THE WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAV ELS
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vaudeville pianist in Manila and showed him in a tight striped suit of
the '20s, sitting at a piano, his hands on the keyboard, his young
face turned sidewise to grin at the photographer. The tunes that
his
father was probably playing at that piano began to jingle in Paco's
ears-"Yes, Sir, That's My Baby" and "Somebody Stole My Girl" and
"The Sheik of Araby" and "I Wonder What Became of Sally"–
making him smile, because they were being played in the fast jerky
style with corny flourishes that his father had long outgrown but liked
to burlesque when at home, for his private fun and the nostalgia.
Paco idly turned the piano into a bed and stretched out the grinning
young man on it and then animated the studio backdrop into a raging
Siberian winter storm-but even after he had told himself that his
father had probably died more of hunger than of pneumonia (since
the manager of the troupe he had last been working for had run away
with an Hawaiian belly dancer and all the troupe's money) he still
could stir up no feeling for the grinning young man in the tight
striped suit dying on top of the piano. So he tried to remember what
he could of his father talking but though he heard his father's voice
very clearly no words were distinct until he remembered that he and
a cruwd that included Mary and the Monson boys and Rita Lopez
had planned to go mountain climbing that afternoon and was wonder–
ing if it would still be seemly of him to go along with them with his
father just dead when he suddenly heard his father talking very dis–
tinctly about mountains. He had asked his father if he might climb
the mountains when he was bigger and his father had laughed and
said that even a baby could climb these mountains in Hong Kong;
they were so bald and wrinkled they looked like old dogs that had
lost their hair, and so small you could climb up to their tops and
down again in half an hour-not like the mountains back in the Phil–
ippines that took days and even weeks to climb and were thick with
trees and shrubbery and dangerous with wild animals. Then he had
begun to tell Paco about a range of mountains just across Manila Bay
that looked like a woman stretched out in sleep.
That was a:bout the only
time
Paco could remember that his
father had told him something definite about the country he had come
from, and he remembered it again when from the railing of the ship
that was taking him to Manila for the first time, to play at the two
night clubs, he had looked up and suddenly seen, with a shock of
recognition, a range of mountains that looked like a woman sleeping.
He had clutched the railing as he gazed at the mountains in astonished
delight, thinking of himself as a boy, seated on the bed, staring at his
