No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  Back then, she hated, with even greater passion, her father and everything he represented, for his sins were unforgivable: the carelessness in living, going from one Latin band to another as if he were a hired gun; instead of pistolas, toting his congas from one club to another in the cuchifrito circuit; drinking and womanizing; the future and its dangers of no concern to him. She despised him—and, above all, his Latino pride, his Puerto Rican insistence on personal independence, even though he was enslaved in the most basic of ways.

  On the issue of personal freedom she was most critical, since she was a staunch believer in the independence of Puerto Rico and aligned herself with the intellectuals who espoused the belief that a great injustice had been done to the island by the United States. At parties and dinners she still regaled guests and friends with her stories of having met William Morales, allegedly of the FALN, when she was a student at Hunter and he at City College, condemning anyone who called him a terrorist and defending his actions against the U.S. as those of a Puerto Rican patriot, someone who was fighting for the independence of his homeland, or at least his parents’ homeland, pausing to make reference to her father’s life, without mentioning him, as an example of certain Puerto Ricans who had no political pride. Even today she could only recall with repugnance his awful accent and his dark skin, oblivious to anything around him except his music, promising to bring her weird stuff like the time he said he was going to bring her a crab.

  “Where you going, papi?” she’d once asked.

  “I gonna play with Machito en Puerto Rico, mijita. Ju be googel, helpy ju motha and I bringy ju a cangrejo,” he’d say, playing with her.

  “What’s a cangreho, papi?”

  “Ha, ha. Ju no, a juey.”

  “A whohey, papi?”

  “Jezz, a juey,” he’d say, laughing, picking up his congas in their bags and waving at her as he went out the door, never kissing her or hugging her, and Hilda and Milagros laughing and explaining that a cangrejo and a juey were the same thing.

  “A crab, dopey,” Hilda said. “He’s gonna bring you a crab.”

  “Really?” she’d said, truly excited by the prospect.

  “Yeah, really,” Milagros said and she and Hilda pushed each other and laughed.

  Years later, at a friend’s house, where they had prepared one of the most delicious dishes of Puerto Rican cuisine, salmorejo de jueyes, she recalled her father and refused to give herself the pleasure of enjoying the crab dish. She still recalled times when she wanted to sit on his lap and he got up at the last minute. She hardly ever saw him while she was a little girl. He never played with her or took her anywhere, dropping by so seldom that the first few years she hid whenever he came in. After her seventh birthday, he stopped coming around.

  Later on, after she had studied and observed people she realized that her father wasn’t unique. There were men who couldn’t face up to the responsibility of marriage and children. Milagros, her oldest sister, who had gotten married and moved to the Bronx, came back one Christmas when Elsa was twelve and said she’d seen their father.

  “Did you talk to him?” Elsa had said.

  “Are you kidding?” Milagros said. “No way. Anyhow, he was with a woman. Una mujer trigueña. Darker than him.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “Yeah, she was sort of cute. Young. Maybe a couple of years older than me. Looked a little like your friend. What’s her name?”

  “Baby Contreras?”

  “Yeah, Baby. Trigueñita así. Like that. Her color.”

  She had gone into the bedroom and cried, unable to stop her tears for nearly an hour. When she was finished she washed her face and swore that she’d never see him, talk to him, or think of him again. But he was always there, grinning at her, his gold tooth glimmering below his mustache and his hair slicked back, pelo estirao, his hair straightened because otherwise it’d be all kinky. But she had good hair, and her skin, although not totally white because who needed that, was a nice creamy color and golden when she was out in the sun.

