The Cuban Club

by Barry Gifford

  “Man never loses a case,” he said.

  Ed had a huge belly and big arms. So did Irma. They both said goodnight and left the room. Tina put her right hand on Roy’s left leg and squeezed his thigh. As soon as Tina heard the door to her parents’ bedroom close and lock click, she turned to Roy and kissed him hard on the mouth.

  Tina stood, took Roy’s left hand and said, “Let’s go down to the river and sit on the pier.”

  The river was at the end of Tina’s street. She led him past a dwarf palm tree that was bent halfway over to a short pier and pulled him down onto the planks.

  “Lie back,” she said.

  There were no boats moving on the water and except for insect noises it was quiet. Tina lay on top of Roy and rubbed her body against his. They kissed a few times with their mouths closed, then Tina rolled onto her side and with one hand unzipped his fly. Roy’s cock popped up like a jack-in-the-box and Tina wrapped her right hand around it. He stared at the crescent moon as she stroked him slowly for a minute or so and then Roy tried to get up and lie on top of her. Tina pushed him back down, held him prostrate with her ropey arms, straddled his legs and put his cock into her mouth. Roy came immediately.

  Tina rolled off of him and spat into the water, turned back to Roy and said, “You have a good dick, I think.”

  She stood up, so Roy did, too. He zipped up his pants. Tina had already begun walking back off the pier. They walked to her house without saying anything. Tina stopped in front of her porch steps. No lights were on. She stretched out her arms and rested them on Roy’s shoulders.

  “I won’t be at the Cuban Club next Saturday,” she said. “I’m going with Ed and Irma to Milwaukee on Monday. That’s where Mamie, Irma’s mother, lives. I have a cousin there, Ronnie. He’s the only boy I let fuck me. He’s twenty-one.”

  “How long have you been letting him do it?” Roy asked.

  “Since a couple of months before my thirteenth birthday. This will be the fifth year. I only see Ronnie in the summer when we visit Mamie. Ronnie’s getting married in September.”

  Tina kissed Roy on the mouth and this time she stuck her tongue in. Roy watched her go up the steps and into the house. He saw Irma sitting on the swing in the dark, smoking a cigarette.

  “Go on now, boy,” she said.

  APPRECIATION

  It was Roy’s mother’s third husband, Sid Wade, who told Roy that his father had died. Roy and Sid did not get along. Roy’s mother had married Sid two years before, when Roy was ten, and it had since been obvious to Roy that if this husband had a choice, he would prefer Roy were not part of the deal.

  Roy had gone home from school to have lunch and Sid took him into what had been Roy’s grandfather’s room before he moved to Florida to live with Roy’s Uncle Buck. Ice coated the windows.

  “Listen, Roy, your father died this morning,” Sid said.

  Roy knew his father was in the hospital being treated for colon cancer. He’d had an operation a few months before and needed to sit on a rubber pillow at the kitchen table. Also, since then Roy had seen his father’s second wife, Evie, giving his dad shots with a large hypodermic needle. Despite the illness, Roy’s father did not appear to have lost his strength or his sense of humor. The only difference Roy noticed was that his dad was at home more. Usually he was at his liquor store from early afternoon until three or four in the morning, and sometimes he didn’t go home for twenty-four hours.

  “In my business, there’s always something going on,” he told Roy. “If I don’t pay attention, I’ll end up paying in other ways, and if that happens too many times pretty soon I won’t be in business.”

  There were always people coming in and going out of his dad’s store, and men hanging around talking or whispering to each other or just standing and waiting. His dad seemed to know all of them and did not mind that none of them ever bought any liquor. The only times Roy saw a bottle of whiskey or gin change hands with one of them was when his dad gave it to him and did not ask for money. Sometimes a showgirl from the Club Alabam next door came in and without saying anything went down the rickety inside staircase into the basement with Roy’s father. They would come back up a few minutes later and the girl would kiss his dad on his cheek and say, “Thanks a million, Rudy,” or “You’re a swell guy,” before leaving. The showgirls came in on a break from rehearsals wearing only high heels and a skimpy costume under a coat. Roy thought they were all knockouts and he asked his father what they wanted to see him about.

