The Infinite Plan (42 page)

Even though Gregory's enthusiasm for Shannon was quickly waning, he failed to notice; during the months when she was pregnant, his disillusion was overshadowed by a tenderness compounded of compassion and delight. He was with her when the baby was born, holding her, wiping away the perspiration, talking to her to calm her, while the doctor worked busily beneath the blinding lights of the delivery room. The smell of blood brought back memories of the war, and he saw the boy from Kansas again, as he had so many times in his dreams, begging him not to leave him alone. Shannon clung to him as she bore down to expel the infant, and in those moments Gregory truly believed he loved her. He liked children and was pleased with the idea of being a father again. It would be different this time, he promised himself; I will be closer to this baby than I was to Margaret. He wanted to be the first to welcome it to life, and the moment the head appeared, he reached out to receive it. He held the baby up to show to Shannon, so choked with emotion he could not speak. Later he would recall that instant as the only true happiness he had shared with Shannon, but even that spark of joy faded within a matter of days. Shannon was not interested in the duties of motherhood any more than in the role of wife or mistress of the house, and as soon as she could squeeze into the tight blue jeans of her single days, she tried to escape the trap of matrimony. Meanwhile, David, the baby, was fidgeting in a playpen, so fretful and bad-tempered that not even his mother wanted to be with him.

One day a mortified Tina reported to her boss that she had seen one of the young lawyers in the firm kissing Shannon in the parking lot. Forgive me for sticking my nose into this, Mr. Reeves, but it's my obligation to tell you, she concluded in a trembling voice. Gregory saw red; he grabbed the offender by the lapel and began punching him. His victim tried to escape by rushing into the elevator, but Gregory ran down the service stairway and trapped the miscreant in the street, creating such a scene that the police were summoned and everyone ended up having to make a statement at the police station, including Mike Tong, who returned from the post office just in time to become a witness to the end of the fight: the defeated Lothario lying on the sidewalk with a bloody nose. That night Shannon blamed what had happened on a few drinks too many and tried to convince Gregory that such incidents were utterly trivial and that he was the only one she loved. Gregory wanted to know what the hell she was up to in the parking lot, and she swore it was nothing more than a casual meeting and a friendly kiss.

“Your age is showing, Gregory; you're really out of it,” was her summation.

“It seems I was born to wear the horns!” Reeves bellowed, and slammed the door.

He stayed in a motel until Shannon located him and begged him to come back, swearing her love and sobbing that she felt secure and protected when she was with him and lost when he was gone. Secretly, Gregory was waiting for her call. He had lain awake all night, tormented by jealousy, inventing futile reprisals and impossible resolutions. He feigned a rage he no longer felt, just for the satisfaction of humiliating her, but he went back to her, as he would every time he left during the months to come.

• • •

When she was thirteen, Margaret disappeared from home. Samantha waited two days before she called me, because she thought Margaret had no place to go and soon would be back. She was sure it was just a little escapade: All kids her age do silly things, it's nothing to worry about, you know Margaret never causes any problems, she's a very good girl. Samantha's ability to ignore reality is like my mother's; it never ceases to amaze me. I immediately advised the police, who organized a massive search; we placed ads in every city around the bay area and made appeals on radio and television. When I went to her school, they told me they had not seen her in months; they had given up sending notices to her mother and leaving telephone messages. My daughter was a terrible student; she had no friends, played no sports, missed too many classes, and finally stopped going altogether. I questioned her classmates, but they knew very little about her, or at least did not want to tell me. I sensed they did not like her very much. One girl described her as being aggressive and vulgar, two adjectives I found impossible to associate with Margaret, who always behaved like an elegant little old lady in a tearoom. Then I talked with the neighbors and found that they had seen her going out at all hours of the night; sometimes a fellow on a motorcycle came for her, but she almost always came back in different cars. Samantha said she was sure that this was just nasty gossip; she had not noticed anything strange. Why should you be aware of your daughter's absence, I said, if you don't even notice her when she's there? In the photograph that appeared on television, Margaret looked beautiful and innocent, but I remembered seeing her mimic provocative gestures and imagined the worst. The world is filled with perverts, a police officer had told me once when I lost track of one of the children I was looking after in the park. I went through days of pure torture, checking all the police stations and hospitals and newspapers.

When I went to Timothy Duane's laboratory, needing a friend, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “This is a case for Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. You must go to the Church of the Dominicans, put twenty dollars in the saint's collection box, and light a candle to him.”

“You're nuts, Tim.”

“Yes, but that isn't the point. The only thing that stuck with me from twelve years of school with the priests is a sense of guilt and an unconditional faith in Saint Jude. You've got nothing to lose by trying.”

“Dr. Duane is right; you have nothing to lose by trying. I'll go with you,” my secretary offered quietly when she heard, and so, along with the unfailing Ernestina Pereda, I found myself on my knees in a church, lighting candles, something I hadn't done since my days as Padre Larraguibel's altar boy.