  The day word came about Joey, she had called out to her mother and, receiving no answer, found her lying on the bed with Joey’s picture in his Marine uniform clutched to her breast, crying quietly in the darkened room so that Elsa immediately knew her brother was dead—recognizing the presence of death to which she had grown accustomed, having seen death consistently since she was a child, beginning in the second grade when her friend Gigi Flores was shot walking to school on Stanton Street when a couple of drug dealers decided to settle things near the Pitt Street Pool and one of the bullets ricocheted off a building and a fragment traveled uncannily at the precise angle to strike Gigi below her right jaw, penetrating the neck just deeply enough to sever the carotid artery so that she was dead within minutes. Or the friends who died of overdoses or were murdered by phantoms, no one ever knowing why or what had happened. Late at night she tried counting all the people she had known who had died before they were thirty years old. She would lose count up around seventy, all of them lying in their caskets quietly, no longer talking back or protecting their dignity, but silenced forever.

  That her brother Joey, whom she loved and felt closer to than any of her other siblings because he was always her supporter and had fought countless battles on her behalf, was dead, left her numb for months. Eventually the numbness turned into glacial indifference, and, like the other deaths, she accepted it with the same resignation that life in the neighborhood imposed on everyone. It was as if the area were the center of a thought system that without saying so imposed every tenet of a determinist philosophy, a mutually agreed-on predestination which left human beings spiritually limp and without true will.

  Her pregnancy had simply happened to her, and once that recklessness, that abnegation of responsibility in becoming pregnant became apparent to her, she began having second thoughts. She recalled those first weeks after she’d told her mother that she was going to have a baby and could Billy move in with them since he was the father and anyway she was the only one left in the house and it would be good to have a man around. Her mother had nodded bravely and said she’d start cleaning out the room, explaining that the only condition was that he help with the household. Elsa reassured her mother that Billy would help out and she set about making their room a love nest, using the money from her weekend baby-sitting jobs to buy curtains and new sheets and a flowered bedspread. She loved walking down the street with Billy, his big strong arm around her waist and her own around his, usually hooking her thumb in the pocket of his jeans and feeling his buttocks with the rest of her hand.

  He was taller than most people she knew, but the way he talked made him seem shorter and like he was one of them. He talked like he was black, not exactly like the morenos, but not unlike them. “I can dig it,” he’d say. Or in greeting someone he’d say things like, “What’s happenin’, brother?” And when the person answered, his head’d be nodding patiently, his eyes half-closed like he was high, which sometimes he was when they smoked and listened to records up in the room, and he’d say, “I hear you, man. Most definitely.” And he’d always refer to guys as “cats.” But most of the time he was quiet, like his mind was far away.

  They’d walk around the neighborhood and go shopping for her mother and once in a while they’d go over to Greenwich Village and walk around late at night and then he’d grow very quiet and a couple of times they’d stopped by a club on Seventh Avenue, the Village Vanguard, or Boomer’s, or the Village Gate on Bleecker Street, and he’d stand listening to the music, his head keeping time. She’d ask him if he wanted to go in, but he’d shake his head and walk down the street, his step hurried. She’d chase after him, asking him what was the matter, but he’d never answer and then they’d go over and sit in Tompkins Square Park until whatever was going on with him passed. Eventually, he told her he used to be a musician and played jazz, but she didn’t know what jazz was and hadn’t pursued the discussion, not finding out that he was a pianist until Vidamía go
t it into her head that she wanted to help him.

  The first few months of the pregnancy were both heaven and hell. She’d heard about morning sickness before but never imagined it would be as devastating as it was. At first the notion that she was pregnant gave her a feeling of absolute power. When her girlfriends found out that she was expecting, she became a celebrity and overnight she was an authority on lovemaking and pregnancy, subjects of almost obsessive proportions with the other girls.

  “What’s it feel like in there?”

  “The baby?”

  “No, the thing.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Is it really hard?”

  “What if you have to pee while it’s happening?”

  “Suppose he has to pee?”

  “My sister, Vilma, says the stuff is all sticky and smelly, but she likes it and she says it turns her on. She said she even tasted it.”

  “Yecht!”

  “Yeah, I betcha it feels good.”

  “No way.”

  “Yeah, way. My cousin Maritza took a hot dog and put it in her tontón.”

