry all these years. I smiled at her and she frowned. Maybe she’d imagined the moment of telling someone differently. ‘The girl was called Dorothy. She was Mary’s housemaid, one of many when he was still around. Of course he took a liking to her. Careless, selfish man. It was bound to happen. She tried to hide it for as long as she could until I spotted it.’ America tapped her temple. ‘You know, the way she stood, the way she walked, even before it really showed. It was Captain Bobby that told her she had to go, the day he left for Manila on business. He threw some money onto the piano and strolled out the door. More money than the poor girl might have seen in a year. He expected Mary to banish her there and then, expected to return to an orderly house. Well, that man never appreciated the kind of stuff his wife was made from. She took us all to her country estate — me, Dominic and the girl — leaving the houseboy in charge here. She saw the girl through her pregnancy and promised her the baby would be cherished. I remember her saying it. Cherished. She had to explain to the girl what it meant. Afterwards, she told Dorothy to disappear without a fuss and she did. She never came back, though she did send letters. A lot of letters. The first ones were addressed to Mary, then after that to Benny. He never got any of them. As far as I know, Mary never answered any either, so Lord knows what the girl was thinking. Most of them she burned without even opening them. I thought about suggesting she kept one or two for him when he grew into a man. But she was young. Who can blame her?’ America paused for a moment, tracing a square on the tabletop with a finger, watching me coolly. ‘I hid the photograph or she’d have burned that too. I thought he’d find out some day and have a pile of questions. There wasn’t really anywhere else I could put it,’ she glanced over at her mat on the floor. ‘Maybe I hoped it would fall out one day.’ I stared at her. ‘Anyway, I’d forgotten about it.’ She frowned at me again. ‘That man would have come back from Manila to find an empty house. Well, good. You know she left a message with the houseboy that her husband wasn’t to follow us and that if he did he wouldn’t be let in at the gate. He never showed his face.’ Even after so long, she looked disgusted. ‘Sure, he phoned. Once or twice. Anyway, a few months later, we came back, Mary carrying a new baby that she’d called Benito, after her grandfather.’ America sighed heavily. As she got up she said, ‘You know, that man never even asked about the girl.’
Pearls
Lola Lovely looked round the dining room with the mournful expression of someone visiting a landscape after a long time to find the places of her youth obliterated. ‘There were only ever friends and family in the house when I was here,’ she said. ‘Strangers don’t respect a place in the same way.’ She ran a finger over the side table, looked disappointed to find it clean. She rubbed her fingertips together anyway but didn’t inspect further. ‘We’d have the priest round for dinner regularly in those days. Ah, but it was Father Lucien then, a handsome Frenchman. Everyone asked him to dine.’ She stopped at the window, gazed out, perhaps seeing the garden as it might once have been. ‘Always in the sun, chut, that child!’ I peered past her but the garden was empty. Lola Lovely ran her hand over her cheek and I imagined her suddenly leaning out of the window calling down to where Mary Morelos, the schoolchild, sat alone playing jacks. America! Tell that child to play in the shade at least. I don’t want her getting dark.