In Emma lore, she told us that when she saw my father for the first time, she fell madly in love. She described every detail. She wore a yellow georgette dress that our grandmother had made; it was trimmed in brown velvet. Her brown suede high heeled shoes matched her purse. The hem of the dress came right to the point that showed off the best angle of her shapely calf. He came sauntering across the room. He was not tall, but he was so handsome, it was shocking. He had blue eyes and beautiful white skin. His black wavy hair combed back made the blue of his eyes stand out and he picked her out from across the room. They danced a tango as everyone stopped and let them have the floor.

Shortest Distance
Angela Berkson
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The war had just ended and he was still in uniform; he was the son of the a Spanish immigrant who had come with his young wife to Nogales in 1913 to build a cigar factory. The son of a Spanish immigrant, a Criollo, a good catch. My mother was of a more humble origin, the daughter of a working class family with no ancestral recollection of being anything other than Mexican. She was in awe of him; this handsome Spaniard in uniform, son of a cigar factory owner, who could dance like Fred Astaire. He promised to return in a month to ask for her hand in marriage and that’s where we all got started.

I keep this story encapsulated in an oval ornament that lingers gracefully in the indescribable hollows of my heart. When I am more pragmatic, I realize it could be something as rudimentary as a fabricated memory to sweeten the past. Nevertheless it is a story of how my mother and father began their life as something beautiful.

I remember how I loved to watch them dance. I wanted to go to the weddings and the tardeadas just to watch them glide across the floor. My father was a well-trained dancer, he reminded us with pride. During the war, while he was stationed in San Antonio, he completed a course in ballroom dancing at the Arthur Murray School of Dance. He found the perfect dance partner in my mother who had beautiful light feet that could follow his every move. I remember fearing they would fall when neither of their feet touched the ground. They were airborne. They were so beautiful when they danced, they could fly.

I don’t know when things went bad. I was a child and only kept track of their dancing and what my mother wore, but things did go bad. In my logic, if they could only go dancing, things would be okay, but I remember once watching my mother pulling my father out of the car in the middle of a new year’s night, and hanging him like a rag doll over the fence while she tried to open the garden gate. She was wearing the green goddess chiffon dress. I had by now started naming my mother’s dresses. The green goddess had a flowing trail of chiffon over each shoulder, anchored by rhinestone clasps. She looked sad as I peeked out through the living room drape; I ran and got under the covers so she wouldn’t notice.

There were many more rough spots and less and less dances and our family became a series of sad stories. It took years for my father to be consumed by alcohol and for my mother to develop a rare and terminal blood disease. She was 58 years old when she died. Before she died, she wanted to leave him but I, using all the power of the eldest daughter, said no. “Yes, it’s true,” I told her, “he is an alcoholic and yes it’s true that you have suffered, but if you leave him, he will die, and you said yourself he was an honest man, one of great intelligence and wit, a man of honor. You can’t leave him when he’s down, Mama. You just can’t.”

My mother didn’t leave my father through the contentious and shameful road of divorce but through the tunnel of death that she illuminated with the strong conviction that there was such a force as the Holy Spirit. Right before she died, she was giving out photocopies of a prayer to the Espiritu Santo that she had clipped out of the Nogales Herald. She was not afraid of death she said to me on various occasions; she was ready to go on.

She spent a week in the hospital, going in and out of consciouness and in one of her most lucid moments she touched her heart and said, “Me duele el corazon.”

“Your heart hurts? Let me call the nurse,” I said getting up from the chair.

“No,” she said, “not that heart, the other one. El corazón de amor.”

I went to reach for her and she glazed over in that merciful coma. I rubbed her heart and said, “I’m sorry Mama.” It was not an apology. It was an acknowledgement of the pain she held in her heart.

Bird (KC)
Angela Berkson
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Sensing that she was in the final stage of death, I called my sister in and we both said goodbye. “Bye, Mama, Mama. Bye.”

We went on about the business of the funeral and taking care of my father. He pulled out their wedding picture and showed me the date. My mother died one day after their 35th anniversary.

“I loved your mother very much,” he said to me with his melting blue eyes and I hugged him and said, “I know you did, Dad.”

I tried to make a joke as I looked at their stunning photograph. I asked him, “How come none of us came out as beautiful as you two?” Still weeping, he shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”

Those are the cameos that I have left from them, those scenes in oval ornaments that hang in the labyrinth of my heart.