SHE DECIDES TO TRY out a new life by writing to Marion about it. If nothing else, perhaps the story of what is happening will begin to make sense to her.
Dear Marion,
Here we are finally settled in! We are staying in a townhouse in Georgetown, an elegant address that Pancho can give out at the White House and the State Department.
Her father’s calling card reads Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal, President, Dominican Republic, though of course there is some debate about whether he can still claim that title. The house is a loan, which Camila has begged from her father’s former friend and protégé, Peynado.
Pancho knows nothing of this transaction. He believes the house is a lease left over from the years when Peynado was his ambassador to the United States. But now Peynado has gone over to the other side and is negotiating with the Americans on his own. Pancho has come to Washington to let the State Department know that the Dominicans already have a president, and that neither Peynado nor any of the other turncoats have a right to negotiate without his approval.
“They won’t listen,” Camila kept telling her father when he proposed the trip back in Cuba. She tried to convince him to give it up, to stay quietly in exile, seeing the occasional patient. They have been through so much already!
Ay, Marion, what a saga this has been . . . I still remember that July, 1916 (was it already seven years ago?), when the Dominican delegation arrived at our door in Cuba. I know I’ve told you how surprised we all were to hear that Papancho had been elected president in absentia! And the greater surprise, after living in exile for so many years, he accepted! I remember telling you that I stayed behind with the little boys in Cuba since Tivisita had not been dead a year, and I wanted to be sure this presidency would “take” before I put the whole family through the ordeal of a move. Two months later, we joined Papancho in Santo Domingo. I remember the boys were still wearing black armbands for their mother. But this is the part I’ve never told you, as I know how proud you are of my father’s being president. Marion, Papancho was president for only four months. The family hadn’t been reunited a month—twenty-seven days!—when Papancho came to our living quarters in the presidential palace one afternoon with the news that the Americans had invaded the island. “I refuse to be their puppet!” he pronounced for the reporters who had followed him upstairs. We went back to Cuba, cabinet in tow—yes, even Peynado came along—to establish a government in exile. So began our saga.
Seven years later, the cabinet has disbanded, but Pancho still persists in his claim to the presidency. Camila has tried to talk sense into him. He cannot save a country that does not want to be saved in the way he wants to save it. But if she has not fully known him in this incarnation before, she is now encountering her father as a Force of History, and when that kind of idea gets in the heads of the Henríquez men, there is no way—short of the paralysis that did temporarily strike Pancho down last year—no way on earth to stop them.
“But where are we to stay in Washington?” Camila finally turned from protest to practicalities.
Max came up with a solution, and at his urging, Camila wrote to Peynado, who replied that, of course, he would be “more than honored to have the former president of our island stay in my house.” He will not be using it during the month of May, and in any case, if he does happen to be in town a night or two, there is plenty of space: four bedrooms on the second floor as well as an attic room with a daybed, where Camila sometimes sits now, in one of her moods, daydreaming about Scott Andrews.
She has been mulling over the proposal of marriage he made in his last letter. Since she allowed the question to go unanswered, and Scott Andrews is a shy man, he is not likely to bring it up again. In fact, one of the reasons she finally agreed to accompany her father this May on what she considers a humiliating mission and a risky one for his health, is to find out if the proposal is still in the offing, as Scott Andrews himself might put it. Then, of course, she will have to decide if she loves him.
SHE MET MAJOR ANDREWS at a reception in the White House over two years ago. It was during one of their numerous trips north in quest of Pancho’s post. Camila had wandered off in the direction of the powder room but took a wrong turn, and ended up in a stately, lamplit sitting room presided over by a portrait that made her stop in her tracks. The face was, of course, a man’s face, but Lincoln’s eyes were the same sad, heavy-lidded ones as her mother’s!
Behind her, Camila heard footsteps, turned, and was surprised to find a guard, as she believed him to be, coming to apprehend her. Scott Andrews was on detail at the White House that night, and his job was to keep guests within the reception area. Ever since Mrs. Harding had opened the White House to the public, small knickknacks had been disappearing: ashtrays in which Teddy Roosevelt had tapped the ashes of his cigar, tassels from Martha Washington’s time torn off lampshades. Scott Andrews told her this later, one of those bits of information that he liked to offer her, knowing she delighted in the harmless gossip that made her feel in the know. And although he had not meant for her to draw this conclusion, Camila understood that his first impression of her—a tall, serene woman from a Spanish-speaking country—was that she was engaged in petty thievery.
