I said, “That’s the question I’ve come here to ask you.”
“You damn fool of a boy,” she said. “I told you to stay away.”
“Then you shouldn’t have given me so much information.”
She took a sudden, deep breath.
“You wanted me to do this,” I said.
“No. No. I just wanted an audience of sorts.”
“An audience?”
She heard in my voice now what I’d been thinking.
She said, “If my best slapping hand wouldn’t land on your stitches, I’d make you pay dearly for that tone and all that’s behind it.”
I didn’t say anything. She looked at me hard in the eyes for a moment and then she wagged her head.
She said, “It’s all because my wonderful role, to be wonderfully played, can never be truly seen.”
I didn’t understand. I waited.
“My darling,” she said, dropping her voice into a vibrant whisper, “I am working in Storyville as a secret agent for the Pinkertons.”
She paused, but not for me to speak. She was playing the revelatory scene. After holding me suspended, she said, “A large number of wanted men pass through this place. Very bad men. I identify them. I peel them off. The Pinkerton Detective Agency takes them away.”
I was, of course, tempted to speak. My mother and I grew up sharing secrets and ironies and a sense of the mad, unlikely scripts we were cast in beyond the footlights, but I found myself keeping my own counsel now, taking in the ironies, working up to giving her a kiss and walking away. So I remained silent and she played on, only too happy to float uninterrupted upon her dramatic pauses.
“Usually,” she said, “this transpires with more discretion than in the case of Solomon Ward, bank burglar and murderer, whose face I recognized and whose apprehension you so ostentatiously interrupted.”
We looked deeply into each other’s eyes for a long moment. She’d spoken her line, given me my cue. She waited. I knew how to work a silence. I have learned much from my mother.
And then I simply asked, “Do you think I’ve compromised you?”
“No, my darling. Don’t worry. I think we’ll be all right.”
“I’m sorry, Mother,” I said. “But I’m glad I’ve put my mind at ease.”
“Me too,” she said.
And I gave her a hug and she inquired after me a little bit and I told her a little bit and we hugged again and she kissed me on my good cheek and I kissed her on both of hers, her preference, in the style of the French, and I explained that I had a train to catch and she sent me off by saying, “My darling son, I know you have always felt my place was in the great body of classic literature. But this work I am doing is great work as well. It is real. It is deeply representative of our unsettled times. It is all about life and death and the struggle for the good and the true.”
I took her hands in mine and I said, “My darling mother, I could not agree more.”
And I let go of her and I walked away.
On the train to Chicago the next day, rushing along the great Mississippi River outside Memphis, the past few weeks began to settle into me. No. Not settle. Perhaps decompose. I thought of Diego. How I likely would never see him again. How there was one more papi in this world who had vanished. I thought of Luisa. And I stopped myself thinking of Luisa. I thought of my mother and I found I did not clearly know what to feel about her. I had an explanation for Storyville, but I did not fully understand. I was happy for the vibrancy of her voice and the buoyancy in her body, but I didn’t like the risks she was running. Though maybe the risks were necessary for the sense of renewed life in her. Maybe that much of it I did understand. After all, the risks of my own life were greater now, and they promised to grow greater still. And I felt strangely happy about that. As The Bard said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” I’d played at watching others play at the primary narratives of this world. I had a chance to do more now. I would do more.