Chapter Three
San Juan, Puerto Rico
1968
On a blazing summer afternoon in 1968 less than a mile from that very intersection, Daisy’s grandmother Rafaela Acuna y Daubón stood before a heavy oval mirror. She was visible through the picture-frame window of a freshly painted, powder-blue hotel of modest renown. Outside, the sun was just beginning to lower itself into the hot bath of the sea, stretching its slow, golden light across the rooftops and cobblestones. This was another June in Santurce, Puerto Rico.
Rafaela’s black hair was pinned through with red roses, and she wore a white peineta and mantilla above. The bell sleeves of her gown were lace and her own grandmother’s drop pearls swung lightly from her earlobes, something borrowed. Rafaela had never cared much for simplicity, and certainly not on her wedding day.
Her sister, Dolores, was there too, in a panic, which provoked a profound tranquility in Rafaela. Beads of perspiration came to stand in the crevice of Dolores’s chin, and Rafaela was glad her sister’s rose-colored dress was silk, so dark circles wouldn’t spread beneath the arms. The sashes of the tall windows were thrown open so the blushing evening sunshine would flood the room. Outside, someone rang the bell on a passing bicycle, and the sound cheered Rafaela. She would not let her sister ruin the splendor of this day. She deserved one perfect day after the stretch of turmoil from which their family was only beginning to emerge. Rafaela’s bridal heels made no sound on the thick carpet as she crossed the room and set the letter down on the table beside the standing mirror. Behind her, Dolores opened a hand fan with a sound like a rolled r , and Rafaela watched its colors flash while her sister fanned herself.
“Well, Rafa?” Dolores said.
Rafaela fitted her fingers into a long white glove and began drawing the satin up her slender arm.
“Help me with the other one, Lola,” she instructed.
Dolores sighed and clicked her fan closed, placing it atop the still unfolded letter. That letter was so unimportant Rafaela wouldn’t even bother refolding it. She wouldn’t bother ripping it up or burning it. She would just abandon it there on the small marble table. Then she would forget it had ever existed.
“But never mind the gloves, Rafa!” her sister said as she picked up the second glove anyway and held it open for Rafaela to snake her arm into. Dolores smelled like the orchids in Rafaela’s bouquet, just at the trembling peak before decay. Dolores pulled the top edge of the glove up over Rafaela’s elbow and grabbed the letter from the table once more. “What are you going to do?” She waved the letter in front of Rafaela like a second fan.
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic.” Rafaela checked her makeup in the mirror, making sure the red lipstick hadn’t strayed onto her teeth during the minute and a half since she’d last checked. She gathered her mantilla to one side and turned to inspect the trail of white buttons stretching from shoulder blades to waistline. Satisfied with what she saw, she settled her mantilla lightly around her shoulders and turned to smile at her sister. “I’m going to marry him,” she said.
Rafaela didn’t have a single remaining doubt in her mind. Of course there had been the usual misgivings of any courtship, but that was all behind her now. They were in love, and this union wasn’t so much a decision as an inevitability. God had created her for this man, and even though he bore almost no resemblance to the future husband she may once have imagined for herself, surely that was only because the limits of her former imagination had been circumscribed by the perimeter of this island. That was no longer true. And so, in less than one hour, Senorita Rafaela Josefina Acuna y Daubón would become Mrs. Peter Brennan Jr.
“I’m ready,” she said.
Dolores stood with her lips parted, her panic suspended by bewilderment. “But… you have to at least talk to him about it.”
Rafaela lifted the bundle of white orchids into her gloved hands. Their stems were wrapped with a dark pink ribbon and fixed with a pearl head pin. “Talk to him about what? There’s nothing to discuss, Lola.”
Dolores shook her head. “But…”
Twenty-one years they’d known each other, and Rafaela was still the only person who could truly stun her sister. Dolores was speechless.
“Look, even if I wanted to talk to him, how would that work?” she asked. “I waltz into the church in my wedding gown and ask him to step outside for a moment?” Rafaela waved a hand vaguely in the air. “We will discuss it later.”
“But later will be too late,” Dolores said. “Later you’ll already be married.”
Rafaela crossed the small space between them and grasped her sister’s hands. She leaned her face toward Dolores as she had done since they were small, when the eighteen months that separated them had been a visible distinction, two matching moon-faced girls, two halos of black curls, one head slightly taller than the other. Rafaela had learned this trick when she was still in diapers, to face her big sister, to cast her eyes into Dolores’s eyes, to hook and reel. When she’d established the steady gaze of her sister’s focus, Rafaela could always make her understand.
“Sister, listen,” she said. “It’s not as if Peter wrote that disgusting letter himself, right?”
Dolores took a deep breath and nodded. This was true.
“That would be different,” Rafaela continued. “But maybe he doesn’t even know about it.”
“But maybe he does,” Dolores said. “And you won’t know how he feels about it until you ask him.”
Rafaela’s shoulders drooped in frustration. “So what if he does know about it, Lola, who cares? He obviously doesn’t think that way or he never would’ve agreed to move here, right? He asked me to marry him! He loves me!”