And now, this May of the borrowed elegant address, this month of May with the heat of summer already creeping about the edges of the nation’s capital, Camila dresses herself in her least shabby outfit to go begging again for her father. She has set up a rendezvous with Scott Andrews to ask if there is anything he can do about arranging one last meeting with the president for Pancho.
In the course of her conversation she hopes to touch upon the Other Matter, as she likes to think of it so as not to scare herself. She must not keep ignoring her own interests in order to take care of her father. Besides, she is weary with his anger. Some days she does not want to get up from bed. Mon has told her how her mother suffered as a young girl from depression, which was called melancholy then. Camila feels it, lapping at her knees, and rising.
This is her twenty-ninth spring: it is time for her to be happy.
“DEAR MARION,” CAMILA WRITES:
Washington is worse than ever I remember it. The heat here is as oppressive as Santiago de Cuba. Certainly not as pleasant as Havana with its sea breezes. How can one believe in a nation that built its capital in a swamp?
She is almost sure she can say these things to Marion about her country, as Marion is the first to criticize this “nutty nation,” as she calls it. Marion, after all, followed Camila home to Cuba from the University of Minnesota. For the past two years, Marion has been busy, opening the first modern dance school in Santiago, teaching “shopping English” to the wealthy daughters of sugar barons, learning to ride horseback, shoot, play tennis, croquet, and to drink Mary Pickfords, a combination of rum, pineapple juice, grenadine, and ice, which despite its name Marion would not be allowed to drink in her “dry” United States.
When Camila and her father left for Washington, Marion accompanied them as far as New York, then took a train west to spend the summer in North Dakota with her recently widowed father, who is worried sick about her. How can she of her own free will choose to live in a savage country like Cuba instead of in the best country on God’s earth? Marion counters with news of her dance academy, the antics of the Henríquez household with its numerous unusual pets, among them a bear, a monkey, and a small pink pig called Teddy Roosevelt (which is, her father writes back,“downright disrespectful”).
I think often of how strange it must be for you, Marion, going home after two years away. Speaking of sagas, yours has been an odyssey! I’m sure the last thing Daddy Reed expected when he sent you east to college in Minnesota from North Dakota was that you would end up in Cuba! He must be so happy to have you back.
Marion is planning to return to Santiago at the end of the summer, and as soon as their Washington mission is over, Camila and her father will return there also. Unless something happens, Camila thinks, as she kisses her friend goodbye at Grand Central Station. Although Camila has mentioned Scott Andrews to Marion, he has never seemed a threat. He is a vague figure, even to her, like the mother she has made up and the brothers she talks to in her head since the real ones are never around.
Do you remember my bringing up S.A.’s name from time to time? The young marine who was so kind to us during our last trip here? The one who kept writing me those letters you were always so curious about! Anyhow, we had dinner together last night. We went to the Madison Club, which is supposed to have a speakeasy in back where you can get alcohol. Of course, we ate in the formal dining room in front. Twice during the meal, S.A. excused himself, saying he had to use the facilities. He came back to the table, flushed and red-faced, so I can imagine what facilities he meant! I am glad he wears civilian clothes when we go out. I could not bear sitting across from someone dressed in the uniform of our occupying force.
Because of the three years she spent in Minnesota, Camila writes quite well in English. But she always writes to her best friend in Spanish so that Marion can keep up her español. Otherwise, she will lose her fluency in North Dakota where no one (underlined three times—Camila calls Marion “the passionate punctuator”), not even the Spanish teachers at the land grant colleges, speak it or write it well. In part, too, Camila suspects, Marion prefers her mail in Spanish to ensure privacy in their communications, as her father, Daddy Reed, has been known to open Marion’s mail “by mistake.”
Now, for a description. Tall, slender, with the fair complexion of his English ancestors—a Douglas Fairbanks lookalike. Truly, people have stopped him on the street and asked him if he is any relation. I’ve always wondered why such a good-looking man is a bachelor. But there is a timidity to him which I think he meant to throw off by joining the Marines. Now he is a military aide at the White House, a position which suits him better. His people are from New Hampshire. Early abolitionists, he makes a point of telling me. He is a kind if timid man. I think you will like him.
