Country of the Bad Wolfes

THE MATRIARCH

In the final days of 1910, some years after finally accepting that she was past all possibility of conception and at last acquiescing to sexual intercourse with Amos Bentley—berating herself for her long abstention even as she thrilled to the act as much as she had the first time in her life, at sixteen with her young soldier husband Melchor—Sofía Reina, age fifty-seven, at last also accepted as fact seventy-two-year-old Amos’s insistence that she was in no way cursed and they should get married before they were too old to even remember each other’s names. Six years earlier, after Victor Nevada died of a stroke, Amos had become an independent assayer and had been making more money than ever. Theirs would be a very comfortable old age, he promised Sófi.

When they told María Palomina they were going to marry, all she said was, It’s about time. They set the date for March.

A few weeks before the wedding, María Palomina awoke early one morning from a pleasant dream of walking hand in hand with Samuel Thomas in Chapultepec Park, both of them yet very young and Samuel Thomas scarless of face and walking without limp. They had never actually gone for such a walk, Samuel Thomas never having gone anywhere beyond a three-block radius of home, and she had not been to Chapultepec since girlhood. But the dream was so real it seemed more remembrance than imagination. Just before she woke from it, Samuel Thomas kissed her hands, first one and then the other, and remarked that they had always been the prettiest he’d ever seen. Then she was awake and looking at her hands. Crippled with arthritis, the knotty fingers as twisted as scrub roots and the gnarled knuckles seized like rusted bearings, they had not been free of pain in years. She suddenly realized that tomorrow was the second of February, her eighty-first birthday. No, no, no, she thought. That’s just too damn old.

And closed her eyes and took a deep breath and released it in a slow settling sigh.

The funeral was three days later and was attended by a handful of neighborhood friends. Sófi’s grief was absolute but when Amos suggested she might want to set back the wedding date she said certainly not and that not even her mother would have wanted them to.

They married as planned on the first Sunday in March. As they were leaving the church, Amos said, “This is the happiest day of my life.” And took three more strides before stopping short and turning to her in disbelief as he clutched his chest. And fell dead.

She shed a few tears and wore black for two weeks, and if her neighbors thought her show of mourning altogether perfunctory and disrespectful, what did she care? She was a lifelong intimate of grief, a practiced expert at mourning, and no longer felt need to make public display of her feelings. And only once did she say, speaking to herself as much as to the sheepish spirit of Amos, I told you, you idiot!

She telegraphed the news to her border kin, and, with no family left to her in Mexico City, asked if she might go to live near them. Marina’s return wire expressed everyone’s condolences and said they would all love to have her with them and that she could take her choice of which family to live with. But Sófi would not burden anyone and insisted on a house of her own. Amos had left her a large inheritance and she sent money to the Wolfes and asked them to please buy a small house for her not too far from theirs. Her friends said she was being rash. Mexico City was the only home she’d ever known and she would wither in the primitive country of the border. Maybe, Sófi said, maybe not. In April she sold her house and moved to Brownsville in the only border crossing she would ever make.

The families received her with an outpouring of felicitous affection. She had for so long looked forward to meeting them all, and was especially effusive toward the twins, who even at the age of forty-one were indistinguishable except to those who knew the identifiers to look for. She was pleased with the little frame house they had selected for her, a block north of the Wolfe homes. She had never lived anywhere but Mexico City but was acquainted with dramatic change and would easily adapt to Brownsville and its ways.

Two years older than Marina, she was by tradition of age entitled to be the new family matriarch—the Mamá Grande. But she protested that Marina was the true matriarch because she had known the twins since their birth and was wife to one of the family’s two heads. For her part, Marina deferred to Sófi as the rightful matriarch because she was not only first cousin to the family heads but was also the daughter of John Roger’s brother and hence the only one in the borderland family to have known both brothers. The twins settled the dispute by decreeing that both women would be accorded the title and respect of Mamá Grande and would be addressed by everyone in the family as Mamá Marina and Mamá Sófi.

But it was Sófi’s singular distinction to have been born and raised in Mexico City, where nobody else in the border families had ever been. They loved to hear her descriptions of the capital, her reminiscences of the Wolfe y Blanco family and her account of how it came to have that surname. They were enrapt by her epic tale of Gloria’s wedding to Louis Welch Little. Were awed by the sad saga of her own marriages and the lamentable outcomes of them all.

It would be years yet, however, before she would tell any of them of her conviction that the family was cursed by its own blood.

She had been in Brownsville two months when the twins came to her with a document case and told her it contained information she might find interesting. Then opened the case and she saw the banded bunch of photographs, the various packets of letters and other documents, the leatherbound ledger. It was all in English, which she did not know, but they promised to translate it all as time permitted. What was important, they told her, was that she know everything about the family. That she be the keeper of its history. The one to pass it down.

Sofía Reina looked from one to the other of them, her eyes shining. She reached across the table and took each one by a hand. “Gracias, mijos,” she said. “Con todo mi corazón. Gracias.”