The Four Temperaments (26 page)

Tijuana, where
they would spend the night, was a sorry town, poised there on the cusp of the United States and with its gaze forever directed northward. Driving slowly around the ragged streets, Ruth first tried the Holiday Inn, only to find all its rooms were taken by a convention of drug enforcement officials. The Ramada was also fully booked, by the participants of another convention, this time of running shoe manufacturers. Ruth saw one of them hurry across the parking lot, three or four thickly cushioned sneakers tucked under each arm.

She finally settled on a third-rate motel where they could rent rooms by the week. Never mind that the sheets on the twin beds were gray, or that the clerk responded to her inquiry about a crib by presenting her with a large metal washtub. There was a kitchenette attached to the room containing a two-burner hot plate, a small fridge that smelled of spoiled milk and a sink with a dripping faucet. The room's single window overlooked the parking lot, which Ruth liked since she wanted to keep her eye on the car, whose very newness seemed exceptional, and for that reason vulnerable here. Credit cards were not accepted, so she paid, in advance, for their first week with cash.

She was glad she had packed Isobel's stroller, which she took out so that they could walk, rather than ride, around the neighborhood. Up a few blocks was the Avenida de la Revolución, a faded main drag with shops that sold cheap sombreros, maracas covered in glitter and T-shirts with maps of Mexico emblazoned on their fronts. Ruth would have liked to buy Isobel a pair of the maracas, but after the near-tragedy with the Beanie Baby, she decided against it. What if the glitter was toxic and she ingested some? Or if she snapped off the handle and poked herself in the eye? These were the kinds of things Penelope used to think about, and for the first time, Ruth felt a rush of sympathy, even kinship, thinking about her.

The T-shirt was safer and ultimately more practical too, since she hadn't yet noticed any laundry facilities. She bought two of the very smallest size the store had. One depicted the Mexican map and the other a picture of some cartoon character in a sombrero, brandishing a gun. She bought two identical ones for herself. Ridiculous as they were, they would at least be clean.

As they walked along the street, Ruth saw a man leading a donkey by a rope tied to the animal's bridle. The beast's gray coat had been covered with some haphazard streaks of chalky paint and Ruth could not fathom what they might have meant. But she continued to stare and realized the streaks were actually meant to be stripes, as if the animal were not the dilapidated creature it patently was, but something exotic and foreign, like a zebra. When the man saw Ruth looking, he stopped and began speaking earnestly to her in Spanish. He pointed to the donkey and Ruth noticed its ears, which looked as if they had been gnawed on, poking through slits that had been cut in the battered straw hat it wore. He was offering Isobel a ride. Was this the life Ruth had engineered for her granddaughter in Mexico? The old Ruth was ascendant now, stern and disapproving. She shook her head and they continued on their way. The man's voice followed them for what seemed like a long time.

After obtaining some pesos from an ATM, Ruth bought a few things for a simple meal at the motel. Isobel ate little but eagerly drank the milk she was offered. Since there was no bathtub, only a stall shower, tiny sink and toilet with a lazy fly circling the bowl, Ruth used the metal washtub provided by the clerk to bathe Isobel. She splashed happily in the water, but cut her finger on one of the tub's sharp edges that Ruth had somehow managed to overlook. Then she cried and cried, and even Ruth's singing couldn't quiet her. She took Isobel's finger in her own mouth, blood leaving a metallic taste on her tongue. After a long while, she finally stopped wailing, and allowed Ruth to dry her with a dingy, threadbare towel. Ruth pushed the two beds together and placed her close to the wall. They both fell asleep almost instantly.

Isobel woke in the night crying, though, and used her small fists to grab onto Ruth's chest in what Ruth perceived as a frantic effort to nurse. Someone in an adjoining room knocked on the wall. Ruth picked Isobel up, and pulling her robe on with a single hand, brought her to the doorway. The night had cooled and the unfamiliar darkness seemed filled with menace, but still Ruth stood there and directed the baby's gaze up to the sky. The moon was as slim and delicate as one of Isobel's own fingernails; a bevy of moths fluttered around the single bulb overhead. Gradually, Isobel quieted down, and when her head began to droop, heavily, on Ruth's shoulder, they went back inside.

In the morning, Ruth felt depleted, which she attributed to two nights of fretful, interrupted sleep. More unsettling, though, was how listless Isobel seemed. Despite Ruth's efforts to engage her, she barely responded. Finally, Ruth stumbled upon the playground she had been thinking about since San Francisco, and pushed the baby in the single intact swing until her arms, shoulders and whole back burned with the exertion of it, but still Isobel's eyes didn't lose their glazed look. This was worse than her crying. Much worse.