His timidity has impeded any progress on the romantic front. And yet when they are apart, Scott Andrews writes Camila fond letters that arrive in Santiago de Cuba with the White House crest on the envelope. Camila has to be on the lookout. Should her father spot the return address, he would tear open the letter, thinking that President Harding or Secretary Hughes is finally conceding that the United States is in the wrong, having invaded another country and forced its president to live in exile on a neighboring island. As for Marion, should she read the letters, she would throw one of her jealous tantrums.
But in person, Scott Andrews withdraws into a correctness that baffles Camila. Perhaps it is a handicap of his profession, immersed as he is in protocol. She wishes he would come boldly forward and champion her father’s cause, use his connections to get them close to the power he is always gossiping to her about. But all Scott does is bring her “souvenir gifts” from the Harding White House: a little ashtray meant as a joke after their first meeting; a deck of cards with Laddie Boy, the First Dog, posed before the American flag; a lady’s watch in a gift box inscribed—so Scott Andrews claims—in Mrs. Harding’s hand, Time for Normalcy, Time for Harding.
Time is running out! Her father sinks deeper into his theory that there is a plot afoot between the United States and the Peynado group to annex the island. His health is worse every day. It is difficult to ask Scott for help. His timidity brings out her own shyness. On one of her earlier visits in the winter, he grazed her breasts as he was helping her with her old Minnesota coat, and he blushed, yes, blushed. In fact, during this trip, she is surprised to discover that he is breaking the prohibition law and drinking. But then, as he has told her himself, President Harding throws late-night parties all the time, with trays full of bottles containing every conceivable brand of whiskey. When Scott Andrews is on White House detail, he drives many a drunk senator or Supreme Court Justice home.
I explained to S.A. about Papancho and how we must have an interview with Mr. Harding before this Hughes-Peynado plan is put through, and S.A. said the usual, that there is nothing he can do, we must go through the proper channels. Proper channels! We have to go through proper channels to protest this country’s outlaw actions toward us!
Enough! she tells herself. She is starting to sound like her father: every thought, every remark going back to the same angry place. It is what caused his breakdown last year. What has made him crazy with worry and overwrought with constant indignation. In fact, she is not sure she would grant him an interview were she the president of the United States. She herself cannot live like this. Nights, in the attic room, she paces, then goes downstairs to the front door, opens the spyglass panel, looks out.
Anyhow, Marion, dear, I imagine you are enjoying the peace and quiet of your golden prairies. Remember that summer I spent with you and Daddy Reed and Mother—you must miss her so! Perhaps Daddy Reed is right, and you should stay put in North Dakota. Paste snapshots of your years at the University of Minnesota in an album. One day your little girl will ask, And who is that? And you will say, She was my Spanish teacher. I followed her to Cuba. I lived there with her and her family for two years. Periodically, I would throw tantrums to get her attention. I would threaten to leave. One day I did leave and never went back.
Ay, Marion, is this then the end of our story?
But she must not say so, or the next thing she knows, Marion will be on a train headed east. Now that they are apart, Camila must use this opportunity to make it clear that Marion should not come back. She must get free of their special connection. But she cannot think of a way to tell her dear friend except by writing these letters that outline a new situation for both of them.
“About the Other Matter,” Camila writes, trying to finish this interminable letter of longing and complaint.
It did not come up. I thought at one point S.A. was about to say something, but instead he excused himself a second time and was gone a good five minutes. When he came back, more flushed than ever, he seemed to fall into a study of my face, but then quickly, he brought up Papancho’s interview and said he would do what he could. He then confided that Washington is very tight right now. Some big scandal is breaking that might go all the way to the top. The president is distraught and has scheduled a trip to Alaska to relax. “Why not encourage him to go to the Caribbean?” I asked curtly. “He practically owns all of it now . . .” I enumerated all the occupied or supervised islands: Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, as well as the Dominican Republic. I am afraid I am becoming as shrill as Papancho, Marion, and this nice man will run hard and fast in the other direction.
