Once out of the narrow hallway of the tenement we were living in at the time, my mother depended upon me to speak for her, to stand between her and the cold, racial glare of Broadway shopkeepers whose sluggish ill will never lost its power to quell me even as it aroused a desperate desire to hear, directed toward Mamá and me, the plain justice which their voices expressed when they served other customers, Irish or German, I guessed, or similar, proper folk, who so complacently placed their canned fruit and vegetables, their white bread and dusty potatoes, on the wooden counter while the grocer, with a pencil stub, rapidly added up the prices with a self-important flourish, then rang up the total on a huge cash register whose drawer shooting out with a loud bang to receive bills and coins always made Mamá start as if at that same instant she had discovered there was no money in her pocketbook to pay for our few purchases, canned milk or vinegar, or three brown eggs.

It was only in Mr. Salazar’s bodega, after a hasty, frightened run from our flat, that Mamá moved with a touch of ease as she estimated the ripeness of plantains, or slipped her hand into a sack of black beans, or touched with one finger the fleshy white roots of sweet cassava in its open wooden crate.

Here in the dim, tiny Spanish grocery store on Broadway and 158th Street, which always smelled of cat urine and cockroach poison, of spiced sausage and coconut candy, Henry Salazar, a tall, elderly, unsmiling Cuban from whose steel-framed spectacles the left lens was missing, weighed lard and onions, and, when asked for it, went to a cubicle at the back of the store and returned with what always looked to be the same gray slab of pork banded with lines of dried dark blood. From this he carved rough chunks, throwing them on his scale until a customer cried, “bastante!”

Below the counter, he kept a stack of lottery tickets for sale, and near a shelf of boxes of Dutch Cleanser and cakes of yellow kitchen soap, a telephone. It was this last which drew customers to the bodega as much, if not more, than Salazar’s meager stores of what the neighborhood Irish children called “spic grub.”

Salazar charged two cents for each use of the telephone; he kept the pennies in large glass jars on a shelf off by themselves. Some storekeepers displayed jellybeans in jars, offering a prize to whoever could guess the correct number of candies in them. I tried to guess at the calls for help the pennies in Salazar’s jars represented, how many inquiries made to remote authorities for news of lost relatives.

Once when I’d been sent for a bottle of milk, a woman was behind the counter weeping into the phone. “Send a police—send, please—” she gasped out. Salazar was wrapping a loaf of lard for another customer who stared aghast at the weeping woman. “Send doctor…”

When she had replaced the receiver, Salazar put down the lard and held out his long hand. Dazed, she stared down into it. “Dos centavos,” he said gravely. She stroked her cheeks, shook her head. “He swallowed rat poison,” she said. “He’s dancing—on his back—on the floor.” The other customer put the two pennies in Salazar’s hand. As I left, I heard the clink of them dropping into a jar.

After Mamá had carried her groceries in a cloth bag back to the kitchen of our tenement flat, she would sit on the edge of a stool near the sink and stare at what she had bought. She kept one foot on the floor; the other dangled like a child’s. Her body was heavy and shapeless in a dress of dark material, and she slumped, exhausted after her perilous journey. Slowly, she would begin to put things away.

Nearly every day when I got home from school, I found Mamá sitting on that stool, one elbow on the counter, staring into the sink, waiting for me to lead her out into the New York streets as if she was blind and deaf.

We had been in New York City for five years. She had not learned English despite the months she had worked in a perfume factory across the Hudson River in New Jersey.

But she managed to keep the job for a year, traveling by subway, then by bus, to the bench where she sat all day long in front of a machine that stoppered bottles of scent, surrounded by women from whose mouths issued a blizzard of language, white and cold, she said to me, like the snow, hard, she said, like the patches of ice on the sidewalk in winter before which she would shudder with dread as I yanked at her arm or grabbed folds of her worn black coat to drag her on and into one of the flats where Papá had moved us because of a rent concession. Several times we moved because he needed more space for boarders who would rent from us one of the linoleum-floored cubicles along the hallway, each furnished with a bureau, a chair and a spindly bed.

It was one of those boarders, Maura Cruz, who found Mamá the job in the perfume factory, and who, with frantic insistence, tried to compel Mamá into becoming an American. And when she was fired from the perfume factory—as a consequence of her inattention, many unstoppered bottles had drenched the skirts and legs of the talkative women further on down the assembly line with the powerful if synthetic aroma of spring flowers—it was Maura who found her work she could do at home. This job, making beaded bags, required only that she deliver her completed work once a month. But the wholesale office to which she had to take the bags was so far downtown that she complained the subway ride was nearly as long as our journey from San Pedro. I had to go with her, she said, because she would not be able to argue with the man who was to pay her for her labor, and whom Maura referred to as a thieving Jew.

The thieving Jew had a dingy little office at the front end of a dark loft near Delancey Street. He was middle-aged, a tired-looking man who barely spoke to us, taking the beaded bags, one at a time, from the sack in which Mamá had carried them, and looking at them so closely he seemed about to press them like handkerchiefs to his eyes. We made thirteen trips to him. Each time, he paid Mamá exactly the sum Maura had told her to insist upon. One late afternoon, he told us he was bankrupt.

“No more business. No more money,” he said when he had counted out eighteen dollars, placing the crumpled bills in Mamá’s hand. “Is he lying?” she asked me in Spanish. I glanced at him. Before I could answer her, he said, “No, I’m not lying,” so diffidently, so mildly, that I felt a rush of sympathy toward him, and surprise that he understood our language. He smiled at me abstractedly, then turned away, placing his hands on the rough table he used for a desk and leaning on them, a grimace of pain on his nearly hidden face.

After these trips, we returned home to find the early winter dusk waiting for us at the top of the subway stairs, or else the long, hazy evenings of summer when men and children gathered beneath the street lights on our corner, shouting at each other in a language that was not Spanish or English but an agitated, harsh mingling of both. A year after Mamá lost her job in the perfume factory, she explained to me, “I couldn’t pay attention to those bottles that flew past me. How could I—with those women always talking?”

“You didn’t have to listen to them.”

“Ah, but I did! They wanted me to know how ignorant I was. They watched me when they talked. I was drowning, I tell you.”

I knew she understood more than she let on, but Mamá’s inability, or refusal, to learn to speak English was like an ailment which ate away at her nature. Even the country folk who rented rooms from us for a few months, and who often came from remote rural districts in Cuba or Puerto Rico, even those guajiros, so ignorant that our chain-pull toilet alarmed them as Beatriz de la Cueva’s servants’ toilet had once alarmed me, would press me—whom they treated in this regard as an authority because I went to school—to help them speak as Americans spoke, to teach them to unlock their tongues so they could pronounce, without that Antilles accent to which they attributed so much of their social and economic misery, those particular words which began with the treacherous th, or those that ended with the perverse, unspellable ough, or the homely ing which was, said a young woman from San Juan, exactly like the sound made by a saltón. “In English, a saltón is a grasshopper,” I said. “Que barbaridad!” she commented.

The Great Depression was not unique to these immigrants who had experienced so much want. When Papá told one of our boarders, Enrique Machado, that there had been sixteen million unemployed people in 1933, the Cuban shrugged. “Hombre! You get a long ride on the subway for a nickel,” he said, as though offering proof of a prosperity kept out of his reach only by his inability to sound like everyone else.

Mamá clung to the old language like a shipwrecked person might cling to a plank, caught in currents which were carrying her ever further from the shore.

 

During our first summer in New York, in 1936, Papá had told us that the gift of money made to him by his mother, and which we had not known about until that moment, was half spent. I think Mamá had known Papá had not won the lottery. She had guessed that he had borrowed money for our passage and settling in the United States from Dr. Baca, or some other crony he had had in Tres Hermanos.

When she learned where it had come from, Mamá was so outraged that Papá had made a secret of its source, she went to her bed and lay down upon it and vowed she would not rise again to cook meals and wash and iron for a man who had insulted her so deeply by not confiding in her.

“I am a fool!” she cried bitterly as Papá stood in the doorway of the kitchen, and I lurked in the dark hall near their bedroom.

“I, who each day take pennies and nickels to that bellaco, Salazar, to buy that porquería he sells that I make into meals to keep you alive—I, whose every day is full of misery—how can I clothe the girl? How can I keep her so she doesn’t go among the American children like a beggar? Where am I? What is this terrible place you’ve brought us to?”

“She has no sense,” Papá muttered while Mamá sobbed convulsively. “She’s forgotten she is in her own country.”

This earlier news, that we were not immigrants but American citizens, and which Mamá had learned in San Pedro before we had even embarked on our ship and which, I suppose, had made no difference in her life that she could grasp, was given to me when I was first enrolled in the public school on Amsterdam Avenue. With his customary, disdainful curtness, Papá had told me that his father, Antonio, had been an American citizen, relinquishing his Spanish citizenship long before he went to San Pedro to claim his own father’s legacy to him of the plantation of Malagita. I had been astonished to think, those first days among the school children whose language I could not yet speak, that I was an American like them, even though I had been born a bastard.

Papá went to the bedroom door. “We have rent from the boarders,” he said defensively. “Don’t forget that.”

“The boarders!” exclaimed Mamá. “The boarders steal into my kitchen in the night and eat what little food is left. They don’t pay the rent except when it suits them. My daughter teaches them for nothing. The boarders! Don’t speak of them!”

Papá went down the hall and out the door, slamming it behind him. I peeked into the room. Mamá was sitting on the edge of the bed. She looked more frightened than angry.

“Should I make supper?” I asked her.

She moaned faintly. “No, no. I’ll get up. I’ll get up in a moment.” She held out her hand, and I went and held it. It was moist and lay slackly in mine.

“Look, you see. Now I know there was a certain sum—well—I can see the very last cent of it. What can he do? He’s not fit for finding work. What will happen to us, Nena? Do you remember the Estradas?”

An old woman, Mrs. Estrada, and her granddaughter, Alicia, had lived down the hall from us when we’d first moved in. I hadn’t seen them for months.

“I didn’t tell you. You know, she was very clean, that old woman. She made a pot of soup for her little Alicia every night. She, herself, was not eating the soup. One morning when you were at school, the police came. She had starved herself to death, you see. They had nothing. In this country, you can die of hunger, never mind what that fool Enrique Machado says. In San Pedro, there was always something to eat. But here? Who would know about it if you died in your bed like Mrs. Estrada? Only when the police come.”

I imagined I could hear two pennies dropping into one of Mr. Salazar’s jars.

A week later Maura Cruz came to us to rent a room and, eventually, to find Mamá her jobs in the perfume factory and for the thieving Jew. But Papá did not work for some years.

 

When I watched Mamá ironing a shirt of Papá’s as she bent over the sheet-covered plank balanced on two straight-backed chairs that she used for an ironing board, her own dress unpressed, her lips moving as she talked to herself, I wanted to kick away the plank, its clumsiness and inadequacy proof that I would never be able to enter that world which I had begun to suspect lay beyond our barrio.

Papá’s shirts always were ironed. Each morning he polished his black shoes with a frayed rag. Each morning he shaved with his straight razor so closely he seemed, daily, to have scraped away more of the thin flesh that veiled his prominent cheekbones and sharp chin. Directly after I left for school, clattering down the narrow stairs that led from our flat to the entrance hall, I could hear his footsteps behind me. I had even less idea of where he went than I had had in Malagita.

Our first flat had been two tiny rooms in a damp basement next to a coal chute, its door lit faintly by a dusty bulb that hung from a low ceiling from among a thicket of narrow pipes which gurgled and shuddered along their length day and night. From our one window, we saw above us the feet and ankles of passersby. I thought we had come there to die—or that the place was the hell Father Céspedes had described with such satisfaction. After we left there, Papá always managed to get the top floor flat in most of the dirty brick tenements in which we lived. Once we were given a six-month rent concession. On the first day of the seventh month, Papá moved us out to a new and identical railroad flat. Indeed, they were like rusty, railroad cars—narrow high-ceilinged halls, three or four bedrooms off them, a kitchen with a deep sink, next to it a grooved metal counter, a parlor at the end of the hall with two windows opening to a fire escape. In one flat where we lived almost a year, a young rent collector, whose father owned the building, came on the first day of the month and stood nervously in the doorway, his nostrils pinched, his lips tightly closed to shut out the smell of our life.

The first time I ventured out into the street by myself, feeling all around me the vast, people-choked city, it seemed to me that Malagita could not exist. As I stood there, not daring to leave the entrance of the building, I felt such a shocking loss, I begun to cry aloud. Mamá heard me from our basement rooms and came to get me and lead me, sobbing, into their dark depths.

We began to accumulate things; a collection of iron bedsteads which, when I touched them, gave me the taste of vinegar on my tongue, thin mattresses covered with coarse-stained ticking, a metal table in one of whose snapping joints I broke my finger, my father’s armchair, a present Mamá had bought him when she was working at the perfume factory and which she had paid for over eight months on an installment plan, and about whose worm-pink cover Papá never ceased to make sarcastic comments, wondering aloud if my mother’s brain contained any other idea of color than pink. Long after the color faded, he would point a derisive finger at it and shake his head.

When we moved from the basement home, we had Papá’s suitcases and two boxes of bedding, a few pots, a small, black iron Mamá had to heat on a stove, and a plunger with a broken handle which Papá had found in a garbage can, and which we had to use often for the toilet in that most wretched of all our homes. On our last move, which we made the year I was seventeen, in 1943, during the war, we had fourteen boxes. On the top of one I carried, I saw Mamá’s Sacred Heart, the same one I had watched her slip into a suitcase in Malagita so long ago. The stuffing had leaked out of the heart which was now collapsed, and Mamá had handled the card so much there were dark splotches on the face of Jesus so that He looked as though He’d been in a street brawl.

We rarely heard from our boarders once they shut our front door behind them and went down the stairs to the street and to different lives. But as we moved from flat to flat, each within a radius of a dozen blocks or so from each other on the east side of Broadway, two of them, Maura Cruz, and the short, explosive Enrique Machado, remained with us for years, moving with us and helping transport our household goods. My father lent his strength only to carry the detested armchair. Once we passed another family on the move. The man and his two sons averted their faces as though to show they were not like us, but the woman, gripping several stuffed pillow cases, gave us a look of wry commiseration.

 

At waking one’s body is without age. It is like the body of someone newly born. That moment in which one is most insensible begins to fill up with the sorrowful presentiment of an absence. I recall how the morning light first touches the top of the tallest royal palm and the face of the clock tower, then a narrow dirt road still cool from the night’s moisture and a ditch beside it in which deep shadows run like water. It gilds a palmetto, the fronds of a thatch above the dried red mud walls of a bohío and sends a radiant shaft across the earthen floor to a low bed where it reveals who it is I grieve for, Nana. She is covered by a sheet around which she has crocheted a border of margaritas, her braid of black hair touches the floor, her long lids are shut but will soon open; as mine have; when she wakes to another day and slowly remembers, as I have remembered, what she has lost.

 

My mother and I had a violent fight. One morning she felt ill. I made up her bed for her. Beneath the thin mattress, I found six letters I had written to Nana.

“You didn’t mail them!” I screamed with rage and panic.

She put down her cup of coffee and clutched her breast. Her hair was frazzled, the sleeve of her pink robe torn. “Hija…” she muttered.

“My God! How could you! How I hate you!”

She flung cup and contents at me. It struck my chin; the coffee splattered on my blouse.

“Atrevida!” she cried. “First, Orlando, now you!”

All these months I had imagined Nana reading my letters, touching them. I was beside myself. Sobbing, I yelled, “Yes, I dare! I’ll call the police!”

Papá and Maura Cruz ran into the kitchen.

“Stop this noise at once!” he ordered.

Mamá had risen from her stool and was advancing toward me, her hands above her head balled into fists.

“You sack of rot!” I shouted.

“Oh! I’ll kill her!” swore Mamá.

