Donna Dufresne
I sat there lost in thought, admiring the fancy dress and shoes my mother, or someone else had sketched in her journal, when I heard my sister Dodie’s BMW kick up the gravel of the circular drive out front of the house. It screeched to a hissing halt of dust, and I was relieved to hear only one car door slam, which meant Dodie was alone and wouldn’t have Jessie, her youngest daughter who was twenty-two in tow. I stamped out my cigarette in the empty scotch glass from the night before, and realized that if I really wanted any privacy, I was going to either have to get my own place or set up one of the empty care-taker houses as my own little cottage. Dodie would not stand by for long while I occupied mama’s room. I’d have to clean up this mess and snoop around in case mama left behind any other bombshell secrets that would blow up in Dodie’s face. I chuckled to myself a bit when I thought of mama’s journals and wondered if she wrote down what she really thought about Dodie’s husband (Old Roy, as we liked to call him), and his pretentious family. Mama and I referred to them as our “out-laws”.
When the heavy walnut door slammed, the two Chihuahuas, Heidi and Amigo began their frantic yelping. I quickly escaped from mama’s room, securing the door behind me so that Dodie wouldn’t be compelled to come barging in to look for me. I met her in the kitchen, rummaging around for demitasse cups and setting the coffee-maker to espresso.
“Well, there you are, sleepy head. I can’t believe you haven’t drugged your lazy butt out of bed and put on the coffee when you knew I was coming over this morning to go through mama’s stuff and all.” Dodie flitted around the kitchen chirping like a catbird in that high, screechy voice of hers, tinged with a little bit too much put-on southern belle.
Actually, I had forgotten she was coming over. I would have to deter her from going through mama’s room and set up a decoy such as going through the china in the dining room. That would keep Dodie occupied for hours, searching for Royal Dolton, and some Antique Road Show piece of shit treasure she could sell for a million bucks. I made a mental note to move mama’s secret trunk into the guest room tonight, which would be ostensibly off limits if I set up my camp in there. I also thought I’d check out the old gardener’s cottage which had been empty for a year since mama’s favorite Mexican gardener went back home one Christmas and disappeared. She hired a landscaping unit after that, which appeared once a week with a whole truck load of Mexican day workers (probably illegal) and accomplished in one day what it took Manuel a month to do. I wanted to see just how much fixing up it would take for me to move into the cottage for six months, where I could have my own space without Dodie barging in any time she pleased. At this point, if Ed, came down from Cambridge to get away from his wife, I wouldn’t be able to hide him in the house. Dodie would be all over me with questions, including when the wedding date was going to be. And, being a consummate snoop, it wouldn’t take her long to figure out that he was already married to someone else. At least the cottage would be outside her normal radar, and the driveway out back toward the stockyard was a little too rutted and bumpy for her delicate little sports car.
“I thought we’d start in the dining room today,” I suggested, “I’ll go fetch mama’s inventory from the will. I know there’s some special items she wanted you and the kids to have, and I’m not all that sure I want the rest, so we can go through it together,” I handed her the heavy cream she liked to put in her espresso, unlike any normal person who would just drink it black and sweet.
But just as I turned to go to the library, Dodie chirped “I thought we’d go through mama’s room first. It needs a good cleaning up anyway, and I wanted to look through the jewelry.”
“No”, I said, “I mean my shit’s all over the room and I haven’t even got my own stuff unpacked yet. I’ll move into the guest room tonight, and you can start in there tomorrow. And don’t worry – do I look like the type who is going to run off with the family jewels? I can hardly remember to put on earrings half the time, and the last thing I’m looking for is a diamond bracelet that will get lost in a pile of horseshit when I’m at the stable.”
Dodie frowned in her pre-temper tantrum kind of way and for a minute I thought she was going to put up a hissy fit, but she thought better of it and said “Alright, I guess you’re the lawyer and all. By-the-way, I brought you some key lime pie I just made this morning, and you’ve got to try a piece right now. I made a chocolate orange sauce which I drizzled on the top and you have to tell me how you like it. I think I’m going to enter it into my luncheon club cooking contest for that fundraiser cookbook we’re making – you know, the one where we’re going to raise money for a cheerleading camp scholarship for poor black girls –I think it’s a winner.”
I don’t think Dodie caught the roll of my eyes as I slipped out of the kitchen to fetch the inventory list. “Yeah – O.K., whatever – just make it a really thin slice,” I shouted from the hall, which of course I knew she would not do.
