The dress which was sketched out in mama’s diary was real. It was too bad that she wasn’t here to explain the little remnants of herself she’d left behind. Ever since I went to that bank vault and claimed my inheritance, my life had become a nightmare – a labyrinth of questions that would never be answered. Had I been a better daughter, I would have known these things. Had I paid more attention to being a girl I may have even stumbled upon some hatbox secrets during those irrepressible Nancy Drew years of adolescence. But here I was, a grown woman for God sakes, scratching my head like a man over the tiny clues left to me in my mother’s steamer trunks she had stashed at the bank. I just didn’t have enough girlie-girl cells in my brain to put two and two together. There was only one person left in our dwindling little family who could help me solve the mysteries of my mother’s self. That would be my sister, Dodie. And, well maybe my grandmother, Abuelita Lena who had been born in Mexico and like Mama had been a dancer.
The last thing Mama had said to me when she handed me that little key to the bank vault, was, “Please don’t share this with Dodie. She wouldn’t understand. There are secrets best kept between us and not the rest of the family.
Here I thought I was going to be picking up a diamond ring or great-granddaddy’s Confederate sword. Not two steamer trunks full of diaries, letters and photographs, although I had yet to find a key to pry open that second trunk. I assumed it was just more of the same. It figures I would inherit all the family papers. Dodie would probably walk away with the Ranch, and I would be stuck with the family tree.
My various degrees in history, library science and law weren’t exactly appreciated by my conservative South Texas family. Daddy, whom we fondly called Colonel Joe, had been a Colonel in the army and had inherited the oil rich McCullah Ranch which was and still is rich in land and oil. He had tried to steer me toward a business degree, exasperated by my stubbornness and self-direction. As far as he was concerned, history was a waste of time and money, and someone was going to have to run the place when he was dead and gone and it sure as hell wouldn’t be Dodie, who had barely made it through High School. He was a little more amiable when I made it into Harvard Law School. Although he didn’t like the idea of me getting an education up North amongst all those “liberal-headed fools”, he did foot the bill.
I had left home for college when I was seventeen to get as far from Texas as I could, and hadn’t looked back since. More than once I’d been accused of running away from the family. Mama had tried everything from begging to conniving to get me to come back home. Holidays were spent sitting across the table from eligible bachelors whom I stared down until they fled with their lame excuses. Dodie would invite me over for dinner so she could nag me about how hard it was to be the only one to look after the family and they were, after all, getting older, and how I ought to consider starting up a law practice in El Paso, God knows there was plenty of drug money to be had. And then there was Abuelita, my quirky New Age Mexican grandmother. I’m surprised she hadn’t concocted some kind of curandadao potion that would make me change my mind. But I liked my life in Boston. I had a thriving law practice, a great old house in Newton with historical provenance moldering in the attic, and a married lover who kept me satisfied and thankfully uncommitted.
I called Dodie and asked her to come out to the ranch so I could show her the sketch I’d found in Mama’s diary. It would be tricky, because I didn’t want Dodie to know about the two steamer trunks. I would have to make something up, like I found the diary in one of those old hatboxes when I was cleaning out Mama’s closet. Dodie, being Dodie, of course, fell for it and was more than happy to be in the role of my advisor for a change. But mostly, she was just curious about that diary.
We settled down on the wide veranda in the shade of the afternoon with a pitcher of mint julep made with Mama’s recipe, heavy on the rum, light on sugar with a shot of peppermint schnapps. It was hot and every insect sizzled as if to remind us that no human being in their right mind was cut out for the South Texas heat. Dodie drawled on in her annoyingly nasal voice, heavy on Texas and pecan pie. She studied the sketch for an instant and immediately promenaded into a monologue about the dress. She had one-upped me, alright. She had the goods and I didn’t, because, after all, she was the good daughter who had stayed close to the family whereas I, apparently, had missed out on all the fun. She didn’t have to say it. The cicadas buzzed the truth catching the same tone of Dodie’s martyr song.
According to Dodie, the dress had emerged out of some hidden closet around 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 Cajunto and accordion music and a very long catholic service in Spanish. I had sent them some expensive Irish crystal thing and continued on my merry way.
Dodie gloated, making sure I knew that I had missed the event of a lifetime. All Abuelita Lena’s family arrived from Monterrey, Mexico, in their exotic and very shiny cars complete with uniformed chauffeurs. There weren’t enough guest rooms for everyone, and some of them had to be shipped off to Old El Paso to stay in a fancy old world-hotel the family had some sort of ties with. The matriarch of the family, Doňa Magdalena, Abuelita’s mother and our great-grandmother, arrived in her wheelchair with her own personal nurse. She stayed at the ranch with my mother and Abuelita who was at her constant service. Dodie never did bother to learn Spanish, so she couldn’t understand a word of what Doňa Magdalena said unless my grandmother 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?”