Maura Cruz threw herself bodily against Mamá. Papá picked me up, his arm hard around my waist, and took me down the hall and flung me on my bed. He slammed the door shut with such force that flakes of blue paint rained from the ceiling to the floor.

I cried tears of pure rage for a long time. I fell asleep. I woke to shame. There was silence in the flat. I had missed school. What excuse could I write out for myself which Mamá would sign in handwriting more like a child’s than mine? I had to use the toilet. There was no one in the hall. When I returned to my room, Mamá, fully dressed, her hair tidy, was sitting on my bed.

“I mailed the letters while you slept,” she said softly.

I lay with my head in her lap.

“She can read, you know, but she can’t write—well, perhaps, a word, two words. It was my father who was really educated. So I thought—I see how wrong it was now—that there was no value in sending the letters you wrote. But—perhaps it’s because I’m so sad that I don’t do much…well, Nena, I wrote a note myself, though she can’t answer it. But I thought, someone might answer it for her. So I asked her for the address of my brother, your Uncle Federico.”

“You went to the post office by yourself?”

“By myself,” she said humbly.

She stroked my hair. “Such a pretty color,” she said. “What would be the American word for this color?”

“They have no word for it,” I assured her, wanting to shield her from any uncertainty.

“Brown,” she pronounced rather grandly after a moment of thought, rolling the r as though it were a small wheel inside the word. Her hand rested on my head. “That was a horrible thing you called me.”

“Oh, Mamá…I didn’t mean it.”

“Tell me,” she said, “what were you going to call the police for? And where were you going to get the two pennies for Señor Salazar’s big jars?” She suddenly began to laugh. It was a sound of deep hilarity such as I had seldom heard from her.

I couldn’t think what I’d had in mind for the police to do. Her laughter trailed off. She touched my ear. “There’s no use in calling them,” she said pensively. “They don’t like us here.”

 

After mailing my letters and her note, Mamá developed a craving to hear from her mother. For several weeks, she crept off every afternoon to a Catholic church, ten blocks south of where we lived, to pray for word from Nana. I had passed her once on Broadway but she didn’t see me. She was keeping close to the store fronts, her face frightened but resolute.

She didn’t like the church. “God is someone else in this country,” she said. At first she had gone to confession but she couldn’t understand the words the Irish priest rattled off behind his wooden grill in the confessional box, and she was ashamed of how few English words she had with which to disclose her sins.

“Orgullo,” she said to me one afternoon as she slipped her rosary into her old black pocketbook and tied a scarf around her head. “What is that in English?”

“Pride,” I answered in surprise. When she returned that day, she told me the priest had asked her if there were missionaries in San Pedro. That was, at least, what she thought he had asked her. “As though we were Africans…” she exclaimed indignantly. Years later, she asked me how to say desesperacíon, and when I said, despair, she bowed her head as though she had heard a fatal judgment. By then, she had given up confession and rarely went to the church, such a huge place, the air cold even in summer.

But her prayers for word from Nana were answered. A month or so after my letters had gone out, a reply arrived from San Pedro written in a careful, rounded hand by my old teacher, Señora Garcia:

 

Your mother received with great happiness her granddaughter’s letters. Everything Luisa wrote is beautiful to her. She hopes there will be more letters so that she can hear Luisa’s voice over the thousands of miles that separate her from Luisa herself. Señora Sanchez has good health. But La Señora de la Cueva is more crazy than ever. (I write this because Señora Sanchez commanded me to. I don’t agree.) The last address she has of Federico in New York City is a restaurant called Salamanca. She sends embraces and kisses to her children so far away.

 

My father, with unusual alacrity, agreed at once to try to find the Salamanca restaurant and inquire after Federico’s whereabouts. But when Mamá took two pennies from a milk bottle in which she kept change and held them out to him, he pushed her hand away impatiently, saying he wouldn’t set foot in that Cuban’s store but would find a public telephone somewhere.

Mamá and I sat together silently, staring at Señora Garcia’s letter. “Your Papá’s lonely,” she said suddenly.

I was preoccupied by the answer to Nana I was fervently composing in my mind, describing to her how Mamá and I had squeezed next to each other in the pink armchair to read Señora Garcia’s words over and over again. “Lonely?” I repeated disbelievingly.

I saw a slow blush spread over Mamá’s face as if, unintentionally, she had revealed something intimate, and perhaps shameful, about my father.

Papá had found a telephone number for the restaurant and had actually spoken to Federico himself. He refused to answer Mamá’s questions—how did her brother sound? Was he happy? Had he asked after her?—except to say that Federico had promised to visit us very soon.

The following Sunday at noon, there was a loud, impatient banging at our door. Maura, whose bedroom was nearest the door, got to it first and opened it. My uncle Federico, his wife, Aurelia, and their son, my cousin, Atilio, brushed past her and in single file marched down the hall to the parlor where Mamá, moved to tears by the occasion—she hadn’t seen her brother for nineteen years—had risen to her feet and was holding out her arms.

Uncle Federico embraced Mamá with an odd, finicking haste, cast a glance at me, then, with a measuring stare, looked around at the room. He sat down on a straight-backed chair, opened his mouth and in a rapid, heavily accented but utterly confident English, related to us his first struggles in the United States, how he had overcome every handicap, how he had risen to the position he now held as maître d’hôtel at the Salamanca restaurant which was, naturally, downtown, and was famous for Spanish cooking, the world’s greatest cuisine, mistakenly credited to France by ignorant people who imagined that in Spain everyone did nothing but eat rice and beans all day long to the accompaniment of castanets.

At first, Mamá had cried out to him to speak in Spanish, or, for God’s sake, to go more slowly in English. But she soon fell silent, the strain on her face as she had tried to follow what Federico was saying replaced by a look of dejection of which, perhaps, she was conscious, because she gave him an occasional, hesitant smile as though to gainsay it. Federico did not notice her smiles; all along his eyes had been fixed upon Papá who, to my surprise, seemed to relish my uncle’s every word.

Nana’s son! It was hard to believe, although he resembled her more than my mother did. It was a clownish resemblance like that left of the original faces of the subjects of portrait photographs after Maura had tinted them with special paints, work she did in the evening for extra money.

Atilio, several years older than I, kept on his little hat which sat ridiculously in the middle of his fiercely curling black hair. His plump, sullen face was as smooth as an almond. He made a dumb show of his reluctance to place his bottom on anything in our parlor. He was wearing a vest as well as a jacket, and the heat—it was August—made him sweat, drops of it running down his forehead. I saw his Mamá take a large, violet handkerchief from her pocketbook, and looking to see that Uncle Federico was not watching, wipe her son’s face and the sides of his short, thick nose, exactly like her own, while he stood scowling at her.

Federico, like many people who never need pause to think, didn’t run out of subjects. He spoke of gala dinners at the Salamanca, of his professional acquaintance with the important people who frequented the restaurant, of the Ford automobile he was considering purchasing from a certain priest—he couldn’t reveal the priest’s name at the moment, but he was a man of some political power in the Latin community—who was offering it for sale, and of the mountains northwest of the city where he had taken Aurelia and Atilio for a week’s holiday last summer.

“What!” he exclaimed, although no one had said anything. “You haven’t been out of the city yet? Incredible! Ah, Orlando, you must see this wonderful American countryside.”

My father held a cigarette to his mouth. So quickly, it seemed one bland motion, Uncle Federico whipped out a box of matches from his pocket, fired one, lit the cigarette and made a slight bow. Aurelia, whose corset stays I could see poking against the fabric of her dress, had gone to stare out the window while Mamá went to the kitchen to make coffee. Federico spoke of the excellent condition of the upholstery in the priest’s Ford, the number of patrons who could be seated in the Salamanca, the cost of his holiday, and the spaciousness of the Sanchez apartment on the upper east side of the city.

“You have a refrigerator?” he asked Papá who shook his head, an amiable smile on his lips. “Ah, yes. Then you have an icebox. So did we, at first, didn’t we, Aurelia? But now of course, we own one,” and he smiled grandly. Papá nodded again as though he shared Federico’s consciousness of his own consequence.

He asked Mamá, just before he left, “And how is our Mamacita?” He looked over her head at once as though silence would be preferable to an answer.

“I had not spoken to her for years until just before we left Malagita, then we—”

Federico interrupted her with a noisy sigh. “Yes, she’s difficult, our mother. She has a difficult temperament. Old-fashioned ideas, you know.”

Mamá looked hopefully into Aurelia’s sudden stare of interest. “It was because of Orlando and me that she wouldn’t speak,” she said gravely.

“Don’t you have a radio?” Atilio whispered to me. I shook my head. Maura Cruz leaned out into the hall where we were all standing.

“Who’s that little monkey?” she asked in a loud whisper, pointing a finger at Atilio. There was a movement to the door, and the Sanchez family, accompanied by Papá, stepped out of the flat into the hall.

“Good-bye, my little niece,” Uncle Federico called back. Papá closed the door and Mamá went to the kitchen. I followed. She was sitting on the stool, holding a cup beneath a trickle of water from the tap. Her dress was the same color as the cheesecloth through which she poured boiled milk for our coffee. A hairpin was about to fall from the knob of hair at her neck. Maura ran into the kitchen and stood there with her hands on her hips, her face intent as she looked at Mamá.

“Let Orlando go with them!” Mamá suddenly shouted. “Those Americans!”

“That boy looked exactly like a monkey,” said Maura.

Mamá wiped her face with a dishrag then looked at it with disgust. “My family,” she muttered. “That was my nephew and my brother.” She caught sight of me. “Take down the clothes in the bathroom,” she said harshly.

Had she guessed I was counting up the ways in which Aurelia was superior to her? Aurelia’s hair was short. I had smelled the thrilling, scorched odor of her permanent wave. The seams of her stockings ran precisely down the middle of her thick calves. Her dress was pressed, her corset, immense, a coat of armor, powerfully holding her together.

I went to the bathroom where our clothes were hung to dry on three cords stretched above the bathtub. Except for a pair of Mamá’s mended stockings, everything was damp.

The wooden handle of the toilet chain was loose. Above the toilet, a narrow window let in a few inches of light that had a gray bloom to it like a rain cloud’s. The sash was askew; it could neither be raised nor lowered. Kneeling on the toilet seat, I saw an identical window set into a dark wall a few feet away. As I peered through the uneven opening, I became convinced all the air was leaking away, down to the invisible place below from which I’d sometimes heard the barbed yowling of cats. I ran out into the silent hall. If only I could find my way to the Sanchez apartment glowing with light on the upper east side! What did it matter how awful the three of them were if they had escaped from the barrio!

 

The Sanchez family did not visit us on many occasions, but Papá often went to the Salamanca late at night at closing time to pick up Federico and go with him to some club on the east side. I visited the Sanchez home some years later. I was not as surprised as I might have been the first day I met them to discover that their apartment was not so different from the railroad flats we had lived in. Only its furnishings—monstrous, overstuffed chairs squatting side by side in the living room on a carpet the color of Mercurochrome, glass tables cluttered with china statues of shepherdesses, squirrels and birds, and a radio in a large cabinet on top of which stood a vaguely sacramental plaster figure of a man clutching a staff around which someone had tied a purple satin ribbon, and the intermittent, clanking shimmy of the refrigerator—were to substantiate Uncle Federico’s claims to material success.

There were a few “clubs” on the west side, too, small abandoned stores furnished with a few folding chairs, a few card tables, where Latin men gathered in the evenings. When Mamá sent me on a late errand, I could hear the cadenced clack-clack of dominoes as they racked them up, the released excitement in their voices as they shouted and quarrelled and laughed over their games. They were, in their club, triumphant exiles. They kept their hats on. For adornment? Protection? I hated those hats. I hated the way the men strutted around each other, crowing Oye! Oye!—listen! listen!—and when, one such summer evening, I saw Papá through a dusty window moving among other men with a bodily ease, an expression of leniency on his face I had not seen at home, I hated him. But he never wore a hat, not even in the iron cold winters.

More and more frequently, he was away from our flat. But, as in Malagita, Mamá would set three places at the kitchen table, and when he did not come, would cover his food with a plate and put it aside for him.

If she begged him for money, holding up a patched coat which I had long outgrown, and pointing at me—“the girl grows so fast…she must have a new coat,” he would push her aside. “Don’t pester me,” he would say.

Somehow Mamá kept me clothed. After she stopped working, she would filch change from Papá’s pockets, and borrow from Maura or Enrique Machado, and gradually amass enough to buy me a sweater or material to make me a dress which she sewed by hand, dragging her stool to the window to get as much light as possible.

I cannot remember my father saying good morning to me; I recall only an atmosphere he brought about by his intent watchfulness to which I awoke each weekday. He didn’t make my lunch or pass a comb through my hair—Mamá did that—but it was the force of his silent insistence that pushed me down the hall and out the door to school.

Yet he was indifferent to what I was taught as long as I could speak and write English. Often, he made me read to him from a newspaper, correcting my accent or demanding I explain the meaning of a word. If my explanation was wrong, he closed his eyes for a long time. I stared at his shirt to see if he was still breathing, imagining that, finally, he’d died of disgust at me.

One morning I found a dollar beneath the jar of change. I took it.

I didn’t go to school but to the Red Robin movie house on Broadway and waited beneath the marquee until it opened at ten A.M. I sat through three entire programs, a serial, a cartoon, a travelogue on Naples, Italy, and two movies. I’d left my lunch at home. As my hunger increased, I grew aware of how weak a form my defiance of Papá had taken, knowing that despite the intimation of eternity aroused by a whole day at the movies, I would have to go home eventually. I was thirteen—there was no other place to go.

When Mamá saw me, she covered her mouth with her hand as she did when she was frightened or scandalized. I shrugged with the last of my courage. “Ay! Did you take it? He knows you took it,” she whispered. I could have denied the theft. Not only boarders wandered through the flat but their friends and cousins.

Papá stood in the doorway of the kitchen. “Did you go to school? What did you do with the dollar?” he asked wearily. I wished only there had been more money for me to steal, an amount substantial enough to have shaken him.

“I went to the movies,” I said insolently, looking over his shoulder at the window as though I found the fire escape more interesting than he, as though he was nothing to me. “I bought a candy bar,” I added. “And this magazine.” I held it up, rolled in my hand. He reached out to take it. He stared briefly at the photograph of a movie star couple on its cover, then began to rip its pages into pieces, letting them fall to the floor.

“Orlando! What are you doing?” my mother cried.

He beckoned me to follow him, and I did, sweat breaking out on my palms. In the bathroom, he took his leather strop from the nail where it hung. “Hold the rim of the tub,” he said neutrally. When I did, he hit me, quickly, four times, with the strop. At each stroke, I felt a wave of faintness; the knocking of my heart was random and violent, as though it had broken loose from whatever contained it. My father was beating me. I felt a depth of helplessness I had experienced only on the ship that had carried us away from San Pedro.

I remained where I was, leaning over the tub, while he returned the strop to its place and left the bathroom. A few seconds later, I heard the clatter of the front door as it opened and closed. The rim of the tub was wet where I had gripped it. I went out into the hall. Maura was peeking through her door which she’d opened a crack. Mamá stood in the kitchen doorway. I didn’t know I was crying until I felt my cheek to brush away what I had thought was a flake of paint. The two women suddenly moved toward me. They stopped a few feet away and clutched each other as if I was a disaster they dared not approach. Then Mamá reached out and touched my blouse that had come loose. Maura went to her room and returned with a small jar of vaseline. Slowly, Mamá lifted the blouse and stepped behind me. She moaned. I heard Maura draw in her breath. Barely touching my skin, Mamá began to spread the vaseline on my back.

“You didn’t stop him,” I accused her.

“Oh, my God! When have I been able to stop him!” Mamá cried.

She handed the jar to Maura. “Come, we’ll eat supper now—now, before he comes back. I’ve made chick-pea soup. Hush! Hush!” She took my hand and led me to the kitchen. Maura ate with us as though it was a celebration. I was too tired to listen to their agitated voices. I wrapped myself in invisibility like the hero of the serial I had watched that day at the movie.

