Authors: Michelle Huneven
He might’ve joined the twentieth century earlier, he said, had he gone to public school. Rito’s elementary school had been built in the thirties, an institutional version of the popular Mission Revival style, with tiled roofs and long, arched arcades. But Sally Morrot believed in a Catholic education. By subscribing all the village children to St. Catherine’s, she singlehandedly preserved in Rito a small, reactionary order of Carmelites, an odd assortment of monastics exiled to this obscure valley for too great a love of earthly things, poor relations with others, an excessive interest in lonely women or young boys. When David was in the fifth grade, the nuns informed Sally Morrot that he was exceptionally gifted, whereupon she summoned him to the mansion, fed him sugar cookies and a pale, woody drink he later identified as milky tea. She administered a series of writing and mathematical problems of her own devising and, finding his performance indeed remarkable, overrode his parents’ humble objection—he was their only child—and sent him to a private Catholic boarding school in Ojai.
Sally Morrot monitored his progress and later, during summer vacations in his high-school years, expected him at her home every
Thursday night for dinner, where he joined five or six other young people in whom she took an active, often financial, interest. Some were children of her litigious, ruined relatives; others were collected from the valley’s dwindling aristocracy. The young people were expected to dress for the occasion, so David wore the white shirt and gray corduroy slacks of his school uniform. His relatives answered the door, served the food, cleared the table.
Sally was incredibly old by that time, her hair vividly white. Her arms were light as cornstalks and her skin a mass of large, round freckles; she looked as if she had been covered with transparent pale-brown leaves. She presided over these dinners with her live-in companion, an elegant, elderly Chinese woman. Dora, whose father had been a diplomat from Hong Kong, spoke with an upper-crust British accent. Sally and Dora asked the children questions to sharpen their conversational abilities: Who has a story to tell? What amusing things happened this week? Who has read a good book? In their more vigorous years, Sally and Dora had traveled all over the world, so they were always saying, “When we dined with Alberto Moravia …” or “When we lunched with Josephine Baker….” None of the teenagers knew who these people were, but the implication was that some day they, too, might eat a meal with Moravia or Baker or Irwin Shaw or General So-and-so, the second-in-command of the French Foreign Legion.
After tea in the study, they were sent home in the black Cadillac driven by Sally Morrot’s driver, who was David’s uncle, Rafael Flores. Crammed inside the car, the teenagers routinely referred to the two women as “old stick-birds,” mimicked Dora’s accent, and mimed the quavery, underwater motions of Sally Morrot’s undiagnosed Parkinson’s disease.
One by one, Rafael dropped off the teenagers until only David remained in the car. As the village
curandero
and spiritual leader, Rafael also took an interest in David’s education. What have you learned about trees? he’d ask. What have you learned about people? You’re studying
fisiología
—what have you learned about the body? And
religiones, mijo,
what have you learned about God? Although he loved his uncle, David had become ashamed of Rafael’s heavily accented English and superstitious beliefs. His
curanderismo
seemed like something in the educational films on primitive cultures David watched in social studies classes. More than a decade would pass before
he asked to learn his uncle’s art. At sixteen or seventeen, David felt only embarrassed for and protective of Rafael, and answered his questions politely yet evasively as the older man parked the Cadillac in its garage by the warehouse. Together, they walked the quarter-mile to the village, into the range of Umberto García’s woozy accordion and the battered, permanently dazed fighting cock who crowed night and day, into the smells of fertile dirt and hot lard and fried spices, and up the stoop into his mother’s warm, spotless kitchen.
“It was schizzy,” David said, “and obviously, my allegiances were torn. My parents were pleased I was being educated, but it broke their hearts. And Sally wanted total control over my life. She wanted me to advance so far, but no farther. She was such an old snob, yet very unusual.”
Even in her eighties, he said, Sally Morrot had walked a portion of the irrigated groves every evening, sometimes with David’s father, or Dora, or Albert, her amanuensis. Other nights she kept her own company, or singled out one of the local teenagers she’d taken under wing. David was sixteen the first time she asked him to “do water” with her. “You don’t begin to know something profoundly until you’ve observed it for at least a year,” she told him. “And after fifty years …” She’d point a trembling finger at a tree, and for the briefest instant David could see the singularity of this one tree, as if it had been created new and whole in that exact moment.
They tramped in knee-high rubber boots and carried hoes to plug up gopher holes with mud. Sally lectured him urgently on her own ideas for social reform, a peculiar system she’d developed based on her reading about Thomas Jefferson and the Shakers. She admired the Shakers’ business acumen, their ambisexual God and distaste for sexual intercourse. Like the Shakers, she advocated adoption over procreation and repeatedly expounded a theory, which David never quite grasped, having to do with redistributing the world’s children sensibly, granting them to whoever had the resources to properly raise them. With Jefferson she shared the belief that America was meant to be a nation of farmers augmented by whatever simple manufacturing was unavoidable. The evils of industrialization, urbanization, and corporate inhumanity arose when the country deviated from its agricultural base.
Sally confused him, David said, and bored him, and often seemed off her nut. Yet she was also devoted to him, and staunchly supported
him when he resolved to go to medical school. “I won’t brook law school,” she told him. “My brothers and their families have been ruined in the courts. But you’ll make a good doctor; you can come back here to care for your people.”
David enrolled in premed at Cal-Berkeley. When he came home for Christmas his freshman year, Sally sent for him. Dora, she told him, had gone to visit her sisters in Hong Kong, suffered an aneurysm, and died. “I can’t stay here alone,” she said crisply. “I’m too old for this life, this big old house. If I stay on, I’ll do nothing but ache for Dora.” She was going to live with her nephew in Oxnard. After consulting with David’s father and her accountants, and with the help of the University of California, she had set up the ranch in such a way that it could run itself more or less indefinitely. Since none of her younger relatives were agriculturally inclined, she thought this the best plan. “I’ll close down the house for a while, in case I want to come back. Eventually somebody will have to live here.”
She assured David his status would not change. “Even if something should betake me, you will be able to complete your education.” That was the last time he saw her, although she faithfully wrote him once a month, a few large, painfully crumpled words on ecru stationery: “The best doctors, I am told, major in English as undergraduates….” “Being widely read will serve you well. I am rereading James and can recommend
The Ambassadors. …
” “First-class essay, but do not use contractions, please.”
Her generosity so resembled a set of rules, it would be decades before David identified love among the snarled strands of duty, resentment, fear, loyalty, and inferiority he felt at every mention of her name. In college lit classes, he discovered her in assorted dowagers in the work of Dickens, Wharton, and, of course, James. Later, after traveling the world and living on the East Coast, he understood that Sally and Dora were lesbians as well as members of that well-established minority, of the eccentric rich. Despite everything, though, whenever his spiritual teachers instructed him to imagine or meditate on pure white light, David would think of radiant snow, backlit clouds, and Sally Morrot’s star-white hair.
A
S SOON
as Lewis turned off the Santa Bernita Highway toward Rito, round rocks began to appear: first a single boulder-sized specimen
at the mouth of a private drive; then a granite honeydew atop a concrete pillar; and finally, in profusion, gradated cannonballs bordering a weedy bed of roses, a yard filled with gray basketballs.
Rito was more or less as Lewis remembered it from three years ago—cluttered yards, cacti in lard buckets, chickens pecking in the foxtails—and a homesickness he’d never felt welled up within him. So many things about the town seemed comic and benign, like stray parts of a joke: a pony tethered to a palm tree; dogs sleeping stretched out, belly up, in the street; a butter-yellow Oldsmobile station wagon stalled in the middle of Church Street, hood up, as six men gazed, rapt, into the engine cavity. I was so lost when I lived here, he thought, yet it was so funny. And safe.
David’s uncle lived two miles out of town and down a gravel lane in a dusty, weathered orchard cottage. The porch sagged with bougainvillea and morning glories. Roses, delphinium, and ranunculus bloomed in the yard with preternatural good health.
They were greeted by a tiny, raffish wirehaired mutt and a small flock of colorful bantam chickens. Lewis and David exchanged phone numbers, and Lewis refused an invitation to come inside to meet David’s relatives. “I’m thinking,” he said, “I might pay a surprise visit to Round Rock.”
David shook his hand. “Good luck, and keep in touch.”
T
HE FIRST
time Libby became truly angry with Red was shortly after they started spending every night together. Joe was due down for a weekend, and Red not only suggested they sleep separately for those two nights—Libby had no argument there—but also felt they shouldn’t see each other at all. “You mean you don’t want Joe to know we’re together?”
Red blushed profoundly, hemmed and hawed. She had never seen him so bollixed. “I need time,” he whispered.
This was not a line Libby liked to hear. “Time for what?”
“When Joe was here last, you were sleeping with Lewis,” he said. “The switch seems, well, kind of
quick.”
She saw he was ashamed of his—their—actions, and she argued that children need to see that adults, too, can move gracelessly, and sometimes stumble into the right thing.
Red wouldn’t agree. “I’d rather model appropriate behavior.”
“Do what you feel is best, then,” she told him as he left for the airport. “But you can save that jargon for your drunks. And I can’t guarantee I’ll want to see you come Sunday, or ever.”
It never occurred to them that Little Bill had long since informed Joe of the romantic reversal. When Red met him at the gate, Joe’s first words were, “Where’s Libby?” He made Red call her from the nearest pay phone. “Don’t blow this one, Dad.”
The second time Libby felt that deep, potentially life-shifting anger was over two and a half years later, the night Lewis showed up out of the blue at Round Rock.
She and Red had been at the new house with the plumber, who needed a light. Libby was already in a bad mood; if they had a real plumber instead of an ex-resident moonlighting as one, he’d possess the right equipment and they wouldn’t have spent all Sunday afternoon running errands for him. “I’ll dash in,” she said when Red pulled up at the garage.
The door was unlocked, surprisingly. She immediately spotted a caged shop light on a pegboard on the far wall and started for it.
“Hello?”
She stopped. In the far bay, a man unfolded before her. She gave a short yelp even as she recognized him. “
Lewis?
” He looked helplessly young, even vulnerable. “What are you doing here?”
“I stopped by to see Red, but he wasn’t home. Then I remembered these dashboard knobs I bought for the Fairlane.”
She moved forward and could see what looked like ivory acorns scattered at his feet. Radio and heater knobs. She looked back to his face; the beard was gone. His lips were so thin as to seem almost nonexistent.
“What are
you
doing here?” he said.
“Oh, God.” She was shaking. “We’re building a house up on the ridge and the plumber needed a light….” She pointed to the pegboard behind him. He turned and automatically plucked the light down for her. The orange cord was tangled with a black cord and he began shaking them apart. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“Red and I. We’re married, you know.”
“No. I didn’t know.” He looked up from the cords. “How would I know that?
Married?
”
“For two years now.”
“No shit?” He started coiling loops of cord around his elbow and the crook of his hand. “You married that fat old guy?”
“And what fat old guy would that be?”
Lewis flinched as if shocked by the cords he held. Red Ray stood behind Libby, framed in the door.
“
You!
” Lewis yelled. “You fat old guy!”
The air crackled with three-way glances, swaying crazily between hostility and joy. Then Red stepped forward, hand extended in welcome.
A
S SOON
as the initial trauma subsided, Libby found herself serenely indifferent to Lewis, for which she liked herself enormously. She didn’t begrudge Red his obvious elation, either. Red had mourned Lewis so often in the last few years, growing suddenly pensive with thoughts, not of Lewis’s misbehavior—dumping Libby, punching Red, abandoning his job—but of his own blunders. “By continuing
to sponsor him after I’d started seeing you,” he told Libby often, “I betrayed his confidence.”
They delivered the light to the plumber; then Red took Lewis on his evening rounds while Libby napped. When they returned, Lewis came in for coffee but refused Red’s dinner invitation.
“No, n-no, that’s okay,” he stuttered before leaving. “I’ll call you soon.”
Once the Fairlane vanished down the roadway, Red had turned to Libby and looked so pleased, so bright in the face, she was almost happy Lewis had come.