My Beloved World (10 page)

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 scraping 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 passes. 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.”

W
HEN 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.

My mother still often worked six days a week, but she was no longer trying to escape from us. Home was now a good place to be, and so she worked the early shift at Prospect Hospital, leaving at six in the morning in order to be home by the time we finished at Blessed Sacrament. Ana came over in the mornings to fix breakfast and get us off to school. I could have managed by myself, but Junior was such a sleepyhead that we’d never have gotten to school on time without help.

The apartment was always immaculate, but it was no longer my doing. I quit my compulsive cleaning and left it to my mother, who cared about the place now. With the bit of insurance money left over after Papi’s burial, she even bought a mirror that covered one wall of the living room, making it seem bright and spacious.

I didn’t entirely trust this new reality, my mother’s transformation included. Once in a while, not often, she would date: a friend’s brother, or someone’s divorced son. I wondered what would happen to Junior and me if she got married again. Would she leave us behind? Would the fighting resume with a new combatant? My anger still lingered at what I had perceived for so long as her abandonment and her coldness toward us. It would take me many years to let go of that anger completely, and just as long for her to lose the last of her chill. It just wasn’t in my mother’s nature at that time to show affection, give you a hug, or get down on the floor to engage with a kid. She had been deprived of the formative security that nurtures such impulses. Besides, they would have mussed up her outfit.

My mother always dressed with effortless style, which seemed almost magical given her modest means. Even now in her eighties, she still looks flawless, camera ready, perfectly put together at all times. She would never understand why I lacked this talent that came so naturally to her. There was always some fault in my appearance that was glaring to her and invisible to me, and she badgered me constantly for being sloppy. Ana’s daughter, Chiqui, who was a few years older than I and idolized my mother, would say, “Celina looks like a movie star and acts like Florence Nightingale.”

Chiqui cared about fashion, about looking good and dressing up; I was convinced that deep down my mother would have gladly swapped daughters with Ana. But about Florence Nightingale, too, Chiqui was right. However undemonstrative, Mami cared about people, and she served as the unofficial visiting nurse on twenty-four-hour call for family, friends, and neighbors throughout Bronxdale and beyond. She took temperatures, gave shots, changed dressings, and called the doctor with any questions she couldn’t answer herself. She grumbled only when people took advantage—“Titi Celina! I need some suppositories for my hemorrhoids!” Perhaps they assumed she could pick up supplies for free at the hospital. The staff there would often help themselves, but my mother wouldn’t dream of it. “Mayo beat me over a three-cent postage stamp!” she would remind us. “You think I’m going to steal a bottle of aspirin or a box of disposable needles, even for you, Sonia?” She hardly had extra money to pay for them, but it scared her to see my needles, reused to the point of bending when I tried to inject myself.

The healing wasn’t limited to physical aches and pains. Some of her best medicine involved listening to people’s troubles, which she could do with full attention and sympathy, while reserving judgment. I remember my mother’s friend Cristina in tears over her son, who was struggling with drugs. That was a common theme, especially with the sons returning from Vietnam. Sometimes, even if there was no useful advice to give, I saw that listening still helped.

There was also John, the Korean War vet, who sat in his wheelchair in front of our building, the only spot of shade in the new projects, where the trees had barely grown. Every day, two neighbors, older men but still strong, would carry his chair down the four steps on their way to work. The kindness left him stranded until they returned, and so John spent his days watching people come and go. My mother always stopped. She’d ask him how he was, whether he’d heard from his family or needed anything. I never had the courage to stop and chat with John when I wasn’t with Mami, but her compassion impressed me, and I would never neglect to smile at him or wave when I passed. The role of confidante to friends has come naturally to me, and I credit the example of my mother, who, left on a park bench, could probably get a tree to tell her its woes.

——

ONE MEMORY OF
my mother’s comforting sneaks up on me in the night sometimes. The bedroom I shared with Junior on Watson Avenue, with its one little window, was not just tiny but unbearably hot in summer. We had a little electric fan propped up on a chair, but it didn’t help much. Sometimes I would wake up miserable in the middle of the night, with the pillow and sheets drenched in sweat, my hair dripping wet. Mami would come change the bed, whispering to me quietly in the dark so as not to wake Junior. Then she’d sit beside me with a pot of cold water and a washcloth and sponge me down until I fell asleep. The cool damp was so delicious, and her hands so firmly gentle—expert nurse’s hands, I thought—that a part of me always tried to stay awake, to prolong this blissful taken-care-of feeling just a bit longer.

WHILE MY MOTHER
seemed to find new confidence and strength after the loss of my father, Abuelita would never emerge from her
luto
at all. She had always dressed simply, but now it was simply black, as if all color had vanished from her life. The parties were over for good; the dominoes and dancing would exist only as memories. I still went to see her often, especially after she moved to the projects, just a block away from us. But her eyesight was beginning to fail, and she didn’t go out unless it was absolutely necessary. Our visits became more sedate, just the two of us talking, spending time together comfortably. I would bring my homework or read a book while she cooked; it was always quieter at her house.

That year of my father’s death had been incredibly hard on her. Her mother, my
bisabuela
, would die very soon after Papi. Abuelita didn’t even go to Puerto Rico for the funeral, she was so overwhelmed with grief for her son. She never spoke about my father after he died, at least not in my hearing, but my aunts and uncles understood the transformation that came over her: Juli was the firstborn, the protected one. If he could be taken away from her, then nothing in the world was safe. Something in the fabric of her universe was torn beyond repair.

Her husband’s Parkinson’s disease had been steadily claiming more
and more of him for a long time. By the time my father died, Gallego’s speech was fading, and within a few months he was completely bedridden, another reason Abuelita rarely left the house. My mother went every week on her day off from the hospital to bathe him and help change the sheets. Perhaps my grandmother was mourning prospectively for her husband too, the sadness heaving back and forth between Papi and Gallego like a trapped wave. When Gallego died a few years later, she would move to the seniors’ home at Castle Hill within days. In the same way that my mother refused to go back into the old apartment after my father died, Abuelita couldn’t bear to be in that space where memories and emptiness collided. And so we did the
rosario
for Gallego in a brand-new, subsidized senior citizens’ home.

THINGS HAD CHANGED
at school, too. My fourth-grade teacher, Sister Maria Rosalie, made an effort to be kinder, and I enjoyed an unofficial respite from reprimand from April, when Papi died, until summer vacation. Not coincidentally, by the time fifth grade started, school had become for the first time something to look forward to. Until then, I had been struggling to figure out what was going on, especially since my return from being in the hospital. Now suddenly lessons seemed easier. It certainly didn’t hurt that I had spent the entire summer vacation with my nose in a book, hiding from my mother’s gloom, but there was another reason too. It was around that time that my mother made an effort to speak some English at home.

As early as kindergarten, Mami once told me, a teacher had sent a letter home saying that we should speak English in the house. But that was easier said than done. My mother’s English was accented and sometimes faltering, though she could manage well enough at the hospital, even working an occasional weekend shift on the telephone switchboard. At home, however, she felt awkward speaking in front of Papi in a language that he didn’t know well.