Papá returned just as we finished eating. Maura slunk out of the kitchen, rolling her eyes heavenward.

I will do as I want, I thought. Later.

At that moment, I heard the sound of claws on the hall linoleum, and into the kitchen walked a short-legged dog. Its filthy mustard-colored fur grew in spikes, its eyes gleamed red in the dim light from the bulb which hung from the kitchen ceiling.

“My dog,” Papá said in a somewhat subdued voice. He clicked his fingers and called softly, “Jamon!” The animal sidled toward him. It seemed very old. It moved like a mechanical toy—I expected to hear the whirring of machinery.

Mamá raised her fist and took a step toward Papá. The dog growled. My father broke into hectic laughter. Abruptly, the dog sat down and gazed up at him. “A man has his friend!” Papá declared.

Mamá wept. She pressed her palms together and lifted her face to the ceiling.

“God send me home,” she sobbed. “Give me back my life…let me work like a slave in the cane—take me away from this place, this man. I am abandoned!”

She choked and coughed, then she picked up the skirt of her dress and wiped her face. Papá made a sound of revulsion. Mamá came to me and pressed my face against her chest; her arm around my back pained me, but I didn’t move.

“Take me to the store,” she murmured tremulously. “I have to buy bread for tomorrow.”

She released me and took her cloth bag from a nail. Papá and the dog were gone.

She made herself ready for the street. She smoothed her dress. Her fingers caught up and twisted loose hairs into the coil of hair at her neck. She took coins from the jar, holding them up close to her eyes to make sure what they were, nickels or dimes—she never carried more money than she thought she might spend—and then, as always, she went to the kitchen window and looked out briefly. Each time I saw her do that, I had the fancy that, for an instant, she gave herself an indulgence, a dream that it was a small village which lay about us.

“Oh—come on!” I exclaimed. When she turned from the window and looked at me, she seemed afraid. Was it because I had spoken so harshly to her? The welts across my back were as much her doing as Papá’s. She had known what he was going to do when he led me from the room. How could I have thought she was imagining anything at all when she stared out at the roofs and chimneys that stretched to the horizon? Her nature, her self, had leaked out of her like the stuffing from the heart of Jesus.

She took a hesitant step toward me. “I won’t let him do it again!” she burst out. “I didn’t even know what he was going to do. Next time—” She gave a hasty look around the kitchen, then grabbed up the blackened iron from the stove and brandished it, her eyes not leaving my face. She paused as though she waited upon a judgment from me on her intention. I tried but I could not visualize Mamá hurling the iron at my father; I could only see her pressing his shirts.

 

On our night errands, as we went down the stairs to the street, we descended into a more concentrated broth of the smells of our own life, the earth odor of beans, thick and placid, the piercing, lurid stink of bug-killer, the smell of ironed cloth to which the raw odor of the yellow soap in which it had been washed still clung, and, as though the building had been steeped in it for a hundred years, the stench of drains.

But—“Que sabroso!” Mamá would say if we passed the door of the fortunate people who were going to eat pork that night. As it fried, it vanquished all other smells; celebratory and consoling, it was a bit of prosperity crackling away in a dark little kitchen like our own.

There were scents of perfume, too, of pomade, lotions and powders from the five-and-ten on Broadway, and their lingering, thin sweetness emanated from flats where women like Maura Cruz lived, women who hoped to bleach and dye and perfume themselves into Americans, who wore heels that made them totter forward as though the wind pressed at their backs, who wore rattling beads and clanking bracelets upon which they spent whatever they could salvage from rent and food.

Maura counseled Mamá to make herself pretty for Papá. Lowering her voice, an insinuating smile on her lips that was not enough to mask her jittery uncertainty, she exclaimed, “Negra! That’s how it’s done with men, like this. Here.” She rubbed two spots of orange rouge on Mamá’s slack cheeks, standing back and narrowing her eyes. Mamá gazed back at her timidly. “Wait!” cried Maura. “Take these!” She handed Mamá a pair of earrings. “Wear them!”

But Mamá, glancing at herself in Maura’s powder-clouded hand mirror, shook her head. “Orlando doesn’t care for clowns,” she said gravely, and handed the earrings back to Maura, and went to wash the rouge from her cheeks, refusing the jar of cold cream Maura held out to her.

Mamá had given up Maura’s dream of pretty women a long time ago. With the fitful energy of prolonged grievance, she contended with each day’s petty irritations, the way Jamon would drop his haunches suddenly and deposit a small hard turd beneath a table, the personal debris Enrique Machado left in the bathtub, the insolence of cockroaches, my own body which grew and lengthened in ways that made us both desperate as I took up more space and required more cloth and leather to cover myself.

My father, periodically wearied by his acquaintances in the “club,” would sit all day in his chair in the parlor, brooding and silent except for an infrequent word to Jamon who never left his side when he was home. Mamá would flutter around Papá, reciting our needs like an enraged prayer.

“Go to your mother!” she shouted at him one evening. “Write to her! My God! The impossible life here—this is no country for people who have nothing.”

“My mother died last month,” Papá said laconically.

I was leaning out of the window, my hands pressing down on the rusted bars of the fire escape. I leaned further out. “Hijita!” screamed Mamá. “You’ll fall!”

I drew back into the room. They were staring at me, Mamá with her hands pressed against her throat, Papá, expressionless, half-risen from his chair. My hands were gritty with dirt. I looked down at them fixedly. La Señora was dead. It was not possible. In that moment the death of a hope I’d not known I’d had, so nebulous, I couldn’t put a word to it, but knew it had been hope by the desolation which followed its loss, made me feel faint and ill. My legs trembled. I imagined all of Malagita following its mistress into a hole in the ground. I had not written to Nana in months, my early resolve to write her once a week weakened, then defeated by the unanswering silence. What would happen now?

“Wash your hands,” Papá ordered me.

I didn’t obey him but stood stubbornly where I was, desperate to hear more. He muttered something. I wondered if he’d called me a donkey as he sometimes did. He turned abruptly and started to leave the room. Mamá caught hold of his sleeve.

“You must talk,” she implored. “What kind of a man says nothing when his mother dies?” He pushed away her hand. “I went downtown to see the Malagita representative—” he began.

“—What?” Mamá interrupted. “What are you saying?”

“Calderío was made executor. The French cow and her children inherited it all.” He shrugged. Mamá looked dazed.

“Then ask her…” she said dully. “Ask the Frenchwoman for something. You are the son.”

“I’ll ask her why she’s a cow,” Papá said. Jamon rose up, tried to scratch his ear and fell down. “Did you imagine that we were going to be rich someday?” Papá asked, his voice swelling into a shout of accusation.

Mamá put her arm around me and led me from the room, down the hall. “It was because he set himself against her…from the beginning,” she said.

She halted in front of the bathroom. “Wash your hands, my love,” she said so gently I thought my heart would break. “Try not to soil your school clothes so much…I’m very tired.”

 

Maura was fired. The factory where she had worked was going out of business. The photographer who occasionally gave her portraits to tint told her not to bother coming around so often—customers couldn’t afford the extra money for color. She wept as she brought us news. “What will I do? Oh, what will I do…” she moaned. Her terror filled the kitchen. She’d seen a man dressed in a woman’s coat lying dead in a gutter on Broadway. She’d seen thousands of people lining up for one dishwasher’s job at a Child’s restaurant. The country was going down. A woman she knew had stood on line for three hours to get free soup. And when there was only one old man standing in front of her, she had fainted from hunger and exhaustion. The rich had hidden themselves away, guarded by savage dogs and armed servants. Would Orlando put her out on the street now that she couldn’t pay her rent?

Mamá reached across the table and clasped one of Maura’s thin hands in her own. She said nothing. There was an eerie quiet. Against the kitchen window, the darkness pressed. Surely it was a thicker, blacker dark than that of mere night! The hands of the two women lay on Papá’s overturned plate—he had not come home yet—and on the stove sat a pot that held the last of the soup we had been eating for several days. That night, it had tasted mostly of stale lard; I knew it was because Mamá had taken a wing and the neck of a chicken she had used for flavoring out of it and put them in a saucer on the kitchen windowsill to give to Papá when he came home.

Except for what the pot held, I noticed suddenly, there was no food in the kitchen—not even the can of drippings Mamá kept near the stove. Had we come to the end of everything? Mamá murmured something and released Maura’s hand. I looked down at my school book, at the poem I had been trying to learn by heart and that I would be required to recite aloud in school the next morning. I didn’t know what some of the words meant; I didn’t know if I’d ever seen a daffodil.

Sometimes, Maura would test me when I had to memorize a poem or learn some dates in history. I looked at her. I could see the patches of damp from her tears on her bony cheeks. The ends of her hair were still reddish but the dye had faded and gone rusty. Only the black roots she hated, and which sprang like wire from her narrow skull, looked living. Timidly, I pushed the open book toward her, feeling a pinch of conscience that I should be looking at her so critically yet wanting something from her. She stared down at the page a second, then slammed the cover down.

“Daffodils!” she groaned, her eyes filling with fresh tears. “Que mierda!”

A cracked bark of greeting from Jamon announced that Papá had come home. I heard the door slam, his slow footsteps down the hall. He came to stand silently in the kitchen doorway, Jamon crouching at his feet. Mamá rose from the table and started toward the stove. She halted suddenly and stared at Papá. He was wearing a long, white jacket buttoned up to his neck, and a square white cap. Across the front of the cap and the pocket of the jacket were stamped initials: N.Y.C.

She started toward him. He held up one hand as though to prevent her coming closer.

“What? Are you a garbage man?” burst out Maura.

“Garbage?” echoed Mamá. “Orlando? You have work?”

He came to the table. Maura got up and left the room. I thought I glimpsed a fleeting smile on her lips. Papá turned over his plate and stared down into it.

“Orlando?” Mamá questioned.

“I’m going to sweep the gutters,” he said to the plate. “I have work as a street-sweeper.”

Mamá opened the window and brought in the saucer of chicken.

“I’m so happy,” she said. “So happy.”

“Don’t speak anymore,” he said quietly. “I ask you not to say any more.”

 

Papá kept his first job almost a year. Jamon mourned his absence by the front door, growling at us when we came near him. One afternoon when I came home from school, I met Mamá on the stairs dragging Jamon by a piece of rope tied around his neck. “He’s making a sty out of the house,” she said breathlessly. She pulled on the rope and the dog bumped down a step. I took him from her and yanked him down the stairs and out into the street where he did everything in a minute in front of our building, standing stiffly on his legs, trembling slightly. He dragged me back into the hall as though in horror of the outdoors. With Papá, he would go anywhere, but when I tried to lead him up the street, he would snap at me with his yellow blunted teeth.

When Papá stroked him, Jamon’s head hung down. His eyes shut until only a moist gleam showed where they were; strings of saliva caught among the whiskers of his muzzle. Papá s hand moved back and forth across his frizzled fur. Papá s lips were slightly parted so that I could see the chalky white of his teeth. When the stern and orderly motions of his hand ceased, Jamon would lower himself slowly to the floor where he appeared asleep. Papá would observe him briefly, then, his own eyes closed, would lean back in the pink armchair. Nothing was permitted to interrupt this occurrence that took place every evening just after Papá came home from sweeping the streets of New York City. Even if supper was ready, Mamá would go to stand silently at the parlor entrance and wait until dog and man were motionless before she asked Papá to come to the table.

All day long the dog yearned for him. When Papá opened the door, his head was already bending toward the animal. The dog groaned, Papá murmured his name, and they went down the hall to the parlor. I was drawn again and again to this scene though it filled me with distress, and a painful restlessness I could not put a name to.

We began to eat meat again. I was aware, as I bit into a piece of beef, how long we had been living on thin soup and rice and scraps of salt pork. Mamá bought a little blue rug to lie beside the bathtub on the cold white tiles of the floor. “The pink one was nicer,” she told me, “but you know how your Papá hates that color.” She bought me a blue sweater nearly the color of the rug, and I wore it until my wristbones poked out of the sleeves and I could hardly pull it over my head.

Papá, too, made purchases, mysterious objects which he kept in their boxes in a corner of the front room, and about which Mamá soon stopped asking questions since they provoked in him that scornful dismissal of any concern of hers that wounded her so.

One Saturday morning he awoke Enrique Machado, who always slept late into the day because he worked half the night in a bowling alley, and took him off for several hours. They returned carrying long wooden planks which they took to the parlor. Machado went out again and came back shortly, clutching a dirty canvas sack full of tools which I recognized as belonging to the super who lived in the basement. When Mamá and I heard the sound of cardboard ripping, we went to look. The boxes were open. Papá and Machado gazed down into them. “Leave everything,” Papá said. “First the mounting for the parts.” He didn’t look in our direction.

Not until Mamá and I had finished supper, and Mamá had put Papá s dish into the oven, did the noise of sawing and hammering cease. Except for Machado’s frequent trips to the toilet—we all knew he had a weak bladder; frequently, during the night, I would hear the weak, hesitant trickling of his urine, then the brief convulsion of the toilet and its long aftermath of gurgle and drip—they hadn’t left the parlor.

Maura had gone out somewhere. The silence after the din of the afternoon was profound. Suddenly there was a roar, a voice singing, an immense earsplitting hammer of a voice that struck the pot on the stove, the dishes in the sink, the thin glass of the kitchen window, and made them clink and rattle.

We ran to the front room. The boxes lay overturned and empty. On a wall of planks which extended halfway across each of the parlor’s two windows, were affixed wires, switches, and metal objects like huge mouths, and it was from these last that the terrible noises were issuing. Machado stood transfixed, but my father was laughing and hugging himself in a frenzy of joy. Mamá clapped her hands to her ears. He looked at her as though he had forgotten who she was. He stepped to the wall and with a strange, exaggerated delicacy, touched a knob. The roaring ceased at once.

“ ‘I Pagliacci” he said with a mercilessness that seemed to condemn us all. He began to right the empty boxes and to carry them away down the hall. “Un an talento,” Machado said admiringly.

When I arrived home from school later than Papá did from his job, I could hear the enormous radio a block away, bands, orchestras, talk, singing, and sometimes a mad twittering of canaries. It was like the shapeless uproar I sometimes heard from the Broadway “clubs” but pitched up so high that people passing by stopped to stare up at the top windows of our tenement, their expressions bewildered and outraged. The police came twice, called by indignant tenants. The second time, they warned Papá that if they were called again, they would take away his contraption and arrest him for disturbing the peace.

A few days after that, he lost his job. He could no longer support his radio, which constantly required new parts and new refinements. He returned to his armchair where he sat, day after day, staring at the now silenced speakers upon which dust had begun to collect. Mamá would not touch them.

Maura, who had fled the apartment to escape the radio, even after long days of searching for work, came back early to her room and unmade bed. Machado was the only member of the household who still went out to work. Mamá eked out meals. There was a brooding quiet throughout the flat. What were we drifting towards Each night, I wondered if we were eating our last meal. Sometimes Mamá and Papá fought about Maura’s not paying her rent, but their anger was lifeless, their voices plaintive, and Papá s threat to evict Maura, without conviction.

The flat was a place I never wanted to be. Walking home from school, always hungry, always angry because I was hungry, I imagined the dark hallway, the blue painted walls, the swollen lumps of plaster, the narrow, stale, silent rooms.

I pretended that the sidewalk would emerge at the cooking shed in Malagita, that I would see Mamá as she had been, her hair pinned neatly to her head, her plump, smooth arm and hand holding a wooden spoon to turn slices of frying bananas, the sweet, warm darkness all around, the lamp flickering in the house of the Chinese a few yards away.

Then I would start at finding myself in front of the entrance to our tenement next to the step, a garbage can half-emptied by a stray animal, a few pieces of coal on the sidewalk that had fallen from the coal chute that led to the basement. When I thought of Papá at such a moment, I knew he was crazy, not like an actor imitating insanity such as I had seen in the movies, but crazy in life.

