First Comes Love
Roger opens a can of tuna fish in the kitchen and Puffy smells it before I do. The old Persian slides to floor from the space she has claimed on the sofa, her belly landing in the shag carpet before her hind feet hit the floor. Slowly, she waddles over to her dish under the kitchen table.
Puffy is the cat Valerie brought to Carmel with her those many years ago when she would show up at my door with some pronouncement or other having to do with her living arrangements, or my living arrangements, her latest boyfriend or my inattention to Roger. After one of those visits I found Puffy curled up on my pillow, her cat carrier stowed in my closet. I called her in Palo Alto that night.
“Oh Mom, I am the worst person in the world! I was going to ask you to keep Puffy for me for a while and I just plain forgot to ask!”
“Valerie you know I’m allergic to cats. Why can’t you keep her?”
“My lease is up and my landlord won’t extend it. He says keeping a cat violates his renter policy.”
“You didn’t know that when you got Puffy?”
I should have known better than to have pursued that line of questioning. How often have I repeated, Valerie is an adult who can make her own decisions and live with the consequences, out loud, over and over. She didn’t owe me an explanation of her behavior then any more than she does now for the ultra-modern house she put up on the lot I gave her. Still, I’m living with the consequences of both decisions. But I have to admit I love Puffy despite the fact that I’m now on allergy medication.
Valerie obviously inherited her gypsy-like behavior from the women in our family. Except for Alaya, who has been content to live her entire life in the family home passed down through generations of Moragas, we don’t form lasting attachments easily. But I have changed. Father Mike helped me see that the pit I dug for myself when I kept people at a distance was called loneliness, a far more painful condition than the discomfort that sometimes precedes intimacy.
Time and again I watched Valerie stumble on that same rock. First it was Peter, the charmer she brought home from Stanford who is now pitching for the Pirates. I see his darling wife and their two little girls when the television camera broadcasts their faces, glowing with excitement, after Peter has pitched another winning game. It’s a cold wind that blows in Pittsburgh, Valerie used to mutter and look away.
Then it was Gibert Borrell. Doctor Gibert Borrell. Valerie met Gibert in Spain and, true to promise, he followed her back to the United States. Spanish men can make a girl feel very special, but one special girl is generally not enough to satisfy the Latin appetite. Still, she let him back into her life. To be fair, she was very vulnerable at the time.
Valerie had fallen deeply in love with Ander Ibbara, a young attorney she met when I deeded her my Uncle Iban’s house in Bakersfield. Valerie and Andy’s sister, Pilar, cooked up a plan to turn the house into a Basque Cultural Center, and that’s when Valerie got her first taste of organizing and managing something. She served on the Board of the Center, commuting back and forth between Palo Alto and Bakersfield. That’s where Andy, the community’s rising young politico, weekend cowboy and most eligible bachelor, opened his arms to her. But Valerie and Andy could not come to terms with where to live. Of course, it goes deeper than that. Where to live is really not as difficult as how to live. Andy was firmly planted in the Central Valley. He had a thriving law practice to manage and a horse ranch to play with. Valerie was a Bay Area girl with a PhD in Spanish Literature, a publisher, a university teaching contract, and property of her own to play with. Valerie let Andy go. Freedom to live the life she chose seemed like a good trade-off until the day she got word that Andy had married someone else.
My saddest day was when Valerie celebrated her thirtieth birthday curled up in a fetal position on my bed in the Carmel duplex, Puffy wedged up under her arm. After Gibert finished his hospital residency at the San Francisco Medical Center, he promptly asked Valerie to be his wife.
“Mom, it would have been perfect if I could have said yes,” Valerie sobbed and gulped air, trying to fit her words in between hiccups.
“Why couldn’t you say yes?” I knew why, but I let her tell me.
“We both could have had a career.” She calmed down, sat up on the bed, and started down her list. “He loved the property in Los Altos. We could have lived there.”
I lowered my chin, raised my eyes to look at her, and waited.
“But he cheated on me!”
There it was. What I was expecting.
“And, I want children and he doesn’t. Not American children.”
Okay, that one I wasn’t expecting. I’d given up on ever having grandchildren. I was very proud of Dr. Valerie Carter, Professor Valerie Carter, and novelist Valerie Moraga Carter. I was amused by Valerie the land baron and neighborhood irritant, but the day Valerie gave her engagement ring back to Andy, I put away my dreams of ever hearing a child call my child Mommy.
That moment was not the time to suggest to Valerie that she couldn’t have it all. She understood that she was up against a clock that can’t be adjusted to fit ambitious agendas. She’d made her choices and now the pain of emptiness overwhelmed her.
“Oh baby.” I sat down on the bed and gathered her in my arms and we cried together.