But Scott Andrews does not run off. A few days later, he invites Camila to accompany him to the Paradise Jazz Club. Jazz! She thought jazz was the sassy music of white flappers with boyfriends in fur coats and Model Ts. But jazz belongs to us, she thinks, colored people, as they are called here, and it is the saddest music in the world. Of course, the only apparently colored people in the room are up on the stage, and no one would guess that Camila, pale-skinned with her wavy, marcelled hair, is one of them. She throws her head back, eyes closed, and lets herself be summoned by the braying saxophone. She can sense Scott Andrews’s eyes on her long, bare neck.
Between numbers, he announces that he has thought of a way to get her into the White House: one of Mrs. Harding’s garden parties! If Camila can get the ear of Mrs. Harding, the president will consent to a meeting with Pancho. “Everyone says she runs the country anyway,” Scott Andrews confides. “In fact, the president calls her the Duchess, and the public calls them the Chief Executive and Mr. Harding.”
“I don’t know,” Camila says, looking down at her hands hidden under the table on her lap, keeping time with the musician playing the piano on stage. She should tell him that she can no longer afford to buy outfits for these fancy parties, that she is shy and mortified whenever she finds herself tongue-tied at large social gatherings.
Before she can voice her reluctance, he reaches across the table for her hand. Quickly, she brings it up from her lap to be kissed. He seems relieved that he has successfully completed his mission and grins. “I’ve been waiting a long time to do that,” he admits.
“That makes two of us.”
The wail of the saxophone has made her brave and the slim-slamy way the large negro is playing the piano.
PEDRO ARRIVES FROM MEXICO the next day with his pretty young bride, Isabel María Lombardo Toledano. He has brought her north so she can meet some members of his scattered family. In a few days, Max will arrive with his wife, Guarina, and their two young boys. Tío Federico is due in as well, white-haired and flinty-eyed, a fierce old warrior. The whole family is assembling, not just to meet Pedro’s bride, but in answer to Camila’s wires. Something must be done with Papancho. The brothers have come to help. Camila is not sure what Tío Federico is coming for, as he is the one who is always urging his brother Pancho to fight to the death. The death of what? Camila wants to ask.
The first night of Pedro’s visit, before the others arrive, she chats with the happy couple in the sitting room. Pancho, who usually excuses himself about this time to go up to bed, lingers, flirting with his new daughter-in-law as if he, too, must make a conquest.
“I am trying to arrange a meeting for Papancho,” Camila explains when Pedro asks how matters stand, meaning only one matter, which has obsessed their father for the last seven years of his life. Camila goes on to explain that she has a friend in the State Department.
“What friend?” Pedro wants to know.
“The sailor,” Pancho pipes up. This is what her father calls Scott Andrews when he is not calling him Camila’s puppy dog.
“My friend, Scott Andrews. He has invited me to a White House garden party where I will try to speak with Mrs. Harding.”
“What?” Pancho challenges. This is the first he has heard of this plan. “We must not beg!” he thunders as the young Isabel looks on, shocked at this sudden change in her new father-in-law.
“We will not go in the back door!” he continues, his voice trembling with rage. “We do things with honor or we leave them alone!”
Camila falls silent. She cannot reason with him when he gets this angry.
When Pancho has finally climbed the stairs to bed, Camila explains to Pedro and Isabel how every morning, she accompanies her father—protest and proposal in hand—to the outer offices of the State Department’s Latin American division. A minor official always greets them, takes Papancho’s calling card, and goes away for a long time. Finally, he comes back with regrets. Secretary Hughes cannot receive them today.
“We have got to stop this,” Camila tells Pedro. “He’s just going to make himself sick again.”
But Camila is surprised by her brother’s reaction. “Papancho has every right in the world,” Pedro says, his voice rising, his hands closing into fists. Beside him, Isabel seems startled for a second time this evening. Who is this stranger she has married? What a worked-up family of fervent idealists! “Look at what the Yanquis have done in Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico. Who is going to stop them?”
Not Papancho, Camila thinks.