 

I asked Maura to test me on the lines of a poem I had to memorize, but she told me not to ask her anymore—she had too much to think about these days. “Find somebody with a job to help you,” she said. By thinking, she meant lying down on her bed and staring up at the ceiling, her door open a crack so, she explained to me, she would not feel she had been thrown into her grave.

When I passed by her room and glimpsed her prone body, her still face, she seemed to be floating, and later, when I peeked through the door and saw her eyes shut, I imagined she had been carried far into her misery until she had fallen asleep within it, as though it had nursed her into forgetfulness.

Over the years, children came and went in my school. Families moved out of the neighborhood or came apart when one of the parents, usually the father, ran away and disappeared. The children were sent to relatives in the south or back to the Caribbean islands from which they had come. When I was in the eighth grade, Ellen Dove transferred into my school from a Catholic school a few blocks away where my father had, in the past, often threatened to send me when he judged I wasn’t learning enough, or that my American accent was becoming “vulgar.” I knew he wouldn’t have been able to. The Catholic school cost money.

Ellen’s braid of thick black hair was tied at its end with a narrow blue ribbon. Her clothes were always freshly ironed, the white cuffs of her cotton blouse starched and gleaming against her brown, narrow wrists. She was lighter-skinned than some of the other Negro children in my class, and she kept herself apart from them as well as from the rest of us. I watched her all the time. I waited, in the mornings, for her to appear at the classroom door, tall, slender, and, to me, uncommon.

She grew aware of my attention. She would turn to me and smile, her eyes shining through black, thick lashes. She would lift one hand and crumple her fingers just slightly. I woke in the mornings, thinking about her. We became friends. She came to my school in March. When the days grew warmer, we walked down to the Hudson River. Just north, the George Washington Bridge gripped the two shores. We found a countryside of small woods and bare slopes. We watched the river flowing past, the boats, the huge ships which came upstream to anchor. Ellen tested me on lines of poetry: “I have a Rendezvous with Death,” I quoted. “The z is silent,” she said. She told me about the future. I had not thought about it before. This future flourished on the banks of the Hudson, far from the tyranny of the present. It had a smell, the buoyant, clear, watermelon smell of the river, and the chaste, plain, green fragrance of the new grass.

Ellen stayed after school doing her homework, or else she went to the public library. Her mother didn’t want her to go home to empty rooms. Her neighborhood was only a few minutes walk from mine, but it was darker, menacing. In her building, there were vacant rooms. The hall fixtures lacked bulbs; animals sheltered in corners and men slept in bundles of rags in the abandoned flats whose shattered doors hung open.

Mrs. Dove washed the walls and floors of her three rooms every weekend, standing on a milk crate to reach into the corners beneath the tin ceilings. One Saturday when I was visiting Ellen, Mrs. Dove, finished with her cleaning, filled a glass with chips she struck from the cake of ice in her icebox, then she poured grape juice over them. Only when Maura opened a new bottle of nail polish—she hadn’t had the money to buy any for months—and spread out the thin fingers of her hand, the yellowed nails curved like the beaks of birds—had I seen such anticipation of pleasure as I saw in Mrs. Dove’s face, exactly like that on Maura’s when with a tiny brush, she made the first, steady stroke of red lacquer. I shivered. Mrs. Dove, glancing at me over the rim of her glass, put it down. “Want some?” she asked. Perversely, I shook my head.

She kept framed photographs on a small table covered with a woven cloth. The largest picture, a family occasion, stood in the middle. In it, a dozen or more people sat around a large table spread with a white tablecloth. Wineglasses, crumpled white napkins and cutlery lay about. Everyone was smiling at the camera except for one elderly white woman whose hair was screwed into a bun on top of her head. Her chin thrust out and up as though she was trying to escape the constriction of a heavy necklace coiled around her throat.

“My grandmother,” Ellen said, her finger touching the old woman’s face. “The table we once had. The tablecloth…”

Behind the brightly lit table and the dark faces, among which the one white face glowed like a bulb, stretched a large room bulky and shadowed with blurred furniture. “Her mother” I whispered, looking toward Mrs. Dove who was standing in front of a window. “Daddy’s,” replied Ellen.

“One of my grandmothers was crazy,” I said. “But she had everything.”

“The other had nothing?” Ellen asked pensively.

“She had me.”

“So did the crazy one.”

“She didn’t want to know that.”

“There’s a man on the roof,” Mrs. Dove announced. Her throat was very long, her skin darker than Ellen’s. She was staring at something across the street. Ellen and I went to look. “He’s in trouble,” she said.

The man was leaning over the roof edge of the tenement facing the Dove’s flat. It was drizzling and twilight had come, a deepening of the gray light. Through the holes in his shirt, the blackness of his skin was startling. He gestured at the sky. His mouth was open as though he was shouting.

“Maybe he’s fixing the roof,” Ellen said.

“Nobody fixes roofs around here,” Mrs. Dove stated. “He’s lost his mind is what it is.”

“Oh, look! He’s going to fall!” cried Ellen.

Mrs. Dove thrust up the window and leaned out so far it seemed she might fall herself.

“Get down off there,” she called.

The man twisted his head violently about as if something had stung him. He caught sight of us crowded at the window.

“Moses grew tired,” he shouted. He began to sob noisily. A tiny old woman rose up behind him, gripped his arms and walked him backwards to the shed that housed the stairwell.

Mrs. Dove shut the window and went to turn on a standing lamp. “Moses grew so tired,” she said, passing her hand across the black fringe of the lampshade, “that Aaron and Hur had to hold up his hands because only when he was holding them up could Israel prevail.” She stood stiffly in remote holiness.

When Mrs. Dove said a religious thing—I could usually tell it was by the pressing gravity of her voice—I had a tormenting desire to laugh. At the same time, I felt rebuked just as when a teacher spoke in a distant sombre tone of voice about Helen Keller’s struggle—or someone else’s who had been born blind, crippled or in terrible poverty—to overcome misfortune, and whose noble character was a reproof to us, in whom, the teacher implied, lack of character was already so apparent.

Mrs. Dove sighed and turned away from us standing mutely before her. I glanced sideways at Ellen. She shut her eyes and felt the air pathetically with her hands, pretending she was blind. How I loved her!

She walked with me downstairs to the street where we paused and looked across at the building into which the man on the roof had been led by the old woman.

The street had its own darkness. I couldn’t remember it in sunlight. A man leaned against a stoop looking blank, poking with a toothpick among his teeth. A dog cut back and forth across the pavement as it ran past us. There were blackened patches of fur and skin along its bony back and sides as though it had been singed. From somewhere nearby, we heard a wordless human howl.

“Maybe that’s him,” Ellen said. “Maybe he wants to go back up to the roof and talk Bible with Momma.”

Would he have fallen over the edge if Mrs. Dove had not called out to him? Perhaps he didn’t want his life. The one person I knew who always wanted his life was Uncle Federico. I imagined that he ate it up, day by day, like a meal. Mamá and Maura often called on God to let them leave this world.

“Thad’s coming tonight,” Ellen told me. I had met her brother once. He was twenty, the only person I had known who went to college, although I had heard of others. The same teacher who read us inspirational stories about Helen Keller, had told us of certain students from our own school who had gone on to what she called “the higher education.” They had seemed like people in history books. I thought of them in their wheelchairs, crippled, deaf, mute, ascending a steep hill to that higher place which, the teacher made clear, the rest of us would never reach. But Thad was a tall, thin, quick-moving man, his head a cap of reddish curls, his skin pale. There was nothing wrong with him. He had stared at me after Ellen had said, “This is my best friend.”

“You and me could be spies,” he had said. “You’re Spanish, aren’t you? You don’t look the way you’re supposed to, either.”

“You, a spy!” Ellen had exclaimed to him. “Not you! Not the way you go round saying Negro Negro Negro.”

“You’d be surprised—how much harder having a choice makes things,” Thad had told her.

“You’d better go,” she said now. “We’re both shivering.”

I hesitated. “I didn’t tell you about Papá s boarder,” I said. “This morning, when I went to the bathroom, he was pressed up against the wall and when I started past him, he grabbed me here.” I showed her, putting my hands over my chest. “And he pushed me back against the wall and lay against me.”

“Jesus!” breathed Ellen.

“Mamá opened her door, and he turned so fast, like a cockroach, and ran into his room.”

“Did you tell?”

“Just you.”

“What if he does it again?”

I took out the pair of scissors from my pocket that I’d stolen from school and showed them to her. “No. He won’t. Now I keep these under my pillow, and take them with me whenever I hear Machado in his room.”

“The teachers count everything.”

“I don’t care.”

“Would you kill him?”

The one unshattered streetlight went on just then at the end of the block. I felt heroic. “Yes,” I said loudly. She put her arm around my shoulders and leaned her head against mine so that I felt the thickness of her braid. “That man’s watching us,” she whispered. “I’ll walk you to the corner.”

I saw the man on the stoop flick his toothpick into the street and walk down the stoop. We started toward Amsterdam Avenue. Ellen glanced back. “It’s all right,” she said. “He’s gone the other way.” She pressed my arm. “What did it feel like?”

I wished suddenly I hadn’t told her about Machado. An old shame kept me silent. As though she were standing there beside me, I felt the grip of Señora Garcia’s hands on my shoulders when she had stopped me from dancing that long-ago time in her garden in Malagita.

I worked the blades of the scissors in my pocket. I had an impulse to swear I’d not known Machado had been in the hall waiting for me. It was senseless. It was Ellen’s hand, not Señora Garcia’s, that now grasped my shoulder. “Tell me,” she insisted.

We had walked several blocks and were nearly at my door when I said, “I don’t know how it felt. I hate him.”

“Look!” Ellen said. She was staring into an unshaded window on the first floor of my building. A man, his shirt half covering his buttocks, squatted on the body of a woman whose arms were raised high above her head, gripping the iron bars of a bed. Her face was rigid. With a violent lift, the man swung up his rear end, then, as if exhausted, let it drop back. The woman’s mouth turned downward slowly as though she tasted something of inexpressible bitterness. I heard laughter. Two men were standing behind us a few feet away, watching as we were. I grabbed Ellen and we fled into the hallways and squeezed ourselves behind the stairs. I don’t know how long we crouched there silently. When, at last, I looked out the men were gone, and no light fell on the sidewalk from the unshaded room. We gave each other a haunted look. Ellen ran down the street to the avenue. She turned once but she didn’t wave.

I went to Maura’s room where I found her sitting on the edge of her bed staring at the wall. I knew she had been waiting for weeks to hear from Uncle Federico whether he could get her work in the kitchen of the Salamanca. I had heard her weeping in the night. Papá wouldn’t allow her to eat with us, but Mamá always left her a plate of something on the stove. After Papá had gone to bed, she would tiptoe down the hall to get it.

She looked at me irritably; whatever she had been thinking about, she wanted to keep on with it.

“Times are getting better they say,” she said angrily. “But not for me.”

“Maybe you’ll hear from Uncle Federico tomorrow.”

“That bastard, excuse me for saying so about your relative, but I’ve been down there three times.” She snorted. “He says he wants to know me better, he wants to be sure I can do the work. Do you know how to wash lettuce, querida?’ he asks me. Very serious, you understand. He’s an important man, after all. Excuse me, but he washes his balls in olive oil, the pig!”

I was struck. Was such an extravagance possible? Did he really?

Maura spread out her fingers. “I should have stayed in Havana,” she said. “At least, the climate is good.” She looked at me inquiringly. “What is it, Negrita?” she asked with a certain kindliness.

“On the first floor, through the window—” I hesitated.

“What, what? Tell Maura…”

I stared at an opened tube of lipstick on her bureau; a hairpin was sticking out of it.

“A man was on top of a woman. He had on a shirt, but she was naked. Her face—she looked like she was dying, like she was poisoned…”

Maura began to giggle. She covered her mouth with her hand, then took it away. “Dios! I wish I had a cigarette,” she said. She reached over to the bureau and snatched up the lipstick tube and scraped at it with the hairpin. “All gone,” she said, showing me the pin. She folded her hands. “Don’t you know about that whore?” she asked, a faint smile on her lips. “That’s how she advertises, so everyone walking by can see what they’d get. She has her ataques in public.”

“What is that? Ataque?” I asked.

“A woman can’t talk about that,” she said broodingly. “It’s something that can’t be explained.” She looked miserable suddenly. I backed out of the room.

 

A few weeks later, Enrique Machado grabbed me again. I bit his cheek. He raised his hand to strike me but at that instant Papá’s voice, raised in complaint, came from behind the door a few feet away. Machado’s hand dropped to his side, his thick pale tongue sought for and found blood from the wound I had given him. He stared at me with frightened, startled eyes. I ran, trembling, into the bathroom.

“I’m as cruel as Papá,” I told Ellen. “When I saw the blood on his cheek, I wanted to shout—good!”

“God!” Ellen cried. “That’s right. You did right!”

“If I hadn’t lost those scissors, I might have killed him.”

She gasped; her eyes shone. I grabbed the books she was carrying home from school. “I’ll carry them,” I said loftily.

She was always loaded down with books. At night, when I thought of her a few blocks east of me, I imagined her, her head bent toward the light from the fringed lamp, reading, learning—getting ready, she’d say wryly—while I dreamed of Malagita. For Ellen, freedom lay ahead.

She and Thad and their mother were close. A steady warmth of concern glowed in Mrs. Dove’s rooms, defended by order, religiosity, an intention to make the most of fleeting chance. Wordless love bound them together. It warmed me when I was there, and it forced me into a more bitter awareness of the irritable pity I felt for Mamá, and my intensifying suspicion that feebleness lay behind my father’s unpredictability and white-faced rages.

He had never had any nerve, I told myself. He was unable to relieve the meagreness of our lives, finding a job only when there wasn’t a spoon of rice left in the kitchen. Sometimes I recalled what Mamá had described to me years before, how Papá had stripped himself of his bridal clothes and left them on the dirt floor of our cabin the day he had jilted Ofelia Mondragon. Perhaps some other man had been left there on the floor along with the clothes. Whoever he had been, he was dead now.

 

Ellen’s father had been a construction engineer in Dayton, Ohio. In those days, a Negro in such a profession was singular. “He had very good manners,” Ellen had said. “If you’d just heard his voice, you would have thought he was a regular Ohio fellow, better educated than most.”

In Mrs. Dove’s scrapbook, I saw newspaper photographs in which his brown face appeared among those of the white dignitaries who attended ceremonies for the opening of a new school or office or apartment building. “My white Gran, his mother, told him to watch out, not forget this had been a slave country.” The city administration changed. Mr. Dove lost his contacts and found himself without work. He sold the furniture in those rooms whose grandeur I had surmised from the dining table in the picture Mrs. Dove displayed among pictures of dead relatives. They had lived well; they hadn’t saved money. Mr. Dove finally got a job as a janitor in an apartment house he had helped build.

“Down the coal chute,” Ellen had said. Mrs. Dove had once given dinner parties and held musical evenings for Negro musicians who couldn’t get work. She had had table linen and a china service for twelve.

“What happened to your father?”

“He began to drink,” Ellen said. “Momma had to leave him. She brought us here with her and after a long terrible time, she got a job as a cook-housekeeper for a rich widow. He moved in with Gran. He died a year later, drink, I guess, and Gran only lasted another few months.”

Ellen was interested in my history. Yet even as she questioned me, her alert gaze on my face, I felt, as I answered, a restlessness in her that made me conclude she couldn’t quite take seriously any trouble that didn’t have to do with color. “Was your Nana telling you you had ancestors that came from Africa?” she demanded. “I don’t know,” I replied truthfully. “You’d know if you’d been born here,” she said.

“Look at me,” she said. “I haven’t got rhythm. I’m not going to be Fredi Washington and sing with the band. But I’m not going to be some woman’s girl like Momma.”

“You get the best grades.”

“What will I do with them?”

