When Aunt Mary returned to the Bougainvillea, she brought her mother with her. I hadn’t seen Lola Lovely for three years. Twice a year, she summoned her daughter, and sometimes the boys, to Manila, rather than manage the journey to Puerto. It wasn’t a long trip, but Lola Lovely liked things to be a certain way and so tended to avoid travelling. She was in her late sixties, but she barely looked her age and she flirted in a desultory fashion with the taxi driver as he hauled her luggage out of the trunk. She looked over the façade of the Bougainvillea, pursed her lips at the boarding-house sign. Behind her, Aunt Mary’s demeanour was cool and I wondered if Lola Lovely had kept at her for most of the way with her demands: ‘Adjust this cushion, fetch a drink, call the steward.’
Lola Lovely lived by herself in Manila. The house was hers, left to her when Judge Lopez died; most of the rest of his estate went to Aunt Mary, who was courting but not married then. The Manila house was modern and much larger than the Bougainvillea – too large really for Lola Lovely, even with her maid and the houseboy, the only staff she was unwilling to do without. It had been designed by an architect who was an old family friend, a fraternity brother of the judge. I’d never seen it but had heard about its big spaces, the skylights that cut blocks of light over marble floors, the waterfall that no longer cascaded in the lobby. Lola Lovely chose to stay there after Mary and Uncle Bobby were married. She loved the arts, couldn’t bear to be too far from the pulse, she’d once said. The proper upkeep of her beloved home would have been covered by her allowance from the Lopez lands if Uncle Bobby hadn’t developed a passion, if not a talent, for poker. Still, Lola Lovely clung to the house, managing as best she could with the remainder of her inheritance. But each time Aunt Mary returned from seeing her, I’d hear her listing to America the latest signs of decay.
I opened the door and took the bags into the house. Lola Lovely smiled anxiously at me. When Benny came down the stairs, she looked relieved and said ‘Ah!’ She had draped a shawl over one arm and made no move to give it to me. When eventually she put it aside, I saw that her arm was in plaster up to the elbow. ‘My wrist,’ she explained irritably to America. She was not the kind to accept without resistance the encroaching signs of frailty.
America had prepared lunch and I’d laid it out in the dining room by the time Lola Lovely had settled herself in. ‘Sheets of music everywhere in one room, sketching paper everywhere in another. You boys inherited your untidiness from your father,’ Lola Lovely said to Benny as she sat down at the table.
‘I’m sure they’d have tidied up if they thought they were due an inspection,’ Aunt Mary said.
‘It’s only me. Their old Lola.’
She waited for a moment and it was America who said, ‘You look just as young as the last time, ma’am.’
Lola Lovely looked pleased. ‘I should take you back to Manila with me,’ she said. America laughed off the invitation uneasily.
Lola Lovely ate carefully with her free arm, concentrating on her plate. She picked at her main course, but when I brought the halo-halo out she smiled and sat forward in her chair. After a while, she said, ‘So why is that boy working in a garage? Shouldn’t he be off to college?’
‘He’s not made any set plans yet.’
‘You give them too much freedom,’ she waved her sundae spoon at her daughter. ‘I’d have threatened to cut him off.’
‘He wants to be a musician,’ Benny said. ‘He doesn’t need college for that.’
Lola Lovely started laughing. ‘He should study law like his grandfather. Make some proper money.’ Lola Lovely looked at her daughter and said, ‘It’s fine to encourage these things when they’re young.’
‘Not everyone wants money,’ Benny persisted.
‘Of course everyone wants money! Even Marcos started off with ideals. But power corrupts!’ Lola Lovely said this with a sudden glee; I’d forgotten how she enjoyed holding court, enjoyed proclamations. ‘It’s that wife of his. She’s twisted him. Women shouldn’t meddle with their husband’s politics.’ Aunt Mary’s spoon hesitated on its way to her mouth. Lola Lovely continued, ‘You know, your father always had an eye on the Senate. He’d have made it too, but then of course that scandal—’
‘Aunt Cora said all politicians have mistresses and no one blinks,’ Benny said. His mother stared at him, startled.
Lola Lovely looked stung. ‘It may be gossip for her, but it was my life,’ she said.