She bought a map, tried to project herself and the baby into one of the places indicated by the bold, black letters. But that was the extent of it. The names of the towns meant nothing to her and all the exhorting of the new Ruth couldn't get the old one to pay the bill, get back in the car and drive away. Instead, Ruth and Isobel spent the next two days in Tijuana, where they walked the same sorry streets, shopped in the same market with its dusty bags of rice and its towers of canned beans, visited the same dilapidated playground, before returning in the early evening to their room.

Since neither of them had hats, Ruth was forced to buy sombreros, to shield their faces from the intensity of the sun. Isobel didn't like wearing hers, and Ruth spent a lot of time putting it back on her head after Isobel had pulled it off again. When Ruth repositioned it for the third time in ten minutes, she was reminded of William, the boy who said no to every hat, pair of mittens, boots, scarf or raincoat for the first dozen years of his life. Once he tried to flush the mittens down the toilet rather than wear them. William. Ruth was angry with Gabriel and Oscar, but not with William. How was he? And Betsy? And the new baby, Hannah? The last time she had spoken to them, they had talked about taking a trip to Puerto Vallarta. They had been there on their honeymoon and loved it. Now they wanted to go again, with Hannah.

Puerto Vallarta. Even the name sounded like song. William and Betsy had come back talking about the white sand, the fresh fish, the papayas the size of footballs. Ruth and Isobel would go to Puerto Vallarta. They would leave in the morning. Would Isobel like the beach? Would she eat papaya? Ruth would find out.

“We're going to go swimming,” she said to Isobel as she got her ready for bed. The baby blinked soberly. “You're going to love it.”

After Isobel had fallen asleep, Ruth opened the map again, studied the possible routes they could take. It was far, several hundred miles from where they now were. Ruth considered flying, but decided against it. She wanted some visual, tactile sense of this country she and Isobel were now inhabiting; she was more likely to find it driving than if they were in the air. They would need to rest and regroup along the way, but that was all right. There wouldn't be conventions everywhere they stopped. Surely, they would find some hotels that were better than this one. Maybe they would find one with a pool. Ruth felt calmed imagining a rectangle of azure; she would hold Isobel in her arms as she dipped her feet, her legs and finally her whole body into the water.

The next day was muggy and strangely overcast, with a heavy bank of bruise-colored clouds hanging low in the sky. And she thought she had left the bad weather behind in San Francisco. The old Ruth considered postponing their departure, but when she looked at Isobel's apathetic expression, the new one got busy packing. Outside of Tijuana, she stopped for gas and watched while the young Mexican boy wiped the windshield with the same care most people would have reserved for their faces. The clouds were still there, but Ruth was not going to let them stop her. She tipped the boy generously and they were on their way.

After about an hour of driving, the clouds, which had sunk lower and lower, opened and it began to rain. At first, Ruth almost welcomed the respite from the heat. The windshield wipers beat a steady rhythm and Ruth thought again of the boy at the gas station, the gentle way his hand had moved over the glass. But as the rain continued and the visibility diminished, the old Ruth began to feel frightened. So did the new one. The rain pattered down on the roof of the car, dribbling down over the windows. The car steamed up and Ruth couldn't find the defroster, so she was forced to hunch over the steering wheel, gripping it tightly and peering over its thick, padded surface in her effort to see the road ahead.

Then she must have taken a wrong turn, because she soon found herself on a badly paved road and after about twenty bumpy minutes, the paving ended altogether. She was now on a dirt road filled with potholes and baseball-sized rocks. Rain had turned everything to pinkish-orange mud. The sides and windows of the car soon became splattered with it. She drove slowly in what felt like circles. Finally, she pulled over to the side of the road and watched the rain continue to come down. Every now and then, a flash of lightning illuminated the sky; once it had passed, the sky was gray again. Ruth tried the radio, but there was only static. She and Isobel sat in the car for a long time, water streaming down the windows, no other cars in sight. They might have been the inhabitants of a latter-day ark, so total and encompassing was the deluge around them.

The exertion of driving and the lack of sleep exhausted her. She put her head on the steering wheel, wishing she could cry, cry like the rain that was pouring down around them. But the tears might frighten Isobel, so she willed herself to hold them in. She turned around to face the baby, who had been quiet for a long while. No singing, no pointing, no squirming. It was as if she had been given Thorazine with her breakfast and was now hypnotized by the rain.

“We're lost,” Ruth finally said, breaking the silence.

“Mama,” Isobel replied. Despite her resolve, Ruth's eyes filled with tears at the word.

“Mama's not coming now.”