The teachers all liked Ellen. She had an eager, appreciative way of listening and, like her father, very good manners. “I’m an example,” she said once, “and I can’t seem to help it.”

When a teacher heard my accent, she would frown.

“Luisa, say this: He has filled the hungry with good things.”

I repeated it. The teacher heard the throaty g I couldn’t get rid of.

“Gree! Gree! Gree!” she would cry. It was as though one of the caged birds in Señora de la Cueva’s garden had flown from Malagita to the classroom to shriek at me with its inhuman craziness.

On a spring morning when the classroom windows were open for the first time that year, a wild fragrance drifting in like a spirit would make me feel anything was possible, but only for a moment. Hope would drown in the smell of dust and chalk and stale paste.

Ellen and I no longer went to the banks of the Hudson to dream of our future. We clung to each other, but we were peevish, arguing sluggishly about which street to walk home on, which teacher was the worst, movie stars.

“John Boles, Leslie Howard,” she said disgustedly. “Those old white things—curdled milk.”

“I hate Leslie Howard.”

“No, you don’t. I saw how you jumped when he got shot in that picture.”

We were weighted with gloom. We intoxicated ourselves with scorn for the movies in which people our age grinned and clapped their hands and danced in their fine clothes to unseen orchestras like happy monkeys, for our schoolmates, for the whores on Broadway we had come to recognize and whose days began as we came home from school, for the lewd janitors who emerged from dark basements at twilight to pick their teeth and ogle us.

Only the mention of Thad brought light into Ellen’s eyes.

 

Maura got the job in Uncle Federico’s restaurant. She soon reappeared as her old self, dingier, but redheaded as fire, jingling her bracelets, wearing skirts that seemed, as she walked, to wrap each buttock separately, her voice as shrill as ever when Papá was away, insisting to Mamá that she leave him or else dress herself up and win his love back. Enrique Machado went to prison for five years. He was caught by the police in a pawn shop at two in the morning, a trumpet gripped in one hand, a diamond ring in the other. My gladness shamed me. I would try to pity him, but then I would recall the horrid knobbiness of his body as he pressed me up against the wall.

Papá, who played the lotería, won two hundred dollars. We moved in a week into an identical flat. We got a three-month rent concession and a new boarder, a thin, short man whose hair pomade had a nose-prickling sweetness. Mamá thrust my old winter coat at Papá; she pressed it against his shoulders, his face, until he pushed her away. But he gave her some of the money from his winnings. I had a new coat, the first new garment I had had in several years except for the shoes Mamá had bought with money borrowed from Uncle Federico.

“One day I will repay you,” she would say bravely. “You’ll see.”

“Perhaps,” Uncle Federico would reply.

I touched the navy blue cloth of my coat and each of its five large white buttons. Most of my dresses were cut down from Aunt Aurelia’s discarded clothes. She was fond of prints that depicted large flowers in tropical colors. When Mamá had finished remaking a dress for me and I had put it on and gone to stand on her bed to look at myself in the mirror on her bureau, my light brown hair and pale face seemed to float, disconnected, above the brilliant material.

We didn’t see the Sanchez family often. We never had a meal with them. They usually came on a Sunday morning—if the weather was warm and clear—never in winter or in rain. Aunt Aurelia in a flaming dress, her plump fingers curled tightly around the clasp of her pocketbook, would exclaim at the earliness of the hour she had risen to go to Mass, or to make her confession. All the while she was speaking, she would watch Mamá with a sly look as if she knew Mamá hardly ever went to church. I imagined Aurelia behind a black, dusty curtain of a confessional, striving to discover in herself some tiny failing.

One Sunday, Uncle Federico brought us, in a finger-smudged cardboard box, the remains of a cake from a birthday party given the night before in the Salamanca. Setting the box in front of Mamá, plucking off the top, he thundered, “There! A souvenir for you alone!”

Three cracked red sugar roses sat on the white icing, and curving letters in green icing spelled out: Happy Birt. My mother gazed down at the cake. I had not noticed until that moment the dark circles beneath her eyes. The flesh of her face drooped like a cloth held loosely by two hands. Her fingers, resting on the rim of the box, looked waxen. I felt as if it had been my own, the effort she was making to thank her brother.

“Thank you,” I said abruptly. Papá suddenly left the kitchen where we were all standing around the table.

“It was specially ordered,” Uncle Federico said tentatively. Could he have been struck, as I was, by the strange, confused expression on Mamá’s face, her silence? I willed her to speak, hoping the sound of her voice, stuck now behind her twitching mouth, would assure me she was not sick, not crazy, but the same woman who, when I had had the illnesses of childhood, fevered, crying out with the agony of earaches, had brought teas of herbs, wool cloths thickened and yellowed with Vicks, cold rags for my burning skin, who had made meals out of nearly nothing, the lamenting spirit of all our narrow crowded flats who had managed to keep our days in some kind of order.

“Looks like somebody stuck their fingers in it,” Atilio remarked. Aunt Aurelia smiled smugly as though he’d said something intelligent.

How long had it been since I’d last heard Mamá sigh and speak aloud of her troubles to the ceiling, above which God looked down, watching her suffering?

“Thank you Federico,” she said at last, her voice barely audible. I went to my room and lay down on my bed. Only a minute later, Atilio appeared in the door. He grinned, leaped to the bed, grabbed the blanket, held it tight across my shoulders, and pressed his wet lips against mine. With my fists, I pounded his oiled little head and heaved up with my hips and legs, thrusting him off me. He fell with a thud to the floor. He crouched there for a second, looking up at me balefully, then stood and said, “You bitch! What do you think girls are for?”

I aimed a kick at his groin. He laughed and covered that part of himself with his hands and swaying his hips like a woman, minced out of the room.

I heard my uncle’s voice as he proclaimed the new prosperity that was coming to the United States, the greatest country in the world. Uneasily alone in my room, perplexed by the lingering sensation of my cousin’s plump lips, I got up and went down the hall to the parlor. Atilio was staring dully at the speakers on the wooden boards Papá had yet to dismantle. Aunt Aurelia was gingerly touching some mending of Mamá’s. For the last few months, she had been doing a little sewing for neighbors who, almost as poor as we were, paid her for her work with eggs or rice or a bit of pork. The Jews, Uncle Federico pronounced, were responsible for the war in Europe. Of course, there would be profit in it for our country. He touched his sleeve and smiled. He often smiled when he touched himself or his clothes. “Adolf Hitler is a person of consequence,” he said, nodding at Papá. “We may have to deal with him ourselves.”

“There’s not the least chance of that,” Papá said.

“Oh, yes. The Jews will drag us in. Roosevelt adores them,” declared Uncle Federico. I stopped listening.

Later, after they had gone, I found Mamá in the kitchen in front of the stove, her hands clasped. I felt a painful urgency, I must embrace her! But I couldn’t. Only a few hours earlier, I had pitied her so, recalled her goodness.

“I’m going to look for work,” I told her.

“Not yet,” she said quickly. “Next year, when you’re fifteen.”

“I can get a job at the five-and-ten for the Christmas weeks.”

“Once it starts, it will be for the rest of your life,” she said as she turned to me. With a certain shyness, she touched my face. “You must keep going to school.”

“I can do both.”

“Not yet,” she repeated.

Jamon, who had become increasingly unsteady on his legs, staggered into the kitchen and stared at us, panting.

“Give it a little milk,” said Mamá.

I placed a saucer in front of him. He stared at it for a long moment then with a scrabble of claws, his head bowed, went out of the kitchen.

“Atilio held me down on my bed and kissed me,” I said.

“That too,” she said softly. “Once it starts…wait…”

Disheartened, yet not knowing what I wanted from her, I started to leave.

“The kissing ends very soon,” she said. She was staring down at the saucer of untouched milk. She pushed it with her toe until the milk splashed on the floor. “He shouldn’t have done that,” she said without conviction.

“Mamá?”

“Oh—don’t ask me anything,” she said. I went out the door. “Forgive me,” her voice trailed sadly after me.

 

Uncle Federico was boastful, sure that what he called his thoughts were the last word on everything. Only rarely had I seen uncertainty in his expression. That had been when he noticed his son and wife whispering together intently, standing apart from him.

He admired the customers of the Salamanca who tipped him well because it was in their power to do so. They were winners, they had influence, which was what counted. He had some himself. With it, he helped Papá get his second job in the United States, and one he kept. Among the regular patrons of the restaurant was the owner of a fashionable food store on the east side. Uncle Federico was not mean but neither, I believed, was he generous. I guessed that he had boasted to this customer that his brother-in-law was the son of a wealthy plantation owner in the Caribbean—he would not name the island of San Pedro; he would be afraid no one would have heard of it—at that moment without employment. I could almost hear him uttering my father’s name, the length of it giving it a significance that would be to Uncle Federico’s credit.

I saw Papá once at his place of work two years later when I went to tell him that Mamá had been taken to the hospital. He was standing behind a counter piled with jars of jam, cellophane-wrapped baskets swollen with fruit and boxes of candy and figs and cakes. An elderly woman, the only customer, walked slowly from basket to basket, poking at the cellophane with a gloved finger. Around her neck were draped two long pieces of dark fur, their tips, two snarling little animal faces whose glass eyes glowed at her waist. Papá was not looking at her; he didn’t see me. He looked haughty, indifferent, another customer, perhaps, who had mistakenly wandered behind the counter.

The doctors sent Mamá home from the hospital the next day. Her violent stomach pains, they said, were the result of nervous agitation. She would have to go on a diet of bland foods. She looked somewhat rested and consumed, with satisfaction, the last of a dish of highly spiced sausages and beans Maura had cooked for me the night before.

All the time Papá had been without work, my uncle had treated him with deference, glancing, as he spoke, at Papá’s face, as though to read there that he had not given offense. But once Papá had been hired—through his introduction—Federico changed. He interrupted Papá continually. He frequently grabbed his shoulders, held him tightly, and even rocked him back and forth like a large doll. I could not tear my glance from the sight of my father’s rigid body locked in Federico’s fleshy arms. I waited for an explosion, for Papá to free himself and hurl my uncle to the floor. It never came. Did my mother embrace him? If she did, did he look the same as when Federico held him? So blank-faced?

My cousin, Atilio, left his apprentice’s job in a machine-tooling shop to go to Canada. From a port there, he would take a ship to England where he would become a soldier. My uncle brought him to us to say good-bye. He was beside himself with pride and agitation. He clutched Papá’s face between his hands. “My little son,” he cried. “Under the bombas.” Mamá began to cry, and Aunt Aurelia sobbed, hiding her face behind her new pocketbook which bore two enormous gold letters, A. S. (Maura, who had glimpsed the Sanchez family trailing down the hall, remarked later, “One more S on that mierda pocketbook would have made it perfect!”)

Atilio was taciturn as usual. When no one was looking, he stared at my breasts and bared his teeth at me.

When the room grew quiet, the women ceremoniously drying their faces, my father looked penetratingly at Atilio. “Why are you volunteering?” he asked.

“Porque este muchacho es un hombre valiente!” cried Uncle Federico driven by emotion into speaking Spanish.

Atilio shrugged. “Well—you know—I like to see places, get around…”

I was sent to make coffee. When I returned, our farewell to Atilio was interrupted by Jamon. He raced madly into the parlor and halted in the middle of the room as if he’d run into a wall. He swayed—something seemed to be stretching his neck, pulling it from his shoulders—then sank to the floor, turning slowly until he lay on his back. His legs gave a violent quiver, were almost instantly still, and stuck straight up toward the ceiling. He was dead.

Aunt Aurelia burst into offended howls. Atilio emitted a bubbling screech like laughter squeezing through a hole but Uncle Federico, faced with the ultimate loser, tiptoed out of the room and into the kitchen where he remained until Papá, his jaw clenched, picked up the corpse and took it away. He didn’t return home until very late.

He must have gone to bury the dog near the river. It was the only living thing he ever showed affection toward, and I didn’t believe he would leave Jamon for the garbage men. He told us nothing—not that we asked him anything. Mamá had given up questioning him. In any case, he was rarely home.

He had bought a small radio which he kept on a box near his armchair in the parlor. Some Sundays he turned it on and leaned forward to hear a concert. Once he had played a radio too loud. Now it was tuned so low, only he could hear it.

 

I found a job, two hours every afternoon, all day Saturday, in a variety store on Broadway. It was narrow and long like a tenement flat. The dusty air was steeped in the odor of camphor. In the display window rose a pyramid of pink or blue felt slippers, around its base, school copybooks and small white saucepans. I was to be paid fourteen dollars a week. On the first day Mr. Dardarian, the owner, handed me an envelope with my pay in it, the world was a different place.

I walked the streets until the cold drove me inside, my finger tips inside the envelope in my pocket, touching the bills. A tide was carrying me away from the life my parents had made, or so it seemed to me that day. I felt a joy that was nearly vengeful.

At home, I handed the envelope to Mamá. She took out the bills, hesitated, then counted out five of them and handed the rest back to me. Her small roughened hand rested briefly on my arm; she gazed at me silently. I went to my room where I spread the nine dollars on my bed. I gathered them up and put them in an old shoebox that also held the letter Señora Garcia had written for Nana. When the box was filled with dollar bills, I would buy my passage for San Pedro. With equal conviction, I believed that I could, and couldn’t, do such a thing.

A few weeks before my fifteenth birthday, on December eighth, the United States declared war on Japan. I began to read the newspaper Papá brought home each evening.

In the variety store, a metal globe of the world stood on its base among boxes of crayons and sets of jacks, checkers, and china-faced baby dolls the length and width of my thumb. On the globe’s surface, in pastel seas, lay the red and green and yellow continents. I touched the eastern edge of America. That I should be standing in the passage between the counters of the store, snow beginning to fall on the street outside, Mr. Dardarian running his hands up and down behind his suspenders as he leaned over the cash register, and yet be there, where my finger touched upon the metal replica of the round earth, was like an invention, a story, as impossible to grasp as the daily news of bombings and battles, of ships exploding and sinking, of men drowning in those painted seas.

We lived in a village of sorts, our barrio. Even when soldiers began to appear along its streets, young men a few of whom I vaguely recognized, transformed by the thick, coarse fabric of their uniforms which gave them a look of competence, I couldn’t imagine where they were going, what might happen to them. Neat, superior in their purposefulness, they came home from training camps to flats like ours to say goodbye. When I saw them and imagined them dead in another country, it was as though I’d learned that the small boys in the street who shouted, bang! bang! could, with their cocked index fingers, really kill.

I read the society columns of the newspaper, followed the beautiful child contests, the comic strips and Hollywood gossip. I stopped reading the war news except for those stories that reported the landing of spies from German submarines along the coast. Mr. Dardarian nailed up a poster on the store wall that read: A slip of the lip can sink a ship.

Maura began to roll her own cigarettes because of tobacco rationing, but Mamá hid the rationing booklets Papá brought home. I found them beneath a bunch of dirty rags in a kitchen drawer. One afternoon, Mamá sat on her stool in front of the sink, clutching the handle of the broom and as it gave way under her weight, began to fall from the stool. I took the broom from her and helped her upright. “No puedo,” she said breathlessly, her face averted as though ashamed to tell me she couldn’t—couldn’t anything, I knew she meant.

Papá bought a record player and records and had a telephone installed in the parlor. I don’t recall it ever ringing. Mamá refused to iron his shirts on the old plank. For a while, he took them to a laundry. Then he brought home a real ironing board. She broke its wooden legs in front of him. “No puedo,” she cried. “No puedo más!”

At night, Papá polished his shoes and listened to his records. He seldom spoke. As he moved fastidiously through the shabby rooms, he grew to seem a prosperous stranger. Yet he gave Mamá money. One evening, I heard him order her to buy a dress, shoes, a coat for herself. “I command you…” he said. I knew she wouldn’t, couldn’t.