  “They need a little help from time to time, Roy,” his dad said, “and I give them something to make ’em feel better.”

  “What do you give them?”

  “It’s not important, son. They’re poor girls and I like to help people if I can.”

  “They always kiss you goodbye.”

  Roy’s father smiled and said, “That’s how they show their appreciation.”

  Roy wanted to go back to school in the afternoon after Sid Wade told him about his father, but Sid said he couldn’t, that he would drive Roy to his father’s house so he could be with Evie and his father’s relatives. Roy asked his mother if he had to go to Evie’s and she said yes, to show his respect. “She’ll appreciate it,” his mother said.

  Years later, long after Sid Wade, his mother and Evie were dead, Roy, in recounting the events of that day for his own son, explained his asking to be allowed to go back to school as his desire to act normally, a way of denying to himself for the moment that his father was dead.

  “I didn’t really understand what it meant,” Roy told his son, “that I’d never again see my father hanging out with his cronies or being kissed on the cheek by a showgirl from the Club Alabam. I wanted to help him and I couldn’t.”

  “You help a lot of people now, though, Pop,” Roy’s son said. “Have you ever been kissed by a showgirl?”

  THE AWFUL COUNTRY

  When Roy’s mother returned from her birthday trip with her companion Nicky Roznido, Roy asked her how it was and she said, “Everybody in Mexico carries a gun.”

  Roy was eight years old and his mother was twenty-nine for the second time. She didn’t look thirty, she said to her friend Kay, and she saw no reason to admit to her real age until she absolutely had to.

  “I was twenty-nine until two years ago,” said Kay, “when I turned thirty-eight. I admitted it to Mario and he told me he didn’t care so long as I looked good to him. I asked him what he would do when that day came and he said he’d have to buy a younger wife.”

  Kay and Roy’s mother snickered and Roy, who was in the room with them, asked Kay, “Did Mario buy you?”

  “He knew what he was getting when he married me,” she said. “Be smart, Roy, don’t ever get yourself into a situation where you’re paying for more than you can afford.”

  “Cut it out, Kay,” said Roy’s mother. “He doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Kay had flaming red hair and green eyes with black dust smudged around them. She was wearing a double strand of tiny pearls and diamond rings on the third fingers of both hands.

  “Your mother’s right, Roy,” she said, and smiled, displaying more teeth than he could quickly count accurately. “Don’t listen to me, it won’t matter, anyway. Everyone makes their own mistakes.”

  Kay returned her attention to Roy’s mother and said, “Come on, honey, I’m going to buy you a fancy lunch to celebrate your return from that awful country. Did Nicky have to shoot anybody this time?”

  After Kay and his mother left the house, Roy went into his room and lay down on the bed. He could hear thunder but it was far away. He thought about what Kay had said about everyone making their own mistakes. He knew she meant something other than giving a wrong answer on a test. Roy remembered the morning his mother threw her second husband, Des Riley, out of the house. He was six then and his mother had said, “We won’t have to listen to his bullcrap any more, Roy. That one was a mistake.”

  “Was my dad a mistake?” Roy asked her.
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  “No, Roy,” she said, “I was just too young to know what I was doing.”

  His mother was really thirty now, not twenty-nine. How old did a person have to be to not be too young? If his father were still alive, Roy would ask him. It was not a question, he decided, that his mother could answer.

  DEEP IN THE HEART

  After she graduated from high school in Chicago, Roy’s mother had gone to the University of Texas in Austin. When he was ten, Roy asked her why she had gone to college so far away.

  “Your Uncle Buck was training to be a pilot at the Naval air station down there and he thought it would be a good idea for me to get away from the nuns and our mother. I was very shy. I’d spent ten years in boarding school being bossed around by the sisters and the priests, I’d never been on a date alone with a boy.”