“Dada?” asked Isobel. That did it. The tears started coming now and she could do nothing to stop them. She quickly turned away from Isobel again. She had been so busy thinking about herself, her anger, that she hadn't stopped to consider what Isobel needed. Not really. She cried as quietly as she could for a few minutes, knuckles pressed to her lips to stifle the sobs. Then she got out of the car, and in the few seconds it took to open the door to the backseat, rain soaked her hair, glued her blouse to her skin. The rain mingled easily with her tears, coating her entire face.

“Do you want to see Daddy?” Ruth touched Isobel's arm. “Should we call him on the telephone?” Isobel turned to her.

“Dada?” she whispered. Her eyes, which had seemed so flat and expressionless for days, suddenly regained some animation. Dada. Had it really been so obvious all along? Ruth dried her face and hair with the paper towels she kept in the car. They waited a little longer, until the sky finally showed some weak light beyond the gray. The rain tapered off and she was able to start driving again. She kept the map open on the seat beside her.

Soon, she was back on the highway. Puerto Vallarta had dematerialized, like a mirage on a hot road. Ruth had a more pressing destination. The airport. The old Ruth and the new one were united now and there was a single Ruth who returned the rental car at the Hertz desk, negotiated with the American Airlines ticket agent and found the silver bank of telephones. Isobel dozed in the stroller, mouth open and snoring lightly.

There was no answer at their apartment in New York and Ruth was reluctant to call Caroline in Greenwich. She couldn't face explaining her mad flight—for madness was what it had been, she saw that now—or hearing the details of the funeral. If it had even taken place. Not really expecting to find anyone there, she finally tried Gabriel's number in San Francisco. She was suddenly grateful to hear Oscar's voice. “Isobel wants to see her father,” Ruth said. “Can you tell him we're on our way?”

GABRIEL

I
sobel shifted
and bounced on Gabriel's lap, obscuring his view of the white casket, but he didn't care. He was so relieved to have her back. He put his face against her neck and inhaled her scent. Then he lifted his gaze over her head so he could focus on the casket, its shiny, lacquered surface reminding him of a grand piano he remembered seeing in an old black-and-white film. It mercifully remained closed. There were masses of white flowers adorning it: lilies, roses, gardenias—Penelope had loved gardenias—and tulips. He could smell them from where he sat and they reminded him of the bouquet she had carried on their wedding day.

On one side of him was Penelope's mother, who wept quietly into a folded handkerchief that she pressed to her lips; on the other side was his father. Next to her was Ruth. Gabriel couldn't see her from his seat unless he bent forward, which he had no inclination to do. Even though they had all flown east together after she had returned to San Francisco, he wasn't ready to deal with his mother. He was still too angry for that. Behind him were his brothers and their wives.

He tried to focus on the minister's eulogy; Gabriel recognized him as the same man who had officiated at his and Penelope's interfaith wedding ceremony. But he was having trouble concentrating. Instead, he found himself thinking about the days prior to this event, the days when he had gotten in his car, armed with only the barest bits of information that Oscar had gleaned from the credit card company and driven south, in search of his mother and daughter.

When Ruth
had disappeared with Isobel, Gabriel had felt suddenly exiled from his former life. Before he had been a man with a wife, child, home and mistress. Now his wife was dead, his mother and daughter vanished. He had left his father, newly turned into a sleepwalker by Ruth's absence, sitting alone in his white apartment. White. A color for ghosts, which was what it seemed everyone had suddenly become. Even Ginny, who remained so vivid in his mind, was far out of reach, back in New York. Gabriel could still feel the itch of lust when he thought about her. But would he ever be able to separate his desire for Ginny from his guilt over Penelope? How long had she been lying in the street, and then the morgue, while Gabriel had been in the car with Ginny? And if he hadn't gone to the ballet that night, would she have been hit at all? Mrs. Erikson had told him that she had been planning to meet him there.

Southern California was hot. But after a little while of riding in the air-conditioned cocoon of his car, Gabriel began to feel like a ghost himself. So he turned off the air, opened the windows and let the hot wind whip through his hair and across his face. It dried his lips and throat, made his eyes feel gritty, but he didn't care. Instead of choosing from his eclectic and tasteful assortment of CDs, he fiddled with the radio. He became engrossed in a talk show where someone called in to say his wife had slept with his brother and was now carrying his brother's child; what should he do? Gabriel was almost tempted to call in and offer his own advice on the subject, but soon enough the station filled with static and then metamorphosed into a country-western station on which the singer wailed about her cheatin' heart.