My throat was parched. I spent a good deal of my pay on bottled sodas. I had the curious thought that I was slowly drying up and would eventually crumble like a leaf in late autumn. I dreamed of being discovered by someone and carried bodily away from the flat, the barrio. In the dull labor of school, I saw no promise of rescue. When I glanced at Ellen, three desks away, her head bent over book or paper, it seemed to me I could almost hear the sound of her intention; it was like a distant, ringing bell that would not be silenced.

I went with her to the library. “Get a card. Look for something,” she told me. I didn’t understand my bleak stubbornness. I couldn’t rid myself of it. I didn’t get a card. Instead, I watched the librarian and the readers as I waited for Ellen. She came to me carrying a thick history of Mexico. “Did you know that you are a colonial?” she asked. She had begun to be disappointed in me. “I can’t get out,” I said to her. “You don’t want to enough,” she said.

She took me to a museum downtown. In enormous halls, huge stuffed animals stood in file. There were masks and fish, great round stones carved by men who had lived in Mexico before the Spaniards came.

Afterwards, we walked along the edge of Central Park. Ellen was whistling tunelessly to herself. She was whistling, I thought, because I wouldn’t talk with her about what we had seen in the museum. How could I speak? I felt crushed by its immensity, the carvings of vanished people, the dead animals, the hundreds of glass-eyed brilliant birds in their cases. And I was uneasy on the broad avenue where there were no small stores and tenements, only huge buildings across from the park at whose windows I looked in vain for a figure or a face. An ancient man was walking slowly toward us. His white hair grew thickly like a wool cap, he carried an umbrella frame upon whose bent ribs a few fragments of black cloth still clung.

“Little nigger girls…” he remarked as we circled around him.

Ellen walked swiftly on. I touched her arm as we started down the subway stairs. “We shouldn’t have come down here,” I said.

“Don’t say that!” she exclaimed angrily. “I’ll go where I want to go. Anyhow he didn’t mean you.” Not looking at me, she added, “Color runs.”

A train came along. My relief at the knowledge that in a few minutes I would be on the familiar streets and then, at once, my bewilderment that I should be relieved at returning to the place from which I wanted so desperately to escape, made me forget Ellen’s anger, even her presence.

 

Thaddeus was coming for supper, Ellen told me one afternoon. Mrs. Dove had said I could come, too. When Ellen opened the door to me that evening, I saw Mrs. Dove cutting her son’s hair. She had brought the fringed lamp close to the chair. Her glasses glittered with reflected light as she bent, snipping at the tight reddish curls which clustered at his neck. They both looked up at me at the same time. Mrs. Dove greeted me with her usual gravity but I noticed that her lips trembled as she spoke. She had buttoned her blouse unevenly. Thad smiled. “My fellow spy,” he said.

Four places were set at the table. A small vase held daisies. They looked fresh. I guessed Thad had brought them; they were not wilted and faded like the flowers Mrs. Dove brought home from the apartment of the woman she referred to as “Madam.”

As Ellen leaned toward me, I glanced at the room. It was not just that it was clean, I realized, but that something had been grappled with to make it look the way it did, an insistence that it yield up whatever comfort was to be gotten from it.

“Thad’s been drafted,” Ellen whispered. “She’s terribly upset.” Mrs. Dove put her hand on Thad’s head and pressed it gently forward. The scissors snipped. Thad grinned up at us as we watched silently.

I knew that Mr. Dove’s insurance had helped pay Thad’s college costs and Ellen’s tuition at the Catholic school. It hadn’t been enough. That was why she had come to the public school and why Thad had a night job at Grand Central Station where he wore a red cap and carried travellers’ suitcases. He could have gotten a job anywhere, Ellen told me, but where it asked race on the employment forms, he always wrote Negro. It was harder for him than if his skin had been dark, she said. White people hated him because he was wearing their skin.

“Luisa!” he exclaimed once during supper. “That’s the prettiest name!”

He spoke of his classes, about the two men he shared a small apartment with, one a sleeping-car porter, the other a short-order cook. He said nothing about being drafted. Mrs. Dove remained silent except to offer us food. As she carried the coffee pot to the table, she began to falter; she swayed suddenly and the pot fell from her hands, the coffee splashing on the table cloth and on my arm.

“God!” she burst out, with such a depth of feeling that I imagined she would push the table to the floor and leap from a window. Instead, she took my arm in her hands and began to wipe off the hot coffee with the hem of her skirt as though I’d been a chair.

“Momma, Momma,” Ellen called to her pleadingly.

She dropped my arm. “It’s wrong. It’s wicked!” she cried. “No Negro man in this country ought to be taken into that white man’s army. Not one!”

Thad had fetched a rag and was mopping up the coffee from the table. Mrs. Dove went to the chair where Thad had been sitting when she cut his hair; she sat down and stared straight ahead, smoothing her skirt over and over again.

“You’re wrong, Momma,” Thad said. He took a flattened cigarette from his pocket, lit it and drew deeply.

“Since when have you taken up tobacco, Thaddeus?” his mother asked.

Thad said, “You think when we come back, things are going to be the same? They won’t be. They’re not going to put the brooms back in our hands.”

“They will be the same,” Mrs. Dove said flatly. “It was after your father started smoking that he began to drink, Thaddeus.”

“Momma? You’ve got to understand my being in the army is a bigger chance for me than a college degree.”

Mrs. Dove laughed bitterly. One side of her blouse collar pushed up against her chin, a few strands of hair had worked themselves free of the black pins that had bound them. She had clenched her hands so tightly, I could see her prominent knuckles.

Hatted and gloved for church on Sunday mornings, she had looked calm and unshakeable like one of the great ships Ellen and I had seen riding at anchor on the Hudson.

I got up to help Ellen with the dishes. She looked at me briefly. “Your arm okay?”

“It was just a few drops,” I said. She was silent. I felt she wanted me to go home. Nobody was talking. I was there. They were holding back, waiting until I’d gone.

“I’d better go,” I said.

“I’ll take you,” Thaddeus said.

“I’ll be all right.”

Mrs. Dove looked at me with surprise as if she’d forgotten I was there.

“No. Thaddeus will take you home,” she said with her customary tone of certainty about what was fitting. That night I had seen her shaken. Like her gloves and her hat, the certainty was, perhaps, something she put on like a garment. As I looked around the room I admired so much, I visualized it empty, as desolate as those other rooms I passed in the halls where homeless men took shelter.

Thad and I were the only people on his street.

“Do you feel bad?” Thad asked. I nodded, wondering how he had guessed. He took hold of my arm firmly.

“Sometimes I miss my grandmother,” I said. He held my arm tighter. He probably didn’t know much about me.

“She’s back there—where I came from.”

“You can go there someday,” he said.

Maura had been saving for a trip to Havana all the time she had been our boarder. During the time she was out of work, she had used up the money. Now she had begun to save again. I didn’t believe she would ever return to Cuba. Once in the United States, I wondered, could anyone ever leave? “I’ll never have enough money for that,” I said. I knew it was too late. It wasn’t only distance that had sealed Malagita away from me; it was the years.

“That’s the wrong way to think,” Thad said earnestly. “If you want to visit your Gran, you’ve got to start the work of it now. You have to make deep choices. When my mother knows Ellen has to have a new coat, she arranges her whole life for that. She’ll start thinking about the winter in April. In the summer, she’ll let the apartment get dark before she turns on a light. She’s thinking about the pennies she’s saving for the coat. I’ve seen her slice a tomato so thin, you’d be fooled by what you see, how she can make one tomato go such a long way. If she finds out that woman she works for is going away for the summer—she doesn’t get paid then—she listens around to see who’s getting married so she can get the sewing work for the wedding. She’s always thinking about that coat.”

He didn’t understand. It wasn’t a visit I wanted but the way it had been. He kept at me about choices. He was beginning to sound like Mrs. Dove when she talked religion.

We had come to the corner of Amsterdam where there were people. Thad was talking so loud, I was afraid they’d think we were fighting. But nobody paid us any attention.

“It’s a hard way to live,” Thad said. “You miss a lot.” He rummaged in his pocket. “Wish I had another cigarette,” he said. “I only buy loosies. You know about them? Three for a nickel.”

I hesitated, then I said what was in my mind. “I’m going to be a servant. I’m not good in school the way Ellen is. I’m going to have to get real work soon, not just an afternoon job. And—oh, I have to get away!”

He let go of my arm. We had reached my corner. I felt cold and miserable. I was sure I had lost his good opinion, if he’d had one of me. What I’d said so loudly, so boldly, had taken me by surprise. He’d forced it from me, talking about things I couldn’t do. But something had come together in my mind the minute I’d spoken, fragments of a picture of myself in a black uniform with a white apron. I felt a sour triumph. I was going against him—he was dreaming. I wasn’t.

“That’s not a choice. You’re just going along.”

In front of my building, I looked up at the whore’s former window. I felt my face turn red. Thad was smiling.

“You’ve forgotten,” he said. “We’re spies, Luisa. We can go anywhere. We know how to disguise ourselves.”

But he didn’t disguise himself. I realized all at once that he wasn’t safe, that he might not even get back to his mother and sister tonight without mishap. He suddenly hugged me. “Don’t be so scared,” he whispered, drawing me up the steps to the door.

“You know I live with two other fellows?” I nodded. “One of them can’t sleep,” he went on. “I mean, never. Except for a few minutes then he wakes himself up with terrible dreams. They make him cry out. Well—it’s more like roaring, you know? He’s a few years older than I am. He didn’t finish the sixth grade. He went to work when he was twelve, he started drinking, too, got into fights all the time. He’s stitched up all over his face and neck. He wanted to be a cook on a ship. He wanted to travel. When he gets really drunk, he says to me the next day, ‘I shipped out last night…’ He’s a short-order cook. When he comes home from the restaurant, he falls into bed…so tired…but the second the light’s out, he’s wide awake. That’s the insomnia.

“He smiles about me going to school. He says, ‘Go to it, Thaddy! Do it!’ but he doesn’t believe anything. He gets up at noon, his feet find his shoes. He drinks a soda, has a cigarette, drinks from the pint he keeps on the floor next to the bed. Then he goes off to his job, jokes with the customers, plants his feet in front of his stove. I’ve seen him there, shaking the french fries, cigarette hanging from his mouth, his bottle handy. When he comes home and lies down, someone else wakes up—the life in him that can’t get out—and it walks around the room all night.”

I saw the new Cuban boarder coming down the block. He nodded to me briefly but stared at Thad for a long moment before he went past us into the building.

Thad was looking at me with a serious, intent expression. I felt a stirring of happiness. It made my breath come fast. He was thinking about me; he might, at any second, say words that would make my life clear. He didn’t speak. The agitation I felt was suddenly too much to bear. “There have to be servants,” I burst out.

“You’ve made up your mind,” he said, “without thinking. You don’t know enough yet.”

“I know I have to get away.”

“But—to what?”

“And I’m really a foreigner.”

He laughed. “Who isn’t?” he asked.

“I’d better go up.”

“You can’t be a servant as long as people think servants are slaves,” he said.

“Your mother—” I hesitated. “She’s a maid.”

“She takes what they give her,” he said, “and she judges them.”

He pressed my hands with his then walked away toward Amsterdam. I watched him until he had disappeared.

I saw him once again a few months later when he came home to say good-bye to his mother and Ellen before he was sent overseas. He smiled at me and pointed to his chest, his soldier’s jacket.

“My new disguise,” he said. “Would you have known me?”

He had no idea how much I had thought about him since we had stood on the street and talked.

“I wouldn’t have known you,” I said. “It’s such a good disguise.”

 

When I was unable to sleep, I dressed and stole down the stairs to the doorway of our tenement and looked out at the street, at the cats which came out at night to search for food, at a man or a woman hurrying some place, their faces glimpsed briefly in the light of the street lamp, mysteriously shadowed. Sometimes, a man, once a small boy, sat on the steps of another tenement down the block, or across the street, and I would wonder about them, wonder what had driven them from their rooms, if, like me, they had started up from their beds the moment the light was turned off, or if they had fled from a family battle, the loud cries of which frequently shattered the nighttime quietness of our street like glass smashing on the pavement.

As I leaned in the doorway, it would seem to me that I could simply leave the barrio, simply walk away.

Thad’s letters from England often contained messages for me. When Ellen repeated them with a touch of sternness, they sounded no different from those of my teachers who tried to goad me into greater effort. Thad had taken me on like a missionary takes on a heathen, intent on saving a soul. It both touched and irritated me. The line was drawn. Ellen and Thad—and even my father in his disaffected and belittling fashion—on one side, I, on the other. They wanted to drag me across the line into a life that required an effort I was unable, or unwilling, to make. To me, being a servant promised a kind of freedom. I was wild with impatience to leave home; I was convinced of a secret power to make things go my own way. Yet I was troubled by thoughts of how Ellen and Thad would judge me, just as I had moments when I longed to astonish my teachers. I made one attempt to alter what I felt was inevitable. One night, I heard the Cuban boarder, Carreno, telling my father that the men in the machine shop where he worked as a turret-lathe operator, were being drafted at such a rate they had begun to hire women. “Women,” he repeated mournfully. “They will disrupt everything,” Papá declared with bitter conviction.

The next morning, I stopped Carreno as he hurried down the hall, and asked him the name of the shop. I didn’t go to school. As I rode downtown to Fourteenth Street where the Moskowitz Diamond Die Company was located, the thought of Thad’s approval of what I was about to do, that thought which had so lifted my spirit that not a second seemed to have passed between the moment Carreno had given me the address and the moment I had dropped my nickel into the subway turnstile, utterly vanished. I felt a cold alarm that made me start forward at each stop, half rise to my feet to get off and run to the uptown platform.

In the small front office of the company on the twelfth floor, a middle-aged woman who smelled rather sickeningly of violet perfume, daintily touched one dry curl on her forehead. “We don’t need nobody now,” she said. Behind the closed door next to her desk, I heard the dull pounding of machinery.

“I heard they were hiring women,” I said.

“We’re going on a war footing pretty soon,” she said. “You’d have to get clearance because of the stuff we’ll make then.”

I stood in front of her desk, mute, longing for her to take my arm and lead me beyond the door. I imagined myself at an unimaginable machine, working levers. “You know what clearance is?” she asked, narrowing her eyes shrewdly. I shook my head.

“F.B.I.,” she said, “and that’s no fooling.”

“Mr. Carreno told—” I began.

“Him!” she snorted. “That fruit!”

I turned toward the door to leave.

“You in school?”

“Yes.”

“Stay there,” she said. She was smiling; it was a dry little smile that barely changed her face. “There’ll be plenty of jobs for a long time,” she said. “Long as the war goes on.”

When I got home around noon, a stream of light lay along the hall, flowing like water in a gutter. Mamá was sitting in the kitchen on her stool in her nightgown looking down at a newspaper. She was so absorbed, she didn’t hear me. She bent over the paper and drew a line with a stubby pencil. As I moved closer, I heard the faint whisper of her breathing. Her fingers were as thin as twigs.

“Mamá?”

“Ssh…I’m nearly finished.”

The children’s page of the newspaper lay open on the sink counter. She had been connecting dots with her pencil and now they formed a cartoon dragon with a forked tongue.

I left her and went into the parlor. A book was lodged in Papá’s chair. I didn’t bother to read the title; I didn’t care what he read. Presently, I heard the slow, reluctant sound of her footsteps. She stood for a moment in the parlor doorway, blinking in the light, then went to the armchair where she groaned faintly as she sat down. She glanced at the book with an odd, startled expression and drew her body away from it.

She had been shrinking for months, dwindling like a piece of ice under the flow of water from a tap. I had noticed, but it had been only noticing—I hadn’t thought about it. She had been a girl, only a few years older than I was now, walking swiftly down the path from the vivienda, dressed in a black uniform, looking anxiously and eagerly for me. As I struggled to recall the face of that girl as it emerged from the dark, it seemed to me I could smell the odor of flowers and pigs, that I sat waiting in the cabin for her to pause at the door, to say, “Ay Dios! I’ll make our supper now.”

“Why aren’t you in school?” she asked timidly.

