My Father's Tears and Other Stories Read online

  He ignored the cliché. She thought in clichés, but that wasn’t the worst of sins. “How can I get lost?” he replied. “I can see the cathedral from here.” They were staying in the Hotel Alhambra Palace, overlooking Granada, Brad Quigley and his longtime companion, Leonora Katz, experimenting to see if a vacation together might nudge their long relationship into marriage or a break-up. She was in her fifties; he was sixty; they worked in different firms within the limpid backwater of Boston finance and had known each other, at first merely collegially, for fifteen years. Her position and income were equal to his; her professional accomplishment shielded them both, to an extent, from the overhanging question of any legalized connection. There was almost no reason why they couldn’t go on as they were, with separate apartments, incomes, and friends. And yet… a small, brisk brunette, she was growing, he could see, brittle, her gestures jerkier, her temper quicker to flare, her judgments snappier and yet prone to sudden reversals and self-doubts. Since exercise classes and conditioning gyms had become the fashion, Leonora looked too thin—deprived. Her fine-boned beauty conformed to the low-maintenance style of Cambridge and Beacon Hill. She did not deign to dye the gray from her hair, which was left long and pulled into a tight roll at the back, and the squint lines in her face were deepening, exaggerating an increasingly frequent expression, that of a slightly deaf person who blames you for not speaking louder.

  “My mother would want me to go,” he said. “Mi madre. She would want me to see the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella. She loved them so.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Leonora said, though the two women had never met. The only other time Brad had been to Spain, twenty years ago, had been with his mother, an unpublished writer who was doing research for a romantic novel concerning the two legendary monarchs and their only surviving child, the love-crossed Joanna the Mad.

  It had been a strange trip, beginning with a humiliating, to Brad, embarrassment when the busy clerk at the Madrid hotel, slipping in English, had called his mother “your wife.” The clerk had quickly, sizing them up, corrected it with a self-critical chuckle to “your mother,” but for Brad a confusion between his mother and his wife held an abysmal plausibility. Not that his mother looked the part, she was gray-haired and stout; but he was forty, and freshly divorced, and what wife, really, would he ever know as well as he knew her? Even as a fetus he had been attuned to her moods and inner workings; she loomed to him less as another person than as an overarching weather. To dilute their relationship he had proposed that they invite along his fifteen-year-old daughter, Belinda, who had taken the divorce the hardest.

  Something fraught and sad about the whole expedition had kept him awake in his hotel room every night, he remembered. His task had been to drive his companions each day out from Madrid to one of the towns—Segovia, Avila, Valladolid, Toledo—where his mother had found a clue, a hint of treasure, in the writings of Prescott and Washington Irving and John Foster Kirk, whose histories had enchanted her in college. Though she could read some Spanish, she was shy of speaking it, and it fell to Brad to negotiate their tourism: “¿Por favor, señor, dónde está el convento?” His mother would gaze at some tombs within the convent, and take a few notes. Once, she reached out and touched the marble foot, worn glossy by other touches, on a funerary sculpture of a long-deceased noblewoman. “What a dear little pointed shoe,” she said.

  Yet he could not believe she was finding what she wanted, the key to crack open that opaque, late-medieval world and get it to spill its colorful mysteries into reach of her pen. The cities surrounding the traces of history were noisy with traffic and ringed with the stark sheds of burgeoning industrial development; post-Franco Spain was hastening to cast off its romantic isolation and the picturesque backwardness that had attracted centuries of infatuated travellers. Belinda, helplessly adolescent, still bearing some baby fat, endured hours in the back of the little rented Fiat and politely tried to interest herself in the stultifying relics, from the Escorial to the castle and aqueduct in Segovia, that her grandmother had come so arduously far to see. All the girl asked, as reward for her patience during this week’s ordeal, was to visit the disco of the Madrid hotel, and this her guardians granted on the last night. While her insomniac father at last slept soundly in his room, she returned around midnight, rosy and giddy and full of strange tales, for her grandmother’s ears, of Spanish boys—how they danced, how they somehow communicated with her, how happy they seemed to see her.