Tijuana was a hellhole. Thanks to Oscar, he had the name of the shop on the Avenida de la Revolución where Ruth had bought some T-shirts, but the owner didn't remember the middle-aged gringa with the baby. And even if he had, then what? Gabriel tried the Ramada and the Holiday Inn, but Ruth had not used the credit card in either of those places. He tried a few other motels in town without any success. It was late by this time and he checked into the Ramada himself, where a huge group of sport shoe manufacturers had recently left. This explained the suitcase stuffed with single sneakers—not a pair among them—that Gabriel found under his hotel bed. Before going to bed, he opened the quart of tequila he had bought earlier that day, and finished it before he checked out.

He hadn't known what to do next, but then he called Oscar and learned that Ruth had turned in the car and bought a ticket back to San Francisco. Gabriel drove straight through, pulling over by the side of the road for brief naps before continuing north again, a tall, sweating cup of iced coffee always within reach. Even so, he knew there was no way he could be there in time to meet her plane. Maybe it was just as well, because he was so angry with Ruth, he didn't know what he would have done when he first saw her.

After the
minister had finished, one of Penelope's old friends got up to speak. She was followed by a cousin and then it was Caroline's turn. Although she had been crying steadily to this point, she managed to contain herself when she faced the assembled group of mourners. “Jen and Trish,” she began, indicating the two women who had just sat down, “knew Penelope as a friend and as a cousin. I knew her as a daughter. Gabriel, as a wife.” He had to look down at that; he couldn't meet her eyes. “But only Isobel knew her as a mother, and Isobel can't speak to us today. Still, when Gabriel gave me some of her papers to go through, I found this.” Caroline held up a sheet of paper. Even from this distance, he could see that it was covered in Penelope's handwriting. He had given this to Caroline? There had been a folder full of things but he evidently hadn't looked through them very carefully. If he had, he might have found it. Whatever it turned out to be.

“It's a letter. Addressed to Isobel. I hope I'm not taking too great a liberty by reading it here today.

“‘My darling daughter,

“‘I know there will come a time when the closeness we share now will end, when you will look at me with distrust and anger. I will become the enemy. It can't be helped; it's what all daughters feel for their mothers at one time or another. Some daughters get over the feeling and can be close to their mothers again; others don't, and the gap that starts in adolescence becomes a chasm, too wide to ever bridge or span.

“‘Still, even though this may happen to us, I wanted to write this letter to you while we were still of one mind, one heart, one spirit. When mine was the face you turned to with such gladness and when your most complete joy was in my arms. I wanted to tell you that whatever you feel for me, it won't matter. You've given me the greatest happiness I've ever known. I will remain, now and forever, your adoring mother.' ”

When Caroline finished, she looked up. “This letter,” she said, “was dated two days after Isobel's birth. Now that I've shared it with you, I'm giving it back to Gabriel, who will want to give it to Isobel. Someday.” Gabriel rose, handing Isobel to his father, who looked momentarily confused before turning her over to Ruth. He walked up to Caroline, who embraced him tightly before handing him Penelope's letter, now folded into neat thirds. Gabriel knew it was his moment to say something. He had something prepared, but it now seemed all wrong. He would not have credited Penelope with the kind of self-awareness that would acknowledge or admit any possible rift with her daughter, even if it was destined to take place well in the future. And the part about being able to get over it—was she talking about her own mother? She had never been especially close to Caroline. Nor, despite Ruth's ongoing disappointment over the fact, to his.

He turned to the group of people waiting for him to speak. “She kept her own counsel,” he began and then let himself be overtaken by grief—for her and for what had happened to them—before William appeared at his side and led him away.

After the service, there was a short ride to the cemetery. Gabriel told Caroline about Penelope's wish to have her ashes scattered, but Caroline had decided against it. The minister asked everyone standing around the open grave to join hands for a moment. The two babies, Isobel and Hannah, weren't there, but were instead back at Caroline's, where Betsy had volunteered to look after them. Gabriel hadn't wanted to let Isobel out of his sight but finally he had agreed. Now he was glad. He didn't want Isobel here, watching as they lowered the casket into the earth.

Caroline gave him one of the white roses from the funeral home and he plucked its petals, dropping them down into the open grave. The petals covered the casket so lightly it was hard to believe that they were really burying Penelope beneath the shower of white. But then Caroline stepped forward with a clod of dirt. It made an awful sound as it hit the casket.

There was a small reception back at Caroline's afterward. As soon as Gabriel saw Isobel, he scooped her up and held her tightly in his arms, even when it was clear she wanted to get down. He was going to have to learn how to let her go, he realized as he watched her struggle. Penelope had known that. What else had she known that he hadn't bothered to find out? Reluctantly, he set Isobel down and watched while she knelt on the floor, reached under a chair and began to stroke the head of a small, apricot-colored cat.