Becoming the Butlers Page 3

  “I’m sorry,” I told my father. “I didn’t mean what I just said.”

  “I know you didn’t, Melody,” my father said, holding my hand. His knuckles were red and scraped; another recent accident. “We’d better look in my guidebook for somewhere to stay.” My father made a policy of never having a strict arrangement. Too much planning took all the fun and spontaneity out of a trip. He preferred to “wing it” and was confident we would always get by. My father flipped through several pages and groaned. “Everything’s way too expensive. I thought Madrid was the budget capital of the world.” A taxi stopped in front of us and honked twice. “Hey,” my father cried, looking up. “A taxi driver should know this town. Wait here while I ask about a cheap place.”

  My father went up to the car closest to him and spoke haltingly in Spanish. The man nodded his head, grabbed my father’s suitcase and threw it into the trunk. My father waved at me to join him, and when I reached him, he whispered in my ear, “Juan says he knows the perfect place. Muy barato.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Rachel, did you ever once listen to your language tapes? Barato means cheap. Muy barato, very cheap. Juan said his cousin is the hotel manager, and that he’ll take good care of us.”

  “What’s the name of this place?”

  “I think he said Rick’s. Like Rick’s Café. You know. Casablanca.”

  Rick’s Café was a café, not a hotel. What was my father talking about? The back of Juan’s cab was very hot, the vinyl seat sticking to my thighs like plastic. Over the car radio an announcer barked stories that all sounded like declarations of a national emergency. A previous passenger had left a soiled movie magazine, ¡HOLA!, and the unfamiliar words and lurid photographs made me finally realize I was in a foreign land. Juan asked my father for an “American smoke,” and when he handed him the pack of Marlboros, the taxi driver took out one cigarette and then pocketed the box.

  “Well.” My father shrugged. “Maybe that’s the custom here.” Before we left for Spain my father had delivered a lecture about culture orientation—how not to act like an ugly American. Some of his suggestions included not ordering Diet Pepsi with ice cubes in cafés, making do with cold showers, and forsaking commercial-strength hairdryers with the capacity to blow out every fuse in town. In an attempt to iron out this present wrinkle of cultural confusion my father leaned over and tried chatting with Juan. His accent, as far as I could tell, was not bad; hours and hours of intensive Berlitz tapes and hanging around the Salvadorian mercado on 110th Street had helped. But the driver, after securing his week’s worth of tobacco, was no longer loquacious, and shut the plastic partition. The taxi’s rocking motion lulled me to sleep. I leaned my head against my father’s shoulder, and felt his hand stroking my hair.

  The radio announcer screamed in my ear. I sat up with a jolt, ready to ask Juan if he could please lower the volume. But the radio was turned off, and the loud words emanated from my father.

  “You tricked us,” he shouted. “Ladrón, thief!”

  “Espera, un momento, Señor,” Juan kept repeating, impatiently blowing his horn.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, still groggy.

  “Of all places, he took us to the Ritz,” my father exclaimed.

  “The Ritz? What does that mean?” I asked, thinking first of the soggy round crackers the school cafeteria served with the chili special. Outside the car window I saw a dazzlingly white palace.

  “Let’s see if it’s listed…,” my father murmured. “Yes, right here. The Ritz Hotel. ‘The most famous hotel in Madrid…a veritable citadel of gracious and snobbish living… Rates for a double room 56,000 pesetas!’ Why that’s…,” my father quickly calculated on his fingers, “$500 a night. Are you loco?” he screamed at Juan. But the taxi driver got out of the car and opened my father’s door.

  “Cheap, cheap, Señor,” he told him. “A real bargain.”

  “All right,” my father said irritably.

  “Dad…” I whined.

  “We have nowhere else to go.”

  We followed the cab driver through a door that led us into the hotel’s laundry room. The smell of bleach was overwhelming. White towels were neatly stacked on long tables, and napkins fluttered against the dryers’ round windows like trapped doves.