R
“I’m going now,” I call to Roger. He comes out of the kitchen where he’s been cleaning up the lunch dishes. I walk into his arms and wrap myself around him while he strokes my hair and kisses the top of my head.
“You are such a good guy,” I smile up at him. “I’m so lucky to have you.” As I say these words, I think about Laura. Her luck ran out the day Fred banged his head too hard on the ground in a stupid football scrimmage that triggered something demonic. I thought of the years she spent trying to arrange their lives to accommodate the anxiety and darkness that descended on the joyful athlete she had married, the one who came home from the Army as damaged goods. Love hurts.
On the drive back to Laura’s, thoughts tumble in my head. Although I am trying not to think too much about the awful moment that Laura and I spotted a dark figure misplaced in a tree, I re-live the experience anyway. Something in Laura knew where she would find Fred. Except for pre-dawn walks to the creek with Goldie, when Fred wasn’t in his cubicle at work he stuck close to home.
The brain cannot anticipate what image the eyes will send when it sees the unthinkable. In that moment, I flailed about for every possible explanation of the dark, sack-shaped form: A clump of mistletoe, too low; an owl, too big. Then the rising sun sent a shot of pink light through the tree that landed on Fred’s bright white calves and feet, exposed to the air like a young boy’s lower legs would be if he rolled up his pants to go fishing. It was a shot Laura took in the heart.
I turn off replay and choose a new tape. How did people do this before the relatively new technology of videotape gave them words for this concept? Silly thought, they just did. It’s a meditation technique. I flood my heart with images of Valerie’s wedding that took place a year ago.
Valerie was married at the Glass House she built on Lundy Lane. The house was not quite finished. She had switched her attention to the landscaping in anticipation of the garden wedding of her dreams.
After that sad moment in my bedroom in Carmel, Valerie had thrown herself into her work and into designing and building the Glass House. I’m the one who was responsible for the name. She had wanted to call it Moragarena West, after the Basque tradition of giving a house a family name combined with something that marks the setting. Moragarena simply means the Moraga Place. When I saw the plans, I remarked that it was a lot of glass. I took to calling it the Glass House and the name stuck. It was a pretty name to my mind. It should not have been a surprise to me that the neighbors did not see it that way.
A year after Andy married a hometown girl who loved all things equestrian, Valerie received a phone call from Pilar. It seems that all things equestrian included the hunky horse groomer, the equivalent of a Menlo Park pool boy, I suppose. Of course, that’s not at all how the ever diplomatic Pilar put it.
I have come to love Pilar, but I’ve never forgotten the calculated manner in which she controlled how I came to know the truth about the family Leora hid from me. Even after Father Mike helped me see how much better it was that I put the pieces together myself, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the role Pilar seems to play in engineering the outcome of things. That’s what makes her such a good champion for Basque interests in Kern County.
Pilar suggested to Valerie that the timing might be good for her to show up at the next MCBCS Board meeting. The Board would be discussing how to allocate funds from a grant Valerie helped write. Pilar let drop that as Valerie had missed quite a few of the meetings in the past year, she was probably unaware that Ander had just been through an acrimonious divorce. Valerie swallowed her pride and drove to Bakersfield.
Vulnerability is not one of the Moraga women’s primary character traits. Valerie has inherited her father Henry’s optimistic nature and her grandmother Leora’s stubbornness. She has an anything-is-possible outlook on life. For his part, Andy sensed this was his moment and made a smart choice not to employ his considerable negotiation skills. Instead, he let his pheromones do his talking.
A cheating wife had not destroyed Andy’s natural confidence and good humor. Valerie and Andy spent time on his ranch shaking their heads in unison over the fickleness of their exes. Andy had released the groomer from his services with a severe punch in the eye, and then sold off most of the horses. He was freer to spend more time in Los Altos with Valerie. For her part, Valerie made no demands. This man would make a terrific father. She would let him figure out the details.
After their wedding, Valerie cut back her teaching schedule and Andy started soliciting clients in the Bay Area. Real estate attorneys with track records helping property owners get a fair shake when governments exercise eminent domain are in high demand in this booming region. The Bay Area is outgrowing its rural roots, which makes it ripe for lawsuits. But while his practice here is growing, their family is not. No baby yet.
R
I pull my car into Laura’s driveway and am surprised to see that Father Mike’s newest old vehicle, a split screen Volkswagen bus, is still in the driveway. When Father Mike was comforting me after my mother’s death, I came to understand that he carefully monitored the time he spent inside my house. We would sit at the kitchen window where he was always visible. We laughed about Carlo Santorini next door. When Carlo trimmed the hedge between our houses, the shears must have slipped. It looked like a small window had been cut in the hedge about the height of Carlo’s eagle eye.
