Searching for Armando
from Chapter 2
His name floated through my childhood. I can recall hearing it uttered, but not anything specific that was said about him. Certain grown-ups uttered it, that is. Not my father. Not my maternal grandparents and aunt, who lived across the street from us. Not my other maternal aunt, who lived on Long Island, and whom we saw often. Perhaps not even my mother, though I don’t see why I don’t remember her saying “Armando” when the grown-ups who did say it were her New York City friends: my Venezuelan godmother, Josephine Arcilagos, and George Anderson, with whom my parents had lived in Greenwich Village after World War II, when I was a baby. My mother had worked with Josephine at NBC during the war, while my father was overseas with the Army Air Force. Armando had worked at NBC, too.
For years, Josephine and George visited us in our suburban home in Teaneck, New Jersey. Sometimes, George brought his lover, Ed. Josephine visited the most often.
We children would wait to spy her on the horizon of our long street, would watch her figure grow gradually larger until, confident at last that it was Josephine, we’d burst towards her on roller skates and bikes, circling her stately approach down the final blocks like noisy gulls around a docking ship.
Armando never came. My mother had another New York friend, Aurora, who was also mentioned often, and she never came either, so I didn’t really think much about Armando’s absence. The gift-laden New Yorkers who did come were entertaining enough, exotic birds amid the robins and wrens and cardinals of our otherwise ordinary neighborhood of tumbling children and aproned housewives and men who were gone before we got up in the morning and who came back just in time for dinner.
At some point, Armando stopped being spoken of. I don’t recall hearing him mentioned at all during my teen years. The next time the name surfaced was in 1971. I was 26, married, and living in the tiny rural town of Hickman, Maryland. My husband, Leo, was a junk sculptor. He eventually was able to make a good living from his art, but at that time he was just starting out. He’d sold one piece, to a friend. I was a part-time teacher in the local high school, stumbling through teaching Home Ec, in which I was neither qualified nor interested.
During one of our weekly phone conversations, my mother told me that an old friend of hers, Armando Zegrí, used to have a gallery in New York that specialized in South American artists, and that he might be willing to look at Leo’s work. She didn’t know the address or even if it was still in operation, but she could find out. I told her no thanks because Leo’s art wouldn’t fit. She didn’t press it. She had made the offer very casually, and I had as casually turned it down.
By the summer of 1976, my marriage was faltering, and I was contemplating a trial separation. I couldn’t think beyond that, even though I had a beguiling lover, Victor, who wished I would, and even though Leo had warned me that if I left, even temporarily, he’d move for immediate divorce. I craved some time and space alone, but I was frozen by indecision and wildly conflicting desires, and by the sense of an enormous finality hovering over me. I sent my parents a long, emotional letter in which I berated myself for my warring emotions. I felt selfish and wrong. I was hurting two men I cared about, and getting all of us exactly nowhere.
My mother replied with an equally long and emotional letter. First, she sympathized with me and encouraged me. Then she made a dramatic confession: she had lived through a similar dilemma with my father and a man she met while my father was away at war. She didn’t name the man, and she said the whole drama had played out before any of we children were born. But as I read her description of the affair, a sudden certainty struck me that this old lover must be the phantom Armando, and that he was my biological father.
I had always felt “different” from my siblings. I had different interests and different kinds of friendships. I also looked different from my three sisters and one brother, who were all blondes. I didn’t think too much about that, however, as my other brother, Brent, was dark like me. I was always being asked my nationality and disbelieved when I answered German and English. To silence the doubters, I devised a theory that Brent and I possessed throwback genes to Australian aborigines. A great-aunt claimed that someone in the Sickels family had lived in Australia long ago. But it turned out that Brent had gotten his darkness the same way I had, from Armando.
My husband is fond of saying that I’ve been writing this story for 30 years. I always bristle when he says that because it makes me sound like the world’s slowest writer, but metaphorically, he’s right. The writing of the book was concentrated in the few years before its publication in 2016, but the first stirrings began in 1976, and the story I eventually uncovered stretches back years before then.
In 1976, my marriage was in trouble. When I wrote to my mother about it, she responded with a surprising confession: early in her own marriage, with my father overseas during World War II, she’d had an affair that eventually forced her to choose between her young husband and her man-of-the-world lover.
cases of 13 “respectable” French and English women from the 1840’s to the 1890’s who had been accused of murder. I soon found myself intrigued by one particular woman, Adelaide Bartlett, and her sensational trial in 1886 London.
Fine, I thought, I’ll take some of the facts of Adelaide’s case, move the story into modern times and onto American soil, and I’ll be all set. But as I fiddled with the idea of a present-day setting, I kept coming back to the fact that what really interested me about the story was the light it shed on the lives of ordinary people at the turn of the twentieth century, which was a time of tremendous social change in the United States. There were organized forces for change like the women’s rights movement and the beginnings of labor unions. But change also grew out of seemingly neutral events like the invention of the typewriter, which allowed middle-class women to enter the work force for the first time, and, in turn, led to the simplification of women’s clothing; or the bicycle, which let adventurous young couples literally escape the watchful eyes of their elders. So I decided to stick with 1886, and Adelaide Bartlett became Isabelle Martin, the discontented wife of a prosperous Philadelphia shopkeeper. Or, rather, Adelaide was the seed that sprouted Isabelle, a distinct personality in her own right.
Though I’d set out to write a mystery, I had no interest in inventing a detective. But I needed a narrator. Aha, I thought: a maid! Servants always know a great deal about the personal lives of their employers. True to the era, my maid would be a country girl come into the city to work. With these two characters in hand, I began writing. Lo and behold, within a few pages, the maid, Hanna Willer, insisted on taking center stage, and THE SHOPKEEPER'S WIFE turned out to be as much Hanna’s story as Isabelle’s, if not more. Not only that, despite my original commercial intentions, the story quickly veered away from the neighborhood of the supermarket racks. Themes of friendship, gender, secrets, and silences engaged my attention. At one point, I was dismayed to realize that I was on Chapter 17, and my murder victim was still alive! But one reviewer later called THE SHOPKEEPER'S WIFE a “strong and finely crafted psychological novel” and “a quiet thriller,” so I guess I did all right in the end.
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