  “Did you like Texas?”

  “The girls were nice but sometimes they played tricks on me.”

  “What kinds of tricks?”

  “Oh, one time at breakfast instead of two sunnyside up eggs they put two cow’s eyes on my plate. But I liked how blue and enormous the sky was and singing ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’ and ‘The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You’ at the football games.”

  “How long did you stay there?”

  “Almost two years. My brother washed out of pilot school and got stationed in Philadelphia. He and Diana were married by then. My girlfriends talked me into entering a beauty contest at the university and I won. I was offered a modelling job in New York, so I went there and stayed with my Aunt Lorna and Uncle Dick.”

  “Aunt Lorna’s the one I punched in the eye when I was two.”

  “That’s right, when she came to Chicago to visit. She and Uncle Dick had a beautiful house on 65th Street off Fifth Avenue. I was making my own money for the first time so I didn’t see the point in going back to college.”

  “I got sick, though, so after a few months I came back to Chicago and spent a few weeks in the hospital being treated for a severe case of eczema. The doctors said I had a nervous condition and should avoid stress. Eventually I went back to work modelling furs for wholesale buyers in the showroom at the Merchandise Mart. I was only nineteen then. That’s when I met your father. He was twenty years older and knew how to take care of me. Boys my own age didn’t. So I married your dad and we honeymooned in Hollywood and Las Vegas. He arranged a screen test for me and his friends out there introduced me to some movie stars.”

  “Like who?”

  “Oh, Errol Flynn and William Holden were the most famous ones. And that terrible Lawrence Tierney.”

  “What was terrible about him?”

  “He was forward with me at the studio but then your dad’s friends let him know the score and he apologized.”

  “I didn’t know you could have been in the movies.”

  “I couldn’t act, Roy, I didn’t have any experience, so nothing came of it. Hollywood is full of pretty girls. I had fun, though. Your dad had business to do in Las Vegas so we spent quite a bit of time there. In those days everyone stayed at the El Rancho, it was the place to be before Ben opened his hotel.”

  “Who was Ben? Was he a friend of Dad’s?”

  “Yes. He was murdered in Los Angeles while we were with his girlfriend’s brother in Vegas.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “They never found out. When you’re in business, it’s easy to make enemies. People never know who their real friends are, anyway.”

  “I’ve got real friends.”

  Roy’s mother smiled at him. She had beautiful teeth. They were sitting at the kitchen table and she patted him on his hand.

  “Of course, Roy,” she said. “I wasn’t talking about you.”

  UNOPENED LETTERS

  “Roy, would you please take out the placemats that are in the bottom drawer of the dining room dresser? The red ones underneath the candlesticks.”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  Roy’s mother was preparing the house for a dinner party that evening in honor of her Aunt Lorna, who was visiting from New York. Roy was fifteen and had not encountered his great-aunt since he was about two years old, an occasion of which he had no recollection. Lorna had helped Roy’s mother establish herself as a model in New York twenty-five years before and she had always been grateful to Lorna for her kindness and generosity; having a dinner party for Lorna during one of her rare visits to Chicago was the very least his mother could do.

  “Ma, who’s Frank Jameson?”

  “What, Roy? Did you find the placemats?”

  “Yes, but there was a marriage certificate and a bundle of unopened letters with a string tied around it underneath the placemats. The marriage certificate is between Nanny and a man named Frank Jameson. Who is he?”

  Roy’s mother came into the dining room and Roy handed her the certificate.

  “And these letters all have a return address in Kansas City. They were sent to Nanny here in Chicago.”

  “The letters are from your grandfather to Nanny. She never opened them because she was married at the time to Frank Jameson.”

  “You mean that she and Pops got divorced? You never told me.”

  “No, Roy, I didn’t think it was necessary for you to know. Maybe I was wrong not to tell you, but you and Pops were so close I didn’t want anything to interfere with that.”

  “How long was Nanny married to Frank Jameson? You must have been a little girl then.”

