No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  One day when Pilar had almost given up all hope she asked an old sailor if he knew Alonso, and showed him the nearly faded photograph. The old man squinted at the photograph and then shook his head sadly, explaining that although he had only seen him a few times he was sure he was the young man who’d had the accident. The pain in Pilar’s heart was as intense as if someone had plunged a knife into her chest.

  “Is he dead?” she said, nearly on the point of fainting.

  “No, but he lost his right leg,” the old sailor said. “It was amputated above the knee.”

  “Does he still live in Valparaíso?” Pilar asked.

  “Yes, I believe he still lives there with his family.”

  “Do you know if he’s married, sir?” she asked, timorously.

  “That I do not know, señorita,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Pilar said, and walked away clutching the photograph to her heart.

  With tears in her eyes she walked home in the rain, unable to know what she would do next. That evening she couldn’t eat and remained awake the entire night. The following week, desperate, and her heart aching to be with Alonso no matter what his condition, she packed a few belongings and with the small amount of money she had saved began a journey that took her along the coast of South America through Ecuador, where she worked as a maid for a wealthy family for six months in Guayaquil, before going on to Lima, Peru, and doing the same for a year. Her suffering and love for Alonso made her even more beautiful and in each place where she worked, suitors came and sought her hand in marriage. Pilar thanked them but explained that she was already engaged.

  Eventually, working and traveling, Pilar was able to reach the city of Valparaiso, Chile. She again found work, this time as a seamstress, a trade she had learned while in Peru, and spent her days working in a dress shop and her evenings searching for Alonso. One evening, after she had put the finishing touches on a wedding gown for one of the young women of the city, she left her place of employment and, crossing a small square, saw a young man ahead of her. He was walking with crutches, his right pants leg folded and pinned halfway up. Without the least hesitation, knowing she had found her love, she called Alonso’s name. The young man stopped, turned, and, puzzled, peered into the failing light of day. She moved forward and it was indeed Alonso. The young man was struck dumb by what he saw before him.

  “Pilar?”

  She nodded and threw her arms around him with so much emotion that she nearly knocked him off balance. The young man laughed and sat on a bench in the square. He explained that he had lost his leg in an accident at sea and was ashamed of his appearance. He thought she wouldn’t want to marry him. Pilar shook her head, put a finger to Alonso’s lips and said she loved him and even if he had lost both legs she would want to be with him.

  “Those were my parents,” Mrs. Alvarez said. “Mi madre y mi padre, que en paz descansen,” she said, may they rest in peace.

  Vidamía, her eyes moist and her mouth red with cherry pie, said it was a beautiful story and then asked Mrs. Alvarez if she thought she’d done the right thing in looking for her father.

  “Yes, I think so,” Mrs. Alvarez said. “Always do what your heart tells you. You’re a good person and your heart will not lie to you. There, wipe your mouth and get upstairs before your mother comes down,” she added handing her a paper towel.

  Vidamía stood up and hugged Mrs. Alvarez and said I love you and then ran upstairs feeling light and wondering if someday she would fall in love like Pilar. But that would be much later, she thought. Now she was going to meet her father. She couldn’t wait to tell Martha Coburn, who was her very best friend now that Elizabeth Wright had moved away.

  7. From A to Z

  Nearly three weeks passed before Maud Farrell, familiar with the complexities of Billy’s fragile mind, phoned her son to tell him that his daughter, Vidamía, had come looking for him. For the past eleven years Billy Farrell had settled into a new life fashioned out of his confusion, and the concern of his grandfather, Buck Sanderson, who had brought him down south, to his part of the country, to help him find a wife. Of greater importance to this relatively calm life was the inventiveness of said wife, one Lurleen Pierce Meekins from Wilkins, in central Tennessee, population 328, who managed to steer him carefully away from his memories of Vietnam and into a structured present and a safe, albeit indefinite future.

  Billy Farrell listened carefully as if his mother’s words were drinking glasses that were being stacked atop each other, each new level of understanding threatening to topple the entire structure. Hearing his mother request that he come up and discuss the matter coupled with the realization that he would have to meet this child, to whom he was a stranger, and inflict upon her the sight of his ugly hand rattled uncomfortably inside of him.