It had been almost a week since I flew down to Texas to finally settle Mama’s estate. It seemed impossible that she had been gone almost sixth months already. Being the only lawyer in the family, Mama had made me executor. I took care of most of the will and probate from my law office up in Boston, but I couldn’t settle the shuffling of generations of knick-knacks from behind a desk. It was about time I showed my sorry ass on the Ranch and helped Dodie go through Mama’s personal things. What Dodie did not know, was that Mama had given me a key to a bank vault before she died. I’d expected to maybe find a few pieces of jewelry and Great Granddaddy’s Confederate sword. Instead, I left the bank with a truck load of old chests brimming with costumes, letters, journals and Lord knows what else. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Dodie to have her fair share, but Mama made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone in the family about the vault. It had something to do with a secret well-kept for most of her life.
We spent the morning culling through the china closet and the Hepplewhite inlay sideboard, laying out silver, crystal and china as if we were classifying dinosaur bones. Most of the contents of this room had belonged to Granny McCullagh, whose own family, the McBride’s, had bought their pedigree collection in northern antique shops, having come into money by cunning accident and a twist of planned fate. It occurred to me that Dodie took after our Scotch/Irish grandmother who was an odd mix of old country South and the pretentious middle class. She loved the stuff of status like the pieces of obscure plate settings that made a statement of old wealth and charm. Dodie was going to have to build an addition onto that Frank Lloyd Wright house of hers in order to fit all the family heirlooms where they could be prominently displayed.
After making some headway wrapping and packing up the china in boxes which were boldly marked “Dodie”, we sat out on the veranda for ice cold lemonade. The original part of the ranch house had been built by Grampy McCullagh back in the thirties, when he was rolling in newly made oil dough. It was built in the old southwest style with thick stucco walls that kept it cool during the oppressive heat of summer. There was a wide veranda that wrapped around three sides of the one-story house embraced by oleanders and fanned by the breeze in the cottonwood trees. Every year since the house had been built, some Mexican gardener strung up the lattice work for elephant ear and morning glory vines to climb, sheltering the siesta snipping inhabitants of the porch from dust and heat.
Out the back of the house was a series of rambling additions which wrapped around a courtyard in two wings with a pool house. The courtyard contained well cared for vegetable and flower beds as well as a formal garden around the pool. The roof throughout the house was made of red, Mexican tiles, and the courtyard had its own sheltered walkway constructed of formal pergolas and a tiled floor that meandered past the master bedroom, the guest rooms, and the kids wing on the other side of the master bedroom, where Dodie and I slept when we were young. The original kitchen was in the back of the old house in the center of the courtyard and its two outstretching wings.
Although the pool was well cared for and inviting for a dip on hot afternoons, and the courtyard had its old-world charm, my favorite place to sit was in the big wooden rocking chairs on the front veranda. Here I could rest my feet up on the rustic balustrade and pretend I really did emerge out of the old west fantasies of my childhood, when the ranch truly was a working business of cattle and horses, not the dwindling lawn ornaments and exotic pets my mother had collected in later years. Sitting there with sidekick Dodie huffing and wheezing up a storm because I lit up a cigarette kind of ruined the moment for me, though.
“You better not be smoking in mama’s room or the rest of the house. You’re gonna burn the place down and none of us will reap the benefit of its worth from that scrap heap of insurance daddy bought just to rub Roy’s nose in. I don’t know what got into him. Roy could have set him up with all kinds of protection for the ranch, the business, the house. He just wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Not that Roy needed the business, mind you, this is just small potatoes compared with his usual investment clientele, but he did want to help daddy out and secure his assets,” Dodie rambled on in the same tone as the cicadas in the trees of August, buzzing away in that annoying message reminding you that it was too damned hot, as if you didn’t know already.”
“Oh, I expect daddy made out alright in the end, he left Mama in pretty good shape when he passed,” I chimed in just to get her off on another topic. She should’ve realized that I knew the history of the books quite well, that being my job and all.
For someone who had the wallowing metabolism of a water buffalo in the physical realm, Dodie had the mental attention span of a meadow vole. She couldn’t stick to one subject if her life depended on it. In order to have a non-random conversation with Dodie, you had to continually bring her mind back to task and set the rail in the direction you wanted to go. Otherwise you’d be stuck on her train of gossip and incidentals going round and round at a dizzifying rate. I couldn’t keep up with all the tidbits she dropped about each and every one of her so-called friends, their bad marriages, affairs, drug addicted children and other train wrecks on which Dodie supped like a vampire. But in-spite of her annoying pertinacity for the mundane, she had an acute memory for family details. I decided to run a query into mama’s past, wondering if Dodie ever remembered her dressing up in a magnolia evening dress.