  Separating from Leonora made Brad nervous; they had been constantly together for six days. He had been struck these days by a feminine querulousness that their peaceful intermittent evenings together in Boston did not reveal. So long the manager of her own life and of other people’s millions, she distrusted his management of their trip. In Seville, he kept leading her, she felt, astray—his map-reading took them up narrow medieval streets abuzz with motor scooters and speeding taxis. She was afraid of falling into the traffic, or having her bag snatched by a passing pair of Gypsies on a Vespa. She forbade Brad to give money to beggars, lest he attract a band of feather-fingered pickpockets. She was convinced that all taxi drivers were cheating them, even if their meters were turned on and audibly ticking. Her demands taxed his poor Spanish beyond its means: “Ask him what those extra charges are for. Tell him he’s going the long way around.” She found scarcely endurable the cacophony of competing tour guides in the Alhambra, and in Córdoba complained, five centuries late, that the Spanish had crassly built a cathedral in the middle of the marvellous mosque, with its serene forest of marble pillars. She had acquired the notion that one should not drink the faucet water in this country; sin hielo had become one of his phrases, not always comprehended, and for her sake he was always sidling into dark, private-seeming bars and buying a plastic bottle of agua minerale.

  So it was with a relieved sense of private adventure that he set out, beneath his umbrella, on the puddled little lane that led to the town from the hotel. It twisted down through hairpin turns; the cathedral quickly sank from sight behind tall shuttered housefronts and, as she had predicted, he became lost. The tiny lettering on his map required fishing his reading glasses from the pocket of his reversible parka; the map became wet and he kept drifting downward, hoping for a clarifying park or monument. At last he emerged into a broad boulevard roaring with commuter traffic. Only a few pedestrians hurried past, under umbrellas. Even when inspected through reading glasses, the map offered no clue to where he was on it. Granada was more of a metropolis than the song suggested. A swarthy beggar, perhaps a Gypsy pick-pocket sitting out thin rainy-day pickings, jeered at him from the doorway of a closed bank. Brad was too proud, and too mournfully pleased with his drenched and solitary condition on this errand of obscure filial piety, to ask for guidance. His instinct was to walk uphill, back toward the hotel, itself lost from sight, where Leonora forlornly waited. For her sake he at last went to a news kiosk and asked the woman in charge, “¿Por favor, señora, dónde está la catedral?” She gestured brusquely and gave the impatient answer, “Derecho,” which meant either to the right or straight ahead. He damply plodded on, missing the loving goad of his mistress’s tongue.

  The cathedral, its blank side blending into secular façades, almost slipped by him. He entered by a small door that opened near the altar. There were many more visitors inside than he had expected on this foul day, including several busloads of Japanese in transparent plastic raincoats. The recumbent effigies of the Catholic Sovereigns were easy to find, though hard to examine, lying high above the floor of the nave on pompous marble sarcophagi. Brad joined a line of Japanese who seemed to know the ropes and found himself stepping down into a crypt beneath the sarcophagi. There, in a small vaulted space, behind bars, an arm’s length away, five plain, black, toylike lead coffins held the remains of King Ferdinand; Queen Isabella; their unbalanced daughter, Joanna; Joanna’s unfaithful husband, Philip the Handsome of Burgundy—he died at twenty-eight, and his widow kept the embalmed body in her bedro
om for years—and, in the smallest hexagonal lead box of all, the dust of a child, a child left out of guidebook history, which did record that Joanna’s madness had not impaired her fertility: two emperors and four queens could claim her as mother, and her insanity flickered down through generations of Hapsburgs.

  Whatever, Brad wondered, had made his own mother think that she could encompass in a work of her imagination these pious, benighted, casually cruel monarchs? She would speak of Juana la Loca as of a lovable eccentric cousin, and of Ferdinand as of the masterful husband she herself had never had. Now she herself was in a box, cherrywood underground instead of lead in a low-ceilinged crypt, but her body reverting to its skeleton all the same. Her body in Spain had been overweight, and dressed in wintry American clothes, so that as Brad remembered her she sweated, pink-faced at the long lunches with him and Belinda on the hot sidewalks by the provincial plazas while they waited for the convents and churches to reopen, her bifocals misting as she consulted her guidebooks and notebooks. Yet, brave soul, she never complained of discomfort, or that she had come all this expensive way and was not finding what she wanted. Now her spirit, not as mad as Cousin Juana’s but certainly fanciful, had brought him again to Spain, dragging with him poor nervous, brittle Leonora, who didn’t trust even the faucet water. He must be nicer to Leonora, he resolved, emerging into the rain and climbing back to the hotel, and then never repeat this misadventure. He would break off the relationship as soon as they were back in Boston. The clouds overhead were breaking up, exposing exclamatory fragments of blue: an El Greco sky.