  “Let me think about it,” he’d said.

  Recalling his time with Elsa Santiago produced memories of Joey and Vietnam, and for nearly four days he sat in his rocker, staring out at the city, not saying anything. The children played around him but he was oblivious to them. Lurleen brought him food and drink. He ate without tasting anything. At night she guided him to bed so he could at least rest if he couldn’t sleep. He remained awake, seeing vividly himself and Joey running across the rice field; and then not hearing the explosion but feeling the force of the blast and then the blackness.

  His mother’s phone call came one evening, after he had spent the day emptying out an apartment on Orchard Street. An old, presumably Jewish, man had died. They always came over and got him when the person was Jewish.

  “Farrell’s a Jewish name, right?” Raymond Marcano had asked him some years before. He’d shaken his head and shrugged his shoulders, not considering the question important.

  “Irish,” he’d said, but Marcano either hadn’t heard him or didn’t believe him.

  In the eyes of the neighborhood he was white, with a beard that was beginning to gray, and that must have reminded them of the Hassidim who trekked from Brooklyn across the Williamsburg Bridge every Saturday to the many synagogues of the Lower East Side. It didn’t matter what he was. Everyone was heading down the same road to death. This time the man hadn’t been Jewish. “The man’s family came and took a watch and some silver candlesticks and frames,” Marcano had said. But most of the belongings remained, including a wooden crucifix and a Bible and the man’s clothes: big, cracked shoes; and, in the drawers, frayed underwear and old dark socks, everything smelling of the old man, musty and forgotten. Sánchez and Marcano had a superstition concerning the Jews. Sánchez explained that it was a sin for Christians to touch a dead Jew’s belongings, especially his clothing, but Billy’d heard that when the Jewish lady on Rivington Street died, Sánchez found a gold watch in her apartment and kept it.

  Billy got the key from Marcano. Once inside the apartment he opened the windows to get rid of the smell of death. He went through the closet, tossing everything into one of those tough, large plastic bags they used in the projects for trash. He kept the socks that were still usable and a maroon sweater with two buttons missing. He found mail addressed to a Mr. Albert T. Zorich—a Con Edison bill and bills from magazines, some mystery novels and a few Christmas cards with postmarks from different places but no return addresses. Lincoln, Nebraska. Ames, Iowa. Lawrence, Kansas. His children? Friends? Relatives? When he was finished he looked under the bed to make sure there were no other shoes there.

  Beneath the rusting metal bed there was an old suitcase. It was an odd make, unlike anything he’d seen in the United States, combining cloth and woven cane, and on the corners triangular metal reinforcements. He pulled out the valise and inside he found hundreds of photographs of what he assumed was the old man. Albert T. Zorich. He was a tall, angular man, sharp-featured and reserved. There were members of his family with him, which he deduced from their resemblance. A wife and children. Parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles. Family picnics. Beach scenes with the people dressed in old-time bathing suits, the women’s lips
painted in cupid bows; self-conscious, smiling people standing on the edge of the woods, near automobiles, waving from trains and buses, shopping in fruit and meat markets; children playing in the snow, their faces ruddy as they held their sled ropes. And there he was, Mr. Albert T. Zorich, smiling with his mouth, but his eyes wearing an overwhelming sadness as if something tragic had happened. Billy dug further down and found pictures of Zorich as a younger man. In those photos his eyes were bright and smiling. Then he saw still others. They were pictures of Mr. Zorich as a soldier in spats and a World War I helmet, the date and place in beautiful script on the back of the picture: Albert, France, 1916.

