XXXIII

“What?”

I sat stupefied in my parents’ living room, unable to believe what my mother was telling me.

“Alejandra, please,” she said. Her mouth was swollen from crying and biting, her eyes were red-rimmed. My tía Gladys sat on the couch with her arm around her, patting her shoulders and back to comfort and support her. My cousins and the undertaker were on their way, my father’s body stiffening on his deathbed under Mike Kauf’s watchful eye.

“I can’t believe that,” I said, tipping the rocking chair forward, bringing it as low as possible without slipping and falling.

“He wrote it out,” my mother said, sniffling, her hand reaching out to my knee, turquoise twine underneath her pale skin. “Do you want to see it?”

“Nena!” my aunt protested. “You don’t have to prove anything to her! If you say it’s so, it’s so! He was your husband!”

I turned away in disgust.

“Gladys, por favor,” my mother pleaded. She shook her off, got up, and marched downstairs to my father’s office.

My tía Gladys and I sat in silence. I stared at the floor and the wall and into the blackness. I felt my chest exposed, my bones seared by caustic winds. All the while, my aunt eyed me in disbelief and loathing.

My aunt, who wed Mike Kauf for love, always saw her marriage as some sort of spiritual battlefield. Early on, she convinced him that their children should be Catholic—strictly Roman, fully invested in the pope’s infallibility—a decision I always thought he might have reconsidered if he’d realized her future fanaticism: Not just Catholic schooling for their primary and secondary education, but Catholic universities, too, DePaul and my father’s beloved Loyola. (I graduated from Jesuit-run Loyola, too, with a degree in Spanish, but mostly because my father’s position translated into free tuition.)

For my cousins, it was Catholic summer camps, church-approved movies, subscriptions to Catholic newspapers, antiabortion protests, passage on the cruise ship to see John Paul II in Cuba the following winter—the only reason to ever go back to the island, my aunt assured us, looking accusingly at me, while my father pondered aloud (but not in her presence) why, if seeing the pope was so vital, she hadn’t traveled to Nicaragua or Nigeria during those papal trips, or why she’d settled for edge-of-the-park seats during his holiness’s Chicago stops. . . .

Of course, in my aunt’s eyes, my family had never set a particularly good example. My parents treated faith as an individual quest. I was baptized, certainly, but no great effort had ever been made to haul me off to church on Sundays or instill in me a particular vision. When I was a child my aunt had tried to include me in some of her family’s hyper-Catholic activities, but my mother always asked me if I wanted to go, and when I saw that neither she nor my father were coming, I couldn’t fathom why I should. My mother never forced me, even though my aunt tried to convince her I really wasn’t old enough (ever) to decide these things, that I needed a stronger, firmer hand to guide me before I could make such decisions on my own.

Once, as a child, I’d asked my mother about the room in the basement reserved for her altar—next to my father’s office, naturally—and she’d been good and patient and told me the story of the black women in her grandmother’s kitchen. She told me, too, about how the Virgin of Charity had saved us on our escape from Cuba, led us right into the warm waters of South Beach. The altar, which was modest by comparison to others I’ve seen since, was a way of giving back, my mother said. The Virgin was its center, surrounded by flowers, water, little gifts (always fruits and candies, never animals in the United States). The same room, however, had its practical purposes: This was where my mother kept the vacuum cleaner, where she accumulated clothing for charity that we’d outgrown or no longer favored, where she kept her photo albums and my old report cards.

A few times, I had helped my mother fill the glasses with water, scrubbing the rings formed from previous infusions, and I’d watch— she let me watch, unlike my father—as she prayed, sometimes silently, sometimes aloud. She’d ask la Virgen de la Caridad for my father’s health, and to keep us both safe. “And help Alejandra find her own way,” she’d say. She’d hug me afterward, and I’d feel warm and sleepy against her.

For my tía Gladys, my mother’s animism was annoying but not terribly threatening. My aunt considered my mother’s faith essentially superstition, tolerating it as a result of Nena’s orphaned youth, a refuge the poor girl had found in her abandonment. In Cuba, Tía Gladys had seen the most educated of people put a glass of water under their beds to keep away evil spirits. And she knew it was possible to play these silly games and still be a good Catholic—that the imagery of the orishas depended so much on Roman iconography gave her, I think, a certain reassurance about Catholic inevitability. My aunt counted on last-minute enlightenment, deathbed repentance, and conversion.

In his later years, my father and I talked about how—though Gladys claimed to respect Mike Kauf ’s Judaism—we knew she had illusions of him coming to his senses in the end, her years of conviction repaid with a final whispered acceptance of Christ. We knew it was no accident that, as the years went by, Mike Kauf observed fewer and fewer Jewish rites, his family obligations on the High Holidays always too complicated to let him get away or make time. Not that Mike Kauf was that observant to begin with: Raised a Conservative Jew, he rarely attended services, but each year during Yom Kippur and sometimes at Pesaj he’d pine a bit and my aunt would shrug, looking hurt as she let him know he was, of course, free to do whatever he needed, if only he could first help her clean the gutters, quickly before it got dark.