Michael Andrew Matheson, I learned, taught high school before he was deemed mature enough to answer the call to the priesthood. It was unfortunate he had not married young, as most of the other seminarians had. He lost that option when he entered the seminary.
The divinity school weighed the risk of ordaining a single man against the possibility that welcoming the son of an esteemed bookbinder might lead to a generous endowment and allowed him in. After all, there was every hope he might pick up a wife shortly after he completed his studies.
Although Father Mike proved himself an asset to the Episcopal Church in America because of his strong commitment to Reform Catholic Christianity rather than Revivalist Protestantism, he never did marry. The Diocese assigned him to a failing mission church with an elderly population hoping he could attract new blood, but church politics were changing. People were beginning to reject the liturgy that Father Mike so deeply loved in favor of a social justice devoid of a Godhead. So it wasn’t surprising that a number of Father Mike’s own parishioners supported the city’s plan to annex the property Saint Matthew’s stood on for an expansion of the adjacent grammar school to include recreation facilities and a senior center. But as the number of people who attended services dwindled, the number of those who came to Father Mike for counseling grew. Apparently, that included Laura. I had not known.
I knock at the door. Goldie is barking on the other side. I push the door open and walk through, carrying my overnight bag stuffed to overflowing with enough clothes to allow me to stay several days. Laura and Father Mike stand up quickly and he prepares to leave. Of course he would stay with her until I returned. What was I thinking?
The sun is setting behind the hills that are visible from Laura’s front picture window.
“Walter Schwartz dropped by,” Laura tells me. Then she laughs. “Was that an eye roll, Dee Russell?”
Walter is our city councilman and Gunther Dold’s presiding puppet. Gunther has been unrelenting in marshaling the councilman’s support to harass Valerie and Andy over so-called code violations while they try to finish the Glass House so they can move in before winter.
“What did he want?”
“To offer condolences, of course,” Laura gives me a wry smile that quickly turns smirky. If my dear friend can smirk at a time like this, I think she is going to be okay.
“Of course,” I say. “Laura, have you called your family in North Carolina yet?” Laura wilts. “Okay, go take a bath while I heat some soup and if you’re up for it after that, we can come up with a plan.” Laura is happy to be told what to do. She heads down the hallway, Goldie at her heels.
The sound of water filling the tub plays a comforting tune in the pipes as I sort through cans in the pantry and come up with some tomato soup. That and a fried cheese sandwich will warm my friend’s stomach. I had tucked some Valium into my purse before I left the apartment. I want to make sure she gets a good night’s sleep.
The smell of lavender bath salts wafts into the kitchen when Laura appears, hardly able to keep her red puffy eyes open.
“Laura, let’s wait until tomorrow to contact your family. I don’t think there is much chance anyone else will get to them first, do you?” Laura shakes her head and I take that as consent. I think about turning on the nightly news for distraction, but a little voice warns me that Fred could be a news story.
We eat in comfortable silence and then I open my purse, shake one tiny pill from a full bottle into my palm, and offer it to Laura with a smile of encouragement. She takes it, goes to the sink to pour herself a glass of water, and goes to bed. I’m exhausted but I have one more thing to do tonight. I sit back down at the kitchen table and reach for the telephone. Valerie answers on the first ring.
“Mom, what happened? How is Laura? How are you holding up?”
“How did you hear about it?”
“Ivy called me. She said that Mr. McMillan had been found dead in the backyard at dawn this morning. It’s been all over the news. Mom, I would have come but Ivy suggested it might be better if I didn’t. She said all the neighbors were out in front and we all know how inflammatory my presence has been lately. She didn’t say that but I got the message.”
“Bless her heart. Ivy wasn’t one of the gawkers. She waited until everyone left and then caught me as I was leaving and offered her help. I love that woman.”
The pie set in a box on the front porch sits on the counter. The box also has a casserole we can reheat tomorrow.
I tell Valerie what I know, but it doesn’t take a PhD to understand the message a man dangling from the end of a rope leaves. If there’s not enough drama in the circumstances of Fred’s life to satisfy people, I suppose they will have to content themselves speculating on the events of his death. I have no idea how the news got the details of Fred’s mental state. Interviews with his colleagues at IBM I guess. It makes me sick.
“I guess you’ll stay with Laura for a few days?”
“Father Mike will be around to help too.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“It doesn’t?” By now, the sun has gone down and I’m sitting in the dark. That’s a fitting metaphor for much of my life. “Why not?”
“Because Laura has been volunteering at the community center in a Bible study Father Mike has been leading for a group of unwed teenage mothers.”
“You are kidding!” I flash back nine years to when Valerie brought the ire of the neighborhood down on her head by suggesting she might start a halfway house for unwed teenage mothers on Lundy Lane. Maybe she wasn’t kidding. “How do you know this?” Why do I not know this?