by Edgardo Vega
For a while he’d gone each Saturday to Dan McDonough’s to take lessons, weaving a fantasy of being on the job, as they referred to being a member of the police force, like his father, and dressing in kilts and playing the pipes. After his father died, all of that disappeared, packed away in the lonely storage of his mind’s sorrows. He realized years later that he had been drawn to the sound of the pipes by the visceral reaction of wishing to go forward at no cost to himself, understanding clearly that even though the pipes were used for dancing and merriment, at the tribal level they were first and foremost a call to battle, and often an homage to the dead, and that he had also seen. That fall, a week after the Yankees beat Cincinnati in the World Series, his father had been shot, and at the cemetery the pipers played at his father’s grave, and he hadn’t wanted to go to the parade the following spring.
In subsequent years, when he was in high school at Cardinal Hayes, because his father and his uncles had gone to the school, his friends persuaded him to go to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. But there was no joy in it, and hearing the pipes only made him ache to see his father. Like the rest of the other boys, he drank too much and puked and rode the train back up to Yonkers that evening. He, Kevin Higgins, and Matty Dolan crawled around the Sanderson lawn, screaming like banshees, as his grandmother, the former Brigid Flynn of Donegal, said, crossing herself, and adding, the words thick in her mouth, that banshees foretold the death of a relative, alluding obliquely to his father, may the saints keep him. Everything was drinking, cursing, and loudness. When he recuperated he swore that he would never go back, and he never again returned to the parade.
Back upstairs after disposing of the photos, Billy sat for nearly an hour and then Lurleen came over and made him get up and sit on the couch. She fixed him a toddy with rum and lemon, and, as if reading his mind, she said he ought to go and meet his daughter.
“It won’t do any good to postpone it, Bill,” Lurleen said. “Go up there and find out.”
“What am I going to tell her, baby?” he said helplessly. “I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do. She’s probably poor and needs help. I can’t offer her anything.”
“She just wants to see you, Bill. She just wants to see her daddy. That’s all.”
“And you don’t mind?”
“No, I don’t mind, you big silly man. She’s your first child. Why should I mind? Go and see your mama and take it one step at a time. Go on up there.”
The next day he walked to Bleecker Street, took the Number 6 train, changed at Fourteenth Street to the Number 5, which had been called the White Plains Road train back when he was fourteen and had just started high school. Forty minutes later he got off the train at the last stop and walked slowly to O’Hanlon’s, dreading what was to come, knowing he’d have to hide the hand from the girl and unsure of what he should say.
When he finally got to O’Hanlon’s he said hello to Michael O’Hanlon, who had been a Marine in the Korean War and now ran the bar for his father, Patrick, who had developed diabetes and had had his right foot amputated. Every once in a while he came to the bar, his wheelchair pushed by Michael’s slow boy, Sean, the three blocks from the house to the bar. Patrick O’Hanlon then sat around, drinking ale and talking about the IRA and Dublin and the injustices of the British, saying that all that hunger-strike business and the women peace activists were just shameful and had done no good at all and what every good Irishman ought to do was pick up a gun and drive the British out of Ireland. “Just like St. Patrick drove out the snakes, which is what they are, the damn Brit bastards. Drive them all out,” he said, gripping the arms of the wheelchair until his face was white with the rage.
“How you doing, Ma?” Billy asked, sitting at the bar.
“I’m okay. How are you doing?”
“I’m all right. I had some things to do. That’s why I couldn’t get up here right away.”
“How’s Lurleen and the kids?”
“They’re okay, Ma,” he said. “Horty’s still having problems writing, but everybody else is doing good. I can’t understand it with her. She reads all the time. Everything. But ask her to write something and she can’t do it.”
“She’s like me, honey,” Maud had said. “Don’t worry about her. She’s a good girl. You want a beer?”
“Sure. It’s pretty hot out there.”
“It wouldn’t be if you didn’t wear that fatigue jacket all the time. Why don’t you take it off? You want a sandwich?”
