Part 6 (2/2)
When she was coming up for discharge, she decided she didn't want to go back to Puerto Rico. Juli said: Stay in New York; we'll get married as soon as you're out of the service. They did, at city hall, with no more ceremony than a couple of signatures and a kiss. When she moved in, it was she and Juli, his brother Vitin and his sister, Carmen, all living with Mercedes and Gallego, the whole family piled into two bedrooms, girls in one, boys in the other. Until the newlyweds got their own place downstairs. The building was an old tenement, with dark and narrow rooms, but their kitchen was big and Juli made it beautiful. He put up curtains and pretty tiles. He raised a scaffold and mixed different colors and painted the old plaster molding on the wall. It was glorious, bouquets of flowers on her kitchen wall. Juli had such flair.
When friends came over, he always had something to offer them, knew how to make them at home. He taught his bride to dance. Bolero. Cha-cha-cha. Merengue. She was clumsy, apologetic. ”You'll do okay, Celina,” he said. ”You'll do okay.” She was learning to be like him, and that was all she wanted.
On her birthday, she went into the bedroom, and there on the bed was a new dress, the skirt spread wide, with roses scattered around it. Juli did everything with creative exuberance; in his heart of hearts he was an artist. He'd taught himself to sculpt and made busts of Roosevelt, Truman, and MacArthur, with nothing but newspaper photographs to go by. One day he made Celina's face. It was a strange feeling to see how he saw her, with arched eyebrows, wearing a turban. That face was stunning, and yes, somehow it looked like her, even though she had never imagined herself to be beautiful. It was stranger still when she saw how they used it as a model at the mannequin factory where he worked. There they were, a whole crowd of Celinas with those eyebrows and turbans, headed for shop windows, who knew where.
My father's education was minimal, though he had demonstrated a prodigious numerical apt.i.tude early. Sixth grade was as far as he'd got before he joined other members of the family working full-time in a b.u.t.ton factory in Santurce. His father got sick with tuberculosis, which was endemic on the island then, with no treatment available, so Juli had to help support the family. At one point, however, something extraordinary happened. Some professors from the university in San Juan had somehow heard about his math talent and came to watch him doing calculations in his head. They wanted to give him a scholars.h.i.+p to go away to school, but his mother-my abuelita-couldn't bear to let him go. He would stay by her side until he was twenty-two, when Abuelita decided to move the entire family, which by then included Gallego, to New York in search of work. My father arrived on the U. S. Army Transport George S. Simonds, which then ferried workers from the Caribbean, just days before Christmas of 1944-within days of my mother's arrival.
When he worked at the mannequin factory, they recognized his talent. He loved that job, but the factory closed, and he went on to work at a radiator factory. There they realized he was good with numbers, and they took him off the shop floor to do their bookkeeping. People could see his intelligence, but with no education the opportunities were limited.
Despite having lost his own chance for an education, my father never resented my mother's ambitions. On the contrary, he encouraged her. She managed to finish high school, do a secretarial course, and study to qualify as a practical nurse in the first years of their marriage. In many ways, he defied the macho stereotype of a Latin male. It took my mother seven years to get pregnant, and though she felt the pressure of Abuelita's impatience and comparisons with others, it was never my father who gave her a hard time. When I was finally born, he was overjoyed. She was the one, not he, who doubted her ability to be a good parent.
The family has always told stories about how difficult I was as a baby, and what a terror as a toddler. They say I learned to walk at seven months and to run the very same day, ever after the hot pepper-Aji!-a menace to myself and everyone else. How many times had they rushed me to the hospital in a panic? Once a fireman neighbor had to rescue me when I got my head stuck in a bucket, trying to see what my voice sounded like in the enclosed s.p.a.ce.
Only lately has my mother told me that my father was the one who walked me through endless colicky nights, even drove me around in the car when he found that would settle me; who was calm and patient while she felt panicked and incompetent.
So how did it all fall apart? When did the drinking become a problem? The move from the tenement on Kelly Street to the Bronxdale Houses was a turning point, and it happened around the time the mannequin factory closed, another displacement. My mother saw the new projects as a place that was cleaner and safer to raise a family. But for my father, it was exile in a wilderness of concrete and vacant lots, far from the enfolding life of family and the give-and-take of friends, far from the whole noisy, boisterous business of the streets where everyone knew everyone, watched out for everyone, and spoke Papi's own language. In the long run, the whole family would follow us, and the Bronxdale Houses would borrow a little of the old neighborhood's warmth, but when my mother insisted on making the move, we were pioneers.
