“If you decide to take this to court, you’ll have to do it soon, because the statute of limitations is one year from the time of the accident.”
“But then they won’t give me my ten thousand dollars!”
“This case may be worth a great deal more than that, Mrs. Benedict. They may have offered you money to gain time, time in which you lose your right to file a claim.”
Although fearful, Bel agreed to file; ten thousand dollars was more than she had saved in a lifetime of working, but Reeves inspired her confidence and Timothy Duane was right: she must do something to protect her son from an uncertain future. That evening Reeves presented the case to his boss, so excited he could scarcely get the words out, recounting the story of the handsome black woman and her grown son who had reverted to childhood because of a fall. Just imagine, if we win, we’ll change these poor people’s lives. . . . But he was met with diabolic eyebrows raised to the hairline and an ironic gaze. Don’t waste time on such foolishness, Gregory. We don’t want to open up that can of worms. He explained that the chances of winning were slim, that it would require years of investigation, dozens of experts, many hours of work, and possibly zero results, because unless they found a cerebral lesion that justified the loss of memory, no jury would accept the amnesia story. Reeves felt a rising wave of frustration. He had obeyed others’ decisions long enough; every day he was more restless and more disillusioned with his work, and he saw no promise of being able to proceed independently. He clung to that sense of rebellion as he delivered to the old man of the orchids the farewell speech he had so often rehearsed in private. When he went home that night he found Shannon lying on the living room floor, watching television; he kissed her with a blend of pride and anxiety.
“I just resigned. From now on I’ll be on my own.”
“That’s something to celebrate!” she exclaimed. “And while we’re at it, Greg, let’s drink a toast to the baby.”
“What baby?”
“The one we’re expecting.” Shannon smiled, pouring a drink from the bottle by her side.
When she divorced her second husband, Judy Reeves kept all the children, including her husband’s by his first wife. Over the years the marriage had become a nightmare of bitterness and quarrels in which the man usually came out the loser. When the time came for them to part, there was not even a thought that the father would take his offspring: the affection between Judy and the two dark-skinned youngsters was so solid and so warm that no one remembered they were not hers. She remained unmarried for only a few months. One hot Saturday she took her brood to the beach, where she met a husky veterinarian from northern California who was vacationing in a van with his three children and a dog. The animal’s hindquarters had been paralyzed after it had been hit by a car; rather than dispatch it to a better life, however, as was indicated by his professional experience, the vet had improvised a harness so that the animal could get around with the help of the children, who took turns supporting her rear while she ran on her front legs. The spectacle of the crippled beast playing in the waves and yelping with glee caught the attention of Judy’s four. That was how they met. Judy was overflowing the seams of a striped bathing suit and downing one ice cream after another. The doctor stood watching, horrified and fascinated by such quantities of naked flesh, but after exchanging a few words they struck up a friendship; he forgot how she looked and by sundown invited her to eat. The two families ended the day devouring pizzas and hamburgers.
The veterinarian took his crew back home to the Napa Valley and Judy remained behind, summoning him with her thoughts. Since her days with Jim Morgan, her first husband, she had not met anyone who was her match in bed or in a good fight. Jim Morgan had been granted early release for good behavior, and even though Judy was then married to the small Mexican with the mustache, Morgan had called to say that not one day had gone by in prison without his remembering her with affection. By then, however, Judy was embarked on a different course. Furthermore, Morgan had been converted to a sect of Christian fundamentalism whose fanaticism was incomprehensible to someone who had absorbed from her mother the legacy of the tolerant Bahai faith; for those reasons, she had chosen not to see him once she was single again. Judy’s mental messages crossed mountains and vast vineyards, and soon afterward the veterinarian came to visit her. They spent a week’s honeymoon with all the children and Nora, the grandmother, who by then was totally dependent on Judy. The cabin Charles Reeves had bought thirty years before had fallen back into its original disrepair. Termites, dust, and the passage of time had worked their slow labor on the wood walls, and Nora had done nothing to save the house from ruin. One evening when Judy and her second husband arrived for a visit, they found the old woman sitting in the wicker rocking chair beneath the willow tree because the roof of the porch had collapsed onto its rotted columns.
“All right, ma’am. You’re coming to live with us,” her son-in-law announced.
“Thank you, son, but I can’t do that. Imagine how upset the Doctor in Divine Sciences will be if he doesn’t find me here on Thursday.”
“What is your mother talking about?”
“She thinks my father’s ghost comes to visit on Thursdays; that’s why she’s never wanted to leave the house,” Judy clarified.
“That’s no problem, ma’am. We’ll leave a note for your husband with the new address.”