“I’m okay.”
“With the jacket on, or you don’t want a sandwich?”
He laughed and said he was fine with the air-conditioning on, but if it wasn’t too much trouble, sure, he’d have a sandwich. When Maud returned from the kitchen with a big corned beef sandwich and placed a second mug of beer on the bar for him, he asked where the girl was.
“Isn’t she coming?” he asked.
“Not today,” Maud said. “I just wanted to talk to you about it. I didn’t want to rush things. You know, I wanted to go slow.”
“I understand, Ma,” he said, somewhat relieved. “That’s cool. No sweat.”
“Do you remember her?”
“I’ve never seen her, Ma,” he said, taking a big bite from the sandwich. Then he lifted up the rye bread and spread more mustard on the meat. “I told you that.”
“I forgot,” Maud said. She was wiping the bar mechanically, gauging his mood, not sure how this would go down. “Do you want to see a picture of her?” she asked, smiling at him.
“Sure,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Did she give you one or did you ask?”
“I asked,” Maud said, then turned and went into her handbag, resting on a box near the cash register. “She called me up to see how things were going and I asked her for one. She wrote me a very fine letter, very nice handwriting.”
She pulled out a square, butterfly-yellow envelope with her name and the address on it and held it under his nose for him to smell.
“It’s perfumed,” she said.
“Where does she live?”
“Look at the return address. Tarrytown.”
“Oh, yeah? She’s doing okay?”
“Looks like it,” Maud said, opening her wallet and sliding it gently across the bar for him to see the picture. He picked up the wallet with the three fingers of his right hand and looked at the picture, admiring the smiling girl in the photograph for a long time and nodding his head. The picture had been taken in a studio the previous winter, right before Christmas, and Vidamía’s hair had been done specially for the sitting. It was cut short and combed in a boyish way, highlighting her already prominent cheekbones and large eyes, the mouth smiling openly with profound innocence and trust. Just looking at the photograph made him anxious.
“She’s a beauty, ain’t she?” Maud said.
“Yeah, she sure is. She has your nose. A little bony—not perfect but cute. And your eyes.”
“Does she look like her mother?”
“A little, but she reminds me of the pictures of Grandma’s sister when she was a girl. The one who went into the convent.”
Maud laughed and said that he was absolutely right, that she had thought long and hard about who it was that the girl reminded her of but couldn’t recall, and that indeed it was Kitty Flynn, the one who had returned to Ireland and become a nun, and how she’d driven many an Irishman to drink from just looking at her she was so beautiful.
“You son of a gun,” Maud said. “Your daughter looks just like Kitty Flynn. You’ve always had a good eye for feminine beauty.”
“Just like my old man,” he said, pointing at her, his eyes mischievous for a moment before they went dead again.
“Go on with you, you scoundrel,” Maud said, taking the wallet back and admiring the photo before returning it to her bag.
“Are they blue?” he said. “Her eyes?”
“Green. Like huge emeralds. Bright, and just like the song.”
“What song?” he said, and he almos
t told his mother that he’d begun recalling jazz tunes.
“What do you mean, what song?” Maud laughed. “If ever a pair of eyes were meant to describe the smiling of Irish eyes, it would have to be your daughter’s. Oirish through and through,” she added, affecting an accent.
“Okay,” he nodded. “That song.”
“Yeah, that song, you dumb mick,” she said. “You think you’re up to meeting her? She’s real anxious to see you, Billy.”
“I guess I better,” he said, finishing the sandwich and taking a long draught of beer. “I’m just worried about the hand.”
“Forget about that, Billy,” Maud said, slapping his arm and in one motion removing the mug and refilling it before placing it back on the bar. “Just forget that stuff. You should see this kid. Remember that picture I told you about? The one of you and the girl’s uncle in Vietnam? That’s all she had to give her a clue about you. But when she talks about you, the love just pours out of her eyes. She needs you to be part of her life. It’s so obvious it makes me cry to watch her. She’s a perfect little lady. You’re going to fall in love with her just like I did.”