  In Madrid, which they had saved for the second week, she seemed to relax; it looked to her like a grander Boston, with a bigger Public Garden and more centrally located art museums. Her taut dark looks and severe hairdo led several pedestrians to address her in Spanish, mistaking her for a native; she liked this, blushing as she protested, “No, no, gracias—soy americana.” More quickly than he, she learned her way around. In the Prado she found for him a little Goya, an odd painting of a dog, which he had remembered from his previous trip, on view in a kind of basement. It was not to be found among the Goya portraits of the royal court on the first floor. Girlishly proud of her Spanish managerial skills, Leonora led him up, through the tourist throngs, to the third floor, where the savage paintings of Goya’s depressive last phase had been sequestered, like a mad person in the attic. He had remembered a complete dog, perhaps thinking of one by Francis Bacon. In reality the painting was titled Perro semihundido—Half-Sunken Dog—and showed only a Thurberesque dog profile and a lot of yellow blank space. Brad wondered why he had treasured this memory for two decades. “I couldn’t let you not find your little dog,” Leonora said, he thought a bit possessively. “You’ve always talked about it.”

  “I have?” He felt as if he had never been in Madrid before. He could not spot the hotel where he and his mother and daughter had stayed, on a wide straight street where he had been politely, wordlessly given a ticket for making a U-turn. Only the grounds of the imperial palace—cropped cypresses seen from a balustrade—rang a faint bell; the mismatched trio twenty years ago had walked there the first groggy afternoon. Resting his arms on the balustrade, he had distinctly told himself, I’m in Spain. An exotic formality and gloom had seemed to arise from the gardens, with their boxy patterns of privet and truncated inky-green cypresses. Entry was forbidden, as Brad remembered it. The King was still youthful and revered, and Spain was clinging to his image as a safeguard against a return of civil chaos. Now the King was a beefy, good-natured sexagenarian, the Prime Minister was a Socialist, euros had replaced pesetas as the coin of the realm, and the palace gardens were open to the public. Brad descended with Leonora into the once-forbidden grounds; they seemed innocuous, chilly, and empty, just another piece of tourist Europe, as impersonally accepting of them as the hotel clerks who took their unmated passports and handed them back without a flicker of Counter-Reformation puritanism. Spain had rejoined the pagan, Mediterranean world.

  Leonora had become more kittenish than she was in Boston. “Wasn’t that clever of me,” she insisted as they left the Prado, “to find your little dog for you?”

  “Perro,” said Brad, relishing the trilled double “r.” “Yes, it was very clever, dear.”

  From Madrid he and Leonora took a day trip to Toledo, by train. Their mood, near their vacation’s end, had turned light-hearted. She did not furiously object when, in the station, he gave a few coins to a Gypsy with a dirty-faced infant sleeping in her arms. He had been to Toledo once before, but by car, with his—not wife—madre and his hija. They had had a flat tire on the way, and his doping out enough instructions to replace it with the spare had been one of his few Spanish triumphs. The flat tire was all he remembered of that excursion except for an old ochre bridge, with studded wooden doors, that they had walked across in sunshine, with Toledo massed behind them on a steep, congested hill.

  Today, too, was sunny. The train climbed through vineyards and freshly green fields for an hour and then stopped outside the city, on the other side of the river. He and Leonora followed a set of twittery English women, who seemed to know the ropes, to a red bus that quickly filled; a large group of others from the train crossed the street and trooped away on a diagonal road. Watching them disappear, Brad envied them their secret—a sort of short cut, with no bus fare. The bus, stymied by some torn-up streets, dropped them off at a spot Brad could not locate on the map; he became as lost as in Granada in the rain, while Leonora lost patience at his side. She needed a bottle of water, and was fearful of being robbed in the narrow, twisting streets. “Amazing,” he admitted, “how these Spaniards hide their cathedrals.”

