My Beloved World (7 page)

WE HAD BEEN
at the funeral home for hours. It felt like forever, but my mother and Abuelita and my aunts had been there even longer, for days. It was important not to leave the body alone, and they all had to keep each other company. Mami didn’t want Junior and me to come, but Titi Aurora insisted, because the nuns and Monsignor Hart were coming from Blessed Sacrament. It wouldn’t be respectful if Junior and I weren’t there when they showed up.

The room smelled of flowers, cologne, and perfume masking a mustiness. People were speaking in whispers, looking at the floor, shaking
their heads. There was talk of premonitions, a greeting or casual word exchanged with my father over the last few days that now took on greater significance; the way he had shaved and dressed up that morning, even though he was home sick. As if he had known. Everyone agreed that he was a good man, a family man, and that forty-two was a tragically young age to go. And Celina so young too, a widow at thirty-six with two young kids!

My aunts took turns crying. Abuelita never stopped. I sat down next to her on the couch and held her hand. Abuelita’s crying was unbearably painful to me. I couldn’t even tell if I had any sadness of my own, because I was so full of Abuelita’s sadness. I worried that her spirit had been torn apart so painfully by Papi’s death that she might never be happy again. What would happen to me if she died too?

The nuns and Monsignor Hart came and went. Dr. Fisher came too, and some people from the factory where Papi worked. All the while, Mami just sat there. Her eyes were open, but she was not really present, not even answering when people talked to her. Titi Aurora had to tell her to say thank you to Monsignor Hart.

What happens next is that I’m supposed to say good-bye to Papi, Titi Aurora says. She wants me to kiss him. I want to scream “No!” but I swallow it because I don’t want to upset Abuelita any more than she’s upset already. “
No tengas miedo
, Sonia. Touch his hand.” I’m not afraid, but I’m not okay either. This thing with a powdery white face resembles my father, but it’s not him, and it’s certainly not something I want to touch. But I close my eyes and get it over with.

A part of me was not surprised by what happened then. A knot that had been tied tight inside me for longer than I can remember began to come loose. Deep down, I’d known for a while that this was where Papi was heading. Looking at this thing that was not Papi, I realized that he was not coming back. From here, Mami, Junior, and I would be going along without him. Maybe it would be easier this way.

… Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte
.

We did the
rosario
for Papi for seven straight nights at Abuelita’s,
and every night I thought it would never end. Abuelita cried. Mami cried. My aunts cried. The prayers went on and on, along with that horrible week. The final night should have been better because the end was in sight, and friends brought dinner instead of just pastries, but the bad news was that we had to do three … whole … rosaries …

Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia: El Señor es contigo. Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres, y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre: Jesús …

I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I woke up with my mother standing next to me, pulling my arm out of its socket, gripping my hand so tightly it hurt. Her whole body was shaking with anger, and her voice trembled as she spoke to Abuelita: “Mercedes, you can’t do this! I won’t let you!” The room was silent. Everyone’s eyes were on Mami, standing there with the tears running down her face. “I swear, I will take her away from you and you will never see us again. Never!”

She dragged me to the bedroom and cried all night. I had no idea what had so upset her that she would turn on Abuelita, and she wouldn’t tell me. Much later I learned the story. As I nodded off in the midst of the prayers, I apparently spoke in a strange voice—one that sounded like Abuelita’s long-dead sister to those who remembered her, a voice my grandmother might summon during one of her séances. The message I delivered was that my father was safely in her company; there was no need to worry. “
Confórmate
,” I said. Accept it.

I can’t explain it. Nothing like that had happened to me before, and it hasn’t happened since. Everyone there was as exhausted as I was, and it’s hard to separate what they heard from what they wanted to hear. I know that I wanted more than anything to make Abuelita feel better; it’s very possible I was talking in my sleep or as I drifted off. In any case, it didn’t matter. Any desire my grandmother might have had to develop what she believed to be my “gift” was trumped by my mother’s threat to remove me from the influence of what she saw as superstition and
brujería
.