“And she’s all right? I mean, in terms of money, because I couldn’t give her anything.”
“She doesn’t want anything. From the looks of it, I think she’s well off.”
“That’s good.”
“So, I can go ahead and set something up?”
“Yeah, sure. I don’t have to dress up or nothing, right?”
“I don’t think so,” Maud said as three men walked in and sat at the bar. “I’ll call you and you can come over to the apartment, okay?” she added, and reached over and patted his arm. “It’ll be all right. Don’t worry.”
“Yeah, sure, Ma,” he said and finished his beer as he stood up to leave. He felt a slight buzz from the three beers as he headed out the door to catch the elevated train back to Manhattan.
8. Catharsis
Maud Farrell, dread and high expectations squaring off against each other in her mind, arranged for Billy and Vidamía to meet. On the agreed-upon day, a Saturday afternoon, her brother, Michael Sanderson, now a Fire Department lieutenant living in Whitestone, Queens, but working out of a firehouse in the South Bronx, where they had grown up, drove over to Tarrytown, whistled at the opulence of the manicured grounds and the mansion-like home of Elsa Santiago and Barry López-Ferrer and banged healthily on the brass knocker with the disdain of the working class when faced with what it considers to be suburban posturing. He was asked inside, and to Barry’s first questions, about his health and his relationship to Vidamía, he answered that he was feeling just fine, thank you, and that he was the young girl’s grandmother’s brother, her grand-uncle, he supposed. To all subsequent inquiries he replied with polite monosyllabic distance.
Eventually they were permitted to leave, and he whisked the young girl away in his car in order to discharge his responsibility and deliver her to Maud’s apartment. It being a Saturday, both Elsa and Barry had been home, and after the tough-looking Michael Sanderson left with Vidamía, Elsa immediately went ballistic and said to Barry, chasing after him as he sought refuge in his den, that she had been right all along and that she had just handed her child over to barbarians. Barry turned around angrily and said she ought to stop being hysterical and overdramatizing things. And then the two of them went at it, berating each other for their lack of support, until, emotionally spent, they lapsed into silence.
Elsa went upstairs and threw herself on the bed, wanting to cry but unable to, her mind raging at Billy Farrell, who had reappeared in her life and taken her daughter away and where would it all end? Had she made it worse by denying Vidamía access when she had asked to see him? But the girl had lied when she said she was going to the museum and had gone to Yonkers looking for him. Lied. She wondered what else Vidamía was keeping from her. Hadn’t she always been honest with her daughter? She thought a moment and decided that she hadn’t. For starters, she never told her how much she’d despised the name Vidamía, how she’d railed at her mother to let her change it, pleading, “It’s like we’re black people or something,” while Ursula Santiago stood monument-like in her insistence that the child would be named Vidamía. “Like morenos, mami. They name their kids any old thing. They make up names. Falima. Koutrana. Latulia. Mahapi.” Things like that, she’d said, making up names as she went. “That’s what we’re doing, mami.”
She had always relegated the matter of her own connection to blackness to the cultural certainty that if one had a Puerto Rican background, naturally one had to include the European, the Amerindian, and the African into the cultural mix. But it wasn’t a question of race. They were Puerto Ricans. She thought the position of people in the United States, both black and white, was ridiculous concerning the matter of race. Even if you had one drop of African blood you were considered black. She knew Americans who were whiter than some Puerto Ricans and went around calling themselves black; while in the case of Puerto Ricans, and many other Latin Americans, the slightest shading away from black excused a person from the stigma of negritude. She knew it was a matter of culture, of people identifying themselves with Afro-American culture, but she also knew that if she capitulated to the argument, she’d have to align herself and become black, and she didn’t want the burden of being black. In her opinion, slavery had beaten everything out of the people. The only thing that remained was the music that had developed from the experience, the destructiveness of self-loathing, and the African inflections in their speech. She hated to think that Puerto Ricans were headed in the same direction.