  “But this is the biggest Gothic cathedral in Spain!” She was almost wailing. “You’re the only man in the world who could totally not find it!”

  When they did come upon it, and prowled amid its five huge aisles, he could not find in himself any memory of having been here before. Surely he and his mother, now as dead as Queen Isabella, and his younger daughter, now married and the mother of three, had marvelled together at the exquisite choir stalls, the towering altarpiece, the elaborately robed carved Madonna dating from the old Visigothic church, and, most memorable of all, the Baroque hole, a piece of sky lined with Heavenly figures, incongruously broken into the Gothic vaulting behind the altar in the eighteenth century. It was as if they had been blind. They would have been weary after their escapade with the tire, and his mother would have had her checklist of sights to feed her fiction. Where had they parked? It was hard to imagine his overweight, overheated mother laboring up and down the streets and stairs that he and Leonora dutifully traversed, from the old Jewish Quarter in the west of the city to the Museo de Santa Cruz in the east. As they wearily leaned on a balustrade, he saw his bridge, glowing golden in the late-afternoon light.

  The train back to Madrid left in an hour, at six. “I bet,” Brad told Leonora, “if we crossed that bridge, and walked to the left, we’d come to the railroad station.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I think this map shows it.”

  “You think. Why are there no people on the bridge? It goes nowhere.”

  “They wouldn’t let a bridge stand that went nowhere. Remember all those people who didn’t get on the bus but crossed the street and walked away diagonally? They must have been walking to this bridge. Here it is, on the map. It’s called the Puente de Alcántara.”

  “How do we get down to it?”

  It was a reasonable question, so Brad thought she was going to be reasonable. They were standing at a considerable height above the river; several busy thoroughfares intervened. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “Maybe into that parking lot. I think I see some steps down.”

  Leonora wanted to please him, but her long years of being single had hardened a habit of self-preservation. “You think,” she said. “You don’t know.”

  “I know that bridge. We were all on it together.”

  �
��That was ages ago; you’re not even sure of that, I can tell from your voice. Look across the river: there’s no road on that side. Brad, I have news for you. I’m taking the bus. I know where it leaves from. If you want to try your precious bridge, I’ll meet you at the station. Give me my return ticket.”

  “Oh, shit, never mind,” he told her. “We’ll go back and take the stuffy, expensive bus together. But it could have been a lyrical experience.” At heart he was relieved that he didn’t have to plod down in search of the entry to the bridge, and that by defying him she had put some space between them; they were in danger of becoming inseparable.

  Back at the bus stop—a triangular square bustling with young Europeans stripped to their shorts and backpacks—Brad widened the distance by regressively yielding to his desire to buy, at one of the portable stands surprisingly prevalent in the somber old city, the Spanish equivalent of a Good Humor bar—chocolate-covered ice cream on a stick. “Don’t,” Leonora begged. “The bus will come.”

  “No, it won’t,” he said. There was a type—vanilla inside a frosty brown skin bumpy with small bits of nuts—that he especially craved. He rarely saw them for sale in downtown Boston, where men in business suits don’t generally patronize Good Humor wagons. “Want a bite?” he offered, poking the treat at his companion, with her gray-streaked hair and censorious frown.

  “I certainly do not. Eat it fast—you’re not allowed to eat on buses. What a baby!” And Leonora softly shrieked, with a panic deserving a graver emergency, when the bus pulled up in the next minute. In the squeeze at the door, he held the half-finished popsicle behind his back, so the driver wouldn’t see. Leonora was horrified, as they took seats in the rear, that he was still gnawing at the stick, with its fast-melting burden. She elaborated: “You’re a disgusting, selfish baby.”

  He waited to reply until he could say, “There. All gone. Nothing spilled. You may apologize whenever you want.” To be more annoying still, he asked her, “What do I do with the stick? Could you put it in your purse? Please? Pretty please?”