We had been sleeping at Abuelita’s every night since Papi died, because my mother couldn’t bear to go back to our apartment. That meant getting up very early in the morning so Mami could get us to school on time, after which she would go to Ana’s. They would drink
coffee and talk and cry together until school was out, and then she would take us back to Abuelita’s. Fortunately, the building manager at Bronxdale Houses let us move into a different apartment very quickly. It was over on Watson Avenue on the second floor—much better than the seventh floor if you’d rather not see what happens in the stairwells. It was much closer to Blessed Sacrament, too. Best of all, my mother was able to change her schedule at the hospital. She didn’t have to work nights anymore, so she could be at home after school.

Tío Vitín and my cousin Alfred helped us with the move. They cleaned out Papi’s room and carried out a big bag of clanking empty bottles. They found those flat, half-pint bottles, drained of Seagram’s Seven, under the mattress, in the closet, behind the drawers, in his coat pockets, his trousers, his shirts, in every jacket. There was even one hidden inside the lining of a coat.

It occurred to me that every day when he came home from work and sent us off with pennies for candy and fifteen minutes more to play, my father was keeping us outside just long enough to have a drink before starting dinner. Junior, who had slept in the same room with Papi, in the other twin bed, and sometimes only pretended to be asleep, now confessed that he had known all along about the bottles under the mattress. I always slept with my mother in the other room, and nothing ever woke me up once I fell asleep. I wondered what else I had missed.

I do know that my father loved us. But as much as he loved us, it wasn’t enough to stop him from drinking. To the end, Abuelita and my aunts blamed my mother for Papi’s drinking. It’s true that Mami could say all the wrong things; neither of them knew how to stop an argument once they started. But I knew too that my mother didn’t make him drink any more than she could make him stop. I knew he did this to himself; even as a child, I knew he was the only one responsible.

All those hours that he sat by the window looking out … I treasured those times when I stood beside him, inhaling the scent of Old Spice up close and of rice and beans bubbling in the background, and he told me what he imagined the future would be: all the different stores they would build on the empty lots around us, or how one day a rocket ship would carry a man to the full moon that was rising, low and yellow, over the South Bronx. The truth is, though, that for each of those
moments, there were so many more long hours of sadness, when he stared in silence at the vacant lots, at the highway and the brick walls, at a city and a life that slowly strangled him.

On the day we moved in, it smelled of fresh paint. The view from the new apartment on Watson Avenue was different. You could see the school yard at Blessed Sacrament from our window. The kids had left for the day, but there were still two guys practicing shots on the basketball court. Farther back, one of the nuns was walking along by the buildings, but I couldn’t tell who it was under the black bonnet … As I looked out the window, a memory came to me of something that happened the day Papi died, which I’d almost forgotten in all the commotion that followed. I was down in the school yard at recess, standing by the fence, looking this way toward the projects—and I thought about him. It wasn’t a normal thought that pops into your head or one that’s connected to the thought that came before it. More of a feeling than a thought, but almost not even a feeling: like the barest shadow of a mood passing over, or a breeze so perfectly soft that nothing moves. I didn’t know yet what had happened, but maybe that was Papi himself, saying good-bye.

I
N THE DAYS
and weeks following the funeral, the release and relief I felt from the end of the fighting gave way to anxious puzzlement. At nine, I was equipped to understand loss, even sadness, but not grief, not someone else’s and certainly not my own. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with Mami, and it scared me.

Every day Junior and I came home from school to find the apartment quiet and dark, with the curtains drawn. Mami would come out just long enough to cook dinner, leaving the back bedroom, where she passed hour after hour with the door closed and the lights out. (Junior and I shared the front bedroom in the new apartment on Watson Avenue, using the twin beds that had been in Papi’s room in the old place.) After serving dinner like a zombie, hardly saying a word, she would go right back into her room. So even though she was working the early shift now and getting home in the afternoon before us, we saw no more of her than when she’d been working late. We did homework. We watched TV. We did homework and watched TV.