Her rage returned and she saw again her father’s face, his dark skin and obvious African features grinning mockingly at her. Doan gworry, negrita. There it was, she thought. Negrita. My little black one. A term of endearment for Puerto Ricans. White or black, they called each other negrito or negrita. Just like black people—“nigger” this and “nigger” that. It was disgusting. She had once told her mother to stop calling her negrita. Although everyone used the word to convey affection, in her opinion the word was, in reality, indicative of the inbred racism of Puerto Rican society. Her mother, because she was white, undoubtedly had the same hang-ups as white people. It was inconceivable, but Elsa was certain of her mother’s prejudice. In Elsa’s unstable mind, it seemed obvious that her mother was trying to make herself superior, to work out her feelings of hostility toward her husband, who had deserted her and the family.
Elsa was in her second year of college at Hunter and had taken a couple of courses in the Black and Puerto Rican Studies Department when lawyers from the independence movement came and spoke at the school, and she was naturally drawn to the cause against United States colonial rule. She felt good listening to them speak in Spanish—not Puerto Rican, as most of her nonacademic American friends called what Puerto Rican people in New York spoke. Though in a way they were right. The patois was a ridiculous mix of badly spoken Spanish, English, and made-up words. She hated calling a mop el mapo, the roof of a building or house el rufo instead of techo, and yarda for yard instead of patio. And not even yarda but yalda. Why couldn’t Puerto Ricans pronounce their R’s? What were they, Chinese? Why did they have to substitute L’s where the R’s should go? If she wasn’t careful, she sometimes slipped up. She had even asked Barry not to speak in Spanish to her in public. She had gotten Vidamía away from that environment and hired Mrs. Alvarez, who was from Colombia and pronounced her R’s correctly and hadn’t lived in the United States long enough to be corrupted into speaking Spanglish.
But the matter of blackness bothered her. The time Elsa made the request that she not call her negrita again, her mother had looked at her long and hard and told her to keep going to the psychiatrist, because she was still crazy.
“What’s all this black and white crap?” she’d said. “What you got in your head? You’re Puerto Rican. You’re not supposed to be thinking like that. What’s the matter with you? The more you go to school the stupider you get, Elsie.
Just shut up with that stuff, okay? Everybody’s got his little mancha de plátano. You understand that? Your father, you, your brothers and sisters, me. Everybody.”
When Elsa opened her mouth to protest Ursula Santiago slapped her own arm.
“What’s this white skin good for, anyway?” she said. “What? Answer me, carajo. Inside I’m Puerto Rican. You think I go around looking at people and saying he’s black, she’s white, she’s yellow, he’s red, they’re brown? You think I got time for all those boberías when I got all kind of things to do? Wake up, Elsie. You’re in a fog half the time.”
“I didn’t mean it like that, mami,” Elsa said.
“Tell you what,” her mother said. “I’ll stop calling you negrita, okay? No more negrita. If I call you negrita again, don’t invite me to your house again, okay?”
Elsa felt suddenly ashamed and sat at the dinette table and cried. Her mother came over and rubbed her back and smoothed her hair away from her face. Elsa stopped crying and hugged herself to her mother. She felt better and was able to say, “I love you, mami. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Ursula Santiago said.
“You can call me negrita,” Elsa told her mother. “I don’t mind.” She couldn’t recall if her mother had ever called her negrita again. Whatever happened, Elsa swore not to let the matter of blackness touch her daughter. She’d made sure of that. No pictures of her own father and no mention of him. Barry was white, and as far as she was concerned, Vidamía was white, and that was that. People who saw them together didn’t know Barry wasn’t her father.
Elsa got up from the bed, looked at herself in the mirror, and brushed her hair. For a moment she considered her image. She was still young and attractive, her hair thick and wavy, her nose long and fine and her lips thin. No one ever questioned her own whiteness, but like a specter, her father’s dark skin mocked her, constantly stalked her, making her wish there was some way of genetically erasing that part of her background. God, she sounded like a Nazi. The thought made her recall the years after she gave birth.