  “Ten years, from when I was six to sixteen. He had a heart attack and died on Christmas day, just after my sixteenth birthday. Pops wanted to re-marry my mother but she didn’t want to. He used to stand in a doorway across the street from our house and when she came out he’d try to talk to her. He’d gone to live in Kansas City after they divorced, then he moved back to Chicago after Frank died. Pops still loved Nanny and wrote her letters but she wouldn’t open them. Half of those letters he sent while Frank was still alive.”

  “But she lived for twelve years after Frank Jameson died, until you were twenty-eight. Why didn’t she open them for all those years?”

  “I don’t know. I only discovered them after Nanny died. I didn’t want to just throw them away.”

  “Did you tell Pops you had them?”

  “No. I meant to but I never did. I don’t know why exactly except that because of things my mother said I blamed Pops for breaking up their marriage. And after he died, I hid them away.”

  “Along with Nanny’s marriage certificate to Frank Jameson. You grew up with him, Ma. Did you like him? What was his profession? And why did Pops and Nanny get divorced?”

  “Frank was all right to me but not to my brother. I was sent away to boarding school, so I didn’t spend much time with him. He didn’t want anything to do with your Uncle Buck, and since Buck was fourteen years older than me he was already pretty much on his own. The Jameson family were fairly well-to-do. They were Irish, the father and mother were born in County Kerry, and there were four brothers, including Frank. They owned warehouses in and around Chicago. Frank was a devout Catholic, so Nanny began going to church regularly. She became close friends with the Mother Superior at St. Theresa’s, near where we lived.”

  “She was in our house a lot when Nanny was dying. I remember her. I’d never seen a woman with a mustache before. What about Pops and Nanny? Why did they split up?”

  “Pops had a girlfriend, Sally Carmel, who lived in Kansas City. I guess he met her on one of his business trips. He still loved Nanny, though, and wanted her to go back with him. I think that’s what’s in those letters.”

  “Love letters.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Are you ever going to open them?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps it’s better to leave them unopened. They’re addressed to my mother, not to me. I’ve often wondered why she kept them. I should probably burn them.”

  Roy’s mother replaced the letters and the marriage certificate in the bottom drawer of the dresser and closed it.

  “Le
t’s not talk about this any more now, Roy. I’ve got to have everything ready for the dinner. Aunt Lorna will be here at five.”

  She went into the kitchen. Roy sat down on a chair in the dining room and looked out the window. The sky was gray with black specks in it, a snow sky. He wondered what else his mother thought was unnecessary for him to know.

  Walking to St. Tim’s the next morning, Roy asked his friend Johnny McLaughlin if he thought either or both of his parents kept secrets about their family from him and his brothers.

  “The Catholic church is all about secrets,” said Johnny. “It’s the mysteries keep people comin’ back for more, hopin’ they’ll some day get filled in on the real goods. My Uncle Sean is always goin’ on about the Rosetta stone, you know, that hunk of rock found in Egypt over a hundred years ago has pictures of birds and half-moons on it symbolize something important. My parents ain’t no different. They just tell me and Billy and Jimmy what’s necessary to keep us in line. Only the dead know the meaning of existence, and they don’t answer letters.”

  “They don’t even open them,” said Roy.

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, 1953

  Roy and his mother had come back to Chicago from Cuba by way of Key West and Miami so that she could attend the funeral of her Uncle Ike, her father’s brother. Roy was six years old and though he would not be going to the funeral—he’d stay at home with his grandmother, who was too ill to attend—he looked forward to seeing Pops, his grandfather, during his and his mother’s time in the city.

  It was mid-February and the weather was at its most miserable. The temperature was close to zero, ice and day-old snow covered the streets and sidewalks, and sharp winds cut into pedestrians from several directions at once. Had it not been out of fondness and respect for her father’s brother, Roy’s mother would never have ventured north from the tropics at this time of year. Uncle Ike had always been especially kind and attentive to his niece and Roy’s mother was sincerely saddened by his passing.