Mama tried to explain that I was in Europe on a scholarship, but the old woman snorted, making it clear that she did not approve.
The wedding supper finally took place on a Friday night in the Grand Old El Paso Hotel. Traditionally the wedding supper was the responsibility of the groom, and with the help of my great-grandmother Magdalena, Abuelita went all out. Uncle Charles was marrying a demure southern girl from Georgia, who had that blonde and freckled look which belonged in 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 her family tree and invited every last living relative right down to the tiniest rhizome. This would be the last big fiesta before her mother would surely die.
“God,” Dodie drawled on, “old Magdalena must have been pushing ninety. And the way grandma Lena was carrying on, you’d have thought that Nancy and Ronald Regan were the guests of honor,”
Daddy, apparently, had a convenient business trip to attend, so he had been out of everybody’s hair up until the night of the wedding party dinner. He arrived handsome and straight as ever in his officer’s uniform decorated with brass and epaulets. But he was in an obvious funk about having to keep company with Mama’s side of the family. Apparently, he still 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 on the birth certificate. Abuelita insisted that the first daughter must be named Magdalena. It was a guarded tradition and had been so for hundreds of years. In spite of the fact that Daddy had wanted to name me Mary Margaret, after his own grandmother, the name Magdalena somehow got filed as my official name. He was overseas the night I was born, probably Viet Nam, so he never saw the birth certificate. My mother got around it by nick-naming me Maggie, which went along with Margaret or Magdalena. Daddy didn’t find out until he had to apply for our passports when I was ten-years old, and didn’t that stir up a hornets nest.
Didn’t Dodie just love a little family dirt? I could tell by the way she gloated over the telling of the story like each little anecdote was a gold nugget. She was more than happy to share with me that Daddy had plenty of reasons to favor her. Apparently I had been a thorn in his side from the day I was born. No wonder Mama didn’t want her to know about her big box of “secrets”.
After a third refill of mint julep, Dodie’s embellishments of the story took hold. I wished to Christ she would just get to the point and tell me what she knew about the damned dress.
“It was a typical Mexican wedding,” she sneered, “the wedding practice and mass went on forever, half of it being spoken in Spanish, which daddy did not appreciate. Mama turned more than a few heads when she walked down the aisle on daddy’s arm in her black magnolia dress and heels that matched. That’s the dress in the picture. There were a lot of cousins overwhelming the groom side of the aisle, and it was hard to know which ones were truly related and which ones were just family friends who were referred to as ‘cousin so-and-so’, but I swear each and every one of them fixed their eyes on Mama as if she were the Virgin Mary making an appearance.”
The cadence of Dodie’s voice and the whine of the cicadas drew me into the story like I was really there. 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 after nine, a little too late for the McCullah side of the family and the poor bride who wasn’t expecting the Groom’s party to outshine the wedding. There were piñatas for the children to occupy them between courses, and authentic Mexican musicians including strolling mariachi and a small orchestra. After the final toast was made to the groom and his new family, the dancing began.
There were enough cousins, aunts and uncles present at that wedding to start their own traditional dance troupe. When the band struck up flamenco, old Jaime 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 sixty-five at the time, but she was still tall and beautiful. Her hair was long and piled high on her head.
There had been enough tequila 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 Uncle Charles, took her hand and led her out to the dance floor, much to the consternation of daddy who did not come from a dancing family and didn’t appreciate mama’s talent and fame as a competitive dancer.
Charles stumbled into some of the basic tango steps with the awkwardness of a brother feeling 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 McCullah 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 and I don’t think I ever saw her dance before that night.”
I thought about how mama used to drag me off to those God-awful dance classes when she volunteered in the poor Mexican barrios, hoping I would catch some interest in my heritage as if it were a cold or flu.
“You should have seen this guy, 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, and 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.”
I knew. I couldn’t wait for Dodie
to leave so I could check out my hunch.
Naphthalene is very bad for you. Probably even worse than smoking, if you can believe that. After Dodie finally left (bless her heart – as we gals like to say in Texas), I dug out an old hand truck in the garage and carted the heavy trunk which reeked of mothballs out to the pergola beneath the shade of the grape vine. Since I hadn’t located a key, I grabbed a crowbar from the garage and pried the damned thing open. I stood back and turned my head away as I lifted 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, already yellowed and aged by the acid in the wood of the trunk and many years. 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 Macy’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. Next to the shoes was a silk magnolia hair clip.