“I’m not going to school anymore,” I said. She looked bewildered and plucked at the book. When she had it in her hands, she turned it from side to side and dropped it on the floor. Perhaps she was beyond caring whether I went to school or not.

“I’m going to look for work as a maid.”

Her hands flew to her breasts, then, with a terrible cry, she covered her face.

“No,” she whispered. “Ave Maria! Don’t do that.”

I walked to her and touched her shoulder. She flinched. I felt a kind of horror. There she crouched, she, whom I’d imagined long subdued by suffering, even become insensible to new blows, was sobbing, shaken, as though it was the first time she had surmised the black heart of life. I began to rub her back. Gradually, her breathing grew less labored. She murmured something and moved away from my hand, turning up her wet face to me.

“It won’t be the same for me as it was for you,” I said.

She shook her head. “You don’t know anything,” she said.

“I know I have to work,” I said coldly.

She stared at me a moment, then lifted her arms. I saw how thin they were as her sleeves fell back. I bent to embrace her. I barely felt her hands against my back, they lay there so lightly. I smelled her, the soiled gown, the neglected flesh, the musty odors of a body which had lost a guiding discipline. There was another smell, sharp, rancid, fleeting, I couldn’t put a name to.

She was thirty-three. She died eight months later of cancer, a few days after her thirty-fourth birthday. By then, I had started my life as a servant.

 

Papá was holding a rolled newspaper in one hand that drooped toward the floor. Until I walked in front of him and could see his face, I thought he was asleep, but his eyes were open, his gaze on the window. I looked and saw a building like ours. On its roof, the ropes women hung laundry on in warm weather stirred and tugged at the leaning poles to which they were attached. Daylight dwindled in patches on the dark brick of the wall. The darkening sky pressed thickly down, pulpy and plum-colored. One star gleamed.

My father took no notice of my presence. After a minute or so, I heard the rustle of the newspaper edges as he struck it on the floor.

“I’ve quit school,” I said. Almost at once, like three hard exclamations, the doors along the hall closed, shutting Mamá and Maura and Carreno into their rooms.

The newspaper dropped at my feet and unrolled. I saw the word, Stalingrad, and I bent to read the headline that told of the surrender of the German Sixth Army. Papá stood and kicked the newspaper away and walked to the window.

When he turned back to the room, his face was calm. He looked at me steadily. I was frightened. Yet I felt distant too, my life a small point of light far away from him, in a place he couldn’t reach.

“I had no reason to hope for more,” he said quietly. “But I did hope.”

“For what?” I couldn’t help asking.

“For—something. You’re not stupid.”

“I have a job,” I said quickly. “On Long Island. I’m going to be—” I forgot for a moment what the ad in the newspaper had said. He waited by the window. “I’m going to be a live-in maid.”

He nodded once. “Well—you’ve taken after her,” he said. He laughed briefly. “After us,” he added.

He returned to his chair, picking up the paper on the way. He shook it open.

I walked down the hall toward my room. Mamá’s door opened. She peered out at me, her eyes wide with alarm. I shook my head. “It’s all right,” I said. “What can he do?”

When I passed Maura’s room, she reached out and grabbed my arm. I shook her off. “Hijita! Don’t be so tough!” she protested. Carreno’s door remained shut.

 

Ellen, as my father had, gave way before the force of my intention. I had said nothing to her about the job until I had gotten it. As I described its particulars—twenty-five dollars every two weeks, every other Sunday and one day a week off, my own room and bathroom—she looked at me with dislike. It wounded me bitterly even as I suspected it rose from her own uncertainty about her life. Well, then. Let them both see me as a hopeless case! She was still a schoolgirl, and Papá had to come home every night to the barrio. I was getting out.

On the banks of the Hudson, she and I had played at magic lives. But I had already had a magic life in the garden of Malagita, in the great kitchen where I had been shown the reflection of my face in a silver tray.

Neither Atilio nor Thaddeus had been heard from for some months. “My little son is under the bombas and has no time for writing letters,” Uncle Federico said. I had seen newsreels of the bombing of foreign cities, fires cleaving the darkness, people running, shadows of confusion and alarm, the bomb craters in the gray light of day piled with the debris of buildings which only hours earlier had been filled with the living.

During the last week I lived at home. I wished the bombas would fall on the city, imagining that in the terror they would bring, in the destruction of all that proclaimed itself permanent, I would be released from doubt, set only on survival.

The morning before I was to take the train from Pennsylvania Station to my job in Forest Hills, I shopped for my mother. Later, I took the broom and swept all the rooms, gathering up the dust on a piece of cardboard I found in Carreno’s room. I paused there. One of the drawers in his dresser was half pulled out. I looked in and saw a few pairs of rolled black socks, a yellow embroidered shirt made of thin, transparent stuff, and a magazine. I picked it up and it fell open in my hands. I dropped it back at once into the drawer, but not before I had seen a clumsy drawing of two naked men, one standing with his head thrown back, the other, kneeling before him, his mouth clamped on to the extended cock of the one who stood, hanging from it like a garment of flesh. For a moment, I couldn’t catch my breath, and I stood motionless, burning as though sheathed in heat.

I looked at the objects on the dresser, a photograph of a caged parrot, a saucer holding a piece of pink soap, a spidery object which I gradually recognized, as I began to breathe normally again, as a hairnet. There was a dark smudge on Carreno’s pillow. Shuddering faintly, I bent forward and sniffed the perfumed residue of his hair pomade. On the wall was tacked a card of a painting of Saint Sebastian. I had begun to count the arrows which pierced his body when Mamá came into the room.

“One would have been sufficient,” she remarked dryly. I laughed too loudly, too long. She grew alarmed. I reached out to touch her, but my hand fell away. I felt too great a revulsion for flesh at that moment.

“Watch out for the sons,” she said.

“He’s eight years old,” I said. “And the other child’s a girl.”

“Watch out for the father, then.”

“Oh, Mamá!”

She took a step toward me. Her eyes filled with tears. “You’ve grown so tall,” she murmured.

I took a very small step away from her. She was staring at the card of Saint Sebastian.

“Sebastiano,” she said softly. “He would have been ten now.”

For a moment, I couldn’t think what she meant. Then I recalled all at once: the swaddled body of the dead baby on the table, the little mouth open. He would be bones by now, no more than a handful.

“I’ll be back twice a month,” I said.

“Perhaps you’ll miss me sometimes,” she said seriously, thoughtfully.

“I will,” I said. I didn’t believe I would.

 

On my free Sunday mornings, I took the train to New York City, away from Forest Hills where the Miller house sat in a row of similar houses on a curving street—each with a glassed-in sun porch and a narrow cement path leading to a white painted door, each, I supposed, with a refrigerator that was never empty, and rooms which at night were flooded with light that had a penetrating, meddling force the daylight seemed to lack and in which the dozens of things I dusted and polished and wiped, furniture, vases, China boxes, clocks, lamps, books, looked ownerless like objects in a store, an accumulation the purpose for which had never been clear.

I returned to the barrio, to our flat, where I opened the door into a dark hall and found myself in a passageway to a different country, and I walked quickly past the rooms, catching sight on my way to the kitchen of our belongings, each a relic of struggle, fought for, gained, abandoned, the flaws that had first placed them within our grasp defeating any effort to make them whole: cracked iron posts of bed frames, drawers that couldn’t be closed sticking out of bureaus, shaky chairs.

But on Wednesdays, my weekly day off, I stayed downtown in the city. I learned the streets and avenues like lessons. When I got hungry I ate in cafeterias where it was not necessary to speak to anyone, only push a dollar through a grill and gather up nickels from a smooth metal tray and deposit them in slots next to glass boxes which held sandwiches and cakes. In the ceaseless noise, among throngs of people, I made my choices of what to eat in private, silent pleasure. In the vast movie theaters where I often spent the afternoons, the speech of actors filled the dark with inhuman emphasis. Sometimes the film broke, then their voices, accompanied by the slap of torn film, changed into a kind of slow, bestial roaring.

It was not in the Miller house where I felt out of the barrio so much as it was on the city streets where I took any direction I wished, where any choice I made, a candy bar, a walk through the aisles of a department store, a movie, seemed a deliverance from all the constraints of my life, and was quickened by an anticipation I had not felt since I had last run down the dirt roads of Malagita to visit Nana.

Only now and then, when I lifted a sandwich or a cup of coffee to my lips, and caught a smell of cleaning fluids and powders which had clung to my fingertips, was I reminded of my labor which maintained the order upon which the Miller’s domesticity rested.

 

“Your goal is fifteen minutes a shirt,” Mrs. Miller had said with a bark of laughter. After I had learned to iron, she brought me handfuls of frayed lingerie and I began to learn to mend, but I could never make the stitches as small and fine as the ones on Nana’s black stockings. After I washed up the dinner dishes, I could go to my room. The garden view that had been promised in the ad was of a scraggly, overgrown hedge. But, at night, the sky was enormous, and when I opened the window, I could smell trees and earth.

“Anybody ever call you Lou?” Mr. Miller asked. “Like a nickname, I mean?”

“Not yet,” I answered.

He had come into the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea. I wrung out a dishcloth and spread it on the sink rim to dry.

“I’m going to call you Lou. Okay, Lou? My wife tells me you made it through two years of high school.”

“Almost three,” I said.

“You can’t get any place without an education,” he said, a tremor in his voice. “You’re always at a disadvantage. You could go to night school, you know. Don’t forget. You’ve got two languages already. You speak Spanish, don’t you?”

“Some,” I acknowledged.

“Well, then. You’re ahead of the game.”

He looked at me expectantly.

“I don’t think Spanish counts, Mr. Miller,” I said, hanging up my apron on a hook behind the basement door. Mrs. Miller had found the apron on a chair one day. Although she was usually good-tempered, she had told me with scarcely restrained irritation that unless I was wearing the apron, it must always be out of sight. I had begun to learn that being a maid was more than cleaning.

“Lou, you’ve got a right, in our country—”

“I’m glad to be working for you,” I interrupted. He stared at me a second, nodded, then took his tea and went to the door. “Okay, Lou. It’s your life,” he said with a touch of disappointment.

It was my life, hidden from the Millers in my room, in the streets I wandered, in my thoughts.

I didn’t care what they called me. I knew more about them than they could guess about me. June and Alfred, I called them in my thoughts after I’d seen their first names on the mail which I spread out on a table in the hall each morning. Yet I liked them. It was not their friendliness so much as their curiosity about me which partly dispelled the coolness I had felt toward them once they had hired me, once I had put on one of the two aprons Mrs. Miller handed me the first day I went to work for them. For all their efforts to make themselves comfortable with my presence, I knew I held mystery for them.

I surmised, had I been a Negro servant, they would have seen me as a flat surface. Not in their most private thoughts would they have considered me more than a dark-skinned vacancy. As it was, there was an odd, shifting equality between us; we were all working people together, except, of course, I didn’t set them tasks. I sensed I must relinquish nothing of my secret life.

I suddenly perceived that for Ellen to distinguish herself by acquiring a profession was a matter of the life or death of her spirit—that to be unknown was ordinary, but to be cancelled out as a creature undeserving of interest, was an unnatural death in life.

In the Miller household, it was the children, Lisa who was seven, and Benjamin, nine, who made me feel a vague, continuing apprehension. They did as they liked. “We love our children,” Mrs. Miller said to me with an emphasis that suggested she thought hers an unusual sentiment. The children never closed a door or picked up anything they had dropped or put anything back from where they had taken it. It was as if their hands were unable to grip things.

At the table, they pouted and pushed away their suppers. Mrs. Miller pleaded with them to eat. She told them about poor people who didn’t have such good food.

“Isn’t that so, Luisa? Aren’t there little children in the world who don’t have enough to eat, who’d be glad to have what’s on these plates?” she asked, rolling her eyes at me to urge me to confirm what she had said. I could only nod as I looked at the plump little girl, sprawled in her chair, her mouth turned down in complaint, the boy idly stirring his milk with his finger. Grimly, I scraped their untouched suppers into the garbage can while Mrs. Miller spoke worriedly about bacteria and disease. But she kept leftovers from the meals she ate with her husband and made use of them.

Sometimes I played cards with the children or read to them when the Millers went out of an evening. But I felt wary of them, aware of the unchildish appraisal in the faces they turned up to adults, and of the deliberateness with which, I judged, they misbehaved. One morning, I woke to find them standing by my bed. I supposed they had been watching me while I slept.

“Please don’t come into my room,” I said.

“It’s my house,” said Lisa.

“We can go where we want to,” Benjamin added.

“Not in this part of it,” I said, trembling with anger. “Not this room. Only if and when I ask you.”

Lisa looked frightened. “Will you ask us?” she said and began to cry.

I was ashamed, and I pitied them. I sat up and embraced them both, drawing them onto my bed. “I’ll ask you,” I promised. “Don’t cry. It’s all right.”

After that, I began to like them better, and I gradually learned that they, too, had their secret lives, refuges from the weight of that love that seemed to measure and record every breath they drew.

 

On a Sunday in October, just as I had put out my hand to brush back a strand of Mamá’s hair so I could see her face and try to gauge if my effort to persuade her to go to the clinic was having any effect, there was a pounding at the front door. I heard Papá walking down the hall to open it.

“You haven’t taken off your coat,” Mamá murmured reproachfully.

“Are you going to live out your life on this damned stool? My God! Do you sleep on it?” I cried in exasperation.

“Oh—leave me be!” she exclaimed.

“You’re sick,” I protested. I turned and seized the tap to try to stop its eternal leaking.

“It can’t be fixed,” Mamá said.

“Will you go if I take you? I’ll take you next Wednesday on my day off.”

“My coat is torn. I can’t find the right color thread to mend it.”

“I’ll find the thread. I’ll mend it,” I promised.

Uncle Federico appeared at the kitchen entrance, his shoulders hunched over, his face stricken, naked without its customary bullying smile.

“Horrible news,” he announced. He walked in, Papá a few steps behind him. As Mamá slid from her stool, Maura, looking half-asleep, staggered into the kitchen wearing her green winter coat over her nightgown.

“Coffee,” she croaked. “Por Dios!”

“You wait for your coffee!” Papá said with ferocity.

“Atilio, my little son…” muttered Federico. Panic gripped me. Would we now have to mourn Atilio’s passing? “He’s in a hospital somewhere in England, his little body burned,” Federico said, tears coming to his eyes.

“Ay, Dios mío!” cried Mamá.

“Only just after he had been made an officer. But he wrote the letter himself—just a few lines, but, poor boy, he always thinks of his papi and his mama and their worry.”

“Will he be crippled?” asked my father.

“Of course not,” Federico answered with sudden irritation. “It is only his left leg and arm, and the new American techniques are the best in the world.”

“I’m so sorry, so sorry,” Mamá said. “Aurelia must be suffering.”

“Of course. The mama always suffers,” Federico said quickly. “The woman stays and suffers,” he added, giving me a dark look. “But I have other news, also very bad,” he said. “It’s about our Mamá, Fefita. And you must remember the good part—she is now released from suffering—unlike my poor Atilio. I received information this morning that a hurricane struck San Pedro. No ordinary thing. They’ve said the winds are 167 miles an hour. And there has been a tidal wave.”

I saw Papá cast a fleeting, resentful look at Mamá. I knew then that he had already heard of the hurricane. While I had been making my bed in Forest Hills, Papá had been listening close to his radio, secretly listening, while Mamá sat on the edge of their bed waiting for the strength to come with which to begin another day. As though I could feel that first slight menacing stirring of wind in the palms, that special faint stirring that comes after a long stillness, after the sky has turned the color of saffron, I cried out, “Nana!”

From Mamá came a faint echo of my cry, a hopeless protest that died away at once.

Federico gazed up at the ceiling. “We won’t know for days—if ever. The devastation is terrible, the cane crop ruined, infants carried out to sea, people have no houses—”

“—Shut up, idiot!” shouted my father. “Shut up!”

