A Thorn in the Bush (4 page)

Chapter 9

Shortly after noon, Serena waltzed into the sickroom with the luncheon tray. A slender blue vase containing three yellow roses graced the center of the tray.

“Your tamales, Señora,” said Serena as she deposited the tray in Mrs. Ross’s lap, whisked a napkin off the plate. “Sweet ones,” she announced. “Just the way you like them.”

Mrs. Ross put aside the pocketbook she had been reading (a Spanish imitation of the English-language mystery thriller entitled
Parachute to Death!).
She admired the mound of tamales in their corn-husk sheathes. Steam curled upward from them. And at one side there was another mound of beans with cheese, some green peas, and a sweetbread roll. The pill rested on the edge of the saucer beside the coffee cup.

“How very nice the food looks,” said Mrs. Ross.

“The Señor Hoblitt goes away,” said Serena.

In the act of reaching for her fork, Mrs. Ross stopped, looked up, saw no sadness on Serena’s face. For all that it showed in her expression, the woman could just as well have announced an increase in production by Mrs. Gonzales’s chickens.

“The artist?” inquired Mrs. Ross. “He is leaving San Juan?”

“Yes. Even now he is packing.” Serena maintained her look of bland unconcern.

She is presenting a brave front for my benefit,
thought Mrs. Ross. She said: “And what of the painting he was to do of you and María Carlotta?”

Serena shrugged. “As you said: artists are fickle.”

“And where does he go?” asked Mrs. Ross.

“Away.”

“Yes, but where?”

“Who knows?”

“I see.” Mrs. Ross recognized Serena’s reply. It was the one frequently used when she knew an answer but refused to reveal it. On occasion, though, it meant no more than it suggested.

“Then you do not know where he is going?” pressed Mrs. Ross.

“He has not told
me,
Señora.”

“To be sure.” Mrs. Ross recognized the futility of further questioning. “Well …” She straightened against the pillows.

“Careful, Señora!” Serena rescued the vase of roses which was teetering on the tray. She put the vase on the bedside stand.

Mrs. Ross smiled. No matter where Hoblitt went: he was going. By Mexican standards, Jaime had achieved miraculous speed in ridding them of the artist. Mrs. Ross felt rested, her appetite sharp.

“I think I will try getting up for lunch today,” she said.

Serena’s braids flung themselves about with the violent shaking of her head. “Dr. Herrera said …”

“Dr. Herrera does not run my life! Bring me my robe. Hmmmph. The man barely knows one pill from another.”

Later in the afternoon, Mrs. Ross ventured across the cobblestones to visit Paulita. It was a dampish, hot day and the humidity gave a cloying quality to all the tropic aromas, sharpened the bitter odors of decay. She felt a sense of escape as she stepped into the shadows of the Romera doorway.

Paulita sat at her accustomed place beneath the Moorish fretwork that framed the entrance to her
sala.
A white serape draped her legs. All around her—the courtyard lush with flowers and a riot of greenery, the somnolence of humming insects and muted house sounds—there was an air of relaxation. But Paulita’s fingers, darting the needle across the red splash of poinsettia, betrayed a secret frenzy, out of tune with her surroundings. And the Hidalgo ancestress stood out prominently in her today: the flaring nostrils, quick movements of the head, the proud way she straightened in the chair to greet her visitor.

“But you are better!” she called in English while Mrs. Ross was crossing the courtyard. “We were so worried about you.”

Mrs. Ross resigned herself to the sharp-edged cane chair facing Paulita, took a deep breath. The afternoons were so muggy this time of year. She noted the perspiration dotting Paulita’s forehead, the bubbling-over in the girl’s manner.

“I’m feeling much better, thank you,” said Mrs. Ross. And she wondered:
What is wrong with the girl?

“We sent Carmella with a cup of herb soup,” said Paulita.

Mrs. Ross recalled ordering Serena out of the room with the offering. “It was delicious,” she said. She fanned herself. In spite of the uncomfortable chair, it felt good to be sitting.

“It will rain soon,” said Paulita. “It is so damp.” She returned to her needlework, cast sidelong glances at Mrs. Ross.

She acts exactly like someone with a secret,
thought Mrs. Ross.

Paulita bit off a thread, peered toward the back of the house, returned her attention to Mrs. Ross. “I have a note from him,” she hissed.

“A note? From …” The implications exploded in Mrs. Ross’s consciousness.