  “Something tells me this isn’t the way most guests enter the Ritz Hotel,” my father said to me as we climbed four flights of winding stairs so narrow that the walls brushed our shoulders. The scent of chlorine was replaced by something stronger and sourish—garlic, I soon realized. Juan finally stopped, pushed open a door, and then waited for us to pass him. My father and I found ourselves in a hallway lit by one orange bulb that flickered SALIDA. “Come,” the cab driver said, opening the wooden door closest to my elbow.

  The “suite” was two rooms linked together by a tiny kitchen that consisted of a toaster oven and a sudsy sink filled with dirty plates. The bigger room contained a sofa, which was already unfolded into an unkempt bed. The sheets, twisted and crumpled, still held the impression of a previous body. I peeked into the other bedroom and saw a bare mattress on the floor. The ceiling was swollen with pockets of bulging paint. Stale smoke lingered in the air. Would these absent guests be returning?

  “Something tells me this is the maid’s room,” my father said. “I bet the bathroom’s out in the hall too.”

  I went to the window, lifted the blind and stared out at a red brick wall. My father took out a cigarette and the smoke made the room even more stuffy.

  “How much do you want?” my father asked.

  “You got to be crazy,” I said to him. “Someone’s living here.”

  “I’m sure Juan can evict them.”

  “Listen Rachel, this is the Ritz. Your mom would be impressed. Well, Juan?”

  “Dos millones.”

  “Don’t be stupid. You’ll take this.” My father offered him a bundle of crumpled bills which Juan grabbed.

  “I can’t believe we’re staying at the Ritz, for only twelve dollars!” my father hooted after the cab driver finally left.

  “You call this a bargain!” I said in disbelief.

  “Don’t you remember what the travel guide said?” my father asked. Five hundred dollars a night. This room might not be a citadel of gracious living, but it’s livable, and the Ritz.”

  “Well I’m glad you like it, since you’ll be the only one staying here.”

  “Melody…,” he said, swinging the room key.

  “If you think I’m going to spend one more second in this dump…”

  “Now, Rachel, it won’t be for very long. Look, let’s put our bags down and find your mom.”

  “Right now?”

  “Why not? I’ll make you a bet that in one hour all three of us will be in the bar drinking the Ritz Hotel’s finest champagne.”

  I suppose I was too tired to feel cynical. “Really?” I asked hopefully.

  “Let’s go.”

  In the lobby two women stopped and stared at my father. They probably thought he was a movie star. My father had changed into a jacket and tie quickly pulled out of his suitcase. He even combed his hair and, when he thought I wasn’t looking, slapped on aftershave. His efforts to impress my mother seemed to me sad and brave. I had washed my face but still wore my dirty jeans and sweatshirt. She’d have to accept me on my own terms.

  “The Rain in Spain stays mainly on the Plain…,” my father sang as we walked out into the drizzle. The yellow Spanish sun was now hidden behind thick metal-gray clouds. I followed my father down several blocks where the streets grew narrower, the buildings smaller and older. Many had wrought-iron balconies where wet laundry dripped down onto the pavement. James now sang “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” in a fine baritone. My mother always said he should have taught languages, where he could utilize his acting ability in class. He hated math and didn’t try to hide his boredom from his students. He gave out easy A’s so they wouldn’t complain.

  Soon we
found ourselves in an empty, large gray square my father said was called the Plaza Mayor. Café umbrellas trussed with rope swayed in the wind, and puddles of water, like plastic wrap, shimmered from the marble tables. George’s uncle lived at the end of the square in a sagging stone building where practically every window was nailed over with boards. Several skinny cats slept in the doorway, which smelled like sour milk.

  “I don’t think anyone’s here,” I said. “We better go back.”

  The house looked haunted, and even if there were any occupants, they would surely be like ghosts: old ladies with white hair to their ankles; aged, stooped men cradling dusty guns. My father pushed open the creaking door and ran up the wooden staircase. “He should be on the second floor,” he called out to me, and then disappeared down a hallway. When I caught up to him, he was in earnest conversation with a middle-aged woman in a nurse’s uniform.