In the bottom of the box was a piece of folded linen paper which looked like it had been well-worn. The edges were a bit torn and the creases disintegrating. This was a letter that had been obviously read more than once. But it was in Spanish, so I set it aside, not being in the mood for a tedious translation.
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 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 is attached to the pool house, where I could hang the clothes from the hooks in the ceiling that mama used for her futile 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 horses. 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 gently streaked with gray and 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. But I could tell he loved her in his Colonel Joe kind of way. He wasn’t one to say as much, but he did buy her a prize horse or two, a love note in a Texan sort of way. I couldn’t recall anything other than a brotherly love between the two of them. That is two brothers who fought on a daily basis but were fiercely loyal when push came to shove. I wondered if he ever tried to dance with her in that dress.
Watching my parents tiptoe through their marriage as if it were a minefield navigated by a troupe of Brownies is probably the reason why I prefer to be a mistress to someone else’s husband. I don’t ever want passion to become entrapped or constrained by the mundane of daily existence. As soon as you start ironing his shirts, a man begins to take you for granted. You become his care-taker and not someone to take care with. I prefer knowing that the man who holds me in his arms loves me deeply and honestly because he wants to, not because he is bound to me by law and property, and that he will always look at me as if I am the most beautiful woman on earth and he will tell me so. I don’t have to clean up his mess or pretend I like his mother. He has no legal or moral ground to control me, and there are no economic strings attached. My livelihood is a separate domain.
You sometimes see long-lasting and passionate marriages between childless couples or couples who have rebounded late in life after the nest has been emptied. But I vowed long ago that I would not live a passionless life like my mother, who seemed perfectly content to go about the daily business of living without love. Thinking about Dodie’s story, though, I wondered if my mother really did live a passionless life, or was there a hidden valley in her heart which none of us were privy to, not even daddy.
Dodie tends to see just what she wants to see to fit her narrow construct of reality, although she possesses the uncanny ability to see more than anyone else would ever read into a given situation, as long as it’s not hers. If mama were someone else dancing with a “tall, dark and handsome” Mexican in the way that Dodie described, she would’ve been all over that situation tooting the gossip horn and constructing an affair of the heart that would be the envy of a Mexican soap opera. But the construct in which Dodie lives, has everyone else’s marriage but hers and mama and daddy’s tainted and cheapened by her juicy tidbits of information. She should have become a CIA operative or a spy like Daddy, for God sakes, at least when it comes to sticking her nose into someone else’s business. Dodie swears that mama and daddy had one of those life-long loving marriages. But I wasn’t so sure about that.
I wondered who Cousin Carlos was and why I’d never heard that name before, and I had spent a lot more time with Abuelita and Doňa 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, while mama resumed her passion for teaching heritage dance to Mexican children. This was something she shared with Abuelita who joined her in the barrios on the border, back before the drug wars when it was still safe to travel there.
There are only one or two occasions that I can remember crossing the border and going to Abuelita’s home in Monterrey, Mexico. Dodie was left behind, but mama, Abuelita, Tia Hester and I traveled by car to Monterrey and stayed in Doňa Magdalena’s spacious villa-like home. I must have been very young, for I only have snippets of memory such as the darkness of that house with its Victorian-like but 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 my mama arrived with Abuelita, and they would disappear for what seemed like weeks, while I was doted upon by my great aunt and Uncle, Pilar and Franco. This is why I have 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.
I knew there were lots of cousins on the Mexican side, most of them short and fat as far as I could remember. 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 Doňa Magdalena’s parlor. I can barely conjure up the images, but most of them seemed to be of the daughters, Pilar, Hester, and Magdalena (my grandmother) in various dance costumes and contests. Come to think of it, there were pictures of mama and Abuelita Lena dressed up in flamenco dance costumes and accepting trophies together as competing mother and daughter. 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. There was not one relic left from mama’s dancing life on the Ranch. It wasn’t like Daddy didn’t know that she danced when he was away. She must have wanted to keep that little piece of her world to herself, a sacred thing of her own.
A breeze rustled up a whiff of mothballs and Mama’s tango dress shifted from side to side as if it were inhabited by her ghost. I tried to kick the image of the last time I saw her, a shriveled remnant of herself in the ICU. I closed my eyes, preferring Dodie’s story about our mother’s last tango, letting the dress guide me toward the trunk full of documents she had left me. I knew then that I would not return to Boston. I would stay put on the Mcullah Ranch and try to map the territory of my mother’s heart. Maybe, just maybe, I would find my own compass along the way.