  “With or without sauerkraut?”

  “Gaw, Yolanda, you’re such a stupid.”

  All of them talking at once and she feeling like she was in total control, explaining that you get sick and throw up the first couple of months, but it wasn’t too bad, minimizing the experience but dreading waking up the next day. And the next morning she would be sick and vomiting and one day she’d even gone with Awilda and talked to a comadre of Awilda’s aunt who knew a doctor who did abortions but he wanted five hundred dollars, and where the hell was she going to get that kind of money. She thought of asking Billy, but that would have been too cruel.

  The feeling of wonder at being pregnant and living with a boy lasted into her fifth month of pregnancy. He seemed insatiable in his desire for her—the big blond boy who held her and kissed her passionately and went into her with a hunger that left her drained until she finally could no longer take the burden of absorbing the pain that poured out of him along with his orgasms and told him he had to leave, her ambivalence about him even puzzling to her.

  “Please, Elsa,” he’d said. “I love you. I want to marry you. I’ll go to school. I’ll learn to do something. Please, don’t do this. Please.”

  “Oh, God, Billy,” she’d replied, sitting on the bed, her belly beginning to show a little, making her skirt tight and uncomfortable. “I can’t, I can’t.”

  “Is it my hand?”

  “No, no, it’s not your hand,” she’d screamed. “I don’t even want to have the baby.”

  “Please don’t say that. Please don’t. It’s going to be all right. It’s just a helpless little baby, Elsa. It’s never done anything to anybody. It’s our baby.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Don’t you love the baby?” he’d asked.

  “I don’t know,” she’d answered honestly. “I’m supposed to, but I just feel so sick all the time. I’m sorry.”

  And he’d hold her and she’d cry and then they’d go to bed and he’d make love to her, calling her name and saying “I love you” and always he’d cry, quietly most times, but once in a while a great racking sob would escape his chest, and then she’d hold him and her own tears would come and after a while she’d fall asleep. Getting rid of Billy didn’t improve the situation. She cried constantly, feeling abandoned and confused, needing to have him touch her and yearning to feel wanted again. And each day the creature inside her grew larger. “Creature” because that is what her mother and the people who spoke in Spanish called it. La criatura. She knew that in Spanish the word carried tenderness and fragility, while in English the word was close to “monster,” something from another planet, or else like that movie they showed from time to time on TV, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, so that she imagined giving birth to an ugly, web-footed monster she would eventually have to kill.

  4. Zing! Went the Strings

  Maud Farrell watched Vidamía fold the piece of paper with her address and telephone number on it, remove her wallet from her bag, slide the paper into a plastic slot, and drop the wallet back into the large bag. She liked the girl’s spunkiness immediately. And then in a gesture that left Maud Farrell shaking her head, wondering how the girl could be so mature and so poised, Vidamía extended her hand across the bar and thanked her. Maud Farrell took the hand, feeling foolish, and shook it, thinking, “This is crazy.” This was her granddaughter, and she ought to put her arms around her and kiss her. She remained behind the bar, her heart swelling with pride, and decided there would be plenty of time for that. The girl left with Arnold Tyson and got into the patrol car to be driven to the train station so she could return home. Through the bar’s window Maud watched the girl wave to her, those eyes pleading for her to keep her promise to let her meet her father soon.

  When the patrol car was gone, Maud Farrell sat pensively, attempting to fashion the best way to let her son know that his daughter had come looking for him. At first she was angry that the entire matter had resurfaced. Back then, after he returned from Vietnam, she had been bothered that Billy was living down on the Lower East Side—with Puerto Ricans, at that. When he got involved with his friend’s sister, she had kept her counsel because the war had damaged him too much for any emotion on her part to be of any help. But she’d hated Puerto Ricans because they’d shot Kevin, and she could never forgive them. She knew the hatred was irrational, against God’s teaching, but she couldn’t help feeling as she did.

