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mysterious past in that one split second just as surely as I have come to accept it over the years. I have puzzled over my mother’s heart for almost half a century. She has told me so little about its workings. But now that I am older, I know she has a right to her secrets. I am content to understand that my mother has had real love, hard love, heartbreak, and to know that while my father has given her the first two, he never will give her the last.
    Not until I was in my forties and she in her eighties did we finally bring the question into the open. We had traveled to New York together. I hadn’t planned it, hadn’t rehearsed it, but after a few glasses of wine at a Manhattan trattoria, there it was.
    “Mother,” I said, “I’ve spent a lifetime trying to ask you one question.”
    She looked at me with her steady blue eyes and nodded hersilvery head. Her thumb and fingers were tilting her glass back and forth, as if she were seeking balance in a violin bow. “You’re asking me about the marriages?”
    “Yes, I am. Yes.”
    She put down her wine, knit her fingers. “There were three before your father,” she said simply.
    I was flabbergasted, amazed. She was talking without any hesitation, coolly, frankly. As if we were talking about rooms in a house. “There were three.” She had three fingers up now, and she was pressing on one with a finger of her other hand. “In the first, I eloped. Or, I should say, a group of us eloped. I was sixteen. My sister Erma talked me into it. Made me do it. On a dare. On a lark. I never realized how responsible Erma was for that miserable first marriage until I was an old woman, until Erma was dead. Until now.”
    She paused there and studied me. I strained to remember Erma. She was the only one of Mother’s three sisters I’d ever met, but all I could summon was a shadowy figure on a childhood visit. I was pulled more to the image of my teenage mother getting married on a dare. It was as if I’d never known her. As if I were seeing her for the first time through a telescope, from another planet. She had allowed me to grow up, it suddenly dawned on me, nothing like her. I was cautious, hesitant, mindful of mores, of my own virginal image, of como se hace. The way good Latinas ought to behave. It was why she had never talked about her past to me. She had recognized the limits of my circumspection, the essential Peruvianness of my soul.
    “That first one’s name was Gerardy,” she said quickly. “The town postmaster. He’d always had an eye on me. So we got married, and that was that. I was a silly little girl. But Erma should have known better. The second was out west, in San Francisco. He was a foreigner who didn’t want to be sent to war. I did him afavor. He needed papers, citizenship. It was a marriage of convenience. There really isn’t any more to tell.”
    I shook my head yes, fine, let that one go.
    “The third one,” she held up a lone forefinger now and moved it through the air, “the third one had love in it.” She stopped there. I waited for several beats to pass.
    “Campbell.” I said it.
    “Yes,” she said, “Campbell. That one. He was killed in the war. And that is all I’m going to say.” She pushed the glass away, across the white tablecloth.
    “That is all you’re going to say?” I blinked.
    “Yes,” she said, “that is part of my life I keep separate. It has nothing to do with the part I’m in now. It is sacred, do you understand that? Sacred. I do not want to go into it. I do not want you going into it. It is not for cocktail conversation. It is not for talk over casual dinners in New York.” She stopped, and I could see her shoulders tense with familiar steel.
    It was clear why she had to get herself on a train, head for another coast. Thank God Papi had been there. That’s enough, Mother. God knows it’s enough, and I will leave it. I didn’t need to know more.
    The irony is that I came to know more anyway, proving the gringo