No one had thought of such a simple solution. Nora got up, wrote the note in her perfect schoolmarm’s hand, collected the pearl necklace that had survived so many crises of poverty, a box with yellowed photographs, and a couple of her husband’s paintings, and calmly took a seat in her daughter’s automobile. Judy threw the wicker chair into the trunk, in case her mother should need it, padlocked the door, and they drove away without a backward look. Charles Reeves must have found the message, just as he found others every time his widow moved, because he never missed a single Thursday of his posthumous appointments, and Nora never lost sight of the thread of the orange that joined her to the other world. The year Gregory married Shannon, his sister was living with the veterinarian, her mother, and a swarm of children of various ages, colors, and surnames; she was expecting her eighth child and confessed to being in love. Her life was not easy; half the house was given over to the animal clinic, she had to contend with a constant parade of ailing pets, the air reeked of creosote, the children fought like tigers, and Nora Reeves had sunk into the merciful world of her imagination and at an age when other old women were knitting booties for their great-grandchildren had harked back to her girlhood. Judy, however, was happy for the first time; finally she had found a life’s companion, and she did not have to work outside her home. Her husband cooked monumental amounts of food on the grill to feed his tribe and bought chocolate cookies wholesale. Despite pregnancy, the good food, and her enormous appetite, Judy slowly began to lose weight, and a few months after giving birth weighed what she had as a girl. On the arm of her third husband, she attended her brother’s wedding wearing light voile and a delicate straw hat; she had one babe in her arms and was trailed by seven children in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, her mother, dressed like a schoolgirl, and a paralytic dog that, despite its clumsy harness, wore the smile of contented animals.
“Say hello to your aunt Judy and grandmother Nora,” Gregory told Margaret, who at eleven was small for her age but totally adult in her behavior. She had never heard of that plump woman or the distracted little old lady with a ribbon in her hair and thought the whole circus was some kind of joke. She did not appreciate her father’s sense of humor.
The bridegroom hired a mariachi band from the Mission district to give a Latin flavor to his wedding; the food was provided by one of Gregory’s former lovers, a beautiful woman named Rosemary, who was not bitter about his wedding because she had never wanted to marry him. She had written several cookbooks and made a career of catering banquets; with her team of waitresses she could serve a Mexican fiesta, a brunch for Asian executives, or a French dinner
with equal ease. Shannon, the center of attention, looking beautiful in an innocent dress of white organdy, danced paso dobles, boleros, and corridos until the drinks went to her head and she had to retire. The rest of the night, Gregory Reeves and Timothy Duane danced with Carmen, as in the old days of jitterbug and rock ’n’ roll, while Dai, with no little astonishment, observed this new side of his mother’s personality.
“That boy is just like Juan José,” Gregory said.
“No,” Carmen replied. “He’s just like me.”
Carmen had returned from her journey to Thailand, Bali, and India with a cargo of materials and a head seething with new ideas. She could not keep up with demands for her work and had rented space for a workshop and hired a pair of Vietnamese refugees, whom she trained as her helpers. During the hours Dai was in school, she took advantage of the calm and silence to design the jewelry her helpers then executed. She told Gregory she planned to open her own shop as soon as she could save enough to get started.
“That’s not how it works. You have a peon’s mentality. You should ask for a loan. Businesses are opened on credit, Carmen.”
“How many times do I have to ask you to call me Tamar?”
“I’ll introduce you to my banker.”
“I don’t want to end up in your shoes, Gregory. You couldn’t pay off everything you owe in a hundred years.”
It was true. Gregory’s banker friend had to provide another loan before Gregory could open his law office, but he did not complain because that year interest rates had shot to record levels. He needed borrowers like Gregory Reeves, because very few were able to meet their payments. That situation could not last much longer; experts were predicting that economic uncertainty would lose the election for the President, a good man criticized for being weak and overly liberal—two unpardonable sins in that place and at that time.
