House on the Lagoon Read Online Free Page B

when they were about to check into the Plaza Hotel or the Sherry Netherland, once they had arrived in New York. At those moments they were very conscious of what they wore, and realized that wearing a genuine pearl necklace or carrying an authentic alligator bag on your arm made a difference when you stepped into an elegant hotel lobby, especially if one “came from down South.” People looked at you with respect. For this reason, once they set foot in the continental United States, the well-to-do families from the island never spoke Spanish but always addressed each other in perfect English.
    Back home, on the other hand, when a son or a daughter from one of our better families was being courted or about to become engaged, mothers would visit their confessors and ask them in secret if the old Bloodline Book from their particular parish by chance still existed, because they needed to see it. They would wipe the cobwebs off the covers, blow the dust from the parchment pages, and peruse them carefully until they verified the spotlessness of the suitor’s stock. Until this was done, permission for the marriage was withheld. Since they were now part of the United States, they told themselves, this was the only way to ensure that their grandchildren would be accepted at the best universities on the mainland, or that they could travel first-class by train or boat all through that great country, just as they had been used to doing in Europe.
    As a result of this close scrutiny, it was becoming more difficult for the daughters of the bourgeoisie to find appropriate husbands. American young men, although desirable from every point of view—they were fair-skinned, well educated, and often connected to the prosperous sugar refineries on the island—were a tricky business. More than once, engagements were dissolved literally at the church door, when, arriving from the mainland for the wedding, a suitor’s family might find the bride’s hair to be suspiciously curly or her skin to have a slight cinnamon hue. They would point out these details to the bridegroom and decry the reliability of the Bloodline Books, cautioning that they could be altered or false, that it was better to trust your own eyes. The engagement would be broken off and the family would return to the mainland en masse, taking along the repentant suitor. This kind of unfortunate occurrence was much rarer when the fiancé was from Spain. Spanish immigrants were usually more lenient than Anglo-Saxons about exotic physical traits. Colonized by the Moors for seven hundred years, they were less suspicious of olive skin or curly jet hair.
    The Spanish Casino was an important institution, because it was where young people from the better families got to know each other. Quintín told me how, the same year Buenaventura arrived on the island, the Casino was planning its most splendid carnival in years. Rebecca, Quintín’s mother, was to be crowned Queen of the Spanish Antilles. Rebecca was sixteen years old, the beautiful daughter of prosperous parents, and the committee unanimously chose her to be queen. When it came time to find a king to escort her, however, things did not go so well.
    The committee was made up of a group of middle-aged ladies who were the organizers of many of the balls given in the city. They were responsible for preparing the lists of eligible young men who could be partners at such events. In the case of the Spanish Casino’s king, for example, they would visit the elegant mansions of Alamares, sit on the terrace drinking coffee, and from there look over the children of the family. As soon as they saw a teenager with down on his cheeks who might serve their purpose, they would ask his parents to let him meet the future queen, to see if she liked him and if they looked well together.
    It usually took only one or two visits with a lanky young man in tow to get the job done, as at their tender age girls weren’t that particular about their escorts.