Chapter 12

Anmoore, West Virginia

February 1915

There were no eucalyptus trees in the woods around Anmoore—as the town of Grasselli had recently been renamed—nor any twelfth-century churches in the town with clanging ancient bells and costumed penitents. It was all clapboard houses and shops, none more than 30 years old, nor any apparently constructed to last for longer than a single lifetime. The acrid smoke of the zinc furnaces hung constantly in the air. None of that mattered to Mercedes.

“Okay, ma’am, a half-step closer to your husband, and chin up,” the photographer instructed Mercedes. He had grown up in Gijón, the big port city fifteen miles to the east of Avilés. With the steady influx of immigrants, his photography studio in Clarksburg was thriving more than he had dreamt possible. The photographer came around from behind the camera, pulled Antonio’s hands from his trouser pockets and squared Antonio’s shoulders. “There, sir, hold that pose, please.” Antonio and Mercedes stood perfectly still as the photographer crossed back to the camera perched atop its heavy tripod, and his ever-smiling face disappeared behind the large wooden box. “Ahhh, perfect,” he cooed. “You look like their majesties.”

Click. The aperture in the large lens on the front of the camera snapped open, paused for a long second, and then slammed shut. “Please hold your poses,” the photographer ordered as he carefully withdrew the photo plate and inserted a fresh one. “Photograph once for disaster, twice for perfection my dear father, God bless his soul, always told me,” he said with a hearty chuckle.

Click. The photographer reappeared, still smiling, from beneath the black cloth which covered the back of the camera. He smoothed his silvery shock of hair. “Okay, okay, very good, I believe you will have a lovely portrait. Just lovely.”

Mercedes and Antonio continued to stand as stiff as sentinels on the intricately patterned Arabian carpet in the cramped studio. It was the first photo either had taken in their lives. “You can move!” the photographer exclaimed.

Antonio tugged at his shirt collar and then shoved his hands back in his pockets. Mercedes smiled giddily, released from the forced seriousness of a proper studio portrait. “You think it will be nice?” she asked the photographer.

He gently pressed her on the back, urging her toward the door— he had four other couples waiting outside—and said: “Absolutely perfect, I assure you. You’ll be delighted you chose to memorialize this moment with me.”

They paused on the sidewalk outside the studio in the unusually warm and sunny February afternoon, and Antonio grumbled to Mercedes as he rolled a cigarette, “For what he’s charging, that picture should sing and dance on command.”

“Oh, Antonio, don’t be so Gallego for once,” she said, giggling. “We didn’t have a real wedding, so we should indulge ourselves a little for our portrait.”

“Hmph,” Antonio grunted, though the truth was that he always did whatever necessary to give Mercedes anything she wanted. He had worked overtime for a month to afford this trip to the photographer.

“Oh, I can’t wait ‘til it’s ready!” she said. “I know exactly where I will hang it in the parlour. In our parlour!” Mercedes luxuriated in hearing herself say it. “Our parlour,” she repeated, squeezing his arm which was interlocked with hers as they strolled toward the streetcar stop. “I still can’t believe we have our own parlour.”

Antonio half grinned. “And kitchen, two bedrooms and bathroom,” he added.

“Yes!” Mercedes said so loudly and enthusiastically that a greybearded man in a top hat and expensive suit passing them from the opposite direction jerked up his walking stick reflexively and whipped his head to look at them, as if Mercedes had reached out and smacked him on the shoulder.

She composed herself and said as casually as possible: “And it’s good you bought the two-bedroom house instead of the smaller one, because we’ll be needing that other room soon.”

“Is somebody already coming to visit?” Antonio asked.

“Well, you could put it that way. But it will be a long visit,” she said.

Antonio stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, cocked his head and looked Mercedes in the face. “What exactly are you talking about? Who’s coming?”

Mercedes smiled radiantly. “Our baby, Antonio. Our baby!”

Antonio remained dumbstruck for the entire streetcar ride back to Anmoore. Mercedes sat, beaming. He stood above her, his knees pressed against hers in the crowded car. He stared out the big window as Clarksburg slipped by. First the storefronts with their plate glass windows and striped awnings, then the joyless brick tenements, then the small clapboard houses like theirs, then the soot covered steel mills and glass factories, then a bit of green countryside, and then their hamlet of Anmoore.

Antonio’s reaction to Mercedes’ announcement surprised him. No distress. No tightness in his stomach. No slithering coldness in his veins. He had proposed to Mercedes not because he felt any less angst about children, despite his improved financial condition, but because he missed her so much that he could not stand being separated from her any longer. All through those months since she had arrived, he always felt a deep ambivalence about their marriage and the children who would inevitably come: they desired each other physically, and acted on it with a frequency that would be expected by two people who have discovered sex for the first time in their thirties.

Antonio was not rapturously happy about the revelation, but he was okay. That alone felt like a miracle to him. “Oh, Mercedes,” he said as they stepped to the pavement from the streetcar, “what wonderful news.”

Mercedes had been terrified to tell him, and his reaction so far had not been particularly reassuring, but she was so ecstatic about it—especially after she had said it aloud to Antonio—that she felt only a tinge of the old darkness. “You know, you can’t be that surprised about it.” She blushed.

Antonio laughed heartily, a rare occurrence, and took her hand in his. “Yes, well, I suppose you’re right about that.”

* * *

Their little house was furnished mostly with hand-me-downs from Antonio’s coworkers who had been friends of Antonio González Conde. They never seemed to sit on the tufted settee. Mercedes preferred the richly carved, high backed Castilian-style chair with the burgundy velvet cushions. Antonio always plopped down in the well used overstuffed armchair.

After dinner in the kitchen, at the wooden table and chairs Antonio was proud to have purchased himself, they had taken their usual spots and listened to the evening Spanish-language news broadcast on the radio.

“Primero must feel like a prophet,” Antonio said as he reached over and turned off the radio. The war was flaming higher and wider every week. Today, the German government had announced it would begin a naval blockade of Great Britain. “Even I can see where that can lead,” Antonio said.

“At least the King has had the good sense to keep Spain out of it,” Mercedes said.

“A little evidence that he’s not a complete idiot, anyway,” Antonio added. “But enough of that ridiculousness. What should we call the baby?”

Mercedes was delighted by how much interest Antonio had taken in the baby over the days since her announcement. “If it’s a girl, I’d like to call her Julia.”

“Julia,” Antonio said noncommittally.

“Yes. One of the books my brother used to teach me to read was The Lives of the Saints—”

“Of course,” Antonio interjected.

“Don’t be mean,” Mercedes said.

“I’m not being mean,” Antonio said, laughing, “just making a logical observation. Primero would approve.”

“Anyway,” Mercedes said. “I read about St. Julia of Corsica in the book, and I’ve always felt close to her because she was a slave girl, and I know how that feels.”

“Julia it should be, then,” Antonio said.

“And you, if it’s a boy?” Mercedes asked.

“I’d like to call him Luís, after my uncle,” he said after a minute. “He treated me better than anybody I knew after my mother died. And whenever my father was drunk and looking for somebody to beat, I always could slip out the window and run down to his farm, and he would feed me and let me sleep there for the night. He was a good man.”

“As you are, Antonio,” Mercedes said. “I honestly don’t know how you managed to be, after all you went through.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Gallegos are as tough as the bark of an old tree. That can cut either way, I suppose. I was lucky I had my mother around until I was five.” Antonio fell silent, a distant look in his eyes. “I wish you could have known her, and she could’ve known you,” he added after a bit.

“I wish that too, Antonio.”