On weekends, I was able to rouse Mami to go grocery shopping, retracing my father’s steps. I remembered what Papi used to buy, and that’s what I put in the basket, though I wasn’t sure Mami would know what to do with everything. I missed Papi’s cooking. I missed Papi. Somehow, when he died, I had taken it for granted that our lives would be better. I hadn’t counted on this gloom.

I wasn’t the only one who was worried about my mother. I overheard
some of her friends talking to Ana, and they decided one of them would pay a call at Blessed Sacrament to ask Father Dolan to come visit Celina. His refusal, as reported over coffee at Ana’s, enraged me, all the more so because of the reason: my mother didn’t go to church on Sunday.

It was true, but she did send her kids to church and always with money for the offering basket. And she worked long hours at the hospital so we could go to school at Blessed Sacrament. Shouldn’t Father Dolan be forgiving if she needed help? Even if he thought she wasn’t Christian enough, I reasoned, shouldn’t he be more Christian? My reaction was of a piece with the frustration I felt when he stood there at the altar during the Mass, with his back turned to us, as priests did in those days before Vatican II. Show us what you’re doing up there! I always thought. Now when he turned his back on us, it felt like just what it appeared to be: rejection. I was delighted when, a few years later under Pope Paul VI, the Church turned its priests around to face the congregants.

Another week passed in darkness and silence. Another friend of my mother’s, Cristina, asked the pastor at her church to visit Mami. He’d never even met her before, and of course she’d never been to his church, which was Baptist. But that didn’t stop him from coming. They talked quietly together for hours. I was impressed that he spoke Spanish; whether or not he had anything to say that could help, at least he cared enough to try. That I respected.

As spring turned to summer, Mami stayed shut in her darkened room, and I found myself on summer vacation longing for school to start. I didn’t feel like playing outside. I couldn’t articulate exactly what I feared, but I knew I should stay close by and keep an eye on things.

My solace and only distraction that summer was reading. I discovered the pleasure of chapter books and devoured a big stack of them. The Parkchester Library was my haven. To thumb through the card catalog was to touch an infinite bounty, more books than I could ever possibly exhaust. My choices were more or less random. There was no one in my family who could point me toward children’s classics, no teacher who took an interest, and it never occurred to me to ask the librarian for guidance. My mother had subscribed to
Highlights
for Junior and me, and
Reader’s Digest
for herself, but by now I was reading whole issues
of the
Digest
myself, cover to cover. “Laughter, the Best Medicine,” was what I sorely needed then. Sometimes when a story caught my imagination, I would search the library for the original book—I understood that these were excerpts or abridgments—but I never had any luck, and that mystified me. Now I realize that a tiny public library in a poor neighborhood would be unlikely to receive new releases.

My favorite book was one that Dr. Fisher had lent me. I had seen it, bound in burgundy red leather, on the shelf in his office and asked about it. He pulled the heavy volume down and said I could keep it as long as I liked. Those stories of Greek gods and heroes sustained me that summer and beyond. I imagined the gods of classical antiquity as versions of Abuelita’s familiar spirits, who interfered in human affairs and kept open lines of communication to the Bronx. The heroes were admirable if flawed, as compelling as any comic book superhero to a kid who was hungry for escape, and there was grandeur in their struggles that the Flash could not match. Riven by conflicting impulses, these immortals seemed more realistic, more accessible, than the singular, all-forgiving, unchanging God of my Church. It was in that book of Dr. Fisher’s, too, that I learned that my own name is a version of Sophia, meaning wisdom. I glowed with that discovery. And I never did return the book.

USUALLY
, when I didn’t understand what was going on with someone, I could listen carefully and observe until I figured things out. But with my mother, still sitting alone in darkness behind her closed door, there were no clues. As far as I knew, when Papi was alive, they did nothing but fight. If they weren’t screaming, they were putting up a stone wall of bitter silence between them. I couldn’t remember ever having seen them happy together. And so her sadness, if that’s what it was, seemed irrational to me.