Point blank I asked, “Did you ever see mama dress up in a black evening gown with a white magnolia pattern and magnolias on the shoes?”
After taking a long draft of her lemonade which was spiked with a little gin, Dodie blinked warily at me. “How the heck would you know about that dress? You were away at school when that happened, and I don’t think I thought much enough about it to say anything to you.”
At this point I was caught a little off guard and had to do some quick thinking to cover my ass. “Oh, not a big deal,” I said, “I happened to see a sketch of that dress in Mama’s papers, and it got me to thinking I’d never seen her wear anything like that.”
It turned out the dress which was sketched out in mama’s diary was real. According to Dodie it had emerged out of some hidden closet the time that Uncle Charles, mama’s youngest brother who wasn’t all that much older than me, got married. I was in Europe at the time, studying in England and traveling around with my first real boyfriend. I wasn’t about to come back from the time of my life to attend a wedding where there’d be a bunch of hokey Mexican music, lots of accordion and Cajunto on the dance floor, and a very long catholic service. I had sent them some expensive Irish crystal thing and continued on my merry way.
But according to Dodie, I missed the event of a lifetime. Our great grandmother, Doña Magdalena and the family arrived from Monterrey, Mexico, in their exotic and very shiny cars complete with chuffers and fancy clothes. There weren’t enough guest rooms for everyone, and some of them had to be shipped off to El Paso to stay in some fancy old-world hotel the family had ties with. Doña Magdalena was the grand matriarch of the family and our Abuelita’s mother. She arrived in her wheelchair with her own personal nurse. She stayed at the ranch with my mother and Abuelita in her constant service. Dodie never did bother to learn Spanish, so she couldn’t understand a word of what Doña Magdalena said unless Abuelita interpreted. She got enough of the gist, though, that Magdalena was more than a little miffed by my absence. She demanded to know “Where is the other one? Our little Magdalena?”, which must have pissed Dodie off. I imagined her touting one of her “What am I – chopped liver?” looks.
The wedding supper finally took place after a week of preparations and Abuelita desperately trying to impress her side of the family with her only son’s wedding. Charles married a demure southern girl from Georgia, who had that blonde and freckled look of a J. Crew catalogue. Her family must have been more than a little shocked by the colorful crew that showed up at that wedding. My Mexican relatives were from old-world money and they had very old-world ideas. Although none of them were as dark as some Mexicans can be, having the blue-eyed strains of Spain in their blood, there were a few distant cousins who clearly had the profiles of an Aztec Indian. Apparently, Abuelita had reached deep into the roots of the family tree and invited every living relative to the last big fiesta before old Magdalena would surely die.
“God, old Magdalena must have been pushing a ninety. And the way Abuelita was carrying on, you’d have thought that Nancy and Ronald Regan were the guests of honor,” Dodie drawled on with her story to the quiet sounds of a South Texas afternoon.
Daddy, apparently, had a convenient business trip to attend, so he was out of everybody’s hair throughout the visit up until the night of the Wedding Party Dinner, when he arrived all spiffy in his formal military jacket. Apparently, he held some kind of a grudge against the Magdalena clan, dating back to the time of my birth when the aunts and grandmothers interfered with my name, making sure that Magdalena was on my birth certificate. He may have come grudgingly, but according to Dodie, he was handsome and straight as ever in his decorated brass and epaulets.
In typical Catholic fashion, the wedding practice and mass went on forever, half of it being spoken in Spanish, which daddy could understand but refused to listen to. Mama turned more than a few heads when she walked down the aisle on daddy’s arm in her black magnolia dress and heels. There were a lot of cousins overwhelming the groom side of the aisle, and it was hard to know which were legitimate, and which were simply close family friends who were referred to as “cousin so & so”.
Finally, after the practice and the long and tedious mass ended, the procession made its way to the grand hotel for the wedding supper, or as Dodie put it – “The last supper”, which didn’t start until 9PM, a little too late for the American taste of the McCullagh side of the family and the poor bride who was swept up by the tsunami wave of an authentic fiesta. There were piñatas to occupy the children between courses, and authentic Mariachi musicians who were well-versed in all the regional cultural dances and songs. Doña Magdalena insisted that everything be translated from Spanish to English, rather than the other way around, which ruffled a few feathers on the McCullagh side. Finally, after the last toast was made to the groom and his new family, the dancing began.