  Billy closed the suitcase and began to look through the apartment, trying anxiously to find an address or telephone number that would tie Zorich and his history together so he could return the photos to the family. Quite unexpectedly, in his mind he heard Miles Davis’s muted horn in an improvisation on “Autumn Leaves,” the phrasing clear and melancholy. He felt a panic, as if hearing the music again meant something sinister, something which he would be unable to decipher. He sat on the old bed for nearly an hour, too numbed to move and unable to turn off his mind from recalling passages of music with their chord structures and the difficult runs that made tunes dazzling in their beauty. What was the connection between the photographs and the music? He didn’t want to remember playing jazz, didn’t want to recall sitting at the piano, his hands moving almost independent of his volition, the figures of music instinctive as he bent over the keyboard and his life hummed the improvisations before they got to his fingers, or simultaneously. He never could figure out the process nor had it mattered since the music flowed endlessly, effortlessly from him. He didn’t want to think about Miles and those days. He’d made the right decision when he went into the Marines. It was what his father would’ve done, it was his duty.

  In the end he gave up trying to figure it out. He lugged the large bag and suitcase over to Ludlow Street and sold the clothing for ten dollars to a thrift shop. He took the suitcase home and after supper told Lurleen of his find. He didn’t tell her about the music, hoping it would go away. The music remained. He could now hear clearly Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Goes to College—the entire chorded piano solo of “Le Souk” and a few other tunes. Photos of Mr. Zorich reminded him of Dave Brubeck, as if the sensitivity of the music and what Brubeck saw of humanity made him sad.

  When the children were in bed asleep he opened the suitcase and showed Lurleen the photos. Together they laid them out on the long dining table, trying to place them in rough chronological order, aided at times by the date and place written on the backs of the photos, other times by their recollections of fashions and the condition of the photos. After more than three hours they were able to establish that the man had lived on the Lower East Side all his life; that his father had owned a hardware store around the turn of the century; that Albert T. Zorich had been born around 1896, had gone to grammar school at P.S. 160 on Suffolk Street, had been trained as a lathe operator, joined the army and had seen service in Europe in WWI; that he had returned home, married his high school sweetheart, Greta Wyche, had raised five children, two boys and three girls, and that all of them had graduated from City College. They further established that Albert T. Zorich had retired from work and his wife had died around 1964, when she was sixty-six years old and he was sixty-eight; that he had gone on living, probably alone, another twenty years until his death.

  Exhausted by the effort, his mind taxed by the attempts to decipher Zorich’s life, Billy sat down and separated the pre-WWI pictures from the ones after the war. It was obvious that something had happened to the dead man in the war. Whatever horrors he had seen had shocked him permanently and caused his face to be contorted by profound sorrow. Billy thought that perhaps God was sending him a reminder of what he had done; perhaps Albert T. Zorich had allowed his friend to die, as had happened to him with Joey.

  He couldn’t handle the speculation, returned the photos hurriedly to the suitcase, closed it, shook off Lurleen’s arm as she tried to stop him, and took the large loft elevator down to the basement. Racing, such that he scratched his arm on a nail as he let himself into the boiler room, he headed for the furnace. He burnt his fingers as he threw the door of the coal burner open, its low summer fire illuminating the room in a shadowy, red glow. Without opening the suitcase he attempted to shove it into the fire, but it wouldn’t fit. He then opened the suitcase, grabbed at the pictures in handfuls, and threw them into the furnace. When he was done and the only trace of the pictures was the odd smell of photographic chemicals, he began, with his bare hands, to tear up the suitcase. His anger mounting with each effort, he used his foot to hold the suitcase down as he tore at the hinges and threw the pieces into the fire.

  What the hell difference did it make what you were? Maybe Albert T. Zorich was a Jew living as a Christian. It meant nothing. He was Irish living like a shadow, Billy Farrell, a dumb mick, a harp, a stupid son of a bitch paddy who had let a buddy die. Dumb friggin’ Irishman. Whether in Dublin or Belfast, New York or Chicago, Toronto or Durban, he was Billy Farrell. There were likely a thousand Billy Farrells in the world. At least five hundred in the U.S. Three or four hundred in Ireland. Some in Canada, others in Australia, New Zealand, and even South Africa. Wherever the Irish had gone they’d sprouted Billy Farrells. Just like they sprouted Kevin Donovans, Johnny O’Connors, Tommy Loughlins, Jimmy Quinns. What difference did it make? Italian, Jewish, Polish, Puerto Rican, black, white. Nothing made sense anymore. So what if he was Irish. He returned upstairs and sat in his rocker, feeling a headache coming on and the music attacking him. Bird, Diz, Monk, Miles, all calling to him.

