American Chica by Marie Arana Read Free Book Online

rule that if you shut up, mind your own business, people may tell you a thing or two. In a telephone conversation several years later, I learned from a cousin I’d never met that Gerardy, her first husband, was a hard drinker, brutal. That he’d wanted to get at her father’s fortune. That he threw my sixteen-year-old mother around like a doll. When he wasn’t tossing mail sacks around as the town postmaster, he was punching her face in and flinging her down the stairs.
    That’s the reason my mother needed a different direction. Hers was a road that had led from a cruel postmaster to a draft dodger in need of a favor, from a heartbreaking war casualty to aplane with my father on it—to the mail route from Panama to Miami, with a cargo that was one sack short. She was drawn to my father’s foreignness. He responded by dismissing whatever past she brought. When she reached down to correct the judge’s document —previous marriages, three —anything might have happened. But in that pivotal moment, my father didn’t dither. He shot out a sturdy span: To another life. To another world. To a point she might never have touched.

    YES, MY FATHER says to the judge, pulling himself together, and the wedding is on. The ramparts sink in.
    When they return to a Boston apartment as man and wife, their friends are there to raise a glass. It’s when they’re finally alone that the masonry wobbles. Yes , she says, it’s true. I didn’t want to lose you. There were others. She weeps. The cables so shredded, they could snap.
    Never mind, he says. It’s behind us now. That part of your life is over. Please don’t say more.
    He weighs the choices, knowing what would be the full impact of the truth on his family. Their marriage is impossible in a Catholic society, unacceptable to a faith that damns divorce as devil’s work and remarried women as tramps. But America is so different. For all he knows, his new wife is nothing more or less than typical. He writes to my abuelito and abuelita. I’ve married the pretty gringa, he tells them. We’re coming to Peru. Send out announcements: Seattle is her city. James B. Campbell is her father’s name.
    He does not broach the subject of the three marriages with her again. To this day. Even as I move between them now, trying to paste together this story, it is something they do not discuss.
    Somewhere in Denver, a city my mother has never mentioned to my father, Elver Reed receives a telegram from my mother,and the old man’s heart sinks with the news. Uncle Elver is her uncle, a rich Denver lawyer, a pillar of his community. He’s been paying for her studies in New York and at the conservatory, giving her a chance to reshuffle her life. But there’s something he doesn’t like about the news of a Peruvian husband. God made those people different. Not like us Anglican folk. It’s understood that the money will stop.
    Even as my father arranges their sea voyage to Lima, all he knows about my mother is what he has heard in an American courtroom. He thinks his in-laws are in Seattle, but they are really in Wyoming. Though he knows their name is not Campbell, he doesn’t yet know it is Clapp. As for his wife’s former marriages, he makes a conscious effort to forget them. And so, although he is wending his way home to Peru, he has taken his first step toward becoming an American: The future interests him more than the past.

3
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    A NCESTORS

    Antepasados
    Y ES, BUT IF you are a Latin American well along the way to becoming a North American, your past is a heavy load of what you carry into your future. That was true for Papi as he brought his pretty young gringa to Peru, and it has been true for me for as long as I can remember. This is not just because we are and always will be Latinos, but because we are Aranas, and for us history is even more inescapable than it may be for other Latin Americans.

    I’VE STOOD IN Venice, on its Bridge of Sighs. It is monumental, rank with history.