A couple of days later the girl at the desk told him Rosa was on the phone.
"Listen João," she said, "do you remember the last time we talked you told me about something you had found, a letter?"
"Yes, I remember." He chuckled.
"I keep thinking about it João. Do you remember what it said?" He could see her rather small eyes in her plump, pink face, her short, pink lashes, which she blinked cheerfully at you like a silent film star when she wanted to please you or get your attention.
"It's in Portuguese," he said apologetically. Rosa had lost the languages of their childhood She said it was because she could not decide between them.
"Can you tell me what it said?"
"Listen, Rosa, if you can hang on a second I can read it to you," he said. He went to his desk and fished the letter from the box beneath it.
He picked up the phone by the desk. "Rosa?"
"Yes, I'm here."
"I want to put down the phone in the office. Just hold on minute more."
He put it down and picked up the phone by his desk again.
"Rosa?"
"Yes João, I can see you walking around, just the way you walk. What are you wearing?"
"Wearing? I'm wearing a white shirt and gray sports slacks. I went to the motel owners' lunch today. Shall I read it to you?"
"Yes, go on," she said breathily.
"'This evening I came in and found our Uncle Ivan' — that's our great uncle Ivan — 'playing with little Rosa once again in that way I do not like. He jumped up' —or it could mean 'acted startled'— 'and cut off my view with his body, and she ran away. I think you have to talk to him about it again.'"
"Oh my god," Rosa said, "why didn't you tell me?"
João wanted to say, 'Honey, because you talk all the time' but he said, "I guess I was embarrassed."
"Well, I can understand that. Do you know anything more?"
"Nothing you can count on."
"Is there anything else in the letters? Can you translate more?"
"I've read them. I've read them all. There aren't many; that generation didn't write much, you can see it in their writing. Of course she would have felt safe writing in Portuguese because Great Uncle Ivan didn't know it."
"No, of course not, he wouldn't have. Do you know anything about him that might make you think...he could lose control of himself?"
"Before this? He was a vigorous man with a brazen eye," he said borrowing father Ieromin's phrase. "He drank too much, they all did. There was something amiss between his brothers, my father, and him; we didn't see him often."
"That's right...he was my mother's uncle... I hardly remember him. Oh, God, do you have any idea what it was about?"
"I went to Brother Ieronim the other day. I tried to ask him but I couldn't get the question across to him."
"I don't know him, who is he?"
He was my great grandfather's nephew."
"Oh, God, how do you remember all this stuff."
"He was my confessor when I was a kid."
"Oh, God, those people, they're fanatics!" She exclaimed. "Don't you know anything?"
"Rosa, do you remember anything?" João asked.
"No, nothing, but children forget, they have to forget. You've seen the stuff on TV."
"I guess I have, but ... "
"Don't you know anything?" she interrupted.
João paused. "Well, I guess I know Anna wrote what I read you. I know aunt Anna was a sensible, cautious woman, I know... I suspect...I know there was some...estrangement between Ivan and the other men. I don't really know why."
"What did the women think of him?" Rosa asked, "Do we have anything from the women?"
"I don't know anything special...I'm not sure ..."
"That's always the way it is!" Rosa said "You could ask, couldn't you?"
"Well, you know aunt Marya, she's been playing the dying swan all her life."
"Well, you could ask her." He felt she was throwing the questions at him like baseballs and he had to hit them or duck.
"If only one of my parents were alive!" she exclaimed, "If only one! If only we could ask Peter!" She sighed. Her brother Peter had been killed in an accident as a child; it hung like regret over her part of the family.
"But why would he have been able to remember if I can't?" Rosa continued.
João thought of her father, a shy, tall, moonfaced man who had played the violin at the family gatherings and João felt anger. Where the fuck had he been? What kind of a father had he been?
"João, I want to see those letters. Can I come up and see them?"
"Of course, but I could read them to ..."
"I understand, but I want to see them, hold them in my hands, crinkle the paper. Do you understand?"
"Of course," he said, but he didn't. Several weeks passed and João found himself relieved that she had not come.
One morning the girl in the front office called to say his mother was in the lobby and she had a boy with her. His mother, who did not drive, lived in a hamlet near Skaggs Creek in the hills toward Fort Ross, the Old Russian fur trading station. He had not seen her in months. Several relatives lived in a tiny cluster of houses and a roadside store that nestled in the green swelling hills like beet seeds cupped in the hand. He had never told her he was gay, not that he was afraid to exactly, but because it would be impossible to explain to her what being gay meant to him and because it meant that he would not give her grandchildren. Now he wondered how many things had endured unsaid for suspect reasons such as that.
He wanted to spare her climbing the stairs to his office and apartment, so he walked down and found them in the front office. They were standing beside the machine that vended sodas with their backs to him, the boy looking at the machine and his mother looking in the same direction as if without seeing. She, whose approval had once sustained him, was today as thin as a broom and bent, wearing a long, shapeless dress that had fallen to a color like ashes in cream, just her feet peeping out in old tennis shoes, and her gray hair, knotted with a rubber band at her neck, falling half way down her back. The boy—João couldn't tell his age—was wearing black Levis, black boots, and a black Levi jacket. He had straight red hair cut short, just longer than a butch.