Federico was stunned. Maura ducked out of the kitchen. Then Federico raised his hand as though to strike Papá. Mamá caught hold of it and he grappled silently with her. As they struggled, Papá, pushing me aside, strode out and down the hall.

I went after him, catching him just as he reached the door. I yanked at his jacket so hard I had it off his shoulders. He turned to face me, his thin mouth opening like the mouth of a fish gulping at air.

“Mamá is dying,” I gasped out. “You bastard! You terrible bastard!”

He tore himself from my grip and, to my amazement, dropped to his knees. He covered his face with his hands and swayed there on the floor before me. I thought he’d gone mad.

“Forgive me!” he groaned. “Forgive me…”

I backed away from him, vaguely aware of Maura breathing noisily nearby. I turned to her, intending to tell her to go away. But as I glared at her excited face, I heard the door bang shut. He had gone. Federico was coming rapidly up the hall. “Stay with your Mamá,” he ordered me. There was no heat of feeling in his voice, only the usual note of self-satisfaction.

In the kitchen, Mamá was crying. Maura shuffled in. Almost admiringly, she remarked, “Fefita, you will cry away all the water in yourself.”

“Papá did something crazy,” I told them. “He kneeled and asked me to forgive him.”

“If that one kneeled, it was because God broke his legs,” Maura sniffed.

How deeply entrenched she was in our lives! My sudden dislike of that fact made me walk quickly to my mother and take her arm to lead her to the bedroom, sheltering her with my body from Maura who followed us to the door. “Excuse me,” I said coldly, and shut her out.

Mamá collapsed on the bed. I sat near her on its edge. “She may not be dead,” I said.

“I would never have seen her again, Luisa,” Mamá said. “What I feel—” she broke off and looked distractedly about the room. “What I feel is that everything is running away from me so fast!”

“Please. Please let me take you to a doctor. I know you’re really sick.”

“Not yet,” she said. “I’ll go. One of these days. You, poor thing. You loved your Nana. Remember? I remember. You watched me in the mornings, wanting me gone. Yes, yes…you wanted me gone so that you could run off to her. I always knew when you’d been there. You came home with those little curls all over your head.”

I cried. She put her arms around me and rocked me back and forth in the old way that had once seemed to drag me into her own mourning but for which I was now grateful. She wiped away my tears with her cold hands. She smiled faintly. “As you said, she may not be dead,” she said. “You know what they say about people as clever as my Mamá—they can swim without getting their clothes wet.”

She shivered, and I looked around for something to cover her with but she put her hand on mine and said, “No. I’m all right. But I’m tired. I’ll sleep now.”

I went to my own bed where I lay motionless, feeling light and without substance. Carreno snored in the next room.

Only a few of the houses of Malagita could have withstood such winds. The vivienda would be untouched, its prodigious doors and great shutters closed against the storm, its servant houses blown away. Somewhere among the vast rooms, the Frenchwoman and her children would have listened to the violence outside, knowing themselves to be safe. The clock tower would stand. And perhaps the marble angel that had stood on the tomb of Antonio de la Cueva.

From the door of Nana’s cabin, she could survey the whole territory of her life. When she saw me running down the dirt road toward her, she had smiled, and when I’d flung myself against her, she had laughed out loud.

I heard Papá returning home later. I got out of bed and looked down the hall to the parlor. I could see his arm on the arm of the chair. I saw him lean forward to turn on his radio and bend his head close to it.

“Forgive me,” he had said. My mother had shown no interest in that extraordinary request of his. Had she known what he had meant, I brooded. From his crimes, I chose only one, the loss of Malagita.

 

My mother died in the second week of December.

I was playing Parcheesi with the children at the kitchen table one evening when Mrs. Miller came to say there was someone on the telephone asking for me.

I had hardly picked it up when Maura’s voice shouted in my ear, “Luisa! Luisa!”

A gust of fear blew through me. “Don’t yell,” I told her. “I can hear you.”

At once, she began to wail.

“Maura, for God’s sake…”

“Your Mamá…” she cried.

I knew then what news was coming to me from this first telephone call of my life.

“Your Papá and I are at the hospital on 168th Street.” She said with a sudden, crazy brightness. Almost at once, her voice sank until I could hardly hear it. “I found poor Fefita in her bed tonight, unconscious. Your Papá and I rode in the ambulance with her.”

“Is she dead, Maura?” When there was no answer, I said, “She’s dead.”

“Yes. Only fifteen minutes ago. She never said a word. Nena? Are you there? She had made her bed, she had packed most of her clothes in a box.”

I could not seem to release the deep breath I had drawn. Maura was calling my name again. I heard myself saying as though from a distance, yes, yes. She was asking me to come as soon as I could, to bring cigarettes—she was going mad with my father so silent.

In the living room, Mr. Miller shook the pages of a newspaper.

“I’ll be there,” I said and hung up.

I went and told the Millers. She stood up, a magazine sliding from her lap to the floor. She held out her hand. I looked at it as it curved to rest upon my arm; it looked so strange to me at that moment. More brusquely than I intended, I shook it off. Mr. Miller had gone out of the room and was now back wearing his coat. “I’ll drive you there,” he said.

“No!” I protested, alarmed by a kind of helplessness induced in me by their concern.

“Get your coat,” he said as though I hadn’t spoken.

“This is your Christmas present from the children,” Mrs. Miller said, tearing red tissue paper from a package. She pressed a pair of white wool gloves into my hands. “You can make use of them tonight. It’s very cold.”

In the car, Mr. Miller told me that his mother had died when he was five. He had some idea of how I felt, and being a foreigner too, because Jews were always, in some sense, foreigners, no matter what they were, and was my father there at the hospital? Is that who had called? And take all the days I needed, they’d manage. And money. Did I need money? He could advance me my pay, or even—

His voice began to falter. I had said nothing. The unanswering silence of one person makes language futile. After a while, when I was able to speak, I thanked him. He stretched out his right hand and rested his small, pale fingers on my wrist.

Maura and Papá were in the visitors’ room, sitting across from each other like strangers. When they saw me, they stood up. Maura came to me, tears beginning to form on the already swollen rims of her eyes.

How old was my father? No birthdays had been marked except mine. Mamá would take from a drawer a little package wrapped in colored paper, and Maura would pick out a bangle of hers and give it to me. Two years ago, on my sixteenth birthday, I had thought—this is how old Mamá was when I was born. Now she was dead.

Over Maura’s shoulder, I stared at my father, at a place on his upper lip where he had missed a patch of dark beard. His eyes were shadowed, half-closed; he had slipped one hand beneath his jacket so that it sheltered against his body.

To whom could I speak of my mother’s life? A nurse came into the room and lit a cigarette. An old man in a brown bathrobe peered in, then slipped around the door and sat down on a bench where he stared fixedly at the floor. Maura was talking of the funeral to Papá.

It was not that I hadn’t loved her. It was not that.

“Where is Mamá?”

“They’ve taken her away,” Maura said.

“Where?” I cried out. The old man stood up and left abruptly. “Where?”

Maura put her arm around me and led me to the window. Below, I saw the Hudson between its luminous banks, blacker than the sky. Softly, steadily, Maura told me that there was a special place in the hospital where bodies were prepared for burial. I heard the tone of invention in her voice. “They dump them in the river,” I said. Her grip on my shoulders tightened. The strength of her stringy arm surprised me and tempered the desperate and confused anger I felt as I stood there, my forehead pressed against the icy windowpane.

At the end of the Mass which Maura had arranged, and which was held in a small chapel of the church Mamá had once gone to, I wept from exasperation when the Irish priest extolled Mamá’s virtues as a wife, a mother, and a pious Catholic. She was to be buried twice; once in the ground, once by the uncomprehending, indifferent priest. Aurelia sobbed loudly into one of her chiffon handkerchiefs but Uncle Federico was silent until the service was over and we were outside on the sidewalk. There should be a meal after the funeral, he muttered, didn’t Fefita deserve a funeral meal? No one answered him. He sighed and looked up at the church doors then quickly away to the more comforting sight of the automobiles passing by on the broad street.

The snow held off until Mamá was put into the ground in a crowded cemetery just outside the city limits. Uncle Federico drove us home in his rackety Ford after dropping Aurelia off at their apartment house. She had bent over the seat toward Papá as though to kiss him, and he had pulled away from her so quickly he had pushed me forward so that I fell on my knees against the car door. I saw a look of dread on his face; his lips trembled, his eyes seemed to start out of his head. It passed in a second.

By evening, the bars of the fire escape at the parlor windows each held their narrow weight of snow. The wind blew great clouds of it across the roofs; where it caught the light, it shimmered like silken cloth.

Papá sat in his armchair, his hand covered his mouth and nose. He raised his eyes briefly to look at me. Was he going to say nothing to me? I started to leave.

“Wait,” he said.

I paused at the door.

“You don’t know how I feel.”

“No. I don’t. How could I?”

“Some people—like your mother—are broken early.”

“By others…”

“Your Spanish has become so coarse,” he said. It was strange but I hadn’t realized we were both speaking Spanish.

“I wonder if you remember what alegría means?” he asked me. “It was the great thing she had when I first knew her. Gaiety, they say here. It’s not the same. Do you know she made me laugh? How she could make me laugh! Away from those dead rooms, how I laughed. Do you know she prayed to me as well as to her Jesus and Mary?”

I found I could not look at him. “There was no place for me in Malagita,” he said. “Not a corner, not a crack.”

“I know what I know,” I muttered.

“You don’t guess at all that you don’t know.”

“Aren’t you sorry?” I burst out.

“Sorry,” he repeated grimly. “My God! Sorry!”

We had no more conversations. Two days later, I went back to Forest Hills where Mrs. Miller assured me that I need do nothing until I felt better. It was work I wanted.

In my room at night, when I knew the children were asleep, and there was no danger of their wandering into my room, I took out of my drawer the two massive silver forks I had found among Mamá’s ragged underwear. They had become tarnished, nearly black. I had taken polish and cloth from the kitchen, and I worked on them until they glittered.

Everything else which had belonged to her had been thrown out by Maura, who, during the time I spent at home, had cleaned and cooked our meals and silenced Carreno when he started to speak of Mamá, as though to show him—and us—that it was only she who had the right to grieve for her.

I had written a note to Ellen, telling her of Mamá’s death, and saying I would stop by on my next Sunday off on the chance I might find her in.

On Sunday, I found Mrs. Dove just home from church, I guessed. She was wearing her hat and gloves. She studied me for a moment. She was most sorry to hear of my mother’s passing on, she said. I observed how carefully she removed her hatpins, smoothed her hair, stretched and pressed the fingers of her gloves.

“She was very sick,” I said.

“It takes a long time getting used to. The sorrow never goes away.”

She placed her hat on a table. “Won’t you have supper with us?” she asked.

“Thank you, but I’d better go home.”

“Well, yes. I suppose your Daddy must be expecting you.”

I looked at her grimly. The sympathy on her face was plain to see. Of course, Ellen wouldn’t have talked to her about my father. She called him “the knife” and it was a kind of understanding, enough for me. We had not often spoken of him. I hadn’t known how to.

When Ellen came, I was sitting by the window, staring across at the roof where long ago she and I had seen a madman. She put her hand on my head. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“I asked her for supper but she has to go home,” Mrs. Dove said.

“Let’s go out and get some coffee,” Ellen said to me.

“Ellen, I’m making your supper. You can have coffee here.”

“I’ll be back soon, Momma,” she promised.

We walked up Amsterdam to a dark little bar where she turned in. “I want a drink,” she said. “Maybe two.” She lit a cigarette then put it out absentmindedly. The bartender said, “You need a few more years to get my drinks. I’m not serving you, baby.”

“Yes, you are,” she said. She smiled so splendidly, so knowingly, I didn’t see how anyone could refuse her anything. He didn’t.

“How is your father?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I’ve never been able to tell. I can’t now. I hate to go back there. Mamá’s gone, my grandmother lost in the hurricane…”

“People disappear,” Ellen said sadly. “So quick—and they’re gone.”

I spoke of the Millers, how kind they’d been. I could hear the insistence in my voice. “It’s not hard work,” I said.

“It’s demeaning.”

“What is, Ellen? What is!”

“Just the doing of it. Being a maid like my mother. Because you don’t have any choice.”

“She sees to you,” I said sharply.

“I know, I know…Momma didn’t know what else to do. She was a lady.” Ellen laughed. “A colored lady. You know what? We used to have a maid. Thad teased her about that.”

“Thad,” I said, suddenly gladdened.

“He’s in Paris. Imagine that! It’s the good thing about the war. Thad got to Europe.”

She tossed down her drink. She’s so skillful, I thought, meant for the world.

“I’m going to City College,” she said. And added fiercely, “That’s where I’m going.”

I told her more about the Miller household. I said too much. I knew my words would return to me in the rooms I dusted and swept, and when I looked at the discontented, nervous children, and when I shut the door to my room without believing anymore that the door would ensure my privacy. “I guess,” I said, “there is kindness that doesn’t mean much.”

As though my concession required her to make one, Ellen said, “Maybe you had good luck. Momma worked for some beasts before she got to old Madam. Her graciousness was severely tried when we first came to New York. Christian suffering, she called it.”

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “Maura Cruz has been doing so much. I’m only going there for her sake. He’s never even thanked her.”

“Luisa? Won’t you try something else? Make your father pay for it. There are so many things you could do! You could learn anything.”

I was thinking about something else. I wanted to ask her if she was in love. I glanced at her stern face and felt silly.

“I’ll walk you,” she said, in the old, sweet words. She held my arm close to hers all the way to my block. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re the one that’s earning your own living.”

It was an indulgence, but I was grateful for it.

“Are you in love with anyone?” I asked.

She laughed. “Oh, Luisa! That’s movie stuff!”

We were standing in front of the window where we had seen the whore at her work. She had moved out so long ago. Now, two children peered at us through the folds of a limp sheet that served as a curtain.

“You can sleep in Thad’s old cot—if you don’t stay at home on your days off,” she offered.

We embraced. The enlivening warmth of my feeling for her carried me all the way to the door of the flat. I heard the sound of men’s voices from behind the door, a shout, laughter.

There were people in the parlor. I went to Maura’s room. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, made up heavily, dressed, her thin legs crossed at the ankles, around one, a thin gold chain. When she saw me, she cried, “Ay, Chica!” and put her finger to her lips. She stood up and came to the door and peered down the hall.

“He has them here all the time now, those good-for-nothing drunks,” she whispered.

I noticed her suitcase on the floor. She followed my glance. “It’s not possible for me to stay,” she said. “It’s a madhouse of men.”

“I won’t see him,” I said.

“He’ll know you’re here. He always knows who comes in and goes out.”

“I’m going right now. I only came to see if you were all right.”

“Thank you, Nena. I’m glad someone in the world cares about poor Maura. You have some things in your room.”

“Nothing I want.”

“Carreno’s gone, too. Your Papá sleeps in his room.”

“How will I find you?”

“I know of a room nearby I think I can rent. I’ll leave the address with Señora Alegre downstairs.”

“Alegre!” I repeated. “Is she happy?”

Maura gave me a bewildered look. I put my arm around her. I could smell her hair dye. She sobbed briefly. I left right away and went quickly down the hall and the stairs to the street. I glanced up at the tenement and suddenly realized that what I hadn’t wanted to see was Mamá’s stool by the kitchen sink.

 

In March, another death occurred. Thaddeus Dove was killed while on a weekend pass when he tripped on a mine in a farmer’s field a few miles north of Paris. A few months later, the war would end, the defeat, Mr. Miller would say, of the old terrible world of the past.

Thad had written home that he loved the French countryside, the stone villages, a cafe he had found in one of them where he could warm his feet on a brazier of hot coals and drink a glass of red wine. It would have been spring there, too, the earth spongy and damp as it was down near the Hudson. I knew how he had looked, a tall, thin, young man, walking across the thawing ground, thinking hard about his life to come.