Chapter Eleven Beverly
Chapter Eleven
Beverly
I’ve just stepped out of the shower when there is a knock on the motel door. Noxzema covers my skin, and a glance in the mirror makes me feel like I’ve seen a ghost.
Judy sits up on her bunk and stretches, the straps of the thin chemise she borrowed from me slipping from her shoulders. The girl had been sleeping in a T-shirt because she hadn’t brought anything nicer. And I’m a firm believer that satin is a requirement for a restful night. Lord knows she can use it.
Jean answers the door, untangling herself from the telephone cord that is wrapped around her wrist. She tells her boyfriend to hold the line.
An embarrassed-looking desk clerk stands in the doorframe, staring down at his shoes, and I tie the sash of my robe around my waist before he can see me in my delicates.
Maybe he’d get a kick out of that, but I wasn’t going to let some stranger be the first man to see me in my nightgown.
“There’s—there’s a telephone call for Beverly Caldwell in the lobby,” he sputters.
My breath stops. Only my mother knows the name of the motel, and she wouldn’t call this early in the morning if it wasn’t important. If it wasn’t bad news.
Could it be my father? Just the possibility that something is wrong with him makes it feel crass to think Mr. Wall Street .
I find my voice. “I’ll be down in a minute. Let me get dressed.”
I slip into my thick pink housecoat and button it up in the bathroom, rinsing my face with one wide swipe of a hand towel. As I step outside, the sun rests on my skin, bare of cosmetics. I can only imagine the sight I am! But that’s inconsequential at the moment.
There are a few people milling about in the lobby in various states of pouring themselves free stale coffee and turning in their keys. I see a phone on a side table near the registration desk, the receiver resting on its side.
“Beverly Caldwell,” I answer. I have to remember to breathe.
“Beverly.” It’s my mother’s voice, but it’s altered. Like she can barely speak.
“Mom, what’s wrong? Are you hurt? Is it Dad?”
She sniffles. “Oh, God. No. It’s Sami.”
I switch the receiver to my other ear, tugging it out of habit to remove a clip-on earring that I haven’t yet put on today. Sami’s sweet face comes to mind, and I instinctively run my hand through my hair, remembering that she had trimmed it just a few short weeks ago.
“What happened?”
Mom exhales and slows her speech. “She was walking down Mercer Street when someone snatched her purse. She tried to hold on to it, but he pushed her away. She fell and hit her head on a fire hydrant.”
“Jeez Louise, will she be okay?”
She sniffles again, and this time it is clear that she is really holding back the floodgates. I’ve never known my mother to become unhinged, and even the hint of it is an indication of how wrenching this is for her. I have an urge to reach out through the telephone lines and hug her. Not our typical dynamic, but—but something had changed that day at Sami’s.
“We don’t know yet, darling. We don’t know. It’s pretty bad. She’s in a coma at Beekman Hospital.”
I look for a chair, but there is none, so I slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the floor. I don’t care if I look like a vagrant.
How the mighty have fallen.
She continues. “Beverly, I never told you. I should have told you. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
“Told me what?” But I already know. I feel it in my soul. I saw it in our eyes when we all looked in the mirror at Sami’s salon. In the weeks since then, though, I hadn’t broached the topic. Bonding with my mother was still in its infancy.
“Sami is my aunt. Your great-aunt. My mother’s sister.”
I feel my blood all rush to my head. I don’t know how to answer, so I’m silent. There is a whole swath of family history that has remained a mystery. It seems like half of me has been smothered my whole life.
She takes a deep breath. “But first, how are you doing in Miami?”
The woman has class, I’ll give her that. Even in a crisis, she remembers her manners.
“I’m fine, Mom. I’m fine. Nothing much to report. Tell me more about Sami.”
It’s the only invitation she needs to keep talking. To keep telling me the things that must have weighed on her heart all these years. She sounds like a dam that has broken, all its information pouring out in tumbling, turbulent waves.
“My parents met just after the Philippine-American War. My father was a college professor from New Jersey who volunteered to go over there as part of a new program to instruct Filipino teachers in American methods. He’d always wanted to see another part of the world.”
I feel my face flush. My father’s parents lived in New York, and while they were both very busy in all the same society-saturated ways my parents were, at least I knew them. So I hadn’t missed having maternal grandparents. And whenever I asked for family stories as a little girl, my mother changed the topic. So I stopped asking.
My mother’s words settle in my heart in a way that make me feel like I’m just getting to know myself. It explains the restlessness in my blood: a piece of me is connected to the other side of the world. It feels like a magnet that has been pulling me, but I didn’t know to where.
And now I do. I can hardly comprehend it.
“Tell me more,” I encourage. Of course I want to learn everything I can. But above all, I am relishing how it feels to talk with my mother like this. Real conversation. The kind we only ever had on our outings to Sami’s.
How sad that it took me leaving, took Sami’s accident, to bring us together.
“There’s not much to it, really,” she continues. “They fell in love and got married. But eventually, he needed to return home since his sabbatical from the college was almost up. My mother refused to leave unless her sister Sami came with them.”
“Why was that?”
“As much as my mother loved him and as much as she idolized the notion of a life in America, it also terrified her. The idea of having Sami by her side was reassuring.”
And there it is again. A precedent of crossing an ocean to create a new life. I feel like I belong somewhere for the first time. In New York, I had everything a person could ever want. But I wanted something different . So, apparently, did my grandmother.
I feel like I make sense to myself now. It’s a dizzying realization.
“Thank you, Mom, for telling me this. But I—I have to ask. Why haven’t we talked about this before? Why did you always put me off when I asked questions?”
She sighs, so deeply that I might have heard it from a thousand miles away even without the assistance of a telephone line.
“Because I was embarrassed, Beverly. We didn’t have much growing up. Sami and my mother cut hair to make ends meet, and my father’s hours were reduced after the university found out that he brought home a Filipino bride. The wives of the other professors excluded her from their gatherings, and it made her miserable. As soon as I was old enough, I moved out, crossed the Hudson River, and made sure that every step I took brought me closer to being the ideal New York woman, as I imagined that to be. I didn’t want to live on the periphery.”
“Oh, Mom.” I look at the clock on the lobby wall. We’re supposed to gather at the swimming pool in fifteen minutes to begin our ditch exercises. I don’t want to hang up. But I can’t make excuses to my trainers. One tardy can lead to dismissal. “Will you be home this evening? May I call you back?”
I have so many questions. Did my father know about my mom’s heritage? Did she ever see Sami outside of our salon days? Had my mother sworn Sami to secrecy—even from me? What happened to my grandparents?
“I’m sorry, darling. I’m detaining you. But I wanted you to know about Sami. I’ll keep you apprised of her condition. And I want to tell you one other thing—”
“Yes?” I want to stay on the line almost as much as I’ve ever wanted anything.
“If any of your routes take you through Honolulu, you have several cousins who live there. I’ve never met them, but I think it’s time that you know that part of your family. And to deliver our apologies.”
“Apologies for what?”
“After my mother and Sami left Manila, their mother died. The family said it was from a broken heart. And none of them have spoken since.”
I feel a shock roll through me as if I’d touched an electrical outlet. Family! The world has just opened up for me a little more, and I feel more dimension to my purpose here.
But will they even want to meet me?