Mexican Gothic(36)

Francis pointed at the photograph showing Alice, who looked like Agnes. “Her mother.”

His hand darted between two pictures, a woman with her light hair swept up and a man in a dark jacket. “Dorothy and Leland. Her aunt and uncle, my grandparents.”

He went quiet. There was nothing more to say; the litany of the dead had been recited. Michael and Alice, Dorothy, Leland, and Ruth, all of them resting in that elegant mausoleum, the coffins gathering cobwebs and dust. The thought of the party without music, the funerary clothes, now seemed extremely morbid and apt.

“Why did she do it?”

“I wasn’t born when it happened,” Francis said quickly, turning his head away.

“Yes, they must have told you something, there must have been —”

“I told you, I wasn’t even born then. Who knows? This place could drive anyone crazy,” he said angrily.

His voice sounded loud in this quiet space of faded wallpaper and gilded frames; it seemed to bounce off the walls and return to them, scraping their skin with its harshness, almost booming. It startled her, this acoustic effect, and it also seemed to affect him. He hunched his shoulders, shrank down, trying to make himself smaller.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t raise my voice like that. The sound carries here, and I’m being very rude.”

“No, I’m being rude. I can understand you wouldn’t want to talk about such a thing.”

“Another time, perhaps I might tell you about it,” he said.

His voice was now velvet soft and so was the silence that settled around them. She wondered if the gunshots had boomed through the house just as Francis’s voice had boomed, leaving a trail of echoes, and then the same plush silence.

You have a devious mind, Noemí, she chided herself. No wonder you dream awful things.

“Yes. Well, what about those prints you have with you?” she told him, because she did not want any more grimness.

They went into the library, and he spread on a table before her the treasures he carted in the box. Sheets of paper with brown, black, and purplish blotches upon the surface. They reminded her of the Rorschach images Roberta—the same friend who swore on Jung— had shown her. These were more accurate; there was no subjective meaning to be assigned. These prints told a story, as clear as her name written on a chalkboard.

He also showed her pressed plants, lovingly collected between the pages of a book. Ferns, roses, daisies, dried and catalogued with an immaculate handwriting that put Noemí’s shabby penmanship to shame. She thought their mother superior would have adored Francis, with his neatness and his organized spirit.

She informed him of this, told him how the nuns at her school would have fussed about him.

“I always got stuck at ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit,’ ” she said. “I couldn’t name its symbols. There was the dove and maybe a cloud and holy water, and oh, then I’d forget.”

“Fire, which transforms whatever it touches,” Francis said helpfully.

“I told you, the nuns would have loved you.”

“I’m sure they liked you.”

“No. Everyone says they like me well enough, but that’s because they have to. No one is going to declare they hate Noemí Taboada. It would be crass to state such a thing while you’re nibbling at a canapé.

You have to whisper it in the foyer.”

“Then, in Mexico City, at your parties, you spend the whole time feeling people don’t like you?”

“I spend the time drinking good champagne, dear boy,” she said.

“Of course.” He chuckled, leaning against the table and looking down at his spore prints. “Your life must be exciting.”

“I don’t know about that. I have a good time, I suppose.”

“Aside from the parties, what do you do?”

“Well, I’m attending university, so that eats up much of my day.

But you’re asking what I do in my spare time? I like music. I often get tickets to the Philharmonic. Chavez, Revueltas, Lara, there’s so much good music to listen to. I even play a little piano myself.”

“Do you, truly?” he asked, looking dazzled. “That is amazing.”

“I don’t play with the Philharmonic.”

“Yes, well, it still sounds exciting.”

“It’s not. It’s so dull. All those years of scales and trying to hit the right keys. I’m so dull!” she declared, as one must. To seem too eager about anything was a little vulgar.

“You aren’t. Not at all,” he assured her quickly.

“You’re not supposed to say that. Not like that. You sound much too honest. Don’t you know anything?” she asked.

He shrugged, as if apologizing, unable to match her high spirits.

He was bashful and a little odd. And she liked him in a different way than she liked the bold boys she knew, different than Hugo Duarte, whom she liked mostly because he danced well and resembled Pedro Infante. This was a warmer feeling, more genuine.

“You think me spoiled now,” she said and allowed herself to sound rueful, because she actually did want him to like her, and it wasn’t for show.

“Not at all,” he replied, again with that disarming honesty, as he leaned down on the table and fiddled with a couple of spore prints.