  He wished he was a little boy again and could start over. He remembered everybody at St. Luke’s School making a big deal of St. Patrick’s Day—everybody, lay teachers and nuns, involved in preparations for going to the parade, everybody wearing green. That had been 1961. Later in the year, Maris and not Mantle was threatening to break Babe Ruth’s homerun record. He was angry because Maris wasn’t a real Yankee. He had been traded from the St. Louis Cardinals. It wasn’t fair that a non-Yankee might break Ruth’s record. But his father said that Babe Ruth had been traded from the Red Sox to the Yankees. He was surprised to hear this. Ruth had been a pitcher. And then it was okay, because he was going to be a pitcher and pitch for the Yankees and, like Whitey Ford, they’d call him Whitey Farrell. He didn’t want Maris to feel bad, so he rooted for him, and Maris broke the record.

  The only thing he’d enjoyed about the parade had been the bagpipes since it was the first time they were marching in front of the Emerald Society and his father’s friend Danny Condon, who’d taught him how to throw a curve ball, was playing the big bass drum for the pipers. He wanted to see his father marching with the other policemen. He recalled standing with his mother, holding her hand tight, and hearing the bagpipes way off at the other end of Fifth Avenue—their eerie sound penetrating the music of some brass band from a high school on Long Island passing in front of them—and he looked down the street, his heart beating wildly with eagerness, imagining how his green tie would be flapping if he didn’t have a chest. But he mustn’t think about that because then he’d think about Joey in Nam, his chest burst open. The sound grew louder and more insistent and he had an urge to go out and march with his father when the Emerald Society contingent reached them.

  “Listen, Mom,” he’d said. “I think it’s the pipes. Listen.” And then he’d tried imitating the sound. “BNEEEE, BNEEEE, BNEEEE. I can hear them, Mom. They’re coming.”

  The pipes got louder and now there were drums. He broke away from his mother and got down on his hands and knees. Through the legs of the people, he saw them marching up Fifth Avenue in their big brogans and knee socks, large bright kilts and bonnets. The sound was now deafening, the skirling going through him so that he wanted to run out into the street to join them. And then they passed by him, the piping in the marrow of his bones making his body vibrate with
something he’d never felt. He looked for his father. Row after row they came, all of them neat in their blue uniforms with their badges and ribbons and caps. And then he saw him and yelled, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” and his father had smiled and winked, waved his hand and pointed Billy out to his friend Jimmy Dougherty marching next to him.

  That year when the pipers played for the first time, the parade was great. All he could think about was the pipes. He’d asked what the pipes were for and people said they were for dancing and parades. The answer didn’t satisfy him. He went to his father, who said he didn’t know but he’d find out from Sergeant McDonough at the 2-3, who was one of the pipers. As with all the promises that his father made, he kept it, and after supper while Billy was doing his homework he could hear his father talking to Sergeant McDonough. “Sure, he might want to learn,” his father had said on the phone. “He’s a damn good musician. Gets it from his mother’s side, because I can’t carry a tune,” he’d said self-deprecatingly. “Sure. I’ll drive over Saturday and bring him.”

  The following Saturday they drove out to Dan McDonough’s house in Brooklyn, and there, in the basement, were the pipes. His heart immediately began beating rapidly. He watched Dan McDonough pick up the pipes, bring the mouthpiece to his mouth, move his arm ever so slightly, and there issued from the pipes the same eerie sound as at the parade. Dan McDonough played “The Wearing of the Green,” and afterward talked about pipes. He said ones not quite like these had been at the Battle of Clontarf in the year 1040, when Brian Boru drove the Vikings from Ireland. Billy listened, wishing to hear the sound of the pipes again. “Would you like to try, Billy?” Dan McDonough said. Billy shrugged his shoulders. Dan McDonough wiped the mouthpiece, brought the pipes over and showed him how to hold them and where to place his fingers and arms so that he could manipulate the bag.