  As she finished setting up the bar and turned on the air-conditioning, she experienced the pleasure of recalling Vidamía: her green eyes large and bright, the lashes long, shading the eyes so that the golden specks in the green appeared to shimmer. The bridge of her nose was thin and perhaps too bony, its tip slightly turned up, the slight upward tilt reminiscent of her own mother, Brigid. She wasn’t perfect but she was her granddaughter, and perhaps she saw greater beauty in her than was there.

  That evening when Maud Farrell got off work, she met Ruby Broadway and they sat in the coffee shop up the street from Ruby’s house and she told her about her granddaughter.

  “Is she dark?” Ruby inquired.

  “Is she what? Dark?”

  “Yeah! Dark!” Ruby said.

  “No, I told you,” Maud answered. “She’s sort of a golden color. Tawny. Like a lion.”

  “Yeah, what we call high yella,” Ruby said. “What kinda hair she got?”

  “Brown and wavy.”

  “Yep, sounds like a high yella gal to me,” Ruby said. “You say her mama’s Porto Rican?”

  “Yeah, Billy met her down on the Lower East Side.”

  “Makes sense. Porto Ricans got plenty of black in them. Is she small or big?” Ruby said.

  “I don’t know. Tall. Maybe five seven. Gangly now, but a looker,” she said and described the prominent cheekbones and full lips that gave Vidamía an exotic beauty which she couldn’t quite place as belonging to any group or race so that Maud felt as if she had met someone so different from anyone she’d ever encountered. She’d have to ask the girl to bring her a picture.

  “Oh, she is a lovely girl, this Vidamía. Just lovely,” she told Ruby.

  From Ruby’s smile anyone could tell their friendship was a true one.

  “You’re sure one proud grandma, ain’t you?” Ruby said.

  “Yes, I am,” Maud said.

  They both laughed and ordered more rice pudding and coffee.

  That night, before she fell asleep, she suddenly realized that the feeling of satisfaction which she had been experiencing since Vidamía left the bar was the same fierce, possessive, all-consuming maternal love that she felt for Billy. And then as if she were standing outdoors and the skies suddenly loosed a heavy downpour, the realization hit her. Billy’s child was the girl she’d wanted to have with Kevin and never could; time after time carrying the child and in the second or third month losing it, until she dreaded becoming pregnant. And then Kev
in was shot and gone forever. That ended any hope of ever again having a child because one thing she could never bring herself to do was open up her heart to another man. God help her, but it was one thing to need the company of a man, to need to have them touch you and feel their roughness and hardness, and another to love someone enough to want to have a child by him, and that time was gone now, receding like the delicate colors of a sunset.

  She recalled being not yet seventeen years old and standing in the bleachers at Gaelic Park on Corlear Avenue in the Bronx with her girlfriends Rita Lyons and Trish Cunningham, who were older and worked as stenographers in Manhattan, watching the hurling game, the sticks flying and the young men in their short pants bouncing off each other, having gone there because Trish was dating Tommy Corcoran, who was a fireman. It was 1949 and all the boys had returned from the big war but everyone was already talking about another war, in Korea. All the girls had fellas and she was still in high school. Rita’s fella was a sailor she’d met at a dance the previous year. He’d gone back home to West Virginia and wrote her long, tender letters. They were planning a June wedding and Rita had a beautiful diamond ring. After the wedding they would move down south where the family had a dairy farm. It was all so exciting that Rita looked dreamy-eyed most of the time.

  When the game was finished, Tommy came over with a great big brawny boy with sandy brown hair and the bluest eyes and loveliest smile she’d ever seen. Her heart immediately began beating uncontrollably and all she could think of was the lyrics to the song “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart,” which she used to sing standing by the piano on Saturday afternoons when her father’s friends came over to the house in Yonkers and played music. Candy Donovan, who used to sing down in the clubs and who was sweet on Charlie Parker, or so the rumors went, taught her how to sing the song.