“Of course he does, Rafa, but you don’t marry only him, you know that. You marry all of them, the whole family.”
“Ay, please—such a cliché!”
“It’s a cliché because it’s true! And if you marry into a family that doesn’t accept you—”
“Stop,” Rafaela interrupted, a new disquiet warping her voice. She dropped her sister’s hands. “Enough, Dolores, please. This is my wedding day.”
Rafaela seldom called her sister Dolores.
She felt Lola searching her face for a crack of doubt, a fissure where she might slip in, but Rafaela knew her sister wouldn’t find a foothold there, because Rafaela’s certainty was resolute. Peter was the one. She lifted the heavy hem of her gown to check her shoes, which were Vaccari, silver, and a gift from her cousin Clarisa, who had worn them only twice. The shoes were gorgeous but not enough to distract her from the worry on her sister’s face. Rafa sighed, dropping the weight of her hem back to the floor.
“They’ll have to accept me once I’m his wife,” she said. “They’ll have no choice. And besides, once they meet me, they’ll see how they misjudged me.” She grinned now, turning her attention back to her sister and pinching Lola’s waist. “They’ll see how lucky he is. Just look at me!” Rafaela threw one arm up over her head and did a hip-rocking twirl, the dress swooshing around her legs.
Dolores couldn’t help but laugh at the force of Rafa’s joy, her self-certainty. Dolores tucked her lips inside her mouth and nodded her head. Rafaela could see the resignation settling over her sister’s features. Lola had told herself she would try, and try she had. Now that the effort was behind them, Rafaela could count on her sister to march through the front door of Sagrado Corazón de Jesús and face the long stretch of that church aisle with a smile. She would disregard the empty pews on the groom’s side and pretend nothing was amiss, that the absence merely reflected the challenges of geography, that here were two happy families uniting their children in holy matrimony.
“Okay.” Lola forced brightness into her face, and then sincerity followed. Rafaela could see the moment it shifted, the way her sister softened, so that when she opened her arms, they were the petals of a maga flower unfurling. Rafaela folded into Lola’s embrace and clung there.
“You are the most beautiful bride!” Lola whispered into her mantilla.
Rafaela pressed her eyes closed once, and then straightened herself to arm’s length, squeezing Lola’s hand. “Well.” She could feel her rib cage rise beneath her bodice. “We have a wedding to attend!”
When Dolores paused on the landing and decided to dash back to the suite for the letter, she didn’t consider why she was keeping it. Perhaps it might one day serve as evidence, a reminder, an insurance policy of some kind. Perhaps one day she’d have occasion to slap it down on a table along with a demand for explanations. Or maybe it was just the possibility of someone else finding it, the shame of its existence. When Dolores snatched it up from that marble table, when she folded and stashed it beneath the wire of her bra where it would pulse against her skin throughout the ceremony like a second heartbeat, maybe she was only hiding it to protect Rafaela, as if she could neutralize its contents through the damp assertion of her humanity.
Rafaela followed her sister beneath the arched double doors of the church she knew as well as her own bedroom, and heard the sober snap of her heel against the tile floor. She allowed her eyes a moment to adjust. Papamío was waiting just inside the vestibule, and when Rafaela peeked through the small arched window of the interior door, there was Peter waiting for her, too, tall and beautiful in his dress blues, gold buttons gleaming, two stripes on the cuff. His blue eyes were so light they were almost white, and the sight of him there, standing hopeful and alone at the foot of the altar, aroused a flame of tenderness in Rafaela. His cheeks bore a hint of red, like the roses Rafaela had fixed beneath the curve of one ear. Her heart throbbed inside her corset, either with love or apprehension. Perhaps both. Lola went first down the aisle. And then Papamío squeezed Rafaela’s hand and did not ask if she was ready. It was too late for all that. What he said was, “Here we go.” And the doors opened.
At the end of the aisle, Peter’s eyes flashed in the late-day church, and Rafaela could see that he was everything she wanted. She could see the life she would have, as the wife of such a man. He was hers, with a smile like daylight, and she loved him. She did. Surely her trepidation was natural. True, stepping down the aisle felt something like walking the plank, but when she reached its end, Rafaela would drop with a splash into her new life, and Peter would catch her.
At the foot of the altar, Papamío was patient while she clung to his arm. If he sensed any reluctance there, he betrayed nothing. He only smiled and breathed, unmoving until she was ready to let go, so he could kiss her cheek and hand her over to the husband-to-be. The moment trembled and expanded while Rafaela failed to let go of her father’s arm. She could feel the joy radiating off Peter only three feet away. It was heady, buoyant. Her groom stepped forward awkwardly, and this was the moment then, it was really time. A different life awaited, a very different life. At last she turned to her father, who embraced and kissed her. Over Papamío’s shoulder, Rafaela scanned the pews and faces. She took inventory of that church while her father turned to shake Peter’s hand.
Because there was one face that might have changed everything, one pair of green eyes that might’ve supplied the errant domino that would have diverted Rafaela onto a totally different path. But that face wasn’t there—of course it wasn’t. Papamío rubbed the bumps of her knuckles once more through the satin glove. Rafaela squeezed his fingers. And let go.