He was drinking before that, she realized, but so was everyone else. In those days it was harder to tell a bit of excess from a serious problem. The beginning of the story went back much further. When his father died of tuberculosis, in the little cottage he had built to quarantine himself from the family, Juli was just thirteen. As the eldest son, and now the breadwinner too, he was the man of the house, child or no. Then, a couple of years later, Gallego came along in his guagua bus and swept Mercedes off her feet. Juli didn't deal with it very well. He never completely accepted Gallego, even after they all came to New York; years later you could still see the uneasiness between them in subtle ways. It was when Gallego appeared that my father first learned to drink. But it would be a long time before his drinking became the catalyst for daily fights, before my mother realized that she not only didn't know what to do but didn't know what not to do to avoid making it worse. And still she insists: whatever else her husband did, he always worked, and he always cared about Junior and me. Just not enough, because how much could you care if you're killing yourself? If you're drinking every extra penny there is?
My mother could not have even afforded to pay for Papi's burial if Dr. Fisher hadn't insisted that my father take out a life insurance policy: twenty-five hundred dollars. When my mother balked at the payments, Dr. Fisher said he would cover it himself if my parents couldn't, which was enough to shame Mami into sc.r.a.ping it together each month. What kind of a doctor pays for his patients' life insurance? The man was a saint. And he knew that Papi couldn't last.
A doctor could see it coming, but for everybody else it was a shock. Even as a nurse, my mother couldn't see it as it was happening right in front of her. The day they took the bus to the hospital, she was still filling out the forms as they wheeled him away. A minute later they announce a code blue over the loudspeaker. She stops and listens out of habit: someone's in trouble. But no, this is Jacobi Medical Center, not Prospect Hospital. She's not on duty, and the moment pa.s.ses. It never occurred to her that they were calling the code for Juli, that he was dying then.
In the months she sat in darkness behind her closed door, it was not just the sad waste of a man with so much talent, so much charm, so much life, that she was mourning. The death of the marriage too finally had to be mourned, a recognition so long forestalled by all the tricks the mind plays in the shadows of denial and shame. And mixed in with the mourning was fear-the practical dread of raising two kids as a single mother on a tiny income, but even more the fear that echoed a much older one, of loneliness, of being cast out. A widow, an orphan-what's the difference?
No, it was not guilt that she felt at all. It was sadness and fear. ”And it was no clinical depression, Sonia. I'm a nurse, I would recognize that. It was simply el luto, the grief that was fitting to the time.”
* You ask how it was, Madam?
As it is with matters of the heart ...
And between each song hung a tear ...
(from ”El Duelo en la Canada,” or ”Duel in the Canefield,” by Manuel Mur Oti)
CHAPTER Eight
WHEN I WOKE UP the morning after I'd screamed at my mother, she had already left for work as usual. Ana fixed breakfast for Junior and me and got us off to school as on any other day. But when we came home that afternoon, I could feel a change as soon as I opened the door. The window shades were up for the first time in many months, and Radio WADO was playing. ”We're home, Mami!” Junior shouted, and then she appeared. She had on a black dress with white polka dots, and it seemed so vivacious I didn't then register that she was still technically wearing black. She also had on makeup and perfume. I felt my smile spreading, my whole body filling up with relief.
When I look back on my childhood, most of my memories are mapped on either side of certain fault lines that split my world. Opposites coexisted without ever being reconciled: the grim claustrophobia of being home with my parents versus the expansive joy at Abuelita's; a mundane New York existence and a parallel universe on a tropical island. But the starkest contrast is between the before and the after of my father's death.
The silence of mourning was over finally, but more important, the constant, bitter conflict that had filled our lives was over too. Of course Junior and I still found plenty of reasons to yell at each other, provoking my mother's familiar warning call-her la la la la that rose ominously in tone, step-by-step, until we got the message that we had gone too far and that justice would be swift if we didn't immediately make ourselves scarce. We were still not like a family on television, but the screaming fights that had worn me down with sadness were no more.
<script>