  “Señor Vasquez is still napping,” he explained to me. “The nurse said we should wait inside.”

  My father and I sat down on a hard piano stool in a small wood-paneled room. Soot from a filthy fireplace tickled my nose and made me sneeze, and I couldn’t imagine my mother or George living in this silent tomblike place. On the wall across from me was a framed photographic gallery of the same man in a military outfit.

  “Who’s that?” I whispered, nudging my father.

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s General Francisco Franco, Rachel, and that wall is a shrine. How did your mom end up living with a fascist?”

  “No way is she here,” I said as the nurse entered the room with an old man in a wheelchair. My father bowed to him, and began speaking in Spanish. George’s uncle’s face looked as shriveled as a prune, and his gnarled reddish hands, which clutched the frayed ends of his blanket, shook uncontrollably. Suddenly, before my father finished speaking, the old man shouted: “Ernesto! Ernesto!” in such an agitated way that he nearly bounced out of his seat. The maid spoke hurriedly to my father, who took my arm and led me out the door.

  “Whoa!” James cried, wiping his forehead with his shirt sleeve. “George’s uncle heard my American accent and thought I was Ernest Hemingway. The nurse told me Señor Vasquez’s wife had an affair with Hemingway and the old guy’s never been the same since. He threatened to kill me, Rachel!”

  We both broke into laughter. It was good to hear my father laugh again, and me too; we hadn’t sounded this happy in a long time.

  “According to the nurse, Señor Vasquez hasn’t heard from George for over ten years. Well there goes that lead. But that doesn’t mean we give up.”

  “What’s next?” I asked.

  “We can look them up in a phone book. There’s a booth right over there.”

  The weathered telephone directory, which hung from a slender metal chain, was crammed with Vasquezes. My father’s nail traced each name. “Just because he’s George at home doesn’t mean that’s what he is here. He could be Jorge. But there’s about twenty Jorges here and a hell of a lot of Georges too.”

  “We could call each one,” I suggested.

  My father stared at all those names with glazed eyes, and shook his head. His face had grown pale, and for a second he looked like he had lost all resolve.

  “No, just think of the cost. And what would I say? Hello, is my wife there?”

  “So that’s that.”

  “Aw come on, Rachel,” he said more heartily, clapping his hand on my back. “Madrid’s not that big. How about lunch—I’m starving.”

  My father and I went to a restaurant near the hotel called Museo del Jamon: Museum of Ham. My father thought this was hilarious. “We can really ham it up in here,” he cried. “Just don’t eat too much: we don’t want the waiter to think we’re pigs.”

  I don’t know what the waiter thought after my father ordered dos botellas de vino tinto and placed a bottle on each side of his plate. He rubbed his hands together as he joked and chain-smoked so that at one point there were four burning cigarettes balancing on the ashtray. I knew he was nervous sitting there with me; we hadn’t really eaten a meal together since my mother had left. James was never home when I made dinner for myself, and I assumed he went out to eat. Once, coming home late from a class trip, I spotted my father sitting at a counter in a Greek coffee shop. The bright lights made all the food look like clay. There were only single men in that coffee shop, and my father was by far the youngest. He was eating a cheeseburger, drinking a Coke, and reading a newspaper like everyone else. The anonymity of the scene stirred me so that I put my head against the window and tapped twice with my knuckles. But my father didn’t hear me, and my face, reflected in the polished glass, loomed over the scene like a watery ghost.

  Now, as I watched my father, I felt as if I were an intruder. James was a fastidious eater. He cut his meat in tiny slices, wiped his mouth with a napkin after every swallow. I was the opposite, tearing my ham sandwich with my hands, picking up the cheese with my fingers. The silence between us felt like another table guest. My father gulped his wine as if his drinking was a substitute for the lapses of conversation.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked me, pushing away his plate.

  “Not really.” I stared down at my unfinished sandwich. “I don’t like Spanish ham. It doesn’t taste like American ham.”

  “But it’s the same. Weren’t you the one who told that girl on the plane water’s water?”