That night someone called to tell me he had seen a person in a bar who looked like Margaret, except considerably older. We went there with two policemen and found Margaret passing herself off as a grown woman, wearing falsies, high heels, tight pants, and a mask of makeup painted over her baby face. When she saw me she started to run, and when we caught her she threw her arms around me, crying and calling me Daddy for the first time I can remember. A medical examination revealed needle marks on her arms and a venereal infection. When I tried to talk with her in the room of the private clinic where we had taken her, she pushed me away and in a deep voice spit out a string of curses, several of which I had never heard, not even in the barrio where I grew up or during my days in the army. She had torn the intravenous needle from her arm and with her lipstick had written terrible obscenities on the walls of her room; she had shredded her pillow and thrown everything within reach on the floor. It took three nurses to hold her while they administered a tranquilizer. The next morning I went with Samantha to see her and found her lying in bed, calm and smiling, her face scrubbed and a ribbon in her hair, surrounded by the bouquets of flowers, boxes of chocolates, and stuffed animals sent by people in my office. Of the devil-possessed girl of the previous day, no trace remained. When I asked her why she had done such a terrible thing, she began crying, apparently repentant. She didn't know what had happened to her, she said, she had never done such a thing before, she had fallen in with a bad crowd, but we mustn't worry, she realized the danger and would not see those people again. The injections were just experimentation, and she would never do it again, she swore.

“I'm fine. The only thing I need is a tape player so I can listen to music,” she told us.

“What kind of music do you want?” her mother asked, arranging her pillows.

“A friend brought me my favorite tapes,” she replied drowsily. “I want to sleep now; I'm a little tired.”

As we left she asked us to bring her some cigarettes—no filter, please. I was surprised that she smoked, but then remembered that at her age I had made myself a pipe, and anyway, compared with her other problems, a little nicotine seemed pretty mild. I didn't think it was a particularly opportune time to discuss the effect of smoke on the lungs when she could have died of an overdose of heroin. When I went back that afternoon, she was gone. She had tricked the nurse, put on the whorish clothes she was wearing when she was admitted, and run away. When they cleaned the room they discovered a disposable syringe, a tape of rock music, and the stub of a lipstick beneath the pillow. I had lost Margaret—since that day I have seen her only in jail or in a hospital bed—I just didn't know it yet. It took me nine years to let her go, nine years of frustrated hopes, useless searching, phony regrets, endless thefts, betrayals, vulgarity, suspicion, and humiliation, until finally I admitted in my heart of hearts that I couldn't help her.

The first Tamar shop opened on a street in the heart of Berkeley, between a bookstore and a beauty shop: a thousand square feet with a small showcase and a narrow door that would have passed unperceived among other businesses in the neighborhood had Carmen not decided to apply Olga's decorating principles—in reverse. The healer's house was as embellished and gaudily painted as an operetta pagoda and so stood out against the sterile gray architecture of the Latin barrio. Carmen's Tamar was located among colorful shops: Chinese and Mexican restaurants with identifying wrathful dragons and plaster cactuses, Indian bazaars, stalls with tourist souvenirs, and flourishing pornography marts where neon signs depicted naked couples in improbable positions. It was not easy to attract a clientele amid such competition, but Carmen painted everything white, installed a white awning above the door and tracks of strong lights to accentuate the laboratory starkness of her shop. She displayed her jewelry on simple trays filled with sand and transparent slices of quartz that offered a stunning contrast to the elaborate design and rich materials. In one corner she hung gypsy skirts like the ones she had worn for years, the only warm notes in all that snowy whiteness. The air was filled with the delicate aroma of spices and the monotone chords of a sitar. “Soon I'm going to add belts, handbags, and shawls,” Carmen explained to Gregory, as she proudly showed off her creations at the opening celebration. “There won't be a wide variety, but the pieces can all be combined, so that with one visit clients can come to my shop and leave dressed from head to toe.” “I don't think you're going to find many takers for those getups.” Gregory laughed, convinced that a woman would have to be sick in the head to wear Carmen's creations, but only minutes later he had to swallow his words when Shannon begged him to buy her several pairs of the “ethnic” earrings he had thought unreasonably expensive and saw his friend Joan, on Balcescu's arm, parading in one of the wildly colored gypsy skirts. Women are a mystery to me, he mumbled.