“As for you, my little sister,” Pedro changes the subject, reaching for her hands and giving one to Isabel to hold as if he is sharing a prize with his young wife. They sit there, sweetly, holding hands as if they were at a seance. (Scott Andrews has told her how Mrs. Harding frequents a clairvoyant on R Street!) It is rare for her brother to be so outwardly affectionate. But Camila has noticed a warming in his manner since he heard of Marion’s departure from Cuba. “Let me give you some advice, since I am your older brother and I have already made all the mistakes you are headed for. Don’t let Papancho’s politics take over your personal life. This friend you mentioned, just enjoy getting to know him. He is American?”
“Yes,” she says quickly. Why does she suddenly feel she should apologize for Scott’s nationality. She knows her brother is glad she is seeing any man at all. Ever since he surprised them in Minnesota, Pedro has worried about Camila’s friendship with la norte-americana. “Scott Andrews’s people are from New Hampshire. They were early abolitionists,” Camila adds, trying to make the Marine major sound appealing to her brother.
“Does he know about Mamá?” Pedro asks, casting a knowing glance in Isabel’s direction. Back home, everyone expects these mixtures. Isabel herself obviously has a little Indian in her golden skin, and a lot in her black hair and dark, almond-shaped eyes.
“Things have not progressed that far,” Camila answers quietly.
“When he meets me, he will know right away.” Despite his effort to speak lightly, Pedro’s voice is edged with bitterness. Camila remembers hard moments in Minneapolis for her brother, rentals suddenly unavailable, entry refused into certain clubs. Pedro and Max have turned out to be the sons who look most like Salomé’s side of the family, darker-skinned, a kink in their hair, all the telling features. Camila thinks of the musicians on stage at the jazz club; how they came in a separate door; how she saw them sitting on crates and eating outdoors when she and Scott left during a break in the music. They could have been her brothers, especially the light-skinned saxophone player. She recalls how Max once earned his living playing the piano in New York. Where do they eat in the winter? she wonders.
“When will we meet him, Camila?” Isabel asks after several moments of silence. This is the first time she has spoken up. She is nineteen years younger than Pedro; perhaps she believes she has to ask permission of her elders to speak up!
If Pedro should say anything at all about Scott Andrews, Camila will say, You of all people should know the heart chooses strangely if it chooses at all. Look at you, the old man in the family, picking a child bride; or Max, a talented musician, with his deaf Guarina; or Mamá choosing a boy obsessed with her talent and great causes.
But better the heart that chooses, she thinks, than the heart that keeps itself aloof, safely, in indecision.
“Dear Marion,” Camila writes her friend that night. “I think I am in love.”
SHE HAS TURNED THE attic room into her bedroom, now that Max and his family have arrived. She draws the ground plan of the house for Marion, the formal entryway, the door with its curious spyglass (“You pull a wooden slot and look out at your visitors, but they cannot see you!”), the formal parlor to one side, the dining room to the other, the sitting room with the grand piano on which Camila plays the pretty Debussy pieces that please and soothe her father, and in back, the large kitchen where Isabel spends much of her time cooking up meals to impress her new in-laws.
We are bursting at the seams, dear Marion. I’ve put initials by each room so you can see how I’ve arranged everyone. Papancho and Tío Federico sleep in the southwest bedroom. Beside them to the east: Pedro and Isabel. In the larger front bedroom: Max and Guarina, with the boys in cots in the alcove. The other bedroom, Peynado’s, should have been mine, but how can I sleep in the quarters of a man my father rants about all day long? I have moved myself upstairs to the attic, which gives me a little more privacy, but it is getting hotter and hotter as the summer progresses. I am not sure how long I can stand it.
She stays up late, stripped down to a slip, writing Marion daily letters she does not send. Sometimes she stands to stretch her back and look down at the quiet, residential street below. When a car approaches, she moves back from view, though her perch is hidden by the branches of the huge sycamore in the front yard.
We went out today Sunday for a stroll to see the Lincoln Memorial that there’s been all the fuss about. Max and Guarina walked ahead with their noisy boys. (I think those boys, and not the influenza everyone blames, are what have made Guarina’s deafness worse!) Pedro and Isabel and I trailed, talking about Mr. Lincoln, whose speeches and writings my brother, of course, quotes from memory—you know our Pedro! Papancho and Federico stayed home, plotting the overthrow, no doubt. It was one of those beautiful breezy days of early summer, when you look up at the sky and want to cry.