Paulita hunched her shoulders in a giggle that made her look school-girlish. “Yes. He sent it by Antonio Muñoz. Antonio was not supposed to tell anyone except me who sent him, but my aunt is his godmother. She made him tell her.”

Mrs. Ross swallowed with difficulty. “What did …”

“He paid Antonio five pesos to bring the note!”

“I see. And what did he say in the note?” Mrs. Ross felt her sore throat returning.

“He said he had to go away for a while, but that he would return and bring me something to make me happy! Is it not exciting?” She lapsed into Spanish, speaking at a furious rate: “What a brute in the eyes! Auntie was outraged. We have not been introduced. We know nothing about him. Remember that artist who … you know … with Ferencia Alabano.” Paulita hugged her
punto de cruz
to her nubile bosom. “Oh, how exciting it is!”

What has gone wrong?
wondered Mrs. Ross.
Something is definitely wrong.
She recalled Serena’s unnatural reaction to the artist’s departure, said: “Paulita, my dear, I know this type of young man. Artists are a strange …”

“Oh, you’re just like Auntie!” exploded Paulita. “She thinks …” She glanced at the spindly outline of her legs beneath the serape. “… just because I must use the sticks to walk that I cannot have … a real life.”

“Perhaps all this is possible,” ventured Mrs. Ross. “But what happens when the young man discovers …” She, too, glanced at the serape.

Paulita smiled. A knowing expression came over her proud face. “It is not just the legs that a young man admires. Surely you know this?”

But Mrs. Ross’s thoughts were twisting through their own private horror. She had convinced herself that Hoblitt, when he learned of Paulita’s infirmity, would react as the other young artist had reacted:
Beauty with a deformity must be destroyed! Let no deformity survive!
She envisioned Hoblitt: jaws slavering, knife upraised, advancing on a cowering Paulita. It was a scene modified by the Gertie experience but otherwise lifted out of a B movie starring Lon Chaney that she had seen twenty-five years before.

“It must not be!” she muttered.

Paulita bent to her sewing. “What will be, will be,” she said. There was a mixture of Indian fatalism and the Hidalgo beauty poring over her secrets in Paulita’s manner. “God has many plans,” she said.

In great agitation, Mrs. Ross arose, said: “I must be going. I just remembered that I have to see Don Jaime.”

“Oh …” Paulita straightened. “But you have just arrived.”

“Please forgive me, child,” said Mrs. Ross. “But it is something that I forgot.”

“Well, if you must,” said Paulita.

The journey across the village went with maddening slowness. In the first place, there was the hot, muggy afternoon. Secondly, the three days in bed had sapped her strength. Each succeeding curb seemed higher than the one before, and the cobblestones were like live things that lay in wait to make her stumble. But even worse than these was the way every doorway, with its waiting villager, drained away the minutes.

“But you are recovered!”

It was the fat, oily-skinned Señora Puntarilla, wife of the village pharmacist. She blocked the narrow sidewalk like a wall, slab arms outstretched in joy.

Mrs. Ross stopped, hid exasperation behind a smile. There was no way around the woman short of detouring through the cobblestone street with its litter of burro droppings. One simply did not do that.

“I offered a candle and my prayers,” said Señora Puntarilla. “And God has answered!”

It took easily two minutes to get the woman to turn sideways, opening a way past.

By that time the alert was out, and each doorway held its waiting greeter: “What a miracle!” “We prayed for you!” “The Jamaica tea: that is what did it. When my aunt …”

She came at last to the two-story cream stucco and glass brick monolith that Don Jaime used both as residence and city hall. Behind a tall iron fence and a garden massed with cabbage palms, hibiscus, bougainvillea, agave and countless vines and creepers, the house reared up like some robot monster lifting itself to peer out at the lake. The second floor windows looked glassy and staring.

Mrs. Ross pushed the latch on the iron gate. It failed to move.
Locked?
She looked at it.
Locked!
She rattled the gate. A hollow clanging echoed through the garden.

Presently, there came a slow slap-slap of sandals down the curving red brick walk. A calf-eyed serving girl in a wrinkled brown dress emerged from the greenery, stopped on the other side of the gate. There was a look of sleepy insolence on her face.

“Good afternoon, Señora.”

“Why is this gate locked?” demanded Mrs. Ross. “I wish to see Don Jaime at once.”

