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.

 

 

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