My parents stood as if entranced, each waiting for the other to speak. If only they would now be merciful, embrace, speak softly! How could my mother, so beautiful a woman, create so much unhappiness for us all? For she was beautiful and her beauty was as holy a kind as that of the statue in the church before which Gonzales had been praying. Her rosiness, her clear skin, the sheen of her hair, her calm eyes, made the old ladies at the Hotel Barstow say of her, “She is the image of a saint.” The line of the hair on her high forehead was almost straight as though a child, drawing a picture and unable to trace in it the actual irregularities of his model, had simplified, had tidied up. The planes of the face were clean and the silken flesh shrank shallowly beneath the cheekbone and became pallid or golden as the light struck it. She was a tall woman, with a graceful, lethargic carriage. Her hands were her only blemish, for they were always red and scaly with the cleaning powders she used in the summer to clean the bathtubs, and in the winter they were chapped. Her fingers were torn with cracks in the tips or hangnails or cuts from knives or gouges from bedsprings. They were always cold as though too much blood had flowed out of their rents, and I supposed that was why she continually rubbed them.

“It is no use, Shura,” my father said at last. His voice was even and formal.

At his words, she bent her head down on her breast. The hair tumbled about her like a veil and at the base of her skull, the scalp was visible between cords of the hair heavily tossed forward. She moaned, “But you must not take Sonia away from me!” She flung back her head again and I saw that not even now was her face distorted by her feelings. Not even her mouth, filter of anger, bitterness, sorrow, became less charming, and the sweetness of its shape, the texture of its dark red flesh seemed to abate her passion, making it something strapped and aimless.

“If I go, I will take nothing but my body and my soul.”

“Soul!” She spat on the floor before her bare feet. “Does a man have a soul that cuts his wife?” She held out her scratched arm. “Sonia, look! What do you think of a father like that, eh?”

“Why do you lie before the girl? She knows I never laid my hands on you. Tell her that you broke my china coffee pot and nagged me until I was crazy!”

“I hate you. Ah, I would hate any man that cried tears like a woman.”

“And I hate you, Shura, with all my heart. You’ve ruined everything for me and I’ve had enough.”

For the briefest moment, alarm showed in my mother’s face, but then she smiled. “And so have I. If it weren’t for Sonia . . .”