“Don Jaime?” The girl shrugged. “El Presidente makes for himself a visit to Mexico City.”

Mrs. Ross stiffened. “To Mexico? When does he return?” She felt furious with the girl, those staring eyes.

“Who knows?” Another shrug lifted the brown shoulders. “He is gone in the automobile to transport el Señor Hoblitt to Mexico City. He has not informed me when he returns.”

With Hoblitt!
Mrs. Ross maintained self-control at the cost of great effort. “But did he not say where they were going?”

“To Mexico City, Señora.” The girl nodded, made as if to return to the house. “
Buenas tardes …”

“
Buenas tardes,”
murmured Mrs. Ross. She turned away, heard the serving girl’s footsteps recede toward the house.

To Mexico City with Hoblitt! All that fool Jaime has to do is drop one word about Paulita’s condition! One careless word!
She felt that she sat on a bomb with the fuse already burning.
And Hoblitt told Paulita that he’s coming back!

Mrs. Ross’s feet began moving automatically in the direction of her house.
Maybe I could take Paulita away to some … But, no. She wouldn’t leave now.
Mrs. Ross mumbled to herself, discarded plan after plan.
A hired guard? No. Costly. And Mexican watchmen are notoriously lax. A call to the Turismo in Mexico City? But what could I say?

Her stumbling, distracted progress caught immediate attention in San Juan. Several villagers tried to stop her, help her. She shook them off.

A small boy was sent running for the doctor: “The Señora Ross is sick from the sun!”

In this manner, Mrs. Ross came to the corner on her own street, saw Dr. Herrera striding toward her, Serena standing beyond him at the gate.

“Here now, what’s this?” demanded the doctor. His square-jowled face showed concern as he took Mrs. Ross’s arm, helped her along the walk.

“Let go of me!” ordered Mrs. Ross. The doctor only gripped her arm tighter.

Serena held the gate open, stood to one side as they approached. Her flat face was firm in its indignation. “I told her not to go out. But, oh, no; she insisted.”

“I’m perfectly all right,” said Mrs. Ross.

“She forced me,” said Serena. “Yes! She forced me to get her things. And now: look!”

Mrs. Ross focused her attention on the doctor. There was a Merthiolate stain on his shirtfront. “I’m perfectly all right,” she repeated.

But she stumbled on the first step up to her porch, experienced a wave of dizziness.
Good Lord!
she thought.
Maybe I’m really getting sick!
Dr. Herrera’s hand felt comforting as he steadied her.

“One is not as young as one once was,” he said.

“That’s what I told her.” Serena brushed past, clattered on ahead, lifting her skirts out of the way as she climbed. “I told her that very thing.”

Perhaps it was a suggestion, or all the walking around after the days in bed, or a retreat from reality … or even a germ. Mrs. Ross found herself in her own bed with a fever that climbed higher and higher as night fell over San Juan.

She lay back on the perspiration-soggy sheet, stared at the
ropero
beyond the foot of her bed. It stood there in its tall, carved mahogany splendor with the mirrors on its doors glistening, and it grew more and more alive as the darkness deepened. She told herself that it was just the place where she hung her clothing, a piece of furniture, a sort of closet. But the thing grew faces and arms in the darkness. And when the neon cross atop the church a block away was lighted, the mirrors picked up reflections of it that were shattered by the blinds.

The
ropero
glared at her with purple eyes.

Mrs. Ross twisted against the clinging sheet. It was so hot. She searched for strength to throw off the cover, failed. So hot. Her head felt light, whirling. The night, the fever—everything grew indistinct, rambling. People moved about. Lights flickered. The purple eyes glared.

It was all a great incoherency.

For a while, Mrs. Ross thought she was back in the northland. There was a strong impression of her old entrance hall with its red velvet draperies and the smell of the oil heaters in everything and the sound of the girls squabbling somewhere. She imagined she could hear the clapboards creaking in a cold snap, felt the old, never-forgotten chill and thought:
I didn’t make it away to the sunshine. It was all a dream. I never made it.

And there was a girl who stayed right there—right in the shadowy flickering beside the bed. It was Gertie, but not Gertie. The face and hair were more like Serena’s. Still, the voice echoing in Mrs. Ross’s head could not be mistaken: Gertie’s voice. The woman kept chanting:
“Men are all alike. Men are all alike. Men are all alike. Men are …”