  “That’s different.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “I thought you’d forgotten about Cynthia,” I said testily.

  “Cynthia.” My father seemed to sigh in relief. “So that’s her name.”

  “Why do you want to remember her?”

  “Now Melody…”

  My neck muscles began to tense. I was too tired for a full-blown fight so I sipped at my flat, warm soda and examined the menu, which was decorated with dancing cartoon pigs.

  “You know,” my father began, “I bet we’ve been awake for more than twenty-four hours. The strange thing is I’m not tired. I feel like I won’t be able to sleep till I see your mother again. She’s going to be surprised as hell when we find her. Remember her surprise party?”

  “It wasn’t much of a surprise.”

  “Yes it was. Elizabeth had no idea. She fainted when she walked through the door. You can’t tell me that someone who was on to the plan could make herself faint.”

  But my mother had known about the party. One of her friends let it slip out. She confessed to me about her knowledge, and pumped me for details. I told her the time and location, even the guest list.

  “We’ll just have to pretend, Rachel,” she said. “I’m even going to faint. Now tell me, which way looks most realistic?”

  She had practiced about twelve different styles of fainting. I said I liked the one when she slowly sank to the floor in a vertical line, like the Wicked Witch melting in The Wizard of Oz. “So I’m a witch now!” my mother exclaimed, cackling. We had laughed so much that my stomach ached afterward. She never told my father about finding out about the surprise party, and I suppose it was yet another secret, stored right next to the big one marked GEORGE.

  My eyes felt watery and I quickly stood up and told my father I had to find a rest room.

  “Ask for the tocador de Señoras,” he shouted, “or baño, if that’s easier to remember.”

  The teenage girls at the next table broke into hysterical giggles. I ran, with my ears burning, to the back. The tocador de Señoras, or baño, wasn’t there. But all I needed was a quiet, dark place to cry. A boy washing dishes stared at me from a foamy sink and eventually came out, carrying a white cloth napkin. He gave it to me and I cried even harder. I didn’t care if he watched me, and when he spoke comfortingly to me in Spanish I shook my head and turned toward the wall.

  My father was gone when I came back to the table. I turned and saw him heading toward the cashier. I impulsively grabbed his glass of wine and brought it to my
lips. The Rioja tasted like chocolate and grape juice, mingled with the harsh smoke of my father’s cigarettes. I took four long swallows, and sank back in my chair. A fuzzy feeling crept over my limbs, blurred my vision, made my head spin, and I thought, that’s why my father drinks: it makes you forget.

  THREE

  That night, before we went to sleep, my father told me how he found out about George and my mother. We both were drunk, and beyond exhaustion, but somehow my father and I couldn’t fall asleep. He said he would tell me a bedtime story that wasn’t make-believe. The strange surroundings and the wine made my head spin and the Dramamine hadn’t completely worn off. So as my father spoke I fell back again into that same hallucinatory state and with my eyes closed could see every scene as clearly as if I had been there too.

  My father had come home early from school that day because of an overwhelming migraine. He called out to my mother, expecting her to be home, as she was overdue on a large wedding project. My father was surprised that she wasn’t there, and that a stack of unfinished invitations still sat on the table. What surprised him even more was the missing television set. Sure that our apartment had once again been robbed, my father went into the bedroom and examined the safe. The money was secure, but my mother’s bureau was empty. Only her wedding ring remained on top of her night table. My father placed the ring on his pinky; the only finger it would fit. He never imagined gold could feel so cold.

  The phone began to ring. My father answered it immediately, hoping for an explanation.

  “Hello,” he shouted. “This is James Harris.”

  “Where are they?” a querulous female voice demanded.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The wedding invitations. My daughter’s getting antsy. If she don’t send them out soon, she’s not going to get any presents.”

  “Who’s this?” my father asked.

  “Mrs. Silvers. Who else is paying for a wedding with over three hundred guests? Are you the math teacher?”

  “Yes, I’m Elizabeth’s husband.”

  “Well, Elizabeth’s husband, let me speak to her.”