• • •
Gregory Reeves rented an office above a Chinese restaurant and had his name and title painted in large gold letters on the windows, as he had seen in old detective movies: GREGORY REEVES, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW. That sign symbolized his triumph. That’s the low class coming out in you, man; I’ve never seen anything more vulgar, was Timothy Duane’s comment, but Carmen liked the idea and decided to copy it for her shop, except that she wanted hers in script. The office occupied one roomy floor in the very center of San Francisco, with its own elevator and an emergency exit that would prove to be useful on more than one occasion. The same day Reeves moved into the building, the owner of the restaurant, a native of Hong Kong, came up to proffer his greetings. He was accompanied by his son, a small, myopic young man with gentle manners; by profession, he was a geologist, but he hadn’t the least affinity for minerals and rocks: his true love was numbers. His name was Mike Tong, and he had been brought to this country at a very early age, when his father moved the entire family to their new home. Mike inquired whether the esteemed lawyer had any need for an accountant; Gregory explained that at the moment he had only one client and could not pay him a salary, but he would be happy to hire him a few hours a week. Reeves could not suspect that Mike Tong would become his most faithful guardian and would save him from despair and bankruptcy. By then the Latino work force had greatly multiplied. Within thirty years, predicted Timothy Duane, we whites will be the minority in this country. Reeves meant to take advantage of the experience he had gained in his native barrio, and of his command of Spanish, to seek a clientele among that segment of the population, because elsewhere the competition was ferocious: three fourths of all the lawyers in the world practice in the United States—one lawyer for every three hundred seventy persons. The most important reason, however, was that he had fallen in love with the idea of helping the most humble; he better than anyone could understand the agony of Latin immigrants, because he, too, had been treated like a wetback. He would have to have a secretary able to conduct business in both languages, and Carmen put him in touch with a woman named Tina Faibich, who had all the necessary qualifications. The applicant appeared in the office before the furniture had arrived. There was nothing but the English leather sofa, Reeves’s accomplice in so many conquests, and dozens of potted plants; records and files were scattered everywhere on the floor. The woman had to pick her way through the debris and perch on a box of books. Gregory saw before him a sweet, placid woman who spoke perfect Spanish and regarded him with an indecipherable expression in her pleasant, bovine eyes. Gregory felt comfortable with her; she radiated the serenity he was lacking. He barely looked at her, did not read her recommendations, and posed only a minimum of questions—he trusted his instinct. As she said goodbye, she removed her glasses and smiled. Don’t you recognize me? she asked timidly. Gregory looked again, observing her more closely. It was Ernestina Pereda, the mischievous kitten of the doctor-and-nurse games in the school bathroom, the sexy vixen who had rescued him from the torment of lust when he was drowning in the caldron of teenage hormones, Ernestina of the hasty coitus and tears of repentance, sainted Ernestina, now a respectable matron. After all the one-night stands, she had married, fully adult, an employee of the telephone company; she had no children and did not need them, she said; her husband was sufficient. She showed Gregory a photograph of Mr. Faibich, a man so ordinary you would not remember his face one minute after seeing it. Gregory Reeves stood with the snapshot in his hand and his eyes on the floor, not knowing what to say.
“I’m a good secretary,” she murmured, blushing.
“This might be embarrassing for both of us, Ernestina.”
“You won’t have any complaint about me, Mr. Reeves.”
“I’m Gregory.”
“No. It’s better if we start from the beginning. The past doesn’t count now,” and she told Gregory Reeves how her life had changed after she met her husband, a quiet man in appearance only; in private he was wildly passionate, a tireless and faithful lover who successfully satisfied her sexual hungers. She had nothing but a blurred memory of the past, largely because she had no interest in what had happened before; her present happiness was what mattered.
“I never forgot you, though, because you were the only one who never promised me something he didn’t intend to deliver.”
“I’ll expect you at eight tomorrow morning, Tina,” and Gregory smiled, shaking her hand.
“That’s a fine joke you played on me,” Gregory protested when he called Carmen, but she, who had known about the stealthy and guilty encounters between her old friend and Ernestina Pereda, assured him that she had not meant it as a joke, that she honestly believed Tina was the ideal secretary for him. She was not mistaken; Tina Faibich and Mike Tong would be the sole reliable pillars in the fragile edifice of Gregory Reeves’s law firm. It was also Carmen’s idea to attract Latin clients with ads on the Spanish television channel during the hours of the soap operas; she remembered her mother sitting hypnotized before the set, more upset about the fate of those fictional characters than about her own family. Neither of the two anticipated the impact of the advertisement. At each commercial break, a blue-eyed Gregory Reeves appeared in his well-cut suit, the image of a respectable Anglo-Saxon professional, but when he opened his mouth to offer his services he spoke in the resonant Spanish of the barrio, with the idioms and unmistakable accent borrowed from the Hispanics who observed him from the other side of the screen. We can trust him, potential clients decided, he’s one of us; he’s just a different color. Soon he was recognized by waiters in restaurants, by taxi drivers and construction workers, and by every warm-skinned laborer he ran into. When his office opened its doors, King Benedict was his only case; after a month he had so many he needed to look for a partner.
“Associates, yes; partners, never,” was the recommendation of Mike Tong, who spent all day in the office even though he was hired for only a few hours a week.