Under the Rose. Flavia Alaya

this one, as she had my father’s slow decline, only without doubt or equivocation. Even as we moved through our own slow gulfs of childhood time, increasingly haunted by the thinning form we caught only in occasional scaring glimpses when the bedroom door was left ajar, we knew conferences were held, plans made; we felt a nameless danger, sensed a new horizon of hope.

      Aunt Mildred, restless for independence, perhaps superstitious enough to be repelled by the morbid sadness of our house, had moved out and nested into special single blessedness at the back of her own shop in town until the Christmas baby arrived, and then into a special kind of madonna-with-child blessedness afterwards. She turned a small income from cutting and draping and stitching her artful fashions, drawing on Ferril’s army pay and what was left of her savings, finding her niche, content to wait out her soldier in the Arizona sunshine.

      She was still a mesmerizing sight for two little girls whenever she visited the squab farm. From the somewhat sprung-out armchair in the family room, our eavesdropping perch on the kitchen, we could see, as she moved the baby from shoulder to shoulder, that she was cultivating a slightly blowsy Rita Hayworth look now, self-consciously tossing her mass of brassy gold hair out of the way, and dodging carefully as my mother careered about the room. Both of them seemed caught in an instinctive dance of frenetic Spagnola energy, rapt in jolted, telegraphic conversation filled with hushed allusions to doctors in the East.

      It snowed the following winter in Tucson, for the first time in fifty years. The snowflakes floated out of a lowering gray sky like fine volcanic ash and sublimed back into the air almost before they had dusted the earth. In my anguished and misremembering mind’s eye it is all one image—the vanishing snow, my father taken from the house on a stretcher that then lifts so lightly into the train it seems to be empty, the sighing train heaving itself away as if it could feel pain.

      The farm vanishes, the birds, the splayed cottonwood tree. For a very little time we seem to be with my aunt and the Christmas baby with the lovely Disney name, my little sister and I, together, climbing up and down the dust pile in her parking lot, collecting bits of scrap metal for the war effort.

      And then the lights behind the big blue sky go quietly dark.

       3

      My father’s illness, the key that unlocks the mystery of this childhood experience of the West, is itself a palimpsest erased and told again so many times that it is no longer possible to say of it, “This is the truth.”

      I remember with an embarrassing rush of nostalgic joy how as a girl, even as a young woman, I imagined that I knew the truth and would always know it, that truth itself was drawn to me—loved me, discovered me the way the wind itself did, roughly caressing my face—that somehow great mysteries locked to others would open obligingly to my unconquerable mind. I dreamed dreams of flying, too, so real and convincing that I would swear I could step off the sill of my bedroom window in broad daylight and float at will, twenty or thirty feet above the lawn.

      I cannot fly, nor do I know what the truth is. I cannot tell my story as linear history, as if it were a chain of cause and effect defying ambiguity, or play it like a musical score. Even to tell the truth as it was for me then—tell it and leave it alone—seems a luxury. How much truth is possible—not just within the range of my own capabilities, but within the conventions of this confessional mode? Am I allowed, slowly or suddenly, to peel away the layers of discovery in strategically timed revelations as they did in fact come to me in real time?

      This is not a novel, though I might sometimes wish it were. And because it is called “true,” who knows whether such mysteries and gaps are licensed by the contract between the one who writes and the one who reads what is written? I strive to recover what I felt as a child, but my story does not therefore become the diary of a child’s life. It remains the self-reflective account of a woman for whom childhood is half a century old, a woman who has, for years in fact, been pondering the archeological and meta-archeological dynamics of memory and truth. And so I know, as surely you know too, that as I write I bring with me not just “the truth as it was for me then,” but knowledge laid over it time and time again, each layer not merely structuring fresh feelings about the facts I already knew, forging new tools of memory with which to recover new “facts,” but reconfiguring the very way all subsequent events, thought to be already explained and understood, are presented to the mind to be explained and understood again. And so it is memory’s curious trick to have knowledge be not singular—one knowledge, one truth, standing straight and upright in place of memories proven false or imprecise—but many knowledges, able like ghosts to somehow disregard the law of the conservation of matter and occupy the same place at the same time.

      These memory-ghosts most haunt me here, where my story veers back upon itself. The ghosts stand, immovable, not-quite-cast-out old versions, not-quite-vanished plausibilities in some curiously reflexive relation to one another. It is as if my life is an archive from which nothing can be taken or destroyed, whose mission it is to preserve all the beautiful dreams of the way things were. Or a synoptic gospel, each version equally true, or equally credible, and each somehow, in spite of conflict, still reverently acceptable as an alternative interpretation of the same life.

      Plain truthseekers, take comfort. If what I have told is not everything I came to know, it is still as real, as inexorable, as history. The Arizona ur-narrative, with its infrastructure of poetic irony (my mother’s illness the decisive factor in the going, my father’s warplant sickening the pivot of the return), remains still both objectively true and also how it was for us then. Pitying our mother’s pain, we understood our father’s pity for it. Pitying our father’s pain, we understood our mother’s pity for it. Through it all, to our eyes as children (and it is fair to say that the four of us, collectively, lived within these meanings, and were in fact the theater in which they were played), whatever else we saw or felt, to see the seductive sheer romance of this crisis in their young marriage and in our young and innocent lives was a real and powerful way of seeing.

      Even in the East Harlem years that followed, and the life resumed in New Rochelle two or so years beyond that, we could, without laying a scratch on the impenetrable veneer of this family romance, reimagine these same facts within a plausible complexity of motives. Since we had known even as small children that our father had sold his business to go west, we could now add what he could not possibly have shared with us then: the immense significance of this to him within the framework of his values. Its meaning, that is, to a man willing to admit, as time went on, how deeply ambitious he had been for wealth, for success as defined by the materialist American dream.

      And so in time I understood that it had not been the prejudice of wartime, or even the poisonous defense plant, that had sickened my father’s life, but a deep sense of failure, an underlying humiliation that could never be fully forgiven, not of my mother, not of God himself. It was difficult for us—but perhaps I should speak only for myself here, once our childhood theater of meaning had fragmented—difficult for me to grasp this view, for what could it mean to a young imagination already so powerfully fired with the symmetry of love? How could I understand the hard economic realities of wartime markets, let alone how he had experienced them—that when rationing came in, the meat futures he had sold in early 1942, just after Pearl Harbor, had skyrocketed in black market value and made other men rich? It added a jagged edge to a sad tale. It did not fundamentally alter its romantic outline, which memory had already enshrined beyond the reach of fact.

      More knowledge would eventually come to write itself like the primal scene upon the innocence of Eden. And with it a clearing of vision, like a new planet swimming into view. At last we could see the madness of it, the madness of a man so deeply centered in his own life-drama that, like some vernacular Oedipus, he could inflict this near-suicidal wound upon himself, give up a burgeoning business in the East, the consolations of an extended family, renounce every former life-chance, inspire his wife to tear herself from her home, her loving sisters, from the city at the very heart of who she was, whose absence from her life could drain the splendor of Arizona of all its own magnificence and beauty. And this madness not just the frenzy of the gambler, sighting a new vein of life-chances, not just the madness of love (though