A couple was signing in or out at the desk and buying bath salts. "Mother," he called out softly in Portuguese, wanting to get her attention without startling her. When he was with his mother he was the head of the family.
She turned and looked at him for a moment as if she had been gazing at the horizon and regretted refocusing on his proximity and then said in monotonous English, "Your sister Varenka has four children now — you remember Kenny, the oldest." His mother put her hand behind the child's back and pressed him gently forward. "And your brother-in-law, Duane, went away, no one knows where, three days before Assumption, and my poor Varenka is left on welfare, and we got a ride from a neighbor." She crossed herself in the Roman Catholic way. When his father died she had gone back to attending the Roman church. As she was speaking, Kenny turned to look at him, unblinking with a sly, dark stair under half lowered lids. João felt the kid was wondering if he could trust him.
"Come on," he said with a comforting, expansive curl of his arm that drew them into a massage room. The room had white walls adorned with new-age posters, a padded table and two chairs, no windows, just a skylight. The air held a faintly spicy smell. João bounced up to sit on the massage table with his hands gripping the edge. His mother and the boy stood beside the chairs facing him. The kid had a turned-up nose and sly eyes. He was kind of cute.
"How's Nikanor getting on?" João asked about his elder bother.
"He is all right, Mary bless us, though he has nothing much to live on. Only there is one thing: his son, my grandson Jason, has gone to the University to be a doctor. He thinks that is the way to get on in the world, but who knows!" She ended her sentence with an exclamatory rising tone that he heard from her more often as the years passed and crossed herself again.
"Jason cuts up dead people," the boy said, and sat down on one of the chairs. He pointed at the massage table. "He does it on a table like that."
"Take off your jacket," his grandmother said mechanically to the boy. He was wearing a black tee-shirt with a Joe Camel emblem and cut off sleeves. Blue bruises and red abrasions marked his slender arms. He sat up straight and squared his shoulders.
"Duane beat him; he is not a Christian man," his mother said.
"That's not true," the boy said turning his head away and raising his voice. "I got them playing basketball." João again remembered fighting with his cousins when his uncles quarreled, each kid standing up for his closest kin, and remembered once when his uncles had caught them and whipped them for fighting.
"How did you do that?" João asked kindly.
"It was an asphalt court. Some assholes did it."
He turned to his mother, "Did you talk to Varenka?"
She crossed herself again. "She won't tell me things, but I know he did it," she said.
He wondered whether she would have brought the boy if she understood that he was not himself a Christian man. The question frightened him.
"How long since we have seen one another," João said and reached towards his mother who submissively stepped forward so he could stroke her hand and shoulder. Suddenly he felt for a moment as confident in her as he had as a child. She could take care of him. "I'd like to talk to you alone," he said in Portuguese, "Can I send the boy out?"
"As you wish," she said.
He asked the boy if he wanted to try the hot tubs. "Well, I guess, sure," he said. João took him into the office room and asked one of the girls to find him a bathing suit.
He returned to find his mother sitting in one of the chairs with her hands folded. He sat in the other chair. Though he seldom used it any more, he continued to speak in Portuguese, like kissing her hand.
"Mama, do you think he would show his wounds in the tub if it was his Dad who beat him?" he confided.
She crossed herself. "I don't understand these young people. Do you understand young people?"
João shook his head.
"They have no shame!"
"Mama, I want to ask you something about the old days?"
"They will never come again," she said and crossed herself.
"Do you remember Dad's uncle Ivan?"
"Yes, he was a hard man and he had a hard life."
He paused. "Do you remember hearing any stories that he did anything sinful to any children?"
"What are you asking!" She crossed herself.
"Do you remember hearing any stories that he did anything sinful to Ellen's children, Rosa, and little Peter who died?"
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that Anna Kovensky thought he did something with your niece Rosa." he said.
"Who told you that?" she asked slyly.
"I found a letter Anna wrote."
"Holy Mother! What does 'sexual' mean? I never....but if Anna said something, it might be true," she concluded without conviction and crossed herself.
João suddenly realized that she was addressing him not in the familiar tense a mother uses with a child, or is used between any intimate relations, but formally, as if he were an important stranger, a boss. How had she come by that respectfulness, which was expressed in her whole bearing, what was it for? He felt sad and vexed, he felt that he had long ago lost his real mother who had been ironing when he played under the board, her strong knees and the toasty smell coming from the steaming cotton protecting him from the goings on of the house.
"Do you ever remember hearing anything like that?"
"I never knew anything, the Holy Mother of God be praised!"
She must have been helpless then too, but he had not known it. He gave up hope of learning anything from her.
"Let me take you and the boy to lunch," he said in English and rose.