Old Magdalena’s Mexican family was its own oligarchy which could have taken over a Banana Republic. But the fact that she also came from a long line of traditional dancers added to the Bohemian flair. There were enough cousins, aunts and uncles present at that wedding to start their own traditional dance troupe. I was all too sorry that I was such a selfish young pup and had missed the opportunity to see our Abuelita dance one more time. When the band struck up a flamenco, old Jaime, who’d been a long-time family friend, came and took Abuelita’s hand and escorted her to the dance floor. Dodie swore that had old Magdalena not been strapped to her wheelchair, she too would have gotten up to dance with her daughter, as her feet tapped the floor in rhythm to the music. Abuelita would have been about seventy at the time, but she was still tall and beautiful, her hair piled high on her head.
There had been enough wine passed around to supply the Mexican Revolution, and the crowd was getting a little rowdy. When the band struck up a tango, there was a moment of hush as all heads turned toward my mother, who was a beauty in her early forties. She blushed and put up her hands to say no, but her brother, Uncle Charles, who was barely thirty years old, took her hand out to the dance floor, much to the consternation of daddy who did not come from a dancing family and who didn’t pay any attention to mama’s previous dancing life as a young woman.
Charles stumbled into some of the basic tango steps in the awkwardness of brother and sister being a little too close for comfort. Then a tall Mexican, whom everyone called “Cousin Carlos”, gracefully cut in, and the Mexican side of the family went crazy with spoons banging against crystal glasses and the kind of frenzied clapping one would expect to find at a bull fight.
“I can remember that scene like it was yesterday”, Dodie drawled on, “Cousin Carlos raised his hand as if he were conducting the orchestra, and the band started over with a different tango. At that moment you could have heard a pin drop on the Mexican side of the family, while Granny Bates and Granny McCullagh were still talking away at their little table. But soon enough, all heads were turned toward mama. I never saw her look like that before. I guess I never paid much mind to her dancing days, when she taught kids in the barrios. I don’t think I ever saw her dance before that night.”
Unlike Dodie, who was more interested in cheerleading and beauty pageants when we were kids, Mama used to drag me off to those God-awful dance classes. I guess she hoped I would catch my heritage as if it were a cold or flu. But eventually, she realized I had no interest in dancing, and left me alone in the stockyard with my horses.
“You should have seen Cousin Carlos, Maggie. He was tall, dark, and handsome – I mean really handsome, even though you could tell he was about the same age as mama and daddy. Roy and I had just gotten married a few months before, and I was out to here in my pregnancy with Kenny, but if I hadn’t been pregnant, I would have stood in a line a mile long to get a chance to dance with Cousin Carlos. I don’t think I was the only girl there who had the same thought. You could tell by the dreamy-eyed wallflower looks that nobody, not even the men, would interfere with that dance by getting up there and making a fool of themselves. Funny, though. Daddy was a little tense throughout the whole thing. You’d a thought he was downright jealous of Cousin Carlos. He got into one of his sullen moods after that. You could tell he was tensing up by that funny little twitch over his right eye. It was going a mile a minute while mama was dancing the tango with Carlos. It was something else. Made me wish I’d taken dance lessons with mama after all. It was almost obscene that two people could move together like one in that way – you know – as if they really knew each other, every nook and cranny in the body. They moved kind of – I don’t know – like an animal – you know like a big cat or something. They looked downright professional out there. Him in his slender, black suit, and mama in that magnolia dress and those ridiculous shoes. By the end of the dance, the crowd went crazy, and mama disappeared somewhere, while daddy sat there steaming and knocking down bourbon. I don’t know whatever happened to that dress. I never saw it after that night,” Dodie drifted off mid-sentence in some dreamy thought.
I couldn’t wait for Dodie to leave so I could check out my hunch about that dress.
Naphthalene is very bad for you. Probably even worse than smoking, if you can believe that. The mothball smell was chokingly intense, and I opted for taking the trunk outdoors to the courtyard. After Dodie (bless her heart, as we gals like to say in Texas), finally left, I dug out an old hand truck in the garage and carted the heavy trunk to the pergola beneath the shade of the grape vine. I stood back and turned my head away as I opened the lid so as not to get the strong whiff of the first escaping gas. On the top there was a layer of old white tissue paper, yellowed and aged by the acid in the wood of the trunk. I wondered if the clothing would be eaten away by acid. Surely there were no moths which could survive the amount of mothballs mama had dumped in there. I removed the tissue paper. On top of the next layer was an old hat box, the kind you could pick up at Macey’s Department Store in the fifties. It was gray with little salmon pink hearts, and the rim was a solid salmon color with a gray silk chord handle coming out of the top. The cover was salmon with a gray rim. I lifted the lid, and there they were. The shoes, even more beautiful than I thought they’d be with their white, silk magnolia tops and the spiked heels. Yes, they were perfectly formed for my mother’s delicate dancing feet.