Carmen Morales conducted her business with the prudence of a peasant. She did her accounts every week, putting aside one part for production, another for taxes, and the rest for modest personal expenses and additions to her savings. She depended on her Vietnamese helpers to execute her designs and Mexican women in the barrio, following her precise instructions, to sew the clothes in their homes and mail them to her. She herself chose all the materials and once a year, during the summer, made a shopping tour of Asia or North Africa, hazardous journeys that would have terrified a less confident woman. She was indifferent to danger because she could not imagine that anyone would harm her. She could travel only during Dai's school vacations, and he grew accustomed to safaris by train, jeep, burro, and on foot through remote villages in the jungles of Thailand, nomadic shepherds' camps in the Atlas Mountains, and wretched slums in the populous cities of India. His slim, dark-skinned body unprotestingly endured all kinds of food, contaminated water, mosquito bites, fatigue, and sweltering heat; he had a fakir's tolerance for discomfort. He was a calm child who learned arithmetic playing with beads for necklaces and before he was ten had discovered various mathematical laws he tried vainly to explain to his mother and schoolteacher. Later, when his extraordinary talent for numbers was recognized and he was examined by university professors, his ideas turned out to be principles of trigonometry. He had a small metal chessboard with magnetized playing pieces, and on swaying trains, crushed among passengers, animal coops, shabby cardboard suitcases, and baskets of food, Dai calmly played chess against himself, never cheating. They did not always stay in hotels or in the huts of friendly natives; at times they traveled in small caravans or hired a guide and camped in the middle of nowhere.

On a straw mat on the ground or in a hammock beneath an improvised mosquito netting, listening to the menacing sounds of night birds and stealthy paws padding by, saturated by the disturbing odor of magnolia and decaying vegetation, Dai felt completely safe beside the warmth of his mother's body: he thought she was invulnerable. With her he lived many adventures, and the few times he saw her frightened, he, too, felt a stab of fear; in those rare moments he remembered his other mother, the one with the eyes like black almonds, who jetted in circles around his head, protecting him from all evil. In a bazaar in Morocco, as they pushed their way through the teeming crowd, Dai dropped Carmen's hand to stop and admire some curved knives with sheaths of tooled leather. The owner of the stall, a large, thuggish man in voluminous robes, grabbed Dai by the collar, lifted him from the ground, and cuffed him hard, but before he could strike a second blow he was attacked by a wild beast, clawing, growling, and biting like a tigress. Dai saw his mother rolling on the ground with the Arab in a whirl of torn skirts, overturned baskets, scattered merchandise, and the jeers of other men in the market. The man's fist struck Carmen in the face, and for a few seconds she lay stunned, but with the strength of desperation, before anyone could anticipate it, she had one of the unsheathed knives in her hand. At that moment the police broke through the crowd, disarmed her, and saved the merchant from a certain knifing, while the men gathered in the circle celebrated the blow struck against the stranger, denouncing her with cries and insults. Carmen and Dai ended up in jail alongside unsavory types who had second thoughts about molesting them when they saw murder in the woman's eyes. The American consul came to their rescue, and later, as he bade them goodbye, advised them never to return. We'll see you next year, Carmen replied, but could not smile because her face was swollen and she had a deep cut on her lip. They returned from those explorations with boxes filled with a variety of beads, pieces of coral, glass, antique metals, semiprecious stones, tiny bone carvings, perfect shells, claws and teeth of unidentified beasts, petrified leaves, and scarabs from the ice age. She also brought embroidered cloth and embossed leathers to use as details on a belt or handbag, time-faded ribbons for skirts, buttons and buckles discovered in forgotten cubbyholes. By then, Carmen was not working in her home. Her treasures were stored in transparent plastic boxes in her workshop, arranged by material and color; it was there she closeted herself for hours to create each design, adding and removing beads, scribing metal, cutting and polishing, in a patient exercise of imagination. It was she who started the vogues for astrological motifs of moon and stars, crystals for good luck, jewelry of African inspiration, different earrings for each ear, and a single ring in one ear with a cascade of stones and bits of silver, all of which would be copied to the point of excess. Carmen had grown more confident with the years and had refined her look slightly, but her happy disposition had not diminished, nor her taste for adventure. She ran her business like an expert, but she had such a good time doing it that she never considered it work. She was incapable of taking herself seriously. She saw no difference between her current prosperous enterprise and the days when she was making crafts in her parents' house to sell in the barrio, or dressing in colorful kerchiefs to juggle in Pershing Square. It was all part of a continuous lifetime hobby, and the fact that the zeros increased on her bank accounts did not affect her sense that work was play. She was the first to be surprised by her success; she could scarcely believe that people were willing to pay so much for ornaments she invented in a fit of inspiration to entertain herself. Life's responsibilities and the pitfalls of success did nothing to change her likable nature; she was still open, confident, and generous. Her journeys had revealed to her the endless misery and pain borne by humanity, and when she compared herself with others she felt extremely fortunate. For her, there was no conflict between a good eye for business and compassion; from the beginning she made it a point to offer employment at optimum conditions to those lowest on the social scale, and later, as her operation expanded, she hired so many poor Latins, Asian and Central American refugees, and physically disabled, as well as the two mentally handicapped men she put in charge of plants and gardens, that Gregory called his friend's business “Tamar's Hospice.” She invested time and money in exhaustive training and English classes for her workers, who almost inevitably had arrived in this country after unbelievable hardships. Her spontaneous charity turned out to be a visionary managerial strategy—as were free meals, required recreation, restful music, comfortable chairs, gymnastic and relaxation classes for muscles cramped by concentration on setting stones—because her personnel responded with astounding loyalty and efficiency.