But then, looking at the sky has always brought tears to her eyes. Somehow that blank, blue expanse fills with the ghostly features of her mother. The summer she spent with Marion’s family in LaMoure five years ago, it was difficult not to gaze up. Half the world was sky! No wonder she was constantly on the verge of tears, sentimental and emotional, taking offense every time Daddy Reed tried to set her straight on Woodrow Wilson and the Monroe Doctrine.
Suddenly, there he was ahead of us, S.A. in uniform, walking with an attractive young lady, as fair as he, her arm slipped in his. He was pointing out this and that as if he were giving her a tour. I pulled down my hat at an angle, hoping he would not notice me. But here comes one of Max’s boys, the little one Leonardo, screaming, TÍA CAMILA, I CAN COUNT MR. LINCOLN’S FINGERS, and of course S.A. turns and takes in the whole family at a glance. I thought maybe he would tighten his hold on his young white goddess, and walk off, but no. He hurried over. “So it is you, Camila! What a surprise!”
Why? she has asked herself over and over as she writes, why does she not send these letters to her friend? Or if she fears losing Marion, then why not just keep a diary as any countless number of ladies are doing? (Scott Andrews has told her Mrs. Harding keeps a little red one in which she writes down every grievance.) But why this pretense that all she is doing is reporting her summer to someone who will listen?
Of course, she thinks as she writes pages and pages of unsent letters, I don’t want anyone, not even Marion, to see me this upset.
My suspicions were all wrong. The fair companion was his sister Franny, visiting from Concord. When we finished the round of introductions, we all went and stood at Mr. Lincoln’s feet and listened while little Leo counted the huge marble fingers in English and Spanish. Then, S.A. invited us all for refreshments at an elegant café nearby. Ay, Marion, what a painful moment. The establishment would not serve us. They said they did not have enough room for such a large party, but there were many empty tables, and we all guessed the reason. Pedro immediately turned on his heels and took Isabel home. But the boys insisted on their promised ice cream sundae, and so we found a nearby stand and sat on park benches, S.A. beside me, silent and shaken. Before we parted, he turned to me and said in the most feeling way, “Camila, I am so sorry.” I cannot tell you how moved I am by this demonstration of S.A.’s support.
“I think I am in love,” she writes again. But this time, reviewing what she has written, she crosses off the first two words just to see the bold pronouncement in print. I am in love. Has she ever said this about anybody before?
She stands, turning off the desk lamp so that the attic is suffused in the soft light coming up from the hall below. She walks to the window, watching her full reflection. She is supposed to be taller than her mother, more attractive, though she has never known if this compliment is a euphemism for “whiter, paler, more Caucasian” in her looks. According to Mon, Salomé was a plain mulatto woman. In the posthumous portrait her father commissioned, Salomé is pale, pretty, with a black neck band and a full rosebud mouth, a beautifying and whitening of the Great Salomé, another one of her father’s campaigns.
NIGHTS, CAMILA LIKES TO roam the yard. The house is surrounded by a high hedge, and so she feels at ease, sitting on a lawn chair in her slip with only a light shawl to pull about her in case anyone from the house should surprise her, smoking her cigarette. She doesn’t know if anyone suspects she smokes. Of course, Marion knows. After all, it was Marion, who introduced her to this vice as well as to skinny-dipping in the James River, and fast rides in her daddy’s “speeding machine.” But unlike her bold, boastful friend, Camila does not like to call attention to her transgressions. Why on earth invite judgment? She has enough of that in her own head, thank you.
At night, she can sit back and look at the sky, and not feel weepy. Contrary to the behavior of most ghosts, her mother’s face never appears in the darkness. Camila gazes up, and, like a schoolgirl assigned a problem at the blackboard, she begins connecting the stars into the shape of the future everyone expects of her She will live in a house, not unlike this one. She will bear children, not unlike her little nephews. She will kiss her kind husband, a man not unlike Scott Andrews . . .
Already she feels bored with this version of what is coming.
ONE AFTERNOON, HOME FROM their call at the outer offices of the State Department, she is sitting in the backyard reading when she is summoned to the front door by Isabel. Pedro is at the Library of Congress, doing research, and Max and Guarina have taken the boys sightseeing for a few days in Philadelphia. Upstairs, the two eminences grises are snoring away at their siesta, and Isabel, dear heart, has been making meringues in the kitchen in this heat. Blessed be the young brides. They shall fatten the earth.