Unfortunately, the mothballs were overwhelming. I put on rubber gloves and brought out a small white trash bag, determined to fish out every last little sucker lost in that trunk. I also grabbed a bunch of fancy padded eveningwear hangers from mama’s closet. If there were clothes in there, they’d have to be seriously aired out before they could be brought into the house. I brought the trunk into the screen house which was attached to the pool house, where I could hang the clothes from the hooks in the ceiling that mama used for her attempts at herb drying. I scooped up the first layer of tissue and mothballs, and peeled off the next, and as I expected, the magnolia dress was right there. It would have fit mama perfectly. She had kept her figure her whole life, having practiced dance every day, and having spent a good part of her life riding. I carefully hung the dress on a garment hanger where it swayed gently in the breeze. As I stepped back to look at it, I thought about the story Dodie told about Uncle Charles’ wedding party and the Mexican entourage.
I tried to imagine mama in her black magnolia dress, her black hair piled on top of her head with that old Mexican horn comb she used, a silk magnolia just behind her ear. I wondered if daddy ever told her how beautiful she was. He was always so preoccupied with getting things done – all work no play. I couldn’t recall him ever being overtly affectionate, although I often caught him watching her with a twinkle in his eye. I could tell he loved her by the way he talked about her to his friends. It was all “Maggie did this – Maggie’s doing that”. But did he ever try to dance with her in that dress? Perhaps he felt too inadequate to dance, being entirely out of his realm. They were an odd match, my parents.
After listening to Dodie’s story, I wondered who this “Cousin Carlos” really was. I’d never heard that name before, and I spent a lot more time with Abuelita and Doña Magdalena in Mexico than Dodie ever did. When I was really young, mama used to pack us up when daddy went overseas or on a special assignment. We would fly from Washington down to Texas to visit mama’s family on Grampy Bates’ ranch. Dodie was prone to travel sickness, and once we got there, she was put in the hands of my grandmother and aunts who doted upon her strawberry curls and dressed her up like she was Shirley Temple. Mama and I would ride the range, and I was given lots of instruction in the stables. Then mama would cross the border to teach heritage dance at a cousin’s studio.
There are only one or two occasions that I can remember crossing the border and going to Doña Magdalena’s spacious villa-like home in Monterrey. I must have been very young, for I only have snippets of memory such as the darkness of that house with the Spanish heaviness of curtains and furniture, and my great grandmother’s elaborate black taffeta mourning dresses which she had worn since her husband’s death. Although the house was somewhat stuffy, it was filled with excitement when we arrived with Abuelita. While Mama was off teaching dance, I was left with and doted upon by my great aunt Pilar and Uncle Franco. This is why I held onto my Spanish language better than Dodie, who never had the mind for a foreign tongue. I spoke better Spanish than mama when I was little. But I’ve lost a lot of the dialect by living up north, although it has come in handy in my law practice that I can translate, if somewhat clumsily.
I knew there were lots of cousins on the Mexican side, but I don’t ever remember someone tall and handsome, other than in the pictures of my great-grandfather. There was a whole wall of pictures in Doña Magdalena’s parlor. Most of them seemed to be of the daughters, Pilar, Hester, and Lena (Abuelita) in various dance costumes and contests. All those weeks when I was left with the great aunts and cousins, they must have been traveling around Mexico and Latin America in dance competitions which were popular at the time. Funny how there were no trophies or pictures in our own home on the ranch. There was not one relic from mama’s dancing life. She must have wanted to keep that little piece of her world from daddy and protected it like it was a sacred thing of her own. The need to keep her artistic life separate from life on the ranch was probably the biggest reason why Dodie was always left behind on Grampy Bates’ Ranch. Mama knew that Dodie would never keep her mouth shut, and the whole universe would know every last detail of everything that was said and done during those Mexican expeditions. I was the type that you had to pry information from with a crowbar, and even then, you wouldn’t get the whole story.
Somewhere in the story of my Mexican roots there were clues about mama and her dancing cousin. Perhaps there were photographs in the trunk, or another treasure trove kept secret on Grampy Bates’ Ranch, or in the attics of the family across the border. I could see now that it was going to take more than a six-month leave of absence to ferret out the story, and I would need to engage the help of my grandmother and aunts, and, God forbid even Dodie, in piecing together the biography of my mother, Magdalena, champion of the tango. She s