I know my aunt was less than thrilled when my mother explained my father’s heritage. But I also know she assumed, since he was already publicly on the road to Christianity, however uneven the route, that his journey would be relatively quick, somewhat effortless. It never crossed her mind that my parents would find mystical coexistence, that they’d help each other—my father fixing my mother’s icon, my mother learning to prepare holiday foods, even if the feast days themselves went unnamed at our table (among my favorites: her black-eyed peas with roasted fish head for Rosh Hashanah). That my parents allowed, even encouraged, my seder attendance at friends’ homes bothered my aunt, but she was hard-pressed to criticize too much when, as young adults, my cousins began to go, too, although not regularly, and more out of curiosity and politeness than the need for connection that I felt so feverishly.

“Well, the Last Supper was a seder,” my aunt would say, rationalizing. “It’s part of our Judeo-Catholic tradition after all. I mean, it was Jesus who started it.”

For the longest time, I know my tía Gladys thought my destiny was like that of souls in limbo—ignorant, impotent, at the mercy of prayers by the faithful still in the material world—until I grew old enough to start questioning my father, fascinated by his mysteries, and became more and more drawn to his private, anguished worship. The more my mother shared of her world, the more it underscored the forbidding gates at my father’s kingdom, the more I wanted to see past the mist, listen for the murmur of prayers beyond the silence. And this intense curiosity about him and his ways seemed to tip the scales, sealed for my aunt my and my father’s doomed fates.

Later, as he realized he was dying, he seemed to see me staring at him just outside Elysium, and at some point he let down his guard, allowing me a closer peek at his realm. We talked more openly, we touched and laughed together as if it had always been that way, sweet and easy. My mother was so relieved at our reconciliation that she celebrated my gift of the mezuzah, she placed a fragile copy of Judah Halevi’s verses on the nightstand for me to read to my father: “It would be easy for me to abandon all the splendor of Sepharad / and beautiful simply to regard the ruins of our ravaged temple.” ³

But when it became clear my father was going under, that a gentle but all powerful tide would gather him and suck him down into the abyss, she panicked like a drowning woman. She lost all reason, twisting madly, grabbing at everything and nothing. She kicked and screamed; she fought with everything she could muster to keep him on her plain and sunny shore.

It’s not just that my mother was dependent on my father in myriad ways, but that my mother had never, ever imagined life without him. Who was she without my father? What was there to anchor if not him? (Me, I’m a balloon, a bird in flight, already well beyond her reach.)

When she found me at my father’s side after his last breath, she squinted as if trying to readjust the picture of her new life, held her heavy head in her hands then bent down to him and felt his chest for his heartbeat. When she failed to find it where it should have been, she began to look everywhere, as if he had hidden treasure in his body, checking the pulse on his arms, neck, throat, with a frenzy and desperation that flabbergasted me.

“Mami, Mami,” I said, putting my arms around her, trying to hold her steady.

She hiccupped. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way, Alejandra,” she whispered.

“He was fine, Mami, he was peaceful, it all happened very quickly,” I tried to reassure her.

“No, no,” she said, practically wrestling with me, “you don’t understand, you don’t understand.”

I let her go. She put her forehead on my father’s chest, caressing him through the sheet I’d pulled up to cover him. She cried like that for a long time while I stroked her back. As I watched her, I tried to imagine her in the aftermath of all this—wandering aimlessly from room to room, the kitchen cold and useless, letting her roses wilt and die, everything turning into mushy black like the fruits at her altar.

“I thought I’d be first,” she said, fingering the bluish mole on her cheek.

I sighed. “Papi was older, Mami, it’s logical he should go first,” I said.

She shook her head like a petulant child. “No,” she said in frustration, then pointed at her face. “See this? See this?” The mole was like a polished stone that morning, shiny and brazen. “I thought if I just let it go . . . you know, if I just left it alone . . .”

“Mami!” I gasped.

“It’s true. I thought I could be first then,” she said, awash in tears as she gazed at my father and placed his cool hand between hers, squeezing and patting it. “I thought . . . for sure . . .”

I put my hands on her shoulders and leaned into her, kissing the back of her neck, holding her to me, thinking the whole time: What will she do now? What will she do?

“See?”

My mother had handed me a short handwritten letter from my father that was to serve as his will; the taunt was not coming from her but my aunt.

“Your mother would not lie to you, Alejandra—my god, only you would even think it.”

“Gladys! ¡Ya! ¡Por favor!” my mother exclaimed. She was genuinely irritated. She sat down next to me on the couch and leaned against me. Gladys made a face and plopped down in one of my father’s rocking chairs, resigned.

I read over my father’s words, through the blue ink loops and curlicues: “I know Alejandra will balk, but I also know she will honor my request. I know that she will think I’ve compromised. But what I know is that god is beyond my imagination, his power beyond my abilities to see, and that what is clear to me is that he said, ‘Return to me and I shall return to you.’ This is what I wish, nothing else: Not to be buried, but cremated, my ashes returned to Cuba and spread over the bay in Havana. That is all I want—no elaborate ceremony, no shiva, no mass, nothing but that. And I’d like to ask Alejandra, who is so precious to me, to be the person who takes me home.”