‘It was her life too,’ Aunt Mary interjected softly, a look on her face as if she recognised a danger. Lola Lovely looked at me warily and I turned to leave. She needn’t have worried; the whole barrio knew the story. Cora Sanesteban who, along with her husband, Ignacio, ran the Coffee Shak and the Baigal Bakery two blocks down the hill from the Bougainvillea, was Aunt Mary’s step-sister. Cora’s mother, the mistress of Judge Lopez and a mere filing clerk at his office, had died when her daughter was six, after which Cora and her older brother – for the judge had fathered two children with this woman – came to live in the Lopez household. The judge would not, could not, have turned them away, but Lola Lovely had plenty to say about it and after a while the two kids were made to sleep in the garage, when even the servants slept in the main house. They stayed there for several years. Then the judge died and they inherited just enough to be asked to leave and make their own way in the world. Aunt Mary was a child herself, ten years old, when Cora and her brother came to live with them, and maybe if she’d been older, things might have been different.
Now at least there was a kind of peace. Aunt Mary owned the freehold on both the Coffee Shak and the Baigal Bakery, the only freeholds that Bobby Morelos hadn’t gambled away, but – against the family lawyer’s advice – she refused to charge the Sanestebans any rent.
As I turned to go, Aunt Mary gestured to me to wait. Perhaps she hoped my presence might deter her mother, but Lola Lovely said, accusingly, ‘I kept you safe, didn’t I? When the Japanese were everywhere?’
‘Mom, please.’ Aunt Mary set down her spoon.
‘He comes back from the war, different. Acted as if I couldn’t possibly understand. As if we hadn’t been through hell as civilians too. Did that woman understand him any better than I? A filing clerk! And she could barely spell. And then, just when I think we’ve got our lives back, he presents me with her offspring. I had to think of the effect on you,’ Aunt Mary sighed. ‘They were just children then. They didn’t know about any of that.’
‘Everyone feels they can judge me. That’s why I stayed away.’
‘Mom, no one’s judging you. Shall we just eat?’
But Lola Lovely was not to be placated now and she said, looking at Benny, ‘Fine! You’ve already proved you’re a better person than I am. Are you happy?’ Aunt Mary gave her mother a warning look.
‘Why were you looking at me?’ Benny said. ‘Is this about Aunt Cora?’
‘Aunt Cora!’
‘Well, what else am I supposed to call her?’
‘I suppose it’s accurate enough.’
‘She’s doing ok now. She’s not a bitter person.’
‘Even you have an opinion about it! Why, you’re just a child.’ Benny made as if to respond but closed his mouth again, looked at his mother. ‘And your mother with her feminism and her activism,’ Lola Lovely continued. ‘Seeing my terrible example and determined not to make the same mistake with you!’
‘Mother!’
Lola Lovely threw down her spoon. ‘We can’t even be together one day without a fight.’
‘Mom?’ Benny looked lost.
But she said, ‘Benito, would you finish your dessert in the kitchen?’
‘I haven’t done anything wrong!’
‘Well, she’s hardly going to dismiss me, is she?’ Lola Lovely said shrilly.
I stepped forward to take Benny’s glass but he shrugged away my help. I looked at Aunt Mary. Her face was dark, lips pressed tight. I followed Benny to the kitchen but he didn’t stay there. He left his half-eaten dessert on the kitchen table and went to his room, closing the door behind him.
America helped me clear the dining room and then took me out into the yard to eat. ‘She’s not at all like her mother, is she?’ I said.
‘Mrs Lovely wasn’t born into money,’ America said casually. I was intrigued but feigned disinterest and America, seeing through it, tossed me a few grains anyway. Lola Lovely, the daughter of a hospital porter, a girl without the benefit of a university education, had somehow managed to land a man like Jimmy Lopez and had climbed into his unfamiliar world. ‘Until he gave her a ring,’ America said, ‘she wouldn’t even let him see where she lived. She made him stop at the corner of the block so that he had to follow her in secret.’
America and I took our time eating and by the time we returned Lola Lovely had retired to the sala, where she sat at the piano fanning herself. I asked if she required a drink and she shooed me away. ‘Just see if my daughter’s finished yet,’ she said without looking at me. The door to Benny’s room was shut, and from behind it I heard the rhythm of Aunt Mary’s precise, melodic sentences. I slipped quickly past the sala to avoid Lola Lovely on my way back to the kitchen.
America regarded me severely. ‘You better not have been listening at the door,’ she said. ‘You make as much noise as a whole herd of carabao.’
‘Is it about Benny? Is he Cora’s boy?’
She started laughing. ‘You’d better not start pecking at my head. You think people have nothing better to do than to explain every last thing to you?’
‘You enjoy knowing things I don’t.’
It was a mistake. I’d forgotten that America, too, was pricklier during Lola Lovely’s rare visits. Her face soured and she said, ‘Let that boy learn his own story without you crowding in on it.’ And with that she barely spoke to me for the rest of the afternoon, except to tell me what to do.