“I looked through the hole as you showed me,” Isabel explains, “But it is no one I recognize.”
Camila feels a slight twinge of disappointment. She had thought it might be Scott Andrews with news of a granted interview. But of course, if Isabel does not recognize the stranger, then it cannot be Scott. For several restless days, she has waited, but there has been no word from him since their last stormy meeting. It baffles her how they have come to this impasse. She had never meant to deliver an ultimatum.
We had just ordered dessert when S.A. leaned close and asked if I had given any thought to his proposal. He had undoubtedly had too much to drink. Before we went any further, I decided to tell S.A. that it is absolutely necessary to arrange an interview between Papancho and President Harding. Absolutely necessary. My father must close this chapter of his life, and without that final interview, he will stay in that horrible limbo that almost killed him last year. And there is a chance, a small chance, that Mr. Harding will listen. Next year is an election year, and the presidents in this country always dust off their noble aspirations about this time. “But what if I can’t line up an interview?” S.A. asked. So I looked him straight in the eye and said, “If you want a future for us, you will not refuse me.” He was quite upset, but I held firm, and just so I wouldn’t soften, I left my dessert untouched, put on my stole, and hailed a motorcab home.
“I’ll be right there, Isabel,” she tells her sister-in-law, closing the new Willa Cather novel Marion has sent her, A Lost Lady, a title she takes personally. She goes up the back steps, tucking stray hairs into the net she is wearing to hold the marcelling in place. She is long overdue for a wave, but the salons in Washington are so expensive. She considers taking off the net, making herself more presentable, perhaps stopping quickly in the bathroom to check her appearance in the mirror. As the first daughter and official hostess, she has had to pay attention to these details for the last seven years. Her stepmother was spared. Eight years dead, just in time. Worn out from being the wife of private-citizen Pancho, she would not have lasted a season as President Pancho’s first lady. But Camila has not had a convenient alibi since she left her job in Minnesota.
Marion, I don’t know what Fury possessed me at that restaurant. But then, in the backseat of the motorcab, when I reflected on the opportunity I had just lost, I felt sick to my stomach. I calmed myself, breathing slowly, sitting on my hands. And I swear I heard my mother speaking to me in a voice very low, but firm: This is what it means to love your country. Duty is the highest virtue. What an oppressive ghost my mother has become! I, too, am an occupied territory. I had to tell the driver to stop the car. We were just then crossing Rock Creek Park, so he pulled over, I paid him quickly, stumbled out onto the grass, and threw up.
In the bathroom she decides that the hairnet is unobtrusive as it is the same color as her dark brown hair. She pats her cheeks. Her brothers are right: she is looking too thin. “It is the style now to be slender,” she tells them, waving their worries away. The Cheerful Front. “If you could bottle it,” as Marion says, “you could make a million bucks.” Guaranteed to promote tractability and smiles. She saves her breakdowns for late at night under the stars, when the family has gone to sleep, for secluded parks with strangers coming up to her as she leans against a tree, asking is she all right, can they be of any assistance.
“Leave me alone,” she wants to say. “But if you would, just get out of my country.”
At the front door, she pulls the slot and is shocked by what she sees. Peynado had mentioned that he might be using the house for an occasional visit during the summer. But it is May, campaigning is going strong back on the island, and Peynado is running for president. In fact, Camila had purposely planned her father’s trip so that they would be departing just when their host might be returning to Washington.
But what shocks her even more is to catch sight of the tall, blond escort, standing behind the short, frocked man. Scott Andrews in uniform! What on earth is he doing here?
Camila considers ignoring the guests, but then of course, Francisco Peynado is not a guest. This is his house. In the front bedroom that Camila has refused to occupy, she has found ear plugs, a tin of lozenges, a stack of cards with pictures of sassy ladies, half-clothed, their bosoms bursting out of their corsets like leavened bread rising in a warm oven.
“¿Quién es?” Isabel whispers. Camila jumps, startled at the sound of her sister-in-law standing beside her. She looks frightened. The poor dear probably thinks officials have come to extradite the whole clan. “Do you know them?”
Isabel must not have recognized, beyond Peynado’s shoulder, the face of the handsome major they met several weeks ago at the monument. “Yes, I know them,” Camila says calmly to allay her sister-in-law’s fears. “But I do not want to disturb Papancho,” she adds. “Keep him inside, all right?”
The girl gazes warily toward the stairs and nods. Camila turns the lock, opens the door, and slips outside.
SHE LEADS THE TWO men to a dainty wrought-iron bench that looks merely ornamental under the sycamore tree. During the anxious interview, she is, of course, constantly checking to see if Pancho or worse, his eagle-eyed brother, Federico, is at the window, or if Pedro might be coming down the street, returning on foot with his book bag full of the free literature he has picked up in one of the many museums on his walk home. And of course, the whole time, she is wondering and worrying about what Scott Andrews is doing accompanying her father’s rival to her front door.
By the time this trip is over I will have a new degree: master’s in intrigue. Even when I was choosing where to sit on the bench with Peynado (S.A. insisted on standing), I was thinking of which side would be best for watching both the street and the house. Meanwhile, I am quickly losing my degree in manners. I didn’t even greet our visitors. In fact, I told Peynado in no uncertain terms that if he came in the house, Papancho would die of apoplexy. He seemed baffled. “But why, Camila? We’re old friends. He is using my house.” And so I had to explain that Papancho had no idea whose house he was using, that he thought it a long-term lease of the Dominican government, that he felt he had a right to use the house as he was the president when the island was invaded. I could see the whole sad situation slowly dawning on Peynado. “I understand,” he said at last. “I will stay at the Portland. But you must reason with your father.” That is when he looked toward S.A., who had given us his back, and was plucking leaves from a nearby hedge like a nervous schoolboy.
“General,” he calls out. Camila has noticed how Peynado flatters officers by addressing them by a higher rank. “Perhaps you can explain to Miss Camila that we have turned a corner and we cannot possibly go back.”
“The election campaigns are proceeding beautifully,” he goes on. And all Camila can think to reply to this is, “So what are you doing here?”
He laughs at her brusqueness, and she sees he is not offended. Sometimes she wonders if she is incapable of offending. If every angry emotion is filtered through the memory of her noble mother and her suffering nation and comes out as a muted, mannerly remark. She knows it is supposed to be one of her womanly accomplishments: her anger does not show; her fingers will only play a jazz number on her lap under the tablecloth, not on the grand piano in the parlor.
“I received a phone call,” Peynado is explaining.
Scott Andrews, who has turned to face them, stiffens. She can see it in his handsome jaw, in the epaulettes at his shoulders suddenly jutting out like knees. What on earth has frightened him? Quickly, she looks up to make sure her father has not spotted them through the window on the stair landing.
“General Andrews called to inform me that you found it absolutely necessary for your father to meet with someone in the State Department. But you must understand, Camila. We are at a delicate moment historically. Your father must not ruin our chances. I have come to escort him home.”
She feels her breath coming short and fears that she will faint right here in front of the two men. So, Scott Andrews has indulged her, has made her think an interview might be possible, and then when she has confronted him, he has called in Peynado to come help get her father off everybody’s hands. Now, when they have become close, when she is falling in love, when it will hurt to lose him.
She does not know how she finally finds her legs and stands up. “I am going to have to ask you both to leave,” she says quietly. Then turning to Peynado, she adds, “We will be out of here by the end of the week.”
“Please, Camila,” her father’s old friend is at her side. “You have to understand.”
She brushes past him, heading for the latched gate as if she needs to show them both the way out. She tries to control the fury rising in her throat. In her head she commences playing the tune of the jazz band of several weeks ago. The piano drowns out her mother’s voice, Peynado’s explanations, the whirring of the cicadas, the call of the robins in the trees above.
Only when Scott Andrews delays a moment to have a private word with her does the music stop—
Where is the music? She needs the sassy sadness of those ivory keys to keep going. She lifts her hand as if she were playing that piano and has momentarily paused, causing this gap in the music, this hiatus in the love story she has been fabricating in her letters to Marion. And then, because she cannot hold in the fury any longer, she brings her hand down hard on the major’s pale face.