In the Name of Salome Read online

  “I think it’s not the same Herminia,” Papá stated.

  “You sound very sure of this,” Don Eliseo observed. “But remember, even Shakespeare had his lapses. Calderón wrote some clunkers. Espronceda has his insipid moments. And Sor Juana can be insufferable.” He gave a little bow of apology for criticizing a favorite of the ladies. “But Ramona and Salomé haven’t said a word,” he noted, at which point Ramona stammered something about it being possible that there were many Herminias just as there were many Anas, Estelas, Filomenas, and Salomés.

  “Hmm,” Don Eliseo considered. He let a moment lapse so as not to seem to have dismissed Ramona’s comment too readily. Then, he turned to me. “And you, Salomé?”

  I could feel that shortness of breath I would always experience when I was forced to speak up. Mamá claimed that with each year, both my asthma and my timidity were getting worse. Often, she would have to step in and answer for me.

  “Herminia hasn’t been feeling well—” My mother stopped, her face scarlet. Quickly, she corrected herself. “What am I saying?” she asked the assembled gathering, smiling lamely. “I mean Salomé. Forgive me. All this talk of Herminia.” She went on to tell in detail about my latest attacks of asthma. It was embarrassing how my mother would talk of my maladies as if I were still a babe in her arms whose body functions could be broadcast to the world.

  The sisters Bobadilla chatted on, but Don Eliseo kept eyeing me closely. “Poets must be brave,” was all he said as he bid me goodbye later that night.

  I DON’T KNOW IF it was the thought that Miguel would soon be returning, and I wanted to do something to make him proud of me. Or if it was simply that I had finished my new poem, “A la Patria,” the one Mamá had found stuck to the bottom of the mattress, and I wanted to redeem the name of Herminia. But one morning, not long afterward, I woke up early, dressed in my lavender muslin and buttoned boots, put on my bonnet and tied the ribbons tight. Then, as Mamá and Tía Ana were out back fussing over the coffee water and the mashed plantains, and as my sister Ramona slept on, I let myself out of the house, pulling the door to so that it appeared shut, and I walked down the 19th of March until I got to the Street of Martyrs, and I turned right and then left down Separation Street to the center of the city. Under the door of the owners of El Centinela, I slipped my new submission.

  The very next issue, Don Eliseo arrived early with a rolled-up paper and a bouquet of gardenias, my favorites. “I got one of the first copies,” he said holding up the paper. And then, handing me the flowers, he added, “Let me be the first to say, It is your best so far, Herminia!” he winked. And then, he added, “There is a crowd headed in this direction.”

  “Ay, Dios mio, ay, Dios mio,” Mamá wailed. Even after Don Eliseo had explained that he meant a crowd of admirers, she was not convinced that we would be safe. My aunt Ana took the paper from her, and when she had finished, very solemnly she handed it to Ramona, who read it and then passed it on to me.

  But I had no need to read what I had written. I had been working on that poem for months. Finally, after toiling over every single word, line by line, I concluded with the two hardest words of all.

  “Salomé Ureña,” I signed.

  TWO

  The Arrival of Winter

  Middlebury, Vermont, 1950

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU came all the way to Middlebury to see more snow!” Marion jokes.

  It is the kind of remark Camila might hear a half dozen times a winter in Poughkeepsie. But somehow it disappoints her coming from the mouth of her dear friend. She wants more from Marion. A melodious phrase, an arresting remark, her mother’s poem to winter:

  In other places you are much harsher,

  stripping the fields of their glorious dress,

  hushing the gossiping waters of rivers . . .

  She keeps her head bowed as she struggles down the street beside her friend. The snow is blowing in swirls all about them, as if it were not just snow but snow in a tantrum, snow angry at being used for too many pretty winter scenes in postcards and poems, snow proving it can be mean and deadly serious. Had she been smart instead of vain, she would have worn the red cap her downstairs neighbor knit her for Valentine’s Day. Instead she has on a silk scarf tied loosely around her head and her unlined leather gloves. Her fingers are numb. But it has always seemed silly to stock herself with winter wear. Every year will be her last year in the United States.

  “It’s one of the snowiest Februaries on record,” Marion continues, puffing out white breaths in protest. “Poor Camila, seven hours on a bus.” It is not like Marion to be so solicitous. She wonders what is up.

  SHE SET OUT FROM Poughkeepsie early this morning—a six-hour ride, but as they headed north, the storm started, and the driver slowed to a crawl; the window presented a pointillist study in white. She kept checking her watch. There was time to spare. Her afternoon class visit was scheduled for four. The presentation itself wouldn’t take place until evening.

  The talk she has prepared is one she will be delivering countless times this year, the centennial of her mother’s birth. It is academic, and uninspiring, and she knows it is. Other scholars can talk about Salomé’s poetry and her pedagogy, but she, Camila, the only daughter, is supposed to shed a different light on the woman.

  She wants her speech to be rousing, an inspiration to noble feeling. (Can one still talk this way in the middle of the twentieth century? Russia has just set off an atomic bomb. In Washington, Senator McCarthy is launching a purge not unlike those of Batista’s secret police. In her own Dominican Republic, a small invasion force of rebels has been slaughtered by Trujillo’s henchmen, her own cousin Gugú, among them.) This is her first public pronouncement as a member of her famous family. She has been surprised to receive so many invitations to speak about her mother this year. She is, after all, the anonymous one, the one who has done nothing remarkable. But—and this annoys her—she is in demand for sentimental reasons, the daughter who lost her mother, the orphan marched out in her starched party dress to recite her mother’s poem, “El ave y el nido,” to the sobs of old aunts and family friends.

  Perhaps that is precisely what she should do, throw away this uninspiring hour she has typed onto twenty pages—a review of the history of Hispaniola, Gallego and Quintana as prosodic influences on her mother’s patriotic poems, her mother’s pseudonym (the practice of pseudonyms, purpose and outcome in a caudillo state), one short anecdote about a jealous rival stealing her mother’s pseudonym thrown in like the rattle one shakes at a fussy child to distract it from bursting out in shrieks in front of company one is trying to impress. And instead, put on her mother’s black dress, hang the beribboned national medal over her head, and come out in a spotlight like a butterfly pinned to swatch of bright fabric, and recite the old favorites (“Ruinas,” “Sombras,” “Amor y anhelo,” and of course, “Mi Pedro”) for her college audiences!

  At least this speech is only her debut performance. Maybe the talk will get better with practice? Next week, she will be giving it at Columbia and at the end of the month at Harvard, where Pedro is still remembered and revered. Then, she has agreed to go to Wellesley for Cinco de Mayo, even though of course, Salomé has no connection with Mexico’s independence day. “It doesn’t matter,” her friend Jorge Guillén, who is teaching there, assured her. “It’s a ‘Latin American holiday,’ so even if you come and talk about Carmen Miranda, the deans will think the campus is international.”

  “Jorge can be wicked,” Camila has admitted to Marion.

  “Jorge is sweet on you,” Marion keeps hinting. The Spanish poet was widowed two years ago, and you’d think from Marion’s comments that some torrid romance is going on between Camila and her summer school colleague. But all that has been going on is that Guillén has been sending Camila his new poems, which are, as Camila has explained to Marion, “all about losing Germaine.”

  On Salomé’s actual birthday, October 21, Camila has been invited to come speak at the instituto her
mother founded in the Dominican Republic. It is the first of many events in a weeklong festival honoring her mother. Camila is to judge the Salomé Ureña Poetry Contest and put into circulation the first complete edition of her mother’s poems. The festival will conclude with a memorial service at her tomb, and Max has written that el Jefe will attend and unveil a new fifty-cent coin with “Mother’s pretty portrait on it.”

  It is enough to make Camila feel like smacking him, even if he is her distinguished older brother. If Pedro were still alive he would not permit his mother’s name to be used in this way by the dictator. Even Pancho would not have been swayed—though Max’s silver tongue always had a way with their father. As for Camila, she has never been able to talk sense into Max, indeed into any of the men in the family, once they latched on to one of their causes. The best she can do is stay out of their way. But, she does not want to disappoint those six hundred girls at the instituto, whose class representatives have penned pleading notes. “Esteemed Señorita Salomé Camila. We do implore you to honor us with your gracious presence.” The Dominican penchant for frilly rhetoric has increased astronomically since the advent of the dictatorship.

  “HERE WE ARE!” Marion announces. Perhaps her friend thinks that in this weather, Camila might have lost sight of where she is. But she has always been good with directions, adept at strategies of survival. As a child, when she was first told the Hansel and Gretel story, she pointed out that those bread crumbs were a bad idea. “What if an animal should eat them—then what?”

  “Have you read this story before?” her stepmother asked her, closing the storybook. In her eyes there was that funny look again—a kind of multiple choice look in which the correct answer was not (a) suspicion, (b) concern, (c) desire to please, (d) desire to banish, but the ecumenical, (e) all the above—so hard to live with.

  Marion clomps upstairs, the doors at each landing decorated variously with floral wreaths, little paper pads with pencils on thumb-tacked strings, a blue-and-white college pennant (the other physical education teacher), and a poster from the language schools. This is a much larger faculty house than her own in Poughkeepsie. “Our nuthouse,” Marion jokes, rather loudly, stomping the remaining snow from her boots. Camila wonders if Marion’s neighbors complain. She thinks about her own housemates, Vivian and Dot. “Sometimes we don’t even know you are up there,” they have noted. She supposes they mean this as a compliment.

  Marion’s own door is bare—though Camila remembers a succession of ornaments in the past: a Life photograph of Martha Graham tilted to one side with her leg in the air like a fan unfolding; the state flag of North Dakota—really quite pretty, turquoise blue with gold fringe, a flag more appropriate to a showy, tropical dictatorship than a drab, midwestern state full of Germans and Swedes; a photo of the two friends on a roller coaster, Camila with her eyes closed, holding her hat down, and Marion, wide-eyed, her mouth open in a scream, her short hair blown out as if she has just had a bad scare. Now, not even Marion’s name card hangs on her door. Inside, the living room is crammed with boxes. The apartment is being dismantled, the walls are bare, except for the prominent oil painting of a silver-haired, prosperous-looking man holding court over the living room—a portrait obviously intended for a boardroom with its identifying brass plaque, John Reed, Regional Manager, North American Life Insurance Company. “Daddy,” Marion’s father, has been dead four years. He would be the last thing Marion packs, of course.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m leaving,” Marion announces, and then, as if the shocked look on Camila’s face were concern about her visit, Marion adds, “Don’t worry. I’m coming to your talk first.”

  ON THE WALK UP to Munroe Hall, Marion explains—if the giggling confession she is making can be termed an explanation. With each year, as Camila has become more respectable—full professor and chair of her department at Vassar, president of the Modern Language Association’s Northeast Division—her friend Marion has gotten more eccentric. Her wardrobe looks as if she has broken into the costume shop at the college. Her hair is cut in a short bob with bangs and encircled by bright scarves that flow behind her dramatically. It’s as if Marion wants attention, and rather than perform responsibly, she is—like an adolescent—showing off to get it.

  “I’m moving to Florida.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “Lesley,” Marion says, watching her carefully.

  Camila feels a pang of jealousy. She averts her face, not wanting Marion to guess at her feelings. For the last twenty-five years, she has been keeping Marion at bay in one way or another. Why should it distress her that Marion has finally found what she always wanted, a woman to love and live with?

  “Who is she?” Camila asks quietly.

  “Lesley is a he,” Marion says with a smirk.

  Camila cannot help but think that Marion has laid this little trap, a male lover with a feminine name in order to get a rise out of her. She must not get riled up. Her class visit begins in a few minutes. She will have to face a group of undergraduates and talk to them about her mother’s poetry. Afterward, she has agreed to meet with a talented Dominican student who is going through a difficult adjustment period.

  “It’s an old Scottish name,” Marion concedes. “You know, like Leslie Howard.” (Who is Leslie Howard? Camila wonders.) “His whole name’s Lesley Frederick Richards the third. Actually, he goes by Fred, but I prefer Lesley.” (Of course!) “He’s got a summer home on Lake Champlain, and this year he stayed on. But the winter is too much for him, so he’s heading back to his place in Florida, and he wants me to join him.”

  “Are you to be married then?”

  “Married?!” Marion says horrified. “Who mentioned marriage?”

  Camila feels exasperated, as if she were talking to one of her uncooperative students, the ones she encourages to take French or German. “Please talk sense, Marion!” All around them, the snow is falling. She feels suddenly very bridal herself, as if she were being pelted by handfuls of rice at a wedding. “What about your job?”

  “Ah, Cam, come on. This place doesn’t take dance seriously. They have me posing the girls in tableaus like they’re so many cabbages for sale!” For a moment, Marion’s own bitterness seems to have swallowed up her earlier playfulness. But she rallies, Marion always rallies. “Anyhow, they’re glad to be rid of me, believe me. Especially after fall recital.” Camila has heard all about it—dancers presenting the ages of a woman’s life, including a writhing birth scene.

  We’re both too old for all this, Camila is feeling. Too old to still be knocking around the hemisphere, motherless, daughterless, fatherless souls. “Ay, Marion, Marion.”

  “You don’t have to feel sorry for me. Lesley is quite well-off.” Marion is gloating!

  She shakes her head and strides ahead. There is nothing to say to Marion when she is in one of her moods.

  “Well, don’t walk off mad,” Marion says, catching up with her. “You’ve got your own little thing going with Guillén.”

  “Marion, don’t start that, please.” Camila hears that tone of know-it-all in her voice. She tones it down. “I’m trying to simplify, not complicate, what is left of the rest of my life.”

  “You’ve been trying to do that since you were born!” Marion says smartly. Oh dear, Camila thinks, why did she accept this invitation? When Chairman Graziano of the Spanish Department invited her on campus to talk about her mother, she accepted in large part because it was a chance to see Marion.

  “Come on, Cam,” Marion says winningly, hooking her arm in Camila’s. “Think of how pleased Daddy would be. Remember how he always worried that I didn’t cotton to young fellows?” Marion does a perfect imitation of the Mr. Reed Camila remembers. “Anyhow, why not congratulate your old friend on her new adventure. Remember you and I are in our prime. Didn’t you read that article in Life about women in their fifties? Kick your heels up, honey, the fun’s about to start!”

  On the campus walk, with students coming
toward them, Marion executes one of her dance leaps and then collapses laughing against her best friend’s shoulder. The students smile, pleased to catch a teacher being flamboyant. They turn into Munroe Hall—no doubt these are members of the class Camila will be visiting. One of them, a tense young man, with her own tawny skin color, eyes her dolefully, as if trying to make up his mind about her.

  SHE SHOULD BE USED to this. Periodically, throughout their friendship, Marion will rip up her roots and do something unexpected. Years ago she dropped out of the university and followed Camila to Cuba. Camila remembers opening the front door to find her handsome, dark-haired friend with a suitcase in either hand. “Howdy!” Marion said, in a voice Camila could tell was straining for bravado. The paleness was more than Marion’s naturally pale color, it was the color of full-blown terror. “Remember how you said, mi casa su casa?” she had said, her voice breaking.

  Camila had felt a rush of warm emotion that made her want to weep with gratitude. She had missed Marion horribly, more than she cared to admit. She had assumed when she headed south that she would never see her beloved friend again. And here she was, Marion! as faithful and devoted as any lover in a storybook.

  Marion announced that she had come to teach modern dance in Cuba. “¡Excelente! We need a modern dance school in Cuba,” Pancho had said, without the least irony in his voice. Probably, if Marion had said that she had come to open a baton-twirling school, Pancho would have said, “How nice! We need to learn to twirl batons in Cuba.” Poor Pancho, always too caught up in his own preoccupations to pay much attention to anyone else’s craziness.

  But Marion soon grew impatient with Camila’s family and Cuban society in general. Somebody had to tell these women that they were now living in the twentieth century! And that somebody was Marion. She would hem her dresses above the calf and cut her hair in a short bob, if she felt like it. She would go out without a chaperone and smoke and swear like a sailor. (Damn it! Hell’s bells! Stick it where the sun never shines, so there!) Nobody blinked an eye. Nobody was surprised. Miss